In addition to his marriage to Blanche de Bourbon,
Pedro is said to have married María de Padilla—at least
he claimed this following her death in 1361 in order to
declare their four children (three daughters and a son, the
youngest) legitimate heirs to the throne. Shortly after his
marriage to Blanche, he had also wed Juana de Castro,
but this marriage was just as ephemeral as his fi rst and
left no children. Eventually Pedro’s line returned to the
Castilian throne when his granddaughter, Catherine of
Lancaster, daughter of John of Gaunt and Pedro and
María’s second daughter Constanza, married the future
Enrique III of Castile.
See also Padilla, María de
Further Reading
Díaz Martín, L. V. Itinerario de Pedro I de Castilla. Valladolid,
1975.
López de Ayala, P. Crónica del rey don Pedro. Biblioteca de
Autores Españoles, vol. 66. Madrid, 1953.
Sitges, J. B. Las mujeres del rey Don Pedro I de Castilla. Ma-
drid, 1910.
Clara Estow
PEDRO III, KING OF ARAGÓN
(1240–1285)
Pedro III the Great, Pere III of Aragón, Pere II of
Catalonia, Pere I of Valencia, and Pere I of Sicily, “was
the troubadour-warrior ruler of the realms of Aragón
(1276–1285) and liberator-conqueror of Sicily. He was
born at Valencia, two years after that Islamic city fell to
his father Jaime the Conqueror, of Jaime’s second wife
Violante of Hungary. Jaime named him heir to Catalonia
in 1253, procurator or vice-regent there at seventeen in
1257, and—at the death of Jaime’s son Alfonso by his
fi rst wife in 1260—procurator of the Catalonia, Aragón,
and Valencia realms. (Pedro’s brother Jaime became
procurator of the Balearics, Roussillon, and Cerdanya.)
In 1262 Pedro married Constance, the daughter and heir-
ess of Manfred, the Hohenstaufen ruler of Sicily-Naples.
Besides four sons and two daughters by his mistresses
María and Agnés Zapata, he had four sons (Including
his successors Alfonso II and Jaime II, and Frederico
III of Sicily), and two daughters (Queen Vio lante of
Naples and Isabel Queen of Portugal).
Although his formal reign lasted only nine years
versus his famous father’s sixty-three, the Infante Pedro
enjoyed a fi fteen-year public career as procuratorial
co-ruler and soldier before his coronation. He restored
feudal order as a teenager, plunged into Mediterranean
Ghibelline politics during negotiations for his marriage,
championed Occitan refugees after such troubles as the
1263 Marseilles revolt, captained the fi rst phase of the
Murcian Crusade in 1265–1266, replaced his father
at home during Jaime’s abortive Holy Land Crusade
in 1269 (and intervened in the Urgell wars of 1268),
and prepared an invasion army to seize Toulouse in- Relations with his father deteriorated in 1272,
with Pedro stripped of all offi ces and revenues; recon-
ciliation came the following year. When the northern
Catalan nobles revolted, Pedro captured and drowned
their leader, his bastard brother Ferran Sanxis. During a
diplomatic visit to Paris, he met Philippe the Bold. His
greatest test came in 1275–1277, when the Mudéjars of
Valencia with Maghribian support revolted and nearly
recovered their land. Pedro had one thousand horsemen
and fi ve thousand foot soldiers at fi rst, but soon had to
assume the entire responsibility when his father died on
the fi eld (27 July 1276). Burying Jaime provisionally at
Valencia and deferring his coronation at Zaragoza to 17
November, Pedro grimly set about conquering much of
Valencia “a second time,” as the contemporary mem-
oirist Ramón Muntaner puts it. Meanwhile his brother
Jaume II of Mallorca received the Balearics, Cerdanya,
Montpellier, and Roussillon.
With the Mudéjar headquarters at Montesa castle
fallen (September 1277), Pedro began a vigorous
domestic and international program. He demanded
tribute from Tunis, harrying it through his admiral
Conrad Llanca, pressured Jaime II of Mallorca into
accepting vassalage, and moved strongly against the
still-rebellious northern barons, ending their six-year
war by his siege of Balaguer (1281) and winning their
support by his clemency. By holding as “guest hostages”
the Infantes de la Cerda, he dominated the Castilian
succession crisis. His negotiations with Philippe the
Bold at Toulouse in 1281, and his treaties of Campillo
and Ágreda with Alfonso X and the Infante Sancho of
Castile that year, stabilized his peninsular situation. He
established understandings with Byzantium, England,
Genoa, Granada, Portugal, and the papacy, and was
fi nally ready for his life’s coup: to foil the Angevin
power that had absorbed Occitania and taken over
Sicily-Naples, and to assume the Hohenstaufens’ Sicil-
ian kingdom and Ghibelline leadership in the western
Mediterranean.
Massing his naval and military strength, he simulated
a crusade against Tunis, actually taking Collo there; the
pope refused crusade title or aid. Previously in contact
with the Sicilians, Pedro now supported the Sicilian
Vespers revolt of 30 March 1282. He moved eight
hundred knights and fi fteen thousand foot soldiers by
sea to Trapani, receiving the crown of Sicily-Naples at
Palermo and starting a twenty-year war. A succession
of naval victories by his admirals, especially Roger de
Llúria, established the Catalans as the dominant mari-
time power of the western Mediterranean after Genoa.
PEDRO I THE CRUEL, KING OF CASTILE