THE WESTER!\' MEDITERRANL\1\ Kll\'CDOIVIS l:ZOO-FJOOThe history of Italy in this period cannot be written with-
out paying attention to the Catalans and their ambitions.
Or rather, it can be written without them, at the risk of
producing what is really a history not of all Italy but of the
major Italian republics in the north and centre, Florence,
Venice, and so on. Unfortunately, too many histories of Italy
have not been more than histories of those great centres.
Put differently, the time has come when it is necessary, for
lack of any such work, to write an outline of the political his-
tory of Italy looking at the country from the south upwards,
from the perspective, that is, of by far the largest state, the
south Italian kingdom. In view of the capital importance
of this kingdom in economic and cultural developments,
those aspects too must be considered, within a wider Italian
framework. By the same token, the history of Spain in this
period has generally been examined from the perspective
of the kingdom of Castile which was, by the sixteenth cen-
tury, clearly the dominant element in the emerging federa-
tion of Spanish kingdoms. Here an attempt is made to look
at Spain's other face, that of Aragon-Catalonia, whose rulers,
though much involved in Iberian affairs, looked increas-
ingly outward towards the Mediterranean, across the Balearic
islands to Sicily, Sardinia and Naples; and whose territories
in the middle of the fifteenth century were half in Italy and
half in Spain. The result is an overview of the political and
economic changes taking place in the lands surrounding
the western Mediterranean, not just the Italian and Spanish
lands, but the territories in France and even Africa which
were drawn into the political and economic web of the Crown
of Aragon.
These two different perspectives, one on Spain, one on
Italy, are intimately related through the power struggles
that brought the Aragonese kings into Italian affairs, and
are expressed through the long-lasting vendetta between
the house of Barcelona and their rivals in Italy and the rest
of the Mediterranean, the house of Anjou. In^1283 plans
were laid for the duel between these two lines of kings to
be settled permanently in single combat at Bordeaux. The
duel itself did not take place; but a Two Hundred Years'
War of Anjou and Aragon continued, with intermissions,
to dominate the western, central and even at times eastern
Mediterranean.
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