Aragon: The Crown That Faced the Mediterranean

The history of medieval Spain is too often told as the story of Castile. Aragon: The Crown That Faced the Mediterranean restores the other half. Born in 1137 from the union of a Pyrenean kingdom and a maritime county, the Crown of Aragon became a singular confederation—Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, Mallorca—that looked east, to the sea, rather than west to the meseta. Across eighteen vivid, rigorous chapters this book follows James I the Conqueror to Mallorca and Valencia, the Sicilian Vespers and the leap into the Mediterranean, the fearsome Almogavars and the Catalan Company in Athens, the long wars for Sardinia and the conquest of Naples, and a trading empire ruled by maritime consulates and the Llibre del Consolat de Mar. Above all it recovers a distinctive political culture—the Corts, the Justicia of Aragon, the Generalitat—built on pactisme, the idea that a king governs by pact and within the law. Evenhanded and source-critical, it decenters the Castilian gaze without surrendering to nationalist myth, flagging the later Catalan, Valencian, Aragonese, and Spanish appropriations of this past for what they are. The result is a portrait of a plural Spain whose history was never reducible to Castile.