The kingdoms of James I and Peter the Great

(13h Century AC - 14th Century AC)

James I, also known as the Conqueror, was according to historiographic tradition, a man of remarkable character and physical appearance. Like his contemporaries, the emperor Frederick II and the kings Louis IX of France, Ferdinand III and Alphonse X of Castilla, stands out as a key figure of the medieval epoch. His son Peter culminated his policy of Mediterranean territorial expansion.

James I

James I (1208-1276) was the monarch of the great conquests. He managed to expand the Aragonese Catalan crown with new territories: Majorca and the Balearic Islands, Valencia and Murcia –the latter would eventually be transferred to the Castilian king–. 

The Aragonese and Catalan king reigned throughout the 13th century, a period of incessant struggle between the nobility and the royal power. In this struggle for power, there was a third distorting and always biased power: the papacy. However, James I succeeded in strengthening the royal power and consolidating such governmental institutions as the Generalitat, the Catalan government, and the Consell de Cent, the governmental institution of the city of Barcelona.

The young king James first married when he was only thirteen to the princess Elionor of Castilla. With this Castilian princess he had a son, Alphonse, who died before the king. At 21 years of age, the monarch embarked on his first important campaign that ended up with a victory: the conquest of Mallorca. By his 22nd birthday, he was an experienced warrior and politician, and at 24, he conquered Valencia.

As regards the battlefield of diplomacy, he signed in 1258 the Treaty of Corbeil. By virtue of this agreement, the monarch transferred the rights of Occitan territory. In exchange, Louis IX of France, a descendant of Charlemagne gave up the Catalan counties. This treaty marked the decline of his policy of territorial expansion. On 4 September 1269, James I embarked on an enterprise intended as the climax of his winning career in Christianity: a crusade to Holy Land. But a sea tempest forced him to go back and give up on this attempt.

James I’s will did not favour the expansion of the Aragonese and Catalan crown. The king, as a feudal lord, felt obliged to give all his sons a piece of territory: first, Alphonse, who died in 1260; then to Peter, future king of the Crown of Aragon and, finally, James II, who was to become the king of Mallorca.

Some historians describe this division as a political error, but James I’s will reflects a well-established custom and heritage philosophy of that time. On the other hand, the territorial conquests of James I favoured trading and contact with the African territory. The monarch reorganized the royal chancery and favoured the creation of documentary registers and archives of the court. With the help of some knights of the Temple, men of law and model citizens, he administered and organized the royal heritage. This effort resulted in the book ‘Llibre del consolat de mar’, the first manuscript on maritime customs.

The legal and institutional evolution reigning over his kingdom is expressed in mightier local and governmental administrative institutions like the Corts Catalanes. Finally, the cultural impulse of the arts materialized in the Catalan chronicle of the ‘Llibre dels feits’, a key legacy of Catalan literature and historiography. In 1276, the monarch, seriously ill, abdicated in favour of his sons Peter, who was to inherit Catalonia, Aragon and Valencia; and James, his father’s successor in Mallorca. He died shortly after signing up his testament in Valencia, on his way to the monastery of Poblet.

Peter the Great

His son Peter the Great became another key monarch of the Crown of Aragon and the main executor of his incipient Mediterranean expansion. Born in Valencia in 1240, Peter the Great had an active role before he actually ruled, but it was not until the age of thirty-six that he became a monarch. Throughout his kingdom, Peter the Great, like his father, had to face the nobility. Another concern of James I’s heir was the frequent Saracen riots in the territory conquered by his father. To maintain and increase the legacy of the Conqueror, Peter the Great was forced to implement aggressive repression measures.

The monarch married his daughter Elisabet to king Dionisus I of Portugal and engaged his first son, Alphonse, to princess Elionor, the daughter of Edward I of England, with a view to building up a supporting network across the Atlantic. In the Mediterranean, he maintained a policy of friendship with Pisa and Genoa.

