POLITICS AND RELIGION II\ THE ERA OF RAMON !LULLleaving his brilliant admiral in charge of a small but deadly
fleet which challenged his foes from Malta to the shores of
southern France and Catalonia, and had a starring role in
the otherwise ineffective resistance to the French invasion of
Catalonia. Peter's heir Alfonso was despatched to Majorca
with an army that rapidly overwhelmed an island that had
not yet had time to grow accustomed to the idea of inde-
pendence from Catalonia-Aragon, and whose merchants, if
anything, suffered during the war from lack of free access
to Catalan markets. The same year, 1285, saw the death of
Peter the Great; he had held on to his crown, and, whatever
might still happen in Sicily, it was abundantly clear that
the house of Barcelona could not easily be dislodged from
Aragon-Catalonia.
PETER'S LEGACY
The new king, Alfonso the 'Liberal' (1285-91) began his
reign on a high note, with the suppression of James of
Majorca's rights in Majorca itself, followed soon after by
the invasion of the Muslim vassal statelet of Min orca ( 1287),
whose surrender treaty of 1231 was deemed to have been
breached when the Minorcan Muslims had sent messages
to north Mrica advising their co-religionists of Peter the
Great's Collo campaign. There were also strategic advant-
ages in directly controlling the largest natural harbour in
the Mediterranean at Ma6 (Mahon) _II The mass enslavement
of the Minorcan Muslims was not simply a chance to make
money: Alfonso's actions were part of a wider trend towards
the assertion of the Christian identity of the western Medi-
terranean kingdoms, and it was the same ruler who initiated
the enclosure of the Jews of Majorca City in a Call or ghetto.^12
Such actions were perhaps all the more important for a ruler- Abulafia, Mediterranean Fmporium, pp. 68-72; E. Lourie, Crusade and
Colonisation. Muslims, Christians and Jews in medieval Aragon (Aldershot,
1990), chapter 5; David Abulafia, 'Monarchs and minorities in the
medieval Mediterranean c.1300: Lucera and its analogues', in P. Diehl
and S. Waugh, eds, Christendom and its discontents. Exclusion, persecution
and rebellion, 1000-1500 (Cambridge, 1966), pp. 246-9. - Abulafia, Mediterranean Emporium, pp. 81-6.