The Worlds of Alfonso The Learned and James the Conqueror (original) (raw)

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The Worlds of Alfonso the Learned

and James the Conqueror

Robert I. Burns, S.J., ed.

Chapter 2

Prelude to Power: Kingship and Constitution in the Realms of Aragon, 1175-1250

THOMAS N. BISSON

[23] Born in montpellier, conqueror of Majorca, Valencia, and Murcia, James I was practically the founder of a federative realms or "Crown" of Aragon. (1)One thinks of him with his sights and ambitions fixed abroad, and rightly so. Yet he was, first and last, king of Aragon and count of Barcelona: brought up in the borderland, he fought first in Aragon, came to rely most on Catalonia, and spent most of his time in these lands. It was these lands his men had first to restore after the catastrophe that brought him prematurely to power, these lands he had first to govern. And it was people of these lands who chiefly settled the conquered domains and whose problems continued to occupy the Conqueror. The conquests helped solve some of these problems, to be sure, while creating new ones; but to understand the institutional [24] evolution of his peoples one must think of James above all in his original peninsular lands.

These were cohesive, expansive, yet lightly governed lands. The Christian peasants and knights, spilling down from their upland refuges, had clung to their kings and counts who first defended them against the Moors and then led them on victorious and rewarding campaigns to the west and south. Throughout the twelfth century almost everyone fought or supported men who fought; and almost everyone prospered from fighting on the frontiers or beyond, or from tribute paid by weakened Moorish leaders. Success in this struggle promoted economic and demographic growth in broadly similar patterns: Old Catalonia and Old Aragon became settled hinterlands behind burgeoning new societies of smallholders, warrior peasants, monks, and knights-regular who reoccupied Moorish domains and opened up new settlements from the Conca de Barbará to the Ebro and, in Aragon, beyond the Ebro. The old lands prospered too, especially in Catalonia, where the population rose to more than half a million in the Conqueror's day, or twice that of his other realms (including Valencia) put together. Barcelona had become a major port city before 1200; Zaragoza was rapidly becoming the natural capital (and melting pot) of Aragon; while Lérida in the borderland, and Tarragona and Perpignan in Catalan-speaking lands, prospered not only from local enterprise but also from favored locations in the king's itinerary.

But this expansion had rendered obsolete the old structures of power. The militant alliance of count or king with fighting barons of the old domains was weakened as military danger receded after 1150. By 1200 there were fewer great lords in Catalonia than there had been a century before, but many more of the lesser lords. The old counties and viscounties had been dramatically reduced in number as the domain of Barcelona expanded and an aggressive class of hereditary castellans, hungering for new outlets and rewards, was left to exploit the peasantry in increasingly onerous ways or to fight among themselves. In Aragon the king's protectorate may have been better preserved, for the baronial tenancies (honores) [25]remained revocable in the thirteenth century. Yet there too the peace of the late twelfth century had aroused discontent in the fighting classes.

James I was not spared these difficulties -- far from it -- but he was not long oppressed by them, nor was he obliged to invent their solutions. For he was fortunate in his ancestors -- even, one may suggest, in his dissolute father -- in some ways that historians have been slow to appreciate. It is well known that his long reign was marked by significant evolution in institutions, administration, and law. What is less well known is that the social and institutional order (and disorder) of James the Conqueror were largely determined by more fundamental changes that had occurred in the two generations before his accession.

It was in the time of Alfonso II (I in Catalonia, 1162-96) that the newly expanded realms of Aragon and Catalonia came to be administered as political units. The process is especially clear in Catalonia; but even in Aragon we can see this monarch seeking, in his grants of charters, to reduce customary differences between the uplands and the Aragonese "Extremadura." The consolidation of Catalan-speaking lands was virtually completed by the devolutions of Roussillon (1172), Lower Pallars (1192), and Urgel (1209). In 1173 the peace statutes of Fondarella were instituted in all the king's lands "from Salses as far as Tortosa and Lérida and their borders." That phrase recurs in subsequent statutes, until those of Peter I (II of Aragon, 1196-1213) make it explicit that the territory so defined was _Cathalonia._In the same period, the coinages of Barcelona and Jaca superseded other local moneys to become the national currencies of Catalonia and Aragon.

