Conflict in Fourteenth-Century Iberia: Aragon vs. Castile and the War of the Two Pedros 9004425055, 9789004425057

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Conflict in Fourteenth-Century Iberia

History of Warfare Editors Kelly DeVries (Loyola University Maryland) John France (University of Wales, Swansea) Paul Johstono (The Citadel, South Carolina) Michael S. Neiberg (United States Army War College, Pennsylvania) Frederick Schneid (High Point University, North Carolina)

Volume 129

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hw

Conflict in Fourteenth-Century Iberia Aragon vs. Castile and the War of the Two Pedros By

Donald J. Kagay and L.J. Andrew Villalon

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Castillo de la Estrella, Montiel. © Francisco Pérez (2005), https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Castillo_de_la_Estrella_-_Montiel_(nevado).jpg. Last accessed on October 30, 2019. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kagay, Donald J., author. | Villalon, L.J. Andrew author. Title: Conflict in fourteenth-century Iberia : Aragon vs. Castile and the  War of the Two Pedros / by Donald J. Kagay, L.J. Andrew Villalon. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2020] | Series: History of warfare,  1385–7827 ; volume 129 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020003674 (print) | LCCN 2020003675 (ebook) | ISBN  9789004380455 (hardback) alk. paper | ISBN 9789004425057 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Iberian Peninsula—History, Military—14th century. |  Spain—History, Military—14th century. | Portugal—History,  Military—14th century. Classification: LCC DP77 .K34 2020 (print) | LCC DP77 (ebook) | DDC  946/.02—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020003674 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020003675

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1385-7827 ISBN 978-90-04-38045-5 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-42505-7 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau Verlag and V&R Unipress. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgments ix Authors’ Academic Biographies xiii Genealogies, Maps, and Tables xvi Abbreviations xvii Introduction xix

part 1 Background to the Conflict 1

Spain: a Geographical Miscellany 3

2

Rival Christian States of Medieval Iberia 11

3

A Much-Contested Frontier 21

4

Two Royal War Leaders 35

part 2 Chronology of the Conflict 5

War of the Two Pedros: Causes and First Months (1356–1357) 67

6

The Middle Years: Expanding Warfare (1357–1363) 89

7

Papal Efforts at Achieving Peace in the War of the Two Pedros (1357–1363) 109

8

The Final Campaigns (1362–1365) 126

9

Aragon’s Victory Morphs into Castile’s Civil War (1365–1366) 137

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part 3 Organization of the Conflict 10

Administration and Financing of the Contending Armies 175

11

Command Structures in the War of the Two Pedros 203

12

Personnel, Payment, Equipment, and Intelligence-Gathering Activities of the Mid-Fourteenth Century Spanish Armies 221

13

Parliamentary Developments during the War of the Two Pedros 239

14

The Fate of Aragonese and Valencian Jews before, during and after the War Years 280

15

The Fate of Four Frontier Towns Touched by War 293

16

Elionor of Sicily (1325–1375): Pere III’s Third Wife, Queen and Important Administrator 321

part 4 Aftermath of the Conflict 17

Castilian Aftermath 1: The Campaign and Battle of Nájera 337

18

Castilian Aftermath 2: Later Events and Consequences 372

19

Prequel and Aftermath of Conflict in the Crown of Aragon 402

20 Conclusion 424 Appendix I: Correspondence between Pere III of Aragon and Pedro I of Castile, 1356 427 Appendix Ii: Pere III’s Administrative and Military Letters, 1356–1365 436

Contents

Appendix Iii: Pedro I’s Administrative and Military Letters, 1364–1365 500 Appendix Iv: Chronicle Chapters of Ayala and Pere III, 1359–1369 513 Bibliography 523 Index 582

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Acknowledgments The authors must thank a number of people and institutions that helped make this volume possible. First, we wish to thank the hard-working and highly competent people at Brill for their great efforts over the many years during which this book has moved inexorably from conception to production. In particular, there are Julian Deahl, now retired, who encouraged the authors throughout this process and with admirable patience awaited the results; Marcella Mulder who has seen to the painstaking task of coordinating with the authors the submission of the manuscript; and Gert Jager, whose patience and high degree of professionalism was responsible for putting the text into its final form for publication, a task that involved a thousand details. They have been, as always, a pleasure to work with. We owe a debt to Kelly DeVries, the editor of Brill’s military series, who has been a stalwart supporter of this project. Nor can we forget Dr. Scott Brestian, the head of a scholarly team whose archeological efforts in the region around Nájera, has provided the authors with invaluable information about the great battle of 1367. We also express our gratitude to the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Education and Culture and U.S. Universities for its generous grant that helped make it possible for the authors to travel to and explore the area of Spain over which the War of the Two Pedros and the Castilian Civil War were fought. Our special thanks go to Nicholas Agrait at Long Island University, a good friend and expert on late medieval Castilian history, whose work on the fourteenth century has proven invaluable to us when researching this book. To the anonymous reader of our manuscript, the authors extend their unbounded appreciation for the careful attention given to this work. We have made the corrections pointed out and inserted references to the works suggested for inclusion. We thank all the above as well as our future readers for their patience and insight, earnestly hoping that the present volume will seem an adequate reward for their attention.

…

Because of the great time and effort this work has cost in bringing it to a conclusion, I am extremely grateful to the vast number of people who have helped make it possible. I will thus take a moment to express my heartfelt thanks. First, I must express my appreciation to my parents, Vestal and Zita Kagay, who spent a good portion of their lives in assuring a secure environment for their four children, which included a first-class education, one which provided a true head-start in life. This acknowledgment must include my brothers, Jerry

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and Dan Kagay, and my sister, Kay Bennett, each of whom has supported me in their own way. Without a varied but remarkable group of professors, advisers, and academic colleagues who have long directed my academic training and have shared the triumphs and failures that characterize every intellectual career, especially one as long as mine, experiences, this and all my other books could not have been written. The most important of these very important people are: (1) Dr. Bede Lackner, my first history teacher at the University of Dallas who opened up for me the broad vistas of medieval history, and (2) Dr. Joseph F. O’Callaghan, my mentor at Fordham University, who helped focus my graduate studies on medieval Spain and provided a bright path of scholarship and honorable activity for me and all of his other students to follow. Their example in the study and writing of history has continued to this very day as both have entered their ninth decade. I would also like to thank two of my closest friends and colleagues who have helped shape my life both as an academic and a person: Theresa Vann, a fellow member of Fordham’s Graduate Program, with whom, I have produced two books, shared many laughs, and weathered the unpredictable directions that academic life can occasionally entail; and Andrew Villalon, my close friend since the early 1980s, who has also served as co-editor and co-author of eight books since 1998, while we were jointly delivering over twenty conference sessions during the past two decades. My appreciation also goes out to my colleagues in the two scholarly organizations to which I feel the most closely associated: namely, the Texas Medieval Association (TEMA) and De re militari: The Society for Medieval Military History (DRM). Among a large group of friends in these organizations I would like to especially recognize the following: Jeremy Adams, Kelly DeVries, James “Dick” King, and Clifford Rogers. And finally to the librarians and archivists associated with the many libraries and archives I have utilized for this and other works including the Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, the Cowen-Blakely Memorial Library of the University of Dallas, the University of Georgia Library System, the Southern Methodist University Library System, and the University of Texas Library System. Donald J. Kagay

…

The generation of a book supplies one with a rare opportunity to thank those who have over the years in some way or another helped make possible its

Acknowledgments

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creation. This includes not only those with a direct role in shaping the work itself, but also those with a role in shaping its author. Consequently, I shall take a moment to express much-deserved thanks to a number of people and institutions: To my parents, Luis J.A. Villalon and Josephine Matthews Villalon, to whom I owe so much, for a generous, understanding, and mind-expanding upbringing, one that always placed stress on the importance of education and scholarship. Also, to my sister, close friend, and greatest fan, Anne Villalon Speyer. And to my step-mother, June Megor Villalon. To the various academic institutions where I received my education; in particular, Staples High School in Westport, Connecticut, and just up the road at Yale University, in New Haven. To a fine cadre of teachers, mentors, and academic colleagues who over the course of many decades have played a noteworthy role in my education and without whom my career as a teacher and scholar would not exist. To name only a few of the most important: J.H. “Jack” Hexter, C. Bradford Welles, Ursula Lamb, John Boswell, and Harry Miskimin. To two of my closest friends and colleagues who over the course of many years helped shape my life both as a scholar and as a person: Norman Murdoch, one of the most loyal people I have ever known, who always had my back and without whom I would probably never have gotten a job in academe; and Donald Kagay, my co-editor, co-author, academic collaborator (and drinking buddy) for some three decades. To my many colleagues in the two academic organizations where I feel most at home and have carved out a niche; to wit, De Re Militari: the Society for Medieval Military History (DRM), and the Texas Medieval Association (TEMA). Among many others in those organizations, I would single out for mention Kelly DeVries, Clifford Rogers, and John Hosler, all of whom have played a role in helping shape this book as well as my career in medieval military studies. To various friends and colleagues with whom I worked in the now defunct University College at the University of Cincinnati for their friendship and encouragement; in particular, one of the most dedicated and productive scholars I have ever met, Mark Lause. To a long series of computers of various makes and models, starting in the 1980s with the Exxon 500 Word Processor, without which (whom?) I would never have completed my Ph.D. dissertation or, arguably, produced any publishable material whatsoever. To the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Cincinnati and, in particular, to its former head, Lowanne Jones. At a critical moment in my career, RLL “took me in from the cold” and then treated me with

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a generosity rare in the academic world, one that is well beyond my ability to repay except by reminding them that I have not forgotten. To the history department staff at the University of Texas where I concluded my teaching career and to Alan Tully, head of the department during most of my time there, who helped bring the 2010 meeting of the Texas Medieval Association to Austin and who helped my wife and me in the wake of a bad injury I sustained in Britain that same year. To Natasha (aka April Jehan Morris) who took over much of the organizing work for that TEMA conference; so much so that without her it would never have taken place. To the librarians and archivists, photocopiers and microfilmers associated with the many libraries and archives I have utilized in researching this and other works. These include principally the University of Cincinnati Library System, the Hamilton County Public Library, the Spanish Archivo Histórico Nacional, Biblioteca Nacional, and the Archivo General de Simancas, the Hispanic Society of America, the University of Texas Library System, and Vatican Collection at the library of Washington University in St. Louis. Among the people working for these institutions, the following stand out: Sally Moffitt, Daniel Gottlieb, and Thomas White at Cincinnati; Consuelo Gutierrez del Arroyo at the AHN, and Isabel Aguirre at Simancas. To generations of kitties who have been my “fuzzy muses.” (Saving the best for last) to my wife, fellow scholar and world traveler, and fellow ailurophile, Ann Twinam (Villalon), who has shared my life for almost five decades and without whose love and encouragement (and occasional prodding) my academic career would have gone nowhere! L.J. Andrew Villalon

Authors’ Academic Biographies L.J. Andrew Villalon and Donald J. Kagay have been academic collaborators and fast friends for nearly thirty years. To date, they have co-edited six collections of essays centering on medieval violence and warfare. This is their second joint monograph. The following are their academic biographies. Donald J. Kagay is an expert in medieval legal and military history, with a specialty in medieval Spain, in particular, the Crown of Aragon. He earned his Bachelors and Masters degree at Southern Methodist University and in 1981, received his Ph.D. from Fordham University, working under one of the foremost historians of medieval Iberia, Dr. Joseph F. O’Callaghan. From 1993 until his retirement in 2015, Kagay taught history at Albany State University in Georgia where he earned the rank of full professor and was highly active in faculty affairs, holding on several occasions the offices of Faculty Senate President and President of the American Academy of University Professors chapter at the university. Dr. Kagay’s scholarship includes the publication of five books and eight co-edited essay collections (six of them with his co-author of this work, Andrew Villalon, (listed in the latter’s academic biography). He has also produced forty-six refereed articles in a number of different journals including the Anuario de Estudios Medievales, Aportes, the Catholic Historical Review, the Journal of the Georgia Association of Historians, Imago Temporis: Medium Aevum, the Journal of Legal History, the Journal of Medieval Military History, the Journal of Military History, the Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association, Mediaevistik, the Mediterranean History Review, Mediterranean Studies, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, and Viator. Dr. Kagay is a frequent reviewer for De re militari, the Sixteenth Century Journal, Mediaevistik, and the Medieval Review. He has also submitted articles to the Cambridge History of Warfare: Middle Ages, the Dictionary of Medieval Iberia, the Dictionary of Modern Spain, the Oxford Dictionary of Medieval History, the Oxford Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and Military Technology. Dr. Kagay has been an invited speaker at the Meadows Museum (Dallas), St. John’s University (Minnesota), Texas Tech University, the Universidad de Barcelona and the University of Cincinnati. In 1994, the University of Pennsylvania published Kagay’s translation of a major medieval law code under the title The Usatges of Barcelona: The Fundamental Law of Catalonia. This book has since been published

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Authors ’ Academic Biographies

electronically in the Library of Iberian Resources Online ([email protected]). Along with Theresa M. Vann, Dr. Kagay published in 1998 a volume of essays in honor of their mentor, Joseph F. O’Callagnan with Brill. In 2002, he put out, The Customs of Catalonia between Lords and Vassals of Pere Albert, Barcelona Canon: A Practical Guide to Feudal Relations with the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. In 2007, War, Government, and Society in the Medieval Crown of Aragon, a collection of thirteen of his earlier articles, appeared in Ashgate’s Variorum series. In 2015, he again collaborated with Dr. Vann to publish a work with Ashgate entitled Hospitaller Piety and Crusader Propaganda: Guillaume Caoursin’s Description of the Ottoman Siege of Rhodes, 1480. Dr. Kagay is currently working with Dr. Vann on a translation of the Historia de rebus Hispaniae, the seminal chronicle of Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada. He is also currently writing a biography of Elionor, Pere III’s third wife. He has also published several articles on the history of Dallas, Texas, where his family settled in the 1850s. The most important of these, an article concerning a utopian settlement north of Dallas that failed in 1848, was published in the Southwest Historical Quarterly. In 1991, Dr. Kagay, along Derek Baker of the University of North Texas, founded the Texas Medieval Association (TEMA), serving ever since as its secretarytreasurer. In addition, he played a key role in organizing almost a dozen of TEMA’s earliest state conferences. In the early 1990s, he summoned and presided over an organizational meeting that led to the founding of De re militari: the Society for Medieval Military History. More recently, he played a similar role in the establishment of the Georgia Medievalists Group. L.J. Andrew Villalon did his undergraduate work at Yale University where he earned honors in history and was elected a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1984. After many years working at the University of Cincinnati, where he currently holds the rank of professor emeritus, Villalon retired and moved to Austin, Texas, serving as senior lecturer at the University of Texas until his “final” retirement in 2016. A specialist in late medieval and early modern European history, Villalon has delivered numerous papers on a variety of topics. His articles have appeared in both collections and a variety of academic journals including the Catholic Historical Review, the Sixteenth Century Journal, Mediterranean Studies, the Journal of Medieval Military History, the British Journal of Transport History, the Journal of Automotive Historians, and the Proceedings of the Ohio Academy of History.

Authors ’ Academic Biographies

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Currently, Villalon is working on two book-length studies in the medieval/ early modern period, one on the canonization of San Diego de Alcalá, the other on the life of Sir Hugh Calveley, an English knight and mercenary soldier in the Hundred Years War. He has co-edited with Donald Kagay (also the co-author of this book) six collections of medieval essays entitled-The Final Argument: The Imprint of Violence on Society in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (The Boydell Press, 1998); The Circle of War in the Middle Ages: Essays on Medieval Military and Naval History (The Boydell Press, 1999); Crusaders, Condottieri, and Cannon: Medieval Warfare in Societies around the Mediterranean (Brill, 2002); The Hundred Years War: A Wider Focus (Brill, 2005); The Hundred Years War, Part II: New Vistas (Brill, 2008) and The Hundred Years War, Part III: Further Considerations (Brill, 2013). Together the pair have also written an earlier, prizewinning monograph—To Win and Lose a Medieval Battle, Nájera (April 3, 1367): A Pyrrhic Victory for the Black Prince (Brill, 2017). In addition to work in his major field, Villalon has published articles on automotive history and the history of World War I. In this other area, he is working toward a book examining the powerful war film, Paths of Glory, tracing its history from the real events of 1914–15 that inspired its creation to its enshrinement as a cult classic during the Vietnam Era. Dr. Villalon has held various grants for study in Spain, including a Fulbright; received two awards from the American Association of University Professors for defending academic freedom; and in 2001, was presented the Professional-Scholarly Activity Award for the University College at the University of Cincinnati. He was the vice president of the Texas Medieval Association (TEMA) in 2007–2008 and president of that organization in 2008– 2009 when he organized (with great help from Natasha!) TEMA’s annual conference held that year in Austin. He is a founding member of De re militari: The Society for Medieval Military History and was elected to a three-year term as its president in 2014. Villalon was an associate editor of the Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and Military Technology published by Oxford in 2010. In 2014, De re militari awarded Villalon and Kagay the Verbruggen Prize for the best book in medieval military history. In 1919, Villalon and Kagay’s book on the Battle of Najera (1367) received the Brigadier General James L. Collins Jr. Book Prize from the United States Commission on Military History for the best book in military history for 2017–2018.

Genealogies, Maps, and Tables Genealogies 1 Inter-related French and English Royal Houses during the Hundred Years War 61 2 Rulers of late medieval Castile 62 3 Rulers of late medieval Crown of Aragon 63

Maps 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Physical map of Spain 4 The realms of medieval Spain 6 Theaters of conflict in the War of the Two Pedros (1356–1366) 88 The Principality of Aquitaine ceded by France to England in 1360 140 Enrique de Trastámara’s invasion of Castile (1366) 153 Campaign and battle of Nájera (1366) 369 Advance of the English and Castilian armies to Vitoria and of Felton’s Party to Navarrete (February–March 1367) 369 End run of the Black Prince from Vitoria to Logroño, March–April 1367; three possible routes 370 English march to battlefield and reposition of the Castilian Army 370 Battle of Nájera (April 3, 1367): Positioning of forces on the field 371 Enrique II’s escape route from Nájera to Southern France 382

Tables 1 Non-Iberian sources XXXIV 2 Pere III’s assemblies during the War of the Two Pedros 243 3 Common elements of Pere III’s parliaments 243 4 Meetings held during Pedro I’s Reign 274

Abbreviations ACA AEM AEEM AHDE AHR AST ATCA AUA BD BRABLB BRAH BSCC CAVC CDACA CDI CDPI I CHCA VII CHCA VIII CHCA XCHCA XV CHCA XVIII CHCA CHE CHJZ CHR CRA CSIC CSJP DHC DEII DJI DPI DS EEM

Archivo de la Corona de Aragón Anuario de Estudios Medievales Aragón en la Edad Media Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español American Historical Review Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia Arxiu de textos catalans antics Anales de la Universidad de Alicante The Book of Deeds of James I of Aragon Boletín de Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona Boletín de Real Academia de Historia Boletín de la Sociedad Castellonense de Cultura Colección de las cortes de los antiguos de Aragón y de Valencia y del principado de Cataluña Colección de documentos inéditos del archivo general de la corona de Aragón. Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris Colección Diplomatica de Pedro I I Congreso de Historia de la Corona de Aragón VII Congreso de Historia de la Corona de Aragón VIII Congreso de Historia de la Corona de Aragón X Congreso de Historia de la Corona de Aragón XV Congrés d’història de la corona d’Aragón XVIII Congreso de Historia de la Corona de Aragón Cuadernos de Historia Español Cuadernos de Historia Jerónimo Zurita The Catholic Historical Review Cortes del reino de Aragón 1357–1451 Concejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas The Chronicle of San Juan de la Peña Documents Historichs Catalans Documents de Enrique II Documentos de Jaime I de Aragón Documentos de Pedro I Documenta Selecta En la España medieval

xviii EEMCA EHR EUC GCB HID ITMA MMM NMS R REHM

Abbreviations Estudios de Edad Media de la Corona de Aragón English Historical Review Estudis Universitaris Catalans Gesta comitum barchinonensium Historia, Instituciones, Documentos Imago Temporis: Medium Aevum Miscelánea medieval murciana Nottingham Medieval Studies Registro Revista Española de Historia Militar

Introduction 1

Iberia: a Region Forged in Conflict

“[War] is the father of all and the king of all … since everything happens through strife and necessity.”1 This brutal axiom, set forth by the early Greek philosopher Heraclitus, seems readily applicable to the Iberian Peninsula, much of whose ancient and medieval history was forged in conflict. Early inhabitants who not infrequently engaged in conflict included the Celts who came across the Pyrenees from the north as well as Phoenicians and Greeks arriving from the eastern Mediterranean by sea. During the third and second centuries BCE, the peninsula served as a major battleground between Romans and Carthaginians as the two great powers of the period fought for control of the Mediterranean region. It required several generations for Rome to emerge victorious from this struggle, after which the Romans faced two more centuries of bloody conflict, dubbed “the War of Fire” by the Roman historian, Appian, before finally subduing the inhabitants of this conquered province. And although what the Romans came to refer to as Hispania enjoyed a prolonged period of peace under the emperors of the Pax Romana, even supplying several of the most illustrious figures to occupy the imperial throne,2 when the western empire entered into its final collapse during the Germanic invasions of the fifth century, conflict once again became the order of the day. German tribes, foremost among them the Visigoths and Vandals, poured in from the north, just as the Celts had done in earlier centuries. Having successfully overthrown Roman rule, they turned on one other with the Visigoths winning this second phase of the conflict and driving their adversaries across the straits into north Africa. Ultimately, the Visigoths would also find themselves fighting against Rome’s most direct successor, the Byzantine Empire, which struggled for decades to regain control of the rich southern regions of the peninsula. Between the eighth and fifteenth centuries, there emerged the lengthiest struggle in Iberian history, one which began with another conquest of the peninsula that began when Islamic invaders crossed the straits from North Africa in 711 and in less than a decade overran all but the far northern mountains of 1  Quoted in Aneta Georgievska-Shine and Larry Silver, Rubens, Velazquez, and the King of Spain (Farnham, Surrey, 2014), 196. See also: Geoffrey Ernest Richard Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy: Two Types of Argumentation in Early Greek Thought (Cambridge, 1996), 214. 2  Among emperors who were born in Spain or to Spanish families were Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, and Diocletian.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004425057_002

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Asturias and Galicia. From here, the Christian remnants of Visigothic Spain eventually launched what has become known as the reconquista, a counteroffensive of nearly eight centuries, during which their kingdoms slowly regained the Iberian Peninsula from the forces of Islam. The movement would end only with the conquest of Granada by the Catholic Monarch, Fernando and Isabel, in 1492. Toward the end of the fifteenth century, as the long struggle against Spanish Islam was finally reaching its conclusion, one keen observer of the Iberian scene, author of La Celestina, Fernando de Rojas, might well have been speaking of the history of his country when he echoed Heraclitus: “all things are created in the manner of struggle and battle.”3 During the medieval centuries, as Christian kingdoms expanded southward by conquering Islamic-held territory, they often found themselves at loggerheads over the division of the spoils, a situation that on some occasions led to conflict between them. Among these wars that involved Christian states the longest and bitterest would eventually become known as the War of the Two Pedros, a name derived from its royal adversaries. It was a struggle waged almost continuously throughout the decade between 1356 and 1366 by the two largest and most powerful Christian states on the Iberian Peninsula—the central kingdom of Castile4 and its eastern neighbor, a political conglomerate known as the Crown of Aragon, or simply Aragon.5 The younger of the two royal adversaries, the primary aggressor, was Pedro I of Castile (r. 1350–1366/69), who has (justifiably or not) come down in Spanish history as Pedro the Cruel. His older and craftier opponent, whose kingdom spent much of the conflict on the defensive, was the monarch of Aragon, entitled in the different realms he ruled as either Pedro IV or Pere III (r. 1336– 1387)6 and dubbed by his subjects “the Ceremonious.” Their bloody, ten-year struggle over what amounted to peninsular hegemony played a critical role in 3  Georgievska-Shine and Silver, Rubens, 196. See also: Charles Presberg, Adventures in Paradox: Don Quijote and the Western Tradition (University Park, Penn., 2000), 43–44. 4  Sometimes referred to as Castile-Leon. Castile grew out of Leon and for a number of generations, the two co-existed as independent kingdoms. Eventually, Castile absorbed Leon as it did two other early Christian states that appeared in the wake of the Islamic conquest, Asturias and Galicia. 5  The Crown of Aragon was composed of the kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia, the county of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, and a small slice of what is today southern France. Here, we shall usually refer to it simply as Aragon. 6  To his Aragonese subjects, the king was Pedro IV; to the Catalans, Pere III. Throughout our work, we have adopted his Catalan name and number—Pere III—in large part to distinguish him from his Castilian counterpart and adversary, reserving the name Pedro for Pedro I of Castile.

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determining how Spain would emerge from the Middle Ages and thereafter transform into the most powerful state of early modern Europe. Despite its significance, in the past this conflict has not received adequate attention from scholars, especially those outside of Spain. The present book has emerged out of a joint research effort by the two authors to address this historical gap. Our effort stretches back for well over a decade and has already given rise to a series of articles in journals and collections;7 and most recently, a co-authored book, To Win and Lose a Medieval Battle, Najera (April 3, 1367).8 The present book expands upon what was covered in the earlier one; in fact, the two are integrally related. The battle of Nájera,9 one of the largest military encounters of the fourteenth century, grew out of the War of the Two Pedros. Several chapters in our earlier work touched on this ten-year struggle and its connection to the great battle that followed. By contrast, this volume centers around the war itself, supplying only a brief treatment of Nájera in its closing section that we have designated “Aftermath.” 2

The War: a Brief Overview

In 1356, the 22-year old ruler of Castile, Pedro I, overcame an aristocratic coalition that had threatened to seize control of his kingdom. Combining bribery with military victory, the young king forced those who would not submit and come over to his side to flee the realm, a group that included his elder, but illegitimate half-brother, Count Enrique de Trastámara, a man who would 7  These earlier works by the authors will be grouped together in the bibliography and cited as appropriate throughout the text; consequently, there is no need to list them here. 8  L.J. Andrew Villalon and Donald J. Kagay, To Win and Lose a Medieval Battle, Najera (April 3, 1367), a Pyrrhic Victory for the Black Prince [hereafter Nájera] (Leiden, 2017). 9  Although some sources use one or another of the variant spelling—“Najara” or “Nazare”— “Nájera” has long been and remains the spelling for the town in northeastern Spain near which the battle was fought and after which it was named. Treatments of the battle appearing in Spanish include: Ramón José Maldonado y Cocat, “La Rioja en la guerra civil entre D. Pedro el Cruel y D. Enrique de Trastámara. Las batallas de Nájera,” Berceo 10 (1949): 61–82; Fernando Castillo Cáceres, “Análisis de una batalla: Nájera (1367),” Cuadernos de la Historia de España [hereafter CHE] 73 (1991):105–46; Anthony Goodman and Angus MacKay, “Logroño y la batalla de Nájera en la guerra civil castellana,” in Historia de la ciudad de Logroño, 5 vols. (Logroño, 1994), 2: 379–89; Tomás Lerena Guinea, “La batalla de Nájera (1367)” in La Guerra en la Edad Media., XVII Semana de Estudios Medievales, Nájera, del 31 de Julio al 4 de Agosto de 2006. Edited by Blas Casado Quintanilla and José Ignacio de Iglesia Duarte (Logroño, 2007), 344–78.

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become Pedro’s nemesis and a decade later mount a successful challenge for the throne of Castile. Within months of having subdued the aristocracy, the king, now firmly ensconced in power, seized upon a relatively minor incident as a pretext for initiating the long-lasting conflict against his eastern neighbor, Aragon. For the next decade, with only brief interruptions, the two kingdoms waged their struggle over the territory lying between them. For most of this time, the war remained a very unequal one as it became in large part a successful war of conquest by Castile. The only significant halt to the fighting came in May, 1361, when adverse circumstances forced Pedro I, much against his will, to negotiate with his adversary the Treaty of Terrer (also known as the Peace of Deza). This agreement greatly favored Aragon by stripping Castile of its recent conquests and for all intents and purposes restored the status quo ante bellum. It would not last. A year later, when circumstances shifted back in Pedro’s favor, he abruptly violated the treaty he had signed and, with support from Granada, Portugal, Navarre, and several of the Pyrenean counties, launched a full-scale invasion along Aragon’s northern border. When the Aragonese monarch, Pere III, proved incapable of stopping this onslaught, the invaders quickly overran the city of Calatayud, pushing the Castilian frontline dangerously close to the Aragonese capital at Zaragoza. The Castilian attack on Calatayud initiated the conflict’s second and most intense phase, one that raged on largely unabated for the next four years. Throughout this later period, Castilian forces repeatedly threatened both Aragon and Valencia, capturing cities, towns, and castles, including the major port Alicante. Another even shorter interruption in hostilities, negotiated in July, 1363, was violated by the Castilian monarch almost as soon as the ink had dried. Not until the closing two years of the conflict did the Aragonese monarch and his captains enjoy any meaningful success in defending their kingdom against Castilian inroads. But despite a slight improvement in their position during 1364–1365, the best Pere III’s forces ever seemed able to accomplish was to retake a few of the places they had lost. Then, at the eleventh hour, the fortunes of war underwent a stunning reversal; one that resulted from an invasion of Spain by the Free Companies, large bodies of mercenaries laid off due to a lull in the Hundred Years War north of the Pyrenees. With help from France and the Papacy, both enemies of Pedro I, Aragon purchased the services these battle-hardened troops and inserted them into the war against Castile. After gathering around Barcelona in Christmas, 1366, this force, led by Pedro’s half-brother, Enrique, and one of the leading military figures of the day on loan from the French, Bertrand DuGuesclin, swept westward into Castile. Meeting little resistance as Pedro

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and an ever-decreasing group of followers fled before them, by spring, 1366, their invasion ended the conflict in an Aragonese victory, something almost inconceivable a few months earlier. The War of the Two Pedros produced very different outcomes in Aragon and Castile. For Pere III, it reestablished the status quo ante bellum, this time for good, by returning to his control all of the considerable territory he had lost to Castile, once estimated by the king as having equaled perhaps one-third of all that he ruled. By contrast, for Pedro I, the war’s conclusion ultimately proved a disaster. He was driven from kingdom and forced to seek safety in the English-held lands of southern France. Despite being briefly restored to the throne a year later by a second foreign invasion, this time conducted by Anglo-Gascon troops under the Black Prince, the deposed monarch never again enjoyed a firm hold on power. His long conflict with Aragon metamorphosed into a civil war within Castile between himself and his hated halfbrother who had officially laid claim to the throne during the 1366 invasion, entitling himself Enrique II. In March, 1369, shortly after losing the battle of Montiel to his adversary, Pedro was captured when trying to escape from the castle overlooking that town.10 Within the hour, he died at the hands of his unforgiving sibling, in what stands forth as one of the most spectacular regicides of the Middle Ages. Pedro would ultimately pass into history as an enormously controversial figure, not unlike Richard III of England. By contrast, his adversary, Enrique, would go on to establish a successful new ruling house on the Iberian Peninsula, the Trastámaran dynasty. A few decades later, a cadet branch of this family rose to power in the Crown of Aragon, where it replaced the last of Pere III’s descendants. Unification of the family’s two branches by a late fifteenth century marriage between Fernando of Aragon (r. 1474/1479–1516) and Isabel of Castile (r. 1474–1506) led to the foundation of the new kingdom of Spain that emerged onto the early modern scene as Europe’s most powerful nation. 3

The Sources (1): Three Key Narratives

A major difference between the present work and the authors’ earlier book centering on the battle of Nájera lies in the nature of the sources used to write each one. In the Nájera book, we were forced to rely very extensively (in some cases almost exclusively) upon the chronicle accounts. Documents of the sort generated as a result of a modern battle are almost entirely lacking for that medieval encounter. By contrast, in the present work dealing with the ten-year 10  The cover of this book shows a view of that castle.

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war that preceded the battle, we have been able to make far greater use of surviving archival materials including not only military, but political, diplomatic, and financial papers that are simply absent for the battle itself. On the other hand, given the close relationship between the larger conflict and the encounter that grew out of it a year after its conclusion, it should come as no surprise to readers that a number of major sources critical to writing the first book have also been critical to writing the second. This is particularly true of our two principal sources. Both are chronicles generated within Iberia by men who rank among the finest chroniclers writing during the closing centuries of the Middle Ages, a period that witnessed this genre reach its apex. From the Aragonese side of the conflict comes the autobiographical account of Pere III, the kingdom’s contemporary ruler and one of the few medieval monarchs who played a major role in drafting his own chronicle.11 Writing for Castile is the aristocratic jack-of-many-trades, Pedro López de Ayala, whose Crónica del Rey don Pedro I would become one of the most controversial works in Spanish history.12 In addition to these two chronicles, there is a third narrative that must be mentioned as a major source, even though it is not contemporary: completed around 1580, it was entitled Anales de la Corona de Aragon by its author, Jerónimo Zurita, who served as royal historian during the reign of Felipe II (r. 1556–1598) it too shines forth as a classic, in this case, one of early modern historiography.

11  The authors have worked from a fine, two volume translation of this work published some decades ago by the University of Toronto Press. See Pere III, Chronicle, trans. Mary Hillgarth with an introduction and notes by J.H. Hillgarth, 2 vols. (Toronto, 1980). 12  Written well over a decade after the king’s death, Pedro’s chronicle is the principal source of information for all later scholarship on this controversial monarch. Over the centuries, the chronicle has appeared in print a number of times. In writing this book, we have used and cited the late nineteenth century version of the chronicle contained in volume one of Crónicas de los reyes de Castilla desde don Alfonso el Sabio, hasta los Católicos don Fernando y doña Isabel [hereafter CRC], edited by Cayetano Rosell, 3 vols., (Madrid, 1877). Although the Rosell version is neither the most recent nor the most scholarly edition of Pedro’s chronicle, it is by far and away the most easily available to scholars, a major reason why we have selected it. This ease of access results from the reissue of Crónicas de los reyes de Castilla as three volumes (66, 68, and 70) in the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles desde La Formacion del Lenguaje hasta Nuestros Dias [hereafter BAE], a monumental collection of Spanish literature published by Ediciones Atlas and always in print. The Crónica de Pedro I is the last item in volume 66 (see 393–614.) Readers wishing to consult more recent, but considerably harder to obtain editions can look at Pedro López de Ayala, Corónica del rey don Pedro, ed. Constance L. Wilkins and Heanon M. Wilkins (Madison, 1985) or idem, Crónica del rey don Pedro y del rey don Enrique, su hermano, hijos del rey don Alfonso Onceno, ed. German Orduna (Buenos Aires, 1994–97).

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Together, these three accounts provide the indispensable chronological foundation upon which the present history has been constructed. Pere III of Aragon: The author of the first of these three narratives is also a leading figure in our story, a monarch who, in company with his Castilian adversary, supplied the name given the conflict by later scholars. Born in 1319, Pere III succeeded to the Aragonese throne in 1336 at the age of sixteen; after which he ruled for fifty-one years, a reign that ranks among the longest and most conflict-ridden in the history of Spain.13 Since Pere III’s career and character are a principal topic of this book, at this point, we need only consider the king very briefly as his own chronicler.14 During his lifetime, Pere ranked high among medieval monarchs who not only took a major interest, but participated extensively in intellectual pursuits. He may, in fact, be regarded as an early, ultramontane example of the Renaissance ruler; a phenomenon beginning to make its appearance in Italy and one which would increasingly characterize the period, both within and outside of that peninsula. One of the Aragonese monarch’s principal intellectual accomplishments was the production of his own royal chronicle. Wishing to follow in the footsteps of his illustrious great-grandfather, Jaume I “the Conqueror” (r. 1213–1276), who had written a well-regarded history of his own reign, Pere began to show an interest fairly early in undertaking a similar account. This effort ultimately produced a significant piece of historical writing that would join Jaume’s earlier work as one of four leading Catalan chronicles from the Middle Ages. Pere’s use of the first person plural (“the royal we”) throughout bears witness to his central role in its composition. While there is some indication that the king may have actually begun to contemplate drafting his own chronicle as early as the opening decade of his reign, most

13  For a detailed history of the monarch and his reign, see J.H. Hillgarth’s introduction to the English translation in Pere III, 1:1–122. In addition, a careful analysis of several of this devious monarch’s political policies can be found in David Cohen’s article, “Secular Pragmatism and Thinking about War in some Court Writings of Pere III el Cerimonios” in Crusaders, Condottieri, and Cannon: Medieval Warfare in Societies around the Mediterranean, edited by L.J. Andrew Villalon and Donald J. Kagay (Leiden, 2002), 19–53. 14  For more about the composition of Pere’s Crónica, see Frederic Alchalabi, “A Chronicler King: Rewriting History and the Quest for Image in the Catalan Chronicle of Peter III (1319– 1386/1387),” Imago Temporis: Medium Aevum 2 (2008): 177–89; Jaume Aurell, Authoring the Past: History, Autobiography, and Politics in Medieval Catalonia (Chicago, 2012), 94–98; Ramon Gubern i Domenech, “Notas sobre la reducció de la Cronica de Pere el Cerimonios,” Estudis Romanics 2 (1949–50): 135–43. The authors of this account have also examined Pere’s participation in writing his own chronicle; see Villalon and Kagay, Nájera, Appendix C.4: Crónica of Pere III [Pedro IV], 485–91.

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scholars believe that serious work on its creation dates to the 1370s. The two surviving redactions appear to have been finished between 1383 and 1385. Pere’s modus operandi in producing the chronicle seems to have involved a collaborative effort between himself and a succession of trusted officials working under his close supervision. They based their efforts in part upon Pere’s memories and in part upon the enormously rich documentation collected in the Archivo de la Corona de Aragón (see below).15 Apparently, these royal collaborators, some of whose names are known, would consult with the king on what matters were to be covered and the order in which they were to be presented. Afterwards, they would undertake research in the documents to ferret out other details. Once reduced to writing, a draft would be presented to Pere for final approval and revision. Much of the information found in the chronicle could have come only from the king and/or been included only with his permission. For the most part, the work treats in loving detail events in which its royal author was closely involved. As a result, it sheds crucial light on virtually all aspects of the struggle with Castile including its final phase: the 1365 negotiations that brought the so-called Free Companies into that conflict, the men who led those companies, the price of their services, their arrival in Barcelona in the winter of 1365–1366, their march into Castile early the following spring, the flight of his adversary, Pedro I, in the face of this force, and finally Pere’s own reoccupation of extensive territory that Pedro had seized throughout their ten year conflict. Unfortunately, at this point, the king’s chronicle leaves off its detailed coverage, as if its author suddenly lost interest in Iberian events, even though his kingdom remained integrally involved in what was yet to unfold. After his victory in the war, Pere is uncharacteristically silent on the campaign of 1367 that led up to the battle of Nájera, the events that took place on that bloody field and what transpired in their aftermath. He condenses the entire year into one fairly brief passage of his chronicle and while what little he does write about this eventful period is essentially correct, it is far too little to add anything to our knowledge. Equally unfortunate is the complete absence of information in Pere’s account of diplomatic dealings with England and Portugal that followed the battle of Nájera and the plans these three countries had for partitioning Castile. While these events can be traced through numerous documents in the Aragonese archives, the king’s account remains silent on them.

15  For the king’s role in drafting his own chronicle, see Hillgarth’s introduction to Pere III, Chronicle, 1:58–65.

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On the other hand, whatever its shortcomings, Pere’s chronicle is absolutely indispensable to historians working on the War of the Two Pedros. Although considerably less dramatic than its Castilian counterpart, in several respects it is superior. First and foremost, it supplies a remarkable, first-hand vision into the mind of one of the two principal adversaries. In addition, by closely following that king’s movements throughout the ten-year conflict, the chronicle supplies a more precise chronology of the events than does its Castilian counterpart. Nor (as we have noted) is the accuracy of Pere’s chronicle simply dependent upon royal memory. There is little if any doubt that he used his trusted scribes to help compile the chronicle by “fact checking” the original documents. Pedro López de Ayala: From the other side of the battlelines comes an enduring masterpiece of Spanish literature, La Crónica del Rey Don Pedro Primero, by one of the foremost literary figures of his age, the multi-talented nobleman Pedro López de Ayala who at first served King Pedro, then went over to the usurper who overthrew him, Enrique II, and many years later produced chronicles on both men. During an active career spanning the entire second half of the fourteenth century, Ayala filled many roles—from a page in the royal household, he rose to become an important crown official and royal adviser, at the end holding, if only briefly, the illustrious office of lord chancellor (canciller mayor) of Castile. He served as a soldier and military commander and was twice taken as a prisoner of war. In his later years, he became not only a poet and moral philosopher, but more importantly from our perspective, one of medieval Europe’s foremost chroniclers. Given Ayala’s prominence in so many difference spheres, we are fortunate to know more about him than most medieval authors, though nowhere near as much as we would like to know; given due largely to his relative reticence in chronicling his own activities.16 Born around 1332 in the northern city of Vitoria, scion of an old Basque family,17 Ayala seems to have originally been destined to enter the church, as a result of which he was sent off at a young age to Avignon, temporary seat of 16  An important source of information about Ayala is the short, fourteenth century sketch of the chronicler in a collection of biographical sketches of important Castilian nobles and knights penned by his nephew, Fernán Pérez de Guzmán, Señor de Batres, and entitled Generaciones y Semblanzas, ed. José Antonio Barrios Sánchez (Madrid, 1998), 37–39. This source supplies not only a physical description, but also the key dates of his birth and death. 17  The chronicler’s father, Fernán Pérez de Ayala, is first mentioned in the son’s chronicle in relation to the events of 1351, where he is characterized as a natural or “native” of the Basque province of Vizcaya. Ayala, Pedro I, 416 (1351, chap. 2).

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the papacy, where he received a sound, if brief education under the tutelage of his uncle, Cardinal Barroso.18 Following the cardinal’s death, the young man returned to Castile where early in the troubled reign of Pedro I, he entered the royal household as a page.19 For well over a decade, the house of Ayala, presided over by the chronicler’s father, Fernán Peréz, stoutly supported the increasingly unpopular monarch. During these years, the younger Ayala came of age. He rose through the military and political hierarchy, occupying for a time the governorship of the major city of Toledo. As a military figure, the chronicler also played a significant role in the king’s war against neighboring Aragon, at one point assuming command of Castilian forces along the frontier. Then, in the pivotal year of 1366, the Ayalas joined much of the Castilian aristocracy, including the closely-allied Basque houses of Mendoza and Orozco,20 in transferring allegiance to Pedro’s hated half-brother and rival for the throne, Enrique de Trastámara.21 During three years of civil war that followed (1366–1369), Ayala helped his new master overthrow his old one. Although the future chronicler was captured at the battle of Nájera, upon securing his release, he quickly rejoined Enrique for the closing months of the struggle. This ended abruptly in 1369 with Pedro’s death under the walls of Montiel, a dramatic scene Ayala would later portray at some length in his chronicle.22 Thereafter, for more than three decades, Ayala continued to serve successive members of the new Trastámaran dynasty including the founder’s son, Juan I (r. 1379–1390), and later his grandson, Enrique III (1390–1407). During Juan’s reign, Ayala witnessed two more of the century’s major military engagements; in one case as an observer, in the other, a participant. While on a diplomatic mission to the Low Countries in 1382, he was present at the battle of Roosebecke in which a French army massacred the forces of the commune

18  Helen Nader, The Mendoza Family in the Spanish Renaissance 1350 to 1550 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1979), 36–42. 19  The first reference to the author contained within the chronicle of Pedro I appears among events from the year 1353, the fourth year of Pedro’s reign, at which time, Ayala is identified as a doncel or royal page. Ayala, Pedro I, 431 (1353, chap. 6). 20  The close connection of these houses is carefully documented in the work of the great seventeenth century Spanish historian and genealogist, Luis de Salazar y Castro, Historia Genealógica de la Casa de Haro (Señores de Llodio-Mendoza, Orozco y Ayala), Archivo Documental Español, vol. 15 (Madrid, 1959). 21  Ayala, Pedro I, 539 (1366, chap. iv). 22  Ibid., 580–81 (1369), chap. vi).

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of Ghent.23 Three years later, Ayala, now over fifty, resumed his own military career when, along with much of the Castilian nobility, he participated in Juan I’s ill-starred invasion of Portugal.24 As a result, he found himself at the battle of Aljubarrota where the Portuguese routed the Castilian invaders, thus ending Juan’s attempt to absorb the neighboring kingdom and reaffirming Portuguese independence for several centuries to come. Once again, Ayala was taken on the field of battle and spent many months as a prisoner of war.25 In 1398, near the end of his life, Ayala capped a long career with a brief stint as lord chancellor of Castile, after which he is thought to have retired into a Geronymite monastery near the Basque country where he had been born. Here, around the year 1407, Pedro López died, having outlived most of his contemporaries including that other great chronicler of the age, Jean Froissart, whose exit from the scene is believed to have occurred just two years earlier. Despite the busy decades of public service, in later life, Ayala found time to write chronicles for each of the four kings he had served, the last of which, the Crónica de Enrique III, remained unfinished at his death.26 The most ambitious of these historical works was the earliest, devoted to the king whom the chronicler had first served, then deserted.27 In the absence of rival accounts of the reign28 or a rich cache of surviving documents in Castile (see below), 23  Pedro López de Ayala, Crónica del Rey Don Juan Primero de Castilla e de Leon, ed. Cayetano Rosell in CRC 2 BAE 68 (Madrid, 1953), 79–80 (1382; chap. vi). See also: Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years War III: Divided Houses (Philadelphia, 2009), 484–46. 24  Ayala, Juan I, 104–7 (1385, chaps. xii–xx). Pérez de Guzmán, Generaciones, 38. 25  Although Ayala provides an extensive list of Castilians and their Portuguese allies killed in the battle, he does not mention his own capture. This information is supplied by Pérez de Guzmán. In fact, the chronicler was luckier than many other Castilians, noblemen as well as commoners, who left their bones to bleach on the Portuguese battlefield. This was the fate of the chronicler’s brother, Pedro González de Mendoza, who surrendered his horse to the fleeing monarch, and then returned to the fray where he met his end. Ibid., 105. 26  Pedro López de Ayala, Crónica del Rey Don Enrique Tercero del Castilla e de León, ed. Cayetano Rosell, in CRC 2, BAE 68 (Madrid, 1953), 161–257. 27  On the basis of internal evidence, Clara Estow, who has studied Pedro’s reign extensively in writing her biography of the king, places composition of his chronicle around 1384. The evidence for this strongly suggests that Helen Nader is wrong when she states “after [Ayala’s] last visit to Avignon in 1396, he wrote chronicles of the reigns of the four kings he had served” unless she means that during the closing years of his life, he put finishing touches on works, some of which he had started to write considerably earlier. See Clara Estow, “Royal Madness in the Crónica del Rey Don Pedro,” Mediterranean Studies 6 (1996): 13–28, esp. 16 n. 11; Nader, Mendoza Family, 61. 28  Ayala’s is the only Castilian chronicle from the period that has survived, in all likelihood the only one that ever existed. Although by the sixteenth century, rumors began to emerge concerning a second chronicle of Pedro’s reign written by one of his supporters

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historians of that kingdom in the fourteenth century have had little choice but to rely extensively (perhaps excessively) upon his writings. Since at least as early as the sixteenth century, Ayala’s Crónica de Pedro I has been an extremely controversial work. Its largely unfavorable portrait of Pedro coupled with the author’s desertion of that king at a critical moment have led not-a-few historians to accuse him of producing a badly biased account of his subject. They condemn the chronicle as either an exercise in self-justification or worse, a piece of propaganda written to serve the usurper to whom he had transferred his allegiance. By contrast, another equally committed school of historical thought (one to which the authors of this book belong) espouses a very different view of the chronicler, seeing in Ayala not only one of the most engaging, but also one of the most reliable writers at work recording history in late medieval Europe. Ramón Menéndez Pidal, one of Spain’s leading nineteenth century scholars, speaks for us when he says: The chronicle of Pedro López de Ayala, is a monument without equal in the medieval historiography of Castile … Ayala narrates the facts with his habitual imperturbability, with a severe and raw precision, in a cold style that cuts like the point of a dagger.29 Jerónimo Zurita y Castro: The third narrative that has proven critical to producing our book, although not a “contemporary” source, has the distinction of being the first work based exhaustively on archival documents most of which had long been buried in the Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, the same and portraying his activities in a more favorable light, sadly, such a work has never turned up and is, in all probability, apocryphal. Late in the sixteenth century, the royal historian, Zurita, investigated the belief that such a chronicle had once existed. While not denying this possibility outright and even conceding that such a work could have contained things not mentioned by Ayala, the royal historian argued persuasively that this would not render Ayala’s work “false,” as some of Pedro I’s descendants were alleging. In fact, most of Zurita’s essay is devoted to demonstrating why he accepts Ayala’s account as essentially accurate. See “Prólogo del Secretario Gerónimo Zurita, dando razon de las Crónicas de los Reyes de Castilla Don Pedro, Don Enrique II, Don Juan I, y Don Enrique III, escritas por Don Pedro López de Ayala, y de las enmiendas que hizo a ellas,” in Ayala, Pedro I, 395–98. For a fine modern treatment of this (alleged) second chronicle, see Nancy Marino, “Two Spurious Chronicles of Pedro el Cruel and the Ambitions of his Illegitimate Successors,” in La Coronica 21:2 (1992–93): 1–22. See also: Maria Estella Gonzalez de Faure, Isabel de las Heras, and Patricia de Forteza, “Apologia y censura: Posibles autores favorables a Pedro I de Castila,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales [hereafter AEM] 36, no. 1 (enero-julio): 111–144. 29  Menéndez Pidal’s characterization of Ayala’s chronicle is cited in J.B. Sitges, Las mujeres del rey Don Pedro I de Castilla (Madrid, 1910), 18.

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repository that houses the majority of archival materials we have employed in writing The War of the Two Pedros. It is a monumental work entitled the Anales de la Corona de Aragón that traces the history of that kingdom throughout the medieval centuries and was produced by one of the most prolific as well as methodologically-advanced historians of early modern Europe—Jerónimo Zurita y Castro (1512–1580). Born in Zaragoza, son of a royal physician, Zurita served the Spanish crown throughout his lifetime in a number of important capacities, first under the emperor, Carlos V (r. 1516–1556) and then under the latter’s son, Felipe II (r. 1556–1598). Starting around 1548, Zurita assumed the duties of a royal historian and, in this capacity, he commenced work on a multi-volume history of his native kingdom. In 1571, now serving as Felipe’s chronicler-royal, he retired from his other posts to devote fulltime to completing the Anales, accomplishing the task only in the year of his death (1580). In composing the Anales, Zurita pulled together a wealth of governmental and military papers from Aragonese archives most of which had never before been consulted, not to mention systematically utilized by other scholars. A good deal of this material sheds extensive light on Pere III and his war with Castile, often filling gaps in the monarch’s own account. As a result of his efforts, this sixteenth-century civil servant ranks among the finest research historians of the early modern period. No scholar involved in serious research into the medieval history of Spain can afford to dispense with his writings.30 The Anales have been reprinted on a number of occasions over the centuries. For our part, we have utilized the eight-volume Zaragoza edition published over a span of eighteen-year (1967–1985).31 4

The Sources (2): Other Medieval Chronicles

In contrast to the two most important contemporary works used in writing this book, the chronicles of Pere III and Ayala, there are several other narrative accounts from the period that either supply background to the War of the Two Pedros and its participants or that treat the conflict and its aftermath. Three of these other sources are also Iberian. 30  Just one example of the work’s importance can be seen in Roland Delachanel’s definitive history of the reign of the French king, Charles V. Whenever that scholar writes about Iberian affairs, he makes extensive of Zurita’s work, second only to his use of Ayala. 31  Jerónimo Zurita, Anales de la Corona de Aragon, ed. Angel Canellas López, 8 vols. (Zaragoza: 1967–85). The War of the Two Pedros (1356–1366) is treated in Book 9 of Zurita, which is printed in volume 4 of the Zaragoza edition, pp. 287–576.

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On the one hand, from Castile comes the royal chronicle of Pedro I’s father, Alfonso XI (r. 1311–1350) authorship of which is generally attributed to one of that king’s leading officials, Fernán Sánchez de Valladolid.32 Not only does Alfonso’s chronicle examine relations between the two neighboring kingdoms in the decades leading up to the war, it also provides a substantial part of the background information available concerning a number of those involved in the conflict, in particular, the future king, Pedro I, and his hated half-brother and eventual slayer, Enrique de Trastámara. The two other Iberian chronicles are those of contemporary Portuguese monarchs, Pedro I (r. 1357–1367)33 and his son, Fernando I (r. 1367–1383),34 the latter a monarch whose most widely-used sobriquet—“the Inconstant”—aptly sums up his character.35 Both were the work of Portugal’s leading medieval historian, Ferñao Lopes. Rising from seemingly humble origins, Lopes became a notary, the keeper of the royal archives (Torre do Tombo), and secretary to several members of the royal family, including both Joao I (1385–1433) and Joao’s son and successor, Duarte I (1433–1438). In March, 1434, he was appointed Portugal’s first royal chronicler, at which time King Duarte commissioned him to write an account of all ten reigns since the foundation of the monarchy early in the twelfth century. While only the last three works are extant—the chronicles of Pedro I, 32  See Corónica del muy alto et muy Católico Rey Don Alfonso el Onceno deste nombre, que venció la Batalla del Rio Salado et Ganó a las Algeciras [Alfonso XI]. ed. Cayetano Rosell, in CRC 1, BAE 66 1:171–398. 33  The Portuguese monarch, Pedro I, whose reign corresponds almost exactly with the conflict between Aragon and Castile, shared with his Castilian counterpart not only his regnal name, but also the same contrasting sobriquets: “the Cruel” and “the Just.” See Fernão Lopes, Chronica de El Rei D Pedro I (Lisbon, 1895–1896). 34  See Fernão Lopes, Crónica de D. Fernando, ed. Giuliano Macchi (Lisbon, 1975). The authors have made use of an abbreviated English translation of this work. See Fernão Lopes, The English in Portugal, 1367–87: extracts from the chronicles of Dom Fernando and Dom Joao, ed. and trans. by Derek W. Lomax and R.J. Oakley (Warminster, 1989). The introduction to the Lomax-Oakley volume has been our major source for information concerning the Portuguese chronicler’s life and work. See also: an article in the on-line e-Journal of Portuguese History: Bernardo Vasconcelos e Sousa, “Medieval Portuguese Royal Chronicles: Topics in a Discourse of Identity and Power,” e-JPH v.5 n.2 Porto 2007. For a more extensive analysis of Fernão Lopes and his “borrowing” from Pedro López de Ayala, see Villalon and Kagay, Nájera, Appendix C.11. 35  Although sometimes dubbed “the handsome”, the actions of this Portuguese monarch do more to uphold his less flattering sobriquet. For an explanation of this judgment, see L.J. Andrew Villalon, “War and the Great Schism in the Iberian Peninsula: The Interrelated Cases of Castile and Portugal,” JMMH, 12 (2014): 217–37.

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Fernando I, and João I, covering the years 1357 to 1411–it is upon these three that the reputation of Fernão Lopes as a great historian securely rests. their attention to detail and careful search for historical causation leads many scholars to rank them among the finest historical works of the late-medieval period. The first two do add some new material, albeit not a great deal, on the War of the Two Pedros and the campaign and battle of Nájera that followed. On the downside, composition of the two Lopes chronicles dates to roughly a half century after both Pere III and Ayala had laid down their pens. Therefore, with most of what he is covering, Lopes had no eyewitness connection similar to his two predecessors. On the other hand, in drafting the chronicles, he had extensive access to the royal documents of which he was the keeper, the majority of which have since been lost, as well as any Portuguese writings that may have existed before his time.36 What is more, he clearly had the chronicles of Ayala from which, on occasion, he “borrowed” material quite liberally, sometimes copying nearly verbatim substantial parts of the earlier work! (His account of the battle of Nájera is a fine example of what would, in the eyes of a modern scholar be seen as an undeniable case of plagiarism.) Here, we are confronted with one great historian putting his imprimatur on the work of another. After all, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. It is important to note that several other chroniclers at work in the later decades of the fourteenth century (see Table 1) were of greater use in writing our earlier book on the battle of Nájera. This is not surprising when one remembers that most of these authors came from north of the Pyrenees and had interests which centered on their own region. For most of them, the land to their south was largely terra incognita, a fact indicated by the almost complete lack of geographical knowledge concerning Iberia manifested in their writings. As a result, their treatment of the War of the Two Pedros, if they treated it at all, was cursory and often confused. By contrast, what most attracted these men to write about the battle of Najera waged in far-away Spain was its remarkable cast of characters; in particular, those English, French, and Gascon warriors

36  In their introduction, Lomax and Oakley make clear that Lopes was not the first Portuguese historian and may not have been the first to undertake a general chronicle of the kingdom. They name some of the works that he may have had access to including one entitled the Crónica de Comdestabre, a history of Nuno Álvares Pereira, winner of the battle of Aljubarrota. Other scholars argue that this work was actually an earlier chronicle written by Lopes himself. Lopes, English, vi–vii.

xxxiv Table 1

Introduction Non-Iberian sourcesa

1 Poem by the Chandos Herald usually referred to as the Life of the Black Prince (Old French) 2 The first book of the chronicle of Jean Froissart (Old French) 3 Prose Memoires redacted from the poem, generally referred to as the Chronique de Bertrand du Guesclin, written by a Picard poet, known as Cuvelier or Cunelier (Old French) 4 Anonymous Chronique de Quatre Premiers Valois (Old French) 5 Anonymous Chronique Normande (Old French) 6 Chronique des regnes de Jean II et Charles V, a fourteenth century continuation of the Grandes Chroniques de France, often attributed to Charles V’s chancellor, Pierre d’Orgemont (Old French) 7 Poem by the English monk, Walter of Peterborough, who served John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, and who may have been present at the battle (Latin) 8 Extremely brief poem by an unknown English author, sometimes attributed (probably mistakenly) to Walter of Peterborough (Latin) 9 English monastic chronicles (Latin) Henry Knighton’s chronicle Sections of the Westminster Chronicle written by John of Reading Anonymous monk of Canterbury’s chronicle The Polychronicon Continuation attributed to John Malverne a All of these chronicles are analyzed at considerable length in our book on the battle of Nájera, both in the introduction (pp. 7–20) and appendix C (351–604).

who poured across the mountains to participate. The list of northerners participating at Najera reads like a who’s who of western European warfare.37 37  Short biographical articles on many of the major English players in the Spanish campaigns of 1366–1367 can be found in the British Dictionary of National Biography. Another good source is volume 2 of David Green’s unpublished dissertation: “The Household and

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Among those commanding the armies were two of the most prominent military figures of the age—the English Black Prince, Edward of Woodstock,38 and his French adversary, Bertrand DuGuesclin, both of whom became the subjects of major literary works celebrating their deeds.39 Many other renowned fighters were also to be found on the battlefield including the prince’s younger brother, John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, whose son, Henry IV, would seize the crown of England in 1399 and whose grandson, Henry V, would win at Agincourt in 1415;40 Sir John Chandos, another of England’s leading generals who had served the prince since Crécy, twenty-one years earlier, and in 1364, had won the great battle of Auray that decided the fate of Brittany; Jean de Grailly, usually referred to in the chronicles as the captal de Buch, a Gascon Military Retinue of Edward the Black Prince, 2 vols., Ph.D. Dissertation (University of Nottingham, 1998.) Some of the biographical information presented in the dissertation has found its way into the author’s subsequently published works. See David Green, “The Late Retinue of Edward the Black Prince,” Nottinham Medieval Studies [hereafter NMS], 44 (2000):141–51; idem, “The Military Personnel of Edward the Black Prince,” Medieval Prosopography, 21 (2000): 133–52. 38  There is a late fourteenth century historical poem generally called the Life of the Black Prince written by an author who served as herald to the prince’s closest adviser, Sir John Chandos, and who is known to history only as the Chandos Herald. Virtually all scholars believe the herald to have been present at the battle with his lord. Of the four printed editions of this poem, we have used the one published by Oxford in 1910 which is the bestknown and most widely utilized by modern scholars. It supplies not only the editors’ transcription of the metered text found in Worcester College, but also exhaustive notes and a carefully compiled prose paraphrase which has greatly aided the authors of the present book. See Life of the Black Prince by the Herald of Sir John Chandos, ed. Mildred K. Pope and Eleanor C. Lodge (Oxford, 1910). 39  For the future constable of France, there are a number of what may be grouped together as the DuGuesclin Memoirs, all apparently tracing back to a late fourteenth century poem and the prose paraphrase that quickly emerged from it, both of which have appeared in print. See Chronique de Bertrand du Guesclin: Collationnée sur l’Édition Originale du XVe Siècle, et sur Tous les Manuscrits, avec une Notice Bibliographique et des Notes, ed. M.F. Michel (Paris, 1830) and Chronique de Bertrand du Guesclin par Cuvelier trouvère du XIV ième Siècle, 2 vols. (Paris, 1839). A more recent edition of the poem has been published as La Chanson de Bertrand du Guesclin de Cuvelier, ed. Jean-Claude Faucon (Toulouse, 1990–1993). For the authors’ detailed analyses of both works, see our book on Nájera, Appendices C.2 and C.5, 395–400, 492–47. 40  Scholarly biographies of this fascinating figure who played an extensive role in the second half of the fourteenth century include Sydney Armitage-Smith, John of Gaunt, King of Castile and León, Duke of Aquitaine and Lancaster, Earl of Derby, Lincoln and Leicester, Seneschal of England (1904; repr. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1964); and Anthony Goodman, John of Gaunt: The Exercise of Princely Power in Fourteenth-Century Europe (New York, 1992). There is a highly readable popular account of the nobleman’s life by Norman F. Cantor, The Last Knight: The Twilight of the Middle Ages and the Birth of the Modern Era (New York, 2004).

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noble who would later be captured in the fight for La Rochelle (1374) and die in captivity due to the French king’s refusal to ransom him; Hugh Calveley41 and Robert Knollys, who had risen from relatively humble origins to become several of England’s most famous “dogs of war,”42 both of whom were said to have fought in the famous Combat of the Thirty (1350);43 Olivier de Clisson, the flamboyant Breton nobleman who despite his appearance on the English side at Nájera would later succeed Bertrand DuGuesclin as constable of France and help drive his former allies from French soil;44 Arnoul d’Audenham, an aging veteran of Poitiers and marshal of France who became DuGuesclin’s principal lieutenant at Nájera and was captured late in the battle fighting alongside his commander; and the list goes on and on. Without the presence of this star-studded cast from north of the Pyrenees, an Iberian encounter would almost certainly have drawn considerably less attention from chroniclers with an essentially northern focus—if indeed they deigned to cover it at all. In all likelihood, it was the presence of these ultramontane warriors that earmarked the battle for extensive treatment in non-Spanish writings; most notably in the work of that well-traveled Flemish author and principal chronicler of his age, Jean Froissart.45 In fact, it was one 41  For detailed consideration of Calveley, in particular, his role in the Spanish expedition, see the article by L.J. Andrew Villalon, “‘Seeking Castles in Spain’: Sir Hugh Calveley and the Free Companies’s Intervention in Iberian Warfare (1366–1369),” in Crusaders, Condotierri, and Cannon: Medieval Warfare in Societies Around the Mediterranean, ed. Donald J. Kagay and L.J. Andrew Villalon (Leiden, 2003), 305–32. 42  Henry Dwight Sedgwick, The Life of Edward the Black Prince, 1330–1376 (New York: 1993), 267. 43  This bloody event was actually a carefully arranged duel to be conducted either to the death or the surrender of one side. It pitted 30 Frenchmen supporting the French-backed claimant to the duchy of Brittany against thirty Englishmen supporting his rival. Although the French eventually won the contest, surviving participants on both sides achieved considerable fame of the sort the Middle Ages accorded its great warriors. Despite being once regarded with skepticism by historians, the ancient tradition of the Combat was borne out by several manuscripts discovered in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. See also: W.H. Ainsworth, Ballads: Romantic, Fantastical, and Humorous (New York, [1874]). 275–326. See also: Steven Muhlberger, “The Combat of the Thirty: An Example of Medieval Chivalry?,” in The Hundred Years War (Part II): Different Vistas, ed. L.J. Andrew Villalon and Donald J. Kagay (Leiden, 2008), 285–94. See also: Villalon, “Seeking Castles,” 305–7. 44  A 1996 biography of Clisson argues that he rather than DuGuesclin designed the Fabian Policy that played such a significant role in driving back the English during the years 1369–1380. See: John Bell Henneman, Olivier de Clisson and Political Society in France under Charles V and Charles VI (Philadelphia, 1996), 56–57. 45  As the foremost chronicler of his age, Froissart has generated a considerable bibliography. A lengthy introduction to the author’s career and chronicle can be found in Thomas

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of these “outsiders”—a man known to history only as the Chandos Herald— who supplies our single best picture of what happened on the field that day in April, 1367. On the other hand, their considerable interest in the campaign and battle of Nájera does not extend backward in time—it does not take in the long and bloody conflict that set the stage for the encounter. To the extent that northern chroniclers even bother to mention anything that took place earlier than the Anglo-Gascon expedition of 1367, their accounts are, for the most part, too cursory to be of use; the only exception being in their coverage of the very last months of the war when the free companies led by DuGuesclin and Calveley came south and decisively shifted the military balance to favor Aragon. In their coverage of this, both Froissart and Cuvelier contribute to our account. Aside from this, the War of the Two Pedros falls well outside their ken. 5

The Sources (3): Archival Asymmetry

While our book on Nájera displayed a far greater reliance on the chronicles, our current work brings to bear not only the chronicles, but massive archival material. A considerable majority of this comes from the Archivo de la Corona de Aragón (Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó) in Barcelona, generally known

Johnes’ two volume English-language version, reprinted several times in the nineteenth century. The authors have made extensive use of this translation of the chronicle as well as its article on the author. See Jean Froissart, Chronicles of England, France, and Spain and the Adjoining Countries from the Latter Part of the Reign of Edward II to the Coronation of Henry IV, trans. Thomas Johnes, 2 vols. (London, 1857), (1:vii–xlvii). A very brief account of the chronicler’s career appears in Charles W. Dunn’s introduction to the much abbreviated, but still substantial condensation of Johnes’ text undertaken by H.P. Dunster in 1853. See: John Froissart, The Chronicles of England, France and Spain by (New York, 1961). A beautifully-illustrated popular account of Froissart by a leading medievalist of the last century is G.G. Coulton’s The Chronicler of European Chivalry (London, 1930). On a more scholarly level, there is the invaluable collection of essays written by major twentieth century scholars who have dealt extensively with the chronicler in the course of their own research. See Froissart: Historian, ed. J.J.N. Palmer (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1981). Peter F. Ainsworth has wrestled with the problem of historical truth in medieval chronicle writing in Jean Froissart and the Fabric of History: Truth, Myth, and Fiction in the Chroniques (Oxford, 1990). For relatively recent reflections on the author and his chronicle, see the introduction to Jean Froissart, Chronique, Livre I, Le Manuscrit D’Amiens, ed. George T. Diller, 4 vols., (Geneva, 1992), 1: i–lv. For a more extensive treatment of Froissart and his chronicle, see Najera, Appendix C.3, 423–29.

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to scholars who study Spain as the ACA.46 By contrast, relatively little of our documentation has come from the Castilian side, despite the fact that that kingdom was larger and more populous than its eastern neighbor and had a chronicle tradition dating back before that of Aragon.47 The fault lies in what we have dubbed an “archival asymmetry” between the two kingdoms, deriving from the very different degree to which documents were preserved in each one. It is probably the major problem facing all scholars who work on the history of medieval Spain; a problem that has proven highly detrimental to our treatment of the War of the Two Pedros. One leading English scholar of the mid-twentieth whose work deals extensively with the War of the Two Pedros and its aftermath, Peter Russell, attributes the absence of Castilian sources concerning the conflict to postwar censorship. Russell accuses Pedro I’s assassin and successor, his hated halfbrother, Enrique de Trastámara, of having “culled” from both public and private archives any documentation generated during his hated enemy’s reign that might have cast that enemy in a better light.48 But while such intentional winnowing almost certainly did occur and had a pejorative influence on our understanding of period, it is certainly not the major reason for the scarcity of Castilian sources. The principal blame for this scarcity of documentary evidence lies not in any short-term censorship by the victor, but in a long-term failure on the part of late medieval Castilians to establish and maintain permanent repositories for their state papers. Unlike their English and Aragonese counterparts living in this same period, inhabitants of Castile proved far more cavalier when it came to preserving the kingdom’s documentary record. Due to the lack of care Castilians showed in this regard, we simply do not possess the kind or number of state papers in their archives (all of which date to a much later period) that would allow us to compile a comparable amount of detail concerning their participation in the conflict between the two kingdoms.

46  For information concerning the extensive archives of the Crown of Aragon, see Federico Udina Martorell, Guia histórica y descriptiva del Archivo de la Corona de Aragón (Madrid, 1986), 21–46. Although not all of Aragon’s relevant archival material is housed in the ACA, a great part of it can be found in this repository. 47  For a more extensive exploration of the Iberia’s medieval chronicle tradition, see L.J. Andrew Villalon, “Iberia: Sources (1300–1500),” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and Military Technology, ed. Clifford J. Rogers, 3 vols. (Oxford, 2010), 2:317–23. 48  P.E. Russell, The English Intervention in Spain and Portugal in the Time of Edward III and Richard II (Oxford, 1955). For Russell’s argument that Pedro’s successor tried to censor him into oblivion, see 17–18 and note 1.

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We wish to emphasize that this is a Castilian problem, one faced by all scholars studying the affairs of that kingdom throughout the medieval centuries. By no means did the failure to preserve a paper-trail of state documents extend equally to all of Iberia. Most importantly, it was not the case in the Crown of Aragon. As early as the eleventh and twelfth centuries, notarial practices became increasingly well-established in the county of Catalonia, site of the great commercial entrepot of Barcelona. Afterwards, these practices spread first to Aragon when the two states were merged through marriage in 1137 then, several generations later, to Majorca and Valencia, newly conquered from the Muslims. As a result of this new emphasis on maintaining a written record, the Aragonese began to show increasing diligence in collecting and preserving their state papers well over a century before the period we deal with in this book. Their efforts ultimately gave rise to the ACA, one of the finest repositories of late medieval documentation to be found anywhere in Europe. Scores of document-filled registers survive there, shedding enormous light on the history of eastern Spain not only during our period, but throughout the later Middle Ages. For this study, we have relied most extensively on one of the ACA’s true gems, the massive collection of notarial registers of the “royal chancellery” (cancellería real). The most important documents in this section come from the registers issued by Pere III. The numbers of these registers range from 1379 to 1388 and are referred to collectively with the title “Of the Castilian War (Guerrae Castellae). These chronicle the crucial period between 1356 and 1368.49 We have also found pertinent documents in registers entitled “Of Favors” (Gratiarum); “Of Sardinia” (Sardiniae); “Of the Court” (Curiae); “Of the Court of the Secret Seal” (Curiae Sigilli Secreti); “Of Money” (Peccuniae); “Of Weapons” (Armatae); and “Miscellaneous Things” (Varia). Other material of interest from the royal chancellery, includes the “Royal Letters” (Cartas Reales) and various items from the general section of “Miscellaneous Things” (Varia).50 By contrast, when it came to establishing a system of royal archives charged with the preservation of similar material, Castile was exceedingly slow off the mark. Throughout the fourteenth century and most of the fifteenth, Castilian state papers continued to travel with a highly peripatetic court, necessitating a periodic “lightening of the load,” either by destruction or abandonment of those things no longer considered worth carrying. In this way, their survival became a matter of chance rather than established governmental policy. Despite several earlier attempts, it would not be until the end of the fifteenth 49  Udina Martorell, Guia, 192. 50  Ibid., 192–93.

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century and beginning of the sixteenth, that Spain’s last medieval monarchs, Fernando V and Isabel, finally established a repository for Castilian state papers, expropriating for the purpose a superb fifteenth-century castle located a few kilometers south of Valladolid. It became known as the Archivo General de Simancas or the AGS.51 Only after its arrival on the scene did Castile finally begin to approach the level of document preservation that had been common in Aragon for several hundred years. Two great ironies exist in respect to the creation of the AGS. To begin with, in the wake of that event, the kingdom that for so long had treated preservation of documents in a most cavalier manner quickly earned a reputation in this area second to none! During the early modern period, the Spanish government, centered in Castile, became a by-word throughout Europe, for producing reams of paperwork. Equally ironic was the fact that one of the first orders of business in establishing this brand new archive was to destroy a number of surviving medieval papers deemed not to merit preservation! Due to this failing on the part of Castile to preserve its governmental records, much of the relatively scant documentation surviving from the reign of Pedro I can now be gathered into just two printed collections, both of them quite modest when compared to the literally thousands of documents preserved from this same period in neighboring Aragon. One of these collections contains a small, but extremely significant cache that has survived in the municipal archives of the city of Murcia. Though far less extensive than the ACA, the Murcian repository provides valuable information concerning the fourteenth-century background of this region and it supplies our major documentary window into the Castilian conduct of the war.52 These Murcian documents have been published in two-volumes containing what their principal editor, Angel Luis Molina Molina, represents as

51  For background on Castile’s oldest archive, including its establishment, see Francisco Javier Alvarez Pinedo and José Luis Rodríguez de Diego, Los Archivos Españoles: Simancas, in Colección Archivos Europeos (Madrid, 1993), 16. See also: Sitges, Mujeres, 8; and Russell, English Intervention, vii–viii. 52  For more about use of the Murcian documents by other historians, see Pilar Díez de Revenga Torres, “Análisis de las lexías complejas en documentos medievales murcianos,” Estudios de linguistica: E.L.U.A. 3 (1985–1986): 193–208; José Damián González Arce, Documentos medievales de Sevilla en el archivo municipal de Murcia en los siglos XIII–XV (Sevilla, 2003; Esther González Crespo, “Inventario de documentos de Alfonso XI relativos al reino de Murcia,” En España Medieval [hereafter EEM] 17 (1994): 235–359; Miguel Rodríguez Llopis and Israel García Díaz, “Documentos medievales del convento de Santa Clara la Real de Murcia,” Miscelánea Medieval Murciana [hereafter MMM] 16 (1990–1991): 195–208.

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being a complete run of all remaining Petrine material from that city.53 It is clearly only a fraction of what once existed. Molina explains that most of the regular cartularies containing royal letters from 1354 to 1367, the period which witnessed the War of the Two Pedros (1356–1366) and the battle Nájera have disappeared from the Archivo Municipal. What survives is just one Libro de Actas Capitulares containing royal letters that date to just two years—from 1364 through 1365. Even for that limited period, it is not the full royal correspondence on any frontline city; not only do we have any answering correspondence addressed by Murcia to the crown. Working from what does still exist, as well as things printed by earlier scholars that have since disappeared, Molina has managed to compile 102 relevant items. In order to better understand Castile’s day-to-day conduct of warfare, these papers are indispensable, for the simple reason that nothing like them has survived for any other site. They supply at least some idea of the wideranging demands that must have been placed on any frontline city, not only Murcia, but also Molina, Alfaro, Gomara, Agreda, and Logroño, all of which are mentioned prominently in Ayala’s chronicle as staging points for the Castilian war with Aragon.54 In other words, virtually all of our Castilian documentation concerning the frontline conduct of the war comes from just two years of a ten-year conflict and from just one city. We can safely assume that other major staging points for the war effort all carried on a similar correspondence with the king. Each of these frontline sites contained royal garrisons and from several of them, repeated expeditions against Aragon were launched. In short, the surviving Murcian documents must represent just the tip of the iceberg. A second, more ambitious project to put together all of Pedro’s documents that still survive in Castilian archives, including those that Molina had already unearthed in Murcia, was undertaken in the 1990s by another Spanish scholar, Luis Vicente Diaz Martín. In a herculean effort, Diaz Martín ransacked archives all over Spain belonging to the state, the church, municipalities, and nobles, 53  D  ocumentos de Pedro I, [hereafter DPI], ed. Angel Luis Molina Molina, 2 vols. (7 and 8) within the larger Colección de Documentos para la Historia del Reino de Murcia (Murcia, 1978), 7:162–63. Molina’s introduction contains a cogent explanation of just what does and does not survive. 54  Ayala prominently mentions not only Murcia but the various other places along the frontier from which the Castilian war effort was conducted. Among the Murcian documents are several that mention the future chronicler. For example, in January, 1365, Pedro I sent Ayala, recently-appointed to the position of frontero, to the city whose inhabitants were instructed to supply his cavalry and infantry with whatever they might need to carry out their task. The king commanded that Ayala be obeyed “as if he were my very body.” See DPI, 1:179–80 (doc. 121); 182–83 (doc. 125);1:185–86 (doc. 128).

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and what he found was printed in four volumes containing in total nearly 1400 pages.55 While a number of these documents were only calendared, many if not most were printed out in full. Unfortunately, as extensive as it may sound at first sight, the collection is dwarfed by what survives in the ACA and other Aragonese archives. Obviously, Diaz Martín’s efforts were first and foremost limited by the paucity of material surviving from Pedro I’s reign. A second problem, however, lies in that material’s chronological distribution. Two full volumes (695 pages) are devoted to just the king’s first two years—1350–1351—half a decade before the outbreak of his war with Aragon. Most of these come out of the first parliament held by Pedro in Valladolid, with the majority simply confirming grants made by his predecessors. Documents from all the rest of the reign—the seventeen years between 1352 and 1369—take up only volumes three and four, a total of 704 pages. Nor is the uneven distribution simply chronological. A substantial majority of the collection’s contents are what might be characterized as private documents, i.e. grants of land and privileges to nobles and municipalities as well as ecclesiastical and secular institutions that Pedro had conferred or reaffirmed. Disappointingly few constitute what we would call state papers, under which heading would fall any involving military matters. Most of the latter were those critical documents from Murcia already printed by Molina Molina. To sum up: our current book is archival-based primarily as regards Aragon. To the extent that it may also be called “archival” in respect to Castilian side of the conflict, we owe an enormous debt to the work of those two hard-working document collectors, Molina Molina and Diaz Martin. In short, it is precisely this asymmetry in the documentary record that for all intents and purposes prevents equal treatment to both sides in the War of the Two Pedros! 6

The Sources (4): Printed Works

Although the War of the Two Pedros began as an internal struggle between two Iberian states, outside intervention ultimately played a crucial role both in deciding its outcome and shaping its aftermath. To help us trace the influence of these outside forces, we have made use of various secondary sources that place the conflict into its non-Iberian context. Three such sources in particular merit special mention. 55  Coleccíon Documental de Pedro I de Castilla (1350–1369) [hereafter CDPI], ed. Luis Vicente Diaz Martín, 4 vols. (Madrid, 1999).

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One of these is an article written at the beginning of the twentieth century by Joaquin Miret y Sans (1858–1919), an early pioneer of Catalan studies. Although trained as a lawyer, Miret y Sans spent most of his time researching the history of his native Catalonia, ultimately becoming a co-founder of the Institute of Catalan Studies. In 1905, he produced the very useful “Negociations de Pierre IV D’Aragon avec la Cour de France (1366–1367),” in which he not only analyzed, but also printed for the first time much of the documentation casting light upon Franco-Aragonese relations during these critical years; in particular, the on-going efforts of Aragon’s hard-pressed monarch to win French aid in his struggle with Castile.56 Also from the beginning of the twentieth century comes the magisterial work of Roland Delachenal (1854–1923), a leading French scholar who dealt primarily with the early Valois monarchs. His definitive 5-volume history of Charles V (r. 1364–1380), a monarch widely known as “Charles the Wise,” makes enormous use of archival documents, often quoting them extensively in his footnotes.57 A final indispensable secondary source for understanding the international context of the War of the Two Pedros is a rather more modern work by Peter Russell (1913–2006), a historian born in New Zealand on the eve of the First World War, who spent most of his scholarly career on the other side of the world at Oxford University. A specialist on medieval Iberia at a time when the subject was not all that popular in the Anglophone world,58 Russell wrote a masterful book in 1955 entitled The English Intervention in Spain & Portugal in the Time of Edward III & Richard II. It remains the best book on how foreign intervention, particularly the intervention by England, shaped events in Spain during the second half of the fourteenth century and laid the foundation for a lasting Franco-Castilian alliance. 56  Joaquin Miret y Sans, “Negociations de Pierre IV d’Aragon avec la Cour de France (1366– 1367),” Revue Hispanique 13 (1905): 76–135. For a highly detailed treatment of the career of the historian, see the lengthy article by a current leader in Catalan historical studies, M. Teresa Ferrer i Mallol, “Joaquim Miret i Sans, Semblança Biografica,” Institut d’Estudis Catalans (Barcelona, 2003). 57  R. Delachenal, Histoire de Charles V, 5 vols. (Paris, 1909–1931). For information concerning the life and academic career of this important turn-of-the-century French historian, see “Nécrologie,” in Bibliothèque de l’école des chartres, vol. 84 n. 1 (1923): 239–41; “Notice sur la vie et les travaux de M. Roland Delachenal,” in Bibliothèque de l’école des chartres 85 n. 1 (1924): 233–50. 58  Late in his career, Russell would produce another outstanding work on Iberian history, this one dealing with Portugal. It is a biography of the first major figure in the European Age of Expansion, Henry the Navigator. See Peter Russell, Prince Henry “the Navigator”: A Life (New Haven, Conn., 2000).

