Chapter 2THE EMERGENCE
OF ARAGON-CATALONIA
THE COMING TOGETHER OF ARAGON AND
CATALONIA
'The rise of Aragon' serves as a label both for the extraordin-
ary success of the Catalan-Aragonese monarchy in asserting
its authority far beyond the heartlands of Aragon and Cata-
lonia in the course of the thirteenth century, and for the
dynamic expansion of the major trade centres of the Catalan
world, notably Barcelona and Ciutat de Mallorca, whose
commerce reached way beyond the political boundaries of
what is often called the Crown of Aragon (Corona d'Arag6,
Corona de Aragon). This, indeed, has always been the central
puzzle: how far the merchants led the monarchs in the con-
quest of much of the western Mediterranean, and how far
the merchants followed in the wake of armed fleets whose
aim was the glorification of the house of Barcelona or the
vindication of its political claims. A question intimately con-
nected with this is the degree to which the kings of Aragon
conceived of the territories they acquired - the Balearics,
Valencia, Sicily, Sardinia - as a coherent 'empire'. In the
account that follows, the basic assumptions are that one can
assume neither a close identity of interest between monarchv
and merchants nor a single-minded purpose of creating a
Mediterranean empire, at least before the mid-fourteenth
century. Catalan writers of the time were accustomed to attri-
bute the successes of their nation to Divine Providence. They
were aware that the success of the Catalans seemed to have