THE MEDITERRANEAN IN THE AGE OF JAMES II OF ARAGONbranch of the Franciscans, the Spiritual movement, provide
a key to his outlook. This attitude certainly had an impact in
his family, where one son, the future StLouis of Toulouse,
renounced the throne to become a Franciscan, so that Naples
and Provence passed to his third son Robert.^14JAMES THE HONEST, 1291-1327
James II of Aragon was perhaps the wiliest of the thirteenth-
century Aragonese rulers. Like most kings of Aragon he
earned a sobriquet which was held to encapsulate his qual-
ities.15 Known asJames the Honest, he could well have earned
the name James the Hypochondriac, or equally James the
Wily. He was able to beguile the Angevins and the papacy
into plans for an exchange of Sicily for some other Mediter-
ranean territory; Cyprus was one option for an exchange,
but Corsica and Sardinia were closer and larger, and there
was no single existing ruler who would need to be displaced.
In any case, the Sicilian nobility insisted that only a descend-
ant of Frederick II could sit on their throne; and the pro-
spect of an Angevin return was firmly rebutted with the
connivance of James's own younger brother Frederick, royal
lieutenant in Sicily, who had his own royal ambitions. And
so Frederick was elected king by his Sicilian friends, finding
himself subsequently at war with James, who sent troops and
ships in rather half-hearted aid of the Angevins, while main-
taining a loving private correspondence with his brother. In
1297 Boniface VIII granted the title to the Regnum Sardinie
et Corsice, kingdom of Sardinia and Corsica, to James II, but
the pope was deceiving himself if he imagined that James was
now firmly in his camp.^16 In 1298, resisting unsuccessfully,
James of Aragon had to concede the restoration of his uncle
- Toynbee, StLouis of Toulouse, pp. 100-9.
- Most of the sobriquets were apparently posthumous, though James I
seems to have been known as El Conqueridor in his own lifetime. The
titles provide a valuable means of distinguishing hordes of Peters,
Alfonsos and so on, when the numbering of the kings according to
the Catalan, Aragonese, Valencian, Sicilian and Neapolitan sequence
differs. On James II, see J.N. Hillgarth, The problem of a Catalan Medi-
terranean Empire, 1229-1324 (English Historical Review Supplement
no. 8, 1975), pp. 30-4. - Casula, La Sardegna aragonese, vol. 1, pp. 61-77.