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Although the authors of the present study have found themselves in disagreement with Russell on a number of significant issues,59 he has made valuable contributions to our research, both substantive and bibliographical to the extent that we would have been hard put to get as far as we have without him. On the bibliographical front, Russell pointed us to both surviving documents and earlier literature; as just one example, it was in reading his book that we first encountered both Miret y Sans and Delachenal. Over the centuries, Spanish scholars writing about the political and military history of Iberia have tended to center their attention on either the Islamic conquest and the Christian reconquest that followed or the wars of fought by the Catholic Monarchs that brought about Spanish unification at the end of the Middle Ages. Other conflicts have generally received short shrift. This includes the fourteenth century War of the Two Pedros, despite the fact that it was the longest, most brutal, and most widespread such struggle between the peninsular Christian states. Writing about this conflict has taken a back seat until relatively recently when an increasing number of Spanish scholars began to look back at this interesting chapter in their history. One of the pioneers in this regard was Antonio Gutiérrez de Velasco who wrote several seminal works on the conflict as long ago as the 1950s, at more or less the same time that Russell published his English Intervention.60 Others who have followed his lead include Julio Valdéon Baruque,61 María Teresa Ferrer i Mallol,62 José 59  Two examples of our disagreement with Russell, one bibliographical, the other substantive: for the first, he virtually dismisses Froissart as a valid source for the battle of Nájera; for the second, he places responsibility for the War of the Two Pedros largely on the shoulders of Aragon’s monarch, Pere III. 60  Antonio Gutiérrez de Velasco, “La conquista de Tarazona en la Guerra de los Dos Pedros (Año 1357)” Cuadernos de Historia Jerónimo Zurita [hereafter CHJZ] 10–11 (1960): 69–98.; idem, “La contraofensiva aragonesa en la Guerra de los Dos Pedros: Actitud militar y diplomática de Pedro IV el Ceremoniosos (años 1358 a 1362)” CHJZ 14–15 (1963): 7–30; idem, “Las fortalezas aragonesas ante la gran ofensiva castellana en la Guerra de los Dos Pedros” CHJZ 12–13 (1961): 7–39; idem, “Los Ingleses en España (Siglo XIV)” Estudios de Edad Media de la Corona de Aragón [hereafter EEMCA] 4 (1951): 215–319.; idem, “Molina en la Corona de Aragón (1369–1375)” Teruel 6 (1951): 75–128. 61  Julio Valdéon Baruque, Enrique II de Castilla: La guerra civil y la consolidación del regimen (1366–1371) (Valladolid, 1966); idem, Pedro I el Cruel y Enrique de Trastámara: ¿La primera guerra civil española? (Madrid, 2002). 62  María Teresa Ferrer i Mallol, “Causes i antecedents de la guerra dels dos Peres,” Boletín de la Sociedad Castellonense de Cultura [hereafter BSCC] 63 (1987): 445–508; eadem, Entre la paz y la guerra: La corona Catalano-Aragonesa y Castilla en la baja Edad Media. (Barcelona, 2005); eadem, “La organización militar en Cataluña en la Edad Media.” Special Issue. Revista Española de Historia Militar [hereafter REHM] (2001): 119–222; eadem, “La frontera meridional valencia durant la guerra amb Castella dita dels Dos Peres,” in Pere el Cerimoniós I la seva época (Barcelona, 1989), 245–357. In their 2005 collection on

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Vicente Cabezuelo Pliego,63 and most recently, a young Spanish scholar, Mario Lafuente Gómez, who has produced a number of articles and two significant monographs on the conflict since receiving his doctorate in 2009.64 What is more, due to the hard work of generations of Spanish scholars, many of Castilian and Aragonese sources of the later Middle Ages have come into printed editions which have greatly facilitated the research and writing of this book. Two of the earliest documentary collections are the surviving legislative records of both adversaries. Here again, we encounter an excellent example of asymmetrical preservation of state documents: the surviving records from the Crown of Aragon are quite numerous and extremely rich in their content;65 by comparison, those of Castile are considerably less so.66 Other authors/editors who have put forward useful documentary publications include: Jesús Bergua Camón,67 Johan Coroleu,68 Ricart Albert and

the Hundred Years War as it played out across Europe, the authors introduced Ferrrer i Mallol’s to an English-speaking audience by publishing an English translation of this article as: “The Southern Valencian Frontier during the War of the Two Pedros.” in The Hundred Years War: A Wider Focus, ed. L.J. Andrew Villalon and Donald J. Kagay (Leiden, 2005), 75–116. 63  José Vicente Cabezuelo Pliego, La guerra de los Dos Pedros en las tierras alcantinas (Alicante, 1991). 64  Mario Lafuente Gómez, “Aproximación a las condiciones de vida en Daroca y su entorno durante la Guerra de los Dos Pedros (1356–1366)” Studium. Revista de Humanidades 15 (2009): 53–58; idem, “Comportamientos sociales ante la violencia bélica en Aragón durante las guerras con Castilla (1356–1375)” Historia Instituciones Derecho [hereafter HID] 35 (2008): 241–68; idem, Dos Coronas en guerra Aragón y Castilla. (Zaragoza, 2012); idem, “Devoción y patronazgo en torno al combate en la Corona de Aragón: Las commemoraciones á San Jorge de 1356, Aragón en la Edad Media” Aragón en la Edad Media [hereafter AEEM] 20 (2008): 427–44; idem, “La guerra de los Dos Pedros en Aragón. Impacto y transcendencia de un conflicto bajomedieval (1356–1366),” (Ph.D. diss., Universidad de Zaragoza, 2009); idem, Un reino en armas: La guerra de los Dos Pedros en Aragón (1356– 1366) (Zaragoza, 2014). 65  Colección de las cortes de los antiguos reinos de Aragón y de Valencia y del principado de Cataluña [hereafter CAVC], ed. Fidel Fita and Bienvenido Oliver, 27 vols. (Madrid, 1896–1922). 66  Cortes de los antiguos reinos de León y de Castilla [hereafter CLC], ed. Real Academia de la Historia, 5 vols. (Madrid, 1861–1903). 67  Jesús Bergua Camón, “Fueros de Aragón. De 1265 á 1381” Anuario de Derecho Aragonés 5 (1949–1950): 455–575. 68  Documents Historichs Catalans del Segle XIV: Colecció de Cartas Familiars Corresponents als Regnants de Pere del Punyalet y Johan I [hereafter DHC], ed. Johan Coroleu (Barcelona, 1889).

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Joan Gassiot,69 Ramon Gubern70 Francisco Marsá,71 Angel Sesma Muñoz, and Esteban Sarasa Sánchez.72 7

New Tools of Research

Two relatively recent innovations in information technology have made acquiring access to both the primary and secondary sources a far easier task than has ever before been the case. The first is electronic. Over the course of writing this book, the web has become an increasing important tool for scholars in all disciplines including history. Many works that in the past might have been available only in a very good library or through the time consuming (and not always productive) process of interlibrary loan are now available on the world wide web at one of a number of sites. To name only the most important that have contributed to our work, there are (1) Google Books (https://books.google.com) and its related site, (2) Google Scholar, (https://scholar.google.com), especially for the recovery of books and articles in Catalan, English, and Spanish which have long been out-ofprint and unattainable through normal library channels; (3) PARES (Portal de Archivos Españoles) critical for the accessing of all chancellery registers of the ACA; (4) LIBRO: The Library of Iberian Sources Online; (5) Dialnet (https:// dialnet.unirioja.com) and (6) RACO (Catalan Journals in Open Access) (www .csuc.cat/en/libraries-cbuc/catalan-journals-in-open-access-raco) for retrieving many Catalan and Spanish journals (7) GALLICA: for access to the resources of the Bibliothèque National de France; (8) the Harvard University Library Portal (http://harvard.edu) and (6) the OCLC WorldCat site (www.world.cat) for invaluable bibliographic information concerning the location of many out-of-print works. For those who prefer to work from hard copy, in addition to the web, there are publishers like Elibron Classics and Ulan Press that print-on-demand facsimile editions of out-of-copyright works making a full volume available at reasonable prices to replace worn and partial photocopies.

69  Parlaments a les corts catalanes, ed. Ricard Albert and Joan Gassiot (Barcelona, 1928). 70  Epistolari de Pere III, ed. Ramon Gubern (Barcelona, 1955). 71  Francisco Marsá, Onomástica barcelonesa del siglo XIV (Barcelona, 1976). 72  Cortes del reino de Aragón 1357–1451: Extractos y fragmentos de procesos desaperacidos [hereafter CRA], ed. Angel Sesma Muñoz and Esteban Sarasa Sánchez (Valencia, 1976).

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8 Organization We have divided our text into four parts, each of which deals with several fundamental aspects of the conflict. Part 1, Background to Conflict, occupies the opening four chapters. These begin by briefly acquainting the reader with the Iberian Peninsula’s geography, topography, and place in the Mediterranean world. Afterwards, they focus in on the new Christian polities forged in the wake of the early eighth-century Islamic conquest, kingdoms that grew out of a movement that became known throughout Iberia as the Reconquista. We trace how the divisions between these new states eventually gave rise to a political situation prevailing in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, one that involved intense competition and even open warfare over territories reconquered from the Muslims. In these introductory chapters, we have paid special attention to the frontier region between Castile and Aragon as well as several centuries of smoldering conflict over this region between these two dominant peninsular powers. At the conclusion of Part 1, readers will encounter the two royal adversaries who would ultimately give their names to the conflict— Pedro I of Castile and Pedro IV/Pere III of the Crown of Aragon. Part 2, The Chronology of Conflict, contains chapters 5–9. These trace the War of the Two Pedros from its emergence out of a fairly minor act of piracy committed by an Aragonese flotilla in the summer of 1356 through to its conclusion just under ten years later when in spring 1366 a foreign invasion financed by France, Aragon, and the Papacy drove the king of Castile from his kingdom and handed a complete victory to Aragon. Part 3, The Organization of Warfare, is our longest section (chapters 10–16) and looks at many specific aspects of the conflict: tactics and strategy, the recruitment and organization of armies, weaponry, the financing of conflict, the effect on various sectors of society, the role of towns and cities, the consequences for peasants, the woes of the Jewish population, and the remarkable role of the Aragonese queen, Elionor. The fourth part, which we have entitled Aftermath of the Conflict, occupies chapters 17–19. Here, we consider how the War of the Two Pedros influenced future developments not only within the belligerent states, but in other regions of the European world that experienced ripples emanating from the conflict. We examine how the War of the Two Pedros ultimately led to the rise of a new royal dynasty in Castile, the Trastámaras, a dynasty that spread into neighboring Aragon early in the fifteenth century, and around the beginning of the sixteenth, unified Spain into the most powerful state of early modern Europe. We also consider how the conflict negatively affected the Reconquista, slowing its advance by decades if not generations. Finally, we trace the impact of the

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Iberian struggle on the larger conflict known as the Hundred Years War raging north of the Pyrenees and its role in establishing a close Franco-Castilian alliance that would endure for several centuries. In our conclusion, which occupies Chapter 20, we assess the importance of the War of the Two Pedros and the Castilian Civil War on the national development of the Iberian Peninsula which eventually installed Castile as the most important of the Iberian realms. 9 Citation When referring to a printed work, the first part of our citation is always to the version we have utilized in our own research, supplying to the reader the necessary page reference(s) within that work. However, in cases where traditional divisions of the work were established by (1) the author or (2) the original publisher, we have done our best to supply those alternative references as well. Although this procedure may seem to some overly complex (it has certainly increased our workload), we have adopted it to facilitate the attempts of readers trying to track down our references in other editions. Consider, for example, the case of one of our two most heavily used sources, Pedro López de Ayala’s Crónica del Rey Don Pedro Primero, published by the nineteenth century scholar, Cayetano Rosell, in volume one of his threevolume collection entitled Crónicas de los reyes de Castilla desde don Alfonso el Sabio, hasta los Católicos don Fernando y doña Isabel. This work was republished in 1953 as volumes 66, 68, and 70 of the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles [BAE]. All subsequent references to this work will begin Ayala, Pedro I followed by the page number in the version of Rosell we have used, to wit, its reprint in the BAE. In addition, we have also given the year and the chapter within that year that appears within Cayetano Rosell’s text. Hence, a reference to the Ayala’s chronicle would take the following form: Ayala, Pedro I, 425 (1352, chap. 2). For another example, consider the case of Jerónimo Zurita, the sixteenthcentury chronicler royal mentioned earlier in this Introduction. In our writing, we have employed the modern Zaragoza edition of Zurita’s Anales de la Corona de Aragon that treats Pere III’s reign in volumes 3–4. On the other hand, Zurita himself divided his monumental history into books and chapters: the reign of Pere III, second longest in Aragonese history, took up most of books VII through X in Zurita’s ordering of the text. Consequently, throughout our work, references to the Anales will be given in both forms: first, according to the volume and page numbers in the Zaragoza edition we

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have used; secondly (in parentheses) to the corresponding book and chapter. Therefore, a footnote reference would take the following form. Zurita, Anales, 4:306 (IX: 5). 10

Translation, Naming, Spelling

Several problems arise in respect to the rendering of names, both those of people and of places. Our book is written in English, primarily for an English-speaking audience. We might therefore (in good conscience) Anglicize names when a perfectly good English synonym for the original exists. Peter rather than Pedro or Henry rather than Enrique. We have chosen not to do this. Instead, we write of the War of the Two Pedros, rather than that of the two Peters. The king of Aragon is Pere III, not Peter III. His Castilian counterpart is Pedro I, and the latter’s much-hated illegitimate half-brother appears as Enrique de Trastámara or later King Enrique II. Or consider the name John. That version will be used only if its bearer is English. If Castilian, Juan; if French, Jean; if Aragonese, Joan; Portuguese, João; if Italian, Giovanni; and so forth. Our naming principal will apply not only to monarchs, but to all others as well. A problem most medievalists encounter is the variability displayed by medieval writers in rendering the names of people and places. One particularly telling example can be seen in the many different names assigned to one individual whom we have mentioned in this book on a number of occasions— the English knight and soldier of fortune, one of the Black Prince’s principal “dogs of war,” Sir Hugh Calveley. Of our two principal sources, one of them, Ayala, refers to him as Hugo de Caurelay. The other, Pere III, calls him Hugh de Calviley. Others differ even more substantially. In his Life of the Black Prince, the Chandos Herald writes of Calverlee or Calvelee. To Jean Froissart, he was Hues de Cavrelee. The chronicle of the French king, Charles V, calls him Hue de Carvele. On different occasions, the anonymous author of the Chronique Normande alternates Cauveley, Caverley, Cameley, and Ceverly. The equally anonymous author of the Chronique des Quatre Premiers Valois speaks of Hue de Karvelley. In Walter of Peterborough’s tedious Latin poem dealing with the Najera campaign the knight becomes Calverlensis Hugonis, These number among more than a score of spellings in contemporary documentation; others of which include Calvyle, Kalvele, Calvile, and Kerverley. Many other names display similar variations, even if they are not as numerous. Since our man was an English knight, hailing from the County of Chester that he later represented

l

Introduction

in parliament, for use in this book, we have adopted one of the English spellings; employed in the British Dictionary of National Biography. On the other hand, we could just as easily have gone with one of the many other forms. The most important thing is to be consistent.73 Finally, it should be mentioned that over the years, both of the authors of this book have been repeatedly frustrated by translations the that fail to supply either a name or a word as it appears in the original work. This is particularly the case if the way in which that name or word is being translated into English may be open to question. As a result, throughout our own translations, we have tried to avoid this “dereliction” by supplying in parentheses the original word when and wherever it seems appropriate to do so. This, of course, includes the spelling of proper names as they appear in the texts we have used. 11 Appendices As in our earlier book on the battle of Nájera, to accompany the text, we have provided four appendices, composed of translated passages from both documents and major chronicles. Here, the reader will see the nature of at least some of our evidence. The only examples that communicate royal emotions appear in documents contained in Appendix I. They follow the exchange of letters that took place between Pere and his principal adversary, Pedro I of Castile. These letters, written by the two men between fall, 1356, and early spring, 1366, became increasingly vitriolic as time passed. In them, Pedro accuses his Aragonese enemy of violating Castilian sovereignty in late-summer, 1356. He demands in these letters and in several others dispatched over the next few months that Pere not only makes amends for his recent wrongs against Castile but also any that had been committed over the previous half-century. For his part, the Aragonese king repeatedly responded that neither he nor his subjects had engaged in such wrongdoing. Appendix II is made up of translated documents and originating from the Archivo de la Corona de Aragon in Barcelona. It includes letters sent by Pere III to other members of the royal family, to his officials, and to members of the parliaments of the three realms that composed the Crown of Aragon. They report the progress of the war with Castile, issue instructions to administrators for the management of many aspects of the conflict, require the raising 73  Interestingly, the medieval spellings do not seem to include one that is frequently used by modern authors, i.e. “Calverley.” See, for example: Sedgwick, Life of the Black Prince, 267.

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of military funds from many different groups, including churchmen, nobles, townsmen as well as Jewish and Muslim communities Several of these documents deal with diplomatic exchanges between Pere III and his archenemy, Pedro I, his some-time enemy, Carlos II of Navarre (r. 1349–1387), several popes and their legates in Iberia. These exchanges either refer to war plans against Castile or were used to announce the establishment of truces and peace treaties, most generally between Aragon and Castile. Some of the most interesting and far ranging of these documents are the exchange of letters between Pere and his wife, Queen Elionor, who served as an important administrator in her own right. Unfortunately, the modern reader sees very little emotion in these letters between the king and his queen. This all-business approach is also apparent in the communications between the king and his eldest son, Prince Joan, who became a significant administrator during the later stages of the war when he was a teenager. Though far fewer communiqués from Pedro I of Castile to the members of his administration survive, these examples that appear in Appendix III largely spring from one source, the critically important archival collection that still exists in Murcia. These documents include the king’s instructions regarding war operations issued by the king to his front-line Castilian and Murcian cities. These communiques are marked by their brevity and urgent tone. They often contain Pedro’s threats of how he would respond if the townsmen did not do their duty exactly as he had instructed them. The final group of documents, which appear in Appendix IV, largely emanate from passages in Ayala’s chronicle of Pedro I. These brief translations deal first with the only real battles that occurred during the War of the Two Pedros—those of Araviana (1359) and the first battle of Nájera (1360), the murder of Prince Ferran in July 1363, and the beginning of Castilian Civil War in summer 1366. All the passages in this appendix, except for those from Pere’s chronicle, have been translated by the authors. The headings of all of these translations include the following: name of the author and, if applicable, the recipient; a short summary of the contents; and all necessary bibliographical information. In the case of ACA documents, this would include the register number, the folio number, the date, and the site where the document was issued. The headings of the chronicle translations include the regnal year, chapter number and pages in the edition we have used.

part 1 Background to the Conflict

∵

Chapter 1

Spain: a Geographical Miscellany The intrusion of foreign war on the Iberian Peninsula through the centuries has invariably and quite rapidly imposed on the invader the realization of the harsh and dangerous beauty of the land south of the Pyrenees. Likened in shape by the ancient geographer, Strabo of Amaseia, to that of a bull hide staked out to dry1 and by modern historians to a castle surrounded on all sides by protective moats,2 Iberia is indeed a strange amalgam of easy maritime access and mountainous isolation. With almost 2,000 miles of extremely regular coastline on the Atlantic and the Mediterranean,3 Spain boasts a great number of usable inlets, but, at the same time, has very few large harbors. The principal Spanish port cities during the Middle Ages faced the Mediterranean and included Almeria, Barcelona, Cartagena, Valencia, and the city of Palma de Mallorca on the Balearic Islands. The largest of these, Barcelona, had a preplague populatilon of some 40,000.4 In antiquity, the regular Mediterranean littoral encouraged seaborne commerce and foreign settlement, first by the Phoenicians and Greeks and then, centuries later and to much greater effect, by the Romans.5 Just inland from much of the Iberian coast especially on the Mediterranean side, can be found low-lying grasses and marshland. Drainage and other forms of landscape-alteration have converted a substantial part of the region into 1  Spanish Information Service, Spain (Madrid, 1962), 13. 2  John A. Crow, Spain: The Root and the Flower: A History of the Civilization of Spain and of the Spanish People (New York, 1963), 1–2; William Atkinson, “Spain: The Country, its Peoples and Languages,” in Spain, A Companion to Spanish Studies, ed. E. Allison Peers (London, 1929), 1–28, esp. 2. 3  Naval Intelligence Division, Spain and Portugal, 2 vols. (London, 1941), 1:39–40; Crow, Spain, 13–15. Geographers divide the Spanish coasts into the following zones: Cantabrian, Galician, Atlantic, and Mediterranean. 4  Josiah Cox Russell, Medieval Regions and Their Cities (Newton Abbot, 1972), 166–86. The principal Spanish port cities during the Middle Ages were the Mediterranean sites Almeria, Barcelona, Cartagena, Palma de Mallorca, and Valencia. Barcelona with a pre-plague population of 40,000 was the largest of the Iberian coastal cities while Almeria and Palma with populations of 4,000 were the smallest. 5  Richard J. Harrison, Spain at the Dawn of History: Iberian, Phoenicians and Greeks (London, 1988), 50–79; C.H.V. Sutherland, The Romans in Spain 217 B.C.–A.D. 117 (1939; reprint, Westport Conn., 1982), 22–44; Leonard A. Curchin, Roman Spain: Conquest and Assimilation (London, 1991), 24–39; S.J. Keay, Roman Spain (Berkeley, 1988), 24–46.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004425057_003

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Chapter 1

Galicia

Cantabrian Mountains León

Pyrenees

.

Ebro R

ns

Central Sierra New Castile

Tagus R .

R. Gu a di a na

Land over 3000 feet above sea level Land over 1500 feet above sea level

Sierra Morena lq ada Gu

Map 1

tai

Guadarama Mountains

n ou

Du ero R .

M ian er Ib

Old Castile Duero R .

r R. uivi

vada a Ne Sierr

Physical map of Spain

some of the most productive land on the peninsula.6 Farther inland, these zones of extensive agriculture and commerce abruptly collide with the uplands formed by the Cantabrian and Pyrenean cordilleras as well as smaller mountain ranges, including the Sierra de Guadarrama, the Sierra Morena, and the Sierra Nevada. Perhaps the most spectacular topographical feature of the Iberian Peninsula, the obvious result of geological uplift, is an extensive tableland or altiplano known to the Spaniards as the meseta central, with a surface composed of many types of sedimentary and volcanic rock. The meseta rises up to some 6,200 feet and dominates the peninsula on both its east-west and north-south axes.7 Between the two of them, the mountains and the meseta give Spain an average altitude of 600 meters, making it the second highest country in Europe after Switzerland. The extreme geography of Spain, the juxtaposition of coastal plain and high plateau, of agricultural land surrounded by mountains helps account

6  Spain and Portugal, 2:109–12; W.B. Fisher and H. Bowen-Jones, Spain: An Introductory Geography (1958; reprint, New York, 1966), 48–51. 7 Spain and Portugal, 1:32–39; Crow, Spain, 10–11; Atkinson, “Spain,” 4–5.

Spain: a Geographical Miscellany

5

for the diversity of Iberian languages and culture and, in large measure, it also helps explain the Iberian way of war that evolved during the Middle Ages. Throughout the medieval centuries, communication between the Iberian coastal regions and the more mountainous interior was made possible primarily by its relatively short, but fast-flowing rivers, most of which run eastwest. Upon their arrival, the Romans, the great road-builders of the ancient world contributed to the peninsula, especially in the more heavily settled southern region of Baetica, an impressive road system. During the medieval period, their principal highway, the Via Augusta stretching down along the Mediterranean coast then swinging west as far as Cadiz, remained in use. On the other hand, many of the trunk roads of the old Roman provinces of Baetica and Terraconensis fell into disrepair by the first centuries of Islamic rule.8 This increased the importance of rivers for communication and commerce. Originating in the western sierras of Castile and León, two of Spain’s leading rivers, the Duero and Tajo, flow into the Atlantic at Oporto and Lisbon respectively. Farther to the south, two more Spanish waterways flow westward across what would eventually become Portugal, thereafter dumping their waters into the Atlantic. The Guadiana runs west into Portugal, then turns southward forming part of the border between the two countries. The Guadalquivir River rises in the Sierra Morena to wander westward through Spain’s southernmost region, Andalusia, past the great cities of Cordoba and Seville before meeting the Atlantic at San Lucar de Barrameda, just north of Cadiz.9 On the eastern side of the peninsula, the most important river is the Ebro which cuts through the Cantabrian uplands, meandering across the wide coastal plain below Barcelona before emptying into the Mediterranean near the city of Tortosa. Other streams along the eastern litoral—the Llobregat, Turia, Xucar, and Segura—are considerably smaller watercourses that rapidly descend from the mountains, but lose their velocity on their flat lower reaches and sluggishly enter the sea. Except for the Ebro in the east and Guadalquivir in the west, none of these rivers are navigable for any great extent. Even the larger water courses experience a considerable variance in water depth due to spring rains and the long summer drought.10 Nevertheless, despite their varying water levels, these main rivers did facilitate interaction between the central uplands and

8   Raymond D. Chevallier, Roman Roads, trans. N.H. Field (London, 1976), 157; Keay, Roman Spain, 61; Albert C. Leighton, Transport and Communication in Early Medieval Europe, A.D. 500–1000 (Newton Abbot, 1972), 53–57. 9    Spain, 18–9; Atkinson, “Spain,” 2–3; Pau Vila, Resum de geografia de Catalunya, 9 vols. (Barcelona, 1936), 1:39–48; Emili Beüt i Belenguer, Geografía elemental del regne de Valéncia (Valencia, 1980), 33–38. 10  Crow, Spain, 15–16; Spain and Portugal, 122–23; Fisher and Bowen-Jones, Spain, 34–35.

6

Chapter 1

ATLANTIC OCEAN

Montpellier

A Coruña

Duero R.

N

Lisbon

Tagus R.

Mérida a R. Guadian

Toledo

Zaragoza Ebr Tarragona A oR R . A G Tortosa

O

R. Jucar

Lérida Barcelona

N

Requena

Alicante Murcia Córdoba . egura R R. S r i v i Seville uadalqu G Granada Almería Màlaga

Cádiz

Valencia

E AL

AR

I

NDS S L AMenorca I C Palma

Mallorca

Ibiza

MEDITERRANEAN SEA

Gibraltar

Tangier

Ceuta

MOROCCO

Map 2

Madrid

E I L S T

Santarém

Salamanca

A

Aljubarrota

- C

P O R T U G A L

Porto

Coimora

Huesca

Ó

Túy

Perpignan

Pamplona León Vitoria-Gasteiz NAVARRE Burgos Logroño Alfaro

B

Min o

R.

L E

Compostella

Melilla

The realms of medieval Spain

the coasts. As they flowed east or west, they cut out long narrow valleys which provided a sure entrance up on to the meseta except in the heart of winter. Life on Iberian Peninsula is affected not only by its topography, but also by the resulting variety of climates and the vegetation these climates support. In broad terms, Spain is divided into three major climactic zones: the northwest, the meseta, and the Mediterranean coast, as well as a number of minor ones. The first of these stretches along the northern coast from the Pyrenees to the Atlantic and then swings south along the Portuguese coast to Lisbon. Its climate is similar to Brittany, England, and Ireland with annual average rainfall of 39 inches, rising in some places as high as 80 inches with an average temperature of 50 degrees F. The second zone, encompassing most of central Spain, tends to be cold in winter and hot in the summer. Madrid, very near the geographic center of the peninsula, has a winter average of roughly 46 degrees F and a summer average

Spain: a Geographical Miscellany

7

of 73 degrees F. This central region tends to be considerably drier than northern Spain with average rainfall levels ranging from twelve to thirty inches. The last of the three zones extends from the Pyrenees in the north, south along the Catalan and Valencian coasts and then swings west along the Andalusian litoral toward the Straits of Gibraltar. The climate here is temperate except in summer, when temperatures sometimes reach up to above 104 degrees in the shade. Rainfall ranges from 16 to 31 inches.11 Because of the difficulties of moving armies across medieval Iberia,12 commanders had to seriously consider under what climactic conditions they were willing to fight. Within a harsh seasonal configuration that not-a-few Spaniards characterized as “nine months of winter and three of hell,”13 warfare normally took place in late spring and early summer. The flora of these climactic zones also played a role in determining the type and duration of warfare. Although scholars believe that most of the peninsula had once been covered in forest, by the dawn of the Middle Ages, this sylvan aspect was largely confined to the Cantabrian and Pyrenean uplands in the north.14 Much of the rest of Spain’s interior was dominated by underbrush known as m ­ atorral. Generally speaking, this scrub, composed largely of wild herbs and rough grasses, failed to supply adequate nutrition for either man nor his domesticated animals.15 With limited amounts of natural fodder for their horses, medieval Iberian armies had little option but to carry enough feed for their mounts and pack animals or engage in short-term raids on enemy agricultural zones to supply their deficiencies.16 For centuries, Castile and what would become Crown of Aragon rivaled one another in dealing heavy blows against Muslim-held territory lying to the south of both kingdoms. Then, in the thirteenth century, following the great advances made by Fernando III “the Saint” (r. 1217–1252), and Jaume I “the Conqueror” (r. 1213–1276), this competition for the former lands of Islam abated somewhat. 11  Crow, Spain, 16–17; Spain and Portugal, 81–106; Fisher and Bowen-Jones, Spain, 31–42; Richard Fletcher, Moorish Spain (Berkeley, 1992), 11–12. 12  Donald J. Kagay, “Army Mobilization, Royal Administration, and the Realm in the Thirteenth-Century Crown of Aragon,” in Iberia and the Mediterranean World of the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Robert I. Burns, S.J., ed. P.E. Chevedden, D.J. Kagay, P.G. Padilla, and L. Simon, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1996), 2:95–115, esp. 108–11. 13  Atkinson, “Spain,” 3. 14  N.J.G. Pounds, An Historical Geography of Europe (New York, 1990), 12–13. 15  Spain and Portugal, 1:136–37; Fisher and Bowen-Jones, Spain, 46–47. Matorral is composed of tomillar (a kind of wild thyme) and retamal (a broom grass). 16  Invading European armies of later centuries quickly discovered this prime fact of the Iberian countryside. See, for example, the complaints of Dutch and English commanders during the Peninsular War concerning the under-fed horses the Iberian environment produced. David Francis, The First Peninsular War 1702–1713 (New York, 1975), 86–88.

8

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For while Castile maintained its drive to the south against the last Muslim stronghold on the peninsula, Granada; by contrast, Aragon began to redirect its principal efforts eastward across the Mediterranean Sea, first expanding on to the islands of Sicily and Sardinia and eventually as far east as Greece. Nevertheless, despite their diverging interests, the two kingdoms shared a common border that snaked southward as the taifa states17 fell one after another before the waxing power of these Christian neighbors.18 Dynastic entanglements and the uncertain nature of the border itself occasioned repeated conflicts between the two powers. The battle zones remained fundamentally the same. Fighting took place in the “middle lands” between the sierra and the coastal plains, from the Ebro River basin down to the Sierras de Cuenca and ending on the lower course of the Segura River. On the northern end of this line, in the upper basin lies the city of Logroño near the point where the borders of Castile, Aragon, and Naverre approach one another most closely. Here, the lower slopes of the Sierra de la Demanda are home to vineyards and olive groves surrounded by thick stands of scrub and stunted grasses.19 As one mid-nineteenth-century traveler observed, much of the region is a “great arid waste where drinking water is scarce and settlements are small and far apart.”20 Aside from Logroño, the major population centers in the region are Calahorra, Santo Domingo de la Calazada, and somewhat farther to the west in the Basque country, Vitoria. None ranks among Castile’s larger cities. This area became the northern most theatre of war where fighting would take place during the War of the Two Pedros. It was here, the year after that war ended (April, 1367), that two of the fourteenth century’s largest armies clashed outside the town of Nájera, a few kilometers west of Logroño. Moving farther south along the frontier between the two kingdoms, major fighting occurred west of the Aragonese capital of Zaragoza. In this area, the hostile armies encountered a landscape of steep cliffs (barrancas) and narrow valleys chiseled out by fast-flowing streams that ran down from the meseta central. Aside from the aromatic herbs and wild flowers that grew on these slopes in profusion, in the fourteenth century the region was covered by thick 17  The name given to Islamic principalities that came into existence following the breakup of the Caliphate of Córdoba in 1301.  18  José María Cordero Torres, Fronteras hispanicas: Geografía e historia diplomacia y administración (Madrid, 1960), 107–9; Robert I. Burns, S.J., “Warrior Neighbors: Alfonso el Sabio and Crusader Valencia, An Archival Case Study in his International Relations,” Viator 21 (1990): 146–202. 19  Spain and Portugal, 2:106–7. 20  Ibid., 107. Quote from Richard Ford, Hand-Book for Travellers in Spain and Readers at Home, 3 vols. (1845; reprint, Carbondale, Ill., 1966), 3:1348–50.

Spain: a Geographical Miscellany

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stands of pine. With open agriculture at a minimum, the region was important through much of the Middle Ages for its wool, mutton, and honey and, where the land was suitable, vineyards. The pine forests provided charcoal for the many “forges” (ferrarias) that produced farm implements as well as weaponry from the district’s abundant iron ore.21 The so-called “bald sierra” (Moncayo) that rises upward from the Ebro Valley supports small towns, most of which began life as hilltop fortresses. The major population center in the region, Calatayud, marked by its “grey, hungry, barren, scaly, and crumbling castle,” stands on the headwaters of the Jalón River, while the other sizeable towns, Albarracín and Teruel, command the swift-flowing Turia River.22 The harsh nature of these steep uplands made this a zone where towns were the only sites that could be attacked or were worth attacking. Still farther to the south lay the ill-defined frontier between the Aragonese kingdom of Valencia and the Castilian kingdom of Murcia a bone of contention between Castile and Aragon throughout much of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and another major theatre in the War of the Two Pedros. Here, the land is very different than it is farther to the north. This is a fertile region of huertas (gardens) characterized by intensive agricultural production. Along the Segura River valley, irrigation produces extremely fertile farmland where the inhabitants grow a wide variety of fruit as well as rice and wheat.23 The towns of Alicante, Elche, and Orihuela are indeed “oases” of green in the midst of a brown hinterland. Given armies inescapable need of food for the men and fodder for the animals, agricultural areas, especially in the south where they were concentrated tended to experience the greatest military activity. On the other hand, where not transformed by irrigation and careful cultivation, significant sections of this southern frontier took on the character of a “treeless and waterless country” cut by deep ravines and covered with extremely course varieties of heather.24 These empty spaces supported little agriculture and were largely given over to the grazing of sheep. As the frontier swung eastward, highlands ran down toward the Mediterranean. Several sites, surrounded by large stands of date palms, bear a strong resemblance to Moroccan

21  Ford, Hand-Book, 3:1296–97; Spain and Portugal, 1:142. 22  Ford, Hand-Book, 3:1296–97, 1319. 23   The towns of Alicante, Elche, and Orihuela are indeed “oases” of green in the midst of a brown hinterland. Given armies inescapable need of food for the men and fodder for the animals, agricultural areas, especially in the south where they were concentrated tended to experience the greatest military activity. 24  Ibid., 2:606–8; Spain and Portugal, 2:110–11.

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sites that face the Mediterranean while turning their back to the bleak interior of North Africa. It was throughout these “middle-lands” separating the two kingdoms that most of the military activity took place. Here, where populations, commerce, and language surged back and forth across a poorly-drawn border, hostile armies conducted repeated raids and on a number of occasions clashed with one another. In the face of on-going attempts by both Castile and the Crown of Aragon to impose control over this frontier region and its intermingled population, it truly became a land of war.

Chapter 2

Rival Christian States of Medieval Iberia Despite the fact that a good deal of Spain’s medieval history centered on the steady and sometimes bitter rivalries between the peninsula’s Christian realms, historians have generally framed Spain’s medieval past by reference to the seven-century reconquest that pitted the Christian survivors of the destroyed Visigothic state against the Muslim invaders who had defeated it in the early eighth century.1 1

Castile-León

By the fourteenth century, Castile was the largest of Iberia’s Christian states both in respect to geographical extent and population size. It had emerged during the medieval centuries out of a number of smaller polities—Asturias, Galicia, León, and the original county of Castile—to dominate central Spain. It had sprung from lands claimed by Visigothic refugees who in the early eighth century utilized the rough landscape of northern Spain to establish strongholds from which they could protect their own communities as well as raid nearby Muslim settlements. This zone of attack and counterattack that various modern scholars have characterized as a “chronically dangerous borderland” formed a front line of conflict that moved steadily southward over the centuries, forming in the process first the kingdom of León and then somewhat later the county of Castile.2 1  For the destruction of the Visigothic state, see Roger Collins, The Arab Conquest of Spain 710–797 (1989; reprint, Oxford, 1994); idem, Early Medieval Spain: Unity in Diversity, 400–1000 (1983; reprint, London, 1988), 146–82; The Chronicle of 754,” in Conquerors and Chroniclers of Early Medieval Spain, trans. Kenneth Baxter Wolf (Liverpool, 1990), 130–32 (chaps. 51–55); “The Chronicle of Alfonso III,” in Conquerors and Chroniclers, 160–67 (chaps. 2–9); Fletcher, Moorish Spain, 15–26; Hugh Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal: A Political History of al-Andalus (London, 1996), 3–18. For the various interpretations of Spanish national character posited by scholars such as Américo Castro, José Ortega y Gassett, Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, and Jaime Vicens Vives, see Joseph F. O’Callaghan, A History of Medieval Spain (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975), 17–24. 2  Robert I. Burns, S.J., “The Missionary Syndrome: Crusader and Pacific Northwest Religious Expansionism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 30 (1988): 271–85, esp. 277; idem, “The Significance of the Frontier in the Middle Ages,” in Medieval Frontier Societies, ed. Robert Bartlett and Angus MacKay (1989; reprint, Oxford, 1996), 307–30, esp. 322. Geographers have

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004425057_004

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Despite their initial expansion, these small Christian realms remained for generations largely in the shadow of the great Islamic state centered in Córdoba, which ruled most of southern and central Spain. Near the end of the tenth century, they were even driven to the verge of ruin by the brilliant Muslim general, Ibn Abī ʿĀmir, also known as Al-Mansūr).3 However, with Al-Mansūr’s death in 1002, the Caliphate of Cordoba had entered a rapid decline and its fall in 1031 marked a turning point. The subsequent parceling out of Andalusia and other Spanish territories among some two dozen Islamic principalities, known as taifas, made possible rapid expansion of León and Castile.4 Strengthened by these divisions among their Muslim enemies, the rulers of the Christian states extended their holdings for fifty years after Córdoba’s fall, bringing these efforts to a glorious culmination when Alfonso VI of Castile (r. 1065–1109) captured the old Visigothic capital, Toledo, in 1085.5 The king’s great victory was short-lived, however, since it sparked a bloody retaliation exacted by two distinct waves of Muslim fundamentalists centered in West Africa and Morocco; first the Almoravids and then the Almohads, who came to dominate Andalusian affairs for well over a century. After suffering a humiliating defeat at Sagrajas (Zallaqa) in 1086, Alfonso VI’s military fortunes declined to such an extent that for the last several decades of his reign the only Christian victories against Spanish Islam were won by local freebooters such as Rodrigo Diáz de Vivar (better known as El Cid) and Geraldo the Fearless.6 long referred to such a no-man’s land as an “artificial boundary waste.” See Archibald R. Lewis, “The Closing of the Mediaeval Frontier 1250–1350,” Speculum 33, no. 4 (Oct., 1958): 475–88, esp. 483. Quote from Julian V. Minghi, “Boundary Studies in Political Geography,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 53, no. 3 (Sep., 1963): 407–28, esp. 407. 3  Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal, 115–22; Bernard F. Reilly, The Medieval Spains (Cambridge, 1993), 86–88; Fletcher, Moorish Spain, 74–76. 4  Mahmoud Makki, “The Political History of al-Andalus (92/711–897/1492),” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1994), 1:3–87, esp. 44–46; Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal, 124–29; David J. Wasserstein, The Caliphate in the West: An Islamic Political Institution in the Iberian Peninsula (Oxford, 1993), 147–64. For the reino de taifas, see Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal, 130–61; Makki, “Political History,” 1:49–60; David Wasserstein, The Rise and Fall of the Party-Kings: Politics and Society in Islamic Spain 1002– 1086 (Princeton, 1985). 5  Derek W. Lomax, The Reconquest of Spain (London, 1978), 65; O’Callaghan, History, 207; Reilly, Medieval Spains, 97. 6   For the African fundamentalists, see Jacinto Bosch Vila, Los almorávides, historia de Marruecos (Tetuan, 1956); Ambrosio Huici Miranda, Historia política del imperio Almohade, 2 vols. (Tetuan, 1956–1957); Allen James Fromherz, The Almohads: The Rise of an Islamic Empire (London, 2010); Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal, 196–236; Makki, “Political

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For the next century, Castile experienced a period of military stagnation. Not until early in the thirteenth century were Iberia’s Christian kings able to join forces against their principal Islamic adversary, the Almohads. Despite suffering one last crushing defeat at Alarcos in 1095, Castilian forces managed to keep the Almohads at bay until Alfonso VIII (1158–1214) and his Aragonese and Navarrese counterparts, won the pivotal victory of the reconquista at Las Navas de Tolosa (July 16, 1212).7 Though hardly knowing it at the time, the Christian victors of this battle had largely broken the back of Almohad domination in Spain. Thereafter, under the effective leadership of sovereigns who now ruled both Castile and León, men such as Fernando III (r. 1217–1252), Alfonso X (r. 1252–1282), and Alfonso XI (r. 1312–1350), most of Andalusia came under Christian control. What is more, the access to the peninsula across the Strait of Gibraltar was effectively cut off to the political heirs of the Almohads, the Merinid dynasty of Morocco.8 After History,” 68–77; Robert A. Messier, The Almoravids and the Meanings of Jihad (Santa Barbara, Cal., 2010). For battle of Sagrajas, see Ambrosio Huici Miranda, Las grandes batallas de la reconquista durante las invasiones africanas (Almorávides, Almohades, Benimerines) (Madrid, 1956), 35–41; Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal, 162; Ramón Menendez Pidal, La España del Cid, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1969), 1:300. For the Cid and Geraldo the Fearless, see H. Butler Clarke, The Cid Campeador and the Waning of the Crescent in the West (New York, 1978); Stephen Clissold, In Search of the Cid (London, 1965), 11–80; Richard Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid (New York, 1989), 107–43; Lomax, Reconquest, 113–15. 7  For battle of Alarcos, see Charles Julian Bishko, “The Spanish and Portuguese Reconquest, 1095–1492,” in The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, ed. Harry W. Hazard, vol. 3 of A History of the Crusades, ed Kenneth M. Setton et al., 6 vols. (Madison, Wisc., 1975–1984), 396–456, esp. 421–24; Huici Miranda, Grandes batallas, 137–169; Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal, 237– 46; Lomax, Reconquest, 118–20; Joseph F. O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain (Philadelphia, 2003), 61–62. For battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, see Juan Eslava Galán, “Tacticas en la batalla de Las Navas de Tolosa,” CHE 6–7 (1978–1979): 39–53; Francisco García Fitz, Las Navas de Tolosa (Barcelona, 2005); O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade, 71–74; Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal, 254–56; Lomax, Reconquest, 127–28. 8  O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade, 112–23; Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal, 271–72; Bishko, “Spanish and Portuguese Reconquest,” 428–29; Lomax, Reconquest, 150–54. For war on the Strait of Gibraltar, see Nicolás Agrait, “The Experience of War in Fourteenth-Century Spain: Alfonso XI and the Capture of Algeciras (1342–44),” in Crusaders, Condottieri, and Cannon, 213–35; idem “The Reconquest during the Reign of Alfonso XI (1312–1250),” in On the Social Origins of Medieval Institutions: Essays in Honor of Joseph F. O’Callaghan, ed. Donald J. Kagay and Theresa M. Vann (Leiden, 1998), 149–65; Huici Miranda, Grandes Batallas, 333–79. For Merinid dynasty of Morocco, see Ahmed Khaneboubi, Les premiers sultans mérinides: 1269–1331: Histoire politique et social (Paris, 1987); Miguel Ángel Manzano Rodríguez, La intervención de los Benimarines en la Península Ibérica (Madrid, 1992); Maya Shatzmiller, The Berbers and the Islamic State: The Merinid Experience in Pre-Protectorate Morocco (Princeton, N.J., 2000).

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Castile’s great reconquest efforts that had largely reached a climax by the midfourteenth century, the only Muslim polity left in Spain was the small kingdom of Granada which would lead a precarious political existence until the dawn of the sixteenth century by playing off its Christian neighbors against each other.9 2

Crown of Aragon

Because of its central location in the peninsula, Castile constantly shared borders with Islamic lands and grew ever larger from their conquest. It is thus hardly surprising that it constituted the largest realms in medieval Spain. Eastward toward the Mediterranean, however, a number of polities would also develop from the emerging war culture of the reconquest. The first of these— Catalonia (“the land of castellans”)—sprang from communities of Visigothic refugees that inhabited both sides of the Pyrenees. Sponsored by Frankish leaders such as Charlemagne (r. 769–814) and his son, Louis I “the Pious” (r. 814–840), the “Spaniards” (hispani) recovered much of their former homeland, as far south as Barcelona by 801. For the next century, this land, known as the “Spanish March” (marca hispanica), was under the authority of Carolingian rulers who administered their Iberian territories through agents that eventually became the region’s first nobility. As Francia began to spin apart after the Treaty of Verdun (843), its Frankish governors south of the mountains became rulers in their own right in so far as they could enforce their authority over subjects living in a land of castles. The frontier nature of the Spanish March as well as the proliferation of fortresses hampered centralized government and advanced the power of the war lords living along the frontier.10 Despite the chaos imposed on the Spanish March from the ever-present danger of Islamic attack and the distribution of land to nobles who often acted like 9   For masterful Muslim manipulation by the fourteenth century Granadan ruler, Muhammad V, see: Clara Estow, “Castilian-Granadan Relations in the Mid-14th Century,” in Hundred Years War: A Wider Focus, ed. L.J. Andrew Villalon and Donald J. Kagay (Leiden, 2005). See also: Rachel Arié, Historia y cultura de la Granada Nazarí (Granada, 2004); Francisco Bueno, Los reyes de la Alhambra: Entre la historia y la leyenda (Granada, 2004); Historia del reino de Granada, ed. Rafael G. Peinado Santaella et al., 3 vols. (Granada, 2000). 10  Pierre Bonnassie, From Slavery to Feudalism in South-Western Europe, trans. Jean Birrel (Cambridge, 1991), 152–53; Collins, Arab Conquest, 210–6; F.L. Ganshof, The Carolingians and the Frankish Monarchy, trans. Janet Sondheimer (Ithaca, N.Y., 1971), 90–91; Archibald Lewis, “Cataluña como frontera militar (879–1050),” Anuario de Estudios Medievales [hereafter AEM] 5 (1968): 15–29; idem, The Development of Southern French and Catalan Society, 718–1050 (Austin, Tex., 1965), 238–39; Lomax, Reconquest, 33.

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kings in their own right, eastern Spain eventually fell under the loose control of the count of Barcelona and Ausona. From the time of Guifré I “the Hairy” (r. 873–914), these counts began to take up the mantle of war with Spanish Islam as a way of solidifying their authority over their own territory which was now coming to be called Catalonia.11 To accelerate expansion of their authority, counts of Barcelona such as Ramon Berenguer I (r. 1035–1076) not only issued new secular laws but also sponsored and controlled emerging ecclesiastical institutions such as the peace and truce of God. By the mid-twelfth century, this legislative activity had coalesced into the first statement of Catalonia’s fundamental law, the Usatges of Barcelona.12 As their domestic power grew, counts, such as Ramon Berenguer III (r. 1074–1131) and his son, Ramon Berenguer IV, followed the lead of their subjects by launching regular attacks against Muslims living across the Ebro River. They also threatened the Balearic Islands.13 By the mid-twelfth century, the “land of castellans” had grown to such an extent that its territory was divided into Old and New Catalonia as a way of differentiating between the original territory of the Spanish March and the later conquests of the eleventh and twelfth centuries that stretched south to Tortosa and west to Lérida. To the west of Catalonia in the landlocked Pyrenean foothills, the region of Aragon came into being when the counts of Barcelona were first pushing their authority southward. The original Aragonese territory, also peopled by Visigothic refugees from the Muslim conquest, stretched from the Pyrenees down to the Ebro and contained a number of small towns including Jaca and Monzón. The growth of this region occurred as the frontier moved southward toward the old Roman city of Caesaraugusta, now known as Zaragoza. 11  G  esta comitum barchinonensium. Textos llatí i català [hereafter GCB], ed. Louis BarrauDihigo and Jaume Massó Torrents (Barcelona, 1925), 32 (chap. 11); Bonnassie, From Slavery to Feudalism, 156, 158, 164, 189, 251, 254; Fletcher, Moorish Spain, 72–77; Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal, 115–22; Manuel Rovira i Sola, “Notes documentales sobre alguns effectes de la presa de Barcelona per al-Mansur,” Acta Histórica et Arqueológico Medievalia 1 (1980): 31–45; Santiago Sobreques i Vidal, Els barons de Catalunya (1957; reprint, Barcelona, 1980), 30–31; Wasserstein, Caliphate, 17–18. 12  The Usatges of Barcelona: The Fundamental Law of Catalonia, trans. Donald J. Kagay (Philadelphia, 1994), 17–57; Thomas N. Bisson, “The Organized Peace in Southern France and Catalonia (c. 1140–c. 1233),” in Medieval France and her Pyrenean Neighbours: Studies in Early Institutional History (London, 1989), 215–36; Karen Kennelly, C.S.J., “Catalan Peace and Truce Assemblies,” Studies in Medieval Culture 5 (1975): 41–51; eadem, “Sobre la paz de Dios y sagrera en el condado de Barcelona (1030–1130),” AEM 5 (1975): 107–36. 13  Caffaro, De captione Almerie et Tortuose, ed Antonio Ubieto Arteta (Valencia, 1973), 30–35; Bishko, “Spanish and Portuguese Reconquest,” 410–12; José María Font Rius, “La comarca de Tortosa a raiz de la reconquista cristiana (1148),” CHE, 19 (1953): 104–28, esp. 125. Alan J. Forey, The Templars in the Corona de Aragon (London, 1973), 17; Lomax, Reconquest, 93.

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In institutional terms, Aragon itself did not appear until the reign of the Navarrese king, Sancho III Garcés “the Great” (r. 1000–1035) who was blessed (?) with a number of sons and provided for them by dividing the many lands he had inherited and captured. From this division, Aragon emerged as a frontier kingship under the control of Sancho’s third son, Ramiro I (r. 1035–1063). The new king extended his sway beyond the Pyrenean uplands he had received, pushing southward into Islamic territory that bordered the Ebro. With the reign of his grandson, Alfonso I “the Battler” (r. 1104–1134), the Aragonese reconquista reached as far south as Zaragoza. In spring, 1118, Alfonso’s army, including a sizeable segment of French auxiliaries, invested the city and in six months, with the aid of artillery, it forced a Muslim surrender, after which the king raided deep into Andalusia.14 When Alfonso I died in 1134 without heirs as the result of a battlefield wound, an intense struggle between legality and expediency shaped the succession. The king had formally bequeathed his realms to the crusading orders of the Hospitalers and Templars. For their part, his subjects had no desire to be made vassals to a religious order wedded to the concept of holy war.15 Instead, they chose as their new sovereign Alfonso’s brother, Ramiro II “the Monk” (r. 1134–1137). Later, they accepted his infant daughter, Petronilla, as his successor. When, after a long betrothal, she married Ramon Berenguer IV, count of Catalonia, the Crown of Aragon and its long-lived Barcelona dynasty was 14  For Zaragoza’s Roman past, see Javier Arce, Caesaraugusta, ciudad romana (Zaragoza, 1979); Miguel Beltrán Lloris, Los origenes de Zaragoza y la época de Augusto: Estado actual de los conocimientos (Zaragoza, 1983); Keay, Roman Spain, 55–56. For early Aragonese development as kingdom, see Antonio Durán Gudiol, Ramiro I de Aragón (Zaragoza, 1978); Lomax, Reconquest, 80; Lynn Nelson, “The Foundation of Jaca (1076): Urban Growth in Early Aragon,” Speculum 53 (1978): 688–708. For Alfonso I, see Bishko, “Spanish and Portuguese Reconquest,” 403–4; Donald J. Kagay in The Encyclopedia of War, ed. Gordon Martel (Oxford, 2012) q.v. “Alfonso I ‘the Battler’”; José María Lacarra, “La conquista de Zaragoza por Alfonso I,” Al-Andalus 12 (1947): 65–96; Lomax, Reconquest, 84; O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade, 37–38. 15  For text of will, see Antonio Bofarull y Broca, La confederación catalano-aragonesa (Barcelona, 1872), 111–15 (doc. 1); José María Lacarra, “Documentos para el estudio de la reconquista y repoblación del valle del Ebro,” EEMCA 2 (1946–1947): 541–668, esp., 572–73 (doc. 179). For discussion of the will (much of it the subject of extremely vehement disagreement), see T.N. Bisson, The Medieval Crown of Aragon: A Short History (Oxford, 1986), 16; José María Lacarra, Vida de Alfonso el Batallador (Zaragoza, 1971), 103–5; Alan J. Forey, The Templars in the Corona de Aragon (London, 1973), 17; idem, “The Will of Alfonso I of Aragon and Navarre,” Durham University Journal 73 (1980): 59–65; Elena Lourie, “The Will of Alfonso I, ‘El Batallador,’ King of Aragon and Navarre: A Reassessment,” Speculum 50 (1975): 635–51.

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born.16 This successful family merger produced a series of strong-willed monarchs, including Pedro II [Pere I] (r. 1196–1213), Jaime [Jaume] I; Pedro III [Pere II] (r. 1276–1285), and Jaime [Jaume] II (r. 1292–1327). Together, they not only brought the Balearics, Valencia, and part of Murcia under Aragonese control but also spread their nation’s influence out into the Mediterranean, first capturing Sicily and later the duchy of Athens.17 3

Christian Boundaries Press Southward

The birth of Iberia’s Christian states came about as a result of both individual settlement and group conquest. Aragonese, Castilian, and Portuguese borders moved ever further southward into that vast swath of land that was al-Andalus. As the various Christian states absorbed territory, they quickly encountered the problem of drawing boundaries between themselves. Throughout the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Catalan and Aragonese rulers defined the territory they considered to be under their rule by listing them in royal laws.18 Despite their pronouncements, boundaries could not remain stable or go unchallenged in the face of steady Christian conquests of Islamic lands. As 16  Josep Pererna i Espelt, “Les condicions de la unió de Aragó i Catalunya en un manuscrit de Valencia, Rafael Martí de Viciana,” Arxiu de textos catalans antics 2 (1983): 357–61; William Clay Stalls, “Queenship and the Royal Patrimony in Twelfth-Century Iberia: The Example of Petronilla of Aragon,” in Queens, Regents and Potentates, ed. Theresa M. Vann (Oxford, 1993), 49–61; Joaquim Traggia, “Illustración del reynado de don Ramiro de Aragón,” Memorias de la Real Academia de Historia 3 (1799): 469–599, esp. 591–98 (docs. 13–14). 17  These kings are listed by their Aragonese and Catalan names and regnal numbers. For the accomplishment of these sovereigns, see David Abulafia, The Western Mediterranean Kingdoms 1200–1500: The Struggle for Dominion (London, 1997), 66–81, 123–27; Antonio Arribas Palau, La conquista de Cerdeña por Jaime II de Aragón (Barcelona, 1952); Enric Bagué, “Pere el Católic,” in Els Primers Comtes-Reis (1960; reprint, Barcelona, 1980), 123–27; Josep-David Garrido i Valls, La conqesta del sud Valencià i Múrcia per Jaume II (Barcelona, 2002), 28–50; Donald J. Kagay, “Jaime I of Aragon: Child and Master of the Spanish Reconquest,” Journal of Medieval Military History [hereafter JMMH] 8 (2010): 69–108; Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal, 255; Vicente Salavet y Roca, “El problema estratégico del Mediterraneo occidental y la política aragonesa (siglos XIV y XV),” in IV Congreso de la historia de la Corona de Aragón, 2 vols. (Palma de Mallorca, 1959–1970), 1:201–21; F. Darwin Swift, The Life and Times of James the First the Conqueror (Oxford, 1894). 18  Biblioteca de la Escorial, Ms. d, ii, 2, f. 51; CAVC, I, pt. 1:63,79; Petrus de Marca, Marca hispanica sive limes hispanicus, hoc est, geographica & historica descriptio Cataloniae Ruscinonis, & circumjacentium populorum (1687; reprint, Barcelona, 1972), 1388 (doc. 490); Usatges of Barcelona, 77 (arts. 57–58); Jaime Villanueva, Viaje literario a las iglesias de España, 18 vols., (Madrid, 1850), 13:300.

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the result of an ever-shifting situation caused by poorly demarcated zones of authority, kings, nobles, and clerics not only engaged in expensive litigation, but also in military conflict.19 Since the boundaries between Christian realms growing at the expense of their Muslim neighbors were often unclear, Aragonese and Castilian rulers were eventually forced to the negotiating table to establish legal borders that both could accept. In 1151, Alfonso VII of Castile (r. 1126–1157) met with Ramon Berenguer IV of Barcelona at Tudillen to work out the limits of their respective authority in the uplands above the Ebro River. They also set a significant precedent by marking off zones for their future military endeavors.20 As Aragonese and Castilian conquests of Muslim territory progressed, their respective rulers continued such negotiations, first at Cazorla in 1179, then at Almizra in 1244, and then again at Soria in 1257. Two of the principal sovereigns undertaking these negotiations were Fernando III of Castile and his Aragonese counterpart, Jaume I, both of whom recognized a need to lay down dividing lines between territory that each would be expected to conquer. As a result of these pacts, Castile, due to her size and central position, was guaranteed the lion’s share of al Andalus. For its part, Aragon was allowed to engage in military operation in the fertile strip between Jativa and Murcia.21 19  R  obert I. Burns, S.J. “Canon Law and the Reconquista: Convergence and Symbiosis in the Kingdom of Valencia under Jaume the Conqueror (1213–1276),” in Proceedings of the Fifth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law (Vatican City, 1980), 398–404; idem, The Crusader Kingdom of Valencia: Reconstruction on a Thirteenth-Century Frontier, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 1:253–81; idem, Muslims, Christians and Jews in the Crusader Kingdom of Valencia (Cambridge, 1984), 215–23; Donald J. Kagay, “Border War as a Handmaiden of National Identity: The Territorial Definition of Late-Medieval Iberia,” Journal of the Georgia Association of Historians 28 (2009): 88–138, esp. 95–96; idem, “Violence Management in Twelfth-Century Catalonia and Aragon,” in Marginated Groups in Spanish and Portuguese History, ed. William D. Phillips, Jr. and Carla Rahn Phillips (Minneapolis, 1989), 11–21, esp. 14–16; Miguel-Ángel Ladero Quesada, “Sobre la evolución de las fronteras medievales hispánicas (siglos XI a XIV),” in Identidad y representación de la frontera en la España medieval (siglos XI–XIV ) (Madrid, 2001), 5–50, esp. 22–23. 20  Liber Feudorum Maior [hereafter LFM], ed. Francisco Miguel Rosell, 2 vols. (Barcelona, 1945–1947), 1:39–42 (doc. 29); Cordero Torres, Fronteras, 109; Bonifacio Palacios Martin, “La frontera de Aragón con Castilla en la época de Jaime I,” in X Congreso de Historia de la corona de Aragón ( Jaime I y su época) [hereafter XCHCA], 3 vols. (Zaragoza, 1976), Comunicationes 1–2, 475–95, esp. 476–77; Ladero Quesada, “Sobre,” 26–27. 21   A CA, Cancillería real, Pergaminos de Alfonso I, no. 268; Registro [hereafter R.] 11, f. 6; Documentos de Jaime I de Aragón [hereafter DJI], ed. Ambrosio Huici Miranda and María Desemparados Cabanes Pecourt, 5 vols. (Valencia, 1976–1988), 3:229–31 (docs. 742–43); Burns, “Warrior Neighbors,” 155–56. María Teresa Ferrer i Mallol, Entre la paz y la guerra:

Rival Christian States of Medieval Iberia

19

Occasionally, the two kings even cooperated to assure that any new Christian regime would attain stability. Acting in support of his daughter, Leonore, wife of the Castilian king, Alfonso X, Jaume I aided his arrogant son-in-law in putting down a widespread mudejar revolt that endangered both of their realms and then in conquering the Muslim principality of Murcia in 1265–1266.22 While the surrender of Murcia to Alfonso X may have seemed to Jaume an act of royal altruism, it infuriated the Catalans and Aragonese who viewed the region as theirs by natural right. Afterward, capitalizing on his own subjects’ discontent and the weakness of the Castilian monarchy, a new monarch, Jaume II, invaded Murcia in 1296, quickly overrunning all Murcian territory above the Segura River, including the region’s capital. Although some of the territory conquered by Jaume, including the city of Murcia, was eventually returned to Castile in 1304 by the treaty of Torrellas,23 the region would remain a flash point between Aragonese and Castilians throughout much of the next century. Because of the fluid nature of the Aragonese-Castilian borders that snaked southward across formerly Muslim lands, pockets of this sparsely settled area La corona Catalano-Aragonesa y Castilla en la baja Edad Media (Barcelona, 2005), 16; Julio González, El reino de Castilla en la época de Alfonso VIII, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1960), 1:814; Ladero Quesada, “Sobre la evolution,” 27; Anscari M. Mundo, “El pacte de Cazola del 1179 I el ‘Liber Feudorum Maior’: Notes paleografiques i diplomaiques,” in XCHCA, Comunicaciones 1–2, 119–29; O’Callaghan, History, 348; Palacios Martin, “Frontera,” 477–78; Theresa M. Vann, “Cazola, Treaty of,” in Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia, ed. E. Michael Gerli (New York, 2003), 222. 22  Mudejares were Muslims who owed allegiance to Christian lords. The southern Valencian region had been destabilized by the Muslim marcher lord, al-Azraq, who rose in rebellion against Jaime I in 1244 and, through the collusion of his erstwhile ally, Alfonso X, had mounted another uprising in 1257 with ominous implications for Valencian mudejares. Chronicle of Alfonso X [hereafter CAX], trans. Shelby Thacker and José Escobar (Lexington, Ken., 2002), 49–51 (chap. 10); The Book of Deeds of James I of Aragon: A Translation of the Medieval Catalan “Llibre dels Fets,” [hereafter BD] trans. Damian Smith and Helena Buffery (Aldershot, Hampshire, 2003),283–327 (chaps. 378–465); Robert I. Burns, S.J. and Paul E. Chevedden, Negotiating Cultures: Bilingual Surrender Treaties in Muslim-Crusader Spain under James the Conqueror (Leiden, 1999), 6–11; Burns, Muslims, 261–84; idem, “Warrior Neighbors,” 157; Josep-David Garrido i Valls, Jaume I i el regne de Múrcia (Barcelona, 1997), 61–110; O’Callaghan, History, 364–69. 23  A CA, Cancillería real, Cartas reales [Jaime II], no. 277; Cartas reales [Pedro IV], no. 679; R. 252, ff. 130–31; Juan Manuel del Estal, Documentos ineditos de Alfonso X el Sabio y del infante su hijo Don Sancho (Alicante, 1984). 129–33 (doc. 12); Ferrer i Mallol, Entre, 538–39 (series 1, doc. 2); Garrido i Valls, Conquesta, 38–50,79–80 (doc. 2); Andrés Giménez Soler, Don Juan Manuel: Biografía y estudio crítico (Zaragoza, 1932), 231 (doc. 7); Ladero Quesada, “Sobre,” 31–32; Zurita, Anales, 2:499–503 (V:xxi).

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did not come under either Aragonese or Castilian control. It was held instead by over-mighty subjects who maintained their exposed positions by building fortresses of all types and commanding small but well-trained units of horsemen whose services they sold to the highest bidder. At different points in the century, members of the Aragonese and Castilian royal family including Juan Manuel (1282–1348), Prince Fernando [Ferran] (1329–1363), and Enrique de Trastámara (1333–1379) as well as scions of important baronial families such as Juan Nuñez II de Luna (1282–1315) controlled the gray areas between the two kingdoms and made a good living in doing so. Royal siblings used their positions as marcher lords to promote their ambitions to gain a crown and one of them, Enrique de Trastámara, was actually successful in this quest. In 1366, he became Enrique II (r. 1366/1369–1379) of Castile. The situation in these “middle lands” served to intensify conflicts between Aragon and Castile. These lands provided home for a population of rugged, often lawless frontiersmen who largely supported themselves by rustling, smuggling, and banditry across boundaries that had very little meaning for them.24 They were a ready source of military manpower to the two realms, realms separated by boundaries that caused rather than prevented war.25 24  A CA, Cancillería real, Cartas reales [Jaime II], no. 2045; R. 236, f. 166; Ángeles Masiá i de Ros, Relación castellano-aragonesa desde Jaime II a Pedro el Ceremonioso, 2 vols. (Barcelona, 1994), 2:126–27; Gimenez Soler, Don Juan Manuel, 333 (doc. 146). 25  A CA, Cancillería real, Cartas reales [Jaime II], no. 2356; R. 104, f. 48; R. 241, f. 224; R. 292, f. 10v; R. 334, f. 116, R. 335, f. 304v; R. 520, f. 262v; R. 1062, f. 8. Simon R. Doubleday, The Lara Family: Crown and Nobility in Medieval Spain (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 92–95; Gimenez Soler, Don Juan Manuel, 232, 274, 292, 456, 574, 651 (docs. 8, 58, 89, 305,473, 587); Donald J. Kagay, “The Dynastic Dimensions of International Conflict in Fourteenth-Century Iberia,” Mediterranean Studies 17 (2008):77–96, esp. 78–79; Masiá i de Ros, Relación, 2:41–42, 205– 6, 310 (docs. 26/95, 168/bis. 2).

Chapter 3

A Much-Contested Frontier The longest running conflict between Christian powers in medieval Spain, the War of the Two Pedros, was caused by forces that stretched back for over a century. The conflict clearly reflected a personal antagonism between the principal contenders, Pedro I of Castile and Pere III of Aragon. It also grew out of the geopolitical ambitions of the two largest Iberian states, Castile-León and the Crown of Aragon, both of which wished to maximize their control over the lands lying between them. At the same time, the conflict can also be traced in part to a set of bitter disputes between the two royal families stretching back at least as far as the great reconquest warrior, Jaume I of Aragon, and Jaume’s son-in-law, the accomplished polymath but failed statesman, Alfonso X of Castile. 1

Establishing Reconquest Boundaries

As discussed above, the lengthy antagonisms grew out of the series of rapid victories over Muslim adversaries in the campaigns of the reconquest. With so much land coming rapidly under Christian control, international quarrels over the drawing of new boundaries could hardly be avoided. Though Castile and Portugal had largely worked out their territorial differences by 1297,1 laying out a viable line between Aragon and Castile proved much more difficult. Though the two parties managed to negiotate their borders southward past the Ebro with their accords of 1151 and 1179,2 they faced deepening disputes over territorial demarcation after the victory of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212. With the victories of Jaume I and Fernando III in the 1220s and 1230s, the Christian zones of conquest in eastern Spain became ever more tightly compressed between the Turia and Jucar Rivers below Valencia. One major area of disagreement stood in the Muslim kingdom of Murcia. The Aragonese king first claimed this territory shortly after he conquered Valencia in 1238; however,

1  Cordero Torres, Fronteras, 107–08. 2  See Chapter 1, note 18.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004425057_005

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his Castilian counterpart also began to attack it at much the same time by overrunning Muslim lands near the headwaters of the Segura River.3 Any pledge of regulated mutual expansion for the two Christian polities was complicated by domestic and international events of the 1240s. In 1244, the same year that the Aragonese and Castilians had signed their latest border treaty, Prince Alfons, Jaume I’s oldest son by his first wife, Leonore of Castile, turned against his father and began conspiring with his younger brother, Pere. The two of them attempted to wrest Valencia from its declared heir, the Conqueror’s third son, Jaume. Though supported by the Castilian ruler, Fernando III, and the majority of the Valencian nobility, Prince Alfons would eventually make peace with his father at Alcañiz in 1250.4 Despite the agreement of father and son, no clear settlement was reached concerning the eastern boundaries of the peninsula. In their reconquest activities the successive monarchs of Castile and the Crown of Aragon competed for the same Muslim territory. Consequently, from the twelfth century onward, they began to lay out mutually acceptable zones of expansion mentioned earlier. In the agreements of Tudillén (1151) and Cazorla (1179), borders were drawn across the Ebro River and through the central Iberian sierras—often before this land had even been conquered from Islam.5 To avoid the dangerous prospect of internecine war among the peninsula’s Christians, Jaume the Conqueror’s second wife, Violante of Hungary, used her influence to get her husband to the bargaining table at Almizra in 1244 where new borders with Castile could be hammered out.6

3  See maps: “Resultado de la batalla de Las Navas de Tolosa” and “Terminación de la reconquista portuguesa y aragonesa,” in Antonio Ubieto Arteta, Cómo se formó España (Valencia, 1958). See also: Burns, “Warrior Neighbors,” 153; Documentos de Alfonso X el Sabio, ed. Juan Torres Fontes (Murcia, 1963), 42–51 (docs. 23–26). For the delineation of Murcian borders in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, see Amparo Bejarando Rubio, “La frontera del reino de Murcia en la política castellano-aragonesa del siglo XIII,” MMM 13 (1986): 131–54; Ángel Luis Molina Molina and María Martínez Martínez, “Delimitación de los términos concejiles del Reino de Murcia,” MMM 13 (1986): 103–16. 4  B D, 146–47 (chaps. 140–41); ACA, Pergaminos de Jaime I, no. 1233; DJI, 2:350–51 (doc. 534); Burns, “Warrior Neighbors,” 153; Kagay, “Development,” 123–25; idem, “Structures,” 62; Fernando de Sagarra, “Noticias y documentos inéditos referentes al infante D. Alfonso, primogénito de D. Jaime I y Doña Leonora de Castilla,” Boletìn de Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona [hereafter BRABLB] 9 (1917–20): 285–301, esp. 288–89. 5  A CA, Cancillería real, Pergaminos de Alfonso I, no. 268; LFM, 1:39–41 (doc. 29); Mundo, “El pacte,” 119–29; DJI, 2:176–77 (doc. 388); Cordero Torres, Fronteras, 109. Just how the lines were drawn in what amounted to enemy territory is unclear. 6  Salvador Carreres Zacares, Tratados entre Castilla y Aragón: Su influencia en la terminacón de la Reconquista (Valencia, 1908), 22–24; Torres Fontes and Martínez Martínez, Delimitación,

a Much-Contested Frontier

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Increasing Castilian interference in Aragonese affairs ultimately became another factor that complicated an already volatile situation. In 1245, Jaume I’s erstwhile advisor and eventually most troublesome Muslim vassal, al-Azrak rose up against the Aragonese conquest. He would become a symbol of his people’s ancient hegemony over southern Valencia and remain an unbowed enemy of Aragonese rule for the next decade-and-a-half. He was able to take this stand because of Alfonso X’s clandestine support, support the Castilian king hoped might deliver some portion of southern Valencia to his control and attract the waves of Castilian settlers who were now slowly moving eastward toward Murcia.7 In these unsettled conditions, Jaume did make some attempt to foster good relations with Alfonso X by agreeing to settle all damages that his Aragonese or Catalan subjects had inflicted upon Castilian residents in the wild middle land between Valencia and Murcia. These bilateral agreements promulgated at Soria in 1256 also established a boundary line between Aragon and Castile running from Alfaro and Calahorra in the north southward to Riqueña, that lay west of Valencia.8 In the end, neither family ties nor a shared dedication to war against Spanish Islam could completely calm the stormy relationship between Alfonso X and his father-in-law. When Castile’s king began attempting to win election as Holy Roman Emperor in 1256–1257, Jaume acted to block these imperial ambitions and revive his own sagging fortunes in southern France. In 1260, he married off his second son, the crown prince, Pere, to the Hohenstaufen heiress, Constanza. This preemptive move by Aragon eventually played a role in sidetracking Alfonso’s drive for the imperial crown, while at the same time it inserted Aragon and Catalonia into Mediterranean affairs as supporters of one of the major Italian factions.9 27–31; idem, Reconquista, 41. For Violante of Hungary, see E.L. Miron, The Queens of Aragon: Their Lives and Times (London, 1913), 100–9. 7  Burns, “Warrior Neighbors,” 154; Joseph F. O’Callaghan, The Learned King: The Reign of Alfonso X of Castile (Philadelphia, 1993), 153–55; Swift, “Life and Times,” 85. 8  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 11, f. 6; DJI, 3:229–31 (docs. 742–43); Burns, “Warrior Neighbors,” 156. 9  The ties of the Crown of Aragon to Sicily springing from Pere II’s marriage to Constanca soon brought the Hohenstaufens into close alliance with Pere even before he became king. Despite this connection, the Hohenstaufen leaders fell before Charles of Anjou in 1366 and 1368. The Sicilian opposition to Angevin rule never disappeared, however, and helped spark the rebellion of the Sicilian Vespers (March 30, 1282) against the Angevins, ultimately leading the rebels to offer Sicily to Pere II of Aragon. This act caused an Aragonese-Angevin war that lasted from 1282 to 1302. Burns, “Warrior Neighbors,” 156, 159–60; Carlos Estepa, “Alfonso X y el fecho del imperio,” Revista del Occidente 43 (1984): 43–53; O’Callaghan, Learned King, 198–213; Cayetano J. Socarrás, Alfonso X of Castile: A Study on Imperialistic

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Despite this new international dimension, the fundamental differences between the crowns of Aragon and Castile centered on their struggle for both security and dominance within the Iberian Peninsula. Even before Alfonso X embarked on his seemingly endless plans for Spanish and European advancement, Jaume I had begun to concentrate on solidifying control over the southern half of Valencia, a solidification he would complete with the conquest of Jativa in 1248 and Biar in 1253. In the midst of Jaume’s escalation of military activity and the resulting expansion of Christian settlement, the king faced once again his old enemy, alAzrak, who had waged what amounted to a guerilla war since signing a peace treaty with the Aragonese king in 1245. A true survivor who knew from a lifetime of practice how Iberia’s multi-faith diplomacy worked, al-Azrak drew support not only from the rulers of Granada and Murcia, but also from the king of Castile. Such support, however, could hardly elevate the rebel’s resistance beyond the status of localized insurrection. Despite the growing power of his Aragonese opponent, the last major Muslim leader of Valencia remained true to his principle of opposition. After going underground for some twenty years, he reappeared and died in the great mudejar revolt of 1276, an action that also claimed Jaume’s life, lost to old age and campaign exhaustion.10

   Frustration (Barcelona, 1976); Arnald Steiger, “Alfonso X el Sabio y la idea imperial,” Arbor 6 (1946): 389–482. For connection of Iberian states to Ghibilline Italy, see Julia Bolton Holloway, “The Road through Roncesvalles: Alfonsine Formation of Brunetto Latini and Dante—Diplomacy and Literature,” in Emperor of Culture: Alfonso X the Learned of Castile and his Thirteenth-Century Renaissance, ed. Robert I. Burns, S.J. (Philadelphia, 1990), 109– 23; J. Lee Shneidman, The Rise of the Aragonese-Catalan Empire, 1200–1350, 2 vols. (New York, 1970), 2:318–19; Ferran Soldevila, Pere el Gran, 4 vols. (Barcelona, 1950–1962), 1:90–93. 10  Robert I. Burns, S.J., “The Crusade against al-Azraq: A Thirteenth-Century Mudejar Revolt in International Perspective,” American Historical Review [hereafter AHR], 93 (1988): 80– 106; idem, “La guerra de al-Azraq de 1249,” Sharq al-Andalus 4 (1987): 253–56; idem, “A Lost Crusade: Unpublished Bulls of Innocent IV on Al Azraq’s Revolt in Thirteenth-Century Spain,” Catholic Historical Review [hereafter CHR] 74 (1988): 80–106; idem, “A Medieval Earthquake: Jaume I, al-Azraq, and the Early History of Onteniente in the Kingdom of Valencia,” in X CHCA, Comunicaciones 1 y 2, 209–44; idem, Muslims, 239–72, 278–84; idem “Warrior Neighbors,” 154–55; For the peace treaty of 1245, see Robert I. Burns, S.J. and Paul Chevedden, “Al-Azraq’s Surrender Treaty with Jaume I and Prince Alfonso in 1245: Arabic Text and Valencian Context,” Der Islam 66 (1989): 1–37; Swift, Life and Times, 139. The mudejares were Muslims who lived under Christian control.

a Much-Contested Frontier

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25

The Problem of Murcia

The icy relationship between Aragon and Castile thawed for a time in 1263 when Jaume’s daughter, Violante, by now Alfonso’s wife, begged help from her father in order to put down a serious insurrection of Castile’s mudejares that had erupted in the previous year with the encouragement of the Muslim ruler of Murcia. Jaume found only lukewarm support in his Catalan and Aragonese parliaments which resisted the crown’s energetic efforts to tempt them into what they regarded as foreign service, despite his promise of great monetary rewards.11 In spite of these impediments, Jaume finally did manage to field an army in January, 1266, and after a month’s siege captured Murcia which he promptly turned over to his son-in-law and daughter, much to the dismay of his Aragonese and Catalan troops. After this seeming demonstration of family solidarity, the relationship of Aragon and Castile improved for a time.12 Nevertheless, the wild border land of southern Valencia and neighboring Murcia remained a largely uncontrollable march in which Aragonese, Catalan, and Castilian inhabitants continued to contend with one other for mercantile advantage and territorial control.13 As a result of this local infighting, control of the area by royal contenders would remain irrelevant. With the death of Jaume I in July, 1276,14 the anarchy and dissent that marked the Valencian and Murcian borderlands seemed to mirror the unstable relations that would characterize the Aragonese and Castilian monarchs 11  A CA, Cancellería real, R. 13, f. 233; BD, 284–98 (chaps. 379–400); Jaime Domenech, Chronica (Valencia, 1975), 83; Pedro Abarca, Anales Historicos de los Reyes de Aragón, 12 vols. (Salamanca, 1684), 4:280–81; Vicente de la Fuente, Estudios críticos sobre la historia y el derecho de Aragón, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1942), 3:360–63; Kagay, “Development,” 132–35; Soldevila, Pere el Gran, 1:122–23; idem, “Servei,” 577. For the uprising of mudejares, see BD, 283–84 (chaps. 378–79); Burns, “Warrior Neighbors,” 162–63; Torres Fontes, Reconquista, 61–71. 12  For Murcian campaign, see CAX, 49–51 (chap. 10); BD, 300–317 (chaps. 406–439); Garrido i Valls, Jaume I, 61–110; Joseph F. O’Callaghan, The Gibraltar Crusade: Castile and the Battle for the Strait (Philadelphia, 2011), 46–47; Torres Fontes, Reconquista, 127–60. For improved family relations which were symbolized by the marriage of Alfonso’s brother, Manuel, to Jaume’s daughter, Constanza, in 1267, and Jaume’s attendance of the wedding of Alfonso’s son, Fernando, with a French princess in 1269, see BD, 344–48 (chaps. 494–99); Burns, “Warrior Neighbors,” 163–4; Swift, Life and Times, 119–21. 13  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 20, ff. 202v–209v; Pergaminos de Jaime I, no. 2146; Burns, “Warrior Neighbors,” 166–72, 185–87 (docs. 9, 12–13). 14  Poem of Pero da Ponte included in Foundations of Crusader Valencia: Revolt and Recovery, 1257–1263, ed. Robert I. Burns S.J., vol. 2 of Diplomatarium, vi; Kagay, “Jaime I,” 105; O’Callaghan, Reconquest, 105.

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for the next decade. Following his illustrious father to the throne, Pere II of Aragon spent the first months of his reign putting down the ongoing mudejar revolts that his dying predecessor had been “unable to resist.”15 Rebellion among Aragon’s Muslim subjects was not the only danger, however, that he faced. He still confronted a power vacuum along his southern frontiers that neither Castile nor Aragon had as yet fully addressed. Meanwhile, both Christian and Muslim raiding went on across the poorly established borders, feeding a growing black market throughout the regions that featured goods of all sorts including slaves.16 Pere II’s concentration on the dangerous southern and western parts of Valencia had much more to do with his fear and distrust of the Castilian king than any danger posed by his Muslim subjects. According to the sixteenth-century historian Jerónimo Zurita, in this period the Aragonese sovereign spent most of his time in Valencia largely to show support to “his people who lived on the … Castilian and Murcian frontier.”17 From 1278 onward, he began to concentrate on refitting and garrisoning the ragged and lightly populated frontiers that Aragon and Valencia shared with Castile. This area would become a major military arena in the War of the Two Pedros.18 The source of much of the disorder was the newly conquered kingdom of Murcia itself. Though turned over to Alfonso by Jaume in 1266, it was widely populated with settlers from the Crown of Aragon. Their numbers actually exceeded those who had come from Castile and, in particular, from its southern province of Andalusia, settlers whom Alfonso X had encouraged in their migration to newly-acquired Murcia. In some cities, like Lorca, the numbers of Aragonese, Catalans, Majorcans, and Valencians outnumbered this

15  The  Chronicle of San Juan de la Peña: A Fourteenth-Century Official History of the Crown of Aragon [hereafter CSJP], trans. Lynn H. Nelson (Philadelphia, 1991), 69 (chap. 36); BD, 379–80 (chap. 564); ACA, Cancillería real, R. 23, ff. 45–48v, 50v–51; R. 35, f. 53; R. 37, f. 98; Soldevila, Pere el Gran, 1:416–42, 474–76 (docs. 58–63). 16  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 39, ff. 188v, 231v; R. 40, f. 43v; Dávila, Historia, 134–35, 178 (chaps. 22, 33); Burns, “Warrior Neighbors,” 173, 188 (docs. 15–16). For illegal trading among Christians and Muslims, see Robert I. Burns, S.J., Islam under the Crusaders: Colonial Survival in the Thirteenth-Century Kingdom of Valencia (Princeton, N.J., 1973), 93–96; idem, “Renegades, Adventurers, and Sharp Businessmen: The Thirteenth-Century Spaniard in the Cause of Islam,” CHR, 58, no. 3 (October, 1972), 341–66, esp. 358–66; Coca Castañar, “Institutions,” 142–43; Bonifacio Palacios Martin, “Frontera,” 481–83. 17  C SJP, 69 (chap. 36); Burns, “Warrior Neighbors,” 171–72; Zurita, Anales, 2:30 (IV:viii). 18  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 22, f. 80; R. 40, 43v–44; Burns, “Warrior Neighbors,” 172–73, 188–89 (docs. 17–18).

