THE WESTEJU.: MEDITERRANEAN KINGDOMS 1200-1500was thus not simply that it had become by^1300 the battle-
ground of the rival dynasties of Anjou and Aragon, but that
it was also the field of competition (and very often of coop-
eration) for Florentines, Genoese, Catalans and other mer-
chants; on the other hand, its own merchants, from Messina,
Amalfi, Bari and other centres, played a more localised role
in trade, keeping mainly by this time within the waters of the
Tyrrhenian Sea, the Adriatic Sea and the straits dividing Sicily
from Mrica; despite occasional visits by traders of Messina
to the Near East, the days were gone when southern Italian
merchants dominated the trade of the Mediterranean. More-
over, the middle of the fourteenth century saw the region
immersed in wars and plague, and the ability of Sicily and
southern Italy to supply the needs of their neighbours was
reduced; but so too was demand, as population throughout
Europe plummeted in the wake of the Black Death. Recovery
did come; but it took time in southern Italy and Sicily, and
it was perhaps impeded by the political strife which, particu-
larly on the mainland, led to the deliberate destruction of
sheepfolds and the exclusion of enemy merchants.
On the horizon, always after 1282, loomed the king of
Aragon. Yet it is clear that in the thirteenth century the
Aragonese had no clearly focused programme of empire-
building. What Sir John Seeley said of the British Empire
applies almost as well to the Catalan-Aragonese Common-
wealth, whose rulers only in the mid-fourteenth century
began to appreciate what they had acquired: 'we seem, as
it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a
fit of absence of mind'. Catalan settlement in the Mediter-
ranean took off after the fall of Majorca in 1229, and had
a similar character to the resettlement of Sicily that was
taking place in the same period: the island was latinised,
and the Muslim population gradually disappeared. This was
the 'middle' solution to a problem that the rulers of Aragon-
Catalonia and Sicily faced: how to reconcile Christian king-
ship with the fact of ruling over large numbers of Muslims
and Jews. The 'strong' solution was to expel the Muslims,
and the 'extra-strong' solution was to sell them as slaves, as
occurred in Minorca in^1287 and at Lucera in 1300. The
'weak' solution, revealed in Valencia, was to permit Muslims
to practise their own religion, subject to certain limitations;
here the model was the traditional way of permitting Jews to