However, Sicily confronted him to the French Anjou and Valois, backed up by the papacy, in favour of the French monarchy. The Aragonese and Catalan monarch took advantage of the popular uprising of the Sicilians in 1282, the well-known Sicilian Vespers, to throw himself into conquering these territories. In order to justify the Catalan expedition and the disembarkment on the port of Trapani, with the approval of the Sicilians, he claimed the rights of his wife Constance Hohenstaufen over the island. However, the monarch did not limit himself to this territory, but he continued with the conquest. He occupied Malta, Gozzo and Gerba and expanded the influence of Catalonia throughout the western Mediterranian sea.

However, the expansionist policy and the war in Sicily brought about the papal crusade against the Crown of Aragon, and resulted in a serious financial decrease of the Crown finances. In this context, pushed by the Unió d’Aragó, in the Cortes de Tarazona of 1283, the king granted privileges to Aragon, Teruel, Ribagorza and Valencia, and summoned the Aragon parliament once a year. These privileges became the basis of Catalan ‘constitutionalism’ or ‘pactism’, and are the basis of public law in Catalonia, a precedent in Europe which allowed to establish a regular functioning of the courts.

One year after the Sicilian Vespers, Pope Martin IV excommunicated Peter the Great and announced a crusade against Catalonia. The leaders of the crusade were the French with the help by treachery of Peter the Great’s brother, king James II of Mallorca. However, the attempt of French conquest failed. The admiral Roger de Llúria and his vessels, that had sailed off from Sicily a few days earlier, defeated the French fleet and put an end to the siege on the city of Girona.

King Peter tried to take revenge on his brother but died while preparing an expedition to Mallorca in November 1285. In his will, the monarch expressed his wish to be buried in Santes Creus.

In the monastery of Poblet, founded in 1150 and protected by Alphonse the Chaste, James I was buried, who maintained his protection of the monastery founded during his grandfather’s times. In 1232, James I revoked his will to be buried in Sigena, in Aragon, where his father Peter the Catholic was buried, and chose Poblet, where he wanted to enrol as a monk. However, the monarch failed to accomplish his last will because he died on his way to the monastery. In ‘Llibre dels feits’, James I ends up saying: ‘And a few days later, with the intention of going to Poblet to serve the Mother of God, having left Alzira and, while being in Valencia, our illness worsened: and as was Our Lord’s will, we could not finish the journey we had started.’

According to his will, the monastery received five thousand coins, his golden ribbon, a large amount of silver, precious stones and rings, as well as his personal prayer chapel and the donation of towns and castles, obtained in his conquests. However, the sepulchre of James I was plundered in 1836, after the monastery was abandoned during the ‘desamortización’ (disentitlement) and the bones of several coffins got mixed up. Rescued later, they were transferred in sacks to Espluga de Francolí and in 1843 they were kept in the Cathedral of Tarragona, and stayed there until 1942. Amidst the Franco dictatorship, the sculptor Frederic Marès restored the royal pantheon and in 1952, General Franco returned the bones of the Catalan monarch to the monastery in a pompous propaganda ceremony.

Recently, the sepulchre of Peter the Great has been exhumed and transferred to the monastery of Santes Creus. Using the most advanced techniques, a team of twenty experts has managed to dig out the coffin of the monarch with a view to study it. The chronicle of Bernat Desclot states that the king was first buried before the major altar of the monastery church. It was his son James II, the Fair, who, fascinated by the solemnity of the sepulchres of the Sicilian monarchs, had marble from Palermo and other materials brought in and commissioned the making of his father’s tomb to master Bartomeu de Girona. 

Located before the major altar, the remains of the monarch lie in a bathtub of red Roman porphyry supported by two stone lions. The bathtub is covered by a stone templet crowned by a polychromed baldachin, of genuine Sicilian style. Impregnable throughout these years, as evidenced by its difficulty to open it up, the sepulchre of Peter the Great contained intact the body of the king. Before the remains were moved, the experts had them x-rayed and gathered samples of fungi and tissues. This remarkable operation allowed, by means of Peter the Great’s DNA, to establish which bone remains kept in the tomb of James I in Poblet actually belonged to his father.