THE V\'ESTERN MEDITERRAt\EAN KINGDOMS 1200-1!100
posed the greatest problem. In 1209, the arrival of northern
armies under Simon de Montfort, with the public aim of sup-
pressing the Cathar heretics and their supporters (jautores)
brought Peter directly into the Albigensian wars in defence
of his dispossessed vassals. Peter was not seeking to defend the
Cathars, whom he had vigorously persecuted in Catalonia;
he was on good terms with Pope Innocent III, who crowned
him king at Corneto near Rome in 1204. (Close links to
the papacy were useful in guaranteeing his Aragonese king-
dom against encroachment by its Spanish neighbours.) Initial
attempts at accommodation with Simon turned into all-out
war, with the unhappy result of the death in battle of the king
of Aragon, at Muret, near Toulouse, in 1213. This event is
often seen as the fatal check to Aragonese aims in southern
France, but other evidence gives the lie to this assumption:
the new king, James, remained in and near the Aragonese
possession of Montpellier during much of his long minority,
and a cadet line of Aragonese counts still held sway in Pro-
vence until the 1240s.
Peter's importance also lies in his successful joint de-
fence of Christian Spain against the resurgent power of the
Almohad Berbers, whose fundamentalist brand of Islam had
taken north Africa and much of Spain by storm in the mid-
twelfth century. The battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212)
brought him glory and also indicated that the Almohads
had lost the momentum which had earlier carried them to
such stunning successes in the past.^17 The way south now lay
open to the emergence of petty Muslim kingdoms, some
loosely under Almohad obedience, but not, of themselves,
able to pose a serious challenge to the Christian monarchs.
Nor was Peter's struggle against the Muslims solely defen-
sive. He initiated plans for a crusade against the Muslim
kingdom of Mayurqa (Majorca), recently brought under the
Almohad banner; these plans laid the groundwork for his
son's ambitions in the same waters.
Peter's reign is important too because it reveals ever
greater financial pressures on the rulers of Catalonia. T.N.
Bisson's study of the fiscal documentation of this period
indicates that the count-king's finances began to go into
the red under Peter II, under the strain of internal con-
flicts, such as the endless struggles with the barons over the
- Fletcher, Moorish Spain, pp. 124-5.
