Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (36 page)

In that same era, the heir apparent of the kingdom-county – the future Pedro III El Grande – married the heiress of Sicily, Constanza di Hohenstaufen. The fourteen-year-old bride, who arrived in Barcelona in 1262 with a fleet of galleys, laden with jewels and surrounded by an extravagant retinue, was to introduce the royal court to unaccustomed levels of opulence. The king’s table, for example, abandoned its previous austerity, which had dictated a standard diet of mutton, with fish on Fridays. Detailed pantry receipts have survived to show that the royal household’s culinary repertoire rapidly improved. Beef, goats’ meat, poultry and salt pork with cabbage were served on ordinary days, not just at banquets, and roast pigeon figured so frequently it may have been the princess’s favourite. Milk, butter, white sugar, spices, onions, spinach and other vegetables became items of daily expenditure, while large quantities of nuts and fresh fruit were consumed at breakfast. Extraordinarily intricate rules were laid down to allocate particular cuts of a carcass to particular grades of cook in lieu of salary. Soap appears on the shopping lists, indicating a dramatic step change in washing habits.
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Meanwhile, fifty years of royal warfare brought the nobility into a strong bargaining position. The traditional warrior caste fought the king’s battles without demur, and was richly rewarded by grants of land and honours. Yet in the last years of Jaime I’s reign, they increased their demands. They formed a ‘Union of Liberties’, calling for a charter of their rights and privileges, a definition of the powers of the justiciar, a guarantee of the rule of law, and a promise of annual parliaments. Jaime I’s successor conceded their demands, issuing a General Privilege (1283), which successive kings were obliged to reconfirm. The document is rightly known as Aragon’s ‘Magna Carta’.
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The growing territorial base of the kingdom-county supplied the flow of manpower and taxes which facilitated further overseas conquests. Once the Balearic Islands had been pacified, the galleys could be sent on longer expeditions. In the two decades after 1282, they descended on Sicily, on the isles of Malta and Gozo, and even on Greece.

Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean. Because of its triangular shape, it had been known since Greek times as ‘Trinacria’, and it had lived through wave after wave of colonizations, Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab and Norman. It is dominated on the eastern side by the volcanic hulk of Mount Etna, and for the rest by rolling hills interspersed with fields of vines and olives. The easternmost port of Messina is separated by a narrow strait from southern Italy, while the westernmost port, Marsala, is equidistant to within 100 miles from Sardinia and Tunisia. In the early thirteenth century, the chief city, Palermo, had furnished the camels and the harems of the exotic and itinerant court of the Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen (r. 1215–50), the so-called
Stupor Mundi
. Thanks to the rivalry between the German houses of Guelph and Ghibelline, however, the Emperor Frederick was drawn into a feud with the (pro-Guelph) Papal States, and he and his sons, Conrad and Manfred, were excommunicated. In 1266 the Hohenstaufens’ Kingdom of Sicily, consisting of southern Italy as well as the island itself, was awarded by papal decree to the papal favourite, Charles d’Anjou.
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Aragon’s link to Sicily came about as an unforeseen consequence of popular discontent with Angevin rule. In 1282 the citizens of Palermo turned on the Angevin-French garrison, and massacred them in a nocturnal outrage that came to be known as the ‘Sicilian Vespers’.
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In the ensuing struggle, a group of former Hohenstaufen supporters appealed for aid to Aragon, offering the throne to Pedro III, the husband of Manfred’s daughter, Constanza. The appeal signalled confidence in Aragon’s newfound military and naval standing; the offer was a result for which the Aragonese court had long been angling.

The War of the Sicilian Vespers, which lasted no less than twenty years, pitted the king of France against anyone and everyone. The fighting was concentrated on a series of naval campaigns in which the Aragonese galley-fleet successfully denied the Angevins a safe passage for their troops.
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Supreme command of operations fell to Jaime II El Justo (1267–1327), Pedro III’s son, who assumed the royal claim to Sicily on his father’s death in 1285. The architect of success was, without doubt, Admiral Ruggiero di Lauria (
c
. 1245–1305), a Calabrian sailor in the Aragonese service who fought six major sea battles against preponderant enemy odds and repeatedly prevailed through a mixture of daring, guile and superior seamanship.
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The final outcome, in 1302, saw a compromise in which the Angevins kept their lands on the
Continente
, while the Aragonese kept the island. In order to confuse posterity, the reduced Angevin realm, centred on Naples, continued to be called the Kingdom of Sicily. The new Aragonese realm, based on Sicily, was initially called the Kingdom of Trinacria. Charmingly, in reference to the
faro
or ‘lighthouse’, which stood on the island shore of the Straits of Messina. the Angevin realm now became known in Sicilian parlance as ‘
La Sicilia di qua del faro
’ or ‘Sicily beyond the lighthouse’. The Aragonese realm was ‘
La Sicilia di qui del faro
’ or ‘Sicily on this side of the lighthouse’. To compound the confusion, the Calabrians adopted the opposite perspective. For them, the tip of their country stood at the lighthouse at Reggio, and for them Sicily became ‘
di qua del faro
’.