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transplanted Andalusian population two to one.19 As a result, throughout most of Murcia, Catalan became the lingua franca and for centuries many Murcians boasted that they spoke the most beautiful form of that language in existence.20 Despite an eventual intermingling of populations, the region was continually pulled apart by the actions of its parent states. Shortly after conquering Murcia and before having turned it over to his son-in-law, Jaume I divided its lands and subordinated the mudejar population. As in other regions conquered by Aragon, he, ostensibly in the name of Alfonso, attempted to confer vast tracts of land on the upper clergy, military orders, and important nobles. Upon taking control, Alfonso reversed most of these actions. Alfonso abrogated many of Jaume’s grants and re-divided the newly won land into smaller plots, some so small that they could hardly produce wheat crops of twenty bushels. By broadly rejecting his father-in-law’s provision, the Castilian monarch not only offended him, but also infuriated the nobles and clergy whose grants had been abrogated.21 Although such disagreements led to an increasing estrangement between the Castilian and Aragonese royal houses, the two governments had no choice but to continue their mutual attempts to delineate their borders and adjudicate cross-border crimes. Complaints about rustling, robbery, and even piracy occupied much of Pere II’s efforts for the first years of his reign. While in most cases the king attempted to protect his own subjects and promote their interest, this was not always true. A royal directive of 1280 forbade under pain of corporal punishment any attack on or interference with Castilian merchants pursuing their trade between Murcia and Valencia.22 Even as case-by-case settlements continued, both Pere and Alfonso, repeatedly sought unsuccessfully

19  Garrido i Valls, Jaume I, 122–23; Miguel Gual Camarena, “La Corona de Aragón en la repoblación murciana,” in VII Congrés d’història de la corona d’Aragó [hereafter VII CHCA], 3 vols. (Barcelona, 1963–1964), 2:303–10; Juan Torres Fontes, Los repartimientos murcianos del siglo XIII, De Al-Andalus a la sociedad fuedal: Los repartimientos bajomedievales (Barcelona, 1990), 71–94. 20  L. Rubio García, “El habla de Murcia en tiempos de Sancho IV (1284–1295),” Anales de la Universidad de Murcia 26, no. 2 (1967–1968): 263–69; Garrido i Valls, Jaume I, 123–24; Bernard Guenée, States and Rulers in Later Medieval Europe, trans. Juliet Vale (1981; reprint, Oxford, 1985), 53; O’Callaghan, History, 367; Vicenç María Rossello Verger, “Múrcia un paiscatalà frustrat?” in Miscellánia Pau Vila. Biografia, bibliografía, treballs d’homenatge (Granollers, 1975), 375–86; Torres Fontes, Repartimientos, 237–38. 21  B D, 347–48 (chap. 498); Garrido i Valls, Jaume I, 127–28; Juan Torres Fontes, “Jaime I y Alfonso X. Dos criterios de repoblación,” In VII CHCA 2:329–40. 22  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 42, f. 230; R. 48, f. 196; Burns, “Warrior Neighbors,” 173–74, 192, 194 (docs. 27, 34).

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to work out a general agreement that might solve once and for all their nagging frontier problems. Coming together at Campillo and Agreda on the Castilian-Aragonese border in March, 1281, the two rulers once again attempted to negotiate a final settlement of issues arising from the Murcian conquest. To resolve claims that had remained open since 1257, they agreed that Alfaro and a number of smaller settlements would go to Aragon while the control of the pivotal castle of Albarracin would pass to Castile.23 On the second day of meetings held in Agreda, the two monarchs aimed at synchronizing their political, diplomatic and military plans for future conquests. Pere II, his son, Alfons, and brother, Jaume II, sovereign of Mallorca (r. 1276–1311) sat down with Alfonso and his younger son Sancho at Agreda where they all swore to uphold terms which they negotiated and set forth in three documents that came to be known as the accords of 1281.24 In the end, despite these efforts, these accords failed to solve the question of the Murcian frontier.25 After 1281, in both Aragon and Castile, attention temporarily shifted away from their mutual border to other pressing issues. In March, 1282, Pere II found himself drawn into Mediterranean affairs when a revolt in Palermo, known as the “Sicilian Vespers” (vesperi siciliani), expelled that island’s Angevin rulers and transferred the crown to Pere. This opened two decades of warfare with the deposed ruler, Sicily’s former ruler, Charles I of Anjou (r. 1266–1285) and his successors.26 23  A CA. Cancillería real, R. 47, ff. 103, 107; Carlos Ayala Martínez, “Paces castellano-aragonesas de Campillo-Agreda (1281),” EEM, Special Issue [En memoria de Claudio Sánchez Albornoz] 8 (1986): 151–68, esp. 157–58; Burns, “Warrior Neighbors,” 177, 195–96 (docs. 35–36); Kagay, “Border War,” 100; O’Callaghan, Learned King, 253. For Campillo, which was a “hamlet” (aldea) between Agreda and Tarazona, see G. Martínez Díez, Las communidades de villa y tierra de la extremadura castellana (Madrid, 1983), 76. 24  These agreements marked the beginning of a relationship between the king’s rebellious son, Sancho, and the Aragonese monarch that would ultimately contribute to a bitter division within Castile’s royal family, a division that took that kingdom to the verge of civil war. 25  A CA, Cancillería real, Pergaminos de Jaime I, nos. 242–43; R. 47, 103v–5; Memorial histórico español: Colección de documentos, opúsculos y antigüedades [hereafter MHE], 48 vols (Madrid, 1851–1918), 2:34–37; Ayala Martínez, “Paces,” 158–59, 163; Antonio Ballesteros Beretta, Alfonso X, el Sabio (1963; reprint, Barcelona, 1984), 937–39; O’Callaghan, Learned King, 253–54. 26  Abulafia, Western Mediterranean Kingdoms, 79–81; Jean Dunabin, Charles I of Anjou: Power, Kingship and State-Making in Thirteenth-Century Europe (London, 1998), 99–113; Denis Mack Smith, Medieval Sicily 800–1713, vol. 2 of A History of Sicily, 3 vols. (New York, 1968), 76–78; Mott, Sea Power, 22–51; Steven Runciman, The Sicilian Vespers: A History of

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At the same time, a succession crisis arose in Castile. In 1275, during an invasion of Andalusia by Muslims from North Africa, Alfonso X’s eldest son, Crown Prince Fernando de la Cerda, died. In turn, the king acknowledged as his successor, not Fernando’s son, Alfonso de la Cerda, but his younger brother, Sancho. Then, in 1282, shortly after signing the most recent agreement with Aragon concerning their mutual border, the king had a change of heart. At the cortes of Valladolid, with backing from the delegates, he shifted his support to Fernando’s children, the so-called infantes de la Cerda. For his part, Sancho refused to accept his father’s new arrangements for the succession and the two began to fight over the passage of the crown, a struggle from which Sancho ultimately emerged triumphant. Despite this victory, the circumstances surrounding his succession as Sancho IV (r. 1285–1292) weakened Castile and later tempted the Aragonese to impose by force a final solution of the Murcian question which would favor them. In 1292, Jaume II, succeeded to the throne of Aragon after having ruled in Sicily for six years, where he had showed considerable ability as an administrator.27 Now turning over control of the island to his younger brother, he returned to the Iberian Peninsula. Despite arranging to marry a Castilian princess, Sancho IV’s daughter, María, Jaume became increasingly suspicious of his Castilian father-in-law’s intentions concerning the Murcian border.28 Having solidified control over his realms, he now turned his full attention to the border question. Unlike the contemporary Portuguese ruler, Dinis I (r. 1279–1325), who was currently settling his problems with Castile peacefully,29 the Aragonese ruler decided on a much more belligerent course. He violated the 1281 agreement with Castile on the grounds that Sancho IV had never turned the Mediterranean World in the Later Thirteenth Century (1958, reprint, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1961), 304–12. 27  Muntaner, Chronicle, 2:422–24 (chap. 175); Giuseppe La Mantia, Codice diplomatico deire Aragonesi dei Sicilia: Pietro I, Giccomo, Federico II, Pietro II e Ludovico dalla revoluzione siciliana del 1282 sino al 1355 (Palermo, 1917), 260–61 (doc. 132); José Ernesto Martínez Ferrando, “Jaume II,” in Descendents, 63–70; Zurita, Anales, 2:282–84, 295–96 (IV:lxxxi, lxxxvi). 28  C SJP, 89–90 (chap. 38); Muntaner, Chronicle, 2:442 (chap. 182); Martínez Ferrando, “Jaume II,” 73–75, 80–82; Miron, Queens, 139–41; Zurita, Anales, 2:427–28,481–82 (IV:cxxv; V:xv). Sancho, it seems, had agreed to help Charles II of Anjou (r. 1285–1289) take the Aragonese ruler captive during a proposed conference at Logroño in 1293, but Jaume got wind of this plot and thwarted it by failing to attend the meeting. The Castilian wedding was apparently annulled and the wedding with Blanche was part of the agreement concluded with her father and the papacy at Anagni in 1295. 29  Cordero Torres, Fronteras, 108; González Minguez, Fernando IV, 41–42; A.H. De Oliveira Marques, History of Portugal, 2 vols. (New York, 1972), 1: 120–21.

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over to Aragon the strategically placed castle of Alicante on the Mediterranean coast as he had promised in the treaty.30 The Aragonese king’s increasing militancy on the border issue was accompanied by a drastic change in attitude toward the nagging reality of the infantes de la Cerda. Although Jaume had once backed Sancho’s claim to the Castilian crown, he now took up the cause of the infantes de la Cerda, who promised to cede Murcia to Aragon in return for his support.31 Having determined to invade Murcia, Jaume II showed himself to be a skilled and determined commander. By late-January, 1296, he had sent his younger brother, Pere, to formalize the alliance with Alfonso de la Cerda and then to gather an army which he and Alfonso would lead against Castile. At the same time, Jaume sent an emissary to the Castilian court to “sever feudal relations” (desafidendo)32 with the new Castilian king, Sancho’s son, Fernando IV (r. 1295–1312), and to abrogate the marriage alliance with Sancho’s daughter.33 Jaume used the ten-day period before his abrogation of feudal and marital ties came into effect to finalize preparations for his Murcian expedition. On February 9, 1296, he wrote to a number of Catalan nobles seeking their aid in the invasion that his brother, Pere, would soon unleash on Castile. He made a similar request ten days later to his Pyrenean nobles.34 On February 22, the king sent a Valencian citizen into Murcia to act as a liaison to the “fifth column” of Aragonese and Catalan settlers who would be happy to overthrow their Castilian overlord. At the same time, the Aragonese arranged for the fitting out 30  A CA, Cancillería real, Cartas reales [Jaime II], no. 277; Garrido i Valls, Conquesta, 79–80 (doc. 2). 31  Martínez Ferrando, “Jaume II,” 89–90; Ángel Luis Molina Molina, “El reino de Murcia durante la dominación aragonesa,” Anales de la Universidad de Alicante [hereafter AUA] 11 (1996–1998): 265–71, esp. 265–66; Zurita, Anales, 2:493 (V:xx). 32  For the legal process leading to a “rupture of feudal ties” (diffidamentum, desafio, desafiament), see Usatges, trans. Kagay, 42; Francesch Carreras i Candi and Sigfried Bosch, “Desafiaments de Catalunya en segle XVI,” BRABLB 16 (1933–1936): 39–64; Eulalia Rodón Binué, El lenguaje técnico del feudalism en el segle XI en Catalña: Contribución al este de latino medieval (Barcelona, 1957), xviii, 12–14; Donald J. Kagay, “The Iberian Diffidamentum: From Vassalic Defiance to the Code Duello,” in The Final Argument: The Imprint of Violence on Society in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Donald J. Kagay and L.J. Andrew Villalon (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1998), 73–82. 33  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 252, ff. 130–31; Kagay, “Border War,” 101; Ferrer i Mallol, Entre, 538– 39 (series 1, doc. 2); González Minguez, Fernando, 44–45. While Jaume ultimately hoped to gain Murcia by this radical strategy, his brother, Pere, hoped by conquest to make good on a promise made him by Alfonso de la Cerda of Cuenca and several other villages, hamlets, and fortresses. 34  Antonio Benavides, Memorias de D. Fernando IV de Castilla, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1860), 2:63– 64, 70–71 (docs. 43, 49–50); González Mínguez, Fernando IV, 45.

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of ten galleys from the cities of Valencia, Tortosa, Tarragona, and Barcelona for a seaborne attack on Castilian territory.35 With preparations completed, two large Aragonese armies marched off to war in the spring of 1296. The first, a force of over 1,000 knights commanded by Prince Pere, drove deep into Castile during the opening weeks of April. The prince eventually used these troops to besiege the town of Mayorga not far from León. When siege engines failed to force an entry, the Aragonese army began to ready itself for a long siege that in the absence of a relieving force would starve out the townsmen. The plan failed because of a serious epidemic that swept through the prince’s force, carrying off many of the invaders. Among the dead was Prince Pere whose remains were returned to Zaragoza for burial.36 By contrast, the second prong of the attack, a maritime expeditionary force led by Jaume himself, landed at Alicante south of Valencia and took the town with little opposition, after which it attacked and overran the fortress located just outside the city walls. The Aragonese king’s ruthlessness in this first battle marked his attitude to the entire Murcian campaign. After cutting to pieces the castle’s garrison commander (alcalde), Jaume declared him a traitor who should not be given Christian burial, but instead be “thrown to the dogs.”37 Following this rapid victory, nothing seemed to stand in the king’s way and by June, 1296, “with the advice of those of the land who were Catalans,” he had conquered all of Murcia’s principal urban sites and strongholds except Alcalá, Lorca, and Mula—all of which contained large Castilian populations.38 The victor now gave the people of these places the options of accepting him as their “true and natural lord” or peacefully emigrating to Castilian territory with everything they could carry. Though the majority stayed put in Murcia, Jaume seems to have had little confidence in their new-found allegiance.39 As the summer wore on, Orihuela and Elche also fell after short but bloody sieges, leading smaller settlements such as Crevillente, Callosa, and Guardamar to surrender without ever facing the threat of military action. The greatest of these bloodless conquests was the capital city itself which opened its gates to 35  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 252, ff. 129v–131; Ferrer i Mallol, Entre, 537–39. 36  C SJP, 92–93 (chap. 38); Muntaner, Chronicle, 2:450 (chap. 187); González Mínguez, Fernando IV, 55–56; Zurita, Anales. 2:496–98 (V:xx). 37  Muntaner, Chronicle, 2:452–53 (chap. 188). 38  A CA, Cancillería real, Cartas reales [Pedro IV], no. 679; Estal, Documentos, 129–33 (doc. 12); Giménez Soler, Don Juan Manuel, 231 (doc. 7); Garrido i Valls. Conquesta, 38–50; Kagay, “Border War,” 101; Ladero Quesada, “Sobre,” 31–32; Molina Molina, “Reino,” 266; Zurita, Anales, 2:499–503 (V:xxi). 39  Estal, “Alicante,” 75–78; Juan Torres Fontes, “Reconquista y repoblación del reino de Murcia,” in Actas del Coloquio de la V Asamblea General de la Sociedad Española de Estudios Medievales (Zaragoza, 1991), 248–72.

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the invaders on August 2, 1296.40 After these first months of incredible success, Jaume ran headlong into the reality that during preceding decades, Murcia had become increasingly Castilian in its allegiance. Though Aragonese forces besieged its other large centers such as Lorca and Cieza, these campaigns were eventually beaten back by superior Castilian forces aided by the local population that invariably supported them. Few of the military encounters between Aragon and Castile during this later period were as organized as those that had occurred during the opening months of the invasion. Instead, they consisted largely of raids which did a great deal of damage to both sides. Jaume was particularly disturbed about what he called “great acts of terror, damage, and injury done to our people of the said realm.”41 After eight years of military engagement in Murcia during which he could neither win any further meaningful victories nor drive out hostile Castilian populations, the Aragonese king finally attempted to solidify the gains he had made north of the Segura River by arranging a peace with Castile. Part of the problem lay in the fact that as the fourteenth century dawned the Aragonese monarch was again forced to turn his attention to other matters. He faced a continual naval in the Mediterranean against the Angevins as well as domestic crises caused by the Aragonese Unión, an aristocratic and urban league that sought to limit royal power.42 As a result, in 1303 in order to extricate himself from the Murcian conflict, Jaume began to put out peace feelers. He soon found that the Castilian king, who had grown to manhood during the struggle, was similarly inclined. The following year, representatives of Jaume and Fernando opened negotiations at the town of Tarazona. Here they elaborated a general formula for attaining the cessation of hostilities, and appointed a board of arbitrators headed by Dinis I of Portugal who were given a specified time in which to finish their work. On August 3, 1303, in the small Aragonese hamlet of Torrellas near Tarazona, the board of arbitration announced its decision. Intending to end the “many damages and evils” of the past few years, Dinis and his colleagues granted Jaume all the towns and fortresses above the Segura River, all of which had already been conquered. These included the port city of Alicante, and the 40  Garrido i Valls, Conquesta, 42–45; Martínez Ferrando, “Jaume I,” 91–93; Molina Molina, “Reino,” 267. 41  Garrido i Valls, Conquesta, 42–62; Molina Molina, “Reino,” 267–69; Zurita, Anales, 2:590–91 (V:xlv). 42  Anton González Anton, Las uniones aragonesas y los cortes del reino. 2 vols. (Zaragoza, 1975), 1:311–42; Donald J. Kagay, “Rebellion on Trial: The Aragonese Union and it Uneasy Connection to Royal Law, 1265–1301,” In War, study VI, 30–43, esp. 34–38; Zurita, Anales, 2:625–30 (V:lvi).

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towns of Orihuela, Elche, Caudete, and Elda. The city of Murcia itself would remain in Castilian hands. On the same day, the arbitrators addressed the issue of Alfonso de la Cerda. They listed the great number of fortresses and villages in Castile and León he was entitled to possess, but remained silent on his claim to the Castilian throne. The principals swore they would uphold these findings and reinforced their oaths by exchanging hostages and castles as sureties.43 Despite these accords, it remained for the two parties to draw clear boundary lines between Castile and Aragon’s new Murcian territory. Until such a line was agreed upon, the Treaty of Torrellas would not bring about any firm peace between the two kingdoms. To help attain this goal, the two sovereigns established a boundary commission that announced its recommendations in May, 1305, at Elche. In effect, this document extended the boundary lines first established in 1244 down to the Segura River. By doing so, they turned over most of northeastern Murcia to Jaume “as his own possession with full rights and lordship.” The only exception to this clear Aragonese victory was Cartagena and its hinterland that the commission returned to Fernando. These instruments did not entirely satisfy either of the combatants since in the region north of Murcia and east of Elche there were still a great number of municipal boundaries left unsettled.44 In spite of his victories throughout the kingdom of Murcia, victories that Castile had formally recognized in the accords, Jaume II had no choice but to realize that many members of the Murcian population remained loyal to Castile and its king. They had only accepted the new state of affairs at the point of an Aragonese sword.45 When all was said and done, the lines drawn on a map by the hard-won accords of 1304–1305 could not be transformed into true boundaries. Instead, the border region remained as it had long been: largely uncontrollable marches where smuggling, slaving, and other black-market operations required that successful manipulators of this environment be thoroughly familiar with the different languages and customs prevailing among its many inhabitants. 43  A CA, Cancillería real, Cartas reales [Jaime II], nos. 2062, 2232–2233, 3333/4; R. 1521, f. 20; Masiá de Ros, Relación, 2:114–5 (doc. 71/221); Ferrer i Mallol, Entre, 120; Garrido i Valls, Conquesta, 81–85 (doc. 5); Giménez Soler, Don Juan Manuel, 291 (doc. 82); González Minguez, Fernando IV, 198–201, 359–60 (docs. 9–10); Kagay, “Border War,” 102; Ladero Quesada, “Sobre,” 32; Molina Molina, “Reino,” 269–70; Villalon and Kagay, To Win and Lose a Medieval Battle, 42. 44  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1521, f. 3; Gimenez Soler, Don Juan Manuel, 314–5 (doc. 119); González Minguez, Fernando IV, 188; Kagay, “Border War,” 102; Martínez Ferrando, “Jaume I,” 97–98; Molina Molina, “Reino,” 270–71; Zurita, Anales, 2:676–77. 45  A CA, Cancillería real, Cartas reales [Jaime II], no. 1156; Masiá de Ros, Relación, 2:152 (doc. 85/252).

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Rustling and kidnapping of Muslims for sale into slavery became growth industries that distant kings had little control over. If anything, this wild region would now grow even wilder as Castilian frustration and Aragonese dissatisfaction fueled conflicts as bitter as they were disordered.46 Though Jaume now supposedly controlled much of the region, real power in this zone was exercised by local lords, the most important of whom sprang from or were closely related to the Aragonese and Castilian royal families. These “middle grounds” developed a largely unchallenged autonomy during the late-thirteenth century and the opening decades of the fourteenth. Their bleak and inaccessible terrain normally stood outside the reach of both Aragonese and Castilian royal law. Increasingly, the frontier districts fell under the control of marcher lords, over-mighty subjects such as Juan Nuñez de Lara (1282–1315) and Juan Manuel (1282–1348). Such men served as royal advisers in both the courts of Castile and Aragon.47 They were able to retreat to their heavily fortified holdings if their relationship with one or the other of the kings disintegrated. They habitually used their lands as a means of passing between royal courts. While the sovereigns occasionally attempted to utilize these nobles in order to cause trouble in each other’s households, they soon found that this could bring about conflicts they did not intend and could not control.48 Even though these autonomous zones slowly gave way before the administrative pressure of Castilian and Aragonese monarchs during the middle decades of the fourteenth century, they remained troubled regions where conflict could easily erupt. 46  Giménez Soler, Don Juan Manuel, 561–62 (doc. 455); Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change 950–1350 (Princeton, N.J., 1993), 198–99; Robert I. Burns, S.J., Society and Documentation in Crusader Valencia, vol. 1 of Diplomatarium of the Crusader Kingdom of Valencia: The Registered Charters of its Conqueror, Jaime I, 1257–1276, 4 vols. to date (Princeton, N.J., 1985–2007), 17, 122–24; José Enrique López de Coca Castañer, “Institutions on the Castilian-Granadan Frontier 1369–1482,” in Medieval Frontier Societies and Angus MacKay (Oxford, 1996), 127–50, esp., 135–45. 47  Simon R. Doubleday, The Lara Family: Crown and Nobility in Medieval Spain (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 92–95; Giménez Soler, Don Juan Manuel, 73–77; Kagay, “Dynastic Dimension,” 78–79. 48  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1162, f. 8; Giménez Soler, Don Juan Manuel, 574, 651 (doc. 473, 587); Masiá de Ros, Relación, 2:205–06.

Chapter 4

Two Royal War Leaders 1 Introduction During the middle decades of the fourteenth century, the kingdom of Castile and the Crown of Aragon came under the control of two very different rulers, sharing the regnal name of Pedro or its Catalan equivalent, Pere. Both remarkable figure in their own right, these two monarchs became embroiled in the most serious and destructive conflict between Christian kingdoms of Iberia to take place during the Middle Ages, a conflict that only later became known as the War of the Two Pedros. (To help avoid confusion on the part of readers, throughout this book we shall reserve the name Pedro for the monarch of Castile while his Aragonese counterpart will be referred to as Pere.)1 Pedro I of Castile (r. 1350–1366/1367–1369) was only in his mid-teens when, in 1350, he came to the throne. His father, Alfonso XI (r. 1311–1350), one of the great Reconquista warriors, had just died at the relatively young age of 39, having contracted plague during his unsuccessful siege of Gibraltar, thereby becoming Europe’s highest-ranking victim of the Black Death.2 The new king’s controversial and sanguinary activities over the course of a nineteen-year reign earned him contrasting sobriquets of Pedro the Cruel or Pedro the Just—one’s choice depends upon just how one views those activities. 1  The authors have also written at some length concerning the background of these likenamed adversaries in their earlier book To Win and Lose a Medieval Battle: Najera April 3, 1367. See esp. chap. 3, “Three Who Ruled.” 2  Contemporary sources throughout Europe usually refer to the mid-century plague as “the great dying” (la mortandad grande), a term Spanish writers would continue to use for several hundred years. See, for example: Crónica de Alfonso XI, p. 390 [chap. cccxxxviii]; Ayala, Pedro I, 403 [1350, chap. i]. The great Aragonese historian of the sixteenth century, Jerónimo Zurita, who goes into somewhat greater detail concerning the epidemic, also refers to it in the same words. See Zurita, Anales, 4:133, 158–59 [VIII, 28; VIII, 32]. Only well after it appeared would Europeans dub it “the Black Death.” Most modern works on fourteenth century plague concentrate their attention primarily on the outbreak as it affected Italy and England, venues that produced the best sources; for example, Philip Ziegler, The Black Death which devotes only minor consideration to its effect on Spain (see pp. 113–16). Considerably more can be learned by consulting Amada López de Meneses, Documentos acerca de la peste negra en los dominios de la Corona de Aragon (Zaragoza: Escuela de Estudios Medievales, 1956). Melanie V. Shirk, “The Black Death in Aragon 1348–1351,” Journal of Medieval History 7, no. 4 (December, 1981): 357–67. For an extensive collection of sources in English, see The Black Death, trans. and ed. by Rosemary Horrox (Manchester, Eng., 1994).

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Within a half dozen years of coming to the throne, Pedro entered into the deadly quarrel with his considerably older adversary to the east. The Aragonese king was known in the realms he ruled not only by different forms of his name, but even different numbers: in the kingdom of Aragon proper, he was Pedro IV (r. 1336–1387), while in the neighboring principality of Catalonia, his subjects referred to him as Pere, third of that name to rule there. Pere III became one of a relatively few medieval monarchs to play a major role in writing his own chronicle.3 His fastidious attention to royal pomp and protocol led his subject to dub him “the Ceremonious.”4 The king was also known as “he of the little dagger” (el del punyalet), coined in reference to an event that occurred early in his reign mentioned below.5 In this chapter, we shall explore the character and actions of these competing war leaders and consider to what extent they fulfilled or failed to fulfill the duties required of a medieval monarch. 2

Duties of Medieval Kingship

All holders of royal or princely authority in medieval Iberia, like their counterparts across Europe, were judged by standards of both good government and misrule that focused on the deportment of the king and his success in managing the realm. As vicars of God on earth, Iberian rulers swore to carry out certain duties both to the Almighty and to the people over whom, by His appointment, they exercised what the leading political theorist of the age, Marsiglio di Padua (d. 1342), would call “coercive force” (vis coercivia).6 3  As noted in the Introduction, we have used a fine English translation of Pere III’s Chronicle by Mary Hillgarth, accompanied by J.H. Hillgarth’s excellent introduction to the king’s life and reign. 4  For the origin of Pere’s principal sobriquet, see Pere III, Chronicle, 1:98. 5  An example of the use of the lesser-known sobriquet appears in Manuel Dualde Serrano, “Tres episodios de la lucha entre ‘Pere el del Punyalet’ y la Unión aragonesa relatados por el monarca a su tio, Pedro Conde de Ribagorza,” EEMCA 2 (1946): 295–377. 6  Marsilius of Padua (d. 1342) wrote one of the most influential and highly secular political treatises of the Middle Ages entitled Defensor Pacis. The author stressed the role of the emperor as “the defender of peace,” and excoriated the papacy for its unjustified usurpation of imperial power. There is an excellent English translation of this important work: Marsilius of Padua, The Defender of the Peace, The Defensor pacis, intro. and trans. by Alan Gewirth New York, 1956. A selection appears in Medieval Political Philosophy, ed. Ralph Lerner and Muhsin (Ithaca, N.Y., 1963), 468 (X:4). See also: Joseph Canning, A History of Medieval Political Thought, 300–1450 (London, 1996), 19 and Donald J. Kagay, “Rule and Mis-Rule in Medieval Iberia,” in War, study IV, pp. 48–66, esp. 49.

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Medieval theory stressed a king’s duty to promote the “common good” (bonum comune) and “public utility” (utilitas publica).7 These critical royal functions were encapsulated in a coronation oath that despite some variation from place to place usually directed a monarch to do good, right wrongs, punish injuries, and solidify the peace.8 Aside from these civil obligations, a medieval monarch also played an important military role: it was his duty to lead his people against foreign invaders and to punish any subjects who were derelict in meeting their obligations to defend the realm. Furthermore, when necessary, it would be his duty to expand his kingdom and increase its power. The tie between sovereign and people amounted to a contract. The ruler who failed to live up to his end of this bargain could be held responsible for his various failings and/or misdeeds. If these were severe enough, he might even become subject to a groundswell of popular opposition, often in the form of aristocratic leagues or urban brotherhoods (hermandades, empresiones, uniones) whose members sought to force sovereigns to modify their actions. In some cases, this might compel the crown to think twice before engaging in an expensive and profitless military campaign.9 The bargain is aptly summed up in Aragon’s legendary Fuero of Sobrarbe according to which the people swore an oath to their perspective monarch: “We who are worth as much as you, make you our King and Lord, provided that you guard and maintain for us our fueros and liberties, and if not, not.”10 This passage, albeit apocryphal, expressed the widely-held belief that sovereigns were promised the support of their people just as long as they carried out their public obligations, but implied that if they did not do so, the people were within their rights to rise up renounce that allegiance.11 7  Thomas Aquinas, “Commentary on the Ethics,” trans. Charles I. Litzinger in Medieval Political Philosophy, 286 (bk 10, lesson xiv), Anthony Black, Political Thought in Europe, 1250–1450 (Cambridge, 1992), 24–26; Canning, History, 112–13; Kagay, “Rule,” 50. 8  Canning, History, 41; Fritz Kern, Kingship and Law in the Middle Ages, trans. S.B. Chrimes (New York, 1970), 73; Gaines Post, Studies in Medieval Legal Thought, Public Law, and the State 1100–1321 (Princeton, 1968), 253–60; see also: Kagay, “Rule,” 50. 9  Kagay, “Rule,” 54–55; “Structures,” 66; Joseph F. O’Callaghan, “Kings and Lords in Conflict in Late-Thirteenth Century Castile and Aragon,” in Iberia, 2:117–35. 10  An excellent book on the so-called “false fueros” of Sobrarbe was written by Ralph E. Giesey, If Not, Not: The Oath of the Aragonese and the Legendary Laws of Sobrarbe (Princeton, N.J., 1968); for the above quote see p. 6. 11  Black, Political Thought, 169–70; Canning, History, 19–20; Kenneth Pennington, “Law, Legislative Authority, and Theories of Government, 1150–1300,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c.350–c.1450, ed. J.H. Burns (Cambridge, 1995), 429, 444–45; Walter Ullman, The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages (Baltimore, 1966), 63–98. See also: Kagay, “Rule,” 50–51.

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Probably no other ruler of the medieval world demonstrated such a concern for the duties and prerogatives of kingship as King Alfonso X Castile (r. 1252– 1284) known to contemporaries as “el Sabio” (“the Learned”).12 In 1356, not long after coming to the throne, the king and his legal advisers (letrados) launched a massive reform movement, which would ultimately reorganize and codify Castilian law. Their reforms gave rise to new law codes that would over the closing centuries of the Middle Ages increasingly replace the existing system that one leading Spanish legal scholar referred to as “chaotic diversity.”13 The most important of these new codes were the Fuero Real, literally the “royal code,” and the far more massive Siete Partidas; and while the former had a greater immediate impact upon Castilian law, it was the latter that became the kingdom’s foremost contribution not only to Spanish law, but to the history of law in general. Las Siete Partidas ranks alongside the Corpus iuris and the canon law, as one of the legal monuments to come down from the Middle Ages.14 While we owe to the royal polymath the initial impetus that gave rise to this awe-inspiring work of legal scholarship, after his death, the code would continue to expand in length and develop in complexity for the better part of a century, undergoing at least four redactions under the tutelage of a series of legal scholars about whom we know little or nothing. Not until 1348 was Las Siete Partidas declared to be an official part of Castilian law in that kingdom’s most important legal document of the fourteenth century, the Ordenamiento

12  See in particular the works on Alfonso X by Joseph O’Callaghan including his recent work: Alfonso X, The Justinian of his Age: Law and Justice in Thirteenth-Century Castile (Ithaca, NY, 2019), the title of which clearly indicates this medieval monarch’s concern with legal reform. 13  Still one of the best, if not the best introduction to the history of Spanish law is Alfonso García-Gallo, Manual de Historia del Derecho Espanol: El Origen y la Evolucion del Derecho, 2nd edition, 2 vols. (Madrid: Artes Graficas y Ediciones, 1964). For García-Gallo’s coverage of the Castilian legal system growing out of the Alfonsine reforms, see 1:387–419. For his characterization of Castilian law c. 1250, see 1:387. 14  We have made extensive use of the English translation. See: Las Siete Partidas, trans. Samuel Parsons Scott, ed. Robert I. Burns, S.J., 5 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). What might be regarded as the definitive printed Spanish editions appeared in Salamanca and Valencia around the mid-eighteenth century, see Las Siete Partidas del Sabio Rey D. Alfonso el Nono [sic] copiadas de la edicion de Salamanca del año de 1555, que publicò el Señor Gregorio López, corregida, de Orden del Real Consejo, por los señores D. Diego de Morales, y Villamayor, Orden de la Real Audiencia de Valencia, y D. Jacinto Miguel de Castro, Fiscal de lo Civil en ella, 7 vols., (Valencia, 1758). Page references will be to the Scott translation. In addition, for those using the Spanish original, we shall provide a reference to the partida, titulo, and ley.

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de Alcalá, drafted by the learned monarch’s great-grandson, Alfonso XI, in conjunction with his own cortes.15 In its final redaction, the Siete Partidas was a massive work divided (as its name indicates) into seven parts that together define virtually all aspects of medieval Spanish society.16 Fittingly for a medieval work, the first part is devoted to ecclesiastical matters. It is, however, the second that treats secular power; in particular, the power and responsibilities of monarchy.17 In line with the “mirror of princes” literature so common throughout medieval Europe,18 Alfonso X used the Second Partida, lengthiest of the seven, to establish a high standard for kingship. Here, he laid out the duties of a good ruler, and the failings of a bad one. He warned monarchs against a whole range of dangerous vices, including cowardice, injustice, greed, gluttony, uncontrolled anger, overly lascivious conduct, even the use of coarse or threatening language; indulgence in which could lead to dire consequences.19 If, on the other hand, the monarch carried out all the prescribed royal duties and avoided the vices the king warned of, he would distinguish his name and his people would continue to honor him even after his death. One of the most significant roles of a medieval monarch as laid out in the learned king’s Second Partida was the military one. In fact, a significant part of this work stands forth as the lengthiest and most detailed military treatise produced in the medieval West between the time of the Romans and the Renaissance. And in what is, after all, a highly royalist law code, the position of the king as war-maker-in-chief is spelled out in great detail. No war could be considered legitimate unless fought under royal auspices. The monarch was to conduct not only the defense of his own realm, but any attack on another 15   Ordenamiento de Alcalá de Henares in Cortes de los Antiguos Reinos de Leon y de Castilla, ed. Don Manuel Colmeiro, 7 vols. (Madrid: Establecimiento Tipográfico de los Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1884), 1:492–637. See also: Alfonso Otero Valera, “Las Partidas y el Ordenamiento de Alcalá en el cambio de ordenamiento medieval,” Estudios historicoosjuridicos 1 (2005): 397–502. 16  According to García-Gallo (1:393–94): “In whichever of its redactions, but especially from the third onward, the Partidas constitutes a complete treatise dealing with all law that was fundamental to the state, unlike any other [treatise] in the world. For its intention, its magnitude, and its perfect knowledge of its subject, in the field of law, it can to a certain extent be compared to the Summa of St. Thomas in theology.” 17  The Second Partida is volume 2 of Scott’s English translation that the modern publisher has entitled Medieval Government: The World of Kings and Warriors. 18  For treatment of the “mirrors of princes” literature, see, for example, Black, Political Thought, 138–39; Rob Meens, “Politics, Mirrors for Princes and the Bible: Sins, Kings, and the Well-Being,” Early Medieval Europe 7, no. 3 (November, 1998): 345–57. 19  Las Siete Partidas, 2:280–81, 284–85 (Part. II, tit. III, laws 4–5; tit. IV, laws 3–5).

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sovereign power. It was his duty either to lead the army in person or through reliable commanders he has appointed, taking into account primarily the appointee’s wisdom above his lineage and social rank and always “having recourse to such as know how to make war.”20 Especially in time of war, subjects were expected to follow royal instructions largely without any questioning of his authority. Penalties for failing to carry out what the code defined as one’s duties were harsh. It was within the theoretical construct laid out largely in the Second Partida that the Iberian adversaries in the War of the Two Pedros were expected to function. 3

The Castilian Aggressor: Pedro “the Cruel” The king Don Pedro died on the 23rd day of March of the said year [1369] at the age of 35 years and seven months. Afterwards, great rumors ran throughout the realm, first telling how Don Pedro had departed from the castle of Montiel, then how he had met his death. The king was a large man with blond hair and a fair complexion and was somewhat halting in his speech. He undertook many labors, was an enthusiastic hunter of birds, and showed temperance in eating and drinking. He slept little and loved many women. The king labored mightily in war. He was assiduous in accumulating jewels and treasures … And he killed many inhabitants of his realm resulting in all the dangers he faced that you have heard tell of here…. Don Pedro reigned without a rival for 16 years; thereafter for three more years during which he was in contention with King Don Enrique.21

In these words, the king’s chronicler, Pedro López de Ayala, briefly summed up his royal subject in the concluding passage of his highly controversial chronicle. Pedro I occupies a niche in Spanish history which the English reserve for Shakespearean arch-villain, Richard III; and while none of the literary portraits of Pedro can rival Shakespeare’s Richard, he like his English counterpart has been a subject of heated historical debate over the centuries.22 20  Ibid., 2:441 (Part. II, tit. XXIII, law 4). 21  Ayala, Pedro I, 592–93. 22  As noted in the Introduction, Pedro’s chronicle, the principal source for all later work on this controversial monarch, was written by his contemporary, Pedro López de Ayala, one of the foremost literary figures of the age. Throughout the nineteenth century, a number of books appeared concerning the king, one of the most famous being the work of French

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Both men became highly controversial in their own time, victims of vicious propaganda disseminated by enemies who were trying to overthrow them.23 Both are known primarily through sources that postdate their death, penned by authors who were, to varying degrees, hostile to their subject.24 Around each grew up (rightly or wrongly) a ‘black legend’ linking the king’s name with murder, tyranny, and treachery. Each was eventually overthrown in a bloody civil war by a persistent and calculating foe (both of whom coincidentally bore

scholar, Prosper Mérimée, entitled Histoire de Don Pedre Ier, roi de Castille, a two-volume English translation of which was published in 1849. A highly useful book for the study of the reign, one that reproduces various key documents, is J.B. Sitges, Mujeres del Rey Don Pedro. In recent decades, a number of works on Pedro have appeared, most of them in Spanish. These include Julio Valdeon Baruque, Pedro I, el Cruel y Enrique de Trastámara: la primera guerra civil española? (Madrid, 2002); Paulino García Toraño, El rey Don Pedro el Cruel y su mundo (Madrid, 1996); Manuel Sánchez Martínez, “Pedro I el Cruel: La guerra de los Dos Pedros,” Historia 143 (1988): 45–56. For English readers, there is a fine biography of the king by Clara Estow, Pedro the Cruel, 1350–1369. For a brief assessment of Pedro and his highly impolitic policies by one of the authors of this book, see L.J. Andrew Villalon, “Pedro the Cruel, Portrait of a Royal Failure,” in Medieval Iberia: Essays on the History and Literature of Medieval Spain, ed. Donald J. Kagay and Joseph Snow (New York: Pedro Lang, 1997), 201–216. 23  Not content with accusing Pedro of being a blood-thirsty tyrant, his enemies went so far as to brand him an illegitimate imposter. To this end, a story was spread that his mother, having failed to produce a son and fearing her royal husband’s wrath, passed off a Jewish infant, Pero Gil, as her own child. On the basis of this slander, those who supported Pedro came to be dubbed by their enemies ‘emperegilados.’ While Ayala omits any mention of the rumor in his chronicle, Pedro’s inveterate enemy, Pere III, cannot resist alluding to it: “It is said by some that this King Pere [Pedro I] was not the son of King N’Amfós [Alfonso XI], but was substituted …” Pere III, Chronicle, 2:492 (VI, 1). See also: Luis Suárez Fernández, El Chanciller Ayala [unpaginated]. 24  As early as the fifteenth century, reference was made to a second chronicle of Pedro’s reign, depicting the monarch in a more favorable light. One of those named as its author was Juan de Castro, Bishop of Jaen, who accompanied Pedro to Gascony in 1366. According to proponents of the “rival chronicle” theory, Castro wrote it during a prolonged exile from Castile, then brought it back with him when he returned to his homeland several decades later. Supposedly, it was willed it to the monastery of Guadalupe where it remained until the time of the Catholic Monarchs, when it mysteriously disappeared. Unfortunately for historians, no such chronicle has ever materialized nor is there is hard evidence that it ever existed; only rumors perpetuated by a sixteenth century family claiming lineal descent from Pedro. Sitges, Mujeres, pp. 21–22; Nancy Marino, “Two Spurious Chronicles of Pedro el Cruel and the Ambitions of his Illegitimate Successors.” La Coronica 21 2., no. 2 (1992–1993): 1–2; González Faure, María Estela, Isabel de las Heras, and Patricia de Forteza, “Apología y censura: Posibles autores de las crónicas favorables á Pedro I de Castilla.” AEM 36. No. 1 (January–February 2006): 111–44.

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the same name—in English Henry; in Spanish, Enrique.)25 Following a protracted period in exile, each of these adversaries won enough foreign backing to mount a successful bid for the throne. In both cases, much of the nobility defected to the challenger. Both Pedro and Richard died in or shortly after the last battle of their reign; both deaths rank among the most memorable cases of regicide in medieval history. Finally, each man has continued to inspire subsequent generations of scholars and writers, some bent upon rehabilitating their subject, others wishing to show that his unsavory reputation was richly deserved. Most contemporary writers followed the two principal sources for the period—Ayala’s chronicle of the reign and the memoirs of Pedro’s principal adversary, Pere III of Aragon—in painting a dark portrait of the Castilian monarch. On the other hand, there were a few exceptions. One of these was the literary giant, Geoffrey Chaucer, who bewailed “the pitous death [of] worthy Petro, glorie of Spayne” in his Canterbury Tales. The author apparently viewed Pedro as a “worthy” monarch and this flagrant example of regicide as a betrayal of the political and social order.26 Another English author who showed sympathy for Pedro was Chaucer’s contemporary, a lesser-known and far less-talented poet, who identifies himself in the poem as Walter of Peterborough.27 A regular cleric and servant of the Black Prince’s younger brother, John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster (1340–1399), Walter may actually have accompanied the 1367 Anglo-Gascon expedition to restore the monarch to the throne from

25  In Richard’s case, this was Henry Tudor who, following Richard’s death at Bosworth, ascended the throne as Henry VII (r. 1485–1509). 26  For Chaucer’s possible Spanish connections and his views on the monarch’s death, see John Gardner, The Life and Times of Chaucer (New York, 1999), 152–53, 168–70; H.L. Savage, “Chaucer and the ‘Pitous Death’ of Petro, Glorie of Spayne,” Speculum 24 (1949): 357–75. 27  Walter’s poem, consisting of 560 verses, survives in two incomplete manuscript copies, both of which are housed in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. See Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Digby, No. 166, fol. 97 r; and MS. Rawlinson, No. 214,20 fol. 188 r. The Digby manuscript contains the entire text of the poem but not the prologue; by contrast, the Rawlinson manuscript gives only half of the text, but supplies along with it the missing prologue. The poem first appeared in print in its entirety but without any English translation in 1859, as part of a two-volume collection of miscellany edited by Thomas Wright. See Walter of Peterborough, “Prince Edward’s Expedition into Spain and the Battle of Najara,” in Political Poems and Songs relating to English History composed during the Period from the Accession of Edw[ard] III to that of Ric[hard] III, ed. Thomas Wright, 2 vols. (London, 1859), 1:97–122. In 2005, Elibron Classics brought out a facsimile reprint edition of the 1859 original.

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which he had been ignominiously expelled a year earlier.28 Not long after the campaign ended, he wrote a tediously lengthy and highly inaccurate Latin poem commemorating the event and glorifying one of principal leaders, the duke of Lancaster. Very near the end of the work, the poet exhorted heaven to aid the restored monarch of Castile: “Now Pedro, you sit on the throne of your fathers. St. Peter, we pray by the sacred flame that you may be a help to the just and a protection to [King] Pedro.”29 Ironically, when both of these English writers penned their sympathetic passages they did so despite the fact that Pedro’s perfidious actions in the wake of the campaign that restored him to the throne had betrayed their English lords and patrons, the Black Prince and his younger brother, the duke of Lancaster. Starting with Pedro’s contemporaries and including both his detractors and supporters over the centuries, there is virtually no denial that the king eliminated numerous individuals whom he regarded, in quite a few cases on little or no evidence, as his enemies. Scholars who see him as Pedro the Cruel characterize his actions as those of a bloodthirsty tyrant; others raising their voices in his defense almost invariably claim that his sanguinary actions were fully justified since they were directed against rebels and traitors, people who opposed legitimate royal authority and supported his enemies; in particular, his half-brother, Enrique de Trastámara, and Pere III of Aragon. One prominent Hapsburg period scholar who took issue with the negative judgment on Pedro was a middle-ranking churchman and prolific historian named Pedro Salazar de Mendoza.30 In his best-known work, La Monarquía de España, Mendoza elicits in Pedro’s favor his youth, the troubled era in which he reigned, and the constant plotting of his aristocracy, in particular, that of his own half-brothers. According to Mendoza, given these extraordinary circumstances the murders and imprisonments undertaken by the king, when judged dispassionately … may better be called “punishments” than “cruelties.” 28  In a 2017 article, the authors of this book about extensively about the mysterious Walter of Peterborough and his possible role in the Black Prince’s 1367 invasion of Castile. See: Donald J. Kagay and L.J. Andrew Villalon, “Winning and Recalling Honor in Spain: English Poetry in Celebration of the Battle of Nájera (1367),” JMMH 11 (2013), 131–54. 29  Wright, Political Poems, 1:122. 30  Pedro Salazar de Mendoza, a canon of the cathedral of Toledo, also wrote the most important account of his illustrious ancestor, Cardinal Pedro González de Mendoza, Archbishop of Toledo and principal advisor to the Catholic Monarchs. See: Salazar de Mendoza, Crónica de el Gran Cardenal de España (Toledo: Imprenta de Doña María Onis de Sarauia, 1625).

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And if sometimes he acted too severely, it was due to the fact that the king and his councillors were not perfect.... If, in his time, there were many deaths, there were also many rebels and malefactors who merited [this penalty].31 It is worth noting that very few if any early commentators attribute Pedro’s actions to madness. Medical and psychological explanations would largely have to await the twentieth century. With the onset of psychohistory, writers such as Chaytor assigned to the Castilian king the “dismal reputation of the homicidal maniac.”32 Other modern commentators such as Gonzalo Moya and Francisco Simón Nieto started with measurements of the king’s remains and then scoured the chronicle and documentary accounts to come to a scientific understanding of Pedro’s personal and public actions. According to their studies, the origin of his uncontrollable anger and unbridled violence sprang from a life-threatening illness in the first years of his reign. In their view, the illness also left behind a slight stutter and a “lethargy” (abulia) which at times rendered Pedro incapable of prompt executive action.33 Born in Castile’s northern capital of Burgos, in August, 1334, Pedro I was the only surviving legitimate offspring, male or female, of King Alfonso XI.34 In 1327, as part of a double marriage alliance with Portugal, Alfonso, himself only sixteen at the time, had taken as his queen a young Portuguese princess named María.35 Like many other royal marriages, their union was designed in large part to produce an heir to the throne. Quite some time passed, however, before the arrival of any child, male or female. For four years, the marriage remained barren and the couple’s first son, a sickly boy named Fernando, died before reaching his first birthday.36 Not until the summer of 1334 did María finally give birth to her second son, Pedro, who would survive infancy and succeed his father.37 There would be no more children born to the queen of Castile. Of Pedro’s youth almost nothing is known, due to the paucity of Castilian documentation for his reign and a crucial gap in the chronicle record extending 31  Pedro Salazar de Mendoza, Monarquía de España, 2 vols. (Toledo, 1625), 2:191. 32  H.J. Chaytor, A History of Aragon and Catalonia. (1933. repr.; New York: AMS Press, 1969), 166; Estow, Pedro, xxxv–xxxvi. 33  Estow, Pedro, 198, 220; Gonzalo Moya, Don Pedro el Cruel. Biología, política y tradición literario en la figura de Pedro I de Castilla (Madrid, 1974); Valdeón Baruque, Pedro, 52–53. 34  The birth is recorded in Alfonso’s chronicle, the authorship of which is generally attributed to a leading royal official, Fernán Sánchez de Valladolid. See: Crónica del Rey Don Alfonso el Onceno de Castilla, in CRC, vol. 1, BAE, vol. 66, 173–392. For Pedro’s birth, see: 264. 35   Crónica de Alfonso XI, 212, 218–19 (chaps. lxv, lxxiv). 36  Ibid., 239, 257 (chaps. cv, cxxv). 37  Ibid., 264 (chap. cxxxvi).

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from 1344–1350.38 There are, however, tantalizing hints that this offspring of a loveless royal marriage experienced a troubled and even dangerous childhood,39 arising out of the king’s indifference to his mother and close attachment to the royal mistress, Leonor de Guzmán, one of the most notorious “other women” in Spanish history who provided Pedro with a flock of half-siblings, several of whom he murdered after becoming king. In 1350, at the age of sixteen, Pedro succeeded to the throne when plague decimated a Castilian army besieging Gibraltar and took the life of his royal father.40 Throughout the opening years of his reign, the youthful monarch found himself surrounded by competing aristocratic factions, including those loyal to his illegitimate half-brothers. What is more, almost immediately upon coming to the throne, he himself contracted a serious illness, possibly a non-fatal case of plague, that brought him perilously close to death and further destabilized an already unstable political situation as potential successors scrambled to position themselves to inherit the crown. Not a few scholars have argued that the king’s illness accompanied by the unseemly conduct of those who would be king helped give rise to a royal paranoia that increased exponentially over the course of the reign. This unfortunate episode also placed mounting pressure on the young king to marry and produce a legitimate heir, thereby clarifying the issue of succession. During the first three years of the reign, Pedro I continued to rely largely upon advisers held over from Alfonso XI, foremost among them Juan Alfonso, lord of Albuquerque, who had formerly been chief steward (mayordomo mayor) of his household when he had been crown prince and who had now become his leading councilor. Albuquerque led the most important political faction, one which advocated continuation of a longstanding Franco-Castilian 38  Alfonso XI’s chronicler treats in excruciating detail the king’s most famous campaign which led to his conquest of Algeciras in 1343–44. Thereafter, the chronicle is silent except for a tacked-on chapter dealing with the 1350 siege of Gibraltar at which the king met his death. See: Crónica de Alfonso XI, 388–92 [chaps. cccxxxv–cccxxxix]. Although recent work by such historians as Nicolás Agrait has shed new light on the events of Alfonso’s later years, this new light has not extended to Pedro’s youth. See, for example: Nicolás Agrait, “The Battle of Salado (1340) Revisited,” JMMH 10 (2012): 89–112; idem, “Por la guarda de la mar: Castile and the Struggle for the Sea in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” JMMH 13 (2015): 139–66. 39  According to Ayala, after falling from grace, several of Pedro’s most important advisers— Juan Alfonso de Alburquerque and Gutier Fernández de Toledo—both alluded to the unswerving loyalty they had shown and evils they had endured in protecting him “during the time when Doña Leonor de Guzmán held power in the realm.” Ayala, Pedro I, 435 (1352, chap. xvii), 507, (1360, chap. xvii). 40   Crónica de Alfonso XI, 390–91 (chap. cccvvvviii); Ayala, Pedro I, 403 (1350, chap i).

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alliance. It was Albuquerque who as early as 1351 dispatched ambassadors to France charged with negotiating Pedro’s marriage to a French princess, thereby strengthening ties with the great power north of the Pyrenees. The chosen bride was Blanche de Bourbon, daughter of the French king’s cousin, the duke of Bourbon, whose sister was wife to the crown prince of France, the future King Charles V. Ironically, a match designed to further Franco-Castilian friendship in the end had precisely the opposite effect.41 Unfortunately for the would-be bride, while negotiations were progressing north of the Pyrenees, back in Castile, the situation had altered dramatically. In spring, 1352, Pedro first encountered María de Padilla, a lady-in-waiting to Albuquerque’s wife, called by one chronicler “the comeliest maiden (apuesta doncella) to be found at that time in the world.”42 A love-struck, seventeenyear-old monarch was so thoroughly infatuated that “he was not himself until he had her.”43 Thus began a romantic attachment that would last with only slight interruption until her death a decade later (1362). Throughout these years, María de Padilla had very little problem holding onto her royal paramour, an ability some of her contemporaries attributed to sorcery.44 Originally, Doña María’s installation as royal mistress had the full approval of Albuquerque who hoped that by bringing this about, he would gain even greater influence over the king. However, in late spring, 1353, Padilla provided her royal lover with their first child, a daughter named Beatriz. It quickly became clear to the king’s first minister and his followers that in promoting the royal attachment to Padilla, he had badly miscalculated. Not only had this raised up yet another competing faction, this one composed of the lady’s relatives and supporters, but her very presence now stood in the way of the French marriage which he had labored to bring about; for “the king loved Doña María de Padilla so much that he was no longer willing to marry Blanche de Bourbon.”45

41  Ayala, Pedro I, 418 (1351, chap. xv). Ayala suggests that the ambassadors were empowered to choose for the king which one of the duke’s six daughters would become his bride. 42  In extensive notes to the edition of Ayala’s chronicle that we have used, the editor cites an alternate version of the meeting between Pedro and Padilla coming from the Historia General, a version which describes Doña María in precisely these words. Ibid., 427 (1352, chap. vi), note 2. 43  Ibid. 44  In a recent book published in Palgrave’s Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic, the author alludes to this belief that Doña María used witchcraft to exercise control over her royal paramour. Although the belief may have been fairly widespread, we have not encountered it in the chronicle literature. See: María Tausiet, Urban Magic in Early Spain: Abracadabra Omnipotens, trans. Susannah Howe (London, 2014). 45  Ayala, Pedro I, 429 (1353, chap. ii).

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Those who supported the match, including Albuquerque and the queenmother, argued forcefully that the king had to go through with it, both in the name of producing legitimate heirs and maintaining Castile’s French alliance. Ultimately, their arguments fell largely on deaf ears. Much against his will, on Monday, June 3, 1353, Pedro participated in an elaborate wedding ceremony held in the cathedral of Valladolid. Two days later, he fled back to the arms of his mistress, despite appeals from his mother and aunt that he remain with his new bride.46 He would see the erstwhile queen only one more time; on another occasion, despite their both being in the same locale, he refused even to visit her. Under the circumstances, there was no question of the couple producing an heir. In the aftermath of the Valladolid debacle, the king came to resent both the French match and the pro-French advisers who had urged it upon him, including his former favorite, Albuquerque. Within hours of leaving the city, he began to move against them. Some he executed or imprisoned while the lucky ones, including Alburquerque, escaped his clutches either sheltering behind castle walls or fleeing beyond the borders of the realm.47 There is an important respect in which Pedro’s libidinous behavior contrasts markedly with that of his father, Alfonso XI. The latter had been anything but a paragon of marital fidelity; his attachment to Leonor de Guzmán had caused him to neglect his Portuguese-born queen through most of their reign. Despite this, he gave her both time and opportunity to produce a legitimate heir. Even when, after years of the queen failing to conceive, her first born died in infancy, Alfonso avoided the temptation to put here aside and marry his very fertile mistress.48 In short, the king’s love for the lady was not allowed to disrupt diplomatic relations with an important neighbor. By contrast, Pedro’s attachment to María de Padilla became the initial wedge driven into his relationship with what had formerly been a friendly power. With passage of time, Pedro subjected the queen to ever harsher treatment, eventually renouncing their marriage as invalid while trying to have the children of his mistress declared his legitimate heirs. Not only did this alienate France as well as many within his own kingdom; it became a major source of friction with Pope Innocent VI, who took up the queen’s cause. While not all of Pedro’s extra-marital liaisons (there were a number) produced such dire 46  Ibid., 433 (1353, chap. xii). 47  Ibid., 433–38 (1353, chaps. xii–xxvi). 48  According to Alfonso’s chronicler, around the time of Pedro’s birth, powerful Castilian nobles urged the king to put aside his Portuguese wife and marry instead his beloved mistress. Crónica de Alfonso XI, 231 (chap. xcvi).

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consequences, several of them did prove politically damaging, especially in respect to the king’s relations with the papacy. As ominous a harbinger as this was for Franco-Castilian relations, desertion of Blanche de Bourbon proved to be only the beginning. As the years passed, Pedro withdrew even the limited military assistance his father had lent the French in their conflict with England. At the same time, he subjected his imprisoned queen to isolation and increasingly harsh and humiliating treatment. Most fourteenth-century sources, including Ayala,49 accuse Pedro of actually having had Blanche murdered; whether or not this was true, it was widely believed, particularly in France. At first, Pedro’s half-brothers welcomed Albuquerque’s fall. Within a few months, however, the meteoric rise of Padilla’s relatives led to a complete about face on the part of the siblings. They now joined their former rival as well as other Castilian aristocrats, including even the queen mother, in a confederation aimed at taking control of the king, replacing his new pro-Padilla officials, and having him return to his young wife. Given the extent of this coalition, Pedro was compelled to meet with its members at a place called Tejadillo and for a time acquiesce in their demands.50 However, by the winter of 1354, the coalition was fast unraveling, due in part to Albuquerque’s death, in part to the king’s success in bribing its members.51 And within a year, it was in tatters as those who had failed to make their peace with the king went into exile, most prominent among them, his half-brother Enrique.52 Starting around 1356, Pedro, now twenty-two years of age, managed to take firm control of the kingdom and in the next decade, his power reached its zenith. During this period, he pursued policies that increasingly alienated not only many of his own subjects, but several neighboring states as well. The new king abandoned the foreign policy principles that had guided Alfonso XI— peace with Castile’s Christian neighbors, a reinvigorated crusading effort against Moorish Granada, and an officially neutral stance in the great conflict raging north of the Pyrenees, but one which tipped slightly toward France. Instead, he allied himself with Granada, launched a major war of conquest against his eastern neighbor, the Crown Aragon, and, breaking with France, moved ever closer to England. The resulting hostility of France, Aragon, and 49  Ayala, Pedro I, 512 (1361, chap. iii). 50  Ibid., 454–57 (1354, chaps. xxxii–xxxiv). At the Tejadillo meeting, the aristocrats chose as their spokesman, Ferrand Perez de Ayala, the chronicler’s father, whom he characterizes as “a sturdy and very reasonable knight.” 51  Ibid., 459–60, [1354, chap. xxxix], 470 (1356, chap. i). 52  Ibid., 473 (1356, chap. vi).

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the Papacy would ultimately become major factors in bringing about Pedro’s downfall. Pedro also failed to arrive at any satisfactory modus vivendi with his powerful half-brothers, the children of his father’s mistress, Leonor de Guzmán; in particular, the eldest of them, Enrique de Trastámara. Following his exile in 1356, Don Enrique spent the next decade aiding Pedro’s principal enemy, the king of Aragon. Of the seven sons of Doña Leonor who survived into his reign, Pedro would eventually have three of them killed, including the two youngest who had spent most of their youth in captivity and therefore played no role in the aristocratic uprisings against him.53 The other member of Alfonso’s illegitimate family who fell victim to the king was Enrique’s twin, Fadrique, who provided a particularly spectacular manifestation of royal treachery, one celebrated in the poetry of the period.54 In May, 1358, having just returned to Seville in triumph after retaking the town of Jumilla in Pedro’s war against Aragon, Fadrique was invited to dine in the alcazar. Here, several of Pedro’s bodyguards bludgeoned him to death, after which the king sat down to dine in the same room where his half-brother’s body lay.55 Examples abound of the king, first lulling a victim into a false sense of security, then, having him killed, often with extreme brutality. Not infrequently, such events occurred, despite promises of safe-conduct given the victim or 53  Early in 1356, with his enemies fleeing from the realm, Pedro took into custody his halfbrother, Juan, and placed him in close confinement in the town of Carmona along with his younger brother, Pedro. Both boys remained there until the king ordered them killed in 1359. Ayala, Pedro I, 470 (1356, chap. ii), 500 (1359, chap. xxiii). In his indignant defense of Pedro I, the seventeenth century scholar, Salazar de Mendoza passes over this double murder in relative silence. It is this highly partisan approach to the facts which led J.B. Sitges to say of that author “he strongly defends the memory of the monarch, albeit uncritically and without much basis in historical fact.” Pedro Salazar de Mendoza, Monarquía de España, 1:190; Sitges, Mujeres, 36. 54  See, for example: “Romance de don Fadrique, maestre de Santiago, y de como le mandó matar el rey don Pedro su hermano,” in Poetas Líricos Castellanos (Romances Viejos Castellanos), 28 vols. (Madrid, Hernando y Compañia, 1899), 8:124–26, 129–31. For a nineteenth century romantic view of the tales surrounding Pedro, Prince Fadrique, and Queen Blanche (somewhat bowlderized in keeping with the period during which it was written), see volume two of Frances Minto Elliot’s Old Court Life in Spain, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894). 55  The story of this event is contained in one of the most graphic passages of Ayala’s chronicle. The chronicler tells of Fadrique and his lone companion, Sancho Ruiz de Villegas, being chased through the buildings by Pedro’s guards and eventually bludgeoned to death. If Ayala is to be believed, Pedro himself may have assisted in finishing off his halfbrother, after which, he calmly ordered dinner served in the same room with the corpse. Ayala, Pedro I, 481–83 (1358, chaps. ii–iv).

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in violation of the laws of hospitality. The pattern began to emerge as early as 1351, less than a year into the reign. When the king and his entourage arrived at Burgos, they found their path blocked by Garcilaso de la Vega, once the king’s guardian, but now the leader of a faction opposing Pedro’s chief adviser. After a few tense moments, the parties reached an agreement and the crisis passed—or so it seemed. Consequently, when de la Vega received an invitation to the palace several days later, he saw no reason not to accept.56 Once inside, the king ordered his arrest, after which he was given only enough time to confess before being beaten to death by royal bodyguards. Not satisfied with the death, Pedro continued to vent his anger on de la Vega’s lifeless corpse, which he had tossed into the street to be trampled by bulls being run to the main plaza. Afterwards, what remained was placed in a basket on the city walls, for the birds to pick over. A similar fate befell Pedro’s cousin, Juan of Aragon. To cement the loyalty of this exiled Aragonese prince, the king promised him lordship over the Basque province of Vizcaya. When the time came to deliver, however, he reneged. Rather than compensate Don Juan, Pedro invited him to the royal residence in Bilbao where he was brutally murdered. Afterwards, Pedro had the body thrown out of a window into the main plaza. As a curious crowd gathered, he announced mockingly, “Behold, this is your lord of Vizcaya.” Some days later, Juan’s corpse was brought back to Burgos, where, instead of receiving burial, it was simply thrown into the river.57 In all of these cases, the king not only murdered the man, but afterwards dishonored his body. Such incidents produced in the minds of many Castilians, in particular members of the nobility, the image of a king, employing deceit and cruelty whenever it came to dealing with opposition, past or present, real or imaginary. Pedro’s unforgiving nature, combined with a very long memory, made it hazardous for anyone who had ever opposed him to attempt reconciliation. Time and again, men thought they had made peace with the monarch, only to be assassinated when an opportunity arose. When Pedro could not lay his hands on the would-be victim, he not infrequently inflicted his vengeance on a relative. In the most famous example of this, the king, finding himself unable to seize Juan Alfonso de Guzmán, had the fugitive’s mother burned at the stake in the plaza at Seville.58 As the king’s 56  So confident was de la Vega that Pedro would observe the rules of hospitality that despite a warning from the queen mother, he decided to accept the invitation, accompanied by only three companions. Ibid., 414–15 (1351, chap. vi). 57  Ibid., 484 (1358, chap. vi). 58  Ayala states only that she was executed in an extraordinarily cruel manner. Ibid., 573 (1367, chap. xxvii). Later sources explain the method of execution.

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actions became increasingly murderous, he alienated an ever-widening circle within the aristocracy, propelling many aristocrats who fled his wrath into the arms of his half-brother, Enrique. There is a standard formula in medieval Castilian documents: “so pena de mi merced” which translates roughly into English as “on pain of my displeasure.” Pedro’s documents are replete with this warning, accompanied by the not uncommon clarifier, “de los cuerpos e de los que auedes” in other words, royal displeasure would affect both the body and worldly goods of the person at whom it was aimed. On the other hand, quite a number of Pedro’s documents carry an alternative, more explicitly threatening formula that is not all that common in Spanish: the king tells the people of Murcia that if they fail him, “que los vuestros cabeças me tornaria por ello.” “Let your heads be returned to me as a result.”59 Although at times, Pedro sounds remarkably like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, for those who experienced his displeasure, it was no laughing matter. As the years passed, the war with Aragon appears to have had a “brutalizing” effect upon the Castilian monarch who had already shown such tendencies from fairly early in his reign. On the one hand, Pedro acted increasingly ruthless with the enemy. When the conflict was still young, he had made efforts to win over lands recently seized from Aragon. For example, in a royal letter, dated October, 1357, the king conceded to conquered Jumilla the status of a royal town and conferred upon its inhabitants the municipal code or fuero enjoyed by the people of neighboring Murcia.60 By contrast, Pedro’s hardening attitude is seen clearly in a document dating to late June, 1364, sent to his frontline city of Murcia, a major staging point in the Castilian war effort. On this occasion, when a force of Moorish light cavalry supplied by Castile’s ally, Granada, was about to cross the frontier and attack the Valencian town of Orihuela, Pedro commanded his Murcian subjects: Go with them … and do such a good job devastating Orihuela that there is nothing left to destroy; and wage the cruelest war you can, cutting off the heads of everyone you capture, so that there will be no man of Aragon taken who is not immediately killed.61 59  The following royal instructions that appear in DPI, all contain some variant on this warning: 93:157; 100:162–63; 103:165; 116:175. 60  D PI, 87:152–53. 61  D PI, 7:162–63. y de con ellos … e talad muy bien Orihuela que non finque cosa della por talar e fazer la as cruel guerra que pudieredes, a quantos omes tomeredes cortalles las cabeças que non fingue ome de Aragon que sea tomado que non sea luego muerto.

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He left no doubt that those who failed to follow these bloody instructions would earn more than just his displeasure: “be assured that if you do not do this, your heads will be sent to me!”62 But it was not just the enemy who experienced the king’s expanding use of terror as the war progressed.63 The effects extended into his own ranks, enveloping any number of his subjects whom he regarded as having betrayed the war effort, given comfort to the enemy, or even those who had failed to show sufficient zeal for the conflict. Most of the executions and assassinations that won Pedro his famous sobriquet can be traced to the war years: the spectacular murder of his half-brother, Fadrique on grounds of having had treasonable intercourse with the enemy; the sudden execution of his principal adviser, Gutier Fernández de Toledo for much the same reason; the imprisonment and death in 1364 of justicia mayor, Juan Alfonso de Benavides, whose only “crime” had been to surrender Segorbe back to the Aragonese when the king failed to relieve its starving garrison.64 The list could go on. Not even an unbroken record of loyal service was sufficient to shield a person against Pedro’s wrath. Throughout the first ten years of the reign, Gutier Fernández de Toledo was a member of the king’s inner circle. He commanded armies in the field, conducted diplomacy, and held various important royal offices. None of this earned Don Gutier the benefit of the doubt, or even a chance to explain, when, in 1360, Pedro began to suspect him on the basis of very questionable evidence of dealing with the enemy. Sent to participate in a new round of peace talks with Aragon, Toledo joined his fellow negotiators near the border, only to learn that they had been instructed to seize and execute him.65 Before cutting off his head and sending it back to Pedro, they per62  Ibid., 163. Sed çiertos que si lo asi non fizieredes que a los nuestros cabeças me tornaria por ello. 63  For more information concerning Pedro I’s use of terror as a military strategy, see: Villalon, “‘Cut Off Their Heads or I’ll Cut Off Yours’: The Strategy and Tactics of Castile in the War of the Two Pedros (1356–1366),” in The Hundred Years War (Part II): Different Vistas, ed L.J. Andrew Villalon and Donald J. Kagay (Leiden, 2008), 153–82. 64  In 1364, an Aragonese army, bent on recapturing Segorve, laid siege to the town. After a long defense, and with supplies fast running out, Benavides agreed that if Pedro failed to send a relief force within a specified time, he would surrender. However, in return for this commitment, the Aragonese permitted the justiciary leave to return to Castile to see if any such relief would be forthcoming. Pedro, although he had no intention of relieving the beleaguered garrison, condemned his justiciary for even daring to negotiate with the enemy, however desperate the circumstances. Instead of permitting the nobleman to return to his post to carry on as best he could, the king tossed him into prison where shortly afterwards he died. Ayala., Pedro I, 536 (1365, chap. iii). 65  In 1360, Toledo led a Castilian delegation to Tudela, a town in Navarre, in order to conduct peace talks with Aragon. When the negotiations reached an impasse, he appears to have

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mitted the condemned man to write one final letter. The dying man’s words would prove prophetic: My Lord, I … kiss your hands and take leave of you, now to journey before an even greater lord than yourself … At the moment of my death, I give you my final counsel—if you do not put aside the dagger, if you do not stop committing such murders, then you shall lose your realm and place your person in the greatest jeopardy.66 Toledo’s advice fell on deaf ears. Royal terror directed against both friend and foe continued and had its effect—though not the one Pedro envisaged. When failure, even after heroic efforts, could occasion imprisonment or death, many who failed adopted as the wisest course desertion to the other side. Time and again, a Castilian noble, not wishing to face the king’s wrath, simply went over to Enrique. As a result, his following that numbered at most a few hundred when the war began grew to thousands. These Castilian exiles proved highly motivated; they were responsible for most Aragonese attacks on Castilian territory. The “counterproductivity” of the royal policy is perhaps best-illustrated by the fate of a Castilian garrison at Murviedro. After a siege of many months, the men were reduced to eating their horses, mules, and whatever rats had not already left the place. Surrender became inevitable, but on honorable terms that permitted the survivors to leave with their arms. As they marched out, Enrique, who had been with the Aragonese, addressed them from the side of the road, reminding them that they could not expect a very pleasant welcome back in Castile. Forced to conclude he was right, most joined him on the spot.67 Tension between monarchy and aristocracy was a medieval fact-of-life. Any king worth his salt did his best to extend royal power and curb aristocratic excesses. In turn, the aristocrats were frequently out to increase their wealth and power at the expense of the crown. In this never-ending jostling for position, aristocrats proved notoriously anarchic; as a result, the coalitions they formed tended to be short-lived. A king often broke them up most effectively opened private talks with the Aragonese infante, Ferran. According to Ayala, he did this in an attempt to bribe the infante into coming over to Pedro’s side. Apparently, Pedro saw the whole affair differently; from that moment, he began to suspect Toledo of treachery. Despite the nobleman’s long record of loyal service, he was given no opportunity to explain his actions or to defend himself. ibid., 501–2 (1360, chap. iv), 504 (1360 chap. viii), 507 (1360, chap. xvii). 66  Ibid., 507 (1360, chap. xvii). 67  Ibid., 535–36 (1365, chap. iii).

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by corrupting individual members rather than by direct military action; as in fact Pedro was able to do early in his reign. However, during the 1360s, a great part of the Castilian aristocracy rose up against their king and supported a rival for the throne with a degree of class unity and grim determination rarely if ever equaled in its history. It was Pedro’s behavior which gave rise to this unrelenting effort to get rid of him. Confronted by such a record, a modern psychiatrist would be hard put not to reach a diagnosis of progressive paranoia, aggravated by homicidal rage and sadistic tendencies. Even in the Middle Ages, the traditional sanction of monarchy—“that divinity which doth hedge a king”—could not always preserve a monarch from the consequences of his or her actions. Loyalty could not survive in a realm where the ruler punished with death not only obdurate opponents, but also faithful supporters; where royal promises meant so little; where men or women suffered for the activities of their relatives. Even a king could get away with these things only occasionally, not habitually. 4

Aragon’s Defender: Pere “the Ceremonious”

Pere III was born two months premature on September 5, 1319, in the town of Balaguer68 in the county of Catalonia.69 Despite his Catalan birth, the young prince spent most of his younger years in Aragonese speaking regions, a fact that seems to have molded his later Catalan accent.70 In the first book of his chronicle, the king, showing more than a touch of pride at having managed to

68  In composing this brief treatment of Pere III’s life and career, the authors have made extensive use not only of the king’s chronicle and Zurita’s Anales de la Corona de Aragon, but also J.N. Hillgarth’s introduction to the English translation. See: Pere III, Chronicle, 1:1–122. Hillgarth utilizes a wide variety of sources to explore the career of the long-reigning monarch and the part he played in writing his own chronicle. We have also consulted David Cohen’s article, “Secular Pragmatism and Thinking about War in some Court Writings of Pere III el Cerimonios” in Crusaders, Condottieri, and Cannon: Medieval Warfare in Societies around the Meditedrranean, ed. L.J. Andrew Villalon and Donald J. Kagay (Leiden, 2003), 18–53. 69  For a treatment of Pere’s childhood and adolescence, see Daniel Girona i Llogostera, “Itinerari de l’Infant Pere (després Rei Pere III) (1319–1336),” Estudis Universitaris Catalans [hereafter EUC], 18 (1933): 336–55; 19 (1934): 81–262. 70  Antoni Ferrando Francés,“Aproximació dialectològica a Llibre del Fets de Jaume I,” Arxiu de textos catalans antics [hereafter ATCA] 20 (2001): 511–31, esp. 512–13; Fernando González Olló, “Opciones y preferencias lingüisticas de rey, Pedro IV de Aragón,” Revista de Filología Española 37, no. 2 (2007): 293–322, esp. 304.

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survive, says of himself that at his delivery he was “so feeble and impaired that neither the midwives nor others present at our birth believed we would live.”71 Despite this inauspicious beginning and several severe bouts of illness during his youth, Pere did live to the comparatively ripe old age of sixty-eight and his reign of over half a century ultimately became the second longest among Aragonese monarchs. In writing of him, Zurita suggests that his character may have been shaped at least in part by his lack of physical prowess: “As this prince was feeble and delicate in his body, his spirit was all the more daring; he was of an incredible promptitude and ardour, greatly vigorous in the execution of all he undertook with spirit and valor for any enterprise.”72 Pere was the second son of Prince Alfons and his first wife, Teresa de Entença, heiress to the county of Urgell, who would die when the boy was eight years old, five days before her husband succeeded to the throne as Alfons III (r. 1327–1336).73 The young prince was largely raised by his mother until her death. Throughout these opening years, his father, whom one historian characterizes as having compiled a royal record of “lethargy, illness, and ineptitude,” took little interest in his second son; not until the boy became the perspective heir, due to his older brother having renounced the throne to enter the church. Even then, Pere spent much of his sickly childhood removed from the royal court where, following his mother’s death, his despised step-mother, Leonor of Castile, exercised preponderant influence over his father. There can be no doubt that Queen Leonor saw her step-son as an impediment to promoting the advancement of her own offspring, Pere’s half-siblings, Ferran and Juan. Consequently, from the moment he became crown prince, Pere found himself in a struggle to preserve the royal patrimony, keeping it out of the acquisitive hands of these half-brothers. While his father lived, Pere and the queen had several dangerous confrontations in the course of which the king tended to support his wife rather than his son. Throughout these years, Doña Leonor saw to it that Ferran and Juan received rich endowments from the crown. Enraged when part of his inheritance ended up in the hands of his step-brothers, the prince in characteristic

71  Pere III, Chronicle, 1:40, 137 [I, 1]. 72  Zurita, 6:713 [X, 39]. 73  Alfons was himself a younger son and therefore not heir presumptive to the kingdom at the time of Pere’s birth. Despite this, he became crown prince several months after Pere was born; a result of his elder brother having renounced the throne to enter the church. CSJP, 102 (chap. 39); Pere III, 1:171–72 (I:42); Roger Sablonier, “The Aragonese Royal Family around 1300,” in Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study of the Family and Kinship, ed. Hans Medick and David Warren Sabean (Cambridge, 1984), 210–39, esp. 224–26.

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fashion fumed and awaited a chance for revenge.74 Following Pere’s succession and their mother’s retreat into her native kingdom of Castile, the two young men often numbered among the king’s principal antagonists. Their struggle would end only with the death of both royal siblings; in Ferran’s case with considerable complicity on the part of Pere himself, a complicity the king readily admits in his own chronicle.75 The uncertain situation in which the king found himself during the early years almost certainly contributed to his overwhelming desire for order and respect, a desire reflected in his extensive restructuring of the royal court in a manner considerably more complex than that established several generations earlier by his great-grandfather, Pere II. All courtly functions that the king participated in or merely viewed “had to be performed with due honor to our presence.”76 Pere’s preoccupation with ceremonial matters earned him his primary sobriquet of “the Ceremonious” (el Cerimonios). Royal documents indicate the king’s firm belief that the Almighty inspired his actions; and that any opposition to him which he habitually characterized as treason was also opposition to God’s will. This led him to conclude that he could legitimately oppose not only temporal powers, but also the papacy to advance what he considered to be a divinely inspired plan.77 Pere’s other sobriquet—“El del Punyalet” (He of the Small Dagger)—grew out of an incident reflecting the king’s overriding belief in the proper powers of monarchy and his right to exercise those powers. In July, 1348, forces loyal to him defeated the Unionist rebellion at the battle of Epila, near Zaragoza. Having executed its leaders (with the notable exception of his own half-brother, Ferran), he marched south and threatened to destroy the city of Valencia, center of the now defunct unionist movement. Pere’s fury extended to the unionist documents containing aristocratic privileges extorted from the crown in 1265 and observed during the intervening decades. During a meeting in October, 1348, the king seized one of these documents and attacked it so violently with the “small dagger” he was holding that he managed to badly cut his

74  Pere III, 1:174–75 (1:43); Kagay, “Dynastic Dimension,” 86; Rafael Tasis i Marca, Pere el Cerimoniós i els seus fills (1957; repr., Barcelona, 1980), 5–6. 75  Pere III, Chronicle, 2:539–540 [VI, 35]. 76  “Ordenacions,” In Colección de documentos inéditos del archivo general de la corona de Aragón [hereafter CDACA], ed. Próspero de Bofarull y Moscaró et al. 41 vols. (Barcelona,1847–1910), 5:8–9, 134, 220; Marta Vanlandingham, Transforming the State: King, Court and Political Culture in the Realms of Aragon (1213–1387) (Leiden, 2002), 108–9, 113–14. 77  Pere III, 1:125–32 (Prologue, chaps. 1–5).

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own hand, thus giving rise to his sobriquet.78 The fires of vengeance that could burn bright within this outwardly aloof monarch could suddenly surface when he felt his royal prerogatives to have been challenged. Although Pere married four times during his reign, only the third marriage to a powerful woman, Elionor of Sicily (r. 1349–1375), had lasting importance. In their twenty-six years together, the royal couple produced a number of children who survived infancy,79 among them two sons, each of whom would ultimately succeed to the throne.80 The death of the second son, Martí I, in 1410 would put an end to the ancient house of Barcelona, setting up a succession crisis in which a cadet branch of the Trastámaran dynasty from neighboring Castile came to the throne. Behind the strong personal image this ruler tried to convey to the outside world lay what seems to have been a feeling of inferiority as regards several of his more war-like and militarily talented-progenitors. In particular, he confronted the spectre of his great-great grandfather, Jaume I known as “the Conqueror” (r. 1213–1276) whom he hoped to emulate, despite which he himself never proved to be a formidable warrior. Like Jaume, Pere produced a personal chronicle setting forth “the great deeds” occurring in his own time; however, far from placing himself in Jaume’s company as a chivalric icon, the royal account he preserved shows just how different he was from his famous forbear in appearance and character.81 In describing his relatively few battle experiences, the king did everything he could to portray his actions in the best possible light, imbuing them with a bravery that his illustrious predecessor would have heartily approved. Despite this the quality that shows through most clearly on the king’s part is not chivalry, but cunning; a quality that he himself makes no attempt to hide.82 78   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1131, f. 85. See also: Epistolari, 100–1 (doc. 10), Manuel Bofarull y de Sartorio, “Procesos contra los nobles de la Unión aragonesa en 1301,” in CDACA, 38:273–77, 388–90, 395–97, 414–15; Jaime Caruana Gómez de Barreda, “Dos relaciones inéditos sobre sucesos de la Unión,” EEMCA, 3 (1947–1948): 484–97; Dualde Serrano, “Tres episodios,” 295–377; Shneidman, Rise, 2:486–503; Rafael Tasis i Marca, Pere el Cerimoniós i els seus fills. (1957; repr. Barcelona, 1980), 45–50. 79  A son by Pere’s first marriage to Marie of Navarre failed to survive infancy. 80  Pere’s second wife, Leonor of Portugal, died in 1348, very likely a victim of the Black Death that ravaged the crown of Aragon during Pere’s reign. If so, this would have made her one of if not the highest born female victim of the plague. 81  Pere III, Chronicle, 132 (Prologue, chap. 6). 82  An excellent treatment of this aspect of Pere’s character can be found in Cohen’s article, “Secular Pragmatism,” 22, 25, 41, 50. See also, Donald J. Kagay, “The Theory and Practice of War and Government practiced by King Pere III “The Ceremonious” of Aragon (1336– 1387), Mediterranean Studies 27, no. 1 (2019): 63–85.

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Ironically, although this king lacked both the military skill and the valor of his forbearers, Zurita was correct in saying that “[he] ruled for over fifty years and was always at war.”83 During that half century, the king battled one adversary after another, both foreign and domestic. These including his cousin, the king of Majorca; his nation’s great maritime rival, Genoa;84 his own rebellious subjects, particularly those living in Aragon, Valencia85 and the nearby island of Sardinia, as well as three successive monarchs of Castile, including both his long term enemy, Pedro I, and his one time ally, Enrique II.86 Although these seemingly unending conflicts gained for the Crown of Aragon greater control over what had been the vassal kingdom of Majorca, tightened its hold on the island of Sardinia, and preserved it from the depredations of Castile, the strain ultimately placed upon royal finances was severe. As a result, Pere increasingly fell back upon support from the Principality of Catalonia centered on its great maritime city of Barcelona, the wealthiest of his realms and the only one which never rebelled against him. In return for this support, the king was forced to concede to his Catalan subjects ever greater rights of self-government, including a much-strengthened legislative assembly, the corts, with increased control over the raising and spending of revenues.87 Despite chronic involvement in military adventures, Pere possessed in considerable measure the soul of a scholar and artist. According to Hillgarth, “one can see in Pere a conscious attempt to emulate the earlier Court of Alfonso X 83  Zurita, 4:713, [X, 39]. 84  For the Crown of Aragon’s military and diplomatic policies during Pere’s reign, see: José Vicente Cabezuelo Pliego, “Diplomacía y guerra en el Mediterráneo medieval. La liga véneto-aragonesa contra Génova de 1351,” AEM 36, no. 1 (enero-junio, 2006): 253–94; Steven A. Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese 958–1528 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 222; Francesco Giunta, Aragoneses y Catalanes en el Mediterráneo, 2 vols. (Barcelona: Ariel, 1989), 1:146–55; idem, “La político mediterranea di Pietro il Cerimonioso,” in Pere el Cerimoniós i la seva época, ed. María Teresa Ferrer i Mallol (Barcelona: Institució Milà i Fontanals, CSIC, 1989), 59–76. 85  For Pere’s conflict with the Aragonese and Valencian nobility, see: Carruana Gómez de Barreda, “Dos relaciones,” 484–97; Dualde Serrano, “Tres episodios,” pp. 295–377; Shneidman, Rise, 2:486–506. 86  For Pere’s on-going relations with Pedro I and Enrique II, see Donald J. Kagay, “Disposable Alliances: Aragon and Castile during the War of the Two Pedros and Beyond,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History [Third Series], X (2013): 111–47. 87  For detailed treatment of the limitations near-constant warfare placed on Pere’s control of finances, see Kagay’s articles “A Government Besieged by Conflict: The Parliament of Monzón (1362–1363) as Military Financier,” in The Hundred Years War: A Wider Focus, ed. L.J. Andrew Villalon and Donald J. Kagay (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2004), 117–48;“The Parliament of the Crown of Aragon as Military Financier in the War of the Two Pedros,” JMMH 14 (2016): 57–77; idem, “War Financing in the Late-Medieval Crown of Aragon,” JMMH 6 (2008), 119–48.

