THE Vv'ESTERN MEDITERR>\NEAN Kll\'GDOMS 1200-1500CONCLUSION
The fourteenth century, which saw such difficulties emerge
in southern Italy and Sicily, was for Aragon-Catalonia a time
when its rulers began to articulate a more coherent concep-
tion of their territories as an organic unity, bound together
by political loyalty and by trade. The reconquest of auto-
nomous Majorca and Roussillon by Peter IV of Aragon in
1343 was a clear statement that the authority of the crown
extended over even the grandest of its supposed vassals.
Peter's own idea of kingly authority, soundly based in his
reading of biblical texts, has to be seen as well as a response
to the challenge that existed within his lands, where the idea
of a limited monarchy bound by some sort of contract with
the community of the realm was more and more persistently
pressed by the Carts, and later on by such theorists as Francese
Eiximenis. Peter expressed his sense of royal dignity through
his love of courtly display, which has earned him the sobri-
quet 'the Ceremonious'. He needed to gain control of the
resources that would emanicipate him from dependence on
his parliaments, and this was not a new problem; but Sardinia
proved an increasingly heavy liability, drawing Peter IV and
Martin I into bitter wars with the Genoese, who also had
interests on the island, and with the local kings of Arborea.
Beyond Sardinia, Peter eyed Sicily, and by the end of his
reign it was clear that the kings of Aragon intended to put
to an end the independent Sicilian monarchy, just as they
had earlier put to an end the Majorcan one.
The years either side of 1400 saw serious problems emerge.
Social tensions in Aragon-Catalonia were clearly expressed
in the anti-:Jewish pogroms of 1391, which the Aragonese
crown sought to restrain, but which resulted in the virtual
collapse of the once glorious Jewries of Catalonia-Aragon.
The process was hastened by a public disputation at Tortosa
in 1413-14, when the Church set out, with the approval of
the new king and the antipope, to humiliate the Jews. This
king, Ferdinand I, had only gained the throne after the
house of Barcelona died out in 1410. The transition from
the ancient dynasty to the Castilian house of Trastamara
was effected remarkably smoothly, and yet signs of tension
were soon visible in, for instance, his disagreement over