The Mercenary Mediterranean_ Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon - Hussein Fancy

8 introduction

a series of legal, fiscal, and administrative reforms that imagined the king

as the ultimate source of the law and granted him a decisionistic power.^19

Although this process of bureaucratization has been seen as evidence

of secularization — of the turning away from theological and charismatic

and toward legal and rational justifications for power — for Jaume and

his immediate successors, Pere II, Alfons II (r. 1285 – 1291 ), and Jaume II

(r. 1291 – 1327 ), these reforms were understood differently.^20 They reflected

a deeper and enduring effort to cast themselves as divinely authorized

rulers, as the heirs of the Holy Roman emperors, above all Frederick II

(r. 1220 – 1250 ). Frederick, in turn, had drawn influence from Christian

and Islamic imperial courts around the Mediterranean. Thus, the Ara-

gonese kings adopted the trappings and traditions of Frederick’s court,

including his employment of a Muslim royal guard. The jenets, in other

words, were a central part of this imperial posture and performance of

divinely inspired authority.

The Aragonese kings’ ambition to style themselves as Holy Roman

emperors also materialized in the decision to capture the island kingdom

of Sicily in 1285 , the seat of Frederick’s court, thereby gaining control

over much of the central and western Mediterranean. Over the following

century, Sardinia and Corsica were also brought under their sway. The

Crown of Aragon thus became a Mediterranean empire.

While the chronicler Ramon Muntaner (d. 1336 ) considered the Ara-

gonese kings “sovereigns (sobirans) over all the kings of the world and

princes, whether of Christians or Saracens,” I employ the term “sover-

eignty” to describe their aspirations to supremacy, underscored because

these aspirations were challenged on every side.^21 The claim to sover-

eignty and unimpeded authority not only obscured an irreducible context

of competition but also the very practice of Aragonese royal power. For

example, the Aragonese conquest of Sicily led to two centuries of furious

struggle with the Angevins, what David Abulafia has felicitously called

the “Two Hundred Years’ War.”^22 The authoritarian impulses of the Ara-

gonese also drew the ire of the popes as well as of the French and Castil-

ian kings, who considered themselves more worthy of the imperial title.

These aspirations brought Pere II into open war with France and Cas-

tile, and, later, they would bring Pere III (r. 1336 – 1387 ) into a protracted

and debilitating conflict with Castile, the so- called “War of the Two Pe-

ters” ( 1356 – 1375 ). As in the twelfth century, Aragonese and Catalan

noblemen rose to challenge their kings in the thirteenth and fourteenth

centuries. In 1283 , 1286 , 1301 , and 1347 confederations of noblemen and

municipalities, called Unions, revolted in order to assert their customary