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of Castile. Like Alfonso, Pere was interested in law, astrology, poetry and history, in Arabic and Hebrew, as well as Christian learning.”88 He is credited with fostering a new prose style of Catalan—“the king’s Catalan”—that helped inspire a literary flowering in the language. He wrote poetry and composed his own speeches, a few of which found their way into his chronicle. And while Pere preferred Catalan, he could function in various other languages including Aragonese (not far removed from Castilian) French, and Latin. In 1346, he created an official archive for the crown of Aragon, situated in Barcelona. And although preservation of state documents pre-dates Pere’s action by some decades, in institutionalizing this activity, he helped give rise to one of the most important repositories of late medieval Europe, thus avoiding the fate of documents in neighboring Castile where similar preservation would not get underway until a century and a half later. Pere III joined the ranks of royal book collectors of the later Middle Ages, men like his contemporary, Charles V (r. 1364–1380) of France, whose extensive collection would become the genesis of the French national library. For his part, the Catalan monarch was interested primarily in historical works. In addition to his own chronicle, he fostered the writing of other histories dealing with Aragon, similar to those which had earlier appeared in France and Castile.89 He entrusted guardianship of his library to the monastery of Poblet where his great-grandfather, Jaume the Conqueror, was buried, charging the Cistercian abbot with “the building of a library in which we have determined to place all our books.” In fact, it is Pere’s involvement with Poblet that best illustrates his considerable artistic interest. Here, he worked throughout his reign to create a royal mausoleum for future monarchs at a time when no comparably resplendent royal burial ground existed on the peninsula.90

88  Pere III, Chronicle, Introduction, 1:36. As noted earlier in this chapter, Alfonso X is known in Spanish history as “el Sabio” that is translated as either “the Wise” or (more appropriately) “the Learned.” For the importance of astrology in Pere’s realm, see: Michael A. Ryan, A Kingdom of Stargazers: Astrology and Authority in the Late-Medieval Crown of Aragon (Ithaca, N.Y. , 2011), 52–53. 89  Most important of these was the so-called Crónica de San Juan de la Pena, tracing the history of the Count-kings of Aragon before Pere’s reign. For an English version, see: The Chronicle of San Juan de la Peña: A Fourteenth Century Official History of the Crown of Aragon, trans. with an introduction and notes by Lynn H. Nelson (Philadelphia, 1991). 90  It would be another two centuries before Philip II (r. 1556–1598) established a similar repository for Spanish kings beginning with the Hapsburg Dynasty beneath his great monastery-palace-royal cemetery of San Lorenzo del Escorial, north of Madrid.

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Among Pere’s many projects, composing the chronicle of his reign ranked high on his list of priorities.91 In 1373, as the project approached completion, the king stated: “To put in writing Our deeds was a thing We have much at heart and We greatly desire it shall come to perfection.”92 While there is some indication that Pere may have been giving thought to his chronicle as early as the 1340s, serious work on it dates largely to the 1370s. The two surviving redactions appear to have been finished between 1383 and 1385. To all appearances, the king’s chronicle was a collaborative effort between Pere and a succession of trusted officials working under his close supervision. The first six chapters of the work cover in considerable detail the nearly half century from 1319, the year of Pere’s birth, to 1366, when his decade long war against Pedro I came to an abrupt end. Thereafter, the coverage of events leaves much to be desired. Although there is a relatively short and rather poorly organized appendix that carries the story forward until roughly 1385, two years before the king’s death, most scholars regard this as a later addition (just how late is a matter of some debate), added to bring the work to its logical ending by at least mentioning the closing years of the reign. Aragonese historians of the later Middle Ages and early modern period have not been uniform in their treatment of this complex figure; while a number have echoed the king’s positive assessment of his own person and reign, others, including one of the most important, Gerónimo Zurita, have been far more critical of the king. In recent centuries, scholars have tended to follow Zurita’s harder line on Pere. The nineteenth century historian, Francisco Montsalvatge, went so far as to characterize him as having “evil instincts and a depraved heart, a sordid viper and the murderer of his brother.”93 An English writer who studied eastern Spain in the 1930s called him “a born intriguer whose weapons were duplicity and hypocrisy … whose punctiliousness did not restrain him from tyranny and murder.”94 According to J. Lee Schneidman, Pere came to adulthood “in a sea of fear and hate,” impelling him to lie, steal, cheat and murder.”95 In the course of this book, the reader will be better able to reach his or her own judgements in respect to the two principal figures who gave their names to the War of the Two Pedros. 91  For the formation of Pere’s Chronicle, see Fredéric Alchalabi, “A Chronicler King: Rewriting History and the Quest for Image in the Catalan Chronicle of Pedro III (1319–1386/1387),” ITMA 2 (2008): 177–89; Ramon Gubern i Domenech, “Notes sobre la reducció de la Crònica de Pere el Ceremonious,” Estudis Romanics 2 (1949–1950): 135–43. 92  Quoted in Hillgarth’s Introduction, Pere III, Chronicle, 1:61. 93  Francisco Montsalvatge y Fossas, El Vizcondado de Bas (Olot, 1893), 65. 94  Chaytor, History, 166. 95  Shneidman, Rise, 1:83.

Genealogy 1

Jeanne

Louis x, 1316

Philips iv, 1314

Margaret

Blanche

Charles iv, 1328

Henry v, 1422

Henry iv, 1413

John of Gaunt, 1399

Edward iii, 1377

=

Inter-related French and English Royal Houses during the Hundred Years War

Charles vi, 1422

Charles v, 1380

John, 1364

Philip vi, 1350

Charles of Valois

Louis XI, 1483 “the Spider King”

Catherine of Valois Charles vii, 1461 “the Dauphin” Henry vi, 1471 King of England and France

Isabella = Edward ii, 1328

Edward i, 1307

Dates show the year of an individual’s death. Descendants of Edward i are in italics.

Jeanne

Philip v, 1322

Philip iii, 1285

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Alfonso de la Cerda

Fernando (d.i.)

Genealogy 2

Rulers of late medieval Castile

Abbreviations: = signifies “married”; ~ signifies a non-married sexual liaison; d.i. means “died in infancy”; d.w.i. means “died without issue”

Fernando de Antequera King of Aragon (1412–1416)

Pedro i (1357–1367) King of Portugal

Beatriz = Alfonso iv of Castile of Portugal

Isabel (m. Edmund Langley Duke of York)

Philippa of Lancaster (m. Joao i of Portugal)

Constanza (m. John of Gaunt Duke of Lancaster)

Blanche de = Pedro i “the Cruel” ~ María de Padilla (1350–1366/1367–1369) Bourbon (d.w.i. 1361)

Catherine of Lancaster (m. Enrique iii)

Sancho

Enrique iii = Catherine of (1390–1406) Lancaster

Tello

Beatriz

Fernando

Fernando iv = Constance (1296–1312) of Portugal

Sancho iv = María de Molina “the Brave” (1284–1296)

Leonor de Guzmán ~ Alfonso xi = María of Portugal (1312–1350)

Beatriz = Alfonso iii of Portugal

(1) (2) Leonor of Aragon = Juan i = Beatriz of Portugal (dau. of Pere iii) (1379–1390)

Juana Manuel = Enrique ii de Trastámara (1366–67/1369–79)

Blanca = Juan Manuel

Fernando

Fernando de la Cerda = Blanche of France

Alfonso x = Yolanda (1252–1284) dau. of Jaume i “the Conqueror” of Aragon

Ferdinand iii “el Santo” King of Castile (1217–1252) King of Leon (1230–1252)

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Pedro (d. 1347)

Genealogy 3

Infante Ferran

Infante Joan

(2) =

Joanna

Pedro iv (Pere iii) (1336–1387)

Alfons iv (1327–1336) Teresa d’Entenza

María

Joan i (1387–1395) (d.w.i.)

(1) = María of Navarre

(1) =

Isabel = Diniz, King of Portugal

Rulers of late medieval Crown of Aragon

Constanza

Leonor de Castilla

Alfons iii (1285–1291)

(3) = Leonor of Sicily

Federigo iii of Sicily

| Isabel

Jaume, Count of Urgel _____ ____________________ | | Alfons Pedro (d. 1377) (d. 1379)

(4) = Sibilia Fortià

Fernando i “de Antequera” (1412–1416) (First Trastámaran King of Aragon)

Leonor of = Juan i Aragon of Castile (1379–1390)

Enrique iii = Catherine of of Castile Lancaster (1390–1406)

Martí i (1395–1410) (d.w.i.)

(2) = Leonor of Portugal (d.w.i)

Jaume ii = Blanche (1291–1327) of Naples

Pedro iii (Pere ii) = Constance, granddau. of Emperor Frederick ii (d. 1250) (1276–1285)

Jaume i “the Conqueror” (1213–1276)

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part 2 Chronology of the Conflict

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Chapter 5

War of the Two Pedros: Causes and First Months (1356–1357) Pedro I came to the throne of Castile when his father, Alfonso XI, died at the siege of Gibraltar on March 27, 1350, Europe’s highest-ranking victim of the Black Death. The new king was only sixteen-years-old. He soon found himself surrounded by competing political factions, whose rivalry convulsed the early years of his reign. Among those struggling for power were Pedro’s mother, María of Portugal; his leading adviser, Lord Alfonso de Alburquerque, his Aragonese cousins Princes Ferran and Juan, living in exile within Castile; as well as a number of half-siblings, sons of his father’s mistress, Leonor de Guzmán, who would become the bane of his existence. Of these, the most important was the eldest, Enrique, count of Trastámara, who many years later would seize Pedro’s crown and become the king of Castile. At the very outset of his reign, Pedro contracted a serious illness which almost occasioned civil war between two potential successors, the Aragonese prince, Ferran, and the current champion of Castile’s high nobility, Juan Nuñez de Lara, as both men jockeyed for the succession. The threat was averted only by the king’s almost miraculous recovery.1 At the same time, this illness early in the reign led others, perhaps including the king of Aragon, Pere III, to believe they could profit at the expense of a weakened monarch. 1

On the Eve of Conflict

As late as 1354, the peace between Pere and Pedro might have still seemed intact from their diplomatic exchanges in which the older monarch described his considerably younger counterpart as “a brother whom we greatly love, esteem, trust, and wish honor and good fortune.”2 Nothing could have been 1  Ayala, 409–10 (1350, chaps. xiii–xiv); Estow, Pedro, 20–30; García Toraño, Rey Don Pedro, 76–82; Mérimée, History, 1:70–76; Valdeón Baruque, Pedro, 60–61. For death of Alfonso XI as highest-placed victim of the Black Plague and the English princess Joan, Pedro’s intended who died in 1348 see ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1134, ff. 36r–v. See also: Black Death, 250; López de Meneses, Documentos, 377–78 (doc. 95); Ziegler, Black Death, 80, 113–14. 2  A CA, Cancillería real, Cartas reales [Pedro IV], no. 5399; R. 1030, ff. 9v–10. See also: Ferrer i Mallol, Entre, 573–79, 587–89; Kagay, “Dynastic Dimension,” 80.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004425057_007

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farther from the truth, however, as the frontiers of the two realms continued on high alert with unending rumors of surprise attacks about to be launched by one side or the other. As in past decades, the situation along the border, which one of Pere’s administrators proclaimed as being ready to “burst into fire and flames,” was only one of several crosses that the Aragonese ruler had to bear at this time.3 Throughout the early 1350s, the principal problems that Pere III faced had little to do with the Iberian Peninsula. Instead, his attention focused on the defense of his Mediterranean holdings, especially the island of Sardinia. Although the native population of the island was traditionally divided into four regional districts known as “judgeships.” Until the early fourteenth century, these remained under the control of bitter rivals, the Genoese and Pisans who periodically clashed over them. While the papacy had granted the Aragonese king both Corsica and Sardinia as early as 1297, Aragon did not attempt to make good its claim to either island for over two decades, despite the fact that Aragonese monarchs fully appreciated their strategic importance in consolidating their expanding Mediterranean empire. Then, in 1322, Jaume II launched a successful invasion of the island, after having formed an alliance with the Genoese against the supporters of Pisa. By 1324, he had gained control over most of the island. For the next two decades, Jaume, as well as his son and grandson, Alfons II and Pere III, poured men and money into Sardinia, without ever managing to gain full control over the island.4 To complicate matters, during this period, Genoa, which had at one time been Aragon’s ally on the island, now became the kingdom’s bitterest overseas enemy. To address the changing situation, in 1351, Pere III hammered out a new alliance with Genoa’s deadliest enemy, Italy’s other great maratime city, Venice. Despite this Venetian connection, in 1355, faced with yet another insurrection among the Sardinians, the embattled monarch found it necessary to negotiate a temporary truce with the Genoese.5 As a result of these overseas 3  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1603, ff. 148r–v; Cartas reales [Pedro IV], no. 5409. See also: Ferrer i Mallol, “Causes,”460; idem, Entre, 572–76; Kagay, “Dynastic Dimension,” 81–82. 4  David Abulafia, A Mediterranean Emporium: The Catalan Emporium: The Catalan Kingdom of Majorca (Cambridge, 1994), 236; idem, Western Mediterranean Kingdoms, 123–27; John Day, La Sardegna sotto la dominazione pisano-genovese (Turin, 1986); Shneidman, Rise, 2:350–51. 5  Abulafia, Western Mediterranean Kingdoms, 179; José Vicente Cabezuelo Pliego, “Diplomacia y guerra en el Mediterráneo medieval. La liga véneto-aragonesa contra Génova de 1351,” AEM 36, No. 1 (January-June, 2006): 253–94, esp. 265–72, 277, 288; Steven A. Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese 958–1528 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996), 222; Francesco Giunta, Aragoneses y catalanes en el Mediterráneo, 2 vols. (Barcelona, 1989), 1:146–55; idem, “La politico mediterranea di Pietro il Cerimonioso,” in Pere el Cerimoniós i la seva època (Barcelona, 1989), 59–76; Frederick C. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic, (Baltimore, 1973), 174–79; Giuseppe Meloni, Genova e

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setbacks, it eventually became clear to Pere that he was no longer able to afford his costly military policy in Sardinia and that he might even have to seek a diplomatic solution. As a result of these pressing imperial concerns, for nearly a year, Pere III was absent from his Iberian realms, leading the fight on the island and overseeing negotiations. Meanwhile, he left the homeland to be run by a regency council under his uncle, Prince Pere I.6 For its part, the ruling council back home eventually came to favor peace, but not from any Mediterranean considerations. Instead, its members had come to fear the new Castilian king whom they thought was already beginning to threaten the Aragonese and Valencian frontiers.7 Here, matters stood in the mid-1350s. Having cobbled together an uneasy peace in the western Mediterranean, Pere now seemed ready to draw his young Castilian counterpart into another round of border negotiations. At this point, however, full-scale hostilities erupted between the two kingdoms; this time from a very unexpected quarter. 2

The Casus Belli

The long expected conflict descended on Castile and Aragon due not to a military action along their disputed frontier, but from an incident in the far-off waters of the Atlantic. Because of the Hundred Years War currently raging between England and France to the north as well as Catalonia’s naval contest with Genoa, the seas around the Iberian Peninsula became cluttered with “privateers” seeking prizes. This environment of maritime conflict not infrequently added its weight to the factors threatening the already shaky peace between the Iberian states. Aragona all’epoca de Pietro II Cerimoniosos (1336–1354) (Padua, 1971), 2–30; Antoni Riera i Melis, “El context mediterrani de la primera fase de regnat de Jaume II (1291–1311): Conflictivitat i canvis,” AUA 12 (1999): 183–205; Zurita, Anales, 4:211, 231–33 (VIII:46, 50)As a result of these overseas setbacks, it eventually. 6  Pere’s uncle, a younger brother of his father, King Alfonso IV, was widely referred to as Prince Pere. Pere III, 2:479–91 (V:31–43); Tasis i Marca, Pere el Ceremoniós, 56–59; Kagay, “Dynastic Dimension,” 81. 7  Pere was away from his realm between June 24, 1354 and September 20, 1355. Pere’s principal advisers at this time were his relatives Count Pedro of Ribagorza, Count Ramon Berenguer of Empuries and long-time royal ambassadors, Archbishop Lope of Zaragoza and Viscount Bernat of Cabrera. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 981, ff. 84–v; Ferrer i Mallol, Entre, 581–82; Kagay, “Dynastic Dimension,” 81.

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In 1356, as part of a recent treaty with France, Pere III permitted the French to outfit a flotilla of ships in the port of Barcelona, destined to aid in their ongoing struggle with England.8 The king entrusted their command to Francesch de Perellós, the future viscount of Roda and royal chamberlain of Aragon, whose services Pere now lent to the French.9 Upon completion, these ships sailed out of the Mediterranean under Perellós, who was charged with delivering the vessels to a French port. In August, having reached the Atlantic, their commander made a stop-over for supplies at the Castilian port of San Lucar de Barrameda, situated at the mouth of the Guadalquivir River, just down river from Seville. Here, he seized two merchant vessels from the Italian city of Piacenza carrying full loads of olive oil. Since his homeland had been at war with Genoa for the past two years and Piacenza was an ally of the Genoese, Perellós felt he was acting within the bounds of “just war” in capturing and eventually selling off his prizes. The taking of merchant vessels was hardly a rare occurrence in this period either in the Mediterranean or out in the Atlantic. Throughout Aragon’s conflicts, first with the Angevins then with the Genoese, these waters were filled with Italian, Catalan, and Valencian corsairs earning lucrative employment by preying on foreign shipping.10 The event at San Lúcar might have passed as a fairly normal occurrence, one not even noted in diplomatic correspondence, except for one important fact–the presence of the Castilian monarch at the small port on the day of the attack! For his part, Pedro I was taking some much-needed rest and recreation after putting down the last vestiges of the baronial insurrection that had flared up in Castile after he had deserted his queen in 1353. After his victories at Toro 8   Pere puts the number of ships at nine: Ayala mentions ten galleys and a leno. See also: Pere III, Chronicle, 2:495 (VI, 3); Ayala, Pedro I, 473 (1356, chap. 7) 9   While the Aragonese monarch would later stress the Parellós was acting “in the name and as captain of the king of France” there can be no doubt that he was one of Pere’s trusted advisers, a fact alluded to throughout the king’s chronicle. For his services, Pere later created Perellós viscount of Roda. Pere III, Chronicle, 2: 495 (VI, 3) 10   Siete Partidas, 2:493–94 (Part. II, tit. xxvi, laws 28–9). See also: María Teresa Ferrer i Mallol, “El castigo de los corsarios en el mundo mediterráneo medieval,” in Sociedad y memoria en la Edad Media: Estudios en homenaje de Nilda Guglielmi, ed. Ariel Guiance and Pablo Ubierna (Np., 2006), 119–26; eadem, Corsarios castellanos y vasco en Mediterráneo medieval (Barcelona, 2001); Archibald R. Lewis and Timothy J. Runyan, European Naval and Maritime History, 300–1500 (Bloomington, Ind., 1955), 118–19, 124–26; Manuel Martínez López, Piratas y corsarios en las costas de Alicante (San Vicente de Raspeig, 2006); Michel Mollat, “La guerre de course et la piraterie (XIIIe–XVe siècles),” AEM 10 (1980): 743–57; Mott, Sea Power, 124–32; C.F. Richmond, “The War at Sea,” in The Hundred Years War, ed. Kenneth Fowler (London, 1971), 96–121, esp. 101–4, 108.

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and Palenzuela in the winter of 1356, the king spent several months in his favorite city, Seville. In late summer, he fitted out a vessel to travel down the Guadalquivir River to engage in some deep-sea fishing during the tuna run along the Atlantic coast.11 For this reason, the Castilian monarch was anchored in the harbor of San Lúcar and personally witnessed the capture of the Piacenzan vessels, an act which he considered to be not only a clear case of piracy, but also a serious “affront” (deshonor) to his royal office. After all, not only had this act of piracy been committed within his territorial waters, but in his very presence. His already highly negative opinion of the event was also colored by the fact that shortly before this he had arranged an alliance between Castile and Genoa. Since Piacenza was also allied to the Genoese, Pedro–in what might be characterized as a knee-jerk reaction–interpreted Perellós’s action as an attack on Castile. Further exacerbating the crisis was the extremely defiant attitude adopted by Perellós. When ordered by Pedro to release the ships and restore their cargos, he refused do so. Twice, Pedro sent one of his principal advisers, Gutier Fernández de Toledo, to convey the royal order, the second time threatening to retaliate by arresting all Catalan merchants in Seville and confiscating their goods. For his part Perellós haughtily replied that he obeyed only the king of Aragon, not the king of Castile. Then, taking what he wanted from the captured cargoes, he threw the rest overboard “within the king’s sight” (a vista del rey),12 sold the ships, and resumed his journey northward around Portugal toward the Bay of Biscay. Furious at what he saw as an attack on his sovereignty, the twenty-threeyear-old Castilian monarch seems to have blamed the event directly on his Aragonese counterpart rather than the work of some rogue commander. Instead of resorting to diplomacy by initiating discussions with Pere he immediately escalated the situation by carrying out his threat to have all the Catalan merchants in Seville and Murcia arrested and have their “clothes, possessions and merchandise” confiscated. He even attempted to avenge the “great insult” (grand baldón) committed against him and his realms by quickly gathering a fleet and pursuing the 11  Ayala, Pedro I, 469–78 (1356, chaps. i–vi). See also: Manuel Barrios, Pedro I el Cruel: La nobleza contra su rey (Madrid, 2001), 33–40, 63–70; Diaz Martin, Itinerario, 75–76; Estow, Pedro, 183–84; García Toraño, Rey Pedro I, 131–219; Mérimée, History, 1:172–266; Valdeón Baruque, Pedro, 67–81. For tuna fisheries on Andalucian coasts, see: Manuel Llaño Rivera, “La pesca de atún: Salir por la via de Tarifa,” Aljaranda: Revista de estudios tarifeños 26 (1997): 4–6. 12  This provocative detail is added by Zurita, Anales, 4:293.

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Catalan ships into Portuguese waters where, given their headstart, he lost them.13 Despite this initial failure to avenge the incident, the young king of Castile, whom Ayala called a “man of great courage and strong will who always loved war,” had taken the first step in what the later historian, Jerónimo Zurita would call a “furious war between the kings of Aragon and Castile.” In the twentieth century, another leading Spanish scholar, Luis Suarez Fernández, would characterize this conflict as the “decisive struggle for peninsular hegemony.”14 3

Initial Preparations and a War of Words

The inexorable march from royal complaint to open warfare is chronicled in a series of remarkable letters exchanged by the Castilian and Aragonese kings between August 8 and November 25, 1356.15 In his opening salvo, Pedro proceeded to review his disagreements with Pere during the preceding year or so, only mentioning in general terms the attack at San Lúcar that had sparked his anger. The tone of the communique is one of smouldering frustration and resentment which had finally burst into open flame. Although Pere had once been his “clear and true friend,” the Castilian king sadly pointed out a series of actions that showed his Aragonese counterpart’s friendship to be an empty sham. He angrily asserted that Pere’s ships had “come into our ports and made war on us.” These actions had caused such damage that the Castilian population living along the kingdom’s frontiers with Aragon and Valencia was in danger of starvation. 13  Ayala, Pedro I, 473–75 (1356, chaps. vii–xi). See also: Diaz Martin, Itinerario, 78–79; Epstein, Genoa, 22; Estow, Pedro, 84; Ferrer i Mallol, “Causes,” 445–508, esp. 445–67; Mérimée, History, 1:268; María Rosa Muñoz Pomer, “Preliminares de la Guerra de los Dos Pedros en el Reino de Valencia (1356),” AUA 1 (1982): 117–34, esp. 121. 14  For the Castilian chronicler’s characterization of Pedro I, see: Ayala, Pedro I, 474 (1356, chap. viii). For Zurita’s view of the War of the Two Pedros, see: Zurita, Anales, 4:289. See also: Luis Suarez Fernández, “Pedro I, Enrique II, Juan I y Enrique III de Castilla, 1350–1400.” In España cristiana: Crisis de la reconquista española (c. 1220–c. 1480), vol. 14 of Historia de España. 1–378., esp. 47, ed. Ramón Menédez Pidal. 41 vols. Madrid: EspasaCalpe, S.A. 1947–1996. 15  The letters exchanged by the two monarchs between August and November, 1356, are substantially reproduced in Pere’s chronicle. Pere III, Chronicle, 2:496–99, 500–3 (VI,3–4). According to Hillgarth, there is virtually no difference in wording between the chronicle version and the originals in the ACA, a fact substantiated by Donald Kagay’s recent research in the ACA. For the full text of the letters between August 8 and December 6, 1356, see: ACA, Cancillerí, R. 1148, f. 104v; R. 1379, ff. 12v–15v, 83v–84v. See also Epistolari, 123–27 (doc. 17).

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While Castilian merchants seem to have participated in similar crimes, Pedro either minimized their participation or even argued that his own “loyal” subjects were innocent. When alluding to the case of a Castilian attack on one of Pere’s merchant vessels that was sailing across the Gulf of Vizcaya, the Castilian king claimed that the perpetrator was a resident of one of the Basque regions that had risen in rebellion against the Castilian crown. Consequently, according to Pedro, he could not be held responsible for what such rebels might do. Despite having said that, the Castilian king would not concede the possibility that Perellós’s attack had been similar to that of the Basque rebel; in other words, that it might have been carried out on the Catalan commander’s own initiative without involving the Aragonese king’s foreknowledge or some insidious anti-Castilian strategy on the part of Aragon. The Castilian king firmly asserted that it was his responsibility to “protect our honor and estate,” even if this precluded living up to any agreements he had reached with Pere during the preceding six year period when their reigns had overlapped. Pedro could not have made it any plainer–he was no longer Pere’s friend and he intended to punish all the perceived crimes the Aragonese king and people had committed against his own royal family and realms. In Pedro’s mind, Pedro’s announcement that he no longer held Pere to be his “friend” was an obvious preliminary to declaring his intention of going to war, even though he did not say this in so many words in this first letter.16 According to diplomatic custom, this letter did not legally qualify as a “defiance” due to its failure to use the word desafio as does Jaume II’s separation from his formal relationship with Fernando IV in 1296. On the other hand, the announcement that friendship no longer existed between the Castilian and Aragonese monarchs was exceedingly clear and could not be misunderstood by the recipient of such a missive. In addition, Pedro’s meaning was reinforced by his alcalde del rey, Gil Vázquez de Segovia, who delivered the king’s letter to the Aragonese court at Barcelona, thus satisfying the terms of a “formal accusation.”17 Pedro’s representative stressed his monarch’s anger at the Perellós attack on foreign shipping within the territorial waters of Castile. Without mentioning the perpetrator by name, Vázquez characterized this event as a shameful deed made worse by the fact that it took place “in the presence of the king.” 16   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, ff. 12v–13v; Pere III, Chronicle, 2:496–99 (VI:3) [For English translation of this letter, see Appendix I, doc. 1]. See also: Estow, Pedro, 184; García Taraño, Pedro, 222–23; Sitges, Mujeres, 216–19. 17  Diaz Martin, Officiales, 38–40; Luis García de Valdeavellano y Arcimus, Curso de las instituciones españoles de los origenes al final del Edad Media (Madrid, 1968), 325.

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Vazquez also discussed the pending case of Pero Muñiz de Godoy, formerly the grand master of the military order of Calatrava, now a refugee from Pedro’s wrath. Following Godoy’s flight into Aragon, Pere had put him in charge of the order’s commandery of Alcañiz, the only one of Calatrava’s holdings that lay within Aragonese territory.18 The Castilian monarch now complained about this arrangement, arguing that the appointment had not been made by the new grand-master of Calatrava, a loyal supporter of Pedro’s, who, according to the rule of the order, was charged with approving all of its commanders. Pere responded to his counterpart’s complaints calmly despite their obvious seriousness and provocative nature. According to the Aragonese king, no matter what Perellós had done to make Pedro so angry, these events had not occurred in Aragonese territory and had not been authorized by him. Besides, the culprit, Perellós, was now in France. Consequently, Pere could not do much at the moment to punish him. On the other hand, the Aragonese monarch would accept any kind of just retribution the other king might inflict on the elusive commander. In regard to the former Calatravan master, Muñiz de Godoy, Pere firmly refused to chastise him since he was a “good knight who had [always] lived in the king’s favor.” Pere III concluded his response to Alcalde Vázquez with the belligerent suggestion that it was actually his own royal master who had broken ties with Aragon “without just cause.” For his part, Pere expressed a willingness to leave the entire matter to the “judgement of God.”19 In the midst of this correspondence, Pere initiated the kingdom’s preparations for war. On August 20, he wrote to his uncle and principal adviser, Prince Pere, instructing him to raise cavalry units for two months service for the protection of the exposed frontiers with Castile. In this letter, the king summarized what would become his military philosophy of warfare for the next eight years when he called upon the prince to “remain on the defensive … while waging war against the enemy as much as you can.”20 He also announced his intention to remain in the northern half of his realms, not for any “pleasure or timidity,” but to better direct the coming struggle, promising to inflict at least as much damage on his Castilian adversary as his own people were already suffering. Pere had not paid the troops he took to Sardinia eighteen months earlier, but had instead relied on their service as feudal companies. He now told another uncle, Count Ramon Berenguer of Ribagorza and Empúries, that he was determined to follow the same course in this new conflict by calling up troops 18  Ayala, Pedro I, 474–75 (1356, chaps. ix–x). See also: Estow, Pedro, 184. 19  Ayala, Pedro I, 474–75 (1355, chap. x). 20  For English translations of full document, see Appendix II, no. 1.

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to fight as feudal vassals, rather than paid soldiers. Five days after the royal communiqué to Berenguer, Pere contacted another leading Pyrenean noble, Count Gaston III “Phoebus” of Foix, with a similar command that, as a vassal, he render feudal service to the crown. Soon afterwards, a similar order went out to others in the region. Despite the attempt to lessen royal expenses by invoking feudal commitments, the Aragonese monarch was eventually forced to abandon this parsimonious expedient. Instead, as the war progressed, its seriousness and extent compelled him to rely increasingly on paid soldiers rather than feudal levies.21 With the actual arrival of Pedro’s angry letter in Aragon, Pere had to set forth his kingdom’s formal position about future hostilities with Castile. He consulted his council, but found its members unable to agree on a course of action. Some of his advisers suggested a policy of peace which would ultimately require some admission of responsibility for Perellós attack. It would also imply a retraction of Pere’s earlier statements on the matter. Other advisers declared that Pedro’s letter was indeed a “defiance,” and with such a declaration of hostile intent in place, it would be a “great disgrace, dishonor, and shame” to formally acknowledge Aragonese errors and beg for peace. They cautioned that in addition to the humiliation involved in undertaking such an initiative, Pere’s adversary might not even accept it since he was a “king filled with such great pride.”22 Working through the conflicting advice, on September 4, 1356, Pere finally penned a carefully worded response to his royal counterpart and entrusted the Castilian ambassador, Alcalde Vázquez, to convey it to his royal master. Its tone was somewhat more moderate than in the king’s earlier correspondence.23 Pere characterized the issue of attacks on Catalan and Castilian merchants as a matter already under discussion by Aragonese and Castilian officials. He agreed to accept their decision and settle any claims “with justice and reason.” He had not seen Castilian complaints about specific cases, but he was certain that the two countries had already or would soon conclude an agreement to deal with such matters. 21   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1176, ff. 44v–45v; R. 1380, ff. 21v–22; R. 1384, f. 5v; R. 1387, ff. 874–v. See also: Epistolari, 170–74 (doc. 26). See also: Jocelyn N. Hillgarth, The Spanish Kingdoms, 1250–1516, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1976–1978), 1:378; María Teresa Ferrer i Mallol, “La sucesión de Juan de Aragón per Martin I y la invasión del conde de Foix. La participación de Barcelona en la defensa de Cataluña (1396–1397),” in Castilla y el mundo feudal: Homenaje al Profesor Julio Valdeón, ed. Maria Isabel del Valdiviseo and Pascual Marínez Sopena, 3 vols. (Valldolid, 2009), 2:381–96. 22  Pere III, Chronicle, 2:499(VI:4). 23   A CA, Cancellería real, R. 1379, ff. 13v–15v. [For English translation, see Appendix I, doc. 2].

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According to Pere, some diplomat communications about the attacks had been misplaced “out of carelessness,” a not unknown problem in carrying out royal business. This may, in turn, have occasioned some of the misunderstanding. At the same time that the king attributed some of their current problems to this sort of failing on the part of royal governments, Pere reminded Pedro that he had long been allied with his father, Alfonso XI, and now wished to continue this ancient “friendship with the house of Castile.” The dispute concerning the order of Calatrava and Muñiz de Godoy was one that neither the Aragonese nor Castilian sovereigns could easily solve “since this was an affair of the church and does not pertain to laymen.” In regard to the attack that had initiated the crisis, Pere, like his Castilian adversary, did not mention Perellós by name. On the other hand, he reaffirmed that he had never ordered such an assault, and if one had actually taken place, he would have the perpetrators suitably punished. As for any commission on his part of unjust acts against his step-mother, Leonor of Castile, and her sons, his halfbrothers, Ferran and Juan, the Aragonese monarch categorically denied them. In conclusion, he claimed that he had maintained all existing treaties and border agreements with Castile, but that Pedro, “without any notification or formal renunciation of the peace,” had sent raiders across the Valencian and Aragonese borders. Pere concluded his letter with an almost exact citation from his adversary’s missive: “We do not consider you to be our friend.”24 After this exchange of royal letters, the Aragonese and Castilian kings sped up their preparations for war. Pedro began to gather an army along the Murcian frontier to attack Aragon while Pere called on his nobles to defend the realm’s borderlands and to inflict as much damage as possible on Castilian territory. He also ordered his officials throughout the Pyrenees to send horses and pack animals to threatened zones. The king’s anxiety about manning his forward positions is reflected in an order of September 23 that allowed accused murderers to escape legal retribution by volunteering for army service along the Valencian border. By and large, his principal strategy was a defensive one carried to fulfillment by posting as many cavalry units as possible to guard his exposed frontiers.25 24   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, ff. 13v–15v (for English translation, see Appendix I, doc. 2); Pere III, Chronicle, 2:500–3 (VI:4). See also: Sitges, Mujeres, 219–22. According to Pere, Castilian troops had attacked settlements in Murcia (Chinosa, Montover), Valencia (Requenas, Sieteaguas), and Aragon (hamlets of Daroca). 25   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1136, f. 120v; R. 1379, ff. 10r–v, 20v–21v; R. 1380, f. 27 [for English translations, see Appendix II, docs.2–3]; Ayala, Pedro I, 475 (1355, chap. xi); Pere III, Chronicle, 2:504–6 (VI:6). See also:Diaz Martin, Itinerario, 78–79; Kagay, “Defending,”

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While these frenzied activities were taking place, in Seville, Pedro I received Pere’s letter which had been hand-delivered by Alcalde Vázquez. A week later, Pedro penned a curt reply that once more complained of Pere’s failure to punish any of the crimes of his Majorcan subjects against Castilian merchants and their vessels. Many of these mariners had lost their cargoes and even their lives as a result of the unwarranted attacks. Consequently, Pere’s claim that he had dealt with these “minor” issues was completely untrue. On the other hand, despite his anger, the Castilian monarchy announced his willingness to keep the lines of communication open and suggested that messengers traveling between the two courts should be granted special safe conducts.26 After receiving Pedro’s latest response delivered to him at the frontier city by a pair of Castilian envoys, Pere drafted his next entry in the war of words. The principal issue he now discussed was the capture of a Castilian ship and its crew by residents of Majorca. Admitting that the Majorcans had indeed carried out this act, he claimed that the case was considerably more complex than Pedro had portrayed it. Only after bringing this issue before his council had the Aragonese king discovered the full truth: the Castilian king, it seems, had sent a large fleet against the Balearics and the captain of one of its vessels had kidnapped “four very rich merchants of Majorca” to hold them for ransom. It was this act that had brought down the ire of the island’s judiciary upon the Castilian perpetrator. When the captain of the offending ship fell into the hands of the Majorcans, he had paid for his actions with his life. In respect to any other issues raised by the king of Castile, Pere argued that the proper course would be to submit to arbitration. He too now approved a safe-conduct for all royal messengers travelling between the two courts. In closing, the Aragonese monarch proclaimed “God and all the world will understand our great justice and the great wrong carried out on your part.” This hostile correspondence between the monarchs of Castile and Aragon stretched over several months and signaled a formal transition into outright warfare between the two kingdoms. It would be the last direct communication between them for years to come.

86–87, idem, “The Defense of the Crown of Aragon during the War of the Two Pedros (1356–1366),” The Journal of Military History 71 (2007): 11–34, esp. 18–20; idem, “Societal and Institutional Cost,” 31–32.; idem, “War,” 198–99; Lafuente Gómez, Dos coronas en guerra, 59–60; Documenta Selecta Mutuas Civitatis Arago-Cathalaunicae et Ecclesiae Relationes Illustrantia [hereafter DS], ed. Johannes Vincke (Barcelona, 1936), 420 (doc. 557). 26   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, f. 83v [for English translation, see Appendix I, doc. 3]; Pere III, Chronicle, 2:506–7 (VI:7). See also: Sitges, Mujeres, 222–23.

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Responsibility for the Conflict

The piratical incident in the harbor at San Lucar de Barrameda leaves the historian facing a number of questions. Why did Pedro I react so strongly to something that on its surface did not seem to merit the launching of a long lasting and highly destructive conflict? Was it merely a knee-jerk reaction to an attack on shipping that had occurred not simply in Castilian waters, but in his royal presence coupled with the highly disrespectful attitude of the Aragonese perpetrator? Or was there a deeper motive? Was the Castilian monarch already seeking a pretext to launch a war of conquest against his eastern neighbor, a pretext provided him by the attack on the two Piacensan ships in the harbor? And in undertaking the attack, was Admiral Perellós merely free-lancing or was he in some way acting upon royal instructions and in accordance with an anti-Castilian policy hatched by his devious overlord, Pere III. Scholars considering the event have answered these questions differently, and depending upon their answers have assigned differing degrees of responsibility to the two monarchs. As we have seen earlier, both kings were functioning in an atmosphere of enmity and distrust between the neighboring realms that stretched back at least as far as the Aragonese invasion of Murcia in 1296 and that lingered on despite the treaty of Torellos dividing the disputed territory in 1304. It is against that background that the motives of both men must be evaluated. Of the two contemporary chroniclers, Pere and Ayala, only the latter makes any real attempt to advance an explanation for Pedro’s seemingly excessive reaction. The fault for the war, he argued, could be laid at the feet of the king’s beloved mistress, María de Padilla, and her relatives who felt that their influence with the Castilian king had declined after he put down a baronial insurrection with such skill and determination. As a result, they maneuvered him into a “dangerous war,” in which their advice and administrative skills would be essential.27 In the mid-nineteenth century the French playwright and historian, Prosper Mérimée, who wrote a lengthy history of Pedro I’s reign, espoused the view that the War of the Two Pedros was ultimately caused by the “extreme distrust” between Castile and Aragon that had existed throughout most of the fourteenth century, a distrust that inspired in the rulers of both kingdoms the “most treacherous designs” on one another’s territory. In this atmosphere, all that was needed was an incident sufficient to spark a conflict. Despite his insightful evaluation of the deeper causes for the conflict and his conceding 27  Ayala, Pedro I, 463 (1355, chap. viii). See also: Estow, Pedro, 186.

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that the spark came from the actions of the Aragonese, Mérimée ultimately assigned most of the blame for the war’s outbreak to the “proud character of Don Pedro, his former grievances, and the personal insult he had just received.”28 For the French scholar, the youth and character of Castile’s monarch bore principal responsibility for converting a minor incident into a major war. It is essentially the view espoused by the authors of this book. Not all historians agree with that assessment. There are those who attribute as much if not more responsibility to Pere III and his policies. In 1910, government-official-turned historian, Juan Blas Sitges y Grifoll29 published Las Mujeres del Rey Don Pedro I de Castilla in which he argued for the innocence of the young king of Castile and pointed the finger instead at his Aragonese counterpart.30 In Sitges’ view, Perellós’s actions at San Lúcar were fully in accord with a plan concocted by France and Aragon to politically hamstring Castile’s young and seemingly unstable monarch who had recently insulted the French royal family by his treatment of his French bride, Blanche de Bourbon. According to Sitges, the incident at San Lucar was part of this larger scheme, one that went awry only when Pedro proved to be stronger and more competent than Pere had imagined. As a result of the Aragonese monarch’s miscalculation, rather than having any negative effect on the Castilian king, the incident produced a conflict that quickly turned against Aragon.31 In the 1950s, a first-rate English historian, P.E. Russell, more or less endorsed Sitges’s earlier argument, also attributing the fault for Perellós’s attack to the “haughty Aragonese king” and his devious policies vis a vis neighboring Castile.32 Like Sitges, Russell portrayed Pere III as being engaged in a conspiracy with Jean II of France (r. 1350–1364) to weaken Castile and to profit from that kingdom’s eventual dismemberment. He too argued that as a result of “seriously underestimating the Castilian king’s strength,” the Aragonese monarch ended up burdening his people with a conflict, from which he would find 28  Prosper Mérimée, The History of Peter the Cruel, King of Castile and Leon, trans. Thomas Johnes, 2 vols. (London, 1849), 1:267–68. 29  For a useful web article concerning the career of Juan Sitges, see: Fernando Balbuena, “Juan Blas Sitges y Grifoll, un sabio olvidado,” Comercio/Aviles (posted December 9, 2008). Most of this author’s historical work appeared on the eve of the First World War between 1910 and 1914. 30  Sitges, Mujeres, 156–57, 214–15, 225–26. 31  Of all of Sitges’s arguments concerning the background causes of the long border war between Pere and Pedro, the following statement seems closest to the truth; namely, the war came about from a “state of enmity between the two neighboring countries that forcefully led to a rupture.” 32  P.E. Russell, The English Intervention in Spain and Portugal in the Time of Edward III and Richard II (Oxford, 1955), 16–17.

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it exceedingly difficult to extricate his kingdom, and then only after considerable destruction and a massive foreign intervention. Given Pere III’s record of duplicity in foreign affairs, it is hard to imagine that he would be above trying to win some advantage for Aragon in the perennial dispute with Castile over their mutual frontier—if a promising opportunity presented itself. Perhaps the baronial revolt of the early 1350s against the newly installed Castilian king had struck his Aragonese counterpart as just such an opportunity. On the other hand, by the time the incident at San Lucar de Barrameda occurred, any opportunity to seize some advantage from it had already disappeared, a fact that must have been obvious to Pere. The revolt against Pedro had collapsed and its supporters had either made peace with their victorious ruler or had fled into exile to escape his wrath. At the same time, the Aragonese monarch faced a smoldering insurrection in Sardinia and an on-again off-again naval war with Genoa. And while negotiations between Pere and the French were in fact taking place during 1356, there is no indication that they involved any attempt to secure French backing for a conflict with Castile. Under the circumstances, it hardly seems likely that Pere, despite his scheming nature, would have given his admiral orders to undertake a rash action that might well incite a new war between the two kingdoms (as in fact it did); especially at a moment when he had no reason to believe that France would support him. It seems far more likely (at least to the authors of this book) that Perellós acted not on instructions from the king, but strictly on his own initiative. There is actually some evidence from a contemporary source to support this interpretation. In 1364, Pere would arrest his chief advisor of many years, Bernat Cabrera, and put him on trial for treason. In the course of the trial, that ended in Cabrera’s execution, he was asked if Perellós had had secret orders from the Aragonese king, instructing him to inflict “damage and ridicule” on the monarch of Castile or his people, orders that would have led to the attack on the two Italian ships. Cabrera responded that “as far as he knew,” the actions of the flotilla’s commander at San Lúcar were completely accidental and had not been planned beforehand or ordered by the king. By and large, Cabrera’s testimony has the ring of truth about it.33 If anyone would have had knowledge of secret royal instructions, it would have been the king’s principal adviser. 33   Proceso contra Bernardo de Cabrera, ed. Manuel de Bofarull y de Sartorio in CDACA, 34:83, 98. See also: Donald J. Kagay, “The ‘Treasons’ of Bernat de Cabrera: Government, Law, and the Individual in the Late-Medieval Crown of Aragon,” in War, study VIII, pp. 40–54, esp. 51–53; J. B. Sitges, La Muerte de D. Bernardo de Cabrera, Consejero del Rey D. Pedro IV de Aragón (Madrid, 1911), idem, Mujeres, 215–16;

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Opening Months

Despite the torrent of bad feelings that the Aragonese and Castilian rulers committed to paper in the fall of 1356, actual warfare took some time to get underway. Actions began on a local level consisting largely of lightning raids (cabalgadas) as uncoordinated as they were violent. The first of these attacks were carried out by Castilian town militias and fell within the long and lucrative tradition of border raiding.34 Local Aragonese forces responded with incursions against Castilian border towns such as Alcaraz, Molina, and Riqueña.35 In September, 1356, Valencian troops clashed with Castilian raiders when neither may as yet have known that hostilities had formally commenced.36 To meet the crisis, Pere III frantically insisted that his subjects in both Aragon and Valencia undertake “with great speed and diligence [the repair of fortresses] that had fallen into disrepair.”37 These early local raids back and forth across the border set a pattern that would continue throughout the war: raiding parties of different sizes would cross into enemy territory perhaps at several points, launching rapidly-moving cabalgadas against the frontier settlements, then crossing back into their own territory. Larger royal expeditions tended to follow this local format. As early as the fall of 1356, the Castilian monarch unleashed a large-scale attack of over 6,000 soldiers that swept in three separate waves across Aragon and northern Valencia, destroying everything in their path, before returning to their home bases.38 In fact, this type of border warfare, characterized by destructive raids, was preferred by the Castilians since it required little planning and the resulting plunder offered ample compensation to the forces involved. By contrast, the Aragonese, who increasingly stood on the defensive as the war progressed had less use for this raiding strategy. During the first six months of combat, neither Pere nor Pedro could fully organize for warfare since both faced difficulties of all sorts in placing their lands on a war footing. Despite their exchange of angry letters, it even took the two sovereigns some months to formally declare war.39 Not withstanding, the 34  Zurita, Anales, 4:299–301 (IX:iii). 35  Lafuente Gómez, Dos Coronas en guerra, 60–64; Zurita, Anales, 4:301–2 (IX:iii). 36  Russell, The English Intervention, 16–17. 37   A CA, Cancillería real, R.. 1381, ff. 32v–33, 35v–36, 41. See also: Kagay, “Shattered Circle,” 125; Zurita, Anales, IV:301, 332 (IX:iii, xi). 38  Lafuente Gómez, Dos coronas en guerra, 67–68; Zurita, Anales, 4:311 (IX:vi). 39  Ayala, Pedro I, 474–75 (1356, chap. x). See also: Zurita, Anales, 4:298 (IX:ii). For the two sovereigns’ view of the war they were engaged in, see Donald J. Kagay, “The Theory and

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delay in martial formalities, however, both sides moved as rapidly as they could toward a state of conflict. For his part, Pere gathered forces drawn from the nobility, the clerics, and the townsmen of Aragon and Valencia.40 At the same time, Pedro made similar preparations, relying on troops recruited from his own aristocracy and the military orders.41 In these same months, both sides also began the more complex process of gathering a fleet to undertake sea-borne operations. At first, Pere, who was already financially stretched to the limit, relied on the ever-present privateers operating in western Mediterranean waters. For his part, Pedro gathered at Seville a flotilla of thirteen vessels impressed from his own merchant marine as well as ships contributed to his war effort by the neighboring, proCastilian states of Portugal and Granada.42 Both kings included in their forces contingents raised by their over-mighty siblings who soon began to play a significant role in the conflict. As early as October 1356, the count of Trastámara who, upon fleeing from Castile had taken service with the French king, Jean II, re-crossed the Pyrenees and became an Aragonese captain. At the same time, the Aragonese Prince Ferran, after breaking his feudal ties to his half-brother, Pere, used his Valencian holdings to stage a pro-Castilian campaign against his homeland.43 This shift in allegiance highlighted the bitter disputes that existed within the two royal families.44 Another factor that both sides began to address in the opening months of the conflict involved the “sinews of war”—money.45 Both sovereigns instituted significant measures aimed at financing the payment and provisioning of troops who were destined to be kept in the field for long periods. While not yet forced to pawn Castile’s crown jewels, Pedro entrusted them to the care of a clergyman from Seville, where they could be easily retrieved in the event such

Practice of Just War in the Late-Medieval Crown of Aragon,” CHR 91 (2005): 591–610, esp. 593–95. 40   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1136, f. 120v; R. 1379, ff. 10r–v, 20v–21; R. 1380, f. 79v. See also: DS, 424 (doc. 559); Kagay, “Defense,” 22–23; Zurita, Anales, 4:300 (IX:iii). 41  Villalon, “Cut Off Their Heads,” 161. 42   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1382, f. 28v; Ayala, Pedro I, 475 (1356, chap. xi); Pere III, Chronicle, 2:525 (VI:25). 43  Ayala, Pedro I, 476 (1357, chap. 1); Kagay, “Dynastic Dimension,” 84–85, 90. See also: Zurita, Anales, 4:306–8, 310–2 (IX:v–vi). 44  For the personal attacks between Pedro and Enrique as well as Pere and Ferran, see Kagay, “Dynastic Dimension,” 91; Benjamin Frederick Taggie, “The Castillian Foreign Policy during the Reign of Pedro I 1350–1369,” (Ph.D diss., Michigan State University, 1972), 350–52; Valdeón Baruque, Enrique II, 96–99; Zurita, Anales, 4:568–69. 45  J.R. Hale, War and Society in Renaissance Europe, 1450–1620 (Baltimore, 1985), 232.

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an expedient became necessary. By contrast, in Aragon, this was a step Pere would find it necessary to take much sooner with his own jewels.46 Differences in the level of financial exigency that arose during the conflict probably resulted in large part from the different military strategies adopted by both sides. Pedro was generally on the offensive in the first eight years of the war and many of his military costs were defrayed by the plunder his forces captured. By contrast, almost from the beginning, Pere found himself defending long swathes of the Aragonese frontier, a territory dotted with fortresses in various states of repair. After borrowing from every willing or intimidated subject, whether Christian, Muslim, or Jew, the Aragonese king quickly had to admit that he had an “intolerable need of funds [for which his] patrimony and revenues were not sufficient to meet.”47 This ever-present need for funds eventually forced him to turn to his wealthiest subjects, the Catalans. Summoning representatives of the eastern Spanish cities to Lèrida in January, 1357, he begged for their financial and military support; this despite the fact that Catalonia did not share a border with Castile. After some wrangling Pere’s Catalan subjects agreed to pledge a subsidy to be paid off in three installments. When the military expenses increased dramatically because of the Castilian attack on Tarazona, Pere was forced to use this parliamentary grant (which he had not yet been able to collect) as surety for a loan to the crown from a Catalan moneylender.48 Only by employing such expedients was the Aragonese king able to keep his head above water in the face of mounting military expenditures he continued to encounter throughout the decade-long struggle. In earlier conflicts, both monarchs had already employed the technique of first raiding over wide areas, then besieging strategically placed castles or fortified towns. Pedro had followed this course during the suppression of the baronial insurrection within Castile (1354–1356). Pere had done much the same thing in the campaigns against Majorca (1343–1344) and Sardinia (1354–1355). On the other hand, while this strategy carried over into Pedro’s war of aggression against Aragon, Pere found himself unable to employ it in what was largely a defensive struggle. 46   D HC, 59; Diaz Martin, Itinerario, 342–43 (doc. 683). 47   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1148, f. 131v; R. 1327, f. 201; R. 1150, f. 143v; DS, 420, 424–25, 434 (docs. 557, 560, 571). 48  The townsmen pledged 70,000 libras to be paid off on May 1, August 31, and November from the collection of a household tax ( fogatge). Lafuente Gómez, Dos coronas en guerra, 74–75; José-Luis Martín, “Las cortes del Pedro el Ceremonioso,” in Pere el Cerimoniós i la seva època (Barcelona, 1989), 99–111, esp. 102–3. For further details on Pere’s war parliaments, see: Chapter 13.

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Time and again, Pedro’s war effort effectively utilized this method of raiding that had so long characterized Iberian warfare between Christian and Islamic forces. He employed forces numbering several thousand men, often broken up into smaller, faster-moving units that would scour enemy territory. This strategy was expanded in September, 1356, when Prince Ferran defected to the Castilian side, effectively opening a second front around the prince’s holdings in Tortosa from which he could readily mount attacks on the region of western Murcia held for a half century by Aragon.49 At the opening of the conflict, Pedro I went to the front where he directed the attack on Aragon. After the first several months, however, he returned to Seville, his favorite city, the place that would generally serve as his capital and headquarters throughout the War of the Two Pedros. Not until January, 1357, did the king once again return to the front. When he launched a sudden attack through Prince Ferran’s lands, aimed at over-running the small Aragonese settlement of Bordalba on the Castilian border. Pedro captured the town in February, the first of many to fall into Castilian hands during the years of conflict. Afterwards, he turned southeast to attack Embid de Ariza, another small Aragonese border post lying to the west of Calatayud. These assaults on minor places prepared the way for an attack on his principal objective in the region, the Aragonese border city of Tarazona.50 Despite his aggressive and largely successful military policy during these opening campaigns, Pedro did suffer at least one military setback in this period when two of his lieutenants put in charge of the castle of Serón de Nagíma southeast of Soria defected to Pere.51 Although the loss was relatively minor, it was noteworthy for one reason: it reflected a growing problem the Castilian monarch would face throughout his reign—the desertion of ever-increasing numbers of his followers. The problem had begun during the baronial revolts and would continue throughout the conflict with Aragon. Even the king’s violent punishments could not overcome it. Unlike Pedro’s unrelentingly offensive policy, Pere’s principal military activity throughout much of the conflict consisted of simply reacting to the attacks of his adversary. Even before having received a formal declaration of war, he had made up his mind to limit royal expenses by engaging in “defense and not 49   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1380, ff. 35r–v; R. 1532, f. 55v. See also: Diaz Martin, Itinerario, 79; Kagay, “Dynastic Dimension,” 91. 50   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, f. 121v. See also: Barrios, Pedro, 15–25; Diaz Martin, Itinerario, 81–82; Gutiérrez de Velasco, “Conquista,” 80. 51  Ayala, Pedro I, 476–77 (1357, chap. ii). See also: Diaz Martin, Itinerario, 81–82. The defectors were Alvar Pérez de Guzmán and Juan de la Cerda.

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attack.”52 Despite his bellicose rhetoric, instead of rushing out to meet Pedro in battle, the Aragonese monarch pursued the role not of heroic warrior, but that of war administrator. From his station well behind the front lines. he dispatched troops to the most dangerous points along his southern and western frontiers and attempted to pay their salaries using so-called “free-love gifts” coerced from his clergy and his Jewish population. These two groups were especially subject to steady, sometimes desperate royal pressure.53 After three months of war brought him little but defeat, Pere began to recruit soldiers from sources he had not previously used. On November 23, 1356, he called for military help from the large number of “hamlets” (aldeas) of Calatayud because of the immanent danger their “mother city” faced from Castilian attack.54 By Christmas, his much-vaunted (at least by Pere) spy network had informed him that his adversary’s army had left Molina and was now raiding villages around Lake Gallocanta, south of Calatayud.55 Despite the intelligence he was receiving, Pere seemed helpless to prevent the destructive raids Pedro and Prince Ferran unleashed against Aragon and Valencia. By early 1357, the Aragonese monarch had given up even the pretense of optimism about his chances and was forced to report that “the king of Castile has done great damage in Aragon with the capture of castles and of other fortresses.”56 6

Aragonese Appeals to the Divine

Starting in the early days of the conflict, Pere III began to emphasize very publicly the idea that God was on his side. The king invariably portrayed himself as occupying the moral high ground; continually claiming in all of his 52   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1148, ff. 104v, 124v: See also: Epistolari, 1:125, 132 (docs. 17–18); Kagay, “Societal and Institutional Cost,” 29; Lafuente Gómez, Dos Coronas en guerra, 65. 53   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1149, f. 74v; R. 1327, f. 201; R. 1379, ff. 86, 93r–v, 95v, 134, 150v–151; R. 1380, ff. 109v–110, 134. See also: DS, 424–25, 431 (docs. 560, 566); Kagay, “War Financing,” 130–31. 54   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1380, f. 79v; See also: Gutiérrez Velasco, “Conquista,” 80. The hamlet population were required to hand over to the royal war effort, “pickaxes, sword, daggers, hatchets, bars of iron, and all other war equipment.” For the developments of hamlets in Aragon, see: Donald J. Kagay, “Two Towns Where There was Once One: The Aldea in Medieval Aragon,” Journal of Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 14 (1993): 33–43, esp. 42–43. 55   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, f. 93v. 56  C AVC, I, pt. 2: 679–81; See also: Kagay, “Societal and Institutional Cost,” 31.

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communications that he was fighting a “good and just war.”57 According to the Aragonese monarch, his ungodly Castilian counterpart could never achieve victory since God would never permit such an injustice to take place. Pere often repeated his belief that the Almighty would not allow Aragon’s final defeat but would always be a “rightful helper” throughout the Aragonese campaigns against Pedro and Pedro’s evil servants, many of whom were alleged to be Muslim.58 Pere’s cosmic view of his war with Pedro I and indeed of all combat in which he was involved was not a point of private faith; it was repeatedly made known to all his estates, in particular the clergy. In the king’s mind, his churchmen were effective intercessors on his behalf with God and the saints. He fully expected that their sincere prayers would induce the Almighty not only to punish the evil enemies, but also to treat with divine forbearance any wrong that Aragonese forces might perpetrate in the bitter conflict. Prayers of individual clergy, however, were not enough for the king. On November 5, 1356, he sent his own set of prayers to the archbishops of Tarragona and Zaragoza, as well as to the bishops of Tortosa, Barcelona, Gerona, Lérida, Elna, and Urgel, with instructions that they be read both before and after the mass that was to be celebrated on the following Sunday in churches across the Crown of Aragon. Though these appeals did not specifically mention Pere, parishioners could not help but understand that they referred to his struggle with Castile, a conflict that was becoming ever more serious. They appealed for an intercession of “Blessed George,” the archangel, through which Pere and his people might “gain victory over our enemies.”59 Although the king would never again insert appeals of this sort into Aragonese church services on such a massive scale, he never flagged in his faith that God was on his side in the war with Castile. On one occasion in 1359, Pere signaled this belief by ordering his troops to exchange the red and yellow colors of the house of Barcelona for a red cross on a white background, the colors of Saint George.60 Four years later, the Aragonese king was in the same 57   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1184, f. 113; See also: DHC, 87–88; Kagay, “Theory and Practice,” 598; idem, “Societal and Institutional Cost,” 30–31. For late-medieval theories of just war, see Roland H. Bainton, Attitudes towards War and Peace: A Historical Survey and Critical Evaluation (London, 1961); Frederick H. Russell, The Just War in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1975). 58   A CA, R. 1385, f. 135; DS, 455–56 (doc. 600). See also: Kagay, Societal and Institutional Cost,” 31. 59  See: footnote 61 in this chapter. See also: DS 425–26 (doc. 561). 60   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1380, f. 71; Pere III, Chronicle, 2:522–25 (VI:22–24). See also: DS, 425–26 (doc. 561 [For English translations, see Appendix, docs. 8, 26]; Kagay, “Theory and Practice,” 601–4, 608–10; Lafuente Gómez, “Devoción,” 427–44.

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cosmic frame of mind when he requested the archbishops of Tarragona and Zaragoza to instruct their clerics upon elevating the host to beg divine aid for their beleaguered king, especially when he faced his Castilian counterpart on the battlefield.61 If, as the king believed, he had some special bond with the Almighty, this relationship took a full decade to bear fruit and bring Pere the victory he so desired. 61   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1385, f. 135 [for English translation, see Appendix II, doc. 5].

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Theaters of conflict in the War of the Two Pedros (1356–1366)

Chapter 6

The Middle Years: Expanding Warfare (1357–1363) The pattern of the first months of war marked by Castilian and Aragonese probing of enemy frontiers began to change in the winter of 1356 through 1357 when Castilian incursions grew larger and more coordinated. A letter drafted by the Aragonese king on Christmas day paints a good picture of this chaotic period. In it, Pere informed his principal captains that two of Calatayud’s hamlets had already suffered great losses during early Castilian raids and that his intelligence network had recently reported to him that another large force of Castilian horsemen was about to attack the same district. Consequently, he implored them to transfer troops from their own garrisons in order to plug a gap around the city, thus enhancing the Aragonese defense.1 The king’s concerns were fully justified. In the opening months of 1357, Pedro moved his headquarters to the Castilian border town of Molina where he gathered 1,000 troops. He then advanced with this force to a position near the Aragonese village of Deca, just to the northwest of Calatayud.2 1

Tarazona and Its Aftermath (Spring, 1357)

Despite the king’s ability to use spies to help anticipate his adversary’s movements, whatever intelligence they managed to supply sometimes seemed little more than a mixture of myth and misinformation. With no clear indication of where Pedro intended to strike, Pere called out companies from all of his realms and directed them to take up positions along much of the Aragonese frontier. At Tarazona, one of his largest border cities that lay between the Ebro and the Sierra del Moncayo, he stationed a sizeable garrison in addition to its 800 citizen-defenders. For this reason, the Aragonese king considered Tarazona “better defended than any other place in Aragon.”3 During the same period, he sought to increase the numbers he could field by ordering his Catalan 1  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, f. 93; R. 1380, f. 113. For Pere’s espionage efforts in the first months of the war, see ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, f. 115; R. 1380, ff. 35r–v. See also Gutiérrez de Velasco, “Conquista,” 83, ftn. 58. For further discussion of espionage in the War of the Two Pedros, see Chapter 12, Section 4. 2  Ayala, Pedro I, 476–78 (1357, chaps. ii–iii). See also: Zurita, Anales, 4:315 (IX:vii). 3  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1149, f. 96v; Epistolari, 155 (doc. 21).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004425057_008

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territorial officials (vicars) to muster as many able-bodied men in their districts as they could lay their hands on. They were to call out “ every knight, son of knight, high-born person, townsmen, villager and others who customarily serve with a horse and weapons … or even those who do not.” Pere also called a Valencian parliament (corts) to provide up to 3,000 men to serve for the next three months.4 As the Castilian threat intensified, the king even appealed to his highly undependable ally, Carlos II of Navarre (r. 1349–1387) “the Bad” (le mauvais) and was asked to, encourage his own subjects” to provide military assistance to Aragon.5 Even with these frantic, Navarrese preparations, the direction of the Castilian invasion caught Pere by surprise. Despite repeated warnings that the Castilians had invaded and overrun Aranda del Moncayo to the north of Calatayud, the Aragonese army was unable to prevent Pedro from capturing various nearby sites across this mountainous district.6 Then, from this high ground, the invaders methodically began to invest the ring of castles that protected Tarazona. The Aragonese monarch learned of this critical situation from several sources, some of them not specifically military.7 On March 2, 1357, Pere corresponded with the abbot of Santa María de Varuela, who complained that villages ringing his monastery such as Alcalá de Moncayo and Vera de Moncayo, had been totally deserted by their population. Apparently villagers on the front lines understood better than their king the imminent danger posed by Pedro’s army. Moving forward through Agreda, the Castilians now invested Tarazona itself and in the early hours of March 9, captured the town almost without a fight. Though Pere attributed this shocking defeat to “great treason and wickedness” of the town’s defenders who, in his mind, supposedly profited from the surrender, its fall was far more likely due to an Aragonese failure to defend one section of the city from the attacking Castilians. To cement his hold on the newly conquered city, Pedro I took steps to expel its Aragonese population. Inhabitants were ordered to leave Tarazona for the neighboring Navarrese town of Tudela with only as much as they could carry.8 Despite royal fury with the premature and absolutely unnecessary loss of 4  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, ff. 152v–53; R. 1380, ff. 159r–v. 5  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, ff. 187v–88. 6  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, f. 111v [for English translation, see Appendix II, doc. 6]. 7  Ayala, Pedro I, 478 (1357, chap. iii). See also: Gutiérrez de Velasco, “Conquista,” 83–88; Zurita, Anales, 4: 316–7 (IX:vii). 8  A CA, Cancillería real, 149, f. 96v; R. 1151, f. 65v; R. 1379, ff. 147–48v, 161r–v [for English translation, see Appendix II, doc. 12]; Ayala, Pedro I, 478 (1357, chap. iii); Epistolari, 155. See also: Lafuente Gómez, Dos Coronas en guerra, 67–68.

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Tarazona, Pere informed its residents that the crown would take “no legal action for any guilt they might have,” but would allow them to resettle in Manresa, north of Barcelona.9 When the king’s army, composed of Aragonese, Catalan, and Valencian militias as well as units commanded by the counts of Foix and Trastámara, belatedly came on to the scene, Pedro marched out of Tarazona with the majority of his troops to take on this relief force. Both sides drew up in battle order on the plain of Borja south of the city and a critical engagement seemed imminent.10 Now, for the first of many times in the long conflict, forces that seemed to be careening inexorably toward a pitched battle proved unwilling to risk their fate on its uncertain outcome. As a result, at the last moment, accepting instead mediation by the Papal Legate, Guillaume de la Jugie, both sides pulled back from the brink. Despite averting this clash, papal arbitration ultimately did little to stop a conflict that had already broken out along much of the borderland between Castile and the Crown of Aragon.11 The fluid nature of this war is demonstrated by the fate of Tarazona. The city remained under Pedro’s control until 1360 when its Castilian garrison commander, Gonzalo González de Lucio, surrendered it back to Pere in return for a large payment.12 For three years, it was held by the Aragonese, after which it passed once again under Castilian control and remained so until the end of the war.13 On the whole, the kind of fighting involved during much of the conflict favored Castile. Pedro remained on the offensive and, despite occasional defeats, won a great deal of Aragonese frontier territory without losing any of his own. As the capture of Tarazona clearly shows, the Castilian king proved himself to be highly accomplished at formulating and carrying out short-term military plans. He chose this target because it was not well supplied, had inferior defenses, and was not garrisoned by an overwhelming number of defenders. He unleashed a rapid attack on his objective, first capturing one by one its supporting castles, after which he penetrated the city through the lightly defended Muslim quarter. Because of the Castilian monarch’s energy and rapid movements, the city garrison was out-maneuvered and surrendered within a day.14 Moved to respond to the growing crisis caused by Castilian attacks that destabilized whole sections of the Aragonese frontier, Pere seems to have spent 9  A CA, Cancillería real, 149, f. 96v; Epistolari, 157. 10  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1152, f. 107v, 117r–v, 152v–53v, 177r–v; Ayala, Pedro I, 478 (1357, chap. iv). See also: Gutiérrez, “Conquista,” 88–89. 11  For a more detailed picture of the ultimately unsuccessful peace effort, see: Chapter 9. 12  Ayala, Pedro I, 502–3 (1360, chap. vi); Pere III, Chronicle, 2:528 (VI:28). See also: Zurita, Anales, 4:397–98 (IX:xxviii). 13  Ayala, Pedro I, 525–26 (1363, chap. iii). See also: Zurita, Anales, 4:454 (IX:xliii). 14  Ayala, Pedro I, 476–77 (1357, chap. ii).

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the first phase of the war casting about for a strategy that might anticipate and even neutralize this threat. Starting late in 1356, he had divided responsibility for defense of his front lines among captains (capitaniae, frontalers), foreign and domestic, clerical and lay. The king argued that he himself could not be everywhere hence the need for such officials. At this point in the war, he believed that stationing soldiers on his borders for up to three months at a time and issuing to their commanders detailed written orders, “was a fitting way to defend the commonwealth.”15 In the winter of 1357, the Aragonese monarch instructed his captains to divide their troops, sending half of them to the relief of Tarazona. Although, for the most part, these men came from outposts near Zaragoza, some also came from as far away as Valencia. The main purpose of the detached units, which usually consisted of fewer than a hundred horsemen, was to shore up threatened village garrisons and reoccupy abandoned castles. Although Pere also instructed his troops to take the war to the enemy whenever possible by entering enemy territory and damaging its border settlements,16 Aragonese attacks on Castile had a down side: at the same time they allowed Aragon to go on the offensive, they weakened its own garrisons, hampering them from effectively driving back Castilian raiders. As the war progressed, an increasing number of soldiers who fought under the Aragonese banner were actually Castilians who had fled their own country, exiles who were led primarily by the count of Trastámara. The movement of these foreign auxiliaries across Pere’s territory required a great deal of administrative coordination. To expedite their free passage throughout his lands, the Aragonese king sent messages to ruling councils of the towns these troops would have to pass through. He sternly reminded them that, though the men were Castilian, they were fighting for Aragon. Consequently, Pere expressly ordered the townspeople to aid them in every way possible. “For the good and tranquil estate of our frontiers,” he instructed urban officials to respect the right of the foreign commanders to exercise legal jurisdiction over their own men both for minor and more serious disputes with the inhabitants. Neither town authorities nor royal officials were to interfere with this military adjudication.17

15  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1381, ff. 41v–42, 48v, 49v, 183v; R. 1382, ff. 132r–v, 174r–v; R. 1383, f. 173. See also: Kagay, “Defense,” 25; idem, “Shattered Circle,” 130. 16  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, f. 111; R. 1380, ff. 140v–41. 17  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, ff. 117, 123r–v.

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Offensives along Aragon’s Land Borders

Following Pedro’s violation of the papally-brokered truce in July, 1357, much of the border fighting for the next few months was carried out by the royal siblings, Enrique de Trastámara and Prince Ferran. During this period, Enrique led his Castilians across the border into the Rioja district while Ferran used his base at Orihuela in southern Valencia to harry the territory around Jumilla west of Murcia. Meanwhile, in the summer of 1358 shortly after having assassinated his half-brother, Fadrique, in the alcazar at Seville, Pedro I once again returned to the front establishing his headquarters in the town of Almazán. Before unleashing scattered attacks into Pere’s realm, he sought to justify himself by sending to his counterpart his list of complaints once again. This time Pere made no reply. Pedro stayed at the front only until August 14 and then returned to Seville to begin preparations for a major campaign in the following year.18 After almost three years of war during most of which he was largely on the defensive against constant Castilian raiding, Pere opened the year 1359 determined to change course and carry the war into enemy territory. On January 22, he led a small force out of Aragon and crossed the Jalón River west of Calatayud into Castilian territory. His forces quickly captured a number of castles before briefly investing the largest town in the district, Medinaceli. On this occasion, the Aragonese monarch’ enthusiasm outstripped his logistical support. Without sufficient supplies or the possibility of replenishing them from the bleak countryside he passed through, he was forced to break off the year’s first offensive and retreat into Aragon, after ordering all frontier towns to maintain the fight with Castile as best they could.19 Leaving his tents and other equipment at Calatayud, Pere instructed the town council to transport all this equipment back to Zaragoza. Because of repeated rumors about an upcoming Castilian counter-offensive, Pere immediately switched back to defense, throwing himself into upgrading, staffing, and provisioning his Aragonese and Valencian fortresses.20 Ironically, after all this activity in western Aragon, the major blow in the campaign would come far to the east, not on land, but against the Valencian and Catalan coasts, the maritime lifeline of the Crown of Aragon. 18  A CA, Cancillería real, Cartas reales [Pedro IV]. Caja 31, no. 646; Avala, Pedro I, 485 (1358, chap. viii). See also: Diaz Martín, Itinerario, 87; Gutiérrez de Velasco, “Contraofensiva,” 8. 19  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1381, f. 192 [for English translation, see Appendix II, doc. 20]. See also: Lafuente Gómez, Dos Coronas en guerra, 77. 20  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1381, ff. 185v–88, 204; Pere III, Chronicle, 2:521–22 (VI:21). See also: Gutiérrez de Velasco, “Contraofensiva Aragonesa,” 13; Zurita, Anales, 4:365–67 (IX:xx).

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Castilian Fleet Operations (1359–1360)

By late winter or early spring, 1359, the Castilian monarch was in Seville making preparations for what would become the most ambitious and expensive military undertaking of the entire conflict—a seaborne operation launched against the coasts of Catalonia and Valencia, conducted by one of the largest armadas of the fourteenth century.21 To take part in this expedition Pedro gathered a fleet numbering at least 127 vessels of all sorts: 41 galleys (galeas), 80 naos, 2 galleotas, and 4 leos.22 This included 12 newly constructed galleys fitted out by the king in Seville’s great shipyard, the Arenal.23 Among the captains of the Castilian fleet listed by Ayala were many of the leading nobles still loyal to Pedro, including the chronicler who identifies himself as “fleet captain” (capitan de la flota). In addition to Castilian vessels, there were contingents contributed by Pedro’s uncle, the king of Portugal (11 ships), by his principal ally, the emir of Granada (3 ships), and by the Italian city of Genoa. (The eleven Portuguese ships arrived fairly late, overtaking the fleet only when it had sailed as far north as the mouth of the Ebro River).24 By May, 1359, Pedro had started moving the ships in Seville down the Guadalquivir River to the port of San Lucar on the Atlantic where the fleet was gathering. Following this maneuver, although the Portuguese had not yet joined them, the king set sail, south past Cadiz and Cape Trafalgar, then east through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean. After a fifteen day stop 21  Much of this information comes from Ayala’s account. See: Ayala, Pedro I, 494–99. 22  This list of the ships is provided by Ayala (page 494). When it comes to distinguishing varieties of medieval ships, contemporary sources are not infrequently vague and/or inconsistent. One recent expert on medieval naval warfare indicates that a galea or galley might also appear in the sources as a barca, galionus, lleño, or nao. See: Mott, Sea Power, 186–201. On other occasions (as we see here), the medieval writer might identify the galea, lleño, and nao as completely different vessels. Under the circumstances, distinguishing between ship types becomes a daunting task. For readers wishing to learn more about medieval warships, an excellent collection on naval warfare in the Middle Ages is Medieval Ships and Warfare edited by British maritime historian, Susan Rose of the United Kingdom’s Open University. The book deals with both shipbuilding and war at sea throughout the period. It consists of twenty-seven articles by leading authorities that appeared in print between 1930 and 2003. See: Susan Rose, Medieval Ships and Warfare (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2008). 23  For information concerning the Arenal, see Cesário Fernández Duro, La marina de Castilla desde su origen y pugna con la de Inglaterra hasta la refundición en la Armada española, vol. 17 of Historia General de España (Madrid, 1894; reprint, Madrid, 1995), 39. See also: Pérez Embid, “Marina,” 159. 24  Ayala, Pedro I, 495 (1359, chap. xi).

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over at Algeciras, the Castilian fleet sailed on past the kingdom of Granada, eventually mustering in Cartagena, the last major Castilian port before reaching the border with Valencia. From here, the king sent out an advance squadron of seven ships northward to scout out the enemy. Throughout this period, Pere seemed fully aware of the approaching Castilian armada and directed his coastal communities to prepare to meet the challenge. On May 24–25, he demanded that the city councils of Majorca as well as the Catalan village of Apiaria both pay their fair share of an overdue parliamentary subsidy. Instead of using this money to pay land-based forces, he now diverted it to the arming of merchant ships.25 Meanwhile, by early June, Pedro’s fleet had sailed up the Murcian coast to launch its opening strike against Guardamar, a small Valencian port at the mouth of the Segura River, south of Alicante. This town belonged to Pere’s halfbrother, Prince Ferran, who had rejoined the Aragonese side.26 Having taken the town and castle by storm, the Castilians secured both a safe anchorage and captured an extensive cache of supplies. When their fleet continued sailing north, Pere again warned the Valencian cities of the approaching danger. Some two weeks later, in order to raise more troops to defend the coastline he activated the Princeps namque clause of Catalonia’s traditional law, the Usatges. The Princeps namque clause bound all Catalan citizens to help their prince, the count of Barcelona, in the event that he was attacked by a foreign enemy and called for their aid in spreading the word “by both letters and messengers” or even through signal fires. Once aware of the crisis, every Catalan male, whether on horseback or on foot, had to rush to the county’s defense. If they failed to do so, those who held fiefs from the count would lose them and all others would have to pay a substantial fine in money or land. The call for help could not be ignored since, as the article proclaimed, “no man must fail the ruler in such a great matter and crisis.”27 As a result of the Castilian fleet’s action for the second time during the conflict, the two monarchs once again found themselves in close proximity. 25  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1381, f. 232v; R. 1382, f. 19v. 26  The Aragonese king had returned it to his often wayward half-brother, when the latter returned to Aragonese service. This same port had been attacked unsuccessfully by a Castilian-Genoese flotilla of 18 ships in August, 1358. On that occasion, all but two ships had been destroyed when blown ashore by a sudden storm. Ayala, Pedro I, 485 (1358, chap. ix). 27  A CA, Cancillería real, Cartas reales [Pedro IV], no. 6003; R. 1383, f. 58 [for English translations, see Appendix II, docs. 25, 27; Ayala, Pedro I, 494–95 1359, chap. xi. The outpost of Guardamar, to the south of the mouth of the Segura River, was a traditional holding of Prince Ferran that Pere had restored to his half-brother in 1357. Kagay, “Conflict,” 93. Usatges, 80, art. 64.

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Anchoring his fleet outside of Barcelona’s harbor on June 10, Pedro encountered a squadron of Catalan galleys drawn up in battle order behind a network of hastily anchored floating obstacles. Urban militias supplied by the city crowded the shoreline behind these vessels. Most of these men came from the capital’s craft guilds and fishing fleet. They had marched out of the Regomir gate with banners flying and were now readying themselves to repel any Castilian landing.28 Faced with a prospect of heavy crossbow and artillery fire from the determined defenders, Pedro reconsidered any plan he might have had for forcing a landing at Barcelona. On the next day, June 11, his galleys skirmished with the smaller Aragonese fleet. Though neither side gained a clear victory, on this occasion Pere’s squadron demonstrated its use of advanced technology. At least one the Aragonese ships was equipped with a bombard which fired a few projectiles at the approaching Castilian vessels.29 Driven away from the Catalan capital by its surprisingly strong defenses, the Castilian monarch withdrew his fleet slightly to the south seeking a temporary anchorage on the far side of the Llobregat River. During the move, Pedro’s ships had to fend off repeated attack by a host of small enemy vessels. From this horde of determined to wreak havoc on Pere’s maritime holdings, the king slowly continued down the Catalan coast toward Tortosa, then turned due east, sailing out to Balearic Islands to attack the wealthy Aragonese island of Ibiza. After staging a successful amphibious landing, Pedro allowed his troops to ravage most of the island before they settled down to a full-scale siege of its principal fortress.30 Meanwhile, back on the mainland, Pere had gathered a fleet of between forty and fifty vessels, which left Barcelona on July 23 and, following his adversary landed at Majorca a few days later.31 After consulting with his nobles headed by Bernat de Cabrera and Francesch de Perellós, long since returned from France, the king decided to launch a surprise attack against the Castilian forces on Ibiza. Before he could do so, however, his “principal adversary” learned of the Aragonese presence on Majorca when his ships captured a merchantman

28  Ayala, Pedro I, 495 (1359, chap. xii); Pere III, Chronicle, 2:522–23 (VI:22). See also: Kagay, “Princeps namque,” 74–75; Zurita, Anales, 4:376–78 (IX:xxiii). 29  Pere III, 2:523–24 (VI:23–24); Ayala, 495 (1359, chap. xii); Zurita, Anales, 4:378–79 (IX:xxiii). 30  Ayala, Pedro I, 495–96 (1359, chaps. xii–xiii); Pere III, Chronicle 2:524–25 (VI:24). See also: Zurita, Anales, 4:379 (IX:xxiii). The Aragonese fleet used at least one bombard against the Castilians. 31  Ayala, Pedro I, 496 (1359, chap. xiii); Pere III, Chronicle, 2:525 (VI:25). See also: Zurita, Anales, 4:380–81 (IX:xxiv). Ayala lists the components of the Aragonese fleet as follows: 20 vessels–Barcelona; 10–Valencia; 5–Majorca; 2–Tortosa; 1–Zaragoza; Collioure–1; Rosas–1.

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from that island. Shortly afterwards, despite having a much larger fleet, Pedro hastily broke off his siege of the fortress and departed for the mainland. According to Pere, this was a blatant act of cowardice on the part of a guilty man who was “fearful of the unjust war he was waging … [and] did not dare enter into a battle … fearing the punishment of God.”32 Despite assuming this tone of moral superiority and bravado, the Aragonese king decided to break off any pursuit he might have undertaken. Instead, he took his adversary’s retreat as a signal to return to Barcelona accompanied by fifteen galleys of the alreadyoutnumbered Aragonese fleet. With their remaining vessels, the admirals, Cabrera and Viscount Hug Folc II of Cardona, limited themselves to shadowing the Castilian fleet on its journey back to the mainland.33 From a high point at Calpe, a town on the Valencian coast where the Castilian fleet had anchored, Pedro and his sailors watched these Aragonese vessels being rowed slowly past their anchorage and, afterwards making for the neighboring coastal town of Denia. From the banners flown on the largest of the Aragonese ships, the Castilian observers could deduce that the Aragonese monarch was no longer with the fleet. Despite ordering his companies to stand ready for action, Pedro still proved hesitant to commit his fate to a wager of battle, even one conducted on the sea when in possession of a considerably larger fleet. Calling a council of war, he found his captains and nobles badly divided. The Castilian admiral, Gil Boccanegra, argued that, to take on a fleet in which his counterpart was clearly missing would be detrimental to both his military interest and honor. The admiral recommended as an alternative that Pedro sail south to the port-city of Alicante that had already fallen into Castilian hands where he could disembark his troops and begin land operations in the neighborhood.34 By contrast, some of the king’s advisers recommended that he should use the great advantages derived both from his superior numbers and the prevailing winds to attack the Aragonese fleet. They assured him that they would bend every effort to deliver to their king a glorious victory “with the will and mercy of God.”35 At this point, what had begun as grand and possibly decisive scheme rapidly petered out. Pedro decided to sail his fleet down the Valencian coast to Alicante where he could anchor and refit his vessels after their long voyage. 32  Ayala, Pedro I, 496 (1359, chap. xiv); Pere III, Chronicle 2:526 (VI:25–26). 33  Pere III, Chronicle, 2:526 (VI:26). For these two important royal retainers, see Kagay, “Treasons,” 41; Sobrequés, Barons, 15–58, 170–71. 34  Ayala, Pedro I, 497 (1359, chap. xvi). 35  Ibid.