It was also then that these newly defined realms were endowed with territorial administrations. In Catalonia, at least, this was something more than a reform. The barons who complained of encroachments on their jurisdiction had no illusions about the change, but historians have underestimated its novelty because the agents who carried it out -- vicars, bailiffs, and_merini_ -- bore the same titles as in the past. Moreover, [26]the statutes of peace which specified their powers were formally analogous to the old Peace and Truce -- from which, in Catalonia at least, they derived. But the reality was new. Toward 1173-74 efforts were launched to remodel the old secular vicariate in Catalonia. The vicars were entrusted with enforcement of the peace, holding the king's hearings locally with the bishops and empowered for the first time to convoke householders of the diocese to repress recalcitrant malefactors. Chosen from among lesser knights without ties to the castellan lineages and now firmly subordinated to the count-king, these vicars became the first efficient agents of local administration in Catalonia. By the thirteenth century their functions were becoming territorial as their powers expanded from police to fiscal and military supervision.

This development coincided with other symptomatic changes in Catalonia: a reorganization of the comital administration of castles and a reform of fiscal accountability. Alfonso reacted vigorously against the pretensions of third- and fourth-generation castellans to exploit their strongholds independently. A series of suits (1178-80 and after) show the king insisting on power of access to castles, and drawing on his archives to prove his claims. In support of this effort the curial scribes Ramon de Caldes and Guillem de Bassa undertook the classification of conventions and oaths that led to the compilation of the Liber feudorum maior, the earliest surviving register of the Crown of Aragon. Simultaneously the same two scribes sought to establish a direct management of fiscal domains, requiring bailiffs to render account at regular intervals and keeping record of accounts in duplicate originals and registers preserved in a new fiscal archive.

One need not exaggerate the effectiveness of these innovations to grasp their significance. Royal finance remained dynastic and itinerant, without treasury or budget. The courtiers who supervised vicars and bailiffs remained untitled and omnicompetent. They were trying to organize local administrations without central ones, or at any rate without two central ones; for it is characteristic of Alfonso II and Peter II that they regarded their court as a single entity serving and [27] representing both realms. The king's rule remained personal, even arbitrary, as we know from the story of James's violent anger with the bishop of Gerona. But the political theory of the Usatges of Barcelona and of peace legislation in Catalonia and Aragon, together with territorial consolidation in both lands, required the delegation and specialization of powers that would progressively and inevitably be institutionalized. Thus while the old curial title of "seneschal" became hereditary and honorific in the Montcada family, and remained so in the thirteenth century, ministerial functions in diplomacy, justice, and finance passed to enterprising and affluent knights, businessmen, and Jews, but especially to secular clerks and scribes through whose labors professional literacy became indispensable to government. In this sense Ramon de Caldes and his associates were not so much reformers as founders of public administration in Catalonia.

These institutional tendencies sat poorly with the military elite of Old Catalonia, the one social element of that land that had ceased to prosper in the later twelfth century. As time passed, the great conquests of Ramon Berenguer IV faded into memories. Alfonso II did not lack energy, but his campaigns in Navarre and Occitania were hardly productive of spoils. In Aragon dissatisfaction with the slackened pace of the Reconquest may perhaps be discerned in the apparition of a pseudo-Alfonso the Battler toward 1174. To discredit him, the king felt it necessary to draw public attention to his great-uncle's tomb at Montearagón. This affair may have helped to revive designs against Valencia and Majorca in 1178-79; and while these campaigns had no immediate military success, they resulted in the formula of partition (treaty of Cazola) that determined the thirteenth-century peninsular conquests. Alfonso II persisted in his dream of conquering Valencia, but he was less given to mobilizing his warriors than to perambulating his domains in leisurely tours.

