THE \".'ESTERN MEDITERR~I\EAN KINGDOMS 1200-1500or desolate land, for instance in Minorca; the experiment
was not a success. The general tone of Aragonese rule was
to treat the Sards as a subject people in all respects com-
parable to the conquered Muslims of southern Spain, even
though they were in fact Christians. The harsher the rule, the
stiffer the opposition; the rulers of Arborea, having invited
the kings of Aragon into the island, were now in full flood
of rebellion, and the Sardinians simply refused to simmer
down: Mariano II of Arborea raised the standards of rebel-
lion again in 1358, and an Aragonese invasion force was
humiliated in 1367. All this cost a fortune, not least when,
in 1371, Peter tried to unleash English mercenaries on the
island. The ambition was to capitalise on the resources of an
island which offered good amounts of grain, salt, pastoral
products and silver, but it is doubtful whether the balance
sheet for Sardinia was ever anywhere other than in the red.
By 1400 the Aragonese had lost all but some of the fringes
of the island, around Alghero in the north-west and around
the major city of Cagliari, in the south-east. The kings of
Arborea dominated the interior and developed a successful
administrative system under a series of rulers of whom the
most famous was the regent Eleonora of Arborea, who has
a speual reputation as a legislator. If Aragonese rule were to
become a reality on the island, it would quite simply need
to be reconquered.^1 "
There were other wars that cost Peter more than he could
really afford, and brought him no more advantage. The
clearance of the seas off Gibraltar in around 1342 had been
a rare example of Castilian-Aragonese cooperation. There-
after, Peter went out of his way to pick a quarrel with his
namesake Peter I (Pedro the Cruel), king of Castile, result-
ing in a long drawn out war from 1355 to 1366. The official
excuse was interference by Basque sailors in Majorcan ship-
ping, the unofficial motive apparently border adjustments
between Aragon and Castile, notably around Murcia. In any
case, Pedro was an ally, as Castilian kings in the past had
tended to be, of the Genoese, who had major bases in south-
ern Spain, notably at Seville. If it was Peter IV's intention to
enlarge the Venetian-Genoese war into a Catalan-Castilian
- F.C. Casula, La Sardet,rna amgonese, 2 vols (Cagliari, 1990), vol. 2, for
the evolution of an independent Arborea.