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After remaining off that small port for six days, he allowed the private shipowners as well as the Granadan and Portuguese squadrons to depart. He then began the tedious journey back to Seville with the remainder of his vessels. When the Aragonese commanders heard of Pedro’s departure, they, too, reduced their fleet by releasing from service the captains who owned their own ships, maintaining only a squadron of ten royal galleys in order to attack individual Castilian and Portuguese vessels. Even this alternative project, however, was soon abandoned due to lack of provisions.36 As on various other occasions during the war, a major campaign involving both Aragonese and Castilian kings, had come close to settling the long conflict with a decisive battle. Yet in the end, both monarchs shied away from such an encounter. Pedro López de Ayala, the future chronicler who had commanded one of Pedro’s ships, would later observe that if the Aragonese and Castilian fleets had clashed off Ibiza, the entire outcome of the war might have been determined by a single battle where both kings had been personally present.”37 Despite this opportunity, neither Pedro nor Pere took any meaningful military action to bring the three-year-old conflict to an end. 4

The Royal Surrogates at War

Through out the conflict Pere proved more than willing to hire mercenaries so he “could make war better and more forcefully.”38 This very quickly brought him into close contact with two men who had extensive political agendas: Pedro I’s half-brother, Count Enrique de Trastámara and his own half-brother, Prince Ferran. Trastámara had entered Pere’s service during the opening weeks of the war, rendering homage “by hand and mouth” to his new lord in November, 1356 as well as on several other occasions in the next decade.39 In exchange for his support, Enrique was rewarded with lands and titles across Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia, many of them once held by Prince Ferran.40 Like other mercenaries active in the Iberian conflict, Enrique’s troops worked for a daily wage

36  Ibid., 498 (1359, chap. xvii–xix). 37  Ibid., 496 (1359, chap. xiv). 38  Pere III, 2:509 (VI:8). 39  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1543, ff. 21r–v. 40  Pere III, 2:510 (VI:8).

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generally determined by the kind of weapons they fought with and the types of horses they rode.41 Due to the economic and military roles that Trastámara and his men played within the Crown of Aragon, they quickly ran into difficulties. As an instant absentee landlord, Enrique was immediately viewed by many within the Aragonese as a foreign interloper. The count and his agents often met with such “injurious and threatening words of death” from the people they were supposedly protecting that they grew increasingly afraid even to enter their towns.42 Unlike native Aragonese captains, Trastámara possessed no longstanding feudal tie within the kingdom and thus could only hope to retain control over the Aragonese forces he commanded by the steady payment of salaries. This he accomplished with some success by drawing on the municipal revenues, intimidating his new vassals to make “free gifts,” and constantly complaining to the king about his dwindling resources.43 On the other hand, because of his strong personality and skill, Trastámara soon emerged as one of Pere’s best, though least loved, captains on the Aragonese frontier. The second of Pere’s important mercenary captains was his half-brother, Prince Ferran. The royal siblings shared a long history of hatred and mistrust. In fact, at the beginning of the conflict, Ferran had actually entered the service of Pedro I, fighting under the banner of Castile. At this time, he established his headquarters in the city of Tortosa, on the lower reaches of the Ebro River well within Aragonese territory. Here, he had hoped to foment rebellion against Pere among the Valencian population that had supported the anti-royalist Unión a decade earlier. During these months, Pere viewed his troublesome sibling as a “notorious public enemy,” guilty of lese-majeste.”44 Despite their harsh words, Pere and Ferran began to reconsider their ruined relationship during the war’s second year. While fighting for Castile, Ferran showed himself to be an extremely self-centered and careless commander who allowed Alicante to be wrested from his control by a much smaller Aragonese force in the winter of 1357. As a consequence, the prince began to fear Pedro’s proven reputation for ruthless vengeance.45 After a full year of secret negotiations with Pere Ferran abruptly traded masters and renewed his allegiance to the Crown of Aragon, professing “a fervent spirit and fraternal love” for 41  For military pay scales and other compensations for soldiers, see Siete Partidas, (Bk. II, Tit. xxiv, leyes i–v). See also: Kagay, “Government,” 140–44. 42  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1543, ff. 35, 36. 43  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1387, ff. 90v–91v, 96, 99v, 104v–5; R. 1543, ff. 32r–v, 40v–42, 49–50v. 44  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1532, f. 56. See also: Kagay, “Conflict,” 91. 45  Kagay, “Conflict,” 92; Masiá i de Ros, Relación, 1:255; Zurita, Anales, 4:311 (IX:vi).

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his half-brother.46 Until his own death in 1363, Prince Ferran continued in Aragonese service. Unfortunately, Pere soon found his half-brother as mediocre a captain as Pedro had. Added to the careless administration of the Valencian fortresses entrusted to him, the prince remained as haughty as he had been in the previous decade, even going so far as to file suit against the Aragonese crown to regain control of feudal revenues that had once been his.47 Much of the damage he did to the war effort resulted from his hatred of and rivalry with Pere’s two other principal war leaders: Enrique de Trastámara and Bernat de Cabrera. Unfortunately for the Aragonese war effort, the political rivalries spawned between these competing captains seemed to convey themselves to the troops. 5

Battle of Araviana (September, 1359), An Aragonese Victory

Almost as soon as he had sailed back from Majorca in August, 1359,48 Pere began the process of readying Aragon against a suspected land invasion by Castilian forces. Earlier that year, fearing just such a Castilian assault, the king had instructed some of his captains to gather companies of horse and foot for frontier service.49 Although nothing came of this, by the following September he again received word that an enemy offensive was in the offing. This led him to call out additional companies mustered by important Aragonese nobles.50 By then, Pere had named the count of Trastámara as the kingdom’s captain general and Trastámara’s younger brother, Tello, as military governor for the towns of Calatayud, Fariza, and Çetina.51 Now in the face of this new Castilian 46  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1532, ff. 62–3. See also: Kagay, “Conflict,” 93; Masiá i de Ros, Relación, 1:270–01. 47  A CA, Cancillería real, Cartas reales [Pedro IV], no. 5744; R. 1161, ff. 424-v; R. 1162, f. 136; R. 1171, ff. 424-v; R. 1173, ff. 55, 65v; R. 1382, ff. 95v–96, 121r–v; R. 1547, ff. 7v–10v, 30–32v, 59v–61. See also: Kagay, “Conflict,” 94; Masiá i de Ros, Relación, 1:279; DHC, 63. 48  Pere III, Chronicle, 2:526–27 (VI:26). 49  A CA, Cancillería, R. 1162, f. 127v. See also: Lafuente Gómez, Dos Coronas en guerra, 202–3 (doc. 33). This letter was directed to the viscount of Rocabertino, the viscount of Canet and Insula, and the nobles Bernat de Sono, Pere Galceran de Pinoso, Panquet and Ferran de Bellcastel, and Berenguer de Olms. 50  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1383, f. 78. See also: Lafuente Gómez, Dos Coronas en guerra, 203, (doc. 34). These letters were sent to Count Lope de Luna, Luis Cornell, Pedro Fernández de Ixar, Felipe de Castro, Blasco de Alagon, and Eximen de Urrea. 51  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1382, ff. 81r–v. In a letter of October 30, 1359 in which Pere complains to the general bailiff of Aragon, Pedro Jordan de Urries, about the confused state of defenses on the Aragonese frontier.

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threat, the king also appointed important Aragonese commanders for the districts surrounding Albarrazin, Borja, Cubells, Daroca, Montreal, and Teruel. In all these appointments, he was careful to specify the duties and rights of captains and spell out their power over civilian populations—in so far as military operations were concerned. In no case, did he fail to take into account how crucially important these frontier captains were to the war effort. This reliance on them is explained in a passage expressed in the letters of appointment he sent to more than one of them: It is fitting for our honor and the utility of the commonwealth, that the Aragonese king, who cannot be everywhere in his realms at once, has designated strong men to defend against the attacks of the enemy.52 Despite complaints about Aragon’s new captain general from other royal captains and their troops, complaints that centered around the fact that he was a foreigner, Pere reaffirmed Trastámara’s appointment to this post in September, 1359.53 Worried about the failure of his subjects to acknowledge the Castilian count, Pere wrote strong letters to his native Aragonese captains, insisting that they “act as good and loyal retainers customarily should” by obeying whatever orders Enrique might issue for the conduct of the war. He warned that if they did not do so, “the direction of the war [would be] thrown into disarray.”54 Even with this stern warning, Aragonese captains showed little sign of acknowledging Trastámara’s authority over them. As a result, in order to promote his drive for a generally accepted chain of command along the frontier, the king summoned all of these principal captains to La Almunia outside of Zaragoza in mid-September. Here, he confronted them, personally commanding them to recognize Trastámara’s supreme command. While not a few of the participants in this conference still balked at obeying the royal orders to accept his leadership, they did agree to continue the offensive operations in Castile that Pere had begun during the previous winter. Following the La Almunia meeting, Trastámara, accompanied by several of the Aragonese commanders, led a force of 800 horsemen and an unspecified number of infantry across the frontier into the mountainous territory below 52  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1383, ff. 132r–v. See also: Kagay, “Pere III’s System,” 207. 53  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1381, ff. 205v–7, 243; [For English translation, see Appendix II, docs. 19, 23]. Besides Trastámara and his brother, this directive names Pedro de Luna, Eximen de Urrea. Archbishop Lope of Zaragoza, Juan Martínez de Luna, and Pedro de Exerica as Aragonese captains. 54  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1382, f. 44v [for English translation, see Appendix II, doc. 29].

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the town of Agreda. This force, made up largely of Castilian mercenaries loyal to Enrique, immediately fell on the small village of Ólvega, northwest of Calatayud, leaving it a smouldering ruin. To counter the threat, the Castilian captains in the region, Juan Fernández de Henestroso and Fernando de Castro, gathered 1,500 troops from the Agreda district and pursued the raiders. This Castilian force eventually cornered Enrique’s men on a plain between the headwaters of the Araviana River and the foothills of the Sierra del Moncayo. On this naturally enclosed field, on September 22, 1359, the two small forces drew themselves up in battle array. By the end of the day, those fighting on the Aragonese side had gained the advantage, after the Castilian ranks lost cohesion. Although the losers attempted to flee from the field, in the confined space of the plain, retreat proved largely impossible and what began as a rout turned into a bloodbath. Araviana provided an opportunity for the exiled followers of Enrique de Trastámara to avenge themselves on their monarch by slaughtering their countrymen who had remained loyalty to him. Among the 300 Castilian dead were Ferrández de Henestroso, Pedro’s principal adviser, and Gómez Suárez de Figueroa, grand commander (comendador mayor) in the military order of Calatrava. In addition to the fallen, a large number of Castilian knights, many of them members of the chivalric Order of the Sash (Orden de la Banda), were captured and later ransomed.55 The tide of this bloody battle might have been turned in favor of Castile had two of Pedro’s other captains, Diego Pérez de Sarmiento and Juan Alfonso de Benavides, more rapidly brought their troops onto the battlefield. Afterwards, Samiento, who had a longstanding rivalry with Henestrosa, was afraid to face the king. Instead, he quickly deserted to the other side and joined Enrique’s growing army of Castilian exiles. Upon hearing of Sarmiento’s desertion, Pedro stripped him of his military office of adelantado mayor and destroyed the castles he held in Castile. Rather than following up on this victory, one that deprived Pedro of his military advisers, Trastámara and his small, but victorious force slipped back across the mountains to safety in Aragonese territory.56

55  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1382, ff. 81r–v. 56  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1032, ff. 160 r–v; Ayala, Pedro I, 499–500 (1359, chap. xxii) [for English translation, see Appendix IV, doc. 1]. See also: Luis Vicente Díaz Martín, Pedro I el Cruel (1350–1369) (Gijón, 2007), 171–72; Gutiérrez de Velasco, “Contraofensiva,” 16–17; Lafuente Gómez, Dos Coronas en guerra, 78–80; Zurita, Anales, 4:383–87 (IX:xxv). For the Orden de la Banda, see Richard Barber, The Knight and Chivalry (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1995), 340–44; Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven, Conn., 1984), 179–81; Rodríguez-Velasco, Order and Chivalry, 122–24.

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The count could hardly imagine how deeply the results of this battle would affect his half-brother, Pedro, as well as his own family. When they heard of Henestroso’s death, both Pedro and his mistress, María de Padilla (Henestrosa’s niece), were shocked. The king’s anger demanded immediate vengeance. This he achieved by taking action against Enrique’s teen-aged brothers, Pedro and Alfonso, who had been prisoners for several years at Carmona, outside of Seville. According to Ayala, the execution of the two adolescents “who were innocent and had done no wrong to the king” weighed heavily on the consciences of Pedro’s supporters.57 6

Najera, (April, 1360), an Aragonese Defeat

In the months following Enrique’s victory, Pere remained on guard against any further Castilian operations. On October 1, 1359, he informed one of Valencia’s high officials that the king of Granada, Mūhammad V, had renewed that kingdom’s alliance with Pedro I. As a result, it was “fitting to make war on [Mūhammad’s] realms and lands, as well as on his subjects and their property.” To announce this renewed state of hostilities with Granada, the king instructed that public criers be sent throughout Valencia.58 Assuming correctly that Pedro would be furious over his defeat and the loss of his leading adviser, at Araviana, Pere was certain that a Castilian incursion across Aragon’s frontier might be in the works. To meet any such attack, he ordered several of his captains to raise a force of 600 crossbowmen and lancers. This company would be held in reserve to be used by Aragonese commanders whenever they say fit.59 Although the king’s continuing emphasis was placed on defense of the realm, the count of Trastámara tried valiantly to pull the Aragonese war effort back onto the offensive. Encouraged by his recent success at Araviana and undoubtedly aware of Pedro’s cold-blooded murder of his younger brothers, he presented Pere with a plan for another invasion of Castile, one that would be carried out by the Castilian exiles, including his new follower, Diego Sarmiento, who had fled the Castilian king’s anger over his performance at Araviana. Despite Pere’s growing enthusiasm for such a venture, he still entertained doubts about his captain general’s ability to exercise authority over the native Aragonese captains. Consequently, he temporarily shelved this plan. 57  Ayala, Pedro I, 500 (1359, chap. xxiii); See also: Estow, Pedro, 199. 58  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1382, f. 68v [for English translation, see Appendix II, doc. 30]. 59  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1382, f. 83 [for English translation, see Appendix II, doc. 31].

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Instead, despite all past indications, the king now decided to replace Trastámara in the post of captain general with his own half-brother, Ferran. From this point on, the rivalry between these two men grew to be increasingly dangerous.60 For his part, Enrique bitterly resented Ferran’s popularity with the emigrè Castilian soldiers in Aragon, men whom Trastámara believed should fight under his banner. For his part, Ferran distrusted Trastámara’s ally, Bernat de Cabrera, whose considerable influence might poison Pere’s mind against the prince. In the midst of these increasing hostilities, hostilities that threatened the Aragonese war effort, the Aragonese monarch did another about-face. Eventually, he came to view Enrique’s plan for another incursion into Castile not only as a means of carrying the war to the enemy, but also a way of reducing the feuding between his captains. Consequently, he eventually gave Enrique, Enrique’s brother, Tello, and Cabrera’s son, the count of Osona, permission to muster a force of 1,500 horsemen and 3,000 infantry to carry out the venture.61 Although Ferran refused to participate, Enrique led his small army across the Ebro back into Castile. After capturing the city of Nájera that lay just across the border, he had some residents of the Jewish quarter (aljama) slaughtered. This brutal action may have been carried out in order to win over the Christian population and further alienate them from King Pedro. Enrique then marched westward to the village of Pancorvo, north of the Castilian capital at Burgos. In response the Castilian monarch, who was currently residing in the capital, dispatched 600 horsemen under one of his most loyal captains, Gutier Gómez de Toledo, to Briviesca, a few kilometers southwest of the invading force. From there, they could shadow Enrique. The king, who appears to have been ill at the time, failed to accompany Toledo, though he would eventually advance in person to Briviesca, bringing with him other companies he had called up. As a result, Pedro’s troop strength increased every day until the army he could bring into field numbered as much as 5,000 horse and 10,000 foot. As these numbers

60  Ferran had long distrusted Cabrera and saw Enrique as his direct rival for military leadership in Aragon as well as a rival for the Castilian crown should Pedro be overthrown. His sly approach to court politics, which was surely passed down to him from his mother, Leonore of Castile, was apparent also in his relationship to the Castilian court during the brief period when he had served under his cousin. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 982, ff. 113–4. See also: Alfonso Antolí Fernández, “La Conquista de Jumilla por el Infante Don Fernando,” Murgetana 23, no. 87 (1993): 55–73, esp. 69–70. 61  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1383, ff. 135–37. See also: Lafuente Gómez, Dos Coronas en guerra, 203–6 (doc. 35). Some of these forces may have been drawn from the general military summons Pere had issued on January 20, 1360.

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increased, the Castilian captains pressed their monarch to prepare for battle against the invaders led by his half-brother.62 At this point and not for the last time, Enrique’s unreliable brother, Tello, appears to have suffered a loss of nerve. Privately he sent a messenger to Pedro, indicating that he and other Castilians serving in Enrique’s army were willing to defect back to the Castilian side. Learning of this proposed desertion, Enrique decided to send Tello back to Aragon escorted by three trustworthy knights63 under the pretense of bringing up reinforcements. Trastámara now withdrew from Pancorvo, and, while sending his other brother, Sancho, north to the town of Haro, he and the majority of his troops returned to Nájera. Upon learning of this, Pedro rapidly set out in pursuit at the head of his much larger army. On the way, he stopped in Miranda de Ebro where he had unfinished business. The town council of this small river port had opened its gates to Enrique who had then massacred much of the town’s Jewish population just as he had some days earlier at Najera. Incensed by this action, the king, now wished to make restitution to the surviving inhabitants of the aljama and to punish those townsmen who had supported the atrocity. He showed his extreme displeasure by reducing Miranda’s status and shifting some of its hamlets (aldeas) to the jurisdiction of the city of Vitoria.64 Afterwards, resuming the pursuit, Pedro swung southward toward Santo Domingo de la Calzada, and then led his forces eastward along the Pilgrim’s Road to Nájera. He established his camp in a field near the Azofra River slightly northwest of Nájera and began to besiege Enrique’s forces within the city. According to Ayala, as the siege began Pedro received a visit from a mysterious Dominican friar who insisted on speaking privately with the king. The chronicler relates the churchman’s words as follows: My Lord, Saint Dominic came to me in a dream and told me to come and tell you that most certainly if you do not guard yourself your brother, Count Enrique, will kill you with his own hand. Astonished and somewhat frightened, Pedro demanded that the cleric tell him if someone had counseled him to say this. The friar replied that Saint Dominic alone had commanded him to speak. Summoning those around him to hear 62  Ayala, Pedro I, 503 (1360, chap. vii). See also: Zurita, Anales, 4:393–94 (IX:xxviii). 63  Ayala identifies these men as Diego Pérez de Sarmiento, Juan González de Bazan, and Suer Pérez de Quiñones. By contrast, the editor of Ayala’s chronicle questions whether Quiñones was serving on Pedro’s side at this time. Ayala, Pedro I, 503 (1360, chap. viii). 64  Ayala, Pedro I, 503–4 (1360, chap. viii) [for English translation, see Appendix IV, doc. 2: Chapter viii]. See also: Diaz Martin, Itinerario, 370 (doc. 758).

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what was being said, the king ultimately concluded that, in fact, someone had instructed the friar to bring this sinister tale into their camp. For this supposed treason, the king immediately had the friar burned to death.65 Undeterred by the warning, on the last Friday of April, 1360, the Castilian monarch initiated what historians often call the first battle of Nájera. Count Enrique ordered a tent decorated with his banners to be set up on a small hill outside the town. When he and his principal captain, the count of Osona, led 800 horsemen and 2,000 infantry out from the town gates, the front ranks of Pedro’s army rushed to attack them, thereby initiating a “very brave battle.” As the two sides collided, Enrique’s much smaller force began to give way, leaving both his tent and banners to be captured. As the royal army bore down on them, the count broke from the mêlée with as many troops as he could salvage and retreated toward the city. Unfortunately, he now found the city gates barred against him by those within the city who supported Pedro. As a result, he and his men actually had to scale Nájera’s walls in order to escape capture or annihilation. Another phase of the battle took place around the aljama. There, Gonzalo Mexía, future master of Santiago, led fifty cavalrymen in a desperate attempt to hold off Pedro’s advancing forces until Trastámara could withdraw safety into Nájera. As a result of Mexía’s action, Enrique and his fleeing men not only survived “annihilation and slaughter”, but, in the process, managed to capture the banners of some of the pursuing Castilians. Although the count’s forces suffered a defeat marked by the loss of thirty knights and at least fifty horses, the royal army did not escape unscathed, losing several important knights and around 150 horses.66 Despite the losses that the two sides suffered on the first day, the king had retained control of the field and could therefore claim a victory. And while Enrique still held the town and its fortified barricades, his escape route seemed cut off. What is more, due to his lack of provisions, he would be unable to endure a long siege. On top of all this, Pedro seemed adamant about finishing off his troublesome sibling on the second day’s action. On that morning, however, as Pedro directed his troops to invest the town, he came upon one of his light cavalrymen (escudero de la gineta) weeping uncontrollably at the death of his uncle, “a good squire of Jaén.” The older man 65  Ayala, Pedro I, 504 (1360, chaps. viii–ix) [for English translation, see Appendix IV, 2: Chapter viii].; See also: Zurita, Anales, 4:395 (IX:xxviii). 66  Ayala, Pedro I, 504 (1360, chap. ix) [for English translation, see Appendix IV, doc. 2: Chapter x]; ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1383, ff. 179v–180. See also: Lafuente Gómez, Dos Coronas en guerra, 81–83. In this action, Enrique’s man captured the banners of the city of Seville and those of the master of Calatrava.

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had been captured on the previous day’s fighting and executed by Enrique’s order that very morning. For some reason not explored by Ayala, the king took this meeting as a dangerous omen and immediately suspended his plans for a siege. He immediately rode back to his camp, and, despite the urging of his captains, he refused to follow up the preceding day’s victory. This allowed Enrique’s army to slip out of Nájera, and cross the Ebro River into Navarre. With the quarry flown, Pedro could do nothing but dismiss his troops. Within a few weeks, he had commenced fresh peace talks with the papal legate. Many of the king’s advisers felt that if he had pressed his clear advantage at this first battle of Nájera, he could have effectively ended the war with Aragon or at the very least ended Enrique’s part in it. Sadly, they conceded that this was not the “will of God.” For his part, Pere also explained his adversary’s action as a result of divine intervention: Pedro’s uncharacteristically timid behavior had been due to the fact that the Aragonese war effort was protected “by the help and mercy of God.”67 6

The Failings of Prince Ferran

Despite the near disaster at Nájera, Enrique’s willingness to bring the war to the hated adversary was not lost on Pere. By this fourth year of the conflict, the king had reached a firm conclusion that it was far more cost-effective to use his principal captain in an offensive rather than a defensive role. Nevertheless, he still hoped that his own half-brother might prove as assertive and effective as Enrique. By 1361, the Aragonese king was ready to issue Prince Ferran a contract in which the crown promised to pay salaries for 3,000 troops for several months. In exchange for this instant army, the prince was to invade Castile and give Pere a percentage of all territory he conquered.68 As usual, however, Ferran failed to live up to his military commitments. As a result, the proposed Castilian expedition never materialized. Instead, for the next two years, Ferran continued to amass a mediocre service record. As an upshot, Pere began to accuse his half-brother of “disservice” in an increasingly public manner.69 By the summer of 1363, the king was on the verge 67  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1383, f. 179v; Ayala, Pedro I, 504–6 (1360, chaps. x–xi) [For English translations, see Appendix IV, doc. 2]: Chapter xi. See also: Zurita, Anales, 4:396–98 (IX:xxviii). 68  A CA, Cancillería real, Pergaminos de Pedro IV, no. 2260. See also: Kagay, “Conflict,” 94; Masiá i de Ros, Relación, 1:282–83, 291, 2:495–97; Zurita, Anales, 4:407–8 (IX:xxxi). 69  Gutiérrez de Velasco, “Fortalezas,” 9–15; Kagay, “Conflict,” 95; Zurita, Anales, 4:445–48 (IX:xlii).

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of leveling a formal accusation at the prince. He formulated a plan to have Ferran arrested when he came before the royal court in the Valencian town of Castellon de la Plana. Pere’s hopes to accomplish this without violence were dashed when on July 16, 1363, when the prince and a few of his retainers resisted the king’s officials. Shouting “it’s better to die than to be a prisoner,” Ferran got his wish. He was killed at the hands of the royal agents sent to arrest him. Pere excused his own involvement in his half-brother’s bloody demise by declaring that Ferran had clearly been guilty of lèse majesté, and thus richly deserved his fate.70 The event removed the king’s troublesome relative while Enrique was freed from a potentially dangerous rival. Despite Ferran’s death, Pere maintained his hope to use his remaining captain to invade Castile and challenge Pedro for his throne. In a series of agreements, Pere promised to provide military support in exchange for the count’s commitment to turn over extensive Castilian territory to Aragon.71 For his part, Trastámara was most definitely ready for this assignment. Endowed, as he was, with the invaluable experience gained in the campaigns of 1359–1360, he had shown himself to be a master of rapid troop movement across Castile’s harsh landscape. His cause, however, appealed to only a part of the Castilian population; the remainder had shown that they would either stand with their king or keep their heads down and survive. In a very real sense, then, Enrique’s raids into Castile presaged the civil war that would hold the kingdom in its grip from 1366 to 1369. 70  Ayala, Pedro I, 527–28 (1363, chap. vii) [For English translation, see Appendix IV, doc. 3]; Pere III, Chronicle, 537–41 (VI:34–36). See also: Kagay, “Conflict,” 95; Lafuente Gómez, Dos Coronas en guerra, 124–25; Masiá i de Ros, Relación, 1:313; Zurita, Anales, 472–73 (IX:xlvii). 71  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1543, ff. 66v, 70. See also: Masiá i de Ros, Relación, 2:531–33, 541–45 (docs. 233/169. 237/181); Zurita, Anales, 4:457 (IX:xliv). In both 1363 and 1366, Pere promised Ferran the use of 1,000 horse and 1,000 foot for two months’ service in Castile.

Chapter 7

Papal Efforts at Achieving Peace in the War of the Two Pedros (1357–1363) 1

Papal Peace Initiatives and Preparations for Renewed Conflict (1357–1358)

From its very beginning, the Castilian-Aragonese conflict was closely monitored by the papacy and its agents. When the conflict began, the Holy See was ruled by an elderly legist, Innocent VI (r. 1352–1362), a man known as a rigorous, albeit somewhat vacillating disciplinarian. Under his leadership, the papacy not infrequently attempted to serve as an honest broker in the intractable international conflicts of the day. Some years earlier, Innocent’s predecessor, Clement VI (r. 1342–1352) had become closely involved in negotiating a marriage for Pedro I when he was still crown prince. At the time, the pope’s plans for a French match to cement the political alliance currently being negotiated between the two kingdoms was derailed by Alfonso XI’s determination to seek an English wife for his son. The perspective bride-to-be was Princess Joan, a daughter of King Edward III. Only her death from plague during the journey to Spain had frustrated these plans and reopened the question of a suitable marriage for the Castilian prince. After the king’s death in 1350, Clement sided with the pro-French party in Castile to arrange Pedro’s marriage to Blanche, a daughter of the duke of Bourbon. Thereafter, faced with Pedro’s flagrant violation of his martial vows, Pope Innocent eventually excommunicated the Castilian king and placed his realms under interdict.1 To resolve this issue, the pope dispatched to Spain a legate, Guillaume de la Jugie, Cardinal-deacon of Holy Mary in Comesdin. The papal agent spent much of 1355 and 1356 in Castile attempting to arrange a reconciliation between Pedro and his young wife, while at the same time bringing about peace between the king and his unruly nobles who had espoused the new queen’s cause. With Pedro’s victory over the rebellious nobles in the winter of 1356, Cardinal Guillaume, who had grown ill while carrying out 1  G. Mollat, The Popes at Avignon: The “Babylonian Captivity” of the Medieval Church, trans. Janet Love (1963; repr., New York, 1965), 275.

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his mission, began asking to be relieved. However, with the outbreak of the Castilian-Aragonese war in late-summer of the same year, the pope redirected his tired legate’s negotiating skills to the task of international peace-making. He was to be aided in this thankless job by another important French cleric, Bertrand de Cosnac, the bishop of Comminges.2 Guillaume had now been in Spain for almost six months and was known to both of the feuding monarchs. He was, nevertheless, unprepared for the difficulties of getting the two of them to a face-to-face meeting. Despite his health, between spring and fall of 1357, he was forced to engage in some fairly frantic shuttle diplomacy between Pedro at his military headquarters at Deza, a village just west of Calatayud, and Pere at the Aragonese capital of Zaragoza. Despite repeatedly traveling back and forth between the pair, the legate was unable to negotiate any effective arrangement. For his part, Pere was more than willing to have the cardinal within his realms, but did not extend the same welcome to any Castilian representatives, including Pedro himself. He gave Guillaume safe passage to enter Aragon with his “attendants, horses, jewels, money and other goods.” But with no Castilian representatives being allowed within Aragon this meant that the frustrated legate could only engage in peace talks by moving back and forth between the two sites.3 Despite this impediment, these long-distance talks, however, did manage to produce a temporary truce.4 Unfortunately for the establishment of any lasting peace, on March 9, 1357 Pedro pressed home the attack against Tarazona. Though Pere argued that this action violated the truce the legate had just negotiated, Pedro claimed that his succesful assault took place only after that truce had elapsed. No matter which position was correct, the attack on Tarazona signaled deepening distrust between the parties.5 Within a few weeks, the Aragonese king had raised a large army that he soon stationed at Borja to the east of the captured city. At the same time, his adversary drew up the Castilian army only a few miles away at Magallón. While Cardinal Guillaume’s presence may have prevented a direct battlefield encounter between the two forces, it was still not enough to hammer out any lasting peace. A slightly more successful effort came about when the Castilian 2  Mollat, Popes, 45, 274–75. Bertrand would become a cardinal in 1372. 3  A CA, Cancillería real. R. 1380, f. 157v [for English translations, see Appendix II, docs. 8–9]. See also: Gutiérrez de Velasco, “Conquista,” 89. 4  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1380, ff. 169r–v. See also: Gutiérrez del Velasco, “Conquista,” 90; Lafuente Gómez, Dos Coronas en guerra, 68–69. 5  Ayala, Pedro I, 479 (1357, chap. vi). See also: Gutiérrez del Velasco, “Conquista,” 89–90; Zurita, Anales, 4:324–26 (IX:x).

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and Aragonese negotiators finally agreed to meet at a mutually acceptable site. The Castilian delegation was headed by Pedro’s chamberlain, Juan Fernández de Henestrosa who would later die at Araviana while the Aragonese envoys were led by one of Pere’s leading advisers, Bernat de Cabrera. These representatives continued their work until May 10, 1357, when they signed a truce that was to remain in effect until the feast of St. John the Baptist in the following year (June 24, 1358). Besides curtailing all military action during this period of just over a year, the agreement also required both sides to surrender to the legate any properties they had already conquered in the preceding nine months. In particular, Pedro was called upon to give up his major prize, Tarazona. By May 25, Pere had complied with the treaty, surrendering the specified sites to the cardinal. By contrast, Pedro attempted to finagle an advantage from the pact by having one of his own subjects put in charge of Tarazona rather than releasing full control to Cardinal Guillaume. At the same time, the Castilian king also tried to insert a new issue into the negotiations: he attempted to invalidate Aragonese control of the part of Murcia given that kingdom by the agreement of 1304.6 Pere rejected outright this new Castilian demand, proclaiming that Aragon had a “just title” to these rich lands, a fact that had been recognized by Pedro’s two predecessors on the Castilian throne.7 As a result, the Aragonese king bitterly refused the new Castilian claim. In mid-May, 1357, despite serious reluctance on Pedro’s part, both sides accepted the terms of the truce, after which public criers announced it throughout both realms. Although the truce was to remain in force for a year with the possibility of a further sixty-day extension,8 almost as soon as the ink dried on the document, both sides began preparing for a renewal of hostilities. Within a week, Pere met with his leading advisers, all of whom shared his abiding suspicions that Pedro I did not “sincerely wish true peace.” Consequently, the king wrote his local officials and the municipal councils of Calatayud, Daroca, and Teruel, urging them to keep up their guard since the Castilian king continued busily making preparations for war “by land and by sea.”9

6  For further information on this treaty, see Chapter 3, Section 2. 7  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1381, ff. 28v–29; Ayala, Pedro I, 479 (1357, chap. vi); Pere III, 2:514 (VI:14). See also: Díaz Martín, Itinerario, 82–83; Estow, Pedro, 187–88; Gutiérrez de Velasco, “Conquista,” 90–91 Zurita, Anales, 4:328–32 (IX:xi). 8  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1149, f. 88; R. 1150, ff. 272r–v; R. 1381, ff. 37v–38; Ayala, Pedro I, 479 (1357, chap. vi); Pere III, Chronicle, 2:514–16 (VI:13–14), See also: Gutiérrez de Velasco, “Conquista,” 90–91; Masiá i de Ros, Relación, 2:423–26 (doc. 210/67); Zurita, Anales, 4:328–32 (IX:xi). 9  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1381, f. 39v; Pere III, 2:516 (VI:15).

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During the months following the signing of the year-long truce, Pedro justified this Aragonese distrust by failing to surrender to legate control of Tarazona and the other sites specified in their agreement. On June 26, 1358, two days after the expiration of the truce, Cardinal Guillaume finally responded by excommunicating him and putting his realms under interdict. In the 1357 truce, the cardinal had also threatened Pedro and anyone else else who did not honor the truce with a sizable fine of 100,000 silver marks.10 Whether or not either of the belligerents took the financial threats very seriously, there was a lessening of military activity following the truce. Although Pedro ordered small-scale raids into Aragon around Calatayud and Daroca, he conducted no extensive military actions against Aragonese territory. Despite their minor nature, Pere did not ignore these Castilian incursions and by late December, 1358, he was was once again complaining to the pope of Castilian bad faith and demanding the return of Alicante and the other properties he had surrendered to the legate in accordance with the agreement.11 The Aragonese monarch spent the months of lessened military activity, directing his own subjects to improve their defenses against any possible largescale Castilian offensives of the sort he assumed to be imminent. Special officials of the royal court were charged with overseeing these preparations. To bolster their authority, the king accorded these officials temporary power to override town councils. The king allowed them to inflict corporal punishment on any resident of the targeted sites who did not help with the repair of fortifications. As early as June, 1357, the king threatened to punish a lieutenant of the castellan of Amposta if the man did not follow royal instructions to prepare for a Castilian attack. Pere’s anger is apparent in the last lines of his letter: “we promise that we will apply such a remedy … that you will wish you had completed the construction project and had carried out my will.”12 His tone was just as harsh six months later when in January, 1358, he wrote to a Franciscan abbess whom he ordered to destroy without delay her monastery’s property outside the walls of Jativa so they could not be made use of in any future Castilian invasion.13 10  Pedro and his captains were not cited for attacking Tarazona during the first truce, but for refusing to surrender the city to the legate. Much of this information comes from Ayala, 479 (1357, chap. vi) and Masiá i de Ros, Relación, 2:427–31 (doc. 212/76). See also: Ferrer i Mallol, “Frontera,” 254; eadem, “Southern Valencian Frontier,” 84–85; Gutiérrez de Velasco, “Conquista,” 91–92; Sitges, Mujeres, 234; Zurita, Anales, 4:333–34 (IX:xii). 11  Ayala, Pedro I, 485 (1358, chap. viii). See also: Cabezuelo Pliego, Guerra, 47. 12  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1381, ff. 42v–43, 48. 13  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1381, f. 102 v. See also: DS, 439 (doc. 577).

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The king continued his preparations for the renewal of war by summoning from the kingdom of Aragon prelates, barons, knights, representatives of monasteries and military orders as well as proctors of the major cities, towns, and villages to meet in a cortes at Cariñena southwest of Zaragoza.14 During this assembly that remained in session from July 30 to August 12, 1357, Pere demanded that his Aragonese subjects raise a force of 700 horsemen who would serve for the next two years under their own captains. Pere swore that during this two-year period he would not impose upon Aragon a “tithe” (decima) or any other civil or military dues.15 At the later Aragonese cortes held at Sariyene held in February, 1358, the king received the promise of a further 200 horsemen from the realm’s churchmen.16 Throughout the uneasy truce, both sides continued to prepare for a renewal of conflict along much of their lengthy frontier, and the region became even more than usual a place where “private feuds” raged.17 In this hostile atmosphere, Cardinal Guillaume’s mission seemed increasingly pointless and even dangerous to himself and his colleagues in Spain. Although the cardinal had requested to be relieved from his post as early as the winter of 1356, he had soldiered through the failures of the following year. When reporting his activities to the Holy See, he begged once again to have his mission terminated because of the toll it was taking on his health. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the pope continued to feel that his legate might be on the verge of completing his task. At first, Innocent informed Pere that he was leaning toward having the cardinal remain in Spain. Shortly afterwards, however, he too began to question the mission’s usefulness and by August, 1357, Innocent began to pull back, at least temporarily, from the business of Iberian peacekeeping. In the end, he recalled the cardinal and his entire staff back to Avignon.18 Meanwhile, the truce Cardinal Guillaume had managed to negotiate was increasingly rendered a dead letter by Castilian and Aragonese preparations for renewed conflict. Throughout the spring of 1358, Pedro was readying the fleet at Seville that would eventually attack the Valencian and Catalan coastlines. At the same time, both Aragonese and Castilian commanders conducted short but destructive raids into enemy territory. In April, in the most significant of these Castilian incursions, Pedro’s half-brother, Fadrique, master of the military 14  For further information, see Chapter 13, Section 3. 15  C RA, 19–34; Zurita, Anales, 4:338–40 (IX:xiii). 16  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1381, f. 109. For a fuller discussion of these assemblies, see Chapter 13, Section 1. 17  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1184, f. 1 [for English translation, see Appendix II, doc. 11]. See also: DHC, 19–20. 18  D S, 435–36 (docs. 572–74).

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order of Santiago, captured Jumilla after only a short siege. Meanwhile, Pere, despite continuously complaining bitterly about his adversary’s violations of the truce, largely stood by the agreement until its stated expiration on June 24, 1358. At this point, he once again renewed hostilities, stating that he did so because of incessant Castilian raiding into Aragon and against the territory of his half-brother Prince Ferran, who had recently come over to the Aragonese side. For his part, Pedro answered the Aragonese complaints with a statement his violation of the truce and once again launching an attack against Aragon. He stated that troops serving under Pere’s captains, the counts of Luna and Trastámara, had unjustly invaded Castile, leaving behind them a trail of burnt villages. According to the Castilian king, now playing the innocent victim, these attacks provided sufficient grounds for the renewal of war with Aragon.19 Although finished with his official duties in Spain, Cardinal Guillaume found it hard to extricate himself from the acrimonious dispute between the two kings. Even after returning to Avignon, his dislike for Pedro I led him to initiate a lawsuit against the Castilian monarch before the Papal Curia. Meanwhile, Pere followed a different course of action. He decided to challenge his royal adversary to a duel, either one-on-one or with an equal number of knights on either side.”20 The king ordered the messenger he sent to Castile, Francesch Roma, to declare the challenge to Pedro in precisely the following words: I am prepared to place myself on a field of battle with you without any advantage to one or the other of us. And there Our Lord will show which of us is upholding the truth. Both the Cardinal’s lawsuit and the king’s challenge ultimately came to nothing.21 19  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1159, f. 176; R. 1160, f. 69; Ayala, Pedro I, 479 (1357, chap. vi). See also: Pere III, Chronicle, 2:514–15, 519–20 (VI:13, 20). See also: Ferrer i Mallol, “Frontera,” 257–58; eadem, “Southern Valencian Frontier,” 87–88; Zurita, Anales, 4:314, 351–56 (IX:vii, xvi–xvii). 20  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1381, f. 99v [for English translation, see Appendix II, doc. 16]. See also: DS, 438 (doc. 576); Ferrer i Mallol. “Frontera,” 258; eadem, “Southern Valencian Frontier,” 88. 21  This action was reminiscent of Pere II’s challenge of Philippe III of France (r. 1270– 1285). Principal information comes from ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1158, f. 6v [for English translations, see Appendix, doc. 21]. See also: Epistolari, 159–60 (doc. 22). For Pere II’s challenge of 1283, see CSJP, 74 (chap. 36). See also: Ferran Soldevila, “Pere el Gran: El desafiament amb Carles d’Anjou,” EUC 9 (1915–1916): 123–72. For the ordeal by combat and the melée, both of which Pere III mentioned in his challenge, see N. Denhom Young,

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Gui de Boulogne Re-opens Peace Negotiations (1359)

After hostilities again broke out, the pope replaced the ailing Cardinal Guillaume with another legate, Gui de Boulogne, bishop of Porto, who, in turn, made his way across the Pyrenees during the winter of 1358–1359. With the coming of spring, 1359, the new papal representative met separately with the two adversaries at the nearby towns of Almázan and Calatayud. During extended interviews, Gui quickly became aware of just how great were the difficulties that had confronted his predecessor and that he now faced in bringing peace to Iberia. In his view, instead of serving “as the shield and defense of Christianity” against Islam, the monarchs routinely neglected their core duty of waging holy war. According to the cardinal, by fighting one other, they were seriously damaging the true faith on the peninsula.22 The legate’s argument had little effect on Pedro I, who continued to condemn the Aragonese monarch as a man who had conspired against his kingdom and himself. He would accept no blame for his own actions, which, he argued, amounted to self-preservation. This sense of injured righteousness became fully apparent to Gui when the Castilian king described how the war had begun. Still fuming over Perellós’s attack in 1356, Pedro claimed that the commander had committed a deep affront against his royal authority by attacking foreign ships in a Castilian port. Since Pedro assumed that the Aragonese admiral had been acting under Pere’s instructions, he argued that the Aragonese king was even more responsible than the attacker. The monarch’s anger also extended to the way Pere had broadened the horizons of the war by hiring troops commanded by Enrique de Trastámara and several of his brothers. As long as Aragon harbored these felons who had shown clear “disservice” to Castile’s crown, there was little possibility of peace.23 The Castilian king was convinced that there could be no settlement unless Pere disavowed and possibly punished Admiral Perillós as well Pedro’s own halfbrother, the count, and all other Castilians who had entered Aragonese service. He was also increasingly adamant that the Murcian towns captured by

“The Tournament in the Thirteenth Century,” in Studies in Medieval History Presented to Frederick Maurice Powicke, ed. R.W. Hunt, W.H. Pantin, and R.W. Southern (Oxford, 1948), 240–66, esp. 260–63; Viscount Dillon, “Barriers and Foot Combats,” Archaeological Journal 61 (1904): 276–308; Henry Charles Lea, The Duel and the Oath (1866; reprint, Philadelphia, 1974). 22  Ayala, Pedro I, 487–88 (1359, chap. ii). 23  Ibid., 487–88 (1359, chap. ii).

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Jaume II in the early fourteenth century had to be returned to Castile accompanied by a sizeable indemnity for the current conflict.24 With Pedro’s version of recent events still ringing in his ears, Cardinal Gui left Almázan and traveled to the Aragonese village of Moros northwest of Calatayud, where Pere was encamped with a small force.25 After revealing Pedro’s conditions for peace, the cardinal then heard the Aragonese position concerning these same issues. For his part, Pere and his legal advisers voiced clear objections to each of Pedro’s demands. To begin with, the king claimed that he could see no reason for punishing Perellós since, in his mind, the admiral’s actions had occurred on the sea beyond the limit of Pedro’s sovereignty. Pere also refused to take any action against the count of Trastámara who had served him loyally. He argued that the count had done nothing to warrant exile. He did promise to terminate his fiduciary relationship with all the Castilian mercenaries, but only after the war was over.26 The charge that Jaume II’s conquest of half of Murcia had been illegal met with a complete rejection on Pere’s part. He cited at length the 1304 treaty of Torrellas agreed to by the monarchs of Castile and Aragon that had set forth a long list of Murcian towns lying north of the Segura River, all of which were to be turned over to the Crown of Aragon.27 In effect, Pere characterized the entirety of Pedro’s demands as baseless. In the end, the Aragonese king was simply not prepared to make excessive concessions to terminate a war that he had neither wanted nor begun.28 On the other hand if the Castilian king ever decided to take on Muslim forces in southern Spain, Pere was prepared to help him “with my body and all my power.”29 Despite the legate’s largely unsuccessful discussions with both combatants, he continued the unenviable task of mediation between these unyielding adversaries who had little common ground. Shortly after his meeting with Pere, he returned to Almazán where he suggested to the Castilian king that the two sides simply reestablish the truce of the previous year. Pedro rejected this out of hand, saying that any restriction placed on his military activities could be “very detrimental” to his hopes for a final victory. On the other hand, the Castilian king did slightly reduce his demands. He now insisted only on the return of what he considered as Aragon’s illegally-held Murcian territory and on 24  Ibid., 488–89 (1359, chap. iv). 25  Ibid.; Pere III, Chronicle, 2:521 (VI:21). 26  Ayala, Pedro I, 489 (1359, chap. v). 27  Ibid., 488–89 (1359, chap. v). 28  Ibid., 491 (1359, chap. v). 29  Ibid., 490–91 (1359, chap. v).

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the exile of Pere’s Castilian mercenaries.30 Ironically, the original demand that Perellos be punished for the incident that set off the war got lost in the shuffle. When Gui communicated this “concession” to the Aragonese king at Calatayud, the latter pointed out that his enemy’s major demand could not be carried out since all of the territories in Murcia held by Aragon had been surrendered to it as the result of a mutually agreed upon treaty. Assuring the legate that he had not totally abandoned hope for peace, Pere revealed that he had sent Bernat de Cabrera to the Castilian court to arrange yet another truce. This final diplomatic drive was quashed shortly afterwards when Pedro formally declared he had no intention of re-establishing peace as long as his “great enemies”—the count of Trastámara and the other Castilian exiles—continued to serve Aragon.31 When the negotiations fell apart in mid-summer, 1359, the Castilian monarch launched the fleet he had been gathering at Seville to attack the Crown of Aragon’s Mediterranean coast. Learning of this, Pere politely informed the papal legate that, given this new threat to his territory, he could no longer participate in the peace process. No amount of negotiation could bring peace while Pedro was preparing to expand the war.32 3

Continuing Papal Efforts to Achieve Peace

Despite the increasing level of warfare that manifested itself in the land and sea campaigns of 1359–1361, papal efforts to bring about a lasting peace treaty continued, even if not as intensely as before. It continued to be the papal legate, Cardinal Gui de Boulogne who undertook the work of peace. Eventually he received aid in this seemingly unattainable quest by developments elsewhere in the Iberian world. Late in 1359, a palace coup in Granada deposed Pedro’s close ally, Mūhammad V, and placed on the throne his younger half-brother, Isma’il II. He, in turn, was deposed several months later by another member of the royal family who took the title Muhammad VI (r. 1360–1362), a man whom Ayala refers to as Bermejo. It was not long before this new leader showed every sign of shifting sides.33 As a result, Castile now faced the threat of having to 30  Ibid., 491 (1359, chap. vi). 31  Ibid., 491–93 (1359, chaps. vii–viii). 32  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1169, f. 53 [for English translations, see Appendix II, doc. 26]. See also: DS, 445 (doc. 585). 33  Ayala, Pedro I, 510–11 (1360, chap. xxiii; 1361, chap. ii). The relationship between Pedro I and Granada is explored in detail in Clara Espow’s article, “War and Peace in Medieval

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fight a two-front war: in the east against an Aragonese army swelled by the ever-increasing number of Castilians who had taken up arms for Pere; on the south, against Granadan troops who had until this point sided with Castile.34 Suddenly peace negotiations with Aragon that had seemed unthinkable to Pedro only a few months earlier were now seen to be highly desirable. With this change of policy, Pedro quickly found himself surrounded by peacemakers. In the first months of 1360, a Portuguese delegation led by Crown Prince Fernão consulted with both Aragonese and Castilian envoys about peace on the peninsula35 However, the steady influence of Cardinal Gui in both courts proved even more important in bringing the two sides together. While Trastámara’s victory over a superior Castilian force at Araviana in 1359 finally encouraged Pedro to get serious about peace, the Castilian monarch’s near-victory at the first battle of Nájera had the same effect on Pere. Early in 1361, Pedro restarted talks by sending one of his major treasury officials to Tudela on the Navarrese border for preliminary meetings with Pere’s leading adviser, Bernat de Cabrera.36 Despite this temporary glimmer of sanity, the two sides seemed ready to re-commence hostilities once again later in the spring, at which time they both stationed fresh troops along their borders. For his part, Gui of Boulogne seized an advantage from this new threat. Given the physical proximity of the two monarchs near the frontier, the legate began once more to engage in shuttle diplomacy between the Castilian camp at Deza and the Aragonese headquarters situated in Terrer.37 Gui’s efforts eventually led to the naming of fully-empowered peace negotiators from both sides, charged with arranging a comprehensive settlement.38 On May 14, 1361, the two sides reached agreement in what historians refer to as the Peace of Terrer, but which might also be called the Peace of Deza, since each monarch accepted the terms in the locale where he was encamped.39 The lengthy terms were first read to the ambassadors who had crafted them, then shortly afterwards conveyed to their royal masters. Eventually, these terms were announced by public criers throughout both realms. Would-be violators of the peace on the local level were warned that they would be punished Iberia: Castilian-Granadan Relations in the Mid-Fourteenth Century” in the Hundred Years War: A Wider Focus, 151–75. See also: Harvey, Islamic Spain, 209–11. 34  Ayala, Pedro I, 511–12 (1361, chap. ii). 35  Zurita, Anales, 4:391–92 (IX:xxvii). 36  Ibid., 4:398 (IX:xxviii); Masiá i de Ros, Relación, 1:282–83. 37  Pere III, Chronicle, 2:530–32 (VI:29–30). See also: Zurita, Anales, 4:412–3 (IX:xxxiii). 38  Ayala, Pedro I, 511–12 (1361, chap. ii). 39  A CA, Cancillería real, Varia, no. 68, f. 171. See also: Lafuente Gómez, Dos Coronas en guerra, 91–92; Masiá i de Ros, Relación, 2:459 (doc. 217/115).

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severely. Any violation by either monarch as well as the naming of hostages, exchange of castles, and the potential payment of fines would fall under the purview of Cardinal Gui or his representative. Because of the complexity of the Terrer document, Aragonese and Castilian negotiators were to have two years in which to review it and, if necessary, rearrange disputed clauses. To see that any problems which arose were quickly dealt with, the treaty mandated the appointment of “a good man who would investigate robberies, thefts, and other crimes” committed along the frontiers of the two kingdoms.40 A principal concern of Terrer was to provide a steady transition to real peace by dealing with populations in both realms who had long made their living by war. The two rulers ordered the immediate release of prisoners and the return of all ransom money. They also called for the surrender of any conquered fortresses, villages, and hamlets as well as all private property and tax revenues utilized by the conquerors. Knowing that the intermittent violence spawned by the conflict would drag on for a time, the peacemakers provided a short transitional period during which criminal violations by unemployed soldiers on their journey homeward would not be punished. After that period, however, the two kings were to deal rigorously with such crimes through their administrators. If necessary, the monarchs would reimburse one another for any violence and damage their troops committed. To avoid future clashes along the common frontier, both agreed to withdraw as many of their troops as possible from this troubled region and cut off payment to any military forces that threatened the peace. Both agreed to a demilitarized zone: they were bound to keep all military units thirty leagues back from the border. The kings also promised to give no support to their former soldiers who might continue the lucrative practice of raiding across the frontier.41 To help bring peace to populations that had been increasingly intermingled during the conflict, both Pere and Pedro proclaimed a general amnesty for any men who had changed sides during the conflict. These were exempted from punishment for “errors and crimes from the greatest to the least” which they had committed down to the day on which the treaty came into effect. On the other hand, this royal protection clearly did not apply to everyone. For Pedro, in particular, some people including his half-brothers and cousin, Prince Ferran, were simply beyond the pale. Pedro insisted that Pere accept responsibility for all future damage these men committed in Castile.

40  Masiá i de Ros, Relación, 2:460, 462, 464–65, 468–70, 473–74 (arts. 1–2, 11, 19–21, 28, 34, 37). 41  Ibid., 2:462–64, 466–69 (arts. 5, 12, 14–18, 22–23, 25–26, 29, 32–33).

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For his part, Pere tried to sidestep the problems due to the mercenaries who had served him by agreeing to pay off Enrique, Ferran, and their companies within eight days after the peace had come into effect at which point they were to leave Aragonese territory.42 Theoretically, the removal of both Enrique and Ferran back across the Pyrenees into southern France would solve the mercenary problem. Just how all this was to be implemented was not addressed within the treaty; on the other hand, it all became a dead letter when the agreements unraveled after only a few months. 4

The Peace of Terrer Disintegrates (1361–1362)

Pedro I unwillingly signed the peace of Terrer on June 15, 1361,43 and began planning how he would eventually evade its terms. In the meantime, his forces continued low-level, Castilian raiding across the Aragonese border, despite the fact that this violated his solemn agreement.44 Although the Castilian monarch had formally accepted the pact of 1361, he blamed Pere for forcing him to “make peace against … [his] will and honor.”45 By October, 1361, with many of the treaty provisions unfulfilled, Pere had become increasingly suspicious of his Castilian counterpart.46 In March, 1362, the Aragonese monarch sent to the Castilian court a delegation led by his great legist, Vidal de Vilanova. After presenting their credentials, Villanova and his fellow envoys formally requested that Pedro make good on the promises he had sworn to carry out.47 When the Castilian monarch refused to do so, Pere largely lost confidence in the Terrer accord’s ability to successfully hem in his Castilian neighbor. As a result, in the early months of 1362, he hedged his political bets attempting to strengthen the shaky relationship with his half-brother, Ferran, while, at the same time maintaining open lines of communication to 42  Ibid., 2:460–62, 466 (arts. 4–11, 24). In addition to Enrique and Ferran, the amnesty did not apply to Pero Carillo Pero López de Padilla, Sor Pérez de Quiniones, Diego Pérez Sarmiento, Gansalvo Gansalvez de Luzio, García Lasso Carriello, Alvar Pérez de Guzman, Pero Ruiz de Sandoval. 43  Ibid., 2:476–78 (doc. 218/115bis); Sitges, Mujeres, 240. 44  A CA, Cancillería real, Varia, no. 68, f. 198. See also: Masiá i de Ros, Relación, 2:480–81 (doc. 220/118). 45  Ayala, Pedro I, 521 (1362, chap. ix). 46  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1394, ff. 78r–v. See also: Masiá i de Ros, Relación, 2:490–93 (doc. 224bis/128). 47  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1394, ff. 94 r–v. See also: Masiá i de Ros, Relación, 2:497–99 (doc. 225/133).

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Ferran’s rival, Enrique de Trastámara, despite the latter’s temporary exile from Aragon to southern France. In the end, new developments in the international diplomatic picture more than anything else seemed to have led Pedro to violate the distasteful treaty he had been forced to accept. After a devastating Castilian invasion of Granada during the winter of 1362, the Granadan leader, Bermejo sought a parley with Pedro. In February, the Castilian king received him under a white flag in Seville and then proceeded to have him executed. When the Nāsrid state yet again fell under the rule of Muhammad  V, Pedro, having once again regained his proven ally, no longer needed the security of the pact of Terrer.48 While the crisis with Granada was resolving itself,49 the Castilian king also began to receive reports that mercenary bands, members of the so-called Free Companies thrown out of work by a temporary hiatus in the Hundred Years War, might be on the verge of crossing the Pyrenees in search of possible military employment. Both the now quite hostile French royal family and the king’s dangerous enemy, his half-brother, Enrique de Trastámara, would be overjoyed to see these men enter the conflict against Pedro. In response to this threat, the Castilian monarch began to seek out a new ally—the highly unreliable Navarrese king, Carlos II. With the reestablishment of a secure Granadan alliance and the threat of Free Company intervention temporarily disappearing, Pedro felt safe in reigniting his conflict against Aragon. From his perspective since he had been forced to sign the treaty, he was not bound to maintain it; instead, he could once again wage war with his eastern neighbor and hopefully regain everything he had been forced to surrender at Terrer. Pedro was also adamant that his adversary should have to pay an indemnity for having touched off the war in the first place.50 Despite Pere’s growing mistrust of Castilian activities, Pedro seemed fairly certain that his adversary did not expect any renewed attack along the frontiers in the immediate future. Far away in Perpignan, the Aragonese king, in order to curtail royal expenditures, had actually left many of his border castles poorly garrisoned and provisioned, making them easy prey for a Castilian surprise attack.51 48  Ayala, Pedro I, 517–19 (1362, chaps. iii–vi). See also; Harvey, Islamic Spain, 209–16; Villalon and Kagay, Nájera, 97. 49  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1543, ff. 42–47v. See also: Masiá i de Ros, Relación, 2:500–509 (doc. 227/149); Zurita, Anales, 4:419–21 (IX:xxxiv) 50  Ayala, Pedro I, 521 (1362, chap. ix). 51  Ibid., 520–21 (1362, chaps. viii–ix).

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It was not long before he learned that he had badly miscalculated the timing of any such aggression. In May, 1362, Castile shattered the fragile peace after it had been in place for only a few months. The Castilian army, backed by troops, supplied by Pedro’s new ally Carlos II of Navarre, poured across Aragon’s frontiers with little opposition. With no meaningful Aragonese response to his invasion, Pedro attacked the strong town of Calatayud. Having invested the site with a large force, he battered away at the town’s recently upgraded defenses using the thirty-six trebuchets he had brought from Castile. With most of the city’s structures badly damaged, the king unleashed his best troops, many of them Muslim, against the defenders, killing large numbers of them.52 He then held back temporarily, awaiting the reaction of his Aragonese rival. Dispatching messengers to the Aragonese court in Perpignan, the Castilian king challenged his adversary to relieve Calatayud within the legally-prescribed forty days. In response, Pere had little choice but to write to the desperate Calatayud garrison admitting that he simply could not relieve them and giving the townsmen permission to surrender without incurring a charge of treason against the Aragonese crown.53 Pedro had apparently learned that, despite Pere’s bombastic talk about personally fighting him in the field, in reality, the Castilian army could with relative ease operate in Aragon without facing meaningful opposition. Within a month, Pere vented his anger at the Navarrese monarch for having joined the Castilian attack on Aragon: “God, who is the Supreme Judge and knows the truth, will not take your side.”54 The bitter exchange between these two monarchs continued for the next year. In April, 1363, the Aragonese king also sent a diplomatic mission to Avignon, insisting that the newly-installed pope, Urban V (r. 1362–1370) use his influence to break up

52  A CA, Cancilleria real, R. 1384, ff. 45, 74v Cartas reales [Pedro IV], caja 52, no. 6241. See also: Gutiérrez de Velasco, “Fortalezas,” 12–13 esp. p. 11, ftn. 6; Kagay, “Defense,” 28; idem, “Shattered Circle,” 132; Lafuente Gomez, Dos coronas en guerra, 96–98; Zurita, Anales, 4:439–41 (IX:xli). Pere III set estimated that the Castilian army attacking Calatayud numbered 40,000 men, the same unbelievable figure he attributed to the Castilian force operating in Valencia during 1364. For traction artillery in medieval Iberia, see Paul Chevedden, “King James I the Conqueror and the Artillery Revolution of the Middle Ages,” in Commemoració del VIII centenari del naixement de Jaume I, ed. María Teresa Ferrer i Mallol, 2 vols. (Barcelona, 2011), 1:313–39; Antoni Ignasi Alomari i Canyelles, L’armament i la defensa a la Mallorca medieval (Palma, 1995), 79–80. 53  Ayala, Pedro I, 129–32 (1362, chaps. ix–xii). See also: Kagay, “Defense,” 28–29. 54  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1384, f. 59 [for English translation, see Appendix II, doc. 45].

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the Navarrese alliance with Castile. At the same time, he wrote to the Navarrese bishop of Elna, hoping that the latter might be able to restrain his king.55 5

A Short-Lived Final Treaty (1363)

In the months following his surprise attack on Calatayud, Pedro I enjoyed an almost unbroken series of military successes. He overran Tarazona, Borja, and Magallón in Aragon and launched several major campaigns against southern Valencia.56 Nevertheless, he still seemed willing to at least discuss a new papally-brokered peace initiative, one, however, that was more to his advantage than Terrer. As part of it, Pere would have to agree to a war indemnity and remove all support from Trastámara and the other Castilian mercenaries who had quickly returned to Aragon following the breakdown of the earlier peace. This willingness may have reflected a growing doubt on Pedro’s part that he could achieve complete victory over Aragon, in the absence of which it might be worth trying to get much of what he wanted through renewed papal-led negotiations. Toward this end, he temporarily backed off his military efforts. In June, 1363, he raised the siege of Valencia, despite having brought the city very near the point of surrender. He also refused to attack Pere’s relief force that was drawn up just to its south on the plain of Nules.57 Hoping to retain the territory he had won up to that time, Pedro decided to consult with Cardinal Gui’s associate, Abbot Jean of Fecamp, who happened to be in the Aragonese town of Murviedro during a Castilian siege of the Valencian town. Though the abbot was ostensibly there only to visit his friend, Prince Louis of Navarre, brother of the Navarrese king, he was in all likelihood Gui’s secret envoy. Several weeks later, these initial discussions morphed into full-fledged peace talks when Pere dispatched his own diplomatic delegation to Murviedro to meet with the enemy. Attempts were made to hammer out a lasting peace between the two royal families, and to establish firm marriage ties between them. After some weeks of negotiation, the two sides managed to agree on the terms of a treaty, which they promulgated on July 3, 1363.58 55  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1184, ff. 110, 113, DHC, 85–88 [For English translations, see Appendix II, docs. 55–56]. 56  Ferrer i Mallol, Entre, 400–5; Zurita, Anales, 4:445–54 (IX:xlii–xliii). 57  Ayala, Pedro I, 526 (1363, chap. iv); Pere III, Chronicle, 2:537–38 (VI:34). See also: Zurita, Anales, 4:461–63 (IX:xlv). 58  Ayala, Pedro I, 526–28 (1363, chaps. v–vi); Pere III, Chronicle, 2:538 (VI:34); See also: Zurita, Anales, 4:464–67 (IX:xlvi). Pere hardly credits the work of the envoys as a peace assembly, but rather a parleying session which prevented the Aragonese and Castilian armies

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Both sovereigns and their advisers swore on the cross and the Holy Gospels to carry out the terms of the Murviedro agreement. All violation of this solemn oath would result in excommunication and an interdict on the guilty party’s realms. What is more, subjects who violated the terms would be considered traitors to their sovereign. In one clause of the treaty, Pedro agreed that the captured fortresses of Murviedro and Almenara would be returned to an agent of the Aragonese crown within three days after the agreement was signed. In a similar manner, Aragon would surrender the castles of Ademuz and Castelhabib to a Castilian agent within five days. The Navarrese monarch, Carlos II, despite being one of the combatants, stood as the treaty’s guarantor. Astonishingly, rulings by this highly duplicitous monarch regarding interpretation of its text were to be final. It was also his duty to punish either of the signatories who did not observe the instrument in either its letter or spirit.59 As with Terrer, the pact of Murviedro aimed at ending hostilities. To bring this about, the negotiators declared that a truce would remain in effect throughout the late summer of 1363. During this period, the two armies would maintain a safe distance between one other. To help promote a lasting cease fire, the negotiators inserted several articles. All earlier penalties, ecclesiastical or secular, established against Pedro by the papal legates or the Aragonese king would be considered null and void. The agreement also protected subjects of either ruler who had surrendered to the enemy, preventing both kings from expropriating the property of people who had changed sides during the conflict.60 The treaty of Murviedro arranged for a dynastic union between realms to be cemented by two proposed marriages. Pedro, by now unencumbered by a legitimate wife or his beloved mistress, could take as his new queen, Pere’s daughter, Joanna. To strengthen the alliance, Pere’s third son, Alfons, was to be married to the Castilian king’s youngest daughter, Isabel. Ultimately, like the rest of the treaty of Murviedro, this agreement remained a dead letter. Nevertheless, it demonstrates Pedro’s resourcefulness in arranging for dowries that included the Aragonese frontier outposts he had already conquered.61 In the weeks after the treaty was proclaimed, both papal agents and royal envoys sought to promulgate it throughout their realms. On July 4, 1363, the from clashing outside of Valencia. This treaty is referred to alternatively as the peace of Unicastillo or Murviedro. 59  A CA, Cancillería real, Varia, no. 68, f. 228. See also: Masiá i de Ros, Relación, 2:512–5 (arts. 1–2, 7, 11, 14). 60  Masiá i de Ros, Relación, 2:513–4 (arts. 6, 8–9, 12–13). 61  Ibid., 2:512–4 (arts. 3–4, 10).

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Castilian king announced his acceptance of the terms.62 Roughly a month later, on August 11, Pere’s representatives met with Carlos II to discuss the fulfillment of the treaty by both the Aragonese and Navarrese.63 While all parties agreed that the truce would be observed, both sides lodged certain complaints. The Aragonese complained that neither Pedro nor his ambassadors had turned over the castles that they had agreed to surrender.64 For his part, the Castilian king believed that Aragon’s chief negotiator, Bernat de Cabrera, had given him assurances that his royal master would execute Enrique de Trastámara. When no such execution took place, Pedro cried foul, alleging that Cabrera’s promises were not being fulfilled. In the end, the treaty of Murviedro proved to be much sound and fury signifying nothing. Pere lost interest in supporting the pact, having concluded that his rival had no interest in establishing a real peace. Instead, he upped the ante by offering to support a new invasion of Castile to be led by the count of Trastámara. As part of the agreement and in return for considerable territorial compensation, Aragon would now strongly back the count’s bid to seize the crown of Castile.65 On the other side, Pedro, with a basic distrust of his Aragonese counterpart and a growing fear of his half-brother, also gave up any real hope he might once have entertained for the prolonged peace process. 62  A CA, Cancillería real, Varia, no. 68, f. 231. 63  A CA, Cancillería real, Varia, no. 68, f. 236. See also: Masiá i de Ros, Relación, 2:519–20 (doc. 230/252). 64  A CA, Cancillería real, Varia, no. 68, ff. 239r–v. See also: Masiá i de Ros, Relación, 2:520–26 (doc. 231/153). 65  Ayala, Pedro I, 527–28 (1363, chap. vi); Pere III, Chronicle, 2:538–40 (VI:35). See also: Kagay, “Conflict,” 85, 95–96; Zurita, Anales, 468–73 (IX:xlvii).

Chapter 8

The Final Campaigns (1362–1365) 1

The Fight over Valencia (1363–1364)

A new phase of the long conflict began in the fall of 1363 with the disintegration of the treaty of Murviedro. By August 2, Pere was already announcing to his principal Aragonese ricoshombres that his adversary had proven unwilling to fulfill any of the promises he had made. As a result, they would once again have to call up their own companies to join royal forces in protecting the frontiers.1 A month later, these combined royal and aristocratic forces found it necessary to fend off fresh Castilian raids that drove deep into Aragonese territory east of Teruel.2 Fearing his adversary would soon move south to attack the frontier zone between Valencia and Murcia, Pere hastily began to resupply fortresses in the region from Elche to Crevillente to Val de Elda.3 These last-minute efforts which included sending Crown Prince Joan into southern Valencia failed to prevent Pedro’s army from successfully launching a massive raid across the Segura River in December, 1363.4 Interlinked Castilian offensives put Valencia’s capital city in jeopardy and spurred the Aragonese monarch to mount a large relief force of his own to save the city. As the two forces approached one another, a decisive battle seemed inevitable. The operations that followed, however, proved to be a strange type of military dance in which Pere doggedly lurched forward toward the final struggle he claimed to be seeking while Pedro just as assiduously maneuvered to avoid it. For the Aragonese, this campaign to save Valencia—one of the largest operations in the entire war—began in March, 1364, when a Franciscan friar, an unofficial representative of the city, journeyed north to sound the alarm (viafós) in Pere’s court. He warned of a “dangerous scarcity of food” in Valencia. In response, the king gathered an army. This operation would, almost inevitably, place him in direct confrontation with the Castilian king who had 1  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1188, f. 145v. See also: Lafuente Gómez, Dos Coronas en guerra, 222–23 (doc. 47). 2  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1386, ff. 44r–v [for English translation, see Appendix II, doc. 59]. 3  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1194, f. 98; R. 1385, ff. 175v–76; R. 1386, ff. 57v, 67r–v; R. 1572, ff. 23v–24, 28v–29. See also: Ferrer i Mallol, Organització, 488–89 (doc. 177); eadem, “Southern Valencian Frontier,” 107–8. 4  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 728, f. 163; R. 1192, f. 94. See also: Ferrer i Mallol, “Southern Valencian Frontier,” 108.

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established his headquarters near the Valencian dockyards, a district known as the grau, to block the passage of all relief supplies into the capital.5 At this time, the size of both opposing forces was considerably greater than either Castile or the Crown of Aragon had previously deployed in the conflict. According to Pere, his own army consisted of 1,722 horse and 16,000 foot while his Castilian counterpart brought to the campaign a force that the Aragonese king estimated to be twice as large as his own, including 6,000 horsemen. Even the fleet of some sixty vessels that supported the Castilians on this occasion dwarfed Pere’s squadron of just ten Catalan galleys. If Pere enjoyed any edge whatsoever, it might have been in respect to his staff of military advisers with whom he surrounded himself and in whose loyalty he reposed considerable trust. These included his uncle, Prince Pere, several of his cousins, the counts of Denia and Prades, and his principal captain, the count of Trastámara. On the other side, Pedro’s lack of trust in his own subordinates was on the rise and becoming an increasingly significant factor negatively affecting the Castilian war effort.6 When the two sides began to jockey for position in late-April, 1364, Pedro seemed to hold a superior position. By occupying the grau, the Castilian king could stem the tide of supplies flowing into Valencia and close off the Guadalaviar River to Pere’s ships. He could also use the dockyard as an anchorage for his own vessels and as an escape zone in the unlikely event that the fighting went against him.7 For his part, Pere attempted to circumvent his adversary’s advantageous position. Having marched through Aragon and crossed into Valencia, he divided his force into two columns that continued to march separately toward the city of Valencia. Like border raiders, both segments of the army moved swiftly, trying to disguise their final destination. During this maneuver neither column lit campfires which would give away their final approach. Having left Burriana on April 28, the Aragonese vanguard quickly advanced down the coast road toward Murviedro. Under cover of darkness, it overran a 5  Ayala, Pedro I, 532 (1364, chap. iii); Pere III, Chronicle, 2:544–45 (VI:40). 6  Ayala, Pedro I, 532 (1364, chap. iii); Pere III, Chronicle, 2:546–48 (VI:40). In fact, as late as the second week of April, Trastámara and his brother had threatened to boycott the Valencian expedition with their Castilian mercenaries, unless Pere paid their salaries that had been in arrears for some time. When the problem was rectified, he and his men again became an integral part of this latest Aragonese campaign. In the end, only Pere’s uncle, Count Ramon Berenguer of Empuries seems to have been missing. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1386, ff. 84r–v [for English translation, see Appendix II, doc. 62]. See also: Lafuente Gómez, Dos Coronas en guerra, 137. 7  For lay-out of Valencia and its surroundings, see Burns, Crusader Kingdom, 1:16.

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Castilian outpost on the Palancia River which emptied into the Mediterranean just north of the town. The Castilian garrison commander in Murviedro now informed Pedro by smoke signals of this successful Aragonese assault against his outpost as well as the line of march Pere was likely to follow. When his spies (espias) failed to bring him any further news concerning the king of Aragon or his army, the Castilian monarch rapidly broke camp and advanced with his forces northward along the coast road toward Murviedro that had long since fallen into Castilian hands and from which he had received the garrison commander’s report.8 Even though the two armies, were now rapidly closing on each other and gave every indication that a bloody combat was probably unavoidable, one of the two royal commanders ultimately proved unwilling to fight. Shortly after the Aragonese column had captured the Castilian outpost, the rest of the army joined it and by dawn, April 29, Pere’s unified force had arranged itself “in good order” along the seashore just north of the town, facing southward toward the enemy.9 With the looming prospect of battle, the Aragonese king addressed his troops in one of the few battlefield harangues of his reign. Arguing that what they now faced was the final settlement of this long war against Castile, he confidently predicted that it would by decided in their favor by the “judgement of God.” His enemy was a “great traitor” who for many years had devastated their homeland, the Crown of Aragon. They would now be avenged. While this appeal to Aragonese patriotism might supply adequate motivation for his own subjects to fight on to victory, he appealed to his Castilian auxiliaries on different grounds: by winning, they would achieve vengeance on the man who had killed members of their families, “dishonored [their] wives, daughters, and sisters,” and driven them from their homeland. By maltreating the majority of his own subjects, Pedro had forfeited his right to rule. On the other hand, if, despite these great wrongs, any of the Castilians in his army harbored a lingering desire to fight for their former king, Pere gave them permission to do so, assuring them that they took with them his good will and appreciation for their past service. Not surprisingly, no defection occurred. Instead, the Castilian contingent cried out that they were now Pere’s vassals, and if they proved themselves disloyal, the monarch could treat them as traitors and heretics.10 8   For the history of Murviedro, see Chapter 15, section 2. 9  Ayala, Pedro I, 532 (1364, chap. iii). 10  Pere III, Chronicle 2:548–50 (VI:41). See also: Lafuente Gómez, Dos Coronas en guerra, 134–37; Zurita, Anales, 4:501–3 (IX:liv); For dynamics of battle rhetoric, see Keith Yellin,

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Though a beach sloping upward toward the enemy may not have been the ideal choice for a battlefield, Pere and his captains were able to maintain the Aragonese formations drawn up there for as much as two hours, even when they fell under a swarming attack by 600 Muslim light cavalry ( jinetes).11 Such probing cavalry assaults often proved a prelude to a larger battle, but in this case nothing further occurred. Though Pere had given his opponent a golden opportunity to attack down the beach, Pedro refused the proffered combat and withdrew his troops back into Murviedro. This was the first of several occasions during the Valencian campaign that the Castilian monarch clearly chose to avoid battle. The Castilian retreat left the royal road and, by extension, the city of Valencia open to resupply by the Aragonese. Saved from slow starvation by Pere’s troops and their sea-borne transports, the inhabitants of the city gave the army a riotous welcome. Even when Pedro hurled large numbers of Muslim cavalry against the city throughout the following days, these were easily beaten off.12 Once again, no major battle ensued. 2

Northern and Southern Skirmishes (1364)

While the military juggernauts prowling the Valencian landscape seemed to have attained success in sidestepping each other yet again, Pere got galling reports concerning his opponent’s insulting views of his own military competence. What the Castilian king objected to about his adversary was the use of secrecy and guile in his advance against Murviedro. According to Pedro, the Aragonese king had acted in a dishonorable way by sneaking up “like an almogavèr.”13 By using this reference to the irregulars who lived off the land and became some of the most feared warriors in Mediterranean warfare,14 Pedro was clearly accusing his enemy of not having lived up to the accepted chivalric norms of contemporary warfare, despite the fact that when the two sides stood

Battle Exhortation: The Rhetoric of Combat Leadership (Columbia, South Carolina, 2008); John R.E. Bliese, “Rhetoric and Morale: A Study of Battle Orations from the Central Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval History 15, no. 3 (1989): 201–26. 11  Ayala, Pedro I, 532 (1364, chap. iii) Pere III, Chronicle, 2:550–51 (VI:41–42). See also: Zurita, Anales, 4:499–504 (IX:liv). 12  Ayala, Pedro I, 532 (1364, chap. iii); Pere III, Chronicle, 2:551–52 (VI:42–43). 13  Pere III, Chronicle, 2:552 (VI:44). 14  Chronicle of Muntaner, 1:22–23, n. 19. See also: David Agustí, Los almogávares: la expansión mediterránea de la Corona de Aragón. (Madrid, 2004).

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toe to toe, it was the Aragonese army that had faced down the Castilians on the beach near Murviedro. Furious at this affront, Pere marched out of Valencia on May 2, again leaving no doubt about his intentions to fight. After openly advancing up the coast road for two days, the king pitched camp at Puçol, just south of Murviedro. Before setting out on this determined expedition, Pere had sent a messenger to his rival assuring him that he did indeed want to fight and that his army would shortly come into the Castilian king’s view. Once established at Puçol, he sent two Castilian prisoners bearing a written challenge for Pedro to “come out to do battle.” When the latter despite his earlier insult, showed no signs of readying his troops for combat, Pere returned to Valencia, openly exuberant at having shown up his enemy, but perhaps with some secret relief about not actually having to fight.15 The last martial aftershocks of the Valencian campaign took place south of the city farther down the coast in the bay of Cullera near the mouth of the Júcar River. The fleets of the two monarchs had briefly engaged one another during the days after Pere had captured Puçol. Now, an armada of thirty Catalan galleys under the command of the viscount of Cardona came up against a considerably larger Castilian-Portuguese fleet said to consist of seventy vessels. When Cardona took his outnumbered flotilla up the river to avoid being overrun, Pedro, who had joined the Castilian fleet, viewed this as a heaven-sent opportunity to bottle up the Catalan ships whose maneuverability would be severely restricted in these narrow waters. In an attempt to prevent their escape, the Castilian king had three of his own ships sunk at the river’s mouth. To offset any advantage this might have afforded the Castilian fleet, Pere moved a portion of his army from Valencia down to Cullera, where the troops occupied a position on the north bank of the Júcar. Here, these troops would be in a position to thwart Castilian land-based sorties and eventually aid in his fleet’s escape back into open water.16 In the midst of maneuvers by both sides, the unpredictable Mediterranean climate wheather intervened. The trade winds of mid-summer that normally blew to the north and offshore changed abruptly into a stiff eastern gale called a solanot that began to buffet the Castilian fleet and soon threatened to blow it ashore where Pere’s forces could make short work of the ships and the sailors who manned them. As the wind increased driving the Castilian fleet ever closer to land, the Aragonese joyfully stood ready to take advantage of this seemingly God-sent opportunity. 15  Pere III, Chronicle, 2:552–53 (VI:44). 16  Ayala, Pedro I, 532 (1364, chap. iv); Pere III, Chronicle, 2:553–54 (VI:45). See also: Zurita, Anales, 4:505–6 (IX:lv).

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Pedro’s galley that was placed in front of the Castilian fleet had already broken its anchor cables when at sunset, according to Pere, “God wishing to aid … [the enemy] lessened the force of the wind.”17 The Castilian fleet now sailed back north to Murviedro where the grateful monarch entered the church of Santa María, wearing only a shirt and breeches and with a halter around his neck to offer up his solemn vow of thanks, promising not only to release some prisoners, but also to go on pilgrimage. Following this set-back, the Castilian king seemed to tire of his Valencian campaign. While leaving a sizeable garrison in Murviedro, he and much of his army marched back to Castile. By contrast, Pere’s enthusiasm for war-making seemed to increase with his adversary’s departure. In late-June, 1364, he overpowered the Castilian garrison in the town of Lliria; then swinging to the east, he marched against Murviedro where he began the first stages of a siege that would last into the following year. Only then did the Aragonese sovereign seek temporary respite from fighting, not because he had tired of it, but due to pressing financial problems that rendered the paying of military salaries extremely difficult.18 3

The Last Full Year of Conflict (1364–1365)

Pere had barely returned to Barcelona in time to hear the verdict read out against his long-time counselor, Bernat de Cabrera a man who had been close to the king for more than two decades. On July 22 after a three-month trial, Cabrera was declared guilty of treason for having betrayed the king by conspiring with his Castilian adversary. Four days later, he was beheaded at Zaragoza.19 Shortly after the death of this high-placed casualty of the Castilian conflict, Pere returned his attention to the several battle fronts on which Aragon faced a challenge. As early as May, 1364, he had alerted the royal governors of the Pyrenean regions of Roussilon and Cerdanya to call out local armed units to meet another threatened invasion of “certain great companies” that were not specifically identified, but almost certainly numbered among those out-of-work mercenaries from across the Pyrenees who posed an ever-present danger to the peninsula.20 On this occasion, with so many of his Aragonese troops still involved 17  Ayala, Pedro I, 532 (1364 chap. iv); Pere III, Chronicle, 2:554 (VI:45). For mooring devices, see Robert I. Burns, S.J. “Gegna: Coastal Mooring in Crusader Valencia,” Technology and Culture 47 (2006): 777–86. For Mediterranean wind directions, see Braudel: Mediterranean, 1:257. 18  Ayala, Pedro I 142–43 (1364, chap. v); Pere III, Chronicle, 2:554–56 (VI:45–46). 19  Kagay, “‘Treason,” 39, 48; Sitges, Muerte, 68–69. 20  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1387, ff. 87r–v [for English translation, see: Appendix II, doc. 63].

