THE EMERGENCE OF ARAGON-CATALONIAAlfonso VII of Castile would lay claim to his lands, and he
knew that by placing his realm in the hands of the Church
he could probably avoid such an outcome.^10 The Hospitallers
had not yet become the fully armed Military Order that was
to evolve over the centuries into the Knights of StJohn and
the Sovereign Military Order of Malta; the Templars were
still few in number, though the Aragonese legacy increased
their reputation enormously. The rulers of Aragon eventu-
ally found a different solution, which resulted in handsome
compensation for the Templars, who emerged instead as a
formidable fighting force guarding the southern frontiers
of the Aragonese lands.^11 To resolve the succession crisis,
not the only severe one in Aragon's history, Alfonso's brother,
a monk, was brought out of seclusion to father a daughter;
this child was betrothed to the count of Barcelona, Ramon
Berenguer N, whom she finally married in 1150. The Ara-
gonese barons had, then, turned their backs on Castile and
on Navarre, which resumed its separate existence as a remote
Pyrenean kingdom.
Under Ramon Berenguer N, who governed Aragon but
did not himself take the royal title, Aragon and Catalonia
continued in fact to take separate paths. In Catalonia, it was
a bold enough step for the count to assume what has been
called 'una autoritat supracomtal', in other words, primacy
among the Catalan counts, through the issue of law codes
such as the Usatges de Barcelona, where the count was assigned
public authority in such matters as criminal jurisdiction and
the minting of coinage.^12 Recognition of these claims was
much slower to come than their assertion. Tighter manage-
ment of the count's own lands coincided with increasing
burdens on the peasantry; the golden age of light exactions,
characteristic of many frontier societies in which every incent-
ive was needed to attract settlers, was coming to its end at
least in Catalonia. Comital taxation, expressed in the bovatge
- E. Lourie, Crusade and Colonisation. Muslims, Christians and jews in
medieval Aragon (Aldershot, 1990), reprints several studies by Lourie
of this problem. - AJ. Forey, The Templars in the Corona de Aragon (London/Durham,
1973); AJ. Forey, The Military Orders from the twelfth to the early four-
teenth centuries (London, 1992), pp. 23-32. - D. Kagay, ed. and trans!., The Usatges of Barcelona. The fundamental law
of Catalonia (Philadelphia, 1994).