The Western Mediterranean Kingdoms_ The Struggle for Dominion, 1200-1500

THE EMERGENCE OF ARAGON-CATALONIA

been achieved against the odds, and this was one way of
expressing that view.'
'Aragon' is really a misnomer. The early history of high-
land Aragon and maritime Catalonia diverged significantly
until the middle of the twelfth century; and even then the
differences in language and economic structure remained

• and still remain - permanent factors separating the two
  regions: Aragonese speech is part of the family of languages
  and dialects that includes standard Castilian Spanish; Catalan
  is a separate romance tongue much closer to the Proven<;:al
  or 'Occitan' languages spoken in medieval southern France;
  Catalonia benefited from access to the sea, Aragon was land-
  locked. Indeed, Catalonia must be thought of as one part
  of a larger arc of territories stretching through what is now
  southern France as far as Provence, sharing many of the same
  cultural and political objectives. Most significantly, Aragon
  proper was by the early twelfth century a kingdom, though
  at that stage it was in a state of merger with neighbouring
  Navarre in the western Pyrenees, another factor that pulled
  its interests away from the Mediterranean and towards the
  Spanish interior; Catalonia was a collection of counties in
  which the count of Barcelona had by the twelfth century
  established a loose primacy that others, such as the counts
  of Urgell, could often choose to ignore.~ Its rough boundar-
  ies spilled over the Pyrenees into the county of Roussillon
  and the northern part ofCerdagne, Catalan-speaking regions
  that were only definitively incorporated into France in the
  seventeenth century.:l Aragon possessed a sizeable Muslim
  population, particularly after Islamic Saragossa (Zaragoza)
  was captured by King Alfonso the Battler in 1118; Catalonia
  had a very small one outside a few major centres on its
  
  
  1. J.N. Hillgarth, The problem of a Catalan Mediterranean Empire, 1229-1324
     (English Historical Review Supplement no. 8, 1975); also J.N. Hillgarth,
     The Spanish Kingdoms, vol. 1, 1250-1410, Precarious balance (Oxford,
     1975); the work of J. Lee Shneidman, The rise of the A.ragonese-Catalan
     f_'mpire, 1200-1350, 2 vols (New York, 1970) has been justly criticised
     not merely for its many errors of fact but for a belief in the coherence
     of Catalan imperial ambitions, notably by Hillgarth.
  
  
  2. T.N. Bisson, The Mediroal Crown o(A.ragon. A. short history (Oxford, 1986),
     for a reliable general overview of the antecedents.
  
  
  3. P. Sahlins, Boundaries. The making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees
     (Berkeley /Los Angeles, 1989).