The coronation of Jaime El Justo of Aragon-Catalonia, which took place in Palermo on 2 February 1286, long before the war was won, was more than a sacred and symbolic ceremony: it was the occasion when the new king could win over his new subjects.

Summoning, therefore, the prelates, barons and syndics of the cities and townships throughout the island, [the notables of the kingdom] assembled in parliament in Palermo… Thither James repaired, with the Queen and the Infant Don Frederic, and was crowned in the name of God and of the Virgin, by the Bishop of Cefalù, the Archimandrite of Messina and many other Sicilian prelates, as well as the Bishops of Squillaci and Nicastro.

During the subsequent days of festivity… James at his own cost conferred the honour of knighthood on four hundred Sicilian nobles: distributed many favours; and granted many fiefs which had lapsed to the exchequer on the expulsion of the French barons, both to do honour to this joyful occasion and to increase the number of his supporters…

For the same reason, during the sitting of parliament on the 5th of February, he promulgated the constitutions and immunities, as they were then called, incorporated with the laws of the Kingdom of Sicily under the head of the acts of King James, and written in the language of concession…
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For Dante Alighieri, writing in the early fourteenth century, the Sicilian Vespers and its consequences were contemporary events that he incorporated into the
Divina Commedia
. On the shores of Purgatory, for example, Dante meets the shade of Manfred, son of the Emperor Frederick II, who like his father had died excommunicate. Manfred explains that ‘despite the Church’s curse’, repentance had given him the hope of salvation; and he begs Dante, if restored to the land of the living, to tell his ‘lovely daughter’ of the good news:

ond’io ti priego che, quando tu riedi,

vadi a mia bella figlia, genitrice

de l’onor di Cicilia e d’Aragona,

e dichi’l vero a lei, s’altro si dice.

(‘I pray, when you return to the world, / that you go to my lovely daughter, mother / of kings in Sicily and Aragon / and tell her the truth, lest she’s heard something different.’)
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As well as being the wife of Pedro III of Aragon, Manfred’s daughter Constanza (still alive in 1300 as Queen Mother) was mother both of Jaime II of Aragon and of Frederico II of Sicily.

In a valley ‘where nature was a painter’, Dante meets the shades of negligent princes, who squandered their birthright. The setting is idyllic. The riot of flowers – ‘
Oro e argento fine, cocco e biacca, indaco legno lucido sereno, fresco smeraldo
’ – is mixed with a choir of souls intoning the ‘
Salve Regina
’. But the lesson is severe. The shades of Pedro III and Charles d’Anjou, rivals for the Sicilian throne, sing in harmony. Others receive the poet’s lash. The
Nasetto
, ‘the Snubnose’, who ‘fled and dishonoured the Lily’, is Philippe III of France, who had died in Perpignan at the end of his campaign in Catalonia.
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Not surprisingly, the original Aragonese candidate for the thone of Sicily was long dead by the time that peace came. Pedro III’s third son, Frederico, was eventually confirmed as the long-term holder of the throne. He gave rise to a new Sicilian line of the House of Aragon, ruling in parallel to their relatives in Barcelona and Majorca for more than a hundred years.
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The islands of Malta and Gozo passed under the Crown of Aragon in 1282, since they formed an integral part of the Kingdom of Sicily. Owing to the long wars between the Aragonese and the Angevins, however, the Maltese nobility gained a large measure of autonomy that lasted until the link with Aragon was severed centuries later. The royal government exercised control through a long series of viceroy/governors. The Arab elite was not expelled; their Muslim faith, Moorish architecture and Arabic language waned very slowly; indeed, modern Maltese is in many respects a derivative of medieval Arabic. The chief city, Mdina, retained its Arabic name while turning into a stronghold of the feudal nobility.
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The link with Greece also originated as an offshoot of the Crown’s intervention in Sicily. At the end of the War of the Sicilian Vespers, the Aragonese army in Sicily could no longer be paid. So, with the king’s approval, a powerful ‘Catalan Company’ was assembled and sent in 1302 as mercenaries to the Emperor of Byzantium, who was already feeling the threat from the Ottoman advance. The company’s leader was an adventurer from Rosselló, Ruggier Desflors (Roger Deslaur or Roger de Flor). A Catalan soldier, who recorded their deeds for posterity, wrote that they had gone to ‘Romania’:

The Emperor, in the presence of all, made Frey Roger sit down before him and gave him the baton and the cap and the banner and the seal of the Empire, and invested him with the robes belonging to the office and made him Caesar of the Empire. And a Caesar is an officer who sits in a chair near that of the Emperor, only half a palm lower, and he can do as much as the Emperor in the Empire. He can bestow gifts in perpetuity and can dispose of the treasure, impose tribute, and he can apply the question and hang and quarter… And again, he signs himself ‘Caesar of Our Empire’ and the Emperor writes to him ‘Caesar of Thy Empire’. What shall I tell you? There is no difference between the Emperor and the Caesar, except that… the Emperor wears a scarlet cap and all his robes are scarlet, and the Caesar wears a blue cap and his robes are blue with a narrow gold border…
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