In fact, the events of the 1170s had hastened a profound change in the structure of power in Catalonia. Influenced by his prelates, the king ceased to share the exploitative ethos of his baronage, substituting a political conception of territorial [28] order for the traditional dynamic of expansionist aggression. While the count of Urgel might be persuaded to institute a Peace and Truce for his lands (1187) in conformity with the statutes of Fondarella, it was more difficult to win compliance from the lesser barons and knights organized for the very kinds of violence prohibited by the statutes. Nor were these men educated for such compliance. The prelates urged all the magnates to ratify the statutes under oath, but there is no evidence that these campaigns met with much success. The political effect of the statutes was therefore to drive a wedge between those magnates who felt an overriding loyalty to the king and those who felt threatened by the Peace.

This issue precipitated the first constitutional conflict in Catalonian history. The struggle has been overlooked by historians, for it seldom reached the battlefield and is poorly documented; yet it lasted for a quarter of a century and exerted a powerful influence on the rise of legislation and taxation in Catalonia.

The early phases of the conflict are especially obscure. It seems that some barons claimed exemption from the statutes of Fondarella on the grounds that they had not consented or sworn to them. A more formidable opposition arose from the allegation that the statutes were in conflict with the _Usatges._The statutes should not derogate from the Usatges in respect to procedures over the possession of castles, the magnates insisted (among other things) in 1188 at Gerona. The king accepted this point in order to secure confirmation of the program of Fondarella, together with additions relative to enforcement. This must have been a stormy session, which satisfied no one. It was followed by an even stormier assembly at Barcelona, where Alfonso was forced to give up his Peace and Truce entirely. The king's next move was to prepare a revised text he judged consistent with the traditional Peace as codified in the Usatges, together with additions devised to maintain the executory force of the statutes of Gerona while associating the barons in the work of enforcement. This text was published at Barbastro in November 1192, apparently without general consultation, and with an address extended, [29] for the first time, to the "good men and people of the cities and towns" of Catalonia.

Meanwhile the struggle had spread to other fronts. For the barons to contend that their lordships were immune from the Peace was to encourage the king to expand his own claims of lordship and overlordship. The suits against rebellious castellans were part of this campaign, and so too, we may conjecture, were Alfonso's interventions in the wars of Urgel (1186-94). Although these wars remain poorly understood, they cannot have been animated solely by political grudges. Persistently the king sought -- and won -- recognition of his suzerainty, first from Count Ermengol VIII, later from the viscounts of Cabrera and Castellbò. But not even the king could hope to control the "power" of all the castles, and the dangers of excessive insistence on his personal lordship became apparent during the reign of James's father Peter II. At Barcelona in 1200, then more emphatically at Cervera in 1202, the barons set about once again to amend the statutes so as to exempt from the Peace the men and animals of lords not personally commended to the king. Although by this time the royal vicars had gained full control of enforcement of the peace, their sphere of operation had been reduced in practice to the comital-royal domains. In 1202 the barons spoke of the "Peace and Truce of the lord-king" as if the peace had become a seignorial institution.

The conflict was further complicated -- and enlarged -- by fiscal issues. Like the barons, the kings suffered from the constriction of military opportunity. Alfonso II retained a costly entourage, and his son tended to extravagance. But royal fiscal resources were limited to ordinary revenues and occasional tallages from or upon men of their domains, and to tolls and the proceeds of coinage; they lacked the right of northern European lords to levy aids on fiefs. In 1173 Alfonso made the Peace of Fondarella the occasion for imposing a general tax on Catalonia. This imposition, first called bovaticum(Catalan bovatge) in an account of about 1175, cannot have been successful. It was a novelty almost everywhere in Catalonia, justified only by a remote and dubious precedent in Cerdaña; and in [30]1188 the king promised not to levy it again. This promise, which in any case may have been jettisoned with the other statutes of Gerona, did not bind his successor Peter II, who imposed the bovatge anew at his accession. Meanwhile Alfonso II had attempted to manipulate the silver coinage of Barcelona for profit, and Peter imposed a "redemption of the money" to compensate for his confirmation of the coinage in 1197. These taxes, coupled with other novel exactions, deepened the existing unrest and led to a new confrontation between the king and his magnates.