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in the prolonged Valencian campaign, Pere had no option but to use Catalan soldiers to defend his northern realms. Consequently, in August, he instructed most of the great nobles and knights of northern Catalonia to assemble at Barcelona and stand ready to defend the Pyrenean frontiers against any attack from the north.21 This call to arms was continued for the next month and included stern warnings to the Catalans that it was their duty as the king’s vassals to defend one of his realms, even if it was not their own and they therefore might look on it as foreign territory.22 To encourage of these Catalan troops engaged in “foreign” service, the king instructed his Catalan officials to protect the soldiers’ property while they were off fighting.23 Meanwhile, in early August, the Castilian king received disturbing reports concerning the Aragonese siege of Murviedro. As a result, he re-assembled his army and led it back into Aragon. For some days, the king focused his energies on attacking Castellhabib, a small village near Teruel. What had once been a Castilian outpost had recently been rocked by a bloody insurrection of its Aragonese inhabitants leading to the death of its Castilian military governor. The violence at Castellhabib was just one of many such contemporary incidents in which Aragonese villagers rose up against their Castilian conquerors. Burning to avenge the death, Pedro ringed the village with siege engines and captured it after two days of all-but constant artillery fire.24 Though no record survives of the vengeance he took against the ruling class of Castellhabib, it seems certain that the punishment was severe. For his part, after Cabrera’s execution and the call-up of his Catalan subjects to defend the north, Pere had decided to return to the front by a somewhat circuitous route by a somewhat circuitous route, moving first from Barcelona westwest to Zaragoza and then northwestnorthwest to Teruel. In mid-October, the king established a new headquarters at the hamlet of Mora de Rubielon, northeast of Segorbe. Here, representatives of beleaguered Castellhabib visited Pere to ask for immediate royal aid in fighting off Pedro’s frontal assault. However, before the king could do anything, his adversary had already taken the town, then marched to the southeast, capturing as he went several Valencian outposts including Ayora.

21  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1386, ff. 102v–3v, 104v–5v. See also: Lafuente Gómez, Dos Coronas en guerra, 223–26 (docs. 48–49). 22  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1386, ff. 108v–9v, 110v–112v. See also: Lafuente Gómez, Dos Coronas en guerre, 226–31. 23  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1387, f. 92v [for English translation, see Appendix II, doc. 65]. 24  Ayala, Pedro I, 533 (1364, chap. vi). See also: Ferrer i Mallol, “Southern Valencian Frontier,” 108.

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To keep the Castilian invaders within striking range, Pere now conducted a series of forced marches southward over the next few weeks, marches that brought his army to the Valencian coast near the town of Vilareal. He then proceeded still farther southward, skirting the capital and advancing along the Mediterranean coast to the south of the city. During a dangerous passage around Valencia that was completed in just over a month, Pere’s troops were constantly harried by Castilian outriders.25 Once again, in early December 1364, the two kings found themselves involved in a series of parallel maneuvers that showed every likelihood of leading to a battlefield encounter, possibly a decisive one. According to Pere, the Aragonese force he gathered at Alcira consisted of 3,000 horsemen accompanied by “many crossbowmen and lancers.”26 Rather unrealistically, he numbered the enemy force at 7000 horse and 40,000 foot, an army commanded in person by his royal adversary whom he repeatedly referred to as “that strange young man.”27 Whatever the real numbers involved, the objective of both commanders was clear: Orihuela, a small town on the Segura River that at the moment found itself in “great peril … from a scarcity of food.”28 Since the Castilian army stood between Pere and this Valencian outpost, the king determined to swing around that force and take up a position blocking its path to Orihuela. Leaving Alcira in early December, the Aragonese king marched down the coast arriving in Gandia and then turning inland to Alcoy. Afterwards he continued his advance still farther southward through what he described as a “waste and desert,” albeit, one that teemed with game. The king arrived at La Matanza, a large plain to the west of Orihuela. Here, Pere’s scouts caught sight of an advance battalion said to number 1,000 knights commanded by the Castilian king himself. Rapidly drawing up his own troops in battle array, Pere again waited for four hours for combat that never materialized. After having moved his men from their position on high ground in order to approach the enemy, Pere was informed by his scouts that the main body of the Castilian army was rapidly coming toward him. Despite their close proximity, once again nothing came of it. After these hours of standing to arms, Pedro withdrew, leaving Pere free to occupy the town of Orihuela where he received a hero’s welcome.29 Even with this momentary reprieve, Orihuela’s situation worsened markedly in the next few months. Though characterizing 25  Ayala, Pedro I, 533 (1364, chap. vi); Pere III, Chronicle, 2:558–60 (VI:48). 26  Pere III, Chronicle, 2:563 (VI:52). 27  Ibid. 28  Ibid., 2:560 (VI:48–49); ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1211, f. 63v. See also: Ferrer i Mallol, “Southern Valencian Frontier,” 109. 29  Ayala, Pedro I, 533 (1364, chap. vii); Pere III, Chronicle, 2:563–67 (VI:52).

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the town’s residents as “good people … who so valorously and courageously have safeguarded our affairs … for which they have gained great fame,” Pere failed to adequately re-provision this urban fortresses. As a result, the Orihuelans finally surrendered when facing yet another Castilian attack the following year.30 The fighting in Valencia which lasted almost two years (1363–1365) witnessed some of the largest and most significant campaigns during the War of the Two Pedros. Rather than following the example of the first years of conflict when Pere III largely fought on the defensive employing hired captains and troops posted along his frontiers. During the fighting around Valencia late in the war, the Aragonese king and his Castilian adversary accompanied by the large armies they commanded faced one another directly in three campaigns that focused on the capital city, as well as several smaller outposts such as Murviedro and Orihuela. On various occasions during these years, the course of the fighting seemed to be moving these monarchs toward a final confrontation that would decide the long struggle one way or the other. These seemingly inevitable battles, however, never materialized due at least in part to changes in the readiness of the two royal commanders for combat. 4

The Valencian Campaigns and the Two Royal Commanders

In the beginning years of the conflict, military realities clearly favored of the Castilian ruler. During the first decade of his reign, Pedro I demonstrated a relentless fighting spirit as Castilian arms advanced from victory to victory. He appeared to be motivated by an incessant drive for vengeance on his enemies, first the barons who revolted against him; later the Aragonese with whom he went to war. By contrast, the Aragonese monarch comes across from his governmental communiques and parliamentary speeches as a leader full of bluster and bravado, but one with absolutely no military experience or readiness to lead from the front. As a result, during the first years of the conflict, Castile’s leader won a great deal of Aragonese and Valencian territory, including the towns and cities of Calatayud, Murviedro, and Tarazona. By contrast, Aragon’s ruler fell back on an expensive system of frontier defense that did not prove impervious to enemy attack. Unlike Pedro, Pere never assumed personal command in the initial years of the conflict.

30  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 727, ff. 164–65v; R. 1210, ff. 47r–v; R. 1211, f. 63v; Ayala, Pedro I, 143 (1364, chap. vii). See also: Ferrer i Mallol, “Southern Valencian Frontier,” 109.

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Beginning with the first battle of Nájera in 1360 through the last of the Valencian campaigns five years later, the military outlook of the two men began to gradually change. Though Pedro maintained control over large swaths of Valencian land until late 1365, Pere began to assume an ever greater military presence in the war effort, exerting stepped-up pressure on his adversary. Though the Aragonese king won no military victory during this period, it was not for want of trying. On two different occasions, he readied his troops for battle, awaiting a Castilian attack that never came. Though the Castilian monarch clearly had the opportunity to successfully take on his Aragonese enemy during these final Valencian campaigns, he repeatedly withdrew from that opportunity when battle loomed. For his part, Pere was certain he knew the reason for his adversary’s hesitation to fight. For although Pedro had compiled an enviable military record in the first years of the conflict with Aragon, he had done so through such cruel measures that “God, who is the judge of battles, will punish him for the great offenses he had carried out against all reason and justice.”31 Pere’s hope for such divine retribution against the “wicked and false traitor”32 who ruled Castile was, at least in his mind, born out by the testimony of a “person worthy of credence”, one who claimed to have observed the Castilian king’s actions during the Orihuela operation of 1364. When it seemed that their sovereign had a good chance to defeat the smaller Aragonese army that stood before him, many of the Castilian leaders began to encourage him to win a victory that could easily make him the “emperor of Spain.” Rather than joyfully agreeing with this prediction, Pedro picked up a loaf of bread, and proclaimed that with it he could feed the very few men in his army who were truly loyal to him. Impugning the allegiance of his own soldiers, in particular the aristocrats, he proclaimed that if he commanded a loyal army like that serving Pere, then he could defeat the “whole of Spain.”33 Pere’s portrait of his Castilian foe as a broken leader who thoroughly distrusted his men is born out by little hard evidence. On the other hand, in discussing the same events, the Castilian chronicler, Ayala, does lend support to the Aragonese king’s assertions that the confidence of his Castilian enemy was steadily declining. In regard to Pedro’s failure to engage in battle at Murviedro 31  Pere III, Chronicle, 2:553 (VI:44). 32  Ibid., 2:548–50 (VI:41). See also: Kagay, “Theory,” 602. 33  Ayala, Pedro I, 535, chap. iii. See also: Donald J. Kagay, “Battle-Seeking Commanders in the Later Middle Ages: Phases of Generalship in the War of the Two Pedros,” in The Hundred Years War (Part III): Further Considerations, ed. L.J. Andrew Villalon and Donald J. Kagay (Leiden, 2013): 63–83, esp. 79–80; Villalon and Kagay, To Win and Lose a Medieval Battle, 100.

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and Orihuela, the chronicler said that the king was motivated by various factors, including “his murder of several knights as well as the fact that the people of his realm were not happy with him.”34 Unlike Pere’s suggestion that Pedro’s declining confidence was ultimately due to a growing fear of divine retribution for his many evil deeds, Ayala assumed that the king’s refusal to do battle simply resulted from his declining trust in his own soldiers; not any fear of the divinity. Somewhat akin to unpopular American commanders in Vietnam who feared being “fragged” by their own troops in the midst of combat,35 Pedro’s concern for the loyalty of his own men may well have made him hesitate to accept the wager of battle. After all, even if infrequent, such fatal desertions were not unknown in the Middle Ages. One of the most famous instances would lead to the defeat and death in battle of a king to whom Pedro is often compared—Richard III of England. Given the kings bloody record against some of Castile’s aristocratic families, his distrust of the nobility of his realm is understandable and may explain in part a kind of military paralysis that kept him away from the battlefield in 1366 when Castile was invaded by Enrique de Trastámara and units of the Free Companies.36 34  Ayala, Pedro I, 535 (1365, chap. iii). 35  Thomas D. Boettcher, Vietnam: the Valor and Sorrow from the Home Front to the Front Lines in Words and Pictures (Boston, 1985), 399–400. 36  Villalon and Kagay, To Win and Lose a Medieval Battle, 100.

Chapter 9

Aragon’s Victory Morphs into Castile’s Civil War (1365–1366) 1 Introduction Rarely does a conflict turn around as quickly as the War of the Two Pedros. At the close of the 1365 campaigning season, no one on either side could have predicted just how rapid and complete would be the reversal in the fortunes of war. By early spring, 1366, it was all over. Aragon had been cleared of Castilian forces and Pere III was traveling about his kingdom, reestablishing royal authority in places that had fallen to his adversary while meting out punishment to those whom he believed had surrendered too quickly. His opponent, the Castilian Pedro, found himself in flight before a triumphant army led by his illegitimate half-brother, Enrique de Trastámara, who paused briefly in the midst of a nearly unopposed campaign to have himself crowned as King Enrique II; thereafter resuming his pursuit. This radical alteration was accomplished by what literary scholars might dub a deus ex machina, in the guise of so-called Free Companies inserted into what had until then been primarily an Iberian conflict. These companies, coming from beyond the Pyrenees were composed primarily of soldiers who had participated in the Hundred Years War, but had been furloughed off during the hiatus in that conflict following the treaties of Bretigny and Calais signed in 1360. They included not only French and Englishmen, but also Bretons, Gascons, Flemings, and some Germans. Despite this fact, as the name of Free Companies implies, these troops were not currently part of any national force. Two leading players outside of Iberia helped make possible their successful intervention and, with it, an Aragonese victory. These two were France and the Papacy. Even though neither power officially entered the conflict by declaring war on Pedro or committing its own forces to the struggle against him, both played a major role in recruiting and financing the Free Companies, thereby decisively shifting the military balance in Iberia. Throughout a reign of nearly two decades, the king of Castile managed to alienate his three most powerful neighbors—the Crown of Aragon, France, and the Avignon Papacy. Against the first of these he launched a war of conquest. To understand why France and the Papacy came to despise Pedro I and eventually committed excessive resources to his removal, it is necessary to © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004425057_011

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trace the progressive estrangement of both powers from the Castilian monarch as well as the problems both were experiencing with the Free Companies in their own territories during the early 1360s. In this chapter, we must examine Pedro’s rapprochement with England, one which led to a full-fledged military alliance; the process of recruiting the companies to fight against the Castilian monarch; and finally, the invasion of 1366 that replaced Pedro on the throne with his half-brother, Enrique de Trastámara. 2

Collecting Foreign Enemies: Abandoning France

Pedro’s ever-increasing alienation from France began in June, 1353, with the debacle surrounding his sham marriage to a French princess, Blanche de Bourbon, sister-in-law to the crown prince of France, the future King Charles V (r. 1364–1380).1 As we have already noted, during the first three years of the new king’s reign, he had continued to rely upon advisers held over from Alfonso XI, the majority of whom, including his chief councilor, Juan Alfonso, lord of Albuquerque, supported a French alliance. In 1351, hoping to strengthen the alliance of the two monarchies, Albuquerque began negotiating for his royal master to marry a French princess. Despite the success of these negotiations, matters did not work out as the pro-French party had planned. For while the diplomats were arranging matters north of the Pyrenees, Pedro fell deeply in love with María de Padilla who gave him their first child even before the would-be French-born queen crossed into Spain. Despite an elaborate wedding ceremony at Valladolid, the king almost immediately deserted his young bride and hurried back to his mistress. Pedro would encounter Blanche only one more time before her death a decade later. During the intervening years, she was shut away, subject to harsh and humiliating treatment.2 Most fourteenth-century sources, including Ayala,3 accuse

1  Ayala, Pedro I, 418–19 (1351, chap. xv), 429–32 (1353, chaps. iii, v, xi). For details concerning Castile’s relations of this period see Georges Daumet, Etude sur l’Alliance de la France et de la Castille au XIVe et au XVe Siecles (Paris, 1898) and Luis Suárez Fernández, Intervención de Castilla en la Guerra de las Cien Anos (Valladolid, 1950). Of great value to the historian working on this period is Daumet’s lengthy appendix which comprises fully half of the book and reproduces treaties and other relevant diplomatic correspondence. 2  Ayala, Pedro I, 436 (1353, chap. xxi), 447–49, (1354, chaps. xix, xxi), 463–64 (1365, chaps. ix–x), 493 (1359, chap. ix), 512–13 (1361, chap. iii). 3  Ibid., 512 (1361, chap. iii).

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Pedro of actually having had Blanche murdered, a charge that was widely believed in France. The desertion and mistreatment of the French-born queen proved to be only the first step. Soon after the wedding, the king began to move against the pro-French party that had arranged his marriage, including Albuquerque. Never again during the reign would this faction enjoy the influence it had once possessed.4 As the years passed, Pedro withdrew even the limited military assistance his father had lent the French in their conflict with England. At the same time, he began to move inexorably into an English orbit, a move that would lead in the early 1360s to a military alliance. For over a decade, the French monarchy looked on impotently as these events unfolded. Although alarmed by the widening diplomatic and military rift with Castile and resentful of the king’s treatment of his French-born queen, France was at first in no position to respond in any meaningful way. In 1356, just as Pedro was consolidating his power within Castile, the great power to the north suffered a crushing defeat at Poitiers, after which that kingdom experienced a decade of crisis rarely equaled in its history. When the French king, Jean II was captured on the battle-field and spirited away to captivity in England, the burden fell upon his eldest son, Crown Prince Charles, who at the age of eighteen assumed the regency during which, he faced one severe crisis after another. Given the dire circumstances facing the French monarchy, as long as Castile maintained a degree of neutrality in the conflict with England, France could ill-afford any action that might propel Castile’s volatile monarch straight into the arms of the English. Even the murder of a French princess (if indeed that is what occurred) could not become a casus belli. The beleaguered kingdom and its regent would have to swallow their pride in the name of pragmatism. At the same time Pedro was alienating the French, his activities brought him increasingly into conflict with another potential adversary, one which was heavily influenced by its connections to France—the Avignon papacy.5 4  Ibid., 433–38 (1353, chaps. xii–xxvi). 5  The relationship between Pedro and the Avignon Papacy is explored in detail in three late nineteenth century works by French scholar, George Daumet, Etude sur les relations politiques du Pape Urbain V avec les rois de France Jean II et Charles V (1362–1370) (Paris, 1887); Etude sur les relations d’Innocent VI avec D. Pedro Ier, roi de Castille, and Etude sur l’alliance de la France et de la Castille. Although G. Mollat’s The Pope’s at Avignon supplies a general account of the papacy during its so-called “Babylonian Captivity”, most of the section dealing with relations between the popes and the Spanish kingdoms actually deals with Aragon. In a recent article, one of the authors of the present study has treated the papal relationship with Castile in somewhat greater detail. See Villalon, “War and the Great Schism,” 217–37.

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Collecting Foreign Enemies: Defying the Papacy

During Pedro I’s nineteen-year reign, three men occupied the Holy See— Clement VI (r. 1342–52), Innocent VI (r. 1352–1362), and Urban V (r. 1362–70).6 Despite papal disappointment over Pedro’s decision to abandon the Granadan War that his father had so avidly pursued, the young monarch managed to maintain good relations with the first of the three men, and, for a short time, with his successor. As was the case with France, the serious break in Pedro’s relations with the papacy first came in 1353. In fact, that break also involved the treatment of his young French bride.7 Ironically, when news originally reached Avignon that a Franco-Castilian marriage was being negotiated, Pope Clement VI was overjoyed. Since the mid1340s, he had labored hard to bring about just such a marital alliance between these two kingdoms, only to see his efforts frustrated when Alfonso XI suddenly opted instead for an English match, despite the fact that a marriage treaty with a French princess had already been drafted and had the support of many of Alfonso’s chief advisers.8 As a result of Alfonso’s decision, although the political alliance between France and Castile went forward without a glitch, the marriage that was supposed to accompany and strengthen it did not. Despite continuing efforts by Clement VI and the pro-French party in Castile which included both the 6  Still of enormous value for surveying papal careers is the monumental 40-volume work by the nineteenth century German historian, Ludwig Pastor, translated from German into English by a series of scholars working over several decades. Pastor’s work was partly written to counter an earlier History of the Popes by Lutheran scholar, Leopold von Ranke, a work denounced by the Vatican as anti-Catholic. A devout Roman Catholic as well as a painstaking historian, Pastor was afforded unprecedented access to the Vatican Library and Secret Archives, formerly closed to secular historians. He picked up the tale at the end of the Middle Ages, with the Avignon popes all of whom (including the three above-mentioned) are covered in volume one. Unfortunately, there is virtually nothing about their interactions with Spain. See Ludwig Pastor, History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, 40 vols. (St. Louis, Missouri, 1923–1969), 1:57–116. For a brief account of Urban, see also: Mollat, Popes, 52–58. 7  Daumet’s Etude sur l’Alliance de la France et de la Castille is extremely useful for understanding the coordinated French and papal efforts of the 1340s–1350s to bring about a Franco-Castilian alliance accompanied by a marriage between the Castilian heir and a French princess. By contrast, his treatment of French involvement in the conflict between Pedro and Enrique is very confusing, not least because he appears to date what are clearly the events of 1366 to the year 1363. The author does this despite citing Ayala’s chronicle which leaves no doubt about the correct chronology. 8  The treaty had progressed to such a point that Clement sent congratulatory letters not only to the two monarchs, Philip VI and Alfonso, but also to the Castilian queen and the intended groom. Daumet, Etude sur l’alliance de la France et de la Castille, 14–15. For the text of the letters, see Text Appendix, 139–40, 146–47.

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queen, María of Portugal, and the kingdom’s most powerful churchman, Cardinal Gil de Albornoz,9 the king remained obstinate in his determination to hedge his international bets by forging this marital tie with England. Early in 1348, Edward III sent his daughter, Jeanne, to Guienne, the initial stage on her journey to her Castilian betrothed. Only the young lady’s death after contracting the plague in Bordeaux prevented the English marriage.10 This, in turn, renewed the opportunity to negotiate a French match. While Clement VI died happy in the knowledge that a French-born princess would become queen of Castile (even if not the same princess designated by the earlier treaty),11 it would remain for the pope’s successor, Innocent VI, to face Pedro’s marital infidelities. Almost from the start, the new pope’s involvement seems to have been more than just the predictable reaction of a French-leaning papacy. To all appearances, Pope Innocent became a true advocate for the deserted and maltreated princess. He joined France in loudly protesting Blanche’s treatment. When the aristocratic confederation briefly seized control of the king, the pontiff worked to strengthen its resolve to make him resume his conjugal life.12 Most significantly, the pope dispatched ambassadors to Castile led by a papal legate, Cardinal Guillaume de la Jugie, to remonstrate with the straying monarch, calling on him to put aside his high-profile mistress and return to his wife.13 In the midst of this marital crisis, the initial rift over the king’s libidinous conduct was magnified by a bizarre royal liaison with still another woman, Juana de Castro, the “exceedingly beautiful” daughter of a powerful Galician family.14 In 1354, Pedro developed a brief infatuation for this lady who demanded marriage as the price of capitulation. He readily agreed, even offering to prove that his marriage to Blanche was not binding, then bullied the bishops of Avila and Salamanca into supporting his claim and performing the marriage ceremony, which they apparently did out of fear.15 This sham marriage lasted only a single day, after which the king deserted this second bride and again returned to his mistress. As was true in the case of Blanche de Bourbon, he never again saw Juana de Castro, though, to his chagrin, she insisted on entitling herself queen of Castile for the rest of her life.16 9   Ibid., 20. 10  Ibid., 16–17. 11  The perspective French bride of the 1340s had since married, and, despite being widowed, refused to marry again. All the parties then returned to the original alternative, that Pedro marry one of the daughters of the duke of Bourbon. Ibid., 22. 12  Ibid., 24–25. 13  Ayala, Pedro I, 468 (1355, chap. xix). See esp. ftn. 4. 14  Ibid., 444 (1354, chap. x). 15  Ibid. 16  Ibid., 444 (1354, chap. xii).

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News of the latest scandal, this one involving the enforced complicity of the church, reached Avignon where it infuriated a pope already wrestling with the question of how to handle the king’s conduct toward Blanche. It appears to have strengthened Innocent’s resolve to follow a hard line. He dispatched a nuncio to Castile with instructions to summon the offending bishops to Avignon and to warn the king even more bluntly that he must return to his spouse or face excommunication. The papal representatives traveling to Spain had instructions to express forcefully the Holy See’s concern with Pedro’s marital arrangements. They soon had an even more important charge: to act as peace makers.17 In 1356, when Pedro launched his war against Aragon, the papacy tried through its representatives already on the scene, including Cardinal Guillaume, to mediate between the two sides. Pedro’s resistance to these efforts became another factor aggravating Castile’s relations with Avignon. In the end, Pedro’s increasingly anti-French stance, his continuing violation of the marriage vows and harsh treatment of his queen, his persecution of several high churchmen in Castile, and his adamant refusal to cooperate in papal efforts at peacemaking convinced two successive popes of the need for more drastic measures. As early as 1357, Innocent VI excommunicated the Castilian monarch; less than a decade later, Urban V deposed him.18 4

An English Alliance

In summer, 1362, the diplomatic situation underwent a major change when Pedro abandoned the last vestige of his father’s pro-French foreign policy and engineered a full-fledged military alliance with the English monarch, Edward III.19 Earlier that year, a pair of royal representatives—a knight, Diego Sánchez de Torragas, and a lawyer (letrado), Alvar Sánchez de Cuellar—had sailed north to the island kingdom where they entered into negotiations at the palace of Westminster with their English counterparts, Lord Latymer, and John de Streley, deacon of Lincoln. Here, in June, they produced a final draft of the Treaty of London, binding the monarchs and their realms together “in a pact of indissoluble unity and friendship by which one would freely assist the other in prosperous times and never fail him in adverse ones.”20 17  Ayala, Pedro I, 477 (1356, chap. ii); Pere III, Chronicle, 2:514–15 (VI:13). 18  Froissart (Johnes), I:340 (chap. ccxxx); Froissart (Diller), 3:365. 19  Taggie, “Castillian Foreign Policy,” 282–83. 20  The text of the treaty in Latin appears in Foedera, Conventiones, Litterae, et cuiuscunque generis acta publica inter Reges Angliae et alias quosvis imperatores, reges, pont( fices, principes, vel communitates, habita aut tractata, ed. Thomas Rymer, 17 vols. (London, 1704–1717),

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The pact committed the English to be “good, true, and faithful allies” not only to Pedro, but also to his infant son, Alfonso, recently acknowledged heir to the throne by the Castilian cortes and to their successors. In this respect, it constituted both de facto and de jure recognition by the English of the right of María de Padilla’s children to inherit the Castilian crown. Ayala states unequivocally that Pedro took this decisive step “because he feared the king of France and his allies due to the death of Queen Blanche.”21 On the other hand, whatever the influence of that unfortunate event on the king, the alliance with England was just the final step in a foreign policy that had been moving in that direction for quite some time. The most significant clause in the agreement outlined England’s commitment to supply Pedro with extensive military aid against any and all enemies with the exception of the pope, the Holy Roman emperor, and the king of France. “They [the king of England and his son] … should faithfully prevent damage to [Pedro and Alfonso] by any of their enemies, persecutors or adversaries.” The treaty went on to specify that England would provide whatever military aid was requested (consistent with its own needs) as long as the Castilian crown was willing to pay the costs. [The English] will help with all their power against all men of the world … who should presume to attack, invade, assail, or wage war against the said lord king of Castile and León … and the aforesaid realm, with the expenses and costs to be born by the king of Castile … If it happens that the king of Castile and Leon, his son, Alfonso, or their heirs should ever need menat-arms, castellans, archers, guards, soldiers, or others … whenever they are compelled to demand these in person or through ambassadors, our own lord king, his son, Edward, and their heirs will help without [making] any difficulty and in good faith [will provide] such men up to the number they can suitably dispatch to [Spain], after considering their own needs … with the costs and expenses to be born by the aforesaid king of Castile and León, his son, Alfonso, and their heirs…. Though the text preserved in Rymer does not spell out in the same detail reciprocal commitments on the part of Castile, such commitments are strongly implied. Consequently, despite a specific exclusion of France from the list of enemies whose hostile activities could activate the terms of this agreement, a 6 (1708): 1357–1373, pp. 369–73. An electronic version has been made available by Tanner Ritchie Publishing of Ontario, Canada [hereafter Foedera.]. See also: Thomas D. Hardy, Syllabus (in English) of the Documents relating to England and Other Kingdoms contained in the collection known as Rymer’s Foedera, 2 vols. (London, 1869), 1:422, 426, 435. 21  Ayala, Pedro I, 525 (1363, chap. 1).

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close military alliance between the crowns of England and Castile could not help but raise the specter of Castilian naval aid helping to cement England’s hold on the Bay of Biscay in the not-unlikely event that hostilities once again broke out north of the Pyrenees. It was a specter that would not have been lost on the dauphin, soon to become King Charles V. Although the English ratified the treaty of London early in 1363, Castile did not officially sign on until autumn of the following year. Nevertheless, by late 1362, there remained no reason for France and its regent to conciliate Castile’s despised ruler. As a result, by the mid-1360s, conditions were ripe for Pedro’s enemies to unite in an effort to overthrow him. After the peace of Terrer collapsed in 1363, the Aragonese came to realize that only their enemy’s removal could put an end to the long and draining war against Castile a war they were losing. In a similar vein, Castilian exiles had concluded that their safe return home depended upon eliminating their royal persecutor. Meanwhile, France and the papacy wanted to have on the throne of Castile a more compliant figure, a king whose interests were more aligned with their own than with England’s. 5

A French Intervention?

The first clear sign that France might become involved in the affairs of Iberia, either directly or indirectly, came in 1364. Fairly early in the War of the Two Pedros, the Aragonese had come to recognize that they were badly overmatched by their larger and considerably more populous opponent, a realization reinforced by Castile’s repeated military successes. As a result, a strategy that called for securing outside intervention in support of Aragon became increasingly attractive and even imperative. It was a strategy first applied in the case of the Castilian exiles when Pere III sent representatives to Paris to arrange his alliance with their leader, Count Enrique de Trastámara. Throughout the rest of the conflict, the agreement between Pere and Enrique played an increasingly important role in the Aragonese war effort. As the conflict progressed, Enrique became Pere’s right-hand man, not only fighting in defense of Aragon, but leading the only noteworthy Aragonese incursions into Castile, during one of which the count came close to losing his life. Nevertheless, despite the growing number and importance of these exiles, their insertion into the conflict ultimately proved inadequate to turn the tide. Much more would be needed if Aragon were to survive an almost unrelenting drubbing at the hands of Castile, particularly in the war’s later stages. Among those principalities beyond the Pyrenees, the most likely to intervene on the side of Aragon and do so effectively was France. During the second phase of the War of the Two Pedros that followed the short-lived peace of Terrer

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(1361–1362), hopes for some form of French involvement in the Spanish war began to grow as Pere and his advisers drew encouragement from the changing diplomatic situation. By 1364, not only had the gap between France and Castile widened into a chasm due to the signing of an Anglo-Castilian military accord, but a far more talented French ruler had come to power. In the past, Aragonese support for France in its conflict with England had been largely naval; Pere III had permitted construction of French warships within his territory, in particular, in Catalonia. As we have seen, it had been the delivery of one such “consignment” that had touched off his war with Castile. Now, following Jean II’s death and the succession of Charles V, Pere rushed to strengthen diplomatic and military ties with his northern neighbor. Even though a major military intervention on Aragon’s behalf taking the form of a French army dispatched into Spain still seemed unlikely, Pere was ready and willing to promote the possibility.22 In 1364, he sent an elite three-man delegation north across the mountains to cement the friendship of the two royal houses and reaffirm all existing alliances between them.23 In addition to Francesch de Perellós, who despite his role in sparking the conflict, had since risen to the rank of royal chamberlain (camarero mayor) and become a leading adviser to the king, it included the Aragonese vice chancellor, Francesch Roma, and the castellan of Amposta. Arriving in Toulouse, the principal French-held city in the south, the three met with the French king’s brother, Louis, duke of Anjou, count of Maine, and royal lieutenant in Languedoc. They were soon joined by other representatives of the crown dispatched from Paris by Charles V to take part in negotiations, including the marshal of France, Arnoul d’ Audenhan, and the king’s chancellor, Pierres Davoyr. The newcomers brought instructions from the French king to arrange with their Aragonese counterparts an even closer alliance than currently existed. Early in March, 1364, the parties sat down to hammer out just such an agreement. Central to the negotiations was the enemy the two sides currently shared— the kingdom of Navarre and its monarch, Charles II (r. 1349–1387), a man whom history remembers by the unflattering, but largely deserved sobriquet, Charles “le Mauvais” (“the Bad”).24 This mercurial figure had long been a thorn in the side of France, where he was count of Evreux by inheritance and the holder of extensive lands in Normandy. Boundless ambition that included a not inconsiderable desire to wear the French crown led him on numerous occasions to 22  The search for a French alliance is documented in Zurita, Anales, 4:523–24 (IX:lviii), 531–32 (IX, lx). 23  Ibid., 4:523 (IX:lviii). 24  Froissart (Johnes), 1:348 [chap. ccxxxii]; Froissart (Diller), 3:377.

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challenge the new Valois Dynasty. To further his ambition, he switched back and forth between supporting the aristocracy and the commons in the internal crises that followed the defeat at Poitiers, and to repeatedly play off the French and English against one another. As a result, Charles II was trusted by no one. When preparing to renew Castile’s war with Aragon, the Castilian monarch had negotiated an alliance with Navarre,25 adding its duplicitous monarch to the list of Pere III’s enemies. At the same time, the dauphin, soon to become Charles V, was involved in a lengthy struggle with the Navarrese involving a number of issues, including control over the duchy of Normandy.26 The way lay open for Charles and Pere to form an alliance against their mutual enemy. It was just such an alliance that French representatives had instructions to seek. The problem for France in any war with Navarre lay in geography: how could a French army attack Charles “le Mauvais” on his home ground? The Pyrenees that formed Navarre’s northern frontier provided that kingdom with a secure border largely impervious to French attack. Crossing directly into the Iberian kingdom through its only major pass at Roncesvalles (Roncevaux) was out of the question. For one thing, the pass was held by a Navarrese garrison; for another, even to arrive there would require a French army to pass through English territory. The only alternative for the French was to cross into Aragon by different passes through the mountains, then traverse that kingdom to attack Navarre from its relatively undefended southern border. Ultimately, France and Aragon came to an agreement that would make this possible. The duke of Anjou in person or some other French captain acting in his stead would be permitted to lead a French army through the Aragonese province of Roussillon north of the Pyrenees and across the mountains by way of the Aragonese-held passes east of Roncesvalles. From there, the force would traverse Aragon to invade Navarre from the south. The Aragonese promised that along this route French troops would be welcomed and allowed to purchase food and other necessary supplies. For their part, the French promised to avoid inflicting harm on the territories they traversed. The duke of Anjou committed himself (or whichever French captain might take his place) to remain south of the mountains until most of Navarre had been conquered and turned over to Pere. For his part, the Aragonese monarch would contribute 400 men at arms to the expedition. Meanwhile, the French Marshal d’Audenham would bring in another 500 to help guard Aragon’s 25  Ayala, Pedro I, 521 (1362, chap. ix). 26  One of the major themes of Froissart’s chronicle between the years 1359 and 1364 is the bitter on-going conflict between the dauphin and the Navarrese monarch, one that involved a number of issues. Chapters concerning this conflict appear intermingled with other events of the same time period. Froissart (Johnes), 1:247–336; Froissart (Diller), 3:153–363.

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borders from any counter-attack. And if this invasion led to military opposition by a third party (in all probability a reference to Castile), the king of France would commit a further 500 men against this new opponent. For Pere, the agreement provided a means of striking at his enemy’s ally at a minimal cost to himself. After all, the French would be doing most of the heavy-lifting. The agreement would also provide an opportunity to win French gratitude. It even held out the possibility of getting the French entangled in the conflict against Pedro whose alliance with Navarre might compel the despised enemy to come in against the invaders. Unfortunately for Aragon, nothing came of this cunning plan. Before any French expedition could be gathered, the two feuding kings arranged for a cessation of hostilities. An end to their conflict erased this promising possibility of direct French intervention in Iberia. Despite this, an intervention from north of the Pyrenees would ultimately decide the war in Aragon’s favor and in that intervention the French king would play a highly significant role. 6

The Rise of the Free Companies

As noted earlier, throughout the Hundred Years War, periods of intense fighting alternated with those of relative quiet, often brought on by a truce or even an uneasy peace. One of the most important of these interludes began after the signing of the Treaties of Bretigny and Calais in 1360 and endured for the better part of a decade. With the termination of hostilities and the return of Jean II from his first captivity in England, both sides began to implement the treaties. In many parts of France, military garrisons received orders to evacuate towns and castles they had held and to disband. While some complied, others did not. With no new employer in sight, scores or even hundreds of hardened veterans, not infrequently accompanied by their old leaders or in some cases under the command of newly elected replacements, banded together into what might today be called para-military units, but what the fourteenth century referred to as “Free Companies.”27 Owing allegiance to no superior authority and “long

27  Chroniclers also refer to these unemployed warrior bands as the great companies or simply the companies. While virtually all of the chroniclers deal with the serious problem they posed, Froissart shows a particular interest in their activities. Froissart (Johnes) 1:292–300, 339–341 (chap. ccxiv–ccxv, cccxxx); Froissart (Diller), 3:166–67, 256–71, 320, 363–65. The best modern book treating the role of the free companies in the fourteenth century is Kenneth Fowler’s Medieval Mercenaries.

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accustomed to pillage,”28 they lived off the land and its civilian population, while awaiting the renewal of open warfare, which would lead to their recall. According to contemporary sources, by Lent, 1361, their burgeoning numbers may have exceeded 16,000 and these numbers continued to grow. Most came from the two principal warring kingdoms, but with them were to be found more than a smattering of mercenaries recruited from other lands. There included English and Welsh contingents, Frenchmen from Brittany, Gascony, Normandy, and Burgundy, and even a small number of Flemings and Germans.29 France quickly began to experience a serious threat from these roving bands of soldiery, often referred to in the sources as routiers (marauders), discharged by both sides for reasons of economy and then left to fend for themselves. At least among the English, a military system that came of age during the Hundred Years War may have contributed to this mounting scourge. Historians have long recognized that over the course of the fourteenth century, English armies underwent substantial changes, substantial enough to lead modern authorities such as Andrew Ayton to speak of them as constituting “the military revolution in Edwardian England.”30 The changes came not only in the realm of battlefield tactics that led to spectacular English victories, but also in the less obvious, though almost equally important areas of recruitment and logistics. In the new system, captains, ranging in social status from leading nobles to men of more modest origins, often self-made through war, recruited companies of men at arms and archers, then contracted for their services either with the crown or with commanders higher up in the military hierarchy.31 It is not surprising that when the winding down of hostilities threw such men out of work, they would simply convert their already organized companies into bands of brigands. Trained for war, possessing a unit cohesion, and accustomed

28  Froissart (Johnes), 1:293 (chap. ccxiv); Froissart (Diller), 3:363. 29  Froissart (Johnes), 1:293–95 (chap. ccxiv); Froissart (Diller), 3:367. 30  Andrew Ayton, Knights and Warhorses: Military Service and the English Aristocracy under Edward III (Woodbridge, England, 1994). 31  For works dealing with changes in the recruitment of an English army, see Andrew Ayton, “War and the English Gentry under Edward III,” History Today 42, no. 3 (March, 1992): 34– 40; idem, “English Armies in the Fourteenth Century,” in Arms Armies, and Fortifications in the Hundred Years War, ed. A. Curry and M. Hughes (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1994), 21–38. N.B. Lewis, “The Organization of Indentured Retinues in Fourteenth Century England,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4, 5th series (1954): 29–39; H.J. Hewitt, The Organization of War under Edward III (Bornsby, England, 1966); A.E. Prince, “The Strength of English Armies in the Reign of Edward III,” EHR, 46 (1931): 353–71; idem, “The Indenture System under Edward III,” in Historical Essays in Honor of James Tait, ed. V.H. Galbraith and E.F. Jacob (Manchester, 1933), 283–97.

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to ravaging for king and country, they could simply turn these “skills” to their own benefit. Throughout the 1360s, the companies threatened not only the French countryside, but also several important cities in the south, most notably Lyon. They also bragged that they would “pay a visit” to the pope and the cardinals at Avignon. In fact, on several occasions the routiers, eager to extort church wealth, held Avignon to ransom.32 For those regions of France which experienced their depredations, in particular Champagne, Burgundy, and Languedoc, peace and war became virtually indistinguishable.33 Several chronicles note that throughout this period, French territory suffered the most serious damage; by contrast, the English-held duchy of Aquitaine escaped relatively unscathed. This led many in the French camp to accuse England of violating the recent peace by acquiescing in, if not actually directing, the war-like activities of the Free Companies, a number of whose captains were either English or Gascon. Such groups formed a ready reserve of fighting men that England did not have to support, but which she could tap for military service at a moment’s notice. Consequently, royal orders to cease and desist preying on “our very dear and much-beloved brother, the king of France,” of the sort Edward III addressed in 1364 to one English captain, Hugh Calveley, may have been a sham; designed more for show than anything else.34 Unfortunately, the French monarchy, badly weakened by the defeat at Poitiers and the internal crisis that grew out of it, proved unable to cope with the growth of the companies. Shortly after returning from England, King Jean II received from the royal council a dire warning that “unless these bands were repressed, they would multiply so much and do so much mischief that the kingdom of France would suffer equally as during the war with the English.”35 Acting on this advice, he commissioned his cousin, Jacques de Bourbon, count de la Marche, to raise an army with which to crush the companies. Bourbon carried out his orders, but when the two forces met at Brignais around Easter of 1362, it was the royal army rather than the companies which experienced a 32  Daumet, Étude sur Urbain V, 46–64. 33  Nicholas Wright, Knights and Peasants: The Hundred Years War in the French Countryside. (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1998). 34  Froissart (Johnes), 1:339 [chap. ccxxx]; Froissart (Diller), 1:364; Thomas Walsingham, Gesta Abbatum Moonestarii Sancti Albani, 3 vols. (London, 1864), 1:302. Lettres des Rois, Reines et Autres Personnages des Cours de France et D’Angleterre despuis Louis VII jusqu’a Henry IV, ed. M. Champollion Figeac, 2 vols. (Paris, 1839–1847), 2:170–72. 35  Froissart (Johnes), 1:294 [chap. ccxiv]; see also: Froissart (Diller), 3:258. In another passage concerning the companies, Froissart summed up the situation in these words: “the wisest of the kingdom declared that if something were not speedily done, either by fighting or getting them out of the country, they would destroy the noble kingdom of France!” See Froissart (Johnes), 1:339 (chap. ccxxx).

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humiliating defeat, suffering losses that included both its commander and his son, Pierre de Bourbon.36 After Brignais, some of the companies drifted off to fight in Italy where the papacy helped arrange and finance their service to the marquis of Montferrat.37 Most, however, remained in France where they continued their depredations, meeting little resistance from a population cowed by Bourbon’s defeat. When a crusade preached by Innocent VI against the routiers failed to materialize, despite papal promises that participants would be absolved from all crimes and sins, the papacy was reduced to looking on helplessly as the companies ravaged the region around Avignon.38 In the mid-1360s, termination of two active conflicts magnified the problem posed by the Free Companies. In 1364, Jean of Montfort, England’s candidate to become duke of Brittany won a decisive victory at the battle of Auray, a victory in which his adversary, Charles of Blois was killed, thereby ending several decades of struggle for the duchy.39 This was followed almost immediately by the peace negotiated between France and Navarre.40 (See above). Each of these events released a new wave of fighting men to swell company ranks.41 Around this time, even military figures as important as the well-known English captain, Sir Hugh Calveley, found their way into the companies. Portrayed in the sources as a giant of a man who once participated in the famous Combat of the Thirty,42 Sir Hugh had earned a considerable military

36  Froissart (Johnes), 1:296–97 [ccxv]; Froissart (Diller), 3:259–65. 37  Froissart (Johnes), 1:297–300 [chap. ccxv]; Froissart (Diller), 3:270. The influence of the companies on early Renaissance Italy is best explored in the works of William Caferro. These include his books Mercenary Companies and the Decline of Siena (Baltimore, 1998) and John Hawkwood, An English Mercenary in Fourteenth-Century Italy (Baltimore, 2006) as well as various articles: “‘The Fox and the Lion’: The White Company and the Hundred Years War in Italy” in The Hundred Years War: A Wider Focus, 179–209; and “Edward Despenser, The Green Knight and the Lance Formation: Englishmen in Florentine Military Service, 1366–1370” in The Hundred Years War (Part III): Further Considerations, 85–102. “Slaying the Hydra-Headed Beast: Italy and the Companies of Adventure in the Fourteenth Century,” in Crusaders, Condottieri, and Cannon, 285–304. 38  Froissart (Johnes), 1:297–99 (chap. ccxv); Froissart (Diller), 3:270. For Innocent VI, see Mollat, Popes, 44–51. 39  Froissart treats this war and its termination at great length in his chronicle. For the battle of Auray that decided the contest, see Froissart (Johnes), 1:326–36 (chaps. ccxxv–ccxxviii); Froissart (Diller), 3:332–51. For a classic treatment of the battle, see Charles Oman, A History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages. 2 vols. (New York, 1924), 2:177–78; Sumption, The Hundred Years War II: Trial by Fire, 517–21. 40  Froissart (Johnes), 1:338–39 (chap. ccxix); Froissart (Diller), 3:363. 41  Froissart (Johnes), 1: 336–39; Froissart (Diller), 3:363. 42  Muhlberger, “Combat”, 285–94.

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reputation fighting for Montfort.43 At Auray, Sir Hugh had shared command of the winning side with his more famous English contemporary, John Chandos. Due in part to his position within the Free Companies, he would eventually play a critical role in Spain. 7

The Free Companies Enter the Iberian Peninsula (1365–1366)

By the time Jean II died in England in April, 1364, his eldest son, now Charles V—later to become widely-known as Charles “the Wise”—had already managed to cope successfully with a number of the more severe problems that afflicted France after Poitiers. Nevertheless, upon coming to the throne, the new king still faced the increasing threat to his kingdom posed by the Free Companies. As a result he and the new pope, Urban V, stepped up efforts to find some means of removing this scourge from their territories.44 One attractive solution—shipping them off to southeastern Europe to fight the Turks— foundered on the companies’ refusal to journey so far from home.45 The pair then decided that an even better solution lay closer at hand: just across the Pyrenees in the kingdom of Castile ruled a figure whom both men detested.46 Recruiting the companies to fight against Pedro I would not only remove them from French territory, it also held out the very real possibility of altering the Iberian balance by turning the course of the Aragonese war against the hated Castilian monarch. 43  An extended account of this period centering on Calveley’s career can be found in Villalon, “Seeking Castles,” 305–328. 44  Apparently, the most pressing issue for both men was simply the removal of the Free Companies in order to curtail the damage they were inflicting upon southern France. According to Zurita, both the pope and the king were well aware “how important it was to clean (limpiar) their land of such men who were a veritable pestilence upon it.” Zurita, Anales, 4:537 (IX:lxi). See also: Daumet, Urbain V, 52–57. 45  The failed negotiation that would have seen their removal to Hungary is mentioned in the English translation of Froissart. See Froissart (Johnes), 1:339 [ccxxx]. It is not mentioned at the same location in the Amien mss. edited by Diller. See Froissart (Diller), 3:363–64. 46  Pere III provides the most detailed fourteenth century narrative concerning the companies’ recruitment, their arrival in Spain, and the opening phase of their expedition into Castile. See Pere III, 2:571–75 [57–59]. Although Froissart’s account is far inferior to Pere’s, the Flemish chronicler name more of the English and French participants than does the king. See Froissart (Johnes), 1:340–42 (chap. ccxxx); Froissart (Diller), 1:365–67. Working from Pere III’s account supplemented by documents in the ACA, Zurita also supplies a useful account of these events. See Zurita, Anales, 4:535–41 (IX,:lxi–lxii). Unfortunately, like Pere himself, the later Aragonese historian ceases to provide detailed coverage at the point where the companies cross into Castile. An excellent treatment of the free companies’ 1366 intervention in Spain, based extensively on archival documentation, followed by an account of the Black Prince’s campaign of 1367 can be found in chapters nine and ten of Delachenal, Charles V, 3:303–64.

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Throughout much of the year 1365, negotiations went forward between the various interested parties. At the papal court in Avignon, a deal was brokered by the former Aragonese prince, Pere, once the leading adviser to his royal nephew, now retired into the Franciscan order. Meanwhile, Perellós who enjoyed a close connection with the French crown, worked with Charles V and his ministers.47 As a final precaution before any Free Company invasion, Pere sought to neutralize Navarre. Early in December, 1365, with the groups of soldiers beginning to arrive at Barcelona, he negotiated a secret convention with his former enemy, Charles of Navarre, in which he promised to pay the Navarrese monarch a considerable sum (30,000 florins) as well as agreeing to compensate him for any damage the companies might inflict on that kingdom during their march into Castile, a march that in the end did spill over the Navarrese border.48 In late summer, 1365, negotiations seem to have been well on their way to completion. When Enrique de Trastámara harangued the Castilian garrison

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47  Pere III, Chronicles, 2:572 (VI:57). 48  Sections of the treaty and the accompanying correspondence are reproduced in Miret y Sans, “Negociations,” 77–79.

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surrendering at Murviedro in an attempt to win them over to his side, he was able to assure them that the Free Companies would soon enter the struggle on the side of Aragon. According to Ayala, during these discussions, Enrique told them that “the king of Aragon had given his pledge to some companies of men at arms who were in France and Gascony and it was certain that they would come to his aid due to the great sum of money he had promised them.”49 By autumn, representatives of the three powers reached their final agreement. France and the Papacy would each contribute one hundred thousand gold florins to help secure the services of the companies.50 For its part, Aragon was called upon to ante up not only a matching contribution, but also a considerable sum beyond that to help pay the companies’ wages, though just how much more is not clear from the sources.51 To raise his share of the purchasing price, Pere called into session at Barcelona his Catalan parliament and demanded from the delegates yet another extensive subsidy, money that would not only help bring the companies in on his side, but preclude any attempt by his adversary to buy away their services. As he worked to arrange the complex finances, Pere invited leaders of the companies to journey from France to Barcelona where further negotiations could be conducted for their entry into the conflict. During these meetings, mercenary captains or their representatives who accepted the king’s invitation agreed to cross the Pyrenees through the eastern passes and muster around the city no later than February of the following year.52 Thereafter, they were to advance into Castile as quickly as possible, not only to carry the struggle to their employers’ mutual enemy but to rid Aragonese territory of their presence. Since the companies would have to traverse much of both Catalonia and Aragon, Pere granted them safe conducts to pass through his kingdoms.53 At the same time, he made what preparations he could to minimize the looting and pillaging that would probably occur in the process. While tacitly acknowledging that a certain degree of damage was unavoidable,54 he demanded assurances from all concerned that they would not actually attack any towns or castles currently held by his forces. As a means of keeping down the damage 49  Ayala, Pedro I, 535 (1365, chap. iii). 50  Pere III, Chronicle, 2:570–72 (VI:56–57). 51  According to Zurita, “On behalf of the king of Aragon, they were offered the other 100,000 in addition to (allende) the wages that they had been promised.” Zurita, Anales, 4:537 (IX:lxii). 52  Ayala, Pedro I, 536 (1356, chap. iv). See also: CAVC, 2:362–66; 3:16–28; Lafuente Gomez, “Comportamientos,” 260–61. 53  Miret y Sans, “Negociations,” 83. 54  The king refers to “the pillage they would find in our kingdom and lands.” Pere III, Chronicle, 2: 572 (VI: 57).

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to the unwalled countryside, the king accepted a plan formulated by one of his Aragonese assemblies for carefully routing the mercenaries through his territories.55 Early in December, 1365, Pere summoned his chief steward, Pedro Jordan de Urries, to take charge of preparations for receiving and welcoming the companies. He also dispatched guides, among them a trusted envoy, Friar Guillen de Guimera, to greet companies entering by the pass at Puicerdan and gathering around the city of Lérida. The friar and his companions had orders to see that these “guests” of the crown had whatever they needed for a safe passage, including supplies at fair prices. What is more, at least by implication, Pere’s representatives were to try to keep them under control and speed them on their way.56 The parties had agreed on a leader to take command of the invasion: Bertrand DuGuesclin, count of Longueville, the intrepid Breton warrior who, despite relatively humble origins, had risen during the civil wars in Brittany to command the forces supporting the French candidate for the duchy, Charles de Blois. Despite losing the decisive battle of that war, DuGuesclin’s other victories as well as his legendary courage were already marking him as the foremost French soldier of his generation. This and his influence with the companies made him the obvious choice. Offsetting this was the fact that at the moment when negotiations with the Free Companies were taking place, the future constable was still languishing in the hands of the English commander, Sir John Chandos, who had captured him at Auray and was awaiting payment of a hefty ransom set at 100,000 francs.57 The French king now arranged for its payment, half from his own treasury, the other half being put up by the king of Aragon and the count of Trastámara. On August 22, 1365, DuGuesclin issued letters acknowledging that Charles V had agreed to pay him a very substantial sum, in part to cover the ransom he owed Chandos, but also to gather and lead the Free Companies out of French provinces such as Normandy and Brittany.58 At the end of September, a public instrument was drawn up announcing that the French king would pay 40,000 florins to the Englishman for Bertrand’s freedom, in return for which the latter would put up as security his county of Longueville.59 Since many of those commanding or serving in the companies were Englishmen or Gascons, an attempt was also made to recruit a high-ranking 55  Ibid. 56  Miret y Sans, “Negociations,” 80; Zurita, Anales, 4:538 (IX:!xii). 57  The amount at which DuGuesclin’s ransom was set comes from Froissart. Froissart (Johnes), 1:341 (chap. ccxxx); Froissart (Diller), 1:365. 58  DuGuesclin, Letters, 40–41 (no. 108). 59  Ibid., 44 (no. 115): September 30 1365.

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English leader to share command with DuGuesclin. The obvious choice was the victor of Auray, John Chandos, one of England’s foremost soldiers and a close associate of the Black Prince. Sir John, however, was currently employed as the prince’s constable of Guienne and so declined the offer. On the other hand, several out-of-work English knights did sign on to an enterprise that promised profit—the most prominent among them being Hugh Calveley.60 Chroniclers leave no doubt that Sir Hugh became the acknowledged leader of a large English contingent taking part in the 1366 campaign. Although Calveley had fought at Auray, commanding the reserve force that seems to have decided the battle against DuGuesclin, sources suggest that the Englishman may actually have been recruited for the Spanish adventure by his former foe. In November, 1365, after DuGuesclin received his own commission from Charles V to lead the companies out of France and into Castile, he sent letters to other captains inviting them to join him.61 According to one source, he also met with over a score of English captains at Chalons sur Seine, telling these hardened warriors, men who had often been his adversaries, that having overthrown Pedro, they would then invade Granada to fight against the enemies of the faith.62 “Know my lords … I will make you all rich and also let you win honor.” Here, it was Calveley who spoke for the assembled captains, agreeing with some enthusiasm that they would follow “the mirror of chivalry” into any fight “except against King Edward or his son, the Prince of Wales.”63 Surviving documents indicate that throughout the expedition, the pair maintained a close connection. In mid-February, 1366, as the invasion pushed westward into Castile, DuGuesclin and Calveley signed an indenture establishing what amounted to a partnership by the terms of which they would divide the spoils reaped from their expedition, with the French commander receiving three-quarters and his English counterpart, one-quarter.64 Nearly five months later, in the opening days of July, 1366, with Enrique’s army encamped near 60  Other prominent Englishmen or English allies mentioned as having taken part in the expedition include Matthew de Gournay, Eustace d’ Ambreticourt, Walter Huet, and Perducas d’ Albret. Froissart (Johnes), 1:341 (chap. ccxxx); Froissart (Diller), 1:366. 61  DuGuesclin, Letters, 48 (no. 127): November 20, 1365. 62  This tale of recruitment appears in both Cuvelier’s poem and the prose version based on it. It does not, however, appear in the more reliable sources, especially the chronicle of Pere III where one might have expected to find it. In the king’s chronicle, the first mention of DuGuesclin refers to his meeting with Pere and fellow captains in Barcelona around Christmas, 1366. See Chronique de DuGuesclin, 182–183; Pere III, 2:573 (VI:58); Richard Vernier, The Flower of Chivalry: Bertrand du Guesclin and the Hundred Years War (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2003), 89. 63  Memoires de du Guesclin, 183. 64  DuGuesclin, Letters, 53–54 (no. 144).

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Seville and Pedro I fleeing from the realm, DuGuesclin acknowledged a debt to Calveley of over 26,000 florins to pay both his wages and those of the men he had brought with him. According to Monsieur Bertrand, Sir Hugh had accomplished everything he promised “well and loyally, without fraud or evil intent.”65 Finally, in the opening days of 1367, when Calveley took his leave of Enrique to join his liege lord, the Black Prince, DuGuesclin officially released him from their indenture: “We witness by these our letters that the said Sir Hugh has well and loyally accomplished the said covenants of which he is now quit.”66 Ultimately, a number of other notable figures from north of the Pyrenees decided to take part in an enterprise that promised both wealth and adventure, among them Arnaud d’Audreham, the marshal of France and lieutenant of Languedoc, who had played a notable role in the French defeat at Poitiers; John, the young count de la Marche, and his relative, lord Anthony de Beaujeu, both of whom represented the French monarchy and were set on avenging their kinswoman, Blanche de Bourbon; and Matthew de Gournay, the second ranking Englishman on the expedition behind Calveley.67 As the companies already gathered by DuGuesclin or on the verge of joining him marched through southern France toward the passes across the Pyrenees, cities and towns along the route began to take whatever precautionary measures they could against being overrun by this horde of soldiery. For example, in October, 1365, when he learned of DuGuesclin’s mission, the French seneschal of Beaucaire, a city on the Rhone just south of Avignon, sent out an urgent warning to people in the region to begin preparing for the imminent passage of the companies and ordering them to withdraw behind their walls.68 A month later, when the future constable actually reached Avignon, he approached his third employer, Urban V, for the papacy’s contribution to the Spanish expedition.69 (In late December, having already crossed the Pyrenees, he sent a procurator back to Avignon to collect what the pope still owed him.70) Throughout autumn, as negotiations to recruit the companies went forward, the Aragonese king increasingly turned his attention to making arrangements for their arrival in his territory.71 On September 14, 1365, following the 65  Ibid., 60 (no 163): July 3, 1366. 66  Ibid., 61 (no. 167): January 2, 1367. 67  Ayala, 546 (1366, chap. xvi); Froissart (Johnes), 1:340–41 (chap. ccxxx); Froissart (Diller), 3:366–67. 68  DuGuesclin, Letters, 45 (no. 118): October 11, 1366. 69  Ibid., 47 (no. 124): November, 12–16 1365 and (no. 125): November, 14, 1365. 70  Ibid., 50 (no. 133): December 22, 1365. 71  As usual, Pere III’s chronicle is the best account for establishing his own itinerary and chronology throughout these events. Pere III, Chronicle, 2: 570–72 [VI, 56–57]. Although

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six-month siege of Murviedro, Pere entered the town, but remained there for only a week before moving to Valencia on September 21. For a month, he remained in his southern capital, laying down instructions on how to pursue the war in his absence, appointing a new governor of the city and entrusting the command of all Aragonese forces along this frontier to his nephew, the count of Urgel. Having made these arrangements, on October 20, Pere hurried north to Barcelona, which he entered eleven days later. Here, he would await the coming of the companies.72 Being present to welcome them in person was deemed sufficient cause for absenting himself from the cortes he had summoned to meet in Zaragoza near the end of November. Instead, the king empowered his eldest son, Joan, crown prince and duke of Gerona, to act in his stead, charging the young man to extract from the long-suffering delegates as much money as possible in order to help pay the companies and to discuss with them means of easing any problems that might arise as a result of their traversing Aragonese territory.73 In the event, not everything went according to plan. To begin with, around mid-December, as the companies began to descend on Aragon somewhat sooner than expected, Pere found it necessary to make a brief journey south to Tortosa. Here, he arranged for Aragonese forces to be dispatched to the war zone on the northwest frontier to take on Castilian garrisons from captured towns like Tarazona and Borja that were wreaking havoc on territory still held by Aragon.74 Meanwhile, in Zaragoza, the Aragonese prince faced delegates clamoring that no meeting of a cortes could take place without the king’s presence and therefore, nobles, prelates, knights, and representatives of corporate entities (towns and cities) who had answered the royal summons were in fact meeting and deliberating as individuals, a technicality that might later be used to argue that no decision they reached was binding.75 Returning to Barcelona, Pere discovered some 10,000 or more of the newcomers “well accustomed to war” gathered on his doorstep. These men had to be fed and housed, then sped on their way to the neighboring kingdom “to avoid the danger which could be caused by [the presence of] such a multitude Zurita’s later history largely follows that of Pere, it is not always as clear, particularly in respect to dates, does not always set forth the chronology as clearly. Zurita, Anales, 4:534–540 (IX:lxi–lxii). Delachenal also criticizes Zurita on the issue of dates. Delachenal, Charles V, 3:303. 72  Zurita, Anales, 4:535 (IX:lxi). 73  Ibid. 74  Ibid. 75  Ibid.

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of foreigners.”76 And in fact, the danger to which the king referred, one that had been widely feared, did ultimately come to pass. Despite any and all guarantees Pere had received, some of the companies seized the city of Barbastro, northeast of Zaragoza, where “they manifested such insolence and cruelty against the inhabitants that they could not have entered or combatted [the city] with greater inhumanity if they were enemies, robbing their houses and tormenting [the inhabitants].”77 When, in desperation, a number of them desperate inhabitants retreated with their goods into the tower of the major church “which is large and very strong,” the invaders burned it down, killing several hundred people. Barbastro was so badly damaged by the entry of the companies, “that it could not have received greater damage if it had been taken by infidels.” All Pere could ultimately do by way of compensation was to exempt the stricken city from major royal taxes. Putting the best possible face on the situation, the king welcomed his new allies with at least an appearance of open arms and a lavish New Year’s day feast. On January 1, 1366, throughout the royal palace in Barcelona and at various nearby venues, tables were set up and knights were wined and dined. Seated at the high table with Pere and several royal relatives were the leading captains, including DuGuesclin, the count de la Marche, Beaujeu, Calveley, and d’Audenham. At the same time, the crown found suitable quarters for the rank and file in and around the city.78 Meanwhile, two Iberian contingents were gathering to join the invasion. On the one hand, the count of Trastámara, accompanied by his surviving brothers, Sancho and Tello, rode in at the head of several thousand Castilian exiles many of whom had been fighting their former monarch for much of the last decade. In addition, Pere’s cousin, Alfonso, count of Denia, a principal royal adviser who had long advocated bringing in the companies, put together a substantial force of his own countrymen sympathetic to the Castilians who had fought beside them for so long. The count was accompanied by a number of his fellow aristocrats including Enrique de Trastámara’s soon to be brother-in-law, Felipe 76  Ayala, Pedro I, 536 (chap. 1365, chap. iii). By contrast, Froissart places their numbers as high as 30,000. Froissart (Johnes), 1: 341 (chap. ccxxx); Froissart (Diller), 1:366. For his part, Pere III does not place any number on this horde. Pere III, 2: 573 (VI:58). Zurita follows Pere’s lead, stating that “I find no certain number of the men at arms who came in these companies from France.” Instead, he simply characterizes the force as “innumerable” though he does cite Ayala as having estimated it at 10–12,000. Zurita, Anales, 4:539 (IX: lxii). Modern scholar, Peter Russell accepts the figure of 10–12,000. Russell, English Intervention, 37. 77  Zurita, Anales, 4:539 (IX, lxiii). Not surprisingly, Pere skips over any mention of an event which reflected badly on his decision to bring in the companies. 78  Pere III, Chronicle, 2:573 (VI:58). See also: Zurita, Anales, 538 (IX:lxii).

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de Castro, Pedro Boïl, Juan Remírez de Arellano, Juan Martínez de Luna, and the count of Ribagorza. Several of these men would be present a year later at the battle of Nájera and at least one of them (de Luna) would subsequently make a permanent move into the Castilian aristocracy.79 After another week of rest and final preparation, this force began its march westward toward the Castilian frontier. On January 9, 1366, just before DuGuesclin departed to take up his command, he and Pere held a final meeting at which the king turned over a large sum—according to Zurita 120,000 florins—to pay for both his men’s wages and his own services. At this time, the king also conferred upon the Breton soldier of fortune properties in both Aragon and Valencia, in particular, the border town of Borja and the region around it (apparently at that moment still in the hands of the enemy). With this donation came the title of count. In his turn, the Frenchman did homage to his new royal overlord.80 The wording of the grant leaves no doubt as to Pere’s reason for having made it: “[You, Bertrand DuGuesclin] with copious numbers of men-at-arms have recently entered our service and come to our aid against our enemy, the king of Castile, who as an evil traitor and in violation of peace treaties … stirred up war on many occasions against us and our realms.” Approximately six weeks later, Pere granted the Valencian town of Mola to DuGuesclin’s co-commander of the expedition, Hugh Calveley, who also paid homage to the king.81 The reason for making the grant was much same: “you have come to serve us with those great and powerful companies of warriors who have come to our aid against King Pedro of Castile, our public enemy.” On January 21, Pere himself left Barcelona, traveling by a somewhat roundabout route to Zaragoza. Throughout these weeks, the king worked tirelessly to speed the companies through his lands without further incident and to secure more sources of finance to help pay for what had become a hugely expensive venture. When Pere finally arrived in the Aragonese capital, on February 13,82 he immediately met with the count of Trastámara to turn over what was still owed him and reaffirm the provisions of their various treaties “setting forth

79  Zurita, Anales, 4:538 (IX:lxii). For more about de Luna’s family transfer to Castile, see: Villalon, “Don Alvaro de Luna,” 161–84. 80  The grant is mentioned in Zurita, Anales, 4:538 [IX, lxii]. The document itself can be found in the ACA, Register 913, entitled “Of Grants of Favors” (Gratiarum), ff. 57–60. An abridged version appears in Delachenal, Charles V, 3:320 (ftn. 1). DuGuesclin, Letters, 51 (no. 136): January 9, 1366. 81  A CA, Cancillería, R. 912, ff. 86–87v; DuGuesclin, Letters, 55 (no. 147): February 25, 1366. 82  Pere III, Chronicle, 574 (VI:59).

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the part [of Castilian territory] that had been promised to the king in case the count conquered the realms of Castile.”83 In the meantime, while Pere pursued his circuitous journey to the capital, the duke of Girona held the city for his royal father. Fully aware of what had happened at Barbastro, Joan instructed all officials under his command to take steps that would prevent a similar fate befalling Zaragoza. While closing off most entrances to the city with barricades, he dispatched representatives of the crown to guide the invading force along several prescribed routes where they could do the least damage, all the while making certain that supplies were made easily available to them, removing any excuse for looting.84 Once past Zaragoza, the Free Companies pushed into western Aragon, much of which was still occupied by Castilian forces. Here, the king assigned first contact with the enemy to Hugh Calveley’s Englishmen who now moved against the border towns of Borja and Magallon both of which were part of the grant to DuGuesclin.85 When their garrisons commanded by Pedro’s Grandmaster of Santiago swiftly retreated into Castile without putting up any real resistance, Enrique and DuGuesclin brought up the main body of the army and accelerated their march toward Burgos where the Castilian king, at least for the time being, awaited them.86 The expedition leaders had concocted an arrogant ultimatum to their adversary, demanding that Pedro immediately make peace with Aragon, restore all Aragonese territory, and afford their army free passage through Castile to “go on a holy expedition” against Granada. In the event, this cynical invocation of the crusading ethos proved to be nothing more than a propaganda ploy aimed at securing the moral high ground; no such “holy expedition” ever materialized though there is some evidence that Pedro’s ally, Muhammad V of Granada, seriously feared that it might.87 As expected, the Castilian king disdainfully rejected these demands, thereby supplying yet another (if somewhat belated) pretense for the invasion.88 83  Ibid. This is Pere’s first mention of Enrique’s involvement in the 1366 campaign. See also: Zurita, Anales, 4:540 (IX:lxii). 84  Zurita, Anales, 4:539 (IX:lxii). 85  Pere III, Chronicle, 2:575; (VI:59). See also: Zurita, Anales, 4:540 (IX: lxii). 86  Pere III, Chronicle, 2:575 (VI:59). 87  Clara Estow, “War and Peace in Medieval Iberia: Castilian-Granadan Relations in the Mid-Fifteenth Century,” in Hundred Years War: A Wider Focus, 151–73, esp. 168–170. 88  The Castilian monarch reacted precisely as his enemies had calculated he would. In the words of the Chandos Herald, “He, who was proud and disdainful, and feared little the power either of them or others … said that he would esteem himself but little if he obeyed such people.” Chandos Herald (1910), 52, 149 [ll. 1721–1726]. According to Froissart, “Don Pedro laughed at this … and sent for answer that he would never attend to such a beggarly crew.” Froissart, 1:341 (chap. ccxxx); Froissart (Diller), 3:367.

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Having cleared northwestern Aragon of the enemy, the companies now crossed into Castile.89 By-passing the town of Alfaro which was held by one of Pedro’s close advisers, Iñigo López de Orozco, the invaders pushed on to the first significant Castilian city that lay along their line of march, Calahorra, which they entered when the defenders led by Ferrand Sánchez de Tovar and the city’s bishop surrendered without a fight. Since leaving Zaragoza, DuGuesclin, Calveley, and other leaders of the companies had joined both the Castilian and Aragonese nobles in urging Enrique to declare himself king. At Calahorra, around mid-March, he took the decisive step, thereafter entitling himself Enrique II.90 8

A Royal Loss of Nerve? (Winter and Spring, 1366)

Upon learning that the invaders were marching toward Castile, Pedro left Seville and hurried north to Burgos, along the way summoning the forces of the realm to gather in that city to oppose Enrique and DuGuesclin. At some point, the king also began recalling the remaining garrisons that were holding places he had conquered in Aragon. Unaccustomed to having to defend his own territory from major attack, he now began making decisions that would ultimately prove disastrous. The first such decision involved a delegation that arrived in Burgos, composed of southern French nobles who were closely aligned with Pedro’s ally, England. Led by the powerful lord D’Albret, these men informed the king that many in the companies, who were either related to them or allied to the English, might be persuaded, with the proper “incentive,” to abandon the expedition or even to change sides. If Pedro desired, they would act as intermediaries. Either 89  Ayala, Pedro I, 540 (1366, chap. 2). Both the Chandos Herald and Froissart indicate that as the expedition pushed westward, it freed all Aragonese land still occupied by Castile. This statement is clearly inaccurate since much of the occupied territory lay well south of companies’ line of march, either in southwestern Aragon or even farther south in the kingdom of Valencia. Chandos Herald (1910), 53, 150 (ll. 1736–1744); Froissart (Johnes), 1:341 (chap. ccxxx); Froissart (Diller), 3:367. A more accurate account of how the lost lands came back into Aragonese possession is provided by Pere III. 90  Ayala, Pedro I, 2:538 (1366, chap. iii); DuGuesclin, Letters, 56 (no. 149): March 16, 1366. See also: Zurita, Anales, 4:540 (IX:lxii). At the point in the story where the expedition enters Castile, both Pere III and later Zurita reduced their coverage of events to a bare minimum, leaving it to the Castilian chronicler, Ayala, to supply most later details. This occurs despite the continued involvement of Aragonese forces under the king’s cousin, the count of Denia. Instead of following the expedition’s progress, both the king’s chronicle and the Anales by the later historian, Zurita, turned their attention to the reclamation of Aragonese territory.

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through parsimony (as Ayala alleges) or a failure to realize the seriousness of the situation, the king rejected an offer that may have represented his best hope of derailing the 1366 campaign. While there is no guarantee that such a preemptive buy-out would have saved him, others, including the papacy, had enjoyed good luck with just such a strategy. One thing is certain: an attempted “buy-out” could have produced no worse results than those which ultimately emerged from the military option that Pedro decided to pursue. The Castilian king’s second disastrous decision resulted from what appears to have been a complete loss of nerve on his part.91 With the full force of the companies bearing down on him in Burgos, he once again ignored his advisers who admonished him to meet the invaders in the field; in much the same way he had ignored them at Orihuela several years earlier. Rather than risk a battle or dig in to defend Burgos or simply fight a holding action in northern Castile, one which would give his Aragonese garrisons time to rejoin him, Pedro decided to evacuate the city and flee southward to Seville. On March 28, 1366, at the enemy’s first approach, he gathered only a small entourage and “without saying anything to the majority of the lords and knights who were with him,” he prepared to pull out.92 What happened next is recorded by Ayala, who, as a member of that small royal entourage, was an eyewitness. When word of the king’s departure got out, the inhabitants of Burgos “great and small” flocked to the palace courtyard where a dramatic scene occurred. The townsmen confronted the departing monarch as he and his men were about to mount up, begging him to stay and protect their city. Although Pedro made a show of thanking the people for their loyalty, he reaffirmed his intention to leave, something he tried to justify on the rather specious grounds that the Free Companies were really headed for Seville where his family and treasure were located. When repeated pleas by the townspeople proved unavailing, they finally managed to extract from Pedro a concession that in his absence, they might deal with the threat as best they could: 91  Pedro’s choice of flight rather than fight remains open to speculation. Several chroniclers, including Froissart, indicate that as a result of his unpopularity, the king was unable to gather sufficient forces at Burgos and therefore had no choice. Apparently seconding this view, Zurita asserts “[Pedro] saw that he was not powerful enough to resist them.” Zurita, Anales, 4:540 (IX:lxii). By contrast, Ayala, who was actually with the king at the time and therefore better placed to know the circumstances, seems to attribute the flight not to a lack of support, but to a loss of nerve. Ayala, Pedro I, 539–40 (1366, chap. iv–vi). 92  Ayala, Pedro I, 539 (1366, chap. iv). For more about this dramatic confrontation between the king and the people of Burgos as well as an English translation of the text from Ayala recording the event, see L.J. Andrew Villalon, “A Medieval City Under Threat Turns its Coat, While Hedging its Bets-Burgos Faces an Invasion in Spring, 1366,” JMMH, 14 (2016): 99–104.

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The people of [Burgos] strongly importuned the king, but when they saw he would not hear any more from them, they asked him this: “Lord, as your grace is aware, your enemies are eight leagues from here, but you do not wish to await them here in this, your very noble city of Burgos with the many good companies you have here. What do you command us to do and how should we defend ourselves?” The king then said to them: “I command that you do the best you are able to do.” And they replied … “My Lord, if it be the case (may God not let it be so) that we are unable to defend [the city], will you excuse us from the oath and homage for this city that we swore to you one, two and three times.” The king responded: “Yes.” Scribes who had been brought along by city authorities to keep an official record of all that transpired now drafted notarized copies. Afterwards, the royal party rode out leaving Pedro’s bewildered followers who had answered his call to fend for themselves. Most now looked to their own safety, either going home or, in not a few cases, going over to the enemy. Meanwhile, abandoned by the king and his army, the citizens of Burgos saw little choice but to surrender to Enrique or see their city sacked. To protect themselves against future retribution for any decision to surrender without a fight, they had maneuvered Pedro into conceding them freedom to act in their own best interest and the best interests of Burgos. As a result, they now felt fully justified in sending representatives the eight leagues to Briviesca to invite Enrique and his army to enter. “Greatly pleased by the messengers from Burgos and the letters that the city had sent him,”93 within days of Pedro’s flight, Enrique entered in triumph. And at the ancient monastery of Las Huelgas, where many past monarchs of Castile had been crowned, he staged an elaborate coronation ceremony.94 In the second week of April, the newly crowned king informed Pere III of his coronation. Even before receiving this official notification, the Aragonese monarch had already written to his ally, addressing him as “rey hermano” (“my brother king”). Pere also took this opportunity to revel in the fact that “that other one, our enemy, who was the king has fled from there like [the coward] that he is.”95 93  Ayala, Pedro I, 540 (1366, chap. vi). 94  Ibid., 540–42 (1366, chap. vii). The chronicler states “from this point onward in this chronicle, he is called king.” 95  Miret y Sans, “Negociations,” 85 partially reproduces the text of several of these royal communications between the monarchs.

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The Aragonese monarch proved more than happy to honor Enrique’s request that his wife, Juana Manuel, and their two children, Juan and Leonor, waiting in the Aragonese province of Roussillon north of the Pyrenees, be sent to join him at Burgos. Pere mobilized all of the prelates along the route each of whom was to escort the new royal family part of the way to Zaragoza, after which they continued to Burgos accompanied by the archbishop of Zaragoza, Lope Fernández de Luna, whose family strongly supported Enrique. The party also included Pere’s daughter, Leonor, who had recently been betrothed to Enrique’s son, Juan.96 In his chronicle, written many years later, Pere suggests that he was hesitant at this time to send his daughter, claiming that he did so only because his ally insisted.97 By the time the party arrived at Burgos, Enrique had already departed for the south. Despite expressing great pleasure at what had taken place, Pere baulked at Enrique’s other request to allow more companies to pass through Aragon on their way into Castile. Writing from Calatayud in late April, the king refused any further passage to companies coming from Languedoc. Citing “the destruction our lands sustained due to the passage of the other companies,” he informed his ally that “in no way can we agree to the said passage without causing manifest and irreparable damage to our lands.”98 Capturing Castile’s northern capital proved to be a critical turning point in the campaign. Not only did it bolster the new king’s prestige, it also provided him with important financial resources.99 He quickly scooped up the royal treasure that Pedro had left in Burgos, while at the same time collecting an extensive servicio from the Jewish quarter. Using these much-needed funds, he paid part of what he owed to the thousands of men who had accompanied him. In addition, expedition leaders now reaped the extensive rewards they had apparently been promised on the eve of the invasion.100 To the count of Denia, commander of the Aragonese contingent, Enrique granted lands he held through his wife, accompanied by the title marques of Villena. To DuGuesclin, the new king gave the city of Molina as a duchy and his own county of Trastámara. The English leader, Hugh Calveley, received Carrión, also with the title of count. 96  Ibid., 86. 97  Pere’s chronicle treats the betrothal and marriage of Juan and Leonor in two different sections, clearly written at different times, seeming in some senses to be contradictory. Pere III, Chronicle, 2:578 (VI:61), 589–90 (VI:2). 98  DuGuesclin, Letters, 58 (no. 160): April 30, 1366. See also: Miret y Sans, “Negociations,” 86. 99  Ayala, Pedro I, 541 (1366, chap. vii). 100  Zurita, Anales 4:537–38 (IX:lxii).

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Enrique also provided generously for his surviving siblings. Even before leaving Aragon, he had arranged the marriage of his sister, Juana, to Felipe de Castro, a powerful Aragonese nobleman who was joining the expedition, and provided her dowry.101 In Burgos, he granted to his younger brother, Tello, the extensive lands of Vizcaya, Lara, and Aguilar with the title of count as well as the adjacent property of Castañeda.102 And he bestowed upon Sancho the lands once held by Juan Alfonso de Albuquerque, also with the title of count, as well as the lordship of Ledesma, and several important towns including Haro.103 All told, the newly crowned monarch remained in Castile’s northern capital for less than three weeks, resting his army while receiving not only members of the aristocracy, but also representative of the cities and towns who came from all over the realm to pay homage. Unlike his parsimonious halfbrother, Enrique proved adept at dispensing largesse. “He received all those who had come to him very well and granted them all the liberties and favors they requested in such a way that no man of the realm was denied anything.”104 Despite some hyperbole on the chronicler’s part, his statement was not all that far from the truth.105 After completing what needed to be done to secure this newly conquered territory, Enrique, DuGuesclin, and Calveley led the army south in pursuit of Pedro. Along the way, an increasing number of Pedro’s former supporters began to come over to the new king’s side. One of those who made the move at this time was Diego García de Padilla, grandmaster of Calatrava, the brother of Pedro’s longtime mistress, María de Padilla, whose children Pedro had acknowledged as his heirs. Two others who had long remained loyal to Pedro but now joined Enrique were, Iñigo López de Orozco and Pedro González de Mendoza, both members of closely aligned Basque families. The pair had either come back from Guadalajara where a fleeing Pedro had sent them or had never gone there in the first place. Since the houses of Orozco and Mendoza

101  Ibid., 4:540 (IX: lxii). 102  At the beginning of Pedro’s reign, Vizcaya, Lara, and Aguilar had belonged to one of the realm’s most powerful nobles, Juan Nuñez, and his wife, María. Following their death, the properties passed to their eldest daughter, Don Tello’s wife, Juana Nuñez. Since both Juana and her younger sister, Isabel, had numbered among Pedro’s victims, leaving no legitimate heirs, the new king now turned these lands over to his brother. 103  Ayala, Pedro I, 541 (1366, chap. vii). 104  Ibid., 541 (1366, chap. vii). 105  Ayala does mention one significant exception to the general policy of welcoming those who approached him, an exception that would come back to haunt the new king. Ibid., 548 (1366, chap. xxii).

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were also closely aligned to that of Ayala, it seems likely that this was the moment when the chronicler changed his allegiance.106 9

Aragonese Reclamations

Having learned of the companies’ advance into Castile and Pedro’s subsequent flight from Burgos, Pere III turned his full attention to recovering all of the territory Castile had seized during the decade-long conflict.107 In the wake of the advancing companies, he dispatched Aragonese forces to reoccupy cities such as Calatayud and Teruel, as well as a host of smaller places. The question of what to do about the Castilian garrisons, especially in the south where the Free Companies had not marched, was quickly resolved by the former Castilian king’s decision to recall his entire army of occupation, ordering commanders to carry out the evacuation as rapidly as possible, then, rally around his royal standard near Toledo.108 He had also instructed them to burn and tear down everything they could on their way out. Just how successful the garrisons were in carrying out this second order depends upon which source one credits. Pere insists that his opponent’s scorched earth policy had only a limited impact, something he attributed to God’s will and the speed with which places at risk reestablished their allegiance to Aragon. “Our people are so naturally [loyal] to Our royal seigniory that, seeing the destruction of the said king, they at once surrendered to Us and Our seigniory, becoming thus as heretofore Our natural vassals.”109 In fact, it is difficult to imagine just how the people’s “natural loyalty” could have prevented Castilian troops from obeying their king’s command to apply the torch to enemy property. None of the sources mention inhabitants taking up arms to speed the Castilians on their way before they could light the fires. 106  The close connection between these Basque houses is thoroughly established in the work of a leading Spanish historian and genealogist, Luis de Salazar y Castro, (1668–1734) that appeared in a modern edition during the 1950s. See Salazar y Castro, Historia genealógica. The connection is also explored in detail in the leading work on the house of Mendoza: Francisco Layna Serrano, Historia de Guadalajara y sus Mendozas en los Siglos XV y XVI, 4 vols. (Madrid, 1942), see esp. 1:42–75. See also: Helen Nader, The Mendoza Family. 107  Pere III, Chronicle, 2:576–78 (VI:60). See also: Zurita, Anales, 4:540–42 (IX:lxii). 108  Ayala, Pedro I, 540 (1366, chap. iv). Pere III, 2:576 (VI:60). “In [Pedro’s] letters he commanded and asked all the officers and men-at-arms of his nation whom he had left in the cities and places which he held in Our kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia, to come at once without delay to him in the region of Toledo.” 109  Pere III, Chronicle, 2:576 (VI:60).

