THE \VESTER!\ MEDITERRANEAI\ Kli\GDOMS 1200-1500recognised as gifts of God. 'Because of our powerlessness,
fragility and littleness, thinking, working and finishing any-
thing good means that God is working within us. '^4 As this
statement seems to confess, Peter himself was not physically
an imposing figure; the sixteenth-century Aragonese chron-
icler Zurita contrasted his bodily frailty with his boldness
and ambition, and it is clear that his heavy emphasis on the
royal dignity and on the grand ceremonial that earned him
his sobriquet was an attempt to mask the fact that he was no
conquering giant like his ancestor James I. What he possessed
that James had not shown in any particular degree was an
intense piety that could, on occasion, easily turn towards
self-righteousness.
Another factor that influenced Peter's outlook was the
difficulty he had as a young man in making his voice heard.
His mother died when he was eight, just before Alfonso IV
succeeded to the throne in 1327; Alfonso's second wife had
children of her own whose fortune she was determined to
make, even at the expense of carving out great estates for
them within the lands of the Crown of Aragon. Her son was
granted such important cities as Tortosa. It is not surprising
that, once king, Peter acted toughly towards those barons who
had not supported him, and that he vigorously asserted royal
authority, even refusing to allow the archbishop of Saragossa,
despite earnest entreaties, to touch the royal crown at his
coronation, in case anyone suspect that the Church possessed
some authority over the monarch. The pious Peter in fact
ruthlessly dominated the Church, appointing his own men to
ecclesiastical office in Spain and Sardinia. On one occasion,
having suffered excommunication, he suspended the pope's
representative by his feet from the top of a tower in order
to persuade him to lift the ban. His mastery of the Church
was strengthened further by his effective control of the Mil-
itary Orders within Aragon-Catalonia, and further still by
the Great Schism, which left him free to appropriate church
revenues until the papacy sorted out its affairs. But his
undoubted piety did not make him fall victim to current ana-
tagonism to the Jews, whom he treated with great solicitude.
It was this sense of the unchallengeable rights of the dynasty
- Chronicle of Peter the Ceremonious, Prologue, cap. 3 (Hillgarth edn, vol. 1,
pp. 127-8).