THE END OF THE HOUSE OF BARCELONAone, it was an ill-advised move that very nearly cost him
an exorbitant price: Pedro sent Castilian ships against the
Balearic islands, and managed to grab some lands for him-
self from Aragon. The solution to his difficulties was to ally
himself with the bastard rival of Pedro, Pedro's half-brother
Henry of Trastamara; there is something ironic in the spec-
tacle of a king of Aragon who claimed to have suffered much
from his own half-brother, who was such a stickler for legal
right, and yet who supported Henry's revolt against the
undoubtedly merciless Castilian king. The danger went fur-
ther still, since the English supported Pedro and the French
Henry. The assassination of Pedro by Henry in the king's
tent in 1369 put an end to this disagreeable problem.^15
Peter IV was well aware that his difficulty in securing
control over the economic resources of Sardinia made it all
the more imperative that he should not lose access to the
resources of Sicily, whose independent dynasty he bonded
to himself by a sequence of marriages, including his own
wedding in 1349 to Eleonora of Sicily. The ultimate aim was,
clearly enough, to secure the complete reversion of the island
to the house of Aragon, but it was difficult to engineer the
extinction of the Sicilian royal line, all the more so since
female succession was well established in the Sicilian royal
family. Attempting to force his way into Sicily, Peter sent a
fleet to the island on two occasions, in 1378 and again in
1382, and finally he carried off the Sicilian heiress Maria,
who was taken to Barcelona with a view to marriage to the
heir to the throne of Aragon. The Sicilian question had not
been resolved when Peter died in 1387, but the outcome
would be a union of Sicily and Aragon in the person of his
second son Martin I of Aragon, II of Sicily.
Peter IV sought to assert the right of Aragon to play a
major part in the politics of fourteenth-century Europe. He
was highly conscious of the achievements of his predecessors
of the house of Barcelona. He interpreted their success in
spreading the Catalan-Aragonese banner over the Mediter-
ranean islands as a sign of God's providential outlook towards
- C. Estow, Pedro the Cruel of Castile, 1350-1369 (Leiden, 1995), for
something of a rehabilitation; excerpts of the key chronicle of Lopez
de Ayala may be found in Las muertes del ReyDon Pedro, ed. D. Ridruejo
(Madrid, 1971).