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By contrast, Ayala implies that the destruction may have been considerable: in his words, the occupying forces were commanded “to come to [the king] at once, evacuating the fortresses, burning and destroying them if possible; and this they did.”110 Zurita states it even more unequivocally. Despite the speed with which the return to Aragonese rule was accomplished, it proved the occasion for “great damage and considerable loss to the people, because they [the Castilians] burned everything and dragged away numerous prisoners.”111 Again, one can understand Pere’s reluctance to give this destruction much play in his memoirs. Whatever the level of damage sustained by places the Castilians had evacuated, which in fact was probably considerable, the Aragonese do seem to have retrieved a good deal of food and war materiel, including siege engines, that their adversaries had failed to remove or destroy. As the lost lands were being secured, Pere and his court journeyed to Calatayud, the sudden attack on which had violated the treaty of Terrer and sparked the later stages of the war. In the presence of a cortes that he summoned to meet there, the king rewarded Aragonese and Valencian towns that had strongly resisted Pedro and contributed to the reconstruction of those that had suffered heavy damage in the conflict.112 Despite some lingering royal annoyance at the extent to which Calatayud itself had collaborated with its conqueror, Pere decided that his wisest policy, one recommended by the justicia of Aragon and the cortes, was to accept the townspeople’s assurances of loyalty and pardon them for any transgressions they may have been forced to commit. Among other things, they reminded him that during the Castilian siege, when the town had begged the crown to save it, no royal aid had been forthcoming. It had only been under those dire circumstances that they had been compelled to surrender. In the end, Pere held the inhabitants of Calatayud to be “good and loyal vassals, right down to the Jews and Moors of the town and including both the living and the dead, since all had been most faithful in their own defense.”113 As a result, he confirmed his adversary’s earlier decision to elevate Calatayud to the rank of city. Any doubt that the crown might have entertained concerning Calatayud was absent in respect to Daroca, a place that had staunchly held out against Castile throughout the conflict. Not only was Daroca accorded the rank of a city, but the king promised to help it acquire a cathedral church. In the end, against all expectations, Pere had won his war and recovered his kingdom. 110  Ayala, Pedro I, 540 (1366, chap. iv). 111  Zurita, Anales, 4:540–41 (IX:lxii). 112  Pere III, Chronicle, 2:576–78 (VI:60). Zurita, Anales, 4:541–42 (IX:lxii). 113  Zurita, Anales, 4:542 (IX:lxii).

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Triumph and Flight

Pedro’s abandonment of Burgos and the forces that had answered his summons triggered a mass defection to Enrique. First to desert were a number of those who despite having answered the royal call “did not wish [Pedro] well”; those “whose relatives he had killed and who had always lived in fear of him.”114 Others whom he left in the lurch began by withdrawing to their estates to watch matters unfold, many of whom defected soon afterwards. The king’s headlong flight southward, first to Toledo and then on to Seville, did nothing to recover the situation. On the day he left Burgos, Pedro had dispatched letters to all Castilian garrisons occupying conquered territory in the Crown of Aragon or along the border, ordering those in Aragon to destroy all that they could, after which they were to join him in Toledo.115 The implication was that here they would make a stand against the companies. And while some chose this opportunity to join the exodus to Enrique, others obeyed the orders they received from the crown, including Iñigo López de Orozco, who appears to have joined the king even before he left Burgos, the grandmaster of Santiago, García Alvarez de Toledo, and the lord admiral, Gil Bocanegra. Despite the fact that the Pedro’s numbers were once again increasing, his flight continued. According to Ayala, on the journey to Toledo, “each day, more companies arrived, but the king did not have trust in them and continued his journey to Seville.” When approached by Orozco, one of his oldest and most loyal supporters, who brought word that several of the English captains were willing to switch sides, Pedro dismissed the suggestion out of hand: “the king did not wish to hear it.”116 Despite his advisers, Pedro’s determination to reach Seville remained unshakeable and, to modern historians, inexplicable. The only result of this journey south could be a further erosion in the support he enjoyed as a growing number of his followers simply lost confidence in a king who did nothing to defend his crown. As he retreated, Pedro continued to disperse the new forces he had gathered, dispatching various members to occupy places for him in Castile rather than keeping them together for a possible battle, a move that can only be explained by the king having undergone a severe loss of nerve. For example, he ordered Orozco and his close relative, Pedro González de Mendoza, to hold the city of Guadalajara in the region where both of their families had extensive 114  Ayala, Pedro I, 539 (1366, chap. iv). 115  Ibid., 539–40 (1366, chap. iv). It is Ayala who states that the major recall of Castilian garrisons went out only after Pedro left Burgos. 116  Ibid., 540 (I 366, chap. 4).

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property. Despite an attempt at this time to buy their continued loyalty with generous property grants,117 he now lost their services as, in fact, he lost the services of others whom he sent off. In the words of Ayala, “when matters proceeded in this manner, most of those who now left him reached agreement not to return.”118 The king remained in Toledo just long enough to put in place the men he hoped would hold for him the most important city in central Castile, under the command of Garcí Alvarez de Toledo, the king’s grandmaster of Santiago, and the alcalde mayor, Diego Gómez de Toledo, who occupied the alcazar. He then resumed his flight across Andalucia to Seville. When Enrique’s pursuing forces arrived at Toledo, the population was deeply divided on the question of which king to support: “within the city there were some people who wanted King Enrique to enter and there were others whom this did not please.”119 In the end, Garcí Alvarez de Toledo to whom Pedro had entrusted the city, found that he did not have sufficient troops to hold it against both the Free Companies outside and Enrique’s supporters within, especially since the latter group had taken control of the alcazar and the Alcántara bridge. Consequently, Toledo peacefully acquiesced in welcoming the new king. At the same time, in return for considerable compensation, he agreed to renounce the grandmastership of Santiago which he held from Pedro to a rival claimant of the office, Gonzalo Mexia, who had fought alongside Enrique during the years of exile in Aragon. Enrique remained in Toledo for fifteen days “paying his men.”120 Once again, the Jews of the aljama were compelled to contribute a servicio. At this point, representatives from other towns throughout central Castile including Avila, Segovia, Talavera, Madrid, and Cuenca came to acknowledge him as their lord king. He left Toledo under the control of its archbishop, Gómez Manrique, 117  Several grants that survive can be found in CDPI, 4: 235–36, docs. 1334–1337. For more about the House of Mendoza, which would become one of the foremost noble houses in Spain, and its close relationship to the chronicler, Pedro López de Ayala, see Nader, The Mendoza Family, 56–77. See also: the unpublished Ph.D. dissertation: L.J. Andrew Villalon, “‘The Law’s Delay’: The Anatomy of an Aristocratic Property Dispute (1350–1577),” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1984) available through University Microfilms. 118  Although the future chronicler was in Pedro’s entourage when it departed Burgos, he provides no indication of what happened to him thereafter. As indicated earlier, a best guess might be that given his ties to Orozco and Mendoza, he accompanied the two when they departed the king’s entourage. 119  Ayala, Pedro I, 542 (1366, chap. vii). 120  Ibid., 542 (1366, chap. viii). A transaction between DuGuesclin and Calveley that occurred in that city indicates that the army was still there at the end of the first week in May. DuGuesclin, Letters, 59 (no. 161): May 6, 1366.

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leader of a powerful noble family, one of whose relatives, Pedro Manrique, adelantado of Andalucia, had been among those in the Murviedro garrison that came over to Enrique following that town’s surrender in 1365.121 When word reached Seville that Enrique had taken Toledo, Pedro and his few remaining supporters decided to appeal to the king’s uncle, King Pedro I of Portugal (r. 1357–1367),122 for aid and possible sanctuary. As an enticement, the fleeing Castilian king offered to his fellow monarch’s son, Fernando, the hand of his own eldest daughter, Beatriz, recognized after her brother’s death as heiress to the Castilian throne by the cortes held three years earlier. As well as her prospects, the perspective bride was to bring with her an extensive dowry made up largely of properties inherited from her mother, María de Padilla, payable immediately. Hopeful that the offer would be accepted, Pedro sent his daughter to the neighboring kingdom.123 As it turned out, he himself soon followed. In the course of these marriage negotiations, Pedro’s position in Seville had become increasingly tenuous. Rioting broke out among those citizens who were ready to join Enrique and became more pronounced as word of his approach reached the city. In the words of Ayala, “[Pedro] was informed that all the people of the city had risen up against him and that they intended to advance against him in the alcazar … in order to despoil him.”124 While this characterization probably overstates the actual level of opposition, the betrayal that did occur in his beloved Seville precipitated the king’s decision to completely abandon Castile and seek safety in neighboring Portugal, taking with him his two remaining daughters, Constanza and Isabel. During their journey to the border, the royal party learned that marriage negotiations with Portugal had foundered on Fernando’s unwillingness to wed Beatriz.125

121  Ibid., 533 (1365, chap. v), 542 (1366, chap. viii). For a more detailed analysis of the house of Manrique’s activities in the closing centuries of the Middle Ages, see L.J. Andrew Villalon, The Law’ Delay. See also: L.J. Andrew Villalon, “Deudo, Property, and the Roots of Feudal Violence in late Medieval Castile,” in The Final Argument: The Imprint of Violence on Society in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Donald J. Kagay and L.J. Andrew Villalon. (Rochester, N.Y., 1998), 55–72. 122  Born in 1320, the Portuguese Pedro poses the complication of a third king of the same name reigning in Iberia during the decades leading up to the battle of Najera. The coincidence extends further: not only did the Portuguese monarch bear the same regnal number as his Castilian counterpart, he is also referred to by the same sobriquets—the Cruel or the Just. 123  Ayala, Pedro I, 542 (1366, chap. ix). 124  Ibid., 542–43 (1366, chap. ix.). 125  Ibid.

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As one of his last acts before leaving Seville, Pedro ordered his treasurer, Martin Yañez, to fit out a galley which he would use to bring with him into Portugal the contents of the royal treasury. Now, before crossing the frontier, the king was in for one last piece of bad news. Word overtook his party that another of the recent deserters, Admiral Gil Bocanegra, had fitted out a flotilla which overtook the treasurer’s galley before it could get out of the Rio Guadalquivir and enter open water. As a result, most of Pedro’s treasure ended up in the hands of the usurper who then used it to pay off his army.126 As Enrique’s triumphant army pushed south toward Seville, news reached him of what had been happening in that city: the uprising of much of the population in his favor, his rival’s flight into Portugal, and Bocanegra’s capture of the treasure galley. He now speeded his own journey south to take advantage of the situation by seizing the region’s two major cities, Seville and Cordoba. Entering Seville in triumph, he rode through streets so filled with crowds that it required hours to reach the palace. With most of the realm having acknowledged the regime change, Enrique now felt it safe to cut back on the number of foreign troops who, despite having made possible his victory, “did great harm to the realm and daily cost the king great sums of money.”127 Deciding to dismiss the majority of the companies, he paid his remaining debt to them, keeping with him only a force totaling some 1,500 lances made up of Bretons commanded by DuGuesclin and English under Calveley. The rest were left to make their own way out of Spain, a journey by hardened men used to pillage that could not have done much to increase Enrique’s popularity along their line of march. The new king now settled down for a four-month stay in Seville, to all appearances certain of his victory. According to Ayala, it had taken only twenty-five days after the coronation in Burgos for most of Castile to come over to the new king. Pere III placed the number of days needed to secure the realm at fifty.128 By the beginning of May, 1366, the Aragonese monarch felt confident enough of the outcome to officially inform leading figures throughout Western Europe of the successful regime change. He contacted his allies, including Pope Urban, King Charles, and a number of French barons, reporting that Enrique de Trastámara (whom he now styled the “illustrious king of Castile”) had indeed secured that kingdom’s throne while “he, who had been king was utterly defeated.”129 It would soon become clear that this last assertion was premature. 126  Ibid., 542–43 (1366, chap. ix–x). 127  Ibid., 545 (1366, chap. xvi). 128  Ibid., 541 (1366, chap. vii).; Pere III, Chronicle, 2:575 (VI:59). 129  Miret y Sans, “Negociations,” 85–87. See also: Kagay, “Disposable Alliances,” 120.

part 3 Organization of the Conflict

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Chapter 10

Administration and Financing of the Contending Armies 1

Crown of Aragon

1.1 Aragonese Administrators and Their Role in Managing Troops The War of the Two Pedros and the Castilian civil war that emerged from it spilled out over more than a dozen years during which the frontier region between Castile and Aragon became even more of a chaotic no-man’s land than it had been in the past (see Chapter 2). While the region posed problems for both monarchs, the problems facing Pere III tended to be greatest given the unsuccessful nature of much of his war effort during which large swathes of the territory he ruled were overrun or devastated by the enemy. To retain and exercise as much royal authority as he could, the king turned over control of vast stretches of this borderland to captains whom he hoped he could trust to obey him. These mighty subjects were often semi-independent of the crown, despite their reliance on on it for financial support. Then, as the war progressed, the dire situation existing throughout the Crown of Aragon made it possible for Aragonese parliaments to play an everincreasing role in the collection and distribution of funds needed to finance the conflict. One result was the emergence of a “shadow government” emanating from these parliaments and their executive committees (diputaciones, generalitats) that not infrequently found itself in competition with the royal administration. Run by the cortes, it more or less paralleled the executive branch from which it took over a number of financial responsibilities. As a result, within a few years within the war’s beginning, many of the duties routinely carried out by royal functionaries were being duplicated by temporary parliamentary agents (the shadow parliamentary government mentioned above) such as tax collectors (cullidores), money receivers (reebedors, recibidores), treasurers (clavaris, tesoreros), and overseers (oidores, administradores) who formed a separate chain of command for the levying of taxes and expenditure of extraordinary subsidies.1 Within the executive branch over which the king retained control, a complex administrative structure evolved under his supervision charged with 1  C DACA, 48:87–88, 90, 105, 130. See also: Kagay, “Government,” 137.

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supporting the logistical, fiscal, and tactical needs of the various military units conducting the war. The royal court (curia regis) attempted to become the vehicle for marshaling of money and supplies while keeping close tabs on military expenditures. The king routinely used a number of his court officials to accomplish these military goals. They included his royal procurator (procurator regis), lieutenant (locum tenens, gerenti vices, portant veus), “treasurer” (tresaurer), “master of accounts” (maestre racional), scribe of accounts (escriva de racio), and a corps of messengers (correus) either to deliver or carry out his military orders or pass them onto others.2 All these officials took a solemn oath to maintain the crown’s many official secrets.3 At the same time, Pere’s military efforts throughout the ten-year struggle with Castile also relied heavily on such territorial and municipal officials as the bailiff (batlle), vicar (veguer), peacekeeper (sobrejuntero), and royal justice (justicia).4 When the king needed immediate help from his nobles and townsmen to respond to an enemy surprise attack, he dispatched members of the court, usually the royal messengers, to deliver the military summons that indicated how many and what class of troops were needed as well as where and when they were to assemble.5 To assure that his instructions were accurately communicated to commanders, in the field, Pere drafted a set message that could be proclaimed “in a noteworthy place” within each city and town of the affected realm (Aragon, Valencia, Catalonia, or the Balearic Islands): Hear ye now that the Lord King [of Aragon] makes known to every knight, son of a knight, high-born person, honored townsman, villager, and others who customarily serve with a horse and weapons … that since the king of Castile has come across the frontiers into Aragon …, the lord king [Pere] wishes to engage him in combat. 2  C DACA, 5, 118. According to Pere’s Ordenacions, there were twenty “messengers” (correus) in the royal court and these men answered directly to the chancellor, vice-chancellor, the chief notary, secretary, and scribes. Pere considered this service crucial to the working of royal government “since princes have to send their letters to different parts of the world and communicate about many matters which might perchance require speed [in delivery].” He used all classes of officials for this function because they were available and were trustworthy in relying sensitive information. 3  Odinacions, CDACA, 5: 186–87. See also: Rita Costa Gomes, The Making of Court Society: Kings and Nobles in Late Medieval Portugal, trans. Alison Aiken (Cambridge, 2003), 28–29; Jesus Lalinde Abadia, La gobernación general en la Corona de Aragón (Madrid-Zaragoza, 1963). 4  O’Callagahan, History, 446; Valdeavellano, Curso, 514–17. 5  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1136, f. 120v; R. 1180, f. 79v; R. 1384, f. 74v; R. 1387, ff. 10v, 36v–38, 60v–61, 123, 189. See also: DS, 424 (doc. 559); María Teresa Ainaga Andrés, “El fogaje aragonés de 1362: Aportación a la demografía de Zaragoza en el siglo XIV,” AEEM 8 (1989): 33–58, esp. 36.

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The message provided that those who answered this summons would be assured a daily wage assessed in the customary way; that is, 7 sous for those riding a heavily-armored horse, 5 for a lightly-armored horse, and 4 for a mule.6 When the recipients of such calls for military aid were slow to respond or in some cases ignored them completely, the messages took on an accusatory tone and the rank of the functionary who delivered the message became higher on the administrative food chain. In 1364, Pere’s frustration with those who failed to answer the summons boiled over in 1364 when he and his eldest son, Prince Joan, drew up plans to relieve the beleaguered city of Valencia, plans that were badly hampered by a very poor response among the Catalan nobility. Claiming that the military actions being contemplated by the crown were being carried out for “the sake of royal honor” and to stymie the evil plans of the “iniquitous king of Castile, our public enemy,” Pere castigated his recalcitrant nobles who had allowed their king to be placed in such straits while he sought to defend the commonwealth.7 Not infrequently faced with such intransigence, Pere allowed royal officials to utilize any means necessary in order to force his subjects to render their traditional military service.8 These crown administrators could compel nobles and townsmen within their jurisdictions to put up their personal possessions as surety that they would fight when called upon to do so.9 The failure of these high-born men would give Pere’s agents a right to distrain their persons and goods until they complied with his military wishes.10 Masters of both stick and carrot, royal functionaries also used a number of inducements such as a moratorium on debt repayment, the postponement of lawsuits, and a temporary release from homicide trials for those who agreed to go on active duty.11 These postponements of civilian responsibilities would extend for up to six months after a soldier’s discharge from the military.12 Because most of the Castilian conflict took place on the frontier and literally swirled around the many fortresses that dotted this landscape, the maintenance 6   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1380, ff. 159r–v. For fuller discussion of military salaries, see Chapter 7, Section 1. 7   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1387, ff. 25, 40v–41, 54v–56, 80v–81. 8   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1387, ff. 116v–7. 9   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1387, ff. 62r–v. 10   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1382, ff. 153–54; R. 1383, ff. 216v–7. 11  One of the authors has made an extensive study of a similar use of military pardons by the English crown to recruit soldiers in the fourteenth century. See: L.J. Andrew Villalon, “Taking the King’s Shilling to Avoid the Wages of Crime: Royal Pardons for Military Malefactors in the Opening Phases of the Hundred Years War,” The Hundred Years War (Part III), 357–435. 12  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1380, ff. 27, 153; R. 1381, f. 185; R. 1387, ff. 73r–v.

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and supply of castles was essential for their successful defense. Although these logistical operations were often carried out by local authorities— urban and clerical captains or commissioners appointed by town councils—, Pere iii not infrequently used royal officials to oversee construction of walls and moats in places open to enemy attacks or where earlier defense works had fallen into disrepair. In carrying out all their military duties, the king’s agents received the same direction from their master that they did in all other administrative matters: “act with diligence so you cannot be blamed in any way.”13 Since the authority of royal officials was not always accepted in municipalities that looked to their own councils for government, Pere instructed royal administrators to punish insubordinate townsmen “in such a way that this will provide an example to others.”14 Because of the seemingly never-ending conflict with Castile, members of the royal court and household proved essential to readying fortresses for war.15 There was constant pressure on these places due to the ravages of Castilian raiders who left many Aragonese and Valencian frontier towns destabilized and indefensible.16 Supplying towns and fortresses would often require several groups of royal officials working in tandem in order to have necessary provisions first gathered into one district, then transported to another. This transfer was often accomplished by private shipowners and merchants hired by the crown.17 Pere even expected his representatives to recruit on their own authority small armed forces. These troops were to protect urban sites “so that they could better and more safely cultivate and harvest their crops.”18 Even after creation of the parliamentary executive committees to act as military paymasters,19 Pere charged his own officials with trying to keep a tight rein on military spending. The king attempted to compile a fiscal account of all military expenses incurred by his captains and other troops fighting for the Aragonese crown. Officials of the royal treasury became permanent features on the frontier verifying muster lists (mostras), estimating necessary expenses (estimes), and issuing pay vouchers or promissory notes (alberani, albaras), letters of credit (cartas de creença), and receipts of payment (apochas). They also 13  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1387, ff. 87r–v. 14  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1382, ff. 107r–v; R. 1387, ff. 83, 161v–62, 163v–164. See also: Kagay, “Shattered Circle,” 128–29. 15  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1174, f. 55v; R. 1380, f. 81v; R. 1387, f. 35v. See also: Epistolari, 1:167–68 (doc. 25); Kagay, “Shattered Circle,” 124. 16  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1382, f. 165v. 17  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1387, ff. 69r–v, 143v–44. 18  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1387, f. 146v. 19  For these parliamentary deputies, see Chapter 14, Section 13.

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oversaw the expenditures compiled by military captains, carefully entering credits and debits in special accounts (comptes).20 Since these representatives of the crown were on the front lines to see that royal money was not wasted, they could prove exceedingly unpopular with captains whose expenditures they might question.21 One of the most contentious issues they repeatedly encountered was the reimbursement of soldiers for the loss of horses when on duty. Some unfortunate men had to wait for considerable periods as the wheels of royal government slowly ground out their compensation. A typical case of this seemingly interminable bureaucratic process occurred in 1359 when the baron, Miguel Pérez de Gotor, lost a horse worth 800 Jacan sous when serving on the Aragonese frontier. A year later, he “complained bitterly” to the justicia mayor, Aragon’s chief judicial officer that he had still not been reimbursed by the town council of Teruel that was considered responsible for making payment. He then appealed directly to the king who warned the town fathers that if they did not comply with his “remedy of justice,” he would unleash his “ire and indignation” on them. When or if Gotor was ever paid is not recorded.22 Those who owed war taxes and failed to pay them were also subject to steady governmental pressure. Pere empowered his agents to raise a military force in order to extort payment from these delinquents.23 If any ratepayers crossed the line of peaceful opposition to the king’s fiscal demands, they could find themselves publicly cited for “renouncing … [royal] authority” and “driving the heel of rebellion” into the king’s war effort. Following the monarch’s orders concerning such malefactors, royal officials often moved to arrest those whom the crown branded as traitors and selling off their goods in a public auction. Fittingly, the proceeds of this sale went into a fund used to pay the salaries of soldiers stationed in the area.24 Once crown parliaments began to assume ever greater responsibility for funding the Aragonese war effort, Pere’s bureaucrats were put in the unpleasant position of attempting to exercise some measure of control over the parliamentary executive committees. This set up a potential for tension between the royal government and the legislature. On the other hand, both royal administrators and appointees of the parliament made use of the same household tax 20  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1381, ff. 123r–v, 192; R. 1382, ff. 180v–81; R. 1383, ff. 221v–22v. See also: Kagay, “Parliament,” 138. 21  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1387, ff. 84r–v. 22  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1387, ff. 190v–91v. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1382, ff. 138v–39. 23  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1387, f. 192v. 24  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1387, f. 32.

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(fogatge, fogaje) as a means of raising extraordinary subsidies and then paying off frontier troops with these funds.25 To maintain some semblance of royal control over these rival parliamentary fiscal operations, Pere insisted that the accounts of the deputies be audited intermittently by members of his own treasury.26 The principal complaint against the parliamentary executive committees lay in their slowness in paying off captains, even those they themselves had appointed. The “great scandal and damage” arising from such inefficiency in paying military salaries eventually came back to haunt the king who for his part sternly instructed the parliamentary deputies that they must solve these problems effectively and as quickly as possible.27 The main reason for the tardy compensation of troops caused ongoing disagreements about just who was responsible for providing money to individual captains: the king or his parliaments. For their part, Pere’s assemblies ordinarily claimed that they were only accountable for raising the large subsidies which they had promised in order to be released from paying fresh war taxes ordinarily for a period of two years. If the king had already consumed this money, he was forbidden from demanding any more from his taxpayers before the two-year period had elapsed.28 Not unsurprisingly, Pere disagreed with this interpretation limiting his right to tax and, as the conflict wore on, became a master at shifting funds raised by the parliamentary executive committees.29 The wartime situation made it almost inevitable that the king’s military commanders would occasionally come into conflict with his royal officials. On these occasions, when the two groups had managed to force amicable ties, it helped the overextended Aragonese military enterprise to function effectively, despite rivalries and distrust manifested among the military leaders. On the other hand, where such ties did not exist, Pere tried to solve problems arising out of conflict between his captains and his royal agents by carefully dividing power between them. In this case, it was essential for Pere to decide which group possessed superior authority and in what situations. He tried to solve the problems by carefully dividing power between them. Royal officials were required to give the military commanders “full help, advice, and favor” in carrying out their military duties. At the same time, the crown called upon civil authorities to settle serious disputes that arose between captains and the urban 25  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1382, f. 146; R. 1387, ff. 10, 166. 26  Kagay, “Parliament,” 138. 27  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1382, ff. 175v–76; R. 1384, ff. 13v–14; R. 1387, ff. 182r–v. 28  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1387, ff. 95v, 96. 29  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1387, ff. 159v–160.

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sites in which they were stationed.30 Not only did royal agents on occasion deliver funds to captains who then used the money to pay off their troops, these same agents could stand as arbiters between commanders and urban councils which had no money to pay the salaries to the companies sent by the crown to defend them. In such cases, they normally worked out a barter arrangement that required the townsmen to provide an amount of food equivalent to the money they owed.31 1.2 Administrators as Protectors of Civilians Since Pere’s officials represented royal law, urban residents saw them not only as intermediaries with the companies stationed along the frontier, but also protectors against military depredations. The crown officials were often required to compel townsmen and villagers to open their gates to legitimatelyappointed troops, even if they did not know these men and had little reason to trust them.32 The mere presence of up to two-hundred horsemen garrisoned in urban sites brought about a clash of authorities, especially since most captains whom Pere sent to the frontier were empowered by their credentials to exercise civil and criminal jurisdiction over the soldiers they had recruited. This allowed them to carry out punishments ranging from monetary penalties to the cutting off limbs and even death.33 If any of these men engaged in a brawl with the townsmen in which urban residents were wounded or killed, the highest official in each of Pere’s realms, the governor general, would have to step in to issue punishments or arrange for judicial settlements between the aggrieved townsmen and their putative protectors.34 The crown charged its representatives with relaying the king’s orders to his captains along the front and receiving back from them the latest intelligence. Most of Pere’s administrative and military servants carried with them official credentials which would identify them to each other.35 Officials of all ranks operated as messengers, forming a communication network that theoretically covered the entire war zone. To assure that his orders passed to his commanders and their replies returned in accurate form, Pere instructed his military appointees to establish countersignatures or other means of verification. This would help guarantee 30  31  32  33  34  35 

A CA, Cancillería real, ff. 132r–v; R. 1387, f. 26. A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1380, f. 111. A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, f. 117. A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1382, f. 132v. A CA, Cancillía real, R. 1379, ff. 123r–v. A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1387, f. 70v.

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the authenticity of messages, on which all national defense rested.36 Pere never specified any possible source of false directives, but he took steps to avoid them. Along the rugged and often ill-defined borders between Castile and the Crown of Aragon, Pere’s front-line captains and local functionaries found it necessary to act in tandem either to resist frequent Castilian raids or mount their own relatively rare forays into enemy territory. One of the thorniest problems they faced centered on the status and treatment of Castilian noncombatants, some detained within the kingdom since the war’s beginning, others captured during the course of the conflict. Toward the end of the war, the Aragonese king moved many Castilian refugees and detainees away from the frontier to avoid the possibility of a “fifth column” loyal to his adversary. Then following the Aragonese victory of 1366, he decided that they no longer posed a threat to his realms. Consequently, he ordered the release of these Castilian prisoners and their repatriation. A good many members of this captive population, dispossessed by the long war, resettled in the Crown of Aragon, accepting Pere as their new royal lord.37 The passage of troops across the borders between Aragon and Castile not infrequently strained relations between Pere’s captains and his administrators. This problem of cross-border troop movement continued into the post-war period when the conflict morphed into a Castilian civil war between Pedro I and Enrique II. During the years between 1366 and 1369, the Aragonese monarch changed course on several occasions, first allowing and then forbidding Enrique to bring in foreign troops through his realms. Shortly before the battle of Nàjera in 1367, Pere issued clear instructions to his officials to prevent any more of Enrique’s men from entering Aragon, even though their passage had occasionally proven to be a very lucrative practice.38

36  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1387, f. 149v. 37  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1387, ff. 135, 144v. Pere, ever suspicious that Pedro’s great victories were caused by the treason and collaboration of his own people, dealt with the problem by moving suspected populations away from exposed frontiers. After the fall of the Aragonese city of Tarazona in 1357, the king, certain that the city had surrendered because of “the great treason and wickedness” of its citizens, would not tolerate the presence of the Tarazona survivors on the Aragonese frontier any longer, moving them to the Catalan city of Manresa where they stayed for the rest of the war. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1149, f. 96v; Epistolari, 155–58 (doc. 21). 38  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1387, ff. 122, 125v, 129.

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1.3 The Fate of a Principal Aragonese Administrator: Bernat de Cabrera Wartime service brought with it hazards that could prove fatal even for principal royal advisers, men who had for years enjoyed their king’s unwavering trust. On the Aragonese side, this proved to be the case with Bernat de Cabrera, the so-called “Great Favorite” (gran privat) who would tragically discover the danger when trying to act as an intermediary between the warring monarchs. On the other side, one finds a comparable figure in the person of Gutier Fernández de Toledo39 whose service to Pedro I predated the latter’s succession to the throne and who, like Cabrera, ended his life on the block at the orders of the king he had long served.40 Scion of an important Pyrenean family, he had entered court service during the late-1340s shortly after the defeat of the Aragonese Unión. With the birth of Pere’s first son, Joan, in 1351, the king appointed Cabrera as the crown prince’s guardian. Eventually, both Cabrera and his own son and namesake, the future count of Osona, would profit greatly from the Aragonese king’s largesse; both men received the grant of fresh titles and lands.41 Cabrera’s meteoric rise also brought that nobleman a number of powerful enemies including Pere’s formidable third wife, Queen Elionor, and his principal captain, Enrique de Trastámara. In 1361, when Cabrera was attempting to negotiate a truce with the Castilian king, Pere became suspicious that his adviser was now engaging in treasonable activities with the hated enemy. This growing royal suspicion deepened the next year when Cabrera’s son, the count of Osona, was captured during the fall of Calatayud. Due to this event, the Great Favorite was unable to convince his royal master that neither he nor his son had ever conspired with the Castilian king. In April, 1364, he was finally charged with “nefarious treasons and the shameful crime of lèse majesté.”42 In the end, Bernat was declared guilty of committing capital offenses. According to the charges leveled against him, he had engaged in a conspiracy with Pedro to sew discord and defeatism along the frontiers. After being 39  For more about the Castilian leader, Gutier Fernández de Toledo, see Chapter 11. 40  For the increasing brutality of both monarchs that in part accounted for their having sacrificed men who had served them well, see Villalon, “ ‘Cut Off Their Heads, or I’ll Cut Off Yours’: Castilian Strategy and Tactics in the War of the Two Pedros and the Supporting Evidence from Murcia,” The Hundred Years War (Part II): Different Vistas, ed. L.J. Andrew Villalon and Donald J. Kagay (Leiden, 2008). 41  C DACA, 34:261, 394–407, 420–29 (docs. 2–3, doc. 6); Pere III, 2:414–15, 466 (IV:30; V:15). See also: Ramon d’Abadal i de Vinyals, Pere el Ceremoniós i els inicis de la decadéncia political de Catalunya (Barcelona, 1972), 88–89; Kagay, “‘Treasons’,” 40; Sitges, Muerte, 1–2; Sobrequés i Vidal, Barons, 158–59. 42  Pere III, 1:180–81 (I:50); Epistolari, 101–2 (doc. 11); CDACA, 32:1–9, 31–34; 33:320. See also: Miron, Queens, 168–76, 187–96; Sitges, Muerte, 3–4, 36–38, 41–42.

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incarcerated for two months, the nobleman met his death at Zaragoza on July 26, 1364, before a crowd of onlookers, said by Pere to be “very pleased at the execution.”43 The victim’s son never returned to Aragon. He died in 1368 fighting for his former enemy and new master, Pedro I against his old enemy, the count of Trastámara, now known as King Enrique II of Castile. For his part, Pere was eventually forced to admit that he had made a bad decision; that Cabrera had been a “man of elevated courage and great counsel,” one whom he had unjustly attacked because of his own “suspicion … anger, and indignation.” The case of the Gran Privat became a cautionary tale for all those who served the king, standing as a reminder of just how dangerous were the duties of a royal official in wartime.44 1.4 War Financing in the Crown of Aragon Even with the steady influx of subsidies from the representative assemblies of Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia between 1357 and 1365, the gathering and dissemination of funds to support his military proved one of Pere III’s most pressing problems throughout the war.45 For the Aragonese king, the all-but continuous payment of military expenses proved virtually impossible from his normal tax revenues. Feudal dues such as hospitality (cena), royal taxes on purchased goods (lezda, leuda) and duties paid on transported goods (peaje, peatge) barely paid for the upkeep of the royal court, let alone burgeoning military costs.46 Extraordinary funds could be drawn from the bovatge and monedatge (monedaje), two national taxes that could legitimately be collected from an entire realm only once in a reign.47 There also were financial exactions explicitly connected with 43  P  ere III, 2:557 (VI:47); CDACA, 34:276. See also: Kagay, “Treasons,” 39, 41–47; Sitges, Muerte, 71–72; Zurita, Anales, 4:515–22 (IX:lvii). 44  C DACA, 33:167–68; 34:480. See also: Kagay, “Treasons,” 53–54; Miron, Queens, 194–95; Sobrequés i Vidal, Barons, 160–61. 45  For these parliamentary subsidies, see chapter 12 of this work. For the fiscal military spending of the Aragones cortes, see Lafuente Gómez, Un reino en armas, 162–210. 46  Pierre Bonnassie, La Catalogne du milieu du Xe à la fin du XIe siècle: Croissance et mutation d’une société, 2 vols. (Toulouse: 1975–76), 1:751–752; Valdeavellano, Curso, 607; Jaime Vicens Vives, Manual de historia economica de España, 2 vols. (Barcelona, 1959), 1:215–16. 47  Jesús Alturo Perucho, “Notes lexíques de llati medieval I de catalá antic en documents relatius al bovatge,” Anuario de filológia 6 (1980): 485–92; María Falcón Pérez, “Fogatges, monedajes y compartimientos como fuentes para el estudios de la toponimia aragonesa medieval,” in Metodología de la investigación científica sobre fuentes aragonesas: (Actas de las V Jornadas), ed. Agustín Ubieto Arteta (Zaragoza, 1990), 281–90; Tomas López Pizcueta, “Sobre la percepción del ‘bovatge’ en el siglo XIV. Una aportación al tema de la tascación directa en la Cataluña bajomedieval,” in Estudios sobre renta, fiscalidad y finanza en la Cataluña bajomedieval (Barcelona, 1993), 335–48; Russell “Medieval Monedatge,” 483–504.

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the waging of war, such as the redemptio exercitus, a payment made in lieu of military service, and the defectus servitii or fallimentum, a fine charged for the failure to answer a military summons or for dereliction of duty.48 None of these regular sources of revenue came close to feeding the fiscal maw that military expenses became during the Castilian war. This reality forced Pere down the path of deficit spending. To address the ever-deepening crisis, he engaged in the forced sale of sold government bonds (censales, censals morts) to his wealthier citizens which produced royal income up front which guaranteed a certain percentage of profit to the investor after a prescribed number of years. The same type of investment emerged from the king’s auction of future tax revenues (violarios, violaris) in return for current payment. Here an investor paid a flat fee in exchange for tax-farming rights over several years that normally assured him a profit.49 Unfortunately, in a war between Christian states, Pere could not collect papally-approved clerical grants as his predecessors had in the fight against Islam.50 Instead, he had to depend on secular forms of taxation to raise funds for national causes. While receiving gifts of money and supplies from what the documents euphemistically refer to as the “sheer generosity” of his people, Pere was increasingly forced to rely on short-term loans and forced exactions (questiae) in order to recruit and pay troops. As we shall see in Chapter 14, the Jewish and Muslim aljamas were the principal victims of this outright royal extortion.51 Despite the size of these grants, they were impermanent and their expenditure quickly left Pere’s military coffers once more depleted. This, in turn, forced the king to demand further funding from the territory and settlements held directly under royal jurisdiction. Such exactions added financial burdens on Aragonese cities and towns such as Zaragoza, Calatayud, and Daroca and the hamlets they controlled. They also provided Pere with much needed money

48  Kagay, “Army Mobilization,” 102–3. 49  J.N. Hillgarth, “The Royal Accounts of the Crown of Aragon,” in Spain and the Mediterranean in the Later Middle Ages: Studies in Political and Intellectual History (Aldershot: Hampshire, 2003), Study 3, pp. 1–23, esp. p. 10; Turull y Rubinat, “Finances,” 62; Vicens Vives, Manual, 1:216–19. 50  Martin Fernández de Navarrette, “Disertación critica sobre la parte que tuvieron los espanoles en las guerras de ultramar de las cruzadas,” Memorias de la Real Academia de Historia 5 (1817): 37–225, esp. 168–70 (docs. 12–13); DJI, 3:227–30 (docs. 432–33); Kagay, “Army Mobilization,” 103. 51  Baer, History, 1:84–86; Kagay, “Army Mobilization,” 102–3.

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grants when parliamentary funds ran out.52 Fiscal obligations of this sort often tended to fall most heavily on small communities, Christian and Muslim, which faced repeated Castilian attacks across the border.53 The crown could also demand extraordinary subsidies from lay and ecclesiastical lords and their vassals who occupied the vast territories controlled by the Iberian military orders.54 Every subsidy (subsidium) or grant-in-aid (auxilium) of this type was collected by a group of commissioners (commissarii, commissaris), who worked in cooperation with local authorities to distribute the collected funds.55 Since most of the money was used to pay military salaries and purchase provisions for companies and garrisons, Pere occasionally allowed his captains, including Castilian mercenaries like Trastámara, to collect the prescribed amount through their own agents. As the war years progressed, however, over-taxed communities reacted with increasing violence against such incursions by men they thought of as “foreigners,” even though these same foreigners were fighting on their side.56 Despite his many fiscal expedients, the Aragonese monarch was still not infrequently caught short by having to fight a multi-front war. On these occasions, he had to adopt even more desperate measures, turning his personal possessions into hard cash. In February, 1357, he began the process of pawning and leasing territories held by the crown. During the spring of that same year, he had to impose upon his wife to pawn her personal property to raise money for the war.57 For her part, the queen agreed to this means of “crisis financing,” pledging to moneylenders her valuables, including bejeweled symbols of her office, in hopes that these treasures could be redeemed when the financial picture improved.58 During the critical year of 1364, when Valencia was in real danger of being captured by Castilian forces, Pere had to find crucially-needed funds to supply the beleaguered city. To this end, he confiscated and pawned all the silver ornaments in the city’s churches in return making a solemn promise that they 52  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, ff. 121v–22; R. 1380, ff. 96r–v, 131r–v. See also: Lafuente Gómez, Un reino en armas, 145–49. 53  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, ff. 90v–91, 143v–44v; R. 1380, ff. 76r–v, 100, 178–79. See also: Lafuente Gómez, Un reino en armas, 152–62. 54  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, ff. 60, 85v–86, 90v–91, 93v–94, 113, 143v–44, 160v–61, 163v–64; R. 1380, ff. 76r–v, 104r–v, 173v–74. See also: Lafuente Gómez, Un reino en armas, 149–51. 55  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1380, ff. 29, 76r–v, 96r–v, 100v, 178–79; R. 1382, f. 104v; R. 1383, ff. 209v–10. See also: Kagay, “War Financing,” 132–33. 56  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1543, f. 37. See also: Kagay, “War Financing,” 132–33. 57  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1197, f. 184; R. 1379, f. 134. See also: DHC, 59; Kagay, “War Financing,” 131. 58  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1565, ff. 179r–v; R. 1566, ff. 171v–72; R. 1570, ff. 34, f. 46v, 77r–v.

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would be redeemed and returned to their original owners at some time in the future.59 In his own words, ten years of almost constant warfare caused the king countless “sleepless nights” from worry about the “intolerable lack of funds” he and his government experienced.60 Despite the many stresses imposed by the seemingly interminable conflict, Pere became increasingly convinced that no workable compromise with Pedro I of Castile was possible. To survive, he would have to continue fighting, even if all of his subjects, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim, were driven into bankruptcy.61 This unbending drive to defeat his “principal adversary” brought about an intensifying “tax weariness” throughout the realm.62 In addition to the financial damage years of war brought with them, they also unleashed a social anger that spread across the Crown of Aragon, even into regions like Catalonia and the Pyrenean borderlands, that had been largely removed from the actual conflict. Everywhere, anger manifested itself in a heightened resistance to paying war taxes or otherwise contributing to the war effort.63 The Catalan population, despite its relative freedom of the ravages of war, opposed paying what they considered as more than their fair share of taxes was mirrored in the attitude of Catalan ecclesiastical institutions, which actively attempted to shed territory under their control in order to avoid the taxes such territory owed.64 Some areas, while not denying a duty to support the war effort, claimed that their lands and revenues had been so heavily taxed that they had experienced severe depopulation.65 Even Pere himself had to recognize the “indescribable poverty” he saw among many of his subjects. He ultimately acknowledged his own responsibility for this sad situation, admitting that it was due in large part to the vast amount of money the inhabitants of his realm had been forced to pay throughout the war years.66 Despite this regret, the king drew solace from the belief that because of his determined conduct of the war, he and his realms had survived.

59  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1197, f. 184; DHC, 59–60. See also: Kagay, “War Financing,” 131. 60  A CA, Cancillería real, Cartas reales [Pedro IV], caja 52, no. 6241; R. 1327, f. 201. See also: CAVC, 2:8; DS, 424 (doc. 560), Kagay, “War Financing,” 141. 61  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, f. 115v. 62  Kagay, “Defending the Western and Southern Frontiers,” 89. 63 64  A CA, Cancillería, R. 1383, f. 242v. See also: Kagay, “War Financing,” 144. 65  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1383, ff. 194v–95. See also: CLC, 2:149; Kagay, “War Financing,” 145. 66  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1381, f. 245v. See also: Kagay, “War Fi

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2 Castile 2.1 Castilian Administrators and Aristocrats at War As on the Aragonese side of the conflict, both officials of the royal court and those dedicated to territorial administration were inextricably involved in the fulfillment of royal directions concerning the war effort. On the other hand, the sources we have indicate that Castilian administrators actually served in the field far more often than their Aragonese counterparts; some of them dying in combat, others at the hands of their own monarch. Among court officials whose positions primarily involved civilian duties, but who are prominently mentioned as assuming military roles were the lord chancellor (canciller mayor), chief steward (mayordomo mayor), royal tax collector (almojarife), chancellor of the privy seal (canciller del sello de la poridad), grand judiciary or chief justice of the royal court ( justicia mayor), keeper of the bed chamber (camarero mayor) and head of the royal bodyguard (guarda mayor del cuerpo del rey). In addition, there were several royal officials whose function was primarily military—the royal standard bearer (alferez major) and the lord admiral (almirante mayor de la mar). Chief among territorial administrators who played a key role in the conflict were a number of adelantados, men whose primary function involved not only judicial, but also military command over a region,67 as well as the territorial judges (merino mayor) who were under their direction. These and other Castilian officials took on significant military duties at the same time they continued to exercise their peacetime functions.68 As the war progressed, many of 67  These territorial officials included the adelantados mayores of Castile, Leon, Galicia, Andalucia, and Murcia, as well as the adelantado of the frontier (adelantado de la frontera). 68  Most of these positions find their legal definition in the great thirteenth century Spanish lawcode Las Siete Partidas; largely in the second partida “which treats of emperors, kings, and other great lords of the land, whose duty it is t preserve it with justice and truth.” See: Siete Partidas, 2:310–31 (Partida II, title ix, leyes 1–): What a King should be to his Officers and to the Members of his Household and his Court, and What They should be to Him. An excellent seventeenth century source which goes into considerable detail on medieval Castilian kingship and royal administrators is Pedro de Salazar y Mendoza, Monarquía de España, 2 vols. (Madrid: 1770). Important sources available in English that define Castilian royal offices and explain their functions can be found in Roger Bigelow Merriman, The Rise of the Spanish Empire in the Old World and the New, 4 vols. (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1962), esp. vol. 1: The Middle Ages, chap. 5 “The Institutions of Medieval Castile, 205–70; and Jean Hippolyte Mariéjol, The Spain of Ferdinand and Isabel (New Bruswick, N.J.: Rutgers, 1961, esp. chap. 4, The Royal Agents, 162–75 and Chap. 5, Justice, 176–91. See also: O’Callaghan, History, 434, 445 and Luis Suárez Fernández, “The Kingdom of Castile

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them were increasingly used as military commanders more than governmental or judicial officials. We know the names of many of the men who filled these offices during the War of the Two Pedros due to the chronicler Pedro López de Ayala, who numbered among them and carefully recorded their activities. Not only were they drawn almost entirely from the aristocratic class to which Ayala belonged, quite a few of them were his relatives by blood or marriage; in particular, those who (like his own family) could trace their origins back to regions in the far north of the kingdom such as Vizcaya and Álava.69 The group most closely related to Ayala includes one of Pedro I’s intimate confidants, Iñigo López de Orozco,70 who numbered among the last to desert the king in 1366 and whom the king himself murdered after he had surrendered on the battlefield of Nájera in spring, 1367. It also included Orozco’s nephew, the chronicler’s brother-in-law, Pedro González de Mendoza,71 who fought for Pedro throughout much of the Aragonese war and served the Castilian king as adelantado mayor de Castilla during the conflict’s final year.72 And of course, in the Fifteenth Century,” in Spain the Fifteenth Century 1369–1516, ed. Roger Highfield, trans. Frances M. López-Morillas (New York, 1972), 80–113. 69  The chronicler’s father, Fernán Pérez de Ayala, the head of the house for most of the reign of Pedro I, is first mentioned in his son’s chronicle in relation to the events of 1351, where he is identified as a citizen (natural) from the province of Vizcaya. Ayala, Pedro I, 416. See also: Fernán Pérez de Guzmán, Generaciones y Semblanzas, ed. J. Dominguez Bodona (Madrid: 1965). 70  Iñigo López de Orozco appears in Ayala’s chronicle as the leading figure in the OrozcoMendoza-Ayala faction. For an account of the house of Orozco, see a seventeenth century work by Castile’s foremost genealogist: Luis de Salazar y Castro, Historia Genealógica de la Casa de Haro (Madrid: Archivo Documental Español, 1959), 75–118. 71  After moving the family’s seat south from Vizcaya to central Castile, Gonzalo Yañez de Mendoza married Juana de Orozco, daughter of a long established Castilian line. Their son, Pedro González de Mendoza, would become the figure thought to be chiefly responsible for establishing his family as one of the foremost noble families of late medieval and early modern Spain. The house of Mendoza would produce among others a lord admiral of Castile, a major fifteenth century poet, a Cardinal-Archbishop of Toledo who served as principal adviser to the Catholic Monarchs, and, in the opening decades of the sixteenth century, the first viceroy of Spain’s newly-discovered American territories. For the Orozco connection, see: Casa de Haro, 52–53. Pedro González confirms the relationship in his will where he refers to his mother’s brother, Iñigo López de Orozco as “mi tio.” See: AHN, Osuna 1862 n. 9: Mayorazgo established by Pedro González de Mendoza, royal mayordomo mayor (1380). 72  The two early modern genealogies fundamental to any study of the Mendoza line are Salazar y Castro’s Casa de Haro and Diego Gutíerrez Coronel, Historia Genealógica de la Casa de Mendoza (Cuenca: CSIC, 1946). The best modern biography of the family is a massive, four-volume work by Francisco Layna Serrano, Historia de Guadalajara y sus Mendozas en los siglos XV y XVI, 4 vols. (Madrid, 1942). An excellent book in English

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there was the future chronicler himself who at one time or another held a number of administrative posts including fleet captain (capitan de la flota) during the 1359 naval attack on the Crown of Aragon, police commandant (alguazil mayor) in the city of Toledo (1360), and garrison commander of Murcia.73 Of all the men who held high administrative posts in the reign of Pedro I and who served the king militarily, none played a more prominent role during the early years of the war than Gutier Fernández de Toledo. Once chief steward of the prince’s household, he became head of the royal bodyguard when his master succeeded to the throne and later repostero mayor (which translates rather inadequately as chief royal butler.) Until his death in 1360 at the hands of the king he had so long served, Toledo was Pedro’s chosen trouble-shooter, combatting the insurrection of the royal siblings, conducting diplomatic negotiations with the enemy, serving as garrison commander in the border city of Molina and, in the last year of his life, assuming command of all Castilian forces operating along the frontier with Aragon.74 Another leading official who played a significant military role was Juan Fernández de Henestrosa, uncle of Pedro’s beloved mistress, María de Padilla, who owed his meteoric rise almost entirely to that relationship. The king appointed Henestrosa both chancellor of the privy seal and camarero mayor and eventually entrusted to him overall command along the frontier; a charge Henestrosa exercised until he met his death in September, 1359, at the battle of Araviana, at which point, Fernández de Toledo filled the vacancy.75 One of the oldest families in Castile providing officials who would play a significant role in the war effort was the house of Manrique76 that had as its concerning the family is Helen Nader, The Mendoza Family in the Spanish Renaissance 1350–1550 (Rutgers, 1979). See also: Villalon’s unpublished PhD. dissertation, The Law’s Delay: The Anatomy of an Aristocratic Property Dispute (1350–1577) (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms International, 1984), esp. 133–38; as well as Villalon’s published articles: “Deudo and the Roots of Feudal Violence in Late Medieval Castile,” in The Final Argument: The Imprint of Violence on Society in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Donald J. Kagay and L. J. Andrew Villalon (Woodbridge, 1998), pp. and “‘Cardinal Sins’ and ‘Cardinal Virtues’ of ‘El Tercer Rey,’ Pedro González de Mendoza: The Many Faces of a Warrior Churchman in Late Medieval Europe’ in Journal of Medieval Military History [JMMH], vol. XIII, ed. John France, Clifford J. Rogers, Kelly DeVries (Woodbridge, England: The Boydell Press, 2015), 213–46. 73  Ayala, Pedro I, 494 (1359, chap. 11), 509–10 (1360, chap. 21), DPI, docs. 121:179-80; 125:182; 128:185-86. 74  Ayala, Pedro I, 406, 500, 507. For more information about the career and fate of this royal administrator who was also one of Pedro I’s principal captains, see chapter 11. 75  Ibid., 499–500. 76  Our major source of information on the house of Manrique is a monumental four-volume genealogy compiled in the late seventeenth century by Luis de Salazar y Castro, Historia

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arrogant device, “It is not we who are descended from kings, but kings who are descended from us.” Following long years of service to Alfonso XI, at that king’s death in 1350, the head of the family, Garcí Fernández Manrique, became an important official under his son.77 Manrique, who would intermittently occupy the office of adelantado de Castilla,78 fought for some years in Pedro’s conflict with Aragon until his death during the campaign of 1362. Afterwards, his son, Pedro Manrique, succeeded him as the official head of the house, filling the office of adelantado during the 1364 invasion of Aragon; then conducting the heroic though ultimately unsuccessful defense of the captured city of Murviedro.79 On the other hand, the most powerful member of the family during these years of warfare was Gómez Manrique, a younger brother of Garcí Fernández and Don Pedro’s uncle.80 Don Gómez was a prelate who, by Pedro I’s reign, had risen to become archbishop of Santiago. His subsequent elevation to the archbishopric of Toledo toward the end of the conflict conferred upon him primacy over the Spanish church. Long a member of the king’s inner circle,81 Don Gómez also served the crown in various administrative capacities, of which lord chancellor (canciller mayor) was only the most notable.82 Like other clerics of the period who also held offices in the royal government, Manrique occasionally found himself undertaking military as well as civilian duties, if only on an organizational level. With but one exception, all of the leading administrators identified in the chronicle appear to have been native Castilians. That exception is the man who served as lord admiral of Castile throughout most of the conflict, Egidio (Gil) Bocanegra, identified by the chronicler as a Genoese (Genoves).83 He and other Genealógica de la Casa de Lara (hereafter Casa de Lara), 4 vols. (Madrid, 1694–1697). Volume four, as its name clearly indicates, is devoted entirely to documentation on which the author based his text. See: Pruebas de la Historia de la Casa de Lara (Madrid, 1694). The original documents are to be found in the Coleccíon Salazar, housed within the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid. 77   Casa de Lara 1:332–46. 78  Manrique filled the office on three separate occasions: 1352–1353, 1354, and 1362. 79   Casa de Lara, 1:403–13. 80  Ibid., 1:321–26. 81  Pedro I worked hard to secure for Manrique the see of Toledo and appointed the cleric one of the executors of his will. See: “Testamento del Rey Don Pedro de Castilla,” in CRC 1:597. 82  Manrique was also the grand chancellor and grand notary of Leon and Castile, as well as the royal chaplain. Casa de Lara 1:321–22. 83  The only other foreigners mentioned by Ayala came in the early 1360, not to fight against Aragon in the War of the two Pedros, but during a hiatus in that conflict when Pedro I redirected his military efforts against Granada. They included the count of Armagnac,

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members of his family, including his son and successor, Ambrosio Bocanegra (all of whom are also specifically identified as Genoese) took part in the 1359 seaborne attack on the Aragonese coast, the largest operation of the war.84 Two officials whose power steadily grew (especially as a number of their companions fell in battle or from royal grace) were the Galician noble, Fernando de Castro, at one time adelantado mayor of Castile, and the royal camarero mayor, Martín López de Córdoba. Both men would ultimately maintain their loyalty to Pedro even after his expulsion from the kingdom in 1366. Both would participate in his restoration the following year and, after his death, continue to support his heirs. For his loyalty, Fernando de Castro would eventually go into exile and be hailed in several European chronicles as a paragon of faithfulness. By contrast, López de Córdoba would continue the resistance to Enrique II within Castile and suffer a gruesome fate when he fell into the hands of the usurper. A number of Castilian administrators exercising war-related functions served the crown as diplomats and intermediaries, keeping open channels of communication with the other side while negotiating and standing as guarantors ( fiadores) of their royal master’s short-lived peace treaties with Aragon, all of which he duplicitously violated as soon as it suited him to do so.85 The first official to fulfill a diplomatic charge related to the war was the royal justice (alcalde del rey), Gil Vazquez who carried Pedro I’s “defiance” to his adversary in autumn, 1356, and returned with Pere’s answer; an exchange that marked the beginning of the long conflict. Others who took part in what ultimately proved an unrewarding diplomatic effort included Gutier Fernández de Toledo, Juan Fernández de Henestrosa, and the royal chanciller mayor, Juan Alfonso de Mayorga.86 the Aragonese noble, Pedro de Xérica, and the English knight, Sir Hugh Calveley. Ayala, Pedro I, 517 (1362, chap. 2). 84  Ayala, Pedro I, 494 (1359, chap. 11), 540 (1366, chap. 4), 543 (1366, chap. 9), 552 ((1367, chap. 4), 573 (1367, chap. 24). Among the Castilian knights (caballeros) named as commanders (patrones) of Castilian galleys, Gil Bocanegra,“almirante de Castilla,” heads the list. Also present were his son, Ambrosio Bacanegra, “Genoves,” who would later succeed him as admiral, and Bartolomés, “Genoves.” The Spanish version of Wikipedia has a well-developed account of this Genoese corsair. It was probably sometime near the end of the war that the almirantazgo moved from the father to the son. Although Gil Bocanegra is still identified as admiral in spring, 1366, a year later, at the time of the battle of Nájera (April 3, 1367), Ayala refers to Ambrosio as holder of this office. At the time, Gil Bocanegra was still alive. Following the battle, the people of Seville seized hold of him. Several weeks later, when the restored and highly vengeful monarch returned to his favorite city, they turned over to him Bocanegra and others who had supported Enrique. He, in turn, had these men, including his old admiral executed. See also: Zurita, Anales, 415 (IX:xxxiii). 85  For more about wartime diplomacy, see chapter 7. 86  Ayala, Pedro I, 507 (1860, chap. 16).

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When the two sides signed the short-lived Peace of Terrer, the Castilian crown compelled an impressive array of luminaries, both ecclesiastical and secular, to affix their signatures. Churchmen whose names appeared on the final document were the archbishop of Santiago and the bishops of Cartagena, Burgos, Oviedo, and Calahorra. Among secular signatories were one of the king’s favorites, Fernando de Castro, his camarero mayor, Martín López de Córdoba, his lord admiral, Gil Bocanegra, his high justiciary, Juan Alfonso de Benavides, and his lord treasurer (tesorero mayor), Martín Yañez.87 Rounding out the list were representatives of six cities (Burgos, Toledo, Seville, and Córdoba, Murcia, and Cuenca) and four frontline towns (Molina, Soria, Medinaceli, and Alzazan).88 Following the defeat at Araviana in 1359, an angry monarch demonstrated why royal service could pose such great hazards for royal administrators who lost the king’s confidence. Pedro apparently forgave a number of the men involved in the defeat, including Fernando de Castro who had escaped the field on horseback, Iñigo López de Orozco who had been captured fighting, and the justicia mayor, Juan Alfonso de Benavides, who failed to arrive in time to take part.89 On the other hand, some Castilian officials were not so lucky, earning Pedro’s extreme and unrelenting displeasure. Two men who fell into the latter category sought safety in flight. Learning that the king had his sights set on them, Diego Pérez Sarmiento, the adelantado of Castile, and Pedro Fernández de Velasco,90 the garrison commander at Murcia, decided to defect to the enemy. Both men fled into Aragon where they joined their recent enemy, Count Enrique. In their cases, all the king could do was strip them of their royal offices and confiscate their lands.91 Two others stationed on the frontier who had had no part in the battle— Pedro Nuñez de Guzmán, the adelantado mayor of Leon, and Juan Alvarez Osorio—were not as lucky. Both picked this inopportune moment to temporarily abandon their posts on the frontier and briefly visit their lands back in Leon, despite royal orders that all troops remain in place in preparation for 87  Zurita, Anales, 415 (IX:xxxiii). Other less important officials identified in the chronicle are Juan Ponce, Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, Enrique Enríquez, Beltran de Guevara, and Men Rodríguez de Biedma. 88 Ibid.   89  While Ayala indicates that the king’s anger did extend to Benavides, the justicia mayor did not become a victim of royal punishment—at this time. Benavides would still be serving the crown more than 4 years later when the crown finally did move against him on an entirely different matter. 90  Pedro Fernández de Velasco, like his contemporary, Pedro González de Mendoza, is generally looked upon as the principal founder of another great Trastámaran noble house. 91  Ayala, Pedro I, 501 (1360, chap. 3).

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another round of fighting.92 Already infuriated by the battle’s outcome, Pedro decided to make an example of the pair. Although Guzmán upon learning of the king’s wrath, fled into Portugal, his flight availed him little when the Portuguese and Castilian monarchs agreed to turn over to one another their respective fugitives. As a result, Guzmán was “very cruelly” (muy cruelmente) executed in Seville, according to Ayala, “the manner of his death would be too ugly and crude to relate and it weighed heavily even on those who had faithfully served the king for such acts did not please them.”93 Osorio’s demise proved rather more bizarre. In his case, Pedro temporarily masked his anger, even going so far as to promise the nobleman offices that had once belonged to Guzmán. When Osorio returned to court, the king dispatched several of his mace bearers (ballesteros) to assassinate him. The assassins caught up with their victim when he was dining with Diego García de Padilla, grandmaster of Calatrava and brother of the royal mistress, who had been given no advance warning of what was about to happen to his guest. Invading the grandmaster’s quarters, the royal henchmen brutally killed Osorio and chopped off his head to take to the king, who thanked them heartily.94 It was actions such as these that illustrate once again the cruelty and duplicity of which this monarch was capable; the threat to anyone who served him, however faithfully, led an ever-increasing number of Castilians (in particular, those at the administrative level) to desert to the other side. When all was said and done, service in the Castilian government during the Aragonese war proved doubly dangerous to those who performed it: as the conflict progressed, fear of King Pedro’s blind anger became as strong as, if not stronger than any fear Castilian officials might feel for the enemy. The nineteenth century French author, Prosper Mériméee, whose lengthy biography of the king is generally favorable to its subject, aptly sums up his behavior in terms that might well lead to a modern diagnosis of paranoia: Don Pedro could never hear of the defection of one of his Ricos Hombres without imagining that the whole of his nobility were conspiring against him. His fury then conjured up enemies everywhere; he struck at random; now at a traitor, now at a faithful vassal. Not to be feared, seemed to him the greatest of reproaches; a few heads must fall in self-justification.95 92  Ibid., 500 (1359, chap. 23). 93  Ibid., 506 (1360, chap. 16). 94  Ibid., 502 (1360, chap. 5). 95  Prosper Mérimée, The History of Peter the Cruel King of Castile and Leon, 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1849), 2:3–4.

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Examples abound. In 1360, the king followed up his precipitate beheading of Gutier Fernández de Toledo by moving against that nobleman’s relatives, in particular his brother, Don Vasco, the archbishop of Toledo, who held that city for the king; apparently with no evidence of wrong-doing on the churchman’s part beyond his certainty that Toledo “would never have done anything without his brother’s counsel.”96 As in the case of Gutier Fernández, the prelate was given no chance to meet with the monarch to make his case. Instead, two royal officials (one of them, the future chronicler) descended on Toledo with orders to expel him from the city with little more than the clothing on his back and escort him into exile in Portugal where he ultimately lived out his life. To no avail, he plead his innocence, stating that the king “knew full well how his mother, and brothers, and all of his relatives had been his loyal servants since his birth despite encountering great anxiety and many dangers” during the years when Leonor de Guzmán had held sway over his father, King Alfonso.97 As a result of these events, Pedro I lost support from one of the great noble houses that had previously shown itself to be strongly in his corner. Another incident occurred in 1365 that also illustrates the counterproductivity of the king’s reign of terror directed against his own followers.98 After an Aragonese siege lasting for some seven months, the Castilian garrison in the captured town of Murviedro found itself reduced to eating its horses, mules, and whatever else could be found within the walls. When appeals to the king for a relief force went unanswered, surrender became inevitable, but on honorable terms that permitted the survivors to evacuate the city with their arms. As the garrison marched out through the gates, the count of Trastámara, who had been present at the siege, addressed his fellow countrymen from the side of the road, making an offer that in the end, they could not refuse. The count reminded these weary men that in spite of having put up a good fight, they could not expect a very pleasant welcome back in Castile from a king who would not excuse defeat, even when it grew out of his own inaction. Instead, Enrique proposed that they should join him. To encourage their defection, Enrique could point to a recent example of Pedro’s “mercy” toward those who failed him. At the same time the Castilian garrison had occupied Murviedro, the king had entrusted the town of Segorbe to another force, commanded by his justicia mayor, Juan Alfonso de Benavides. The latter soon found himself in the same position as the defenders of 96  Ayala, Pedro I, 509 (1360, chap. 21). 97  Ibid. 98  For more about Pedro I’s lavish use of terror as a ruling strategy, see Villalon, “Cut Off Their Heads,” esp. 174–78.

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Murviedro, running out of provisions and without any relief in sight. Benavides negotiated with the besiegers to allow him to journey to Seville where he could appeal directly to his monarch for a relief force and, in nothing came of that, then he would surrender the town. For his part, Pedro refused to even hear out his beleaguered garrison commander. Instead, the justicia found himself tossed into prison where he died soon afterwards. Faced with this telling example, most of the defenders were forced to conclude that their interlocutor was right and joined him on the spot.99 Among the leaders who surrendered at Murviedro, the most prominent was the adelantado, Pedro Manrique, who appears to have joined his comrades in going over to Trastámara. Whether he chose that moment or a subsequent one to transfer his loyalties, by the time the free companies invaded Castile in 1366, he was firmly situated in Enrique’s camp, serving as the latter’s adelantado mayor.100 When the usurper staged his coronation at Burgos, he granted his recent adherent the town of Treviño and several adjacent villages.101 The fact that this grant was confirmed by the recipient’s two brothers, Garcí Fernandez and Diego Gómez Manrique as well as his powerful uncle, the archbishop of Toledo, indicates that Don Pedro had not been alone in switching sides. His powerful house had followed him in making the move. Finally, during the free company invasion of 1366, the flood gates opened. Pedro’s refusal to fight and his subsequent flight southward to Seville triggered a mass defection among his followers, as even the longest serving officials, men such as Iñigo López de Orozco, Pedro González de Mendoza, and Admiral Bocanegra, joined Enrique. Perhaps the single most damaging defection, at least from a fiscal standpoint, involved the Genoese seaman. When Pedro and his family fled from Seville into Portugal, he ordered his lord treasurer, Martín Yañez de Sevilla, to follow as quickly as possible in a ship with the royal treasury. Before the treasurer’s vessel could reach the open sea, however, Bocanegra overtook it in a galley of his own and seized its cargo which he promptly turned over to his new royal master.102 As a result, Pedro’s money and jewels went into paying the free companies that had made possible Enrique’s successful invasion.

99  Ibid., 535–36 (1365, chap 3). 100   Casa de Lara, 1:405. 101  For the grant of Treviño, see: Casa de Lara (Pruebas), 4:49–52 (1366). 102  Ayala, Pedro I, 542–43 (1366, chap. 9).

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Faced with his costly failure, the treasurer felt he had no choice but to defect since the likelihood of Pedro forgiving him was nearly non-existent. In so doing, Martín Yañez became the last major administrator to switch his allegiance.103 2.2 Castilian War Financing The sources of financial support that Pedro I had inherited from his father, Alfonso XI, and which he used to advance his conflict with Aragon were all but identical with those open to Pere III. His uses of them, however, proved different in at least one critical respect. Like his Aragonese counterpart, the Castilian king had the option of summoning his cortes to seek emergency subsidies (servicios, ayudas), but largely avoided this step.104 He did exact a general parliamentary due, the moneda forera, a payment to the crown rendered every seven years by which his subjects recognized their allegiance to his “royal lordship.” This was enacted in his only true cortes, that of 1351 held at the time of his accession.105 Aside from this, however, he seems to have made little if any use of Castile’s representative body to finance his conflict. Instead of relying on parliamentary funding, Pedro used every other form of revenue and taxation customarily open to a Castilian monarch. Unlike his Aragonese adversary who spent much of his time in arranging for extraordinary subsidies from his parliamentary bodies to keep the stream of military funding flowing, Pedro depended on his realm’ normal taxation to pay for his military ventures and utilized his regular officials to collect these imposts. Even in the face of what seem to have been staggering costs to support

103  After joining Enrique, Yañez fought in his army at the battle of Nájera. Following the defeat, the treasurer and several other refugees fled to the north coast, perhaps with the intention of taking a ship to other parts. Instead, he was captured by a local squire who brought the prisoner to Seville and turned him over to the unforgiving monarch. Among his excuses to Pedro, Yañez explained that he had not joined the king in exile due to his fear of royal anger. This availed him nothing and he was soon executed. Ayala, Pedro I, 573 (1367, chap. 28). 104  See Chapter 13, Section 16 for Pedro’s skimpy parliamentary involvement. For Castilian parliamentary subsidies, see O’Callaghan, Cortes, 135–42; idem, “Las Cortes de Castilla y León (1251–1350),” in Alfonso XI, Study XI, pp. 155–81, esp. 171–75; idem, Reconquest and Crusade, 162–64; Procter, Curia and Cortes, 190–95. For Alfonso XI’s war financing, see Nicolás Agrait, “El asta de la lanza: Los mecanismos de financiación de la guerra durante el reinado de Alfonso XI (1312–1350),” Gladius: Estudios sobre armas antiguas, arte militar, y vida cultural en oriente y occidente 32 (2012): 103–20. 105  D PI, 4:17–20 (doc. 15). See also: Agrait, “Monarchy,” 262–64; Ladero Quesada, Fiscalidad, 54–56. Though evolving in time into an extraordinary grant, the moneda forera was basically a grant to the king in exchange for his promise not to devaluate Castilian coinage for the next seven years.

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Castile’s campaigns against Aragon, Pedro’s war funding revealed the king’s confidence in his kingdom’s normal financial structures.106 The core of the Castilian army consisted of the knights who, from their feudal relationship with the king and the money-fiefs (soldados) he granted them, had to serve at their own expense for up to ninety days.107 Many others, however, also served in Pedro’s army. These forces regularly supported their operations from the plunder they won in enemy territory.108 This plunder also formed a significant source of royal revenue (see below). In some instances, the Castilian king secured military funds by extending the number of townsmen and villagers—especially who lived in frontier zones—who owed the crown military service.109 The king also reduced costs of supplying castles by shifting the responsibility for their upkeep to the nearest town council, placing on that body the obligation to purchase and deliver such provisions. These councils had to see to the repair of nearby fortifications.110 In some instances, Pedro could also count on his townsmen to provide unpaid transport of provisions, weapons, and artillery to the front with their oxen and wagons.111 The king could increase the size of his army without increasing military salaries by recruiting men who had been imprisoned for “murder of men or women, theft, assault, highway robbery, breaking into churches and monasteries, and all other crimes whatsoever.”112 Despite these financial expedients that allowed the Castilian king to operate with greatly reduced expenditures, his initial successes on the Aragonese and Valencian frontiers quickly forced him to garrison many enemy towns and castles which “drained off his men and caused great expenses.”113 In 1359, Pedro angrily admitted to the papal legate, Gui de Boulogne, that he had already run 106  For military bills from other fourteenth-century campaigns across Europe, see Agrait, “Monarchy,” 226–30; Norman Housely, “European Warfare, c. 1200–1320,” in Medieval Warfare: A History, ed. Maurice Keen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 113–35, esp. 123–26; Macdonald, Don Fernando, 44; Prestwick, Armies, 339–46; idem, Three Edwards, 317–19; Clifford J. Rogers, “The Age of the Hundred Years War,” in Medieval Warfare, 137–60, esp. 149–50. 107  Agrait, “Monarchy,” 74–75; Ladero Quesada, “Organización militar,” 208. 108  Ayala, Pedro I, 477–78 (1357, chap. iii); 521–22 (1362, chap. ix); Pere III, 2:503–4, 513–14 (VI:5,12). In an attack on the Valencian town of Castellhabib in 1364, Pedro claimed a portion of all the “Moorish men and women, animals and livestock, and all other things [his troops] captured.” DPI, 169–70 (doc. 110). 109  D PI, 145–47 (docs. 83, 115). See also: Molina Molina, “Repercussiones,” 144–45 (doc. 16). 110  C DPI, 4:174, 215–16 (docs. 1.271, 1.323); DPI, 138, 153, 157, 184 (docs. 76, 88, 92–93, 126). See also: Molina Molina, “Repercussiones,” 132, 151–52 (docs. 1, 21). 111  C DPI, 4:185 (doc. 1.284). See also: DPI, 172–73, 186 (docs. 114, 130). 112  C DPI, 4:311–12 (doc. 1.009). 113  Ayala, Pedro I, 518 (1362, chap. v).

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up debts of 10,000,000 maravedis or 500,000 Aragonese florins in fighting his war with Pere III.114 Like his nobles and clerics, the king drew much of his income from customary revenues and rents produced by his own lands. Having earmarked these revenues for the crown’s war efforts, in 1363, the king sent his treasurer, Martín Yañez, into royal and free cities, towns, and villages as well as across other lordships with instruction to rigorously collect all rents and dues owed to the crown by the residents. As a result, the treasurer rigorously collected “great quantities of maravedis, food, and other things,” much of which was used to bolster the king’s military efforts against Aragon.115 One of the most extensive of fiscal royal rights (regalias), one that contributed greatly to the crown’s annual income, was the monopoly on salt production. Pedro sometimes diverted this source of revenue directly to military needs such as the repair of artillery.116 Regalias of all types that were collected within cities, villages, and bishoprics could provide the crown with a sizeable amount every year. For example, in 1364, the royal government collected a huge sum from this revenue source paid within the bishopric of Burgos, much of which it immediately applied to army funding.117 In addition to Castilian revenue sources that (at least in theory) could be tapped only occasionally, the kingdom’s ordinary taxation formed a similar collection base throughout the conflict with Aragon. Taxes, such as the martiniega or the marzadga, could occasionally bring in one-tenth of a region’s yearly agricultural output.118 Travelers or merchants transporting goods into Castile had to pay a toll called (portazgo) that amounted to one-eighth of their value. Under Alfonso XI, and later under his son Pedro, toll receipts from the portazgo were often used to pay military bills. Unlike Alfonso, however, Pedro modified the toll by exempting Castilian townsmen and villagers from having to pay it within their own communities.119 Another impost, the almojarifazgo 114  Ayala, Pedro I, 488 (1359, chap. iv). 115  D PI, 155–56 (doc. 91). 116  C DPI, 4:98–99, 228–29 (docs. 1.184, 1.329). See also: Agrait, “Monarchy,” 247–48; Ladero Quesada, Fiscalidad, 90–100. 117  C DPI, 4:187–91 (doc. 1.290); Agrait, “Asta,” 105; Ladero Quesada, Fiscalidad, 191–203; Manuel Nieto Cumplido, “Documentos de Pedro I de Castilla en el catedral de Córdoba,” Cuadernos de Estudios Medievales 2–3 (1974–1975): 215–31, esp. 229–31 (doc. 4). 118  C DPI, 3:345 (doc. 1.036); 4:63–64, 95–96 (docs. 1.148, 1.179); Agrait, “Monarchy,” 240–41; Ladero Quesada, Fiscalidad, 33–39. Pedro’s government could effectively confiscate the specified amounts of crops and then later collect in money the normal percentage of tax normally associated with the martiniega. CDPI, 4:81 (doc. 1.165). 119  Siete Partidas, ed. Burns, 4:1058 (Part. V, Tit. vii, l. v); Agrait, “Monarchy,” 240; Manuel González García, “El portazgo de Salamanca en la Baja Edad Media,” Archivos Leoneses 26

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was levied on manufactured products; for example, cloth, tools, rope, furniture etc. To assure the flow of receipts from this tax, the king placed royal agents in market towns during the busiest commercial periods of the year to threaten those who avoided or delayed payment.120 Another annual tax the Castilian monarch relied on to support his armies was the yantar, a feudal due by which a lord could claim from his vassal full lodging for himself and his entourage usually for a prescribed period of time. It is usually referred to in feudal law as the right of hospitality. By Pedro’s reign, this duty had morphed into a sum to be paid by townsmen and lower nobility to the Castilian king, queen, and crown prince.121 Also essential for Pedro’s military funding was a payment known as the montazgo.122 Originally levied on Castilian property-holders for government protection against having their lands ravaged by the huge flocks of migratory sheep that regularly marched across the kingdom, by the fourteenth century, it had become a major source of revenue regularly exacted from taxpayers (pecheros). Despite the considerable sums these imposts placed in the Castilian coffers, they were not always easy to collect due to extensive claims of tax exemption put forward by many sectors of society. Opposition to paying them not infrequently led to litigation.123 A Castilian monarch also possessed a number of taxes that were specifically connected with the waging of war on both land and sea. In his cortes at Valladolid, Pedro praised the fonsadera, a fee paid in lieu of performing military service, as one of his most important imposts. Under both his father and himself, funds from this source were often used for the rental of mule trains to transport military supplies.124 The crown even drew revenues from the failure of some of his subjects to obey summonses to perform military service. Pedro enacted a fine, not unlike the Aragonese defectus servitii, for those who did not comply with the king’s call to arms.125 To underwrite the expensive process of arming galleys, the Castilian king could activate another lucrative impost, the appropriately-named galera, by which many of his Atlantic ports agreed to equip a galley for war service in (1972): 125–43; César González Mínguez, El portazgo de la Edad Media: Aproximacón a su estudio en la Corona de Castila (Bilbao, 1989); Ladero Quesada, Fiscalidad, 131–34. 120  C DPI, 4:300 (doc. 1.452). See also: Nieto Cumplido, “Documentos,” 228–29 (doc. 5); Agrait, “Monarchy,” 245–46; Ladero Quesada, Fiscalidad, 140–43. 121  D PI, 179 (doc. 120). See also: Agrait, “Monarchy,” 248–49; Ladero Quesada, Fiscalidad, 37–40. 122  C LC, 2:60. See also: Agrait, “Monarchy,” 241–42; Ladero Quesada, Fiscalidad, 131–34. 123  C DPI, 3:356 (doc. 1.047), 4:121–22, 195–99 (docs. 1.209, 1.293). 124  Agrait, “Monarchy,” 250–51; Ladero Quesada, Fiscalidad, 41–47. 125  C DPI, 4:61 (doc. 1.143). See also: Agrait, “Asta,” 107–08.

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exchange for exemption from all other royal taxation.126 Even warfare itself could prove profitable through the king’s right to the royal fifth (quinto real) of all plunder captured by each expeditionary force that ventured into enemy territory. Pedro activated this revenue source when he warned all of his officials under pain of corporal punishment that they must collect and safeguard all the money owed him from the royal fifth.127 The king also funded his war efforts using the annual grant of tribute (parias) paid by Granada’s ruler128 as well as occasional “free gifts” from his own Jewish subjects.129 However, a major breakthrough in royal funding was accomplished with stepped up use of the alcabala, an excise tax on certain specified products. The alcabala had existed in certain Castilian regions since 1253, and was often associated with the portazgo. In 1333, Alfonso XI drafted a schedule listing the products subject to this tax and the amount to be paid on them. Over a decade later in the cortes of 1345, Alfonso, currently in the midst of his Straits campaigns, applied the impost to his entire realm.130 Though the alcabala was still a relatively new tax when Pedro commenced the Aragonese war, he felt little compunction in utilizing it to defray military expenses. In 1364, he declared that the receipts of the alcabala on “grain, wine, and other articles” sold at León was to be used to pay for the contingents that city sent for service in the Castilian army.131 In the following year, the king defied centuries of tradition by declaring that the Jewish community of León had to contribute to this important source of military funding.132 Eventually, the tax produced a lawsuit in the city of Seville with its large Jewish population that attempted to determine how proceeds derived from the alcabala would be divided between the crown and the city authorities.133

126  Agrait, “Monarchy,” 249–50; Ladero Quesada, Fiscalidad, 45–46. 127  D PI, 169–70 (doc. 110); Siete Partidas, ed. Burns, 2:478 (Part. II, Tit. xxvi, ley. vi). See also: Agrait, “Monarchy,” 256–57. 128  Hilda Grassotti, “Para la historia del botin y de las parias en León y Castilla,” CHE, 39–40 (1964): 43–132; Ladero Quesada, Fiscalidad, 47–52; Joseph F. O’Callaghan, The Learned King: The Reign of Alfonso X of Castile (Philadelphia, 1993), 40. 129  Agrait, “Monarchy,” 243–45; Baer, History, 1:362–64; Ladero Quesada, Fiscalidad, 75–77; idem, “Los judios castellanos del Siglo XV en el arrendamiento de los impuestos reales,” Cuadernos de Historia 6 (1975): 417–39; Ray, Sephardic Frontier, 80–81. 130  Ladero Quesada, Fiscalidad, 175–90; Salvador de Moxó y Ortiz de Villajos, La alcabala: Sobre sus orígenes, concepto y naturaleza (Madrid, 1963); idem, “Los orígenes de la percepción de Alcabalas por los particulares,” Hispania 114 (1970): 5–68; idem, “Los cuadernos de alcabalas: Orígenes de la legislación tributaria castellana,” AHDE 39 (1969): 317–450. 131  C DPI, 4:149 (doc. 1.243). 132  Ibid., 4:214 (doc. 1.322). 133  Ibid., 3:354–57 (doc. 1.046).

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In conclusion, like his Aragonese adversary, Pedro made aggressive use of a great number of his kingdom’s ordinary and extraordinary taxes as well as many royal rights and dues to fight the ten-year war that occupied most of his reign. As a consequence of this heavy taxation, along the embattled frontiers of Aragon, Valencia, and Castile, many small towns and villages were all but depopulated and the principal cash crops of both regions were greatly reduced.134 134  Ibid., 4:50 (doc. 1.132).

Chapter 11

Command Structures in the War of the Two Pedros 1

Employment of Captains in the Crown of Aragon

Medieval warfare, as opposed to simple fighting, was rightfully in the hands of the crown. Honoré Bonet, affirmed this in the fourteenth century, saying that “no man should or may bear arms without the permission of the prince.”1 For his part, Pere III of Aragon would wholeheartedly agree with the warrior/poets statement. In his own mind, not only was Pere a good king, but also a “daring, battletested, and valiant” commander of men.2 As a monarch, it was his lawful responsibility to declare war or to make peace; royal decisions that would affect the entire “commonwealth” (cosa publica).3 For the king, a successful military record during the several decades before the Castilian war supported this belief. After all, his forces had defeated the Unión and had overrun Majorca, expelling his cousin, Jaume III. Furthermore, he had also enjoyed at least partial success in the effort to subjugate the island of Sardinia. In line with his views on the duties of kingship and his self-image as a successful war leader, during the opening weeks of the Castilian conflict, Pere loudly proclaimed an intention to personally seek out and do battle with Pedro I. In reality, he completely failed to follow through on this aggressive rhetoric until much later in the war when he actually entered the front-lines in a leadership capacity. At the beginning of the war, Pere relied on the unpaid service of his great nobles and their companies of vassals to protect the frontiers of the Crown of Aragon and do the actual fighting against the initial wave of Castilian invaders. In so doing, they would be their regular feudal commitment to render military service to the crown for up to three months each year.4 Although this was a temporary expedient, it was not one that Pere could easily abandon. On 1  The Tree of Battles of Honoré Bonet, ed. and trans. G.W. Coupland (Liverpool, 1949), 129; Richard W. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 1999), 98. 2  Parlaments, 42–48. 3  Francisco Elias de Tejada, Las doctrinas en la Cataluña medieval (Barcelona, 1950), 147–48; Donald J. Kagay, “Poetry in the Dock: The Court Culture of Joan I on Trial (1396–1398),” in War, Study XI, pp. 48–99, esp. 49–50. 4  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1380, f. 23. See also: Kagay, “Defense,” 21–22; Zurita, Anales, 4:214–15 (VIII:xlvii), 258 (VIII:lvi), 300–1 (IX:iii). The principal barons Pere used were Lope de Luna,

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004425057_013

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occasion, the king attempted, not all that successfully, to expand the role of his feudal levees by trying to deploy them outside of their own realms. This clearly violated feudal agreements that compelled men to serve only within their own homelands. Pere made every attempt to justify such a break with tradition on the grounds that the Crown of Aragon faced a national emergency; one that overrode traditional limits on feudal service.5 Given the inadequacy of the feudal system to meet the kingdom’s military needs in this latest crisis, the Aragonese monarch soon came to realize that salaried rather than feudal troops represented the only efficient solution for his conflict with Castile.6 By spring 1357, Pere had appointed his first frontier captain, Lope Fernández de Luna, and placed him in command of the royal forces holding the important towns of Calatayud, Daroca, and Teruel as well as the hamlets under their jurisdiction.7 He justified the appointment by saying that he himself could not safeguard the scattered frontier places and therefore had no choice but to rely on paid companies numbering up to 100 horsemen and 150 infantry commanded by experienced military leaders. These men were honor-bound to obey all royal orders. It was their role to treat the civilian population under their control with respect and justice, and to recruit capable and suitable troops to serve in their companies.8 Although this use of frontier captains began as a stopgap measure in response to a national crisis, it ultimately became a central element of the Aragonese military system. Throughout the Castilian conflict, Pere utilized such military subordinates along the frontiers of both Aragon and Valencia.9 These leaders as well as forces serving under them drew their pay from one of three sources: from the towns and hamlets they protected; the parliament; or from the royal government.