The details of this encounter, too, are poorly recorded. All we know is that, by an act attributed to him in March 1205 at Gerona, Peter II solemnly renounced the new taxes, retaining only customary impositions on his own domains. He promised to reserve appointments of vicars for knights of Catalonia who were to be chosen "with the counsel of great and wise men of the land"; the vicars must swear to govern lawfully. Peter also promised to maintain the coinage of Barcelona stable for his lifetime, and to refrain from exacting ransoms of the coinage or of the peace. These engagements were incorporated in a charter -- indeed a magna carta which, like other "great charters" of its day, was secured by oaths of the king's barons -- directed to the clergy, magnates, knights, and good men "of all Catalonia."

Had these concessions taken effect the struggle would have ended in a compromise, not unlike that reached in the amended statutes of the Peace seventeen years before. In fact, the articles on vicars and _bovatge_in 1205 were probably patterned on baronial petitions first accepted at Gerona in 1188. But there is no evidence that the charter of Gerona was ever promulgated, let alone observed. Ever more urgently in need of money, Peter not only imposed a new money-tax on both of his lands in November 1205 but also debased the coinage of Barcelona without notice in 1209. He borrowed heavily. He taxed ecclesiastical lands, not always with prior consent, before giving way to a better organized opposition of prelates assembled at Lérida in March 1211, where he granted individual charters of nonprejudice.

[31] So the initiative remained with the king. The instituted peace, however truncated, survived baronial dissidence to become the basis of a new political order in Catalonia. Peter II found natural allies in his townspeople, granting them specific protections in the statutes of 1198 and after; he legislated on other matters, such as heresy and marriage; and he continued his father's practice of convoking "full" or "solemn" courts from time to time. To some of these courts representative townsmen were summoned for the first time. But his most audacious innovation was to devise a form of taxation adequate to the enlarged needs of the new principality. Territorial in basis, levied by paid collectors, his taxes became his major source of new income. Peter capitalized on precedent by calling some of his impositions bovatges or monedatges; and it was a consequence of his reign that the bovatge came to be admitted as a customary accession-tax in Catalonia. The king overcame the unpopularity of these levies by invoking the "urgent necessity of the Saracen war" (1197) or the expenses of the crusade (1212). In theory, if not yet entirely in disposition, these were the first public subsidies in Catalonian history.

The political experience of Aragon in these years is more difficult to grasp. But it looks as if the king's men were less insistent on jurisdictional rights there than in Catalonia. Tenurial custom, having been regulated with the barons in the earlier twelfth century, remained on the whole more favorable to the king. Peter II seems to have employed his early ceremonial courts to confirm the traditional aristocratic consensus founded on common military interests. There too, however, fiscal problems arose. James I recalled that his father had alienated most of some seven hundred "honors" (in Aragon), evidently for short-term financial advantage. Resistance by the ricos hombres to Peter's costly submission to the pope in 1204, as related by the sixteenth-century historian Jerónimo Zurita, may be connected with other indications that the king pressed Aragon even harder than Catalonia in his first three years. As early as 1194-96 the manipulation of the coinage of Jaca caused a reaction that produced the famous papal[32] admonition Quanto personam tuam in 1199. And when Peter attempted to impose the monedaje in 1205, there is said to have been concerted protest in Aragon. Zurita speaks here for the first time of a confederation of Aragonese towns, and it is possible that this event marked a turning point in Peter's policy. While there is no evidence that he ever collected the money-tax in Aragon he certainly did so in Catalonia, where most of his known taxes and borrowing postdated 1205.

James the Conqueror thus succeeded to realms associated in a loose and uneasy condominium. The Catalans and Aragonese had reacted against fiscal and administrative pressure each in their own way, and the privileges of each were beginning to assume political significance. Yet the ideal of dynastic unity was maintained through the association of magnates of both realms in the court and entourage. In the disorders that followed Peter's untimely death, the pontifical regents tried to preserve an impartial administration. They summoned general courts at Lérida -- that is, in the borderland city most central to the united realms -- in 1214 and 1218. On both occasions they dealt with matters of common concern: chiefly fidelity to the king and restoration of the royal domain. In 1220 they counseled the young king's directive for a uniform fiscal supervision by the Templars in Aragon and Catalonia, and magnates of both realms are said to have urged the marriage with Leonor of Castile.

