THE V\I'ESTERN MEDITERRANEAN KINGDOM 1200-1500a drain while Peter's men hammered on the door of his
bedroom, though he must have known that the price of
escape would be the seizure of a large part of his territories
by Peter's armies.^7 The pope, meanwhile, declared the king
of Aragon deposed from his throne, on the grounds that
Aragon was a vassal kingdom of the Holy See (a relationship
that had been largely ignored since Peter II was crowned
by lnnocen t III in 1204); the new king was to be Philip III
of France's younger son Charles of Valois, a second-rate
imitation of his own great-uncle Charles of Anjou. A second,
massive French invasion of Catalonia, in 1285, launched
as a full-scale crusade, was accompanied by civil unrest in
Barcelona; this Peter ruthlessly suppressed by hanging the
ringleader despite assuring him of a safe-conduct.x James
of Majorca proved his unreliability by opening the French
campaign with an attack on Elne, the sometime capital of
Roussillon, in the hope of wresting it from Peter's men. The
passes across the Pyrenees seemed sufficiently well guarded
to hold back the French, until a route across the mountains
was apparently betrayed by one of James of Majorca's men.
What saved Peter was not his military skill, for he largely
avoided confronting the massive French host, but the out-
break of disease in the French ranks; even King Philip III was
a victim, so that the army turned back when it was already
in charge of Girona, and the dying Philip was borne to Per-
pignan, where he died, and with him the crusade."
Other factors ensured the survival of the house of Barce-
lona, too. The death early in 1285 of Charles I of Anjou
occurred when his own heir Charles, Prince of Salerno, was
- as has been seen - a captive in Aragonese hands, having
been captured at sea by Admiral Roger de Lauria.^111 Peter
saw the need to gain control of the western Mediterranean,
7. Martinez, Trrigica historia, pp. h7-80, utilising the dramatic account
of Bernat Desclot, the close adviser of Peter the Great who left an
important chronicle of the reign (printed by Soldevila, LPs quatre
grans croniquP.'i', English version: Chronicle of the reign of King Pedro Ill.
trans!. F.L. Critchlow, 2 vols, Princeton, NJ, 1928-34).
8. C. Batlle y Gallart, III crisis social J econ6miw de Barcelona a rnrdiados del
siglo XV, 2 vols (Barcelona, 1973), vol. 2, doc. l.
9. Villani's Chronirle, trans!. Rose E. Selfe and ed. P.H. Wicksteed (Lon-
don, 1906), pp. 277-9.
- J. Pryor, 'The naval battles of Roger of Lauria', journal of Medieval
History, 9 ( 1983), pp. 179-2 Hi.