THE V.'ESTERJ\ MEDITERRA.I\'EAN KINGDOMS 1200-1500the royal dynasty. No earlier king of Aragon had been so clear
in his mind that all the territories under the rule of princes
of Aragonese descent, Majorca and Sicily as well as the main-
land Spanish lands, had to be united under a single sover-
eign. Equally, it was becoming obvious that the monarchy
faced as strong a challenge as in any of the European king-
doms from the theorists and practitioners of a limited
monarchy that would rule by consent of the great estates.
MARTIN THE ELDER
In vtew of the care that Peter the Ceremonious took to
ensure that worries about the succession were settled, and
that the cadet houses of Aragon were drawn back under the
authority of the king of Aragon, it is ironic that the decades
after Peter's death were marked by increasing uncertainty
about the succession. Peter's heir John or (in Catalan spell-
ing) Joan I died without male heir in 1396, to be succeeded
by a brother, Martin, whose own son, also Martin, had mar-
ried the heiress to Sicily; but this same son predeceased his
father, leaving the throne of Aragon unexpecedly vacant by
1410.
John I's brief reign, from 1387 to 1396, was marked by
tension: the Carts, critical of royal extravagance at a time of
economic uncertainties, demanded the reform of the king's
household and the banishment from court of those who were
thought to be leading the king and his luxury-loving queen
astray. There were uncomfortable parallels with events in
contemporary England, where another ruler with grandiose
ideas of his office, Richard II, met even tougher opposi-
tion. The difference was that Richard developed an uncom-
promising political programme, which finally brought him
to deposition, while John I was all threats and bluster. On
the other hand, John's external relations were a mixture
of successes and failures. An attempted invasion in 1390 by
the count of Armagnac, who believed he had a claim to the
throne of M~jorca, was defeated. To head off such challenges,
John arranged a marriage between his daughter and the pos-
sible claimant Duke Louis II of ~jou-Provence; in the long
term, however, this created a claim in the house of Anjou-
Provence to the throne of Aragon, which would be revived