THE END OF THE HOUSE OF BARCELONAheavily on the founders of the Aragonese commonwealth
in the thirteenth and early fourteenth century that Peter's
role as the figure who tried, with varying success, to impose
an unprecedented degree of unity on his disparate lands
can too easily be passed by.
It is the case, nonetheless, that Peter IV is one of the most
accessible Aragonese monarchs, since he and his advisers
spent many years justifYing the king's policies in an autobio-
graphical chronicle. Some sections, notably those concerned
with Sardinia, were not based on eye-witness knowledge; but
the greater part of the work betrays close involvement by
the king in its authorship: at one point the king mentions
that he was sitting in bed reading his ancestor James I's
autobiography, which first survives in a manuscript of this
period. The king of Aragon was thus intensely interested in
studying how his predecessors had acquired lands, fame and
glory, and (even more) on what legal basis their claims to
lands in the Mediterranean could be justified. The inescap-
able conclusion, for Peter, was that God Himself had guided
the house of Barcelona; he portayed himself as a new King
David: 'and truly our wars and tribulations were prefigured
in the wars and troubles of David ... and, as the goodness
of the Creator delivered David out of the hand of Saul, king
of the Philistines, and out of the hand of Absalom and the
people who had risen against him, so the mercy of the Lord
has delivered us and our kingdoms out of the hand of all
our enemies'.^3 It was, he said in the preface to his chronicle,
the special duty of the king to render praise to God for the
favours he had granted his servant the king of Aragon, pro-
tecting him from his enemies. God sustains the entire world,
and it is proper that everything the good man has should be
edition contains an extensive introduction outlining the reign; for the
Catalan text, one can use Soldevila, Les quatre grans crimiques. Other
studies of the reign include: R. Tasis, La vida del rei En Pere Ill (Bar-
celona, 1954); R. d'Abadal, Pere el Ceremoni6 i els inicis de la decadencia
politica de Catalunya (Barcelona, 1972); see also the collection of essays
published as an annexe to the Anuario de Estudios medievales, Pere el
Cerimoni6 i la seva epoca (Barcelona, 1989).- Chronicle of Peter the Ceremonious, Prologue, cap.^4 (Hillgarth edn, vol. 1,
pp. 128-9). Quite why Peter, otherwise so sound in his biblical know-
ledge, thought Saul, king of Israel, was instead king of the Philistines
cannot be explained.