“The machicolated archway spanning the street of the Almudaina is the only survival of the five gateways that afforded entrance to the Citadel.”
(page [15])
He was succeeded by his son Sancho, who died without children, and the crown then passed to his uncle, the fourth son of the Conqueror, and through him to Don Jaime III., the last King of Majorca, who fell upon the field of Lluchmayor in 1349, in a last attempt to regain the crown wrested from him by Pedro IV. of Aragon.
So ended—within little more than a hundred years of its creation—the independent monarchy founded by Jaime the Conqueror, and the islands have from that time been incorporated with the kingdom of Aragon.
In the fine sixteenth-century town hall is preserved a full-length portrait of the Conqueror, which represents him as a grave-faced man with a pointed beard and hair cut square upon the shoulders, robed in crimson mantle, ermine collar, crown, and sword. For many centuries it was the custom to celebrate the anniversary of the capture of Palma by exhibiting this portrait outside the town hall, surmounted by the royal standard of Aragon and surrounded by the portraits of eminent Majorcans.
The town contains innumerable other features of interest, but before leaving this portion of my subject I must not omit a mention of the Lónja—the Exchange—a large building standing near the harbour, and one of the first objects to attract the attention of the traveller as he nears the quay. Its keep-like walls and turreted parapets are usually the subject of much admiration, but I must confess that to us the great building seemed too symmetrically square and too conspicuously new to awaken in us any enthusiasm for its exterior.
Severely rectangular it undoubtedly is—but its appearance of newness is misleading, for it dates from the fifteenth century, when it was the custom for Spanish towns to vie with one another in the splendour of their Exchanges; its claim, therefore, to be one of the finest Lónjas in Spain is a legitimate source of pride.