GENERAL CONCLUSIONpractise their faith under Christian rule. Yet both Jews and
Muslims found themselves being targeted, with increasing
persistency, by those who sought their conversion, making
them attend missionary sermons and studying their holy
books in order to be able to challenge rabbis and imams on
their own religious territory. In the lands of the Crown of
Aragon, the condition of both Jews and Muslims gradually
worsened, though the decline was not continuous.^1 Nor were
their fates so closely bound together that the expulsion of
the Jews from Spain, in 1492, entailed the expulsion also
of the Muslims, who within the Crown of Aragon continued
to maintain public worship until 1525.
The western Mediterranean was thus a battleground of
dynasties, of merchants and of religions; its political his-
tory in the late Middle Ages was dominated by the two
hundred years' war for control of the Sicilian kingdom. This
war ended in a final loss of independence. The territories
brought under a single rule by Roger II of Sicily in the early
twelfth century had, by the beginning of the sixteenth cen-
tury, become once again the possession of a single king, even
if he wore separate crowns in what would become known as
the 'Two Sicilies'. But, whereas the Normans had established
a kingdom in the face of outside threats, from German and
Greek emperors and from Mrican emirs, the king of Aragon
would henceforth rule Naples and Sicily as far flung, though
very important, provinces of an empire which would soon
extend to Flanders, Milan and vast tracts of the New World.
Aragon itself would become increasingly subordinated, in
political, cultural and economic life, to Castile; the succes-
sion of Charles of Habsburg to both kingdoms and their
dependencies guaranteed that Naples would not resume its
position as effective capital of an Aragonese Mediterranean
- ]. Boswell, The Royal Treasure. Muslim communities under the Crown of
Aragon in the fourteenth century (New Haven, Conn., 1977) assumed a
linear decline in the fortunes of the Muslims, a view challenged in
important respects by the work of Mark Meyerson, Muslims of Valencia in
the age of Fernando and Isabel (Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1991). See also the
perceptive assessment of the early fourteenth century in D. Nirenberg,
Communities of Violence. Persecution ofminarities in the Middle A~ (Princeton,
NJ, 1996), which, despite its title, concentrates on events c.l320 in
southern France and Aragon-Catalonia, and makes telling comparisons
between the treatment of Jews and that of Muslims.