But the great assault was yet to come. On Sept. 6, 1229, Don Jaime I—King of Aragon and Count of Barcelona—destined to live in history by the title of El Conquistador, set sail for Palma with 150 galleys and 18,000 soldiers, besides a great company of Spanish knights aflame with religious zeal, the lust of conquest, and the hope of glory. We are told that the Christian host encountered a great storm on the way, and that they were grievously sick before they landed near Porto Pi to the west of the town.
Here the infidels attacked them, but were beaten back and besieged within the city, which fell some three months later after a desperate resistance, and was entered by the victorious Spanish army on December 31, 1229.
From that memorable day may be said to date modern Palma. Everything around one testifies to the break that separates the history of the town since the conquest from the old period of Arab domination. The names of the streets immortalise the Conqueror and succeeding sovereigns or notables of the invading race. The scutcheons that ornament the public buildings display the arms granted to Palma by Don Jaime—a castle in the sea, with a palm-tree issuant, quartered with the arms of Aragon and surmounted by the Bat, cognisance of the Counts of Barcelona.
The town houses of the aristocracy are the old palaces of the nine noble families whose ancestors accompanied the Conqueror and settled in the island. The Governor’s residence stands where did the Moorish sheikh’s palace; the Cathedral occupies the site of the principal mosque. So thorough were the invaders in destroying or converting to other uses the Moorish buildings, so fierce was their Christian zeal—“which spared not even stones”—that hardly a trace remains of the oriental Palma, that city crowned with minarets and peopled with 80,000 souls, which attained under the Moors a glory and magnificence that have never since been equalled.
The Palma of the present day is a prosperous town of some 60,000 inhabitants. She has burst her ancient limits, and her eastern outskirts are thick with factories and windmills extending to the plain, while outside her western fortifications has sprung up a large residential suburb, and the wooded slopes above the bay are thronged for miles with villas and summer residences. Only the town that lies inside the walls is the old Palma, and this—in its main features—has probably altered little since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
“The gateway by which Don Jaime is said to have made his triumphal entry into Palma in the year 1229.”
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