Political circumstances threatened this unity from the outset. First, the desperate need of repaying the crown's debt obliged the court to levy the very taxes that had been resisted under Peter II (and doubtless in the court of 1214), and that could only be granted following new negotiations in which the privilege of each realm was separately recognized. Second, the Templars charged with restoring the comital-royal domains were obliged to advocate principles of fiscal administration that ran counter to the interests and instincts of the barons (probably in both lands). Third, the king himself emerged from the tutelage of the Templars too early -- he was [33]not yet ten -- to avoid falling under the influence of baronial factions.

The matter of taxation was resolved first, in terms that were to be decisive for the future. It cannot have been easy. Given the arbitrariness of Peter II's monetary policy, it is surprising to find no evidence of reaction after his death. There was no confirmation of the quaternal silver of Barcelona in the great court of 1214, nor was the monedaje (Catalan_monedatge)_ imposed or collected thereafter in Catalonia. This can only mean that the Catalonian magnates, persisting at this time in the position they had already taken in 1205, insisted that their coinage "be diligently conserved" (as the usatge "Moneta autem" put it) without cost to the people. It was a brave defiance. But for the moment it fairly invited the crown to manipulate the coinage of Barcelona for profit. This is precisely what happened when the doblench money, which had been temporarily imposed by James's father Peter, was definitively instituted by James in 1222. At that time a royal ordinance overvalued the new money in relation to the old by twenty-five percent, "even though," as the king admitted, "it may seem . . . that . . . some people are unjustly troubled." But if the Catalans refused to consent to the money-tax, it is probably because they granted a bovatge in the general court of Monzón in 1217. While this subsidy was assuredly requested on grounds of urgent fiscal need, its grant so early in the new reign fixed irrevocably its character as an accession tax. The Aragonese meanwhile granted money-taxes expressly for the reduction of royal debts. Indeed they did so on three occasions -- in general courts of 1218, 1221, and 1223 -- as the boy-king was prevailed upon to sell repeated confirmations of the iaccensis after his marriage and after reaching the age of majority. Here we see the practice pioneered by Peter II in Catalonia -- commutation for public purposes of an arbitrary imposition -- being introduced into Aragon. It came in changed circumstances, however, for the events of 1218-23 ensured that the Aragonese money-tax would become a consented levy, and ultimately that the confirmation of coinage in plenary courts would become a custom of Aragon.

[34] These taxes and others helped restore some measure of solvency to the king's estate toward 1220-25. The Templars tried to restore the direct accountability of recovered domains according to the procedures developed in Catalonia in the late twelfth century but badly compromised before 1213. But this work could only thrive on restraint; and as the king came of age and the influence of the baronage increased, the alternative system of finance and administration by credit reasserted itself strongly. Once the bulk of pledges in the hands of Jews had been recovered, anxiety about the domain slackened. Schooled in the memory and promise of conquests against the Moors, James seemed a better and better risk to the barons, whom the king, for his part, was content to employ as procurators of his lands.

The young king's emancipation from the Templars (1217-20) marked a critical phase of his political education. Monzón had evidently been chosen for James's nursery because of its borderline location. In fact, the Aragonese magnates had reason to be suspicious. The provincial master who took custody of James was a Catalan (Guillem de Montrodon), and James grew up speaking Catalan; moreover, Monzón lay within Catalonia according to the traditional peace confirmed in 1214. When James went to Huesca and Zaragoza in 1217, he remarked that it was the first time he had ever been in Aragon. While the Catalonian barons were secure in their prospering inheritances, Aragonese lords still awaited the distribution of honors to supplement their constricted patrimonies. Their frustration may have induced them to resist efforts to renew the territorial peace in Aragon as had been done in Catalonia. James could not safely avoid dealing first with Aragonese insubordination nor, in so doing, creating factions of his own. He learned how to fight and how to negotiate in Aragon -- and men learned to respect him there.

