THE WESTER\\ MEDITERRANE:\.1\ Kll\GDOMS 1:200-1 •,ooor 'cattle tax', which was in fact a general levy, aroused con-
stant opposition; but even for the ruler to try to impose it
was some indication of his growing stature as first among
equals within the Catalan domains. Taxation was also the
issue that tended to unite the barons of both Catalonia and
Aragon against their master; paradoxically, it was by offend-
ing them with his tax demands that the ruler created among
them solidarity, and even if this solidarity-expressed in early
Carts or parliaments (as early, in fact, as 1164 at Saragossa,
a little later in Catalonia) -set the barons against the prince,
it still had a crucial role in creating a sense of political
community.^11 The fragmented, early feudal world of tenth-
and eleventh-century Catalonia and Aragon was giving way to
a new order in which the central political issue was the degree
to which the barons as a whole might be able to rein in the
count of Barcelona and king of Aragon. Traditionally, medi-
eval rulers escaped from such preoccupations by presenting
themselves as successful war-leaders, even though the finan-
cial outlay that this necessitated often pushed them back into
the arms of the barons.
Thus by 1200 the territories coexisted in a personal
union. Alfonso II of Aragon (I of Catalonia^1 1 ), who came to
the throne as a child in 1162, pursued a vigorous policy of
southward expansion into Moorish territory, agreeing in the
treaty of Cazorla ( 1179) to let Castile absorb Murcia in south-
eastern Spain in due course, but setting Aragonese-Catalan
sights on the more accessible Muslim statelet of Valencia,
closer to home. On the other hand, Alfonso faced more
immediate challenges in southern France, in defence of
important family interests. Here the Aragonese asserted their
authority in the imperial county of Provence, whose line of
local counts, themselves of Catalan origin, faced extinction
in 1166; Alfonso gathered up the county into his own hands,
taking the title 'marquis of Provence' in l 185, though after
his death it was once again separated from his core territor-
ies in Aragon-Catalonia. Until the mid-thirteenth century,
- Bisson, MPdie:val Crown o{ Aragon, pp. 50. RO.
- Considerable confusion can result from the differences in the num-
bering of the kings of Aragon and of the counts of Barcelona or
Catalonia. In this text the Aragonese rather than the Catalan num-
bering has been adopted throughout; it tends to nm one higher than
the Catalan svstem. so that Peter the Ceremonious in the fourteenth
century is Pedro IV de Arag(m but Pcre Ill de Catalunya.