"Take care not to go against our lordship," he said to the rebel Pero Anones in 1225. But the brave words could hardly conceal his inability to maintain a consensus, in counsels dominated by rival factions progressively forming around the abbot Ferrando, Nunyo Sanç, and Guillem de Montcada. When [35] the latter two settled their inscrutable and destructive war in Catalonia, and joined Ferrando in Aragon in 1225, James was for a time at their mercy.

One of our best glimpses of the motives for unrest in Aragon may be found in James's bitter recollection that these ambitious men in their moment of entente presumed to distribute the vacant honors of Aragon. Their impulse seems to have been a self-serving reaction against the regalian peace program, associated with direct fiscal management, advocated by the prelates and the Templars. Yet even at this extreme some semblance of biregnal solidarity was preserved (or claimed), and this persisted in the pacts of 1226 between Aragonese towns supported by Aragonese and Catalonian magnates. The costly and unsuccessful siege of Peñíscola (September 1225), together with the king's harsh pursuit of Pero Ahones, helps to explain Aragonese initiatives in the league. But antiroyalist sentiment in both lands soon ran its course. There was mounting sympathy for a king who, at seventeen, had carried on a Moorish campaign without adequate (and due) support; who had firmly reimposed the Peace in Catalonia (Tortosa 1225); and who was learning to discriminate between his advisers. New combinations of prelates and magnates may be discerned in the background of the Peace of Alcalá (1227), and a newly mature assurance is apparent in the king's handling of the war and process of Urgel (1228) and of the decision to attack Majorca.

Yet on the eve of his great conquests there remained a constitutional anomaly that James could no longer tolerate as his predecessors had done. As we have seen, the lands between the Segre and the Cinca had been administered with the bailiwicks of Catalonia before 1213, and the statutes of Peace and Truce had defined Catalonia as including Lérida and Monzón since 1173. On the other hand, the (Aragonese) coinage of Jaca had circulated between the Cinca and the Segre; and a tradition nourished since the days of Alfonso the Battler held this zone to be naturally Aragonese. In 1228 James gave in to the Aragonese point of view by convoking all the towns "from Fariza to the Segre," together with the richio homines of Aragon,[36] to a general court at Daroca concerned with an Aragonese dynastic issue. Seeking recognition of his infant son's legitimate title at a moment when he planned to divorce his wife, the king may have acted in this fashion to comfort disappointed magnates, who already knew that he meant to postpone the invasion of Valencia in favor of that of Majorca. This event was the basis for the Infante Alfonso's claim to the dynastic succession; and so long as no separation of the lands united since 1137 was contemplated, there was little political urgency about the administrative status of the borderlands. Only those wanting the protection of the peace in those lands were likely to feel threatened, an issue that may indeed have been in the air, for only three bishops (one of them Catalan) attended James at Daroca.

But the king's remarriage and the births of Peter and James changed things, the more ominously as the partiality of their mother confirmed Alfonso in his Castilian sympathies. And when in 1244 Alfonso's inheritance was reduced to Aragon while Catalonia was assigned to Peter, the status of Lérida and its hinterland became an openly political issue for the first time. James at that moment not only favored Catalonia (and Peter) by pronouncing that Catalonia's western limits extended to include Lérida and Monzón. He even maintained that such had been his understanding in the court of Daroca. The record of 1228 strongly suggests otherwise, however, and it is therefore of some interest that practically all evidence of that assembly disappeared early. There is no mention of it in the Llibre dels feyts. The original record survives only in a parchment carried home by the deputies of Lérida, preserved there perhaps against the king's will, and virtually unknown from that time to our own.

The volte-face of 1244 confirmed the new ascendancy achieved by Catalonia in the conquests of Majorca and Valencia while putting Aragonese loyalties to a new and unprecedented test. There is no need to insist here on well-known facts: how the campaign of Majorca was allowed, through Aragonese indifference, to become a chiefly Catalan expedition, supported financially by a bovatge limited necessarily to [37] Catalonia; how the campaign of Valencia was projected in a general at Monzón, which granted a money-tax necessarily paid chiefly by the Aragonese; and how Aragonese wishes to dominate Valencia were frustrated by the massive influx of Catalonian settlers. It is a measure of James's assurance that he saw no injustice in the altered situation. In later years he felt no compulsion to heed Aragonese demands that he punish his son-in-law Alfonso the Learned of Castile for violations in the borderlands, a defiance perhaps encouraged by new international ideals of fraternal monarchy. And the failure of the Aragonese to support the Murcian campaign of 1265-66 made it even easier to renounce this conquest in favor of Castile. Between 1229 and 1266 James the Conqueror had fulfilled his grandfather's treaty of Cazola (1179) to the letter.

The history of the Corts (Aragonese Cortes) is no less revealing in the federative perspective. Most of the plenary assemblies of James I met in his early years, some being the work of the regents during his childhood. At least fourteen such assemblies are attested from 1214 to 1236. Two of these met at Lérida (1214, 1218) and three at Monzón (1217, 1222, 1236), for a total of five in the borderlands; and at least four of these dealt with issues of interest common to the two realms. Of the other nine assemblies, at least four also dealt with matters of biregnal interest. The earliest of these assemblies show the regent-counselors conceiving of the king's "court" as a concentration of prelates, magnates, and urban deputies from both realms; in 1218 they spoke of "our whole court of Catalonia and Aragón congregated at Lérida." In 1214 barons and townsmen of both realms performed fealty, while only those of Catalonia ratified the peace; in 1218 the king's first confirmation of the iaccensis money engaged to its redemption only those who used that coinage. If the regents and prelates could have prevailed upon the Aragonese to accept a statute of peace, and if they could have persuaded the men of both realms to agree on a common subsidy for the redemption of domains, there might have resulted a federative monarchy of precociously sovereign character. It is possible that such a design, encouraged by the popes, was entertained [38]from 1214 to 1218. If so, the privileges of Aragon and Catalonia, dating from the reign of Peter II, defeated it. What survived was merely the notion that each realm should contribute in accordance with precedent, in separate negotiations. Already by 1218-19 the practice of separate convocations within each realm for administrative regulation was revived; and in 1228 the courts of Daroca and Barcelona dealt separately with dynastic and military affairs for realms that (then) overlapped in the Cinca-Segre area.

Professor González Antón has recently warned against mistaking James I's assemblies for Cortes, for those "auténticas Cortes" he finds developing only in 1283 and after. No one familiar with the anachronism that has stalked our interpretations in this field can fail to sympathize with this view, or to appreciate the caution with which González reviews the facts. But in this case he is disposing of the baby with the bath. Let us not argue about words. If not the "Cort(e)s," then at least the recurrent practice of interested debate in plenary courts, both in Aragon and in Catalonia, must be said firmly to date from the reign of James I. It was in the first half of the thirteenth century that the occasional summons of magnates (and sometimes towns) to enlarged sessions of the king's court was transformed into a ceremonial representation of estates of the realms. James learned more abruptly than his father about the potential of general courts for mobilizing in defense of privilege, as well as the difficulty of preserving the traditional mode of authoritarian consensus against concerted interests. He may have been the first ruler of his house to convoke assemblies as a matter of political discretion. In fact, he convoked them less often in his later years than in his earlier ones, complaining of their impertinent debates and observing that "in no country in the world has [counsel] the sense or value that it should have." By 1228 it had become normal to summon the towns together with prelates and barons in both realms: at least nine of the fourteen assemblies down to 1236 included town deputies. Some of the Aragonese deputies at Lérida in 1214 are known to have attended subsequent courts of Aragon, and it is highly probable that [39]Catalonian townsmen gained similar consultative experience during these years.

A formal procedure was already evolving that, if not yet invariable, clearly anticipated the mature ceremonial of the late medieval Cort(e)s. This included the hortatory proposition by the king or by a prelate on the king's behalf; the responses by ad hoc delegates of assembled clergy, barons, and towns, followed by discussion within the orders; and the public agreements and decisions such as vote of bovatge, determination of a date of muster, and promulgation of statutes. In 1264 at Barcelona there was a demand for redress of grievances prior to deliberation on the king's appeal. The summons had surely assumed a recurrent form by James's early years, a form perhaps at first, like the other procedures, similar in the two realms so commonly convoked together. An increasingly regular form of solemn diploma, making specific reference to the general court and often to those present, points to a newly categorical recognition of plenary consultation. Finally, while the king maintained the initiative (as he still did in the fourteenth century), deciding which social elements to summon and legislating with or without their assent, the events of the years 1175-1228 secured for the Catalans and Aragonese a proven right of parliamentary consent to extra-customary taxation.

In his later years, troubled again by Aragonese uprisings, James I would impulsively declare his partiality for Catalonia: "the best realm of Spain, the most honorable, and the most noble"; a land, he added, whose notable people far outnumber those of Aragon. Both parts of the remark are telling. James's scars were Aragonese, and it is no accident that the _rics hòmens_of his Catalan speech come as a loan-word from Aragonese. James was the first ruler of the Crown of Aragon who could be called Catalan by emotional preference. But his preference was not simply personal, reactive. It was rooted in a logic of historical change that he had the wisdom to grasp, and therefore to influence, but of which he was in no way the originator. There was nothing spiteful in his decision -- for the future of the Crown of Aragon, his most crucial decision -- to [40]maintain Valencia as a separate realm, thus enabling the Catalans to share at Aragonese expense a prize such as they had acquired virtually for themselves in the case of Majorca.

Catalonia was the dynamic, expansive partner of the union, more diversified in wealth and resources than Aragon, with her population growing faster. What sealed the advantage was that Catalonia, for all the restlessness of her old and new aristocracies, was better governed than Aragon. The regalian program of the Usatges and the peace furnished a model of territorial discipline which, if no more historically "legitimate" than the aristocratic constitution of which Aragon was to be a conservatory in the later Middle Ages, proved better suited to the newly defined needs of a growing society. The administrative functions of this order continued to evolve under James, but the foundations were laid in the reign of his grandfather. Fiscal administration was more interrupted, as we have seen; and while this problem remains in need of study, it looks as if James took advantage of the conquests to put his finances on a new footing in the 1240s, leading in the next decade to an improved curial supervision of ordinary revenues and expenses in all of his realms. The enregistration of accounts and correspondence was an administrative innovation of public-bureaucratic character, yet even here James was building on precedents dating from reforms in the Catalonian operations of his grandfather, and advocated by the Templars ever since.

The conquests mark a great divide in James I's reign. They created a new Crown of Aragon. We still know too little of their impact on the original dynastic lands. But the forces that explain them, and the destiny the Conqueror fulfilled, were an old and ongoing story in his day. They had arisen in the court that bound and the interests that divided the societies of Catalonia and Aragon.

Notes for Chapter Two

1. This essay is based chiefly on archival research of my own, some of it unpublished, and partly on a familiar secondary literature unnecessary to cite in detail. See CHCA VII, 3 vols. (Barcelona 1964), ponencias by J. M. Lacarra, Yves Renouard, and J. M. Font Rius; CHCA X (Jaime I y su época), 2 vols. to date (Zaragoza, 1979-80), ponencia by Jesús Lalinde Abadía; _comunicaciones_by T. N. Bisson and Luis González Antón. See also T. N. Bisson, "L'Essor de la Catalogne: identité, pouvoir, et idéologie dans une société du XII e siècle," _Annales: ESC_39 (1984), pp. 454-79, where three of my specialized studies are cited. See also my Conservation of Coinage . . . (Oxford 1979), chaps. 4, 7; _Fiscal Accounts of Catalonia under the Early Count-Kings (1151-1213),_2 vols, (Berkeley 1984); and "A General Court of Aragon (Daroca, February 1228)," EHR 92 (1977), pp. 107-24.