Pedro Fernández de Ixar, Jordan Pérez de Urries, Miguel Pérez Zapata, Juan López de Sesse, and Miguel de Gurrea. For Valencia, he used Count Alfonso of Denia and Pedro de Xerica. 5  Customs of Catalonia between Lords and Vassals of Pere Albert, Barcelona Canon: A Practical Guide to Feudal Relations in Medieval Spain, trans. Donald J. Kagay (Tempe, Ariz., 2002), 36–37 (art. 27). See also: Kagay, “Defense,” 21; idem, “The National Defense Clause and the Emergence of the Catalan State: Princepts nameque Revisited,” in War, Government, and Society in the Medieval Crown of Aragon (Aldershot, Hampshire, 2007), Study 1, pp. 57–97, esp. 88–89; Zurita, Anales, 4:215 (VIII:xlvii). 6  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1380, f. 115; R. 1382, ff. 51v–52. 7  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1152, ff. 149r–v. See also: Lafuente Gómez, Un reino en armas, 98. 8  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1381, ff. 41v–42, 48v, 49v, 183v; R. 1382, ff. 132r–v. See also: Kagay, “Defense,” 25; Lafuente Gómez, Un reino en armas, 123. 9  Lafuente Gómez, Un reino en armas, 110–17.

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The crown conferred upon a captain complete jurisdiction over the region he administered as well as its civilian inhabitants. He could levy money or labor from those under his control and initiate legal proceedings against townsmen or even whole towns that he considered to be hindering his military duties.10 Like most military administrators, Pere’s captains were ordered to carry out some public policies that made them extremely unpopular with the local people. In addition, trouble not infrequently arose between soldiers under their direct command and local militias of the towns they were charged with defending. If a front-line community under a captain’s leadership faced the threat of an enemy siege, he would have to make certain that it possessed adequate provisions, water, and war materiel to mount a successful resistance. At the same time, he had an obligation to escort outlying populations and their animals into an urban under his command. Despite having been appointed by the crown, these men, even when they came from the same realm and spoke the same language, were often viewed as “foreigners” by the very townsmen they were supposed to protect.11 This local hostility not infrequently resulted from social and economic dislocation that the presence of a large military force could bring about in a relatively small community. In the border regions where military captains held the greatest sway, such hostilities could also spring from their interference with such timehonored professions as smuggling, slaving, and black market activities, all of which actually helped war-torn frontier settlements to survive as the conflict dragged on. 2

Pere’s Principal Captains: Prince Ferran

The interaction of Pere and his half-brother, Ferran, during their formative decades was marked by a competition for the love and favor of their father, Alfons III. When the king died in 1336, Pere contemplated vengeance against his hated stepmother, Leonor, and her two sons, Ferran and Joan but was never 10  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1382, ff. 132r–v; R. 1387, ff. 14v, 120v, 140v–41, 148v–49v, 166v–67. See also: Kagay, “Pere III’s System,” 207–08. 11  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1383, ff. 50r–v, 174v–75, 179v; R. 1387, ff. 127v, 138v, 129v, 140r–v, 144, 150r–v, 169v–69. See also: Kagay, “Pere III’s System,” 209–10; Lafuente Gómez, Un reino en armas, 117–23. For linguistic similarities and differences between the troops and Pere’s various lands, see Donald J. Kagay, “The Institutional Blue Print of a Crusader Land: The Case of the Medieval Crown of Aragon,” Journal of the Georgia Association of Historians 24 (2003): 25–60, esp. 32–33.

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able to accomplish it when Alfons’s second family fled to Castile. After living for more than a dozen years in the court of their uncle, Alfonso XI of Castile, the two brothers returned to their Aragonese homeland where Ferran emerged as a leader of the anti-monarchical Valencian Unión in 1348. When this organization went down to defeat at the decisive battle of Epila near Zaragoza, Ferran and Joan escaped back into Castile in time to become important figures early in the reign of Pedro I. Using their new-found influence with the young Castilian monarch they were able to arrange a shaky truce with their royal halfbrother, Pere, in 1352. As a result of their restored status in Pere’s realms and the position they had attained within Pedro’s court, the two siblings for a time enjoyed the status of “over-mighty subjects” in both Aragon and Castile. Four years later at the outbreak of the Castilian-Aragonese conflict, Ferran briefly severed all his ties with his Aragonese brother, Pere, and instead took service as a captain of Castilian force. Then after a lackluster year of service in Pedro I’s army, the prince did another about-face by re-establishing friendly relations with Aragon, while at the same time, bringing with him a not inconsiderable contingent of Castilians who had deserted Pedro and decided to enter the conflict on the Aragonese side.12 As the war progressed, the Aragonese achieved their greatest offensive success through the efforts of Pere’s leading captain, Enrique de Trastámara who in 1359 and again 1360 conducted large raids (cabalgadas) against Castilian territory. Pere decided to negotiate contracts not only with Enrique but also with Ferran, both of whom were to undertake further operations against Pedro. In this way, Pere hoped to take the war to his adversary. He also hoped that the plunder the two men obtained through their aggressive activities helped reduce the crown’s defensive costs. Remarkably, despite Trastámara’s willingness to seize the offensive, by 1361, the Aragonese king seemed prepared to throw his primary support behind Ferran, despite the fact that the latter had achieved relatively little military success up until that point. As a result, Pere issued a contract in which he promised to pay the salaries of 3,000 men for several months, who would then serve directly under his half-brother. In return, the prince agreed to invade Castile and give the king a percentage of all territory he managed to conquer.13 Royal hopes were soon dashed. On this occasion, as so many others throughout his lifetime, Prince Ferran failed to live up to his commitments. His Castilian expedition never materialized. Instead, he continued to amass 12  Kagay, “Dynastic Dimension,” 84–93. 13  A CA, Cancillería real, Pergaminos de Pedro IV, no. 2260. See also: Masiá i de Ros, Relación, 1:282–83, 291, 2:495–97; Zurita, Anales, 4:407–8 (IX:xxxi); Kagay, “Conflict,” 94.

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a lackluster service record over the course of the next two years, leading his royal half-brother to accuse him of disservice in an increasingly public manner. These royal accusations were fostered by the prince’s rivals—Trastámara and Cabrera.14 By the summer of 1363, the king was at the point of formally charging him with dereliction of duty. Pere planned to have his now-discredited principal commander taken into custody when he came before the royal court at the Valencian town of Castellón de la Plana. All hopes for a peaceful arrest were dashed on July 16 when Ferran and a few of these retainers resisted the royal officers sent to take him into custody. Shouting “it’s better to die than be a prisoner,” Ferran got his wish when he and some of these retainers were killed in the ensuing scuffle. The king tried to explain away his own responsibility for his half-brother’s bloody demise by declaring that Ferran had clearly been guilty of lèse majesté, and thus richly deserved his fate.15 3

Pere’s Principal Captains: Enrique de Trastámara

With Ferran’s demise, Pere lost a very troublesome relative and not very effective commander. Despite the prince’s death, the king retained his dream of using one of his leading captains as a means of invading the neighboring kingdom and possibly even challenging Pedro for the Castilian throne. As a result, the king now fully transferred his hopes to the exiled Castilian count, who proved very willing to accept the assignment. While Prince Ferran’s mediocre military record had disabused Pere of the idea that his half-brother might become Aragon’s military savior,16 Enrique de Trastámara proved to be a very different character. His military aggression was fueled by a deep hatred of his own half-brother, Pedro I. Hired to be one of Pere’s leading captains in 1357, the count attracted a large company of Castilian expatriates who served him for the next decade.17 14  Gutiérrez de Velasco, “Fortalezas,” 9–15; Kagay, “Conflict,” 95; Zurita, Anales, 4:445–48 (IX:xlii). 15  Ayala, Pedro I, 527–28 (1363, chap. vii) [For English translation, see Appendix II, doc. 65]; Pere III, Chronicle, 537–41 (VI:34–36). See also: Kagay, “Conflict,” 95; Lafuente Gómez, Dos Coronas en guerra, 124–25; Masiá i de Ros, Relación, 1:313; Zurita, Anales, 472–73 (IX:xlvii). 16  Kagay, “Dynastic Dimension,” 86–87; idem, “Pere III’s System,” 224–26. 17  Pere III, Chonicle, 2:510 (VI:8); Donald J. Kagay, “Pere III’s System of Defense in the War of the Two Pedros (1356–1366): The Aragonese Crown’s Use of Aristocratic, Urban, Clerical and Foreign Captains,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History [third series] 7 (2010): 195–232, esp. 215.

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As a result of the contract between the two men, Trastámara was granted control over many Aragonese, Catalan, and Valencian border towns from which he drew financial support. Two years later, Pere conferred upon him the very illustrious title “Captain General of the Kingdom of Aragon both on this side and beyond the sea.”18 The count’s two invasions (entradas) of Castile in 1359 and again 1360 so cemented his value in the king’s mind that three years later (1363), Pere promised to aid his military vassal in his drive to seize the Castilian throne. The pair also negotiated a marriage agreement between their children, Enrique’s son, Juan, and Pere’s beloved daughter, Elionor.19 Despite his successful rise through the Aragonese military hierarchy, the count of Trastámara shared many of the same frustrations as Pere’s other captains. While actually possessing a greater fiscal base than these native Aragonese military leaders, Enrique could only get provisions and wages for his men from urban revenues that proved increasingly difficult to collect as the war went on. Due to the resulting scarcity of funds, the count’s company suffered several “lean” periods each year. With Enrique’s growing importance to Aragon’s over-all war effort, the king employed a number of expedients to fill the funding gap, including the manipulation of the Mediterranean grain market, in an attempt to supply his principal captain.20 On the other hand, since such direct royal action was not always possible, Enrique and his troops found themselves relying on town councils for much of their support. In turn, urban authorities grew increasingly weary of the “unbearable damage caused by supporting so many troops for so long.”21 When Enrique began to take the funding problem into his own hands by sending collection agents into his towns, he found civilian resentment against him rising to an ever higher level. Even in 1357, his representatives had encountered such “injurious and threatening words” at Montblanch in Catalonia that they were afraid to enter the town or any of its surrounding villages. This hostility only increased over time. Six years later, the citizens of Castellon de Burriana in Valencia refused to recognize Trastámara’s right to tax them, even when the king issued a stern warning to the town council, calling upon the town’s inhabitants to support

18  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1381, ff. 205v–7. See also: Lafuente Gómez, Un reino en armas, 102. 19  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1543, ff. 66v, 70; Masiá i de Ros, Relación, 2:531–33 (doc. 233/169), 541–45 (doc. 237/181); Kagay, “Pere III’s System,” 215; Zurita, Anales, 4:457 (IX:xliv). For further discussion of Trastámara’ attacks on Castile in 1359 and 1360, see Chapter 7, Section 2. 20  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1387, f. 107. See also: Kagay, “Pere III’s System,” 218. 21  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1387, ff. 90v–91v, 96. See also: Kagay, “Pere III’s System,” 218.

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the count or face charges of treason.22 Despite the stormy relationship Enrique experienced with some of his urban vassals, the majority eventually came to accept him. As we have seen, Enrique would eventually make very good use of Pere’s offer to supply military assistance in return for the cession of Castilian territory to the Crown of Aragon. In 1366, the king and his general, with financial aid from France and the Avignon Papacy, managed to enlist the Free Companies. Under Enrique’s leadership, these battle-hardened men spear-headed a successful invasion of Castile, bringing about the overthrow of Pedro I and placing the crown on Enrique’s head. Pere’s principal military commander had become king of the realm he had been forced to flee a decade earlier.23 4 Pere III Stands on the Defensive As we have noted, despite Pere’s belligerent rhetoric immediately announcing that he would attack his “public enemy,”24 the Aragonese king decided early in the war to pursue a defensive strategy. He spent the first several years of the conflict developing this strategy by stationing leading vassals along his frontiers, and relying on a network of heavily-defended fortresses. Within the kingdom of Aragon, such strongholds stood along the river valleys of the Jalón, Jiloca, and Turia where they were linked by the fortified towns such as Calatayud, Daroca, Tarazona, and Teruel.25 By contrast, the defensive lines in Valencia farther to the south were less well-drawn. Nevertheless, neither region held out very well against an unceasing Castilian onslaught. The most heavily contested campaigns of the war were fought not in the interior but along the Mediterranean coast between Murviedro and Valencia as well as across the well-irrigated region that radiated eastward from the castle of Jumilla to the sea. It was a region that contained the towns of 22  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1387, ff. 25v–26; R. 1543, ff. 36v, 35, 36. See also: Kagay, “Pere III’s System,” 218–19. 23  See Chapter 9. For the author’s earlier articles on this invasion and its results, see also: Villalon, “’Seeking Castiles in Spain: Sir Hugh Calveley and the Free Companies’ Intervention in Iberian Warfare,” in Crusaders, Condottieri, and Cannon, Medieval Warfare in Societies around the Mediteranean, ed. L. J. Andrew Villalon and Donald J. Kagay (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 305–28 and “Spanish Involvement in the Hundred Years War and the Battle of Nájera,” in The Hundred Years War: A Wider Focus, ed. L. J. Andrew Villalon and Donald J. Kagay (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 3–74. 24  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, f. 177v; R. 1380, f. 171v. 25  Fisher and Bowen-Jones, Spain, 159–60; Gutiérrez Velasco, Fortalezas aragonesas, 7, 12, 30–31; Palacios Martin, “Frontera,” 490–92.

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Alicante, Elche, and Orihuela as well as the smaller settlements of Almanza, Cieza, and Hellin.26 Pere’s castles in both realms that were under attack (Aragon and Valencia), consisted of two varieties: on the one hand, there were the larger, more strategic fortresses for the most part directly under royal control, on the other, smaller sites occupation of which the crown entrusted to lesser nobles in exchange for a yearly payment to the crown.27 In the larger castles, Pere appointed the castellans, many from among the nobles who had supported him during the Unionist uprisings. He provided garrisons of roughly 100 men that he supplied and funded for up to three months. Any castellan chosen by the king had the responsibility to keep his fortress in good repair and to maintain a sufficient supply of water, food, and weapons. Pere gave them legal jurisdiction over these fortresses, as well as the surrounding settlements. When the Castilian war began, the monarch charged his officials with collecting urban revenues as well as extraordinary subsidies raised to support royal armies.28 Pere’s castellans undertook a heavy responsibility when they accepted command of a castle. Surrender to the enemy was regarded as equivalent to causing the “death of their lord,” an offense that merited the death sentence. Consequently, in most circumstances, such men were expected to die at their post; failure to do so rendered them guilty of “villainous and evil treason.”29 Even Pere’s wife and trusted administrator, Queen Elionor, was known to unleash her renowned temper on any official of hers who, through his “fault and negligence,” had lost one of her fortified sites.30 Throughout the Castilian war, Pere proved to be a severe task master. When circumstances left castellans no choice but to surrender, they often saw both their property and fiefs confiscated by the Aragonese crown as a punishment. Even if they later recovered their reputations and their property, the king never

26  Fisher and Bowen-Jones, Spain, 204–7; Enric Guinot Rodríguez, “Fronteras exteriores e interiores en la creación de un reino medieval: Valencia en el siglo XIII,” Studia historia: Historia medieval 24 (2006): 127–53, esp. 135–37. 27  Usatges, trans. Kagay, 71 (arts. 26–28); Cusoms, trans. Kagay, 2–4, 6 (arts. 2–4, 7). See also: Lafuente Gómez, Un reino en armas, 125–27. 28  Ferrer i Mallol, “Contribución,” 145–146; Lafuente Gómez, Un reino en armas, 128–30. 29  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1569, ff. 22v–23; Siete Partidas, ed. Burns, 3:384, 388 (Part. II, Tit. xviii, leyes. 2, 6). See also: María Teresa Ferrer i Mallol, “La tinença a costum d’Espanya en els castells de la frontera medidional valenciana (segle XIV),” Misceŀlánia de Textos Medievals 4 (1988): 1–102, esp. 60, 63 (docs. 16, 21); eadem, “Organización,” 151; Kagay, “Pere III’s System,” 200–1. 30  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1566, f. 62.

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fully trusted them again.31 The dangers were surely apparent to these officials, all of whom probably agreed with the thirteenth-century chronicler, Ramon Muntaner, that “one of the greatest dangers of the world is to hold a castle for a lord.”32 Despite any misgivings they may have had, such men must also have realized how important they were to their king’s defensive strategy. 5

Pere Turns to the Attack

In the spring of 1363, the Aragonese monarch began to shift away from what until then had been largely a defensive strategy and went onto the offensive. He gathered 2,000 knights and an unspecified number of infantry, marching south to relieve the kingdom of Valencia from the latest Castilian invasion.33 Although a direct confrontation with Pedro was briefly avoided when the two sides signed the short-lived treaty of Muviedro, the Castilian king quickly violated this latest agreement and launched a new attack on Valencia in early 1364. Pere responded by gathering one of the largest armies of the conflict numbering perhaps 20,000 men composed of noble, clerical, and urban units, commanded by his close relatives and other members of the high nobility. On the other hand, his most important adviser turned out to be “the foreigner”, Enrique de Trastámara, whose Castilian troops had served Aragon for almost a decade, during which time they had become Aragon’s main offensive threat against Castile. Although Pere’s army maneuvered throughout May and June in an attempt to force the Castilian king to fight a decisive pitched battle, such an engagement never materialized. In the end, although this campaign failed to produce any battlefield encounters or highlight any fighting skills on the part of the monarch, Pere did prove adept at recruiting a large force and seeing to its logistical support. In other words, the king did at least demonstrate his ability as a military manager.34 31  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 914, ff. 226v–27; R. 1211, ff. 95v–96. See also: Ferrer i Mallol, “Tinença,” 66, 71–71 (docs. 24, 32); eadem, “Frontera,” 292–3, 297–98; Kagay, “Pere III’s System,” 200–1. 32  Muntaner, Chronicle, trans. Goodenough, 2:453 (chap. 188). 33  Pere III, 2:537–38 (VI:34). See also: Ferrer i Mallol, “Southern Valencian Frontier,” 106–7; eadem, “Organización,” 175; Zurita, Anales, 4:461–64 (IX:xlv–xlvi). 34  Pere III, Chronicle, 2:544–49 (VI:40–41). See also: Kagay, “Battle-Seeking Commanders,” 71–74; Lafuente Gómez, Dos Coronas en guerra, 135–44. The principal members of Pere’s staff were family members, Prince Pere, Counts Jaume of Urgel, and Alfonso of Denia. The chief advisers from the upper nobility were the counts of Prades and Ampurias, and the viscount of Cardona.

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While amassing troops for the campaigns of 1363–1364, he also proved successful in melding together frontier companies, Castilian mercenaries, castle garrisons, and urban militias, none of which had much previous experience fighting alongside one another. In the past, the militias had been largely responsible for defending their own towns and while they had occasionally participated in cabalgadas raiding into enemy territory, few of them had ever served in a large army. Now the king incorporated them into his military machine under the command of frontaleros, the name appropriately given to officers with experience in fighting in a frontier setting.35 Within this quite sizeable force, officers served on various levels. The lowestranking, the “squad leaders” (cabos, caps), commanded up to forty men who could be deployed either on the battlefield or to serve as a castle garrison. They could also command units of crossbowmen.36 An official known as an adalid, functioned as a commander of light cavalry engaging in cross-border raids.37 To deal with social and legal issues that arose during the campaign, the leaders of the army appointed a number of constables (alguaciles, algutzirs) and endowed them with full power to adjudicate or negotiate differences that might occur between officers or officers and their men.38 6

Castile’s Army Structure

Unfortunately, in the case of Castile we know far less about the organization and recruitment of its armies than we do with Aragon. On the other hand, theoretical norms of army formation were clearly laid out in Alfonso X’s masterwork, the Siete Partidas, and Juan Manuel’s treatise on societal organization, the Libro de los Estados. In the first of these works, Pedro I’s royal ancestor clearly delineated the national duty of all men capable of bearing arms to help their king when he was attacked by a foreign enemy. On the other hand, this gathering of a national host, very similar to the Catalan provision for a mass call-up, known as Princeps namque, was seldom carried out during the fourteenth century. 35  A CA, Cancillerís real, R. 1379, ff. 80, 112v, 123–24. See also: Lafuente Gómez, Un reino en armas, 135–36. 36  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1149, ff. 101v–2. See also: Lafuente Gómez, Un reino en armas, 137, 140. 37  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1386, f. 35. See also: Lafuente Gómez, Un reino en armas, 138– 39. For the adalid’s role in Christian border war against Spanish Islam, see Siete Partidas, 2:451 (Part II, Tit. xxiii, ley. 19). See also: Rojas Gabriel, Frontera, 243; Torres Fontes, Instituciones, 154. 38  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1380, ff. 22r–v; Lafuente Gómez, Un reino en armas, 139.

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Instead, it came to be replaced by individual militias composed largely of local urban nobility, the so-called caballeros villanos.39 In his law code Alfonso X also discussed the qualities of army commanders and the duties of their subordinates. For his part, Juan Manuel, expanding on the Siete Partidas, explained how the various parts of Castilian armies were supposed to operate when on campaign. To what extent Pedro profited from these theoretical treatises is uncertain. But there can be little doubt that his role as military commander was eased as a result of the many army reforms his father had enacted, in particular those laid down during the cortes of Alcalá in 1348.40 As with Alfonso, Pedro commanded forces consisting of both permanent and temporary contingents of cavalry and infantry, some of which were raised by individual captains who made war their profession. From the king’s point-of-view the principal strength of his army rested with its core of permanent troops. First among these were members of the royal “retinue” (mesnada), who occupied a place around the king during ceremonial occasions or when his army took to the field. These men comprised the royal body guards closest to the king in a manner similar to English household knights. Upon occasion they also served as royal advisers, bodyguards and diplomats.41 Another group of professional warriors who swelled the royal host belonged to the various crusading orders, men who had dedicated their lives to warfare.42 All of the army’s cavalry were divided between heavily and lightly armored horsemen who received different salaries and fought with different weapons. On campaign, they were either arrayed in “close formations” (haces) or fought scattered across a wide area (en tropel).43 Some cavalry units in Pedro’s army came from the urban militias and normally fought under the banners of their home towns.

39  S iete Partidas, ed. Burns, 2:405–6 (Part II, Tit. xix, ll. iv–vi). See also: Máximo Diago Hernando, “Caballeros hidalgos en la Extramadura castellana medieval (Siglos XII– XV),” EEM 15 (1992): 31–62, esp. 36; Ladero Quesada, “Organización militar,” 213–14; idem, “Organización militar de la Corona de Castilla en la baja Edad Media,” in Castillos medievales del Reino de León, ed. Hullera Vasco-Leonesa (Madrid, 1989), 11–34, esp. 25–26. 40  Nicolás Agrait, “Castilian Military Reform under the Reign of Alfonso XI (1312–50),” JMMH 3 (2005): 88–126; idem, “Experience,” 26; Estow, Pedro, 9. 41  Christopher A. Candy, “A Growing Trust: Edward III and his Household Knights, 1330– 1340.” in Hundred Years War (Part II), 49–62; Francisco García Fitz, “La composición de los ejércitos medievales,” in XVII Semana de Estudios Medievales. Nájera, del 31 de Julio al 4 de Agosto de 2006, ed. José Ignacio de la Iglesia Duarte (Logroño, 2007), 85–146, esp. 90–93; Prestwick, Armies, 167–68. 42  Forey, Military Orders, 86. 43  Agrait, “Monarchy,” 62–65; Macdonald, “Don Fernando,” 36–37.

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Infantry composed a far larger portion of Pedro’s army than did cavalry. These “footmen” (gentes de pie) came from several sources and carried out a number of military functions. The king recruited the largest such contingents from Castile’s frontier towns and villages. As inhabitants of these sites, they had to answer summons whether urban or royal to take part in military “expeditions” ( fonsados).44 Other infantrymen came out of the castle garrisons regularly maintained by clergy, nobles, and town councils. Such forces normally served under their castellans or local leaders.45 A Castilian army also contained units referred to ballesteros, a word which seems to encompass not only crossbowmen but also other infantry armed with a pike, not unlike halberdiers of a later period.46 Besides regular foot soldiers, Pedro also depended on contingents of “irregulars” (almogáveres), who lived off the land while operating as scouts and commandos. Pedro followed his father’s example with the use of artillery, primarily in the form of trebuchets. Trebuchets and mangonels were routinely built, repaired, and transported within the war zone, from cities such as Murcia. There is also some indication that the king employed early gunpowder weapons, the socalled bombardas and lombardas. These not only fired large projectiles, but also spread clouds of shrapnel that proved dangerous to front-line troops, even those wearing armor. With the increased use of “engines of war,” the “engineer” (artillero) became an important member of Castilian armies, a new reality reflected in how much better he was paid than other men in the king’s service.47

44  García Fitz, “Composición,” 117–24. 45  García Fitz, “Composición,” 96–101, idem, “Una frontera caliente: La guerra en las fronteras castellano-musulmanas (siglos XI–XIII)” in Identidad y representación de la frontera en la España medieval (siglos XI–XIV ). Seminario celebrado en la Casa de Velásquez y la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (14–15 de diciembre de 1998), ed. Carlos de Ayala, P. Buresi, and Philip Josserand (Madrid, 2001), 159–79; idem, “Notas sobre la tenencia de fortalezas: Las castillos del concejo de Sevilla en la Baja Edad Media,” HID 17 (1990): 55–81. 46  Agrait, “Monarchy,” 66; Antonio Torremocha Silva, Algeciras entre la Cristianidad y el Islam: Estudio sobre el cerco y la conquista de Algeciras por el ray Alfonso XI de Castilla, asi como de la ciudad y sus términos hasta el final de Edad Media (Algeciras, 1994), 132. 47  D PI: 169 (doc. 109); Pere III, Chronicle, 2:524–25 (VI:24). See also: Agrait, “Monarchy,” 68; Fernando Arias Guillén, “¿Hubo una revolución militar en Castilla en la primer mitad del siglo XIV?” Edad Media. Revista de Historia 15 (2014): 195–216; Weston F. Cook, “The Cannon Conquest of Nasrid Spain and the end of the Reconquista,” in Crusaders, Condottieri and Cannon, 253–82, esp. 258–59; Macdonald, “Don Fernando,” 34–35.

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215

Leadership in the Castilian Army

Far more than his Aragonese counterpart who remained on the defensive until very near the end of the conflict, from early on Pedro I adhered to the advice laid down in the Siete Partidas instructing a commander to be “bold in action, but also in speech.”48 Especially during the opening years of the conflict, the Castilian king led his military forces in person. Despite assuming the mantle of supreme command, much of the every-day administration of the army fell to the advisers and functionaries of the royal court. While carrying out their normal duties, they also saw to the immediate needs and concerns of the campaign. Unlike what was happening in Aragon, the Castilian king does not seem to have used his parliaments to provide funding for the conflict. Consequently, these royal officials assumed the responsibility for raising money.49 During the course of the war, leadership within the Castilian army underwent a degree of transition. Many of the duties once performed by the king’s standard bearer (alferez major del rey), including battlefield direction of troops, fell increasingly into the hands of other military commanders, such as the chief judiciary (merino mayor) and the constable (condestable).50 Also exercising command were the principal military governors (adelantados mayores), each of whom exercised jurisdictions over an extensive region of the kingdom (Castile, León, Asturias, Galicia, and Murcia). Throughout the conflict with Aragon, the most important of these officials was the one who controlled Murcia and Castile’s southernmost frontier with the kingdom of Valencia. While adelantados exercised fiscal and judicial functions within their own territories, they also commanded the not insignificant companies that they brought into the field.51 Below these upper ranks stood Pedro’s trusted young knights or pages (doncels) who often led their own companies of horsemen. Such knights might serve under one of their own number who bore the title “captain of the pages” 48  Siete Partidas, ed. Burns, 2:434 (Part. II, tit. xxii, l. i). 49  Agrait, “Monarchy,” 103–5; Rogelio Pérez Bustamente, La administración de los reinos de la corona de Castilla (1230–1474), 2 vols. (Madrid, 1976), 1:278–80; David Torres Sanz, La administración central castellano en la baja Edad Media (Valladolid, 1982), 189, 209. 50  Agrait, “Monarchy,” 105–6; Barbara Holmgreen Firoozye, “Warfare in Fifteenth-Century Castile,” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 1974), 23; Juan Torres Fontes, “Los condestables de Castilla en la Edad Media,” AHDE 41 (1971): 57–112, esp. 62–63; Torres Sanz, Administración, 74–75. 51  Agrait, “Monarchy,” 107–8; Pérez Bustamente, Gobierno, 1:170–77, 235, 289, 292, 345, 289; Braulio Vázquez Campos, Los adelantados mayores de la frontera de Andalucía, (Seville, 2008); idem, “‘Frontera’ y adelantamientos en época de Alfonso X,” HID 30 (2003): 513–35.

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(alcalde de donceles).52 In addition to its aristocratic commanders, the Castilian army often contained a group of sub-commanders including the leaders of infantry (almocadénes), the captain of cavalry (adalid), and the logistics officer (quadrillero). While serving in specific roles assigned to them by the king, these officers also led small contingents that operated either within the main army or in carrying out separate functions, such as scouting.53 In addition to his own countrymen, Pedro also utilized auxiliary contingents supplied by allies such as Granada, Navarre, and Portugal. While fighting in the Castilian army, they continued to serve under their own commanders and banners. During the early years of the conflict, Pedro built a reputation as an effective war leader. As time passed, however, this began to erode. The decline was apparently due to several factors: the king’s loss of several subordinates whom he truly trusted, his growing distrust of the rest of his supporters, bordering on paranoia, and increasing fear of his own people growing out of his brutal actions. 8

The King’s Generals: Juan Fernández de Henestrosa

In the first years of his reign, Pedro replaced his father’s advisers and several Portuguese courtiers attending his mother, María, with men of his own. His new leading adviser was Juan Fernández de Henestrosa, the scion of a noble family from near the city of Valladolid in northern Spain. Due both to his loyalty in these early years as well as his relationship to Pedro’s famous mistress, María de Padilla, Hinestrosa soon began to emerge as the king’s most influential adviser. From 1353 onward, he held the major offices of chamberlain (camerero mayor) and chancellor of the privy seal (canciller de la sello de la poridad) in which capacity, he conducted peace talks with the king’s baronial enemies in 1354. Throughout these years, he also served as a diplomat and military leader until his sudden death at Araviana in 1359.54 Unquestioning support of the king during the marriage crisis and the first civil war with his aristocracy made Henestrosa the man the Castilian king trusted most during the first decade of his reign.55 In 1357, he negotiated with 52  Agrait, “Monarchy,” 104–05. 53  Siete Partidas, ed. Burns, 2:436–38 (Part. II, Tit. xxii, ll. v–vii). See also: Andrés Serrano del Toro, “Tres oficios de frontero en la comarca de los Vélez durante la Edad Media: El caudillo, el adalid, y el almocadén,” Revista Velezana 32 (2014): 8–17; Juan Torres Fontes, “El adalid en la frontera de Granada,” AEM 15 (1985): 345–66. 54  Ayala, Pedro I, 500 (1359, chap. xxiii). See also: Díaz Martín, Oficiales, 89–91; Estow, Pedro I, 82–83. 55  Ayala, Pedro I, 447–49, 457 (1354, chaps. xix–xxi), 463–64 (1354, chap. xxxii).

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the cardinal of Boulogne at Tarazona and again at Almazán two years later in an unsuccessful attempt to arrange peace between Castile and Aragon.56 As time passed, Henestrosa increasingly took on a military role. He accompanied the monarch to the siege of Toro in early 1356, an event that ended the first civil war. Throughout the War of the Two Pedros, the chamberlain continued to serve as a royal envoy, habitually functioning as a “good and true knight.” While the absence of Castilian sources leaves it unclear how much fighting he actually engaged in, Ayala’s chronicle does indicate that Henestrosa was present on several campaigns with the king during which he tried to bring about a reconciliation between Pedro and his half-brother, Fadrique, grandmaster of Santiago.57 And he spent the last months of his life as the military commander of Almazán on the Aragonese border. In fall, 1359, when Enrique de Trastámara led a sizeable raiding party into Castile, Pedro’s chief adviser, now leading companies of horse and foot, caught up with the invader near the Araviana River. The resulting battle, fought in September, proved to be a disaster for Castile, a number of whose leaders, including the army’s commander, were killed. Ayala’s chronicle leaves the possibility that the defeat of the superior force may have been due, in part, to hostility and jealousy felt toward the chamberlain by some of his subordinates. Several of these men may have arrived on the scene, but failed to enter the fray while its outcome was still in doubt.58 In the view of one modern scholar, the loss of this trusted adviser had a major effect on Pedro’s government. Thereafter the king seemed “incapable of effectively rearranging his administration … [which led to an era] characterized … [as much] by the king’s distrust as by the government’s lack of direction.”59 Following Henestrosa’s death, the decline of Pedro’s military leadership begins to become increasingly apparent. Royal failings as a commander seems to have resulted in large part from a growing fear of traitors within both his court and his army.60 Indecisiveness and an ever-growing record of cruelty continued to undermine the allegiance of his subjects, many of whom joined his half-siblings in defecting to Aragon. Despite a superiority in numbers, the Castilian monarch repeatedly proved unwilling to trust the wager of battle, due in large part to a royal perception of widespread disloyalty among his own troops and subjects. Pedro’s paranoid mistrust of Castilian commanders became particularly 56  Ibid., 479 (1357, chap. vi), 484–85 (1358, chap. vii), 487–88 (1359, chap. ii). 57  Ibid., 469–70 (1356, chap. i). 58  Ibid., 469–70 (1369, chap. xxii). See also: Lafuente Gómez, Dos Coronas en guerra, 78–81. 59  Luis Vicente Díaz Martín, Pedro I el Cruel (1350–1369) (Gijón, 2007), 171–72. 60  Kagay, “Battle-Seeking Commanders,” 77; Zurita, Anales, 4:289 (IX:l).

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obvious in 1364–1365 when he possessed clear advantages in manpower and position over Pere III, but repeatedly refused to fight. 9

The Ingratitude of Princes: Gutier Fernández de Toledo

While a number of Pedro I’s longtime supporters eventually met with their royal master’s fatal ingratitude, perhaps the most egregious example is furnished by one of the king’s principal captains during the early years of the War of the Two Pedros, Gutier Fernández de Toledo. Even before Pedro succeeded to the throne in 1350, Toledo had played a role in the prince’s life, having served as a member of his household.61 At the first reorganization of royal office holders, the young monarch appointed Gutier Fernández chief of his royal bodyguard (guarda mayor).62 The king then entrusted his new chief bodyguard with the command of forces, including both ships and men, sent out to deal with his illegitimate half-brothers, sons of the royal mistress, Leonor de Guzmán, and their powerful partisans. Most of these nobles, including Doña Leonor, had sought sanctuary in fortified places throughout southern Spain, one of which was the port city of Algeçiras not far from the frontier with Granada. Landing troops there, Toledo appealed to the townspeople and with their help secured control of this strategic spot for the king. Although offered the prestigious governorship of Algeçiras, he declined, choosing instead to serve at court.63 Some months later, it was Toledo who escorted Leonor de Guzmán to her final prison in Talavera, though he appears to have had nothing to do with her murder.64 Toledo’s career temporarily went into decline in 1353, due to his close connection with the king’s principal adviser during these early years, Juan de Alburquerque, who had himself fallen out of royal favor as a result of having promoted Pedro’s marriage to a French princess.65 Nevertheless, by the following year, Toledo was firmly back in the young king’s good graces, having stood 61  Ayala, Pedro I, 410, 507 (1350, chap.xiv; 1360, chap.xvii). During the opening year of the reign, the chronicler mentions several members of the family, including Gutier Fernández, as being royal favorites (privados), a status that probably resulted from the family’s support during the years before his succession. A decade later, in his final letter to Pedro, the condemned man reminded his royal master of this long and loyal service, begun in the days when the royal mistress had held sway over his father; when those who took the side of Alfonso’s legitimate wife and son, like the Toledos, had experienced very real danger. 62  Ayala, Pedro I, 406 (1350, chap. viii). 63  Ayala, Pedro I, 406–7 (1350, chap. viii). 64  Ayala, Pedro I, 412 (1351, chap. ii). 65  Ayala, Pedro I, 439 (1353, chap. xxix).

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by Pedro at a moment when many if not the majority of the realm’s leading nobles joined the short-lived coalition that attempted to seize control of Pedro and separate him from his beloved mistress, María de Padilla. When the contending royal and aristocratic parties met at Tejadillo, it was he who spoke for the king.66 During the next half dozen years, Toledo’s role as a trusted servant of the crown continued to grow. In addition to membership on the royal council, at one time or another, he held the posts of alcalde mayor of the city of Toledo, royal camarero mayor, and repostero mayor.67 Despite exercising advisory and administrative functions, throughout his career Toledo was first and foremost a soldier. During the opening years of the reign, he participated in the sieges and encounters where the king overcame the internal resistance of his aristocracy.68 Following the outbreak of war against Aragon in 1356, he took on increasing military duties. He commanded the garrison stationed in the border city of Molina, a major site from which attacks were repeatedly launched against the enemy.69 Following the Castilian defeat at Araviana in 1359, Pedro gave Toledo charge along the entire frontier between the battling kingdoms.70 He sent word to all of the garrison commanders that they were to obey Toledo’s orders as if these “came from his own body.” In this same period, Gutier Fernández undertook several diplomatic missions for the crown in an attempt to put an end to the conflict which was becoming ever more brutal and expensive.71 It was these activities that got him into trouble with the crown. When a meeting with the Aragonese representative, Bernal de Cabrera, fell through, Toledo decided he would try to drive a wedge between the two major Aragonese commanders, Enrique de Trastámara and Prince Ferran, who were already showing signs of a growing hostility toward one another. Holding a long meeting with Ferran, “he promised [the prince] on behalf of the king of Castile that he would be pardoned and given many royal gifts if he were to return to Castile and swear allegiance to the king.” According to Ayala, this conversation with the exiled prince aroused Pedro’s suspicions: “and this afterwards did great damage to Gutier Fernández with the king who suspected him of having a different intention.”72 Despite a career of loyal service, Toledo was given no royal consideration when, early in 1360, Pedro came to suspect his captain of conspiring with the 66  Ayala, Pedro I, 451, 454–55 (1354, chap. chaps. xvii; xxxii). 67  Ayala, Pedro I, 439, 454 (1353, chap. xxix; 1353, chap. xxii). 68  Ayala, Pedro I, 428–29 (1353, chap. i). 69  Ayala, Pedro I, 494, 505 (1359, chap. x; 1360, chaps. xi-xii). 70  Ayala, Pedro I, 500 (1360, chap. i). 71  Ayala, Pedro I, 501 (1360, chap. ii. 72  Ibid.

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enemy.73 The monarch dispatched the unsuspecting nobleman on what Don Gutier thought was to be yet another round of negotiations with the Aragonese. Instead, upon his arrival at the ambassadorial gathering in the town of Alfaro, his supposed collaborators, acting on secret royal orders, arrested him. Having allowed their prisoner just enough time to write a short letter to the king, they rushed him to the block, afterwards sending his head back to Pedro.74 73  Ayala, Pedro I, 501. 74  Ayala, Pedro I, 506–7. The text of Toledo’s cautionary letter is reproduced in Ayala’s chronicle, page 507. We have already quoted it in chapter 4.

Chapter 12

Personnel, Payment, Equipment, and IntelligenceGathering Activities of the Mid-Fourteenth Century Spanish Armies 1 Introduction The documents in the Archivo de la Corona de Aragón permit us to state with some confidence how Aragonese troops were raised, organized, equipped, and paid. By contrast, in the comparative absence of Castilian documentation, we can frequently only surmise that the monarch of that kingdom, Pedro I, probably used some of the same methods as his father, Alfonso XI, when putting together his own armies. During the War of the Two Pedros, despite the gaps in Castilian documentation, we can confidently assume that there were some significant differences between the military systems devised by Pedro and his father as well as between the Castilian and Aragonese during their long conflict. 2

Military Recruitment in Aragon

In the Crown of Aragon, the king gathered a fighting force, much as he did the members of a parliamentary assembly: he dispatched a letter of summons that informed customary members of a royal host that the kingdom was prepared to go to war. In this document, the king was supposed to lay out the reason for the conflict as well as when and where the members of the army were to gather.1 Pere III’s chancellery sent these military summonses to all the clergy, nobility, and town councils who also attended the king’s various parliaments. Pere’s documents ordered the addressees to send military units to specific muster points where they thus could be organized to aid the king in “defending and protecting our realms and lands,” while inflicting as much damage as possible on their adversary to the west. Summoned parties were seldom given more than a month to answer this call to arms.2 The summons often bound recipients to bring into the field military companies of a size that had become customary over the years. On the 1  Thomas N. Bisson, “The Military Origins of Representation,” AHR 52, no. 2 (April, 1966): 1198– 1218, esp. 1203–4; Kagay, “Development,” 362–63. 2  Customs, 36–42 (arts. 37–39); Kagay, “Defense,” 19; idem, “Pere III’s System,” 203. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004425057_014

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other hand, it might actually spell out the number of troops needed, the type of armor they would wear, and even the number of horses they would have to bring.3 Because many of these men served under feudal obligations, the limit of their required service was not always specified in the summons. In addition to formal calls for military service, the Aragonese king might issue emergency orders to military units that were already in place, including cavalry, castle garrisons, and crossbowmen. In these cases, the crown dispatched criers (cridas) to the groups liable to being called up.4 The number of soldiers who actually served in Iberian armies varied considerably. Christian expeditions against Spanish Islam during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries could entail recruitment of up to 15,000 troops; but a century later; the forces being regularly called up usually involved fewer than 2,000 men.5 While several of Pere III’s Mediterranean expeditions against Sardinia and Majorca did involve armies of over 10,000, most of his campaigns in the War of the Two Pedros were considerably smaller, sometimes numbering fewer than 3,000 men.6 Although Pere’s forces were drawn from several different sources during the conflict with Castile, there was a general movement away from feudal levies to paid service. To understand the significance of this change, it is necessary to glance back at the earlier system that it replaced. Like other parts of Charlemagne’s “empire” of the early Middle Ages, Catalonia, one of three realms that would later compose the Crown of Aragon, spawned a nobility that was totally feudal in character. Vassals (homines, fideles) held a fief ( fevum, terra de feo) in exchange for a number of services they were to render, including the provision of military forces at their own expense when summoned out by their lord. This military relationship was considered to be in effect throughout the lord’s lifetime and often called upon the vassal to protect his lord’s life and property. Though, on the surface, specific agreements between individuals seemed to end with the death of one or other of the parties, the feudal connection normally bound 3  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1382, ff. 205r–v; R. 1383, ff. 135–37; R. 1384, f. 9; R. 1386, ff. 104v–5v. See also: Bernard S. Bachrach and David S. Bachrach, Warfare and Medieval Europe c. 400–c. 1453 (London and New York, 2017), 129–30; Lafuente Gómez, Dos coronas en guerra, 203–5, 212–13, 225–26 (docs. 35, 39–40, 49). 4  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, ff. 145v–47v. See also: Lafuente Gómez, Un reino en armas, 77–78. 5  Ferrer i Mallol, “Organización militar,” 169–71; García Fitz, Castilla, 137–41. 6  Agrait, “Monarchy,” 69–70; Ferrer i Mallol, “Organización militar,” 171–77; Lafuente Gómez, Un reino en armas, 91–94.

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families and could continue for generations.7 From this Catalan feudal network, later Aragonese kings, who also ruled as counts of Barcelona, could require all of Catalonia’s military forces to serve them. This included not only the great noble families that came from the older Catalan counties in the north but also the younger noble houses that grew up in the region farther south that became known as New Catalonia.8 The situation in Aragon was originally somewhat different than that which prevailed in Catalonia. Here, twenty extended clans produced the great nobles (barones, ricoshombres) of that kingdom. The most important of these used their territorial wealth to supply troops for Pere’s armies during the Castilian war. Later, companies of horsemen bound to their great lords by feudal ties also, became an important component of Pere’s armies.9 These Aragonese and Catalan troops owed the king up to two months a year of military service, either through service in garrisoning castles or in a royal host. On the other hand, with Catalan expansion across the Mediterranean during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, this feudal model became increasingly unworkable for two principal reasons: first, Aragonese kings often found themselves engaged in warfare for more than two months a year, thereby exceeding the feudal commitment of their vassals. Second, feudal levies that could be deployed for war on the homefront could not be called on for “foreign” service; that is, service outside of their own realm. This increasingly serious problem of who could be called up to fight the king’s wars in distant lands and for how long they could be compelled to serve would ultimately be addressed by the use of monetary sources to pay soldiers’ wages. Towns, perched on the Aragonese and Valencian frontiers with Castile, provided another important source of Pere’s military manpower. Moderately-sized communities often controlled a number of hamlets in their neighborhood. These small aldeas originally had to fight under the command and banners of their “mother towns.” Despite attaining considerable autonomy when they managed to establish a self-governing organization or communidad, the crown could still require them to repair urban walls, garrison local castles, and

7 Usatges, trans. Kagay, 12–13, 119–20 (docs. 3, 5); LFM, 2:10–11 (doc. 498). See also: Bonnassie, Slavery to Feudalism, 152–59; Josep Trench Odena, “La escribanía de Ramon Berenguer III (1097–1131): Datos para su estudio,” Saitabi 31 (1984): 11–36, esp. 36. 8 Usatges, trans. Kagay 43. See also: Bonnassie, Slavery to Feudalism, 150–52; O’Callaghan, History, 468; Sobreques i Vidal, Barons, 65–119. 9 Chaytor, History, 117; Kagay, “Structures,” 5–6; O’Callaghan, History, 468.

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supplement royal hosts; in fact, the same demand it could make of the “mother towns.”10 All townsmen and residents of the hamlets (aldeanos) served under urban commanders. The vast majority of these men fought as infantry. Although very few served as cavalry; those who did received royal pay vouchers to help maintain their mounts.11 In the later stages of the Castilian conflict, Pere found it most efficient to appoint military captains who would then have complete control over frontier regions and the settlements within them. This situation not infrequently spawned bloody disputes between royal contingents under their crown-appointed captains and urban citizens who increasingly viewed the soldiers stationed near them as rapacious “foreigners.”12 The clergy in the Crown of Aragon served Pere throughout every period of his warlike reign. Aragonese kings had come to rely on the principal crusading orders (Santiago, Calaltrava, Alcantara, and the Hospitallers) for war funding and troops. Their efforts were supplemented by the Catalan and Valencian orders of San Jorge and Montesa, which had been founded by the Aragonese crown some decades before the conflict with Castile. While most of the members of these ostensibly religious institutions had taken at least minor orders, they also had extensive military experience. The large tracts of land they possessed supported sizeable companies of horsemen that served in a royal host. As in Castile, the military orders in the Crown of Aragon were “always ready to make war and peace whenever and with whomever … [the king] commands.”13 Besides these warrior-clerics, Pere also relied on members of the regular clergy to supply military fees and, in at least some cases, to actually take the field. Perhaps the most significant of these men was the archbishop of Zaragoza, Lope de Luna. This prelate’s service to the crown was so “profitable and necessary” that in 1363 Pere III was forced to write Pope Urban V to have the archbishop released from administrative responsibilities in Rome in order to immediately return to Spain and resume his military duties.14 As a senior 10  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1387, ff. 109v–10, 127r–28v, 134v–35, 139, 172. See also: Jaime Carauana Gómez de Barreda, Indice de los pergaminos y documentos insertos en ellos, existtentes en el Archivo de la ciudad de Teruel (Madrid, 1950), 34, 37–38; Kagay, “Pere III’s System,” 204–7; idem, “Two Towns,” 35, 39; Powers, “Two Warrior Kings,” 117–8. 11  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1385, f. 127v; R. 1387, ff. 9v, 97. See also: Masiá i de Ros, Relación, 2:530–31 (doc. 232/154); Kagay, “Pere III’s System,” 205; Lafuente Gómez, Un reino en armas, 37–43. 12  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1383, ff. 132r–v; R. 1387, ff. 140v–41, 150r–v, 191. See also: Kagay, “Pere III’s System,” 207–10. See Chapters 11 and 13 for a fuller discussion of these disputes. 13  Forey, Military Orders, 50; Ferrer i Mallol, “Organización militar,” 187; Kagay, “Pere III’s System,” 210–11; Sainz de Maza Lasoli, Orden de San Jorge de Alfama, 58–61, 259–60. 14  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1187, f. 156. See also: DS, 454–55 (doc. 599); Lafuente Gómez, Un reino en armas, 56.

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member of the Luna clan, the archbishop was familiar with the administration of warfare in all of its forms. Besides regular duty in the royal host, he oversaw extensive territories along of the Aragonese frontier with Castile carrying out both functions until advanced age slowed his fulfillment of these duties. As a prominent enemy of the “iniquitous and wicked plans” of the Castilian king, Archbishop Lope used all of his ecclesiastical influence to raise troops among the various military orders in Aragon and his family position to summon vassals of his extended clan. While these troops were not infrequently members of the clergy, they were treated like other soldiers of the crown, receiving exemption from all taxes on their journeys to the front and indemnification for crimes they might commit on campaign.15 They also received the standard reimbursements for damage to their horses and property, while being paid salaries for their military service similar to the other members of the royal host.16 Unlike Pedro I, the Aragonese monarch had few allies whose declared friendship could bring a steady stream of troops into royal service. Surprisingly, the most important contingent of foreign troops serving under the royal banner were all Castilian, most of whom had been driven from their own kingdom by its vengeful ruler. These forces were commanded by two principal captains: Count Enrique de Trastámara, Pedro I’s illegitimate half-brother and Pere’s own half-brother, Prince Ferran. After the count’s homage to the Aragonese king “by hand and mouth” in November, 1356, the pair negotiated a detailed agreement in the next year which guaranteed Trastámara the full use of several Aragonese, Catalan, and Valencian towns as a source of revenue and supplies. Pere eventually saw this steady captain as an effective cats-paw against Pedro I. By 1363, he made his first commitment to back Trastámara in an attempt to win the Castilian throne—something the count would accomplish three years later.17 Pere’s other principal captain, his own half-brother, Ferran, had originally emerged as an important Castilian leader, fighting on the side of Pedro I. Showing himself to be a mediocre commander during the first year of war, Ferran defected a second time, rejoining the Aragonese in late-1357. Though greatly popular with many of the Castilian expatriates who were fighting for

15  Sainz de Maza Lasoli, Orden, 61–62, 274–79 (docs. 51, 53). See also: Ferrer i Mallol, “Organización,” 187; Kagay, “Pere III’s System,” 210–11. 16  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1201, f. 26v. See also: Sainz de Maza Lasoli, Orden, 256–57, 269–70, 281–82 (docs. 40–41, 49, 56); Kagay, “Pere III’s System,” 212–13. 17  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1543, ff. 66v, 70; Varia, R. 68, ff. 69–74. See also: Masiá de Ros, Relación, 2:444–51 (doc. 213/78bis), 541–45 (doc. 237/181); Kagay, “Pere III’s System,” 213–15; Zurita, Annales, 4:472–73 (IX:xlvii).

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Aragon, the prince showed more talent at intrigue than as a warrior defending the frontier. In summer, 1363, he met his death at the hands of his royal brother.18 In his defense of Aragon against Castilian invasion, Pere III also depended on another method for gathering and paying troops—the invocation of the national defense clause. What was referred to in the Crown of Aragon as Princeps namque, a national call to arms, was much like the arríere ban in France, ordering all men of fighting age to come together when the realm was threatened by a foreign invader. Although the custom took written form as early as the twelfth century,19 it was rarely invoked before the thirteenth century.20 For his part, Pere III activated Princeps namque at least twelve times between 1359 and 1371.21 As the conflict wore on, the Aragonese and Valencian cortes and Catalan corts evolved into essential sources of military manpower and funding. In return for their contribution, the Aragonese monarch found it necessary cede some of his royal power to the parliamentary delegates whose administration of certain phases of the war eventually gave to these assemblies greater independence. Later in the conflict, the funding and recruiting and of up to 3,000 knights and an equal number of infantry not infrequently fell under the supervision of the clerical, noble, and urban estates (brazos) of the realm.22 This development did have its drawbacks because the fighting men raised by his parliaments were not always of the same quality as those the crown recruited. Pere often complained that their troops were “not trained in war … only [managing] to consume supplies and waste [his] property.”23 The king and his bureaucrats accused these soldiers of using all possible means to avoid summonses and put off military service for as long as they could. On one 18  Ayala, Pedro I, 526–27 (1363, chap. v); Pere III, Chronicle, 2:537–41 (VI:34–36). See also: Masiá i de Ros, Relación, 2:499–500 (doc. 226); Kagay, “Pere III’s System,” 221–38; Zurita, Anales, 4:472–73 (IX:xlvii). 19  Usatges, trans. Kagay, 80 (art. 64). See also: Kagay, “National Defense Clause,” 57–58; Ladero Quesada, “Organización militar,” 213–14; Lafuente Gómez, Un reino en armas, 43–44; Francisco Luis Pacheco Caballero, “El usatge, Princeps namque, los Cortes y los juristas,” Initium: revista catalana d’història del dret 10 (2005): 225–46. 20  Kagay, “National Defense Clause,” 65–73. 21  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1519, ff. 1–73v, 98–118; R. 1520, ff. 12–21v, 70–80, 82–83v; R. 1520 [second section], ff. 5–12; Pere III, Chronicle, 3:522–23 (VI:22). See also: Ferrer i Mallol, “Organización,” 159–60; Kagay, “National Defense Clause,” 74–75, 83; Sánchez Martínez, “Invocation,” 311–18, 324–29. 22  See Chapter 13 for a fuller discussion of parliamentary developments in the Crown of Aragon during the Castilian war. 23  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1383, ff. 16v–17. See also: Lafuente Gómez, Un reino en armas, 51.

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occasion in 1359, Pere’s dismay with these parliamentary recruits is obvious when he told the delegates that the war would progress more successfully if they would simply supply him with money and let him choose his own troops. The unpredictable nature of these forces became apparent when the villagers used every means possible to avoid answering a parliamentary summons, even after the king sternly threatened corporal punishment for such dereliction of duty.24 3

The Payment of the Troops

Starting well before the reign of Pere III, Aragonese monarchs had begun to think outside the traditional recruitment box in raising armies or conducting the crown’s foreign adventures, such as those in Sicily (1282), Murcia (1296– 1304) and Muslim Almeria (1309–1310). The old feudal methods of recruitment clearly could not keep pace with the larger foreign campaigns.25 The hiring of mercenaries filled this gap for a time, but proved far too unpredictable for any Aragonese commander to rely on for long. With the reign of Jaume II and his long record of international warfare, a new solution for stable recruitment of soldiers became essential. In 1321, when the Aragonese monarch attempted to move his upcoming invasion of Sardinia beyond the planning stage, he soon found that traditional means of recruitment were inadequate to support his territorial ambitions. In his frustration, in 1323, he summoned a Catalan corts to Barcelona which ultimately granted him a huge war subsidy (acorriment, sou). This model of waging war as a paying proposition rather than one based on feudal allegiance provided a clear precedent which Jaume’s grandson, Pere III, would enthusiastically embrace.26 It was during Pere’s campaigns of the 1340s in the Balearics and Roussillon against his half-brother, Jaume III of Majorca (r. 1329–1349), that the Aragonese king came to realize how weak feudal allegiance had become among troops 24  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1185, ff. 130, 146v–47. See also: Lafuente Gómez, Un reino en armas, 79. 25  Saíz Serrano, “Guerra,” 66–70. 26  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 308, ff. 228–29, 268r–v. See also: CAVC, I, pt. 1: 272–76; Arribas Palau, Conquista, 397–83 (docs. 19–20); Pablo Cateura Bennasser, “La Mediterania de la Corona d’Aragó, segles XIII–XVI & VII centenari de la sentencia arbitral de Torellas, 1304–2004,” in XVIII CHCA, 2 vols., 1:209–24; Francisco Cesare Casula, “La Corona de Aragón en el Mediterráneo (siglos XIII–XV): Cerdeña,” Historia 16, no. 109 (1985): 65–72; Saíz Serrano, “Guerra,” 70–71; Vicente Salavert Roca, “La isla de Cerdeña y política internacional de Jaime II de Aragón,” Hispania: Revista Española de Historia 39 (1950): 211–65.

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who increasingly demanded payment for their service. During the summer of 1344, when Pere brought several noble companies into the Pyrenees, he became convinced that unless he provided a daily wage for his knights, they might well abandon the campaign, leaving him only a small cadre of court troops to do the fighting. After unsuccessfully seeking aid from French mercenaries, he gave in and took the irrevocable step of paying his own soldiers, even those with feudal ties to the crown.27 By the time, Pere attacked Sardinia in 1355–1356, he had come recognize a hard truth: paid troops could be trusted more than their feudal counterparts.28 When the Castilian war began shortly after this Sardinian campaign, the Aragonese king’s initial attempts once again to utilize feudal forces bore out what he had learned in the earlier conflict. As a result, he increasingly attempted to shift the struggle onto a paying basis, utilizing for this purpose every source of ready income including loans, parliamentary grants, and the temporary royal appropriation of ecclesiastical revenues. As the war progressed, even feudally raised levies began to receive a daily wage to compensate them for military service.29 By the end of the conflict in 1366, the evolving practice of military payment had hardened into a series of ordinances that would regulate the compensation of Aragonese armies for the next century.30 In 1365, Pere turned over administration of military finances to several designated officials of the royal court, including the seneschal of the Crown of Aragon, the governors of the three individual realms that made up that crown (Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia) and the scribe of accounts. Among other things, they and their delegates were responsible for drawing up and checking muster rolls, setting collective “estimates” (estimes) for the value of war horses, and issuing reimbursements for their loss.31 Nor did the end of the War of the Two Pedros terminate Aragon’s wartime move toward a paid military force. In 1369, three years after the conflict ended, Pere enacted a statute that in future established military salaries according to the equipment employed on campaign. Thus, heavy cavalry drew 7 sous as a

27  Pere III, Chronicle, 1:273, 312, 342, 354–56 (III:61–62, 95, 147–48, 164); Saíz Serrano, “Guerra,” 72–73. 28  Pere III, Chronicle, 2:454–91 (V:1–43); Giuseppe Meloni, “Su alcuni feudatari maggiore e minore in Sardegna all’epoca di Pietro il Cerimonioso,” Studi Sardi 20 (1966–1967): 285–98, esp. 292–94; Zurita, Anales, 4:285–86 (VIII:lxii). 29  Saíz Serrano, “Guerra,” 74–76. 30  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1162, f. 127v. See also: Lafuente Gómez, Dos Coronas en guerra, 202–03 (doc. 33). 31  Lafuente Gómez, Dos Coronas en guerra, 76–77.

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daily wage while the light cavalry received 5 sous.32 In 1385, the king also attempted to insert the issue of military pay into normal administrative practice at the same time he insisted on measures to reduce the rampant malfeasance that plagued all the royal military operations during the last decades of his life.33 The royal changeover to paid troops was mirrored among the aristocracy. It became the norm among the households of great nobles such as Alfonso, count of Denia and marqués of Villena, who despite a relatively lackluster military performance, emerged from the conflict with Castile with greatly enhanced power. During these years, he expanded his household by gathering many retainers, each of whom received a salary. These payments (quitacions) took the form of a daily wage as well as reimbursement for any losses incurred in his service. The count also paid castellans for the maintenance of his fortresses in northern Valencia. All of his paid men accompanied Alfonso as a private army during the Nájera campaign in 1367 and again during military actions such as his invasion of Navarre in 1398–1399.34 The journey from the payment of troops to the formation of a permanent professional army in Spain would not be an overly long one. Within a centuryand-a-half, campaigns across Europe were being fought by ever larger Spanish armies, composed of infantry, cavalry, artillery, and quartermaster units, all of whom were paid a daily wage for their service.35 4

Military Recruitment in Castile

As we have noted a number of times, due to the paucity of sources, historians working on medieval Castile are severely hindered when trying to provide detailed descriptions of military recruitment and organization. For example in dealing with Aragon, we are certain that when war began the crown sent out military summonses to call up its forces. While the same must have been true in Castile, very few documents of this sort survived there. Nevertheless, it is clear that Alfonso XI issued summonses to his own officials and to the town 32  Ibid., 77–78. 33  Ibid., 78–80. 34  Saíz Serrano, “Clientela,” 106–7, 111–12, 124–26, 129. 35  André Corvisier, Armies and Societies in Europe, 1494–1789, trans. Abigail T. Siddall (Bloomington, Ind., 1979), 41–46; Hans Delbruck, The Dawn of Modern Warfare, vol. 4 of The History of the Art of War, trans. Walter J. Renfroe, Jr., 4 vols. (Lincoln, Neb., 1990), 13–19; Hale, War, 71, 109–18; William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society Since A.D. 1000 (Chicago, 1982), 73–74.

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councils that provided troops for the royal host.36 It is a fair assumption that his son, Pedro, did the same. Unfortunately, surpassingly little hard evidence of this remains. Perhaps because of Aragonese and Catalan influence on the notarial practices of neighboring Murcia, a few of Pedro’s calls for troops from that realm survive from the period of Castile’s war with Aragon. These summonses almost always demand the service for a period of three to six months for from fifty to a hundred men, many of whom seem to have been archers or crossbowmen. These documents usually gave their recipients a little over a month to report to Castilian frontier towns or to captured Valencian outposts. In general, such units supported Pedro’s invasions of Aragon while carrying out “evil and damage there.” The king also used them for attacks on specific objectives such as the besieged Valencian town of Orihuela. For such duty, military salaries ranged from one to eight maravedis to be paid by the town council that sent the troops or by the regional commander under whom they fought. Refusal to serve or desertion from one’s post could result in severe penalties on the individual, or in some instances, on the corporate body that sent them to the front.37 When the date for the muster of a Castilian army approached, its contingents would stand before the king and his officers, who conducted an inspection (alarde) of all horses, weapons, and armor.38 In this way, the royal commander could see for himself that the summoned units were properly equipped. Leadership roles in such armies were generally filled by Castiles’s great nobles, many of whom held sizeable landed estates. These great lords brought with them large companies of horsemen, who were their vassals and fought under their family banners. They normally took financial responsibility for their retinues, but defrayed some of these costs with the money fiefs (soldadas) that Alfonso XI had established during his campaigns to wrest the Strait of Gibraltar from Muslim control.39 Because of the Castilian crown’s continuing need to recruit troops, lords of the “middle lands” lying between Castile and Aragon, but not fully controlled by either kingdom, converted this military necessity into a lucrative

36  D  ocumentos de Alfonso XI, ed. Francisco de Asis Veas Arteseros, vol. 6 of CODOM, 6: 368 (doc. 323). See also: Agrait, “Monarchy,” 36–38. 37  C DPI, 4:44–45 (doc. 1.127), 97–98 (doc. 1.181); 139–40 (doc. 1.237); 190–91 (doc. 1.291); 199–200 (doc. 1.294); 230–31 (doc. 1.332); DPI, 158, 160–61, 185–86 (docs. 94, 97–98, 128). 38  Agrait, “Monarchy,” 36; García de Valdeavellano y Arcimus, Curso, 328. 39  Agrait, “Monarchy,” 39.

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growth industry.40 The greatest of these “middle marchers,” was Juan Manuel, who could on occasion provide the Castilian crown a retinue of up to 1,000 knights. Although the crown lost their services when Juan Manuel died in 1349, a half-dozen years before the War of the Two Pedros, it was able to compensate for this loss by calling upon Castile’s other great lords, who could put up to 6,000 knights in the field at any one time.41 Many of these baronial troops that Alfonso XI had depended on, however, were largely unavailable to his son because of the bitter relations between the new king and his aristocracy, in particular, the growing number who chose to follow the king’s half-sibling, Enrique de Trastámara.42 Ordinarily, neither the father nor his son brought with them the full force they were capable of gathering. On rare occasions Alfonso XI raised an army of over 10,000 men, he normally took the field with fewer than 6,000. And while on one occasion, Pedro recruited what seems to have been over 50,000 soldiers and sailors to conduct the great naval offensive of 1359, he too normally commanded considerably smaller armies of 3,000 troops or less. Baronial companies that served in the Castilian army were largely made up of lesser members of the aristocratic class, known variously as infanzones, hidalgos, and caballeros. Many of these men were the younger sons of great nobles and looked on war as an opportunity to gain new wealth or territory which might advance their status. The long war between Castile and Aragon forced Pedro I to increase his calls for service by these lower-ranking nobles as well as commoners (pecheros). The aristocrats often answered such summonses since having a good military record might help them achieve or attain royal recognition of their knightly status.43 Since there is no proof that Pedro ever summoned his cortes for military purposes, he was forced to rely on feudal troops far more than his Aragonese counterpart. 40  For these nobles of “middle territories,” see Giménez Soler, Juan Manuel, Biografía, 89–90, 92–93; Kagay, “Dynastic Dimension,” 77–96; idem, “Pere III’s System,” 221–28; Gregorio Sánchez Doncel, “Un gran señor medieval: Don Juan Manuel,” AUA 1 (1982): 87–116, esp. 108–14. 41  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1032, ff. 160r–v; Ayala, Pedro I, 478 (1357, chap. iv), 499–500 (1359, chap. xxii). See also: Ferrer i Mallol, “Organización militar,” 175; Lafuente Gómez, Dos coronas en guerra, 78–80. 42  Ayala, Pedro I, 454–56 (1354, chap. xxxii), 460–69 (1355, chaps. i–x). 43  C DPI, 4:207–8 (doc. 1.308). See also: Agrait, “Monarchy,” 40–41; Michael J. Crawford, The Fight for Status and Privilege in Late-Medieval and Early Modern Castile, 1465–1598 (University Park, Penn., 2014), 1–16; Marie-Claude Geribet, Los noblezas españoles en la edad media (Madrid, 1997), 77–78; Angus MacKay, “The Lesser Nobility in the Kingdom of Castile,” in Society, Economy and Religion in Late-Medieval Castile (London, 1987), Study IV, pp. 159–80, esp. 160–65.

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While the Castilian king also normally depended on his regular clergy to provide money and supplies for the general war effort, he did not overlook their ability to put small groups of soldiers into the field. Consequently, in 1360, Pedro notified the bishop, dean, chapter, and minor clergy within the bishopric of León that they were to supply fifty horsemen for service in a royal force then gathering at Almazán.44 These troops, along with a sufficient number of horses, suitable weapons, and all other items necessary for military service, had to report to the king’s host on the date he specified. To assure that this unit arrived on time, Pedro insisted that the Leonese bishop send a number of his clergy to accompany the troops. In 1364, the king wrote the urban council of Sahagun to insist that they follow the example of the monastery located in their community whose abbot had already pledged 100 crossbowmen for royal service. These recruits would not be listed on the royal “pay-list” (nomina), but instead were vassals of the abbot or the town fathers.45 The crusading orders of the Hospital, as well as the Iberian orders of Alcántara, Calatrava, and Santiago supplied the crown with a significant source of soldiers throughout the war with Aragon. Though these clerical warriors had been established in the Iberian Peninsula as guardians of the Christian community against Islamic invasion, they were eventually drawn into struggles between Spain’s Christian states.46 All of the military orders active in Spain were organized as permanent armies with several commanders who manipulated the huge land grants (encomiendas) that both the crown and the faithful had conferred upon them. Many of these encomiendas spread across frontier districts bordering Islamic territory. The revenues from these lands helped support the orders’ armed forces.47 The Iberian orders, in particular, were drawn into military conflicts between Christian monarchs. During Pedro’s reign, they frequently provided him with up to 2,000 knights for military campaigns.48 This king’s use of such troops was often complicated by personal motivations. In 1342, Pedro’s half-brother, Fadrique received the mastership of Santiago at age nine from his father, Alfonso XI. Due to this significant appointment and other royal grants the young grand master emerged as one of Pedro’s greatest rivals for power during the baronial uprisings between 1350 and 1355. 44  C DPI, 4:44–45 (doc. 1.129). 45  Ibid., 190–91 (doc. 1.291). 46  Bachrach and Bachrach, Warfare, 139–40; Forey, Military Orders, 79–81, 89–90. 47  Forey, Military Orders, 49–50; José Vicente Matellanes Merchán, “La estructura de poder en la Orden de Santiago, siglos XII–XIV,” EEM 23 (2000): 293–319, esp. 304–5; Daniel Rodríguez Blanco, “La organizació institucional de la Orden de Santiago en la Edad Media,” HID 12 (1985): 167–92, esp. 179–81. 48  Agrait, “Monarchy,” 41–42; Forey, Military Orders, 81.

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Throughout these years, Pedro became increasingly concerned by Fadrique’s power and wealth and eventually took steps to eliminate the threat. After the defection of Prince Ferran to Aragon early in 1358, the frustrated monarch of Castile turned to Fadrique for help against the strategic outpost of Jumilla. Despite conquering the town, Fadrique was unable to overcome the king’s lethal suspicions. These led directly to his brutal murder in May, 1358, almost immediately after having won the victory.49 Pedro never disregarded the military advantages Santiago and other crusading orders provided him. Shortly after Fadrique’s death, the king took steps to solidify these benefits under his control by appointing as the new grand master his mistress’s brother, Diego García de Padilla, a man who proved no threat to him.50 Militias mustered from Castile’s cities and towns comprised another important component in Pedro’s military establishment during his conflict with Aragon. These bodies had originally been established to defend urban centers from Muslim attack and to carry on border raiding against their Islamic neighbors. They were largely composed of cavalry gathered through a general mobilization (apellido) under a traditionally recognized commander (adalid) who directed the extended raid (cavalgada) and divided all plunder that it generated.51 The king called up urban units to serve in royal hosts either for a specified term or until the campaign itself ended. As with most contingents that made up Pedro I’s armies in the Aragonese war, those provided by Castilian cities and towns were mustered at the beginning of an offensive. Royal directives issued to urban councils specified that they provide the services of both horsemen with sufficient mounts and weapons as well as crossbowmen “with as many

49   Coronica del muy alto et muy Cotolico rey Don Alfonso el Onceno, ed. Cayetano Rosell, CRC,Vol. 1, BAE, 66, 173–392, esp., 346–48 (chap. 273); idem, Pedro I, 481–83 (1358, chaps. ii– iii). See also: Alfonso Antolí Fernández, “El infante Don Fadrique en Jumilla,” Murgetana, 88 (1994): 3–23, esp. 9–12; Estow, Pedro, 190–91; Pedro Luis Pérez de los Cobos, “El infante Don Fadrique Maestre de Santiago,” MMM 10 (1983): 45–59, esp. 49–51; Zurita, Anales, 4:352–53 (IX:xvi). 50  Enrique Rodríguez-Picavea Matilla, “Nobleza y sociedad en la Castilla bajo medieval. El linaje Padilla en los siglos XII–XIV,” Studia Historica, Historia Medieval 22 (2015): 121–53. 51   Miguel-Angel Ladero Quesada, “Las ciudades de Andalucía occidental en la Baja Edad Media: Sociedad, morfología y funciones urbanas,” in La ciudad hispanica durante los siglos XIII al XVI: Actas del coloquio celebrado en la Rabida y Sevilla de 14 al 19 de Septiembre de 1981, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1985-), 3:69–107, esp. 84–88; Rojas Gabriel, Frontera, 243; Torres Fontes, Instituciones, 154, 173–74.

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crossbows and quarrels as they considered necessary.”52 The levies were required to appear when the army underwent its initial inspection and received a specified daily wage to be paid either by the crown or the town council that sent them. Once in service, urban troops could only leave the army with the king’s permission. As with all other members of the royal host, any failure in this regard could bring immediate charges of treason, punishable by beheading.53 In fact, urban crossbowmen did not always serve with royal expeditions that ventured into enemy territory, but instead functioned principally as members of castle garrisons or participants in smaller offensives. The vast majority of these troops were not recruited from among cities’ ruling classes, but hailed instead from the lesser artisans and workers. While they were listed on the king’s pay roll, the town councils normally paid their daily salaries.54 Provided either through foreign alliances or as mercenaries, soldiers who were not Castilian played a role in Pedro’s armies, sometimes greater than their numbers might imply. One of these foreign contingents fought with the Castilian army due to a strange and short-lived agreement between the Castilian and Navarrese kings that was signed in 1362. When offered an alliance by Pedro I, one that he believed would help bolster his position against France, Carlos II of Navarre jumped at the chance. Much to his chagrin, the Navarrese monarch soon found himself embroiled in hostilities with Aragon. Shortly afterwards, Carlos freed himself from the Castilian alliance, and pulled back the Navarrese troops that had served with Castile. The campaigns of 1362–1363 also featured other foreign troops. During that period, the Portuguese royal family, closely related to the Castilian king through his mother, María, provided 300 horsemen for an expedition against 52  T  he Code of Cuenca: Municipal Law on the Twelfth-Century Frontier. trans. J.F. Powers (Philadelphia, 2000), 165–80. See also: Agrait, “Monarchy,” 42–44; Bachrach and Bachrach, Warfare, 232–36; Manuel González Jiménez, “Las milicias concejiles andaluzas (siglos XIII–XV),” in La organización militar en los siglos XV y XVI: Actas de las II jornadas nacionales de historia militar (Seville, 1993), 227–41, esp. 234–35; Manuel Graizard Coronado, “Las milicias locales en la Edad Media,” Boletín de Real Academia de Historia [hereafter BRAH] 55 (1909): 353–62; Miguel-Angel Ladero Quesada, “La organización militar de la Corona de Castilla durante los siglos XIV y XVI,” in La incorporación de Granada a la Corona de Castilla, ed. Javier Castillo Fernández (Granada, 1993), 195–229; Powers, Society, 97–101. 53  C DPI, 4:139–40 (doc. 1.237), 199–200 (doc. 1.294); DPI, 7:161 (doc. 98). 54  C DPI, 4:230–31 (doc. 1.332); DPI, 158, 160, 185–86 (docs. 94, 97,128). See also: Agrait, “Monarchy”, 44; Juan Manuel Bello León, “Las milicias concejiles castellana finales de la Edad Media. El estado de la cuestión y algunos datos para contribuir a su estudio,” Medievalismo 19 (2009): 287–331, esp. 302–10.

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the Aragonese village of Sos. Portugal’s greatest contribution to the Castilian war effort, however, had already come several years earlier, when during the great naval offensive of 1359, the Portuguese crown had provided a large squadron of galleys.55 The foreign troops utilized by Pedro that generated the most complaints among both his enemies and his own subjects were those supplied by the Granadan ruler, Muhammad V. These Muslim soldiers participated actively in many land and naval campaigns against Aragon. With a reputation for savagery on the battlefield, Islamic light cavalrymen were often so feared by Pedro’s Christian communities that he had to issue specific instructions on how his subjects were to treat his Muslim allies. As purveyors of a “most cruel war” that the Castilian king wished to wage against Aragonese and Valencian towns, the king had some concerns about safety of Muslim troops in the midst of his own people. In this vein, he wrote to the council and officials of Murcia in 1364, commanding them to give the Muslim cavalry “good lodgings” for free and provisions for a reasonable price. Any violent disputes between the two groups would bring stern reprisals from the crown. While Muhammad’s help was of great importance to Pedro, it proved in some ways to be a two-edged sword. For example, despite the Granadan ruler’s pledge of 3,000 knights for use against Enrique II in 1366, Pedro never received these forces. He also found it increasingly difficult to control Muhammad who took advantage of Pedro’s absence from Spain in 1366–1367 to reconquer much of the territory lost to Castile by his rival, Bermejo, in 1362.56 The mechanism of putting armies into the field during the War of the Two Pedros reflected changes in military recruitment that became more common as the fourteenth century passed into the fifteenth. This new way of staffing armies saw the replacement of feudally-based troops with those who were bound to individual lords by contracts that specified duties and salaries. What was happening in Spain may have mirrored events on the larger European scene. As the Hundred Years War progressed north of the Pyrenees, feudal armies were giving way to forces paid to participate for a given period or a specific campaign. Rulers and great barons gathered these men by contracting either with individual soldiers or with captains charged with raising a certain number of men, who were to be paid wages for their services.57 55  Ayala, Pedro I, 494 (1359, chap. x); 526 (1363, chap. iv). See also: Fowler, Medieval Mercenaries, 61. 56  D PI, 161–62 (doc. 100); Ayala, Pedro I, 514–15 (1361, chaps. vii–viii). See also: Estow, Pedro, 208, 253–54. 57  Candy, “A Growing Trust,” 49–62; Anthony Goodman, “The Military Subcontracts of Hugh Hastings, 1380,” English Historical Review [hereafter EHR] 95, no. 374 (Jan., 1980): 114–20;

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Military Intelligence Gathering

Throughout their ten-year conflict, Pere and Pedro were desperate for intelligence of all sorts concerning enemy numbers and troop movements, especially along their frontier where most of the fighting took place. While both sides probably used many of the same sources, as usual we know more about their functioning in the case of Aragon. Pere III’s military information came to him from town councils and other overt sources as well as through the covert actions of spies.58 This early clandestine service undoubtedly included Christian and Muslim subjects of both realms who routinely made their way through the war zone while in the pursuit of personal profit or in some cases, when carrying out religious and humanitarian duties. Into the second category fell members of the military orders whose holdings spread across the borders of Castile and the Crown of Aragon. There were also professional ransomers (alfaqueques) who traditionally traveled back and forth through the peninsula’s Christian and Muslim lands in order to free their coreligionists held in Islamic captivity.59 Another set of potential secret agents sprang from among the professional guides (exeas) who led merchant caravans across Aragon and Castilian into the kingdom of Granada. The merchants themselves, who were also important J. Russell Major, “Bastard Feudalism and the Kiss: Changing Social Mores in Late Medieval and Early Modern France,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17, no. 3 (Winter, 1987): 509–35, esp. 527–31; Philip Morgan, “Going to the Wars: Thomas, Lord Morley in France, 1416,” in Hundred Years War (Part II), 285–314; J.W. Sherborne, “Indentured Retinues and English Expeditions to France, 1369–1380,” EHR 79, no. 313 (Oct., 1964): 718–46, esp. 740–41; Saíz Serrano, “Guerra,” 34, 43; Scott L. Waugh, “Tenure to Contract: Lordship and Clientage in Thirteenth-Century England,” EHR 101, no. 401 (Oct., 1986): 811–39. 58  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, f. 93v; R. 1381, f. 192; R. 1382, f. 83; Cartas reales [Pedro IV], caja 40, no. 6003. 59  The scattered territorial possessions of Iberian military orders and the necessity of travel between them to maintain efficient administration of these holding was intensified during the 1350s by casualties among leaders such as Master Fadrique of Santiago who died by Pedro’s hand in 1358. Ayala, 481–83 (1358, chap. iii); ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1160, f. 33v; DS, 442 (doc. 581). For ransomers, see James William Brodman, “Medieval Ransoming Law on the Medieval Spanish Frontier,” Speculum 60 (1985): 318–30; idem Ransoming Captives in Crusader Spain: The Order of Merced on the Christian-Islamic Frontier (Philadelphia, 1986), 7–8; Juan Torres Fontes, Instituciones y sociedad en la frontera murciana-granadina (Murcia, 2004), 37–38, 269. For other types of spies in medieval Spain, see Ivan Giménez Checa, “Los espias de Vaticano,” Clio: Revista de Historia 72 (2007): 18–30; Joan Manuel Ibars Buira and Jordi Nomen Recio, “Unas espias en la Edad Media,” Aula de innovación educativa 201 (2011): 83–90; José Manuel Rodriguez García, “Agentes secretas en la Reconquista y como se espiaban moros y cristianos,” Clio: Revista de Historia 65 (2007): 26–37.

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members of the black market that flourished along the frontier, in all likelihood sold information to both sides.60 Any and all of these travelers were well placed to observe enemy military operations and bring back word of this to their monarch. As a result, they not infrequently conducted their business under royal protection.61 While the two principal adversaries in the War of the Two Pedros seem to have spent time and money in attempting to keep their own intelligence channels open, they may also have tried to stymie enemy spying efforts.62 For example, in those of his realms that supported large numbers of Castilian settlers or refugees, Pere attempted to protect his own military operations from prying eyes by moving this foreign element away from any crucial localities.63 Even with such precautions, the constant movement of Jewish emigrants between aljamas on both sides of the border, (much of it facilitated by royal safe-conducts), brought with it a steady transfer of information, military and otherwise. While few of the Jewish refugees, who took to the road in search of profit or safer lives or both, actually took up the dangerous trade of espionage, some, like Salomon de la Cavalleria, scion of an important Jewish family of Zaragoza, made money from the sale of information. Though never himself playing the role of a spy, Cavalleria was clearly a receiver of illicit intelligence. He used his contacts among the Jewish community to collect such information after which he delivered it to the Castilian king. When Pere III heard public rumors of these “sinister undertakings against Our crown,” he had the alleged spy master investigated and presumably punished.64 As the War of the Two Pedros continued, fear of Castilian espionage within the Crown of Aragon motivated both the king and his officials to occasionally arrest men suspected of spying on the basis of very little evidence. Royal administrators in Zaragoza accused Todros Levi, a Jewish resident of that city, of being involved in espionage. The charge was based solely on Levi’s ties to a suspected Castilian operative identified in the document only as Açach. In fact, Levi seems to have done nothing more than put up Açach at his home on one occasion when the latter had traveled from Castile to Zaragoza. Nevertheless, this single incident was deemed sufficient to bring down upon this generous 60  C  ode of Cuenca, 206–7 (chap. xli:2); DPI, 7:165–66 (doc. 104). See also: Brodman, Ransoming, 7–8. 61  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1384, f. 79v. See also: Burns, “Guidaticum,” 51–113. 62  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1380, ff. 187v–88. 63  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1149, f. 192. See also: Epistolari, 155–58. 64  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1076, ff. 79r–v. See also: Diago Hernando, “Movilidad,” 274–75. On January 17, 1365, Pere instructed Pere Terreni, a “doctor of laws,” to investigate this matter, but there is no clear indication what came from this investigation.

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host a verdict of exile from all of Pere’s realms. Only after four years of Levi consistently protesting his innocence was he finally freed from charges of treason, when the crown relented and declared that he was only guilty of poor judgement.65 Surely the most ludicrous of such rushes to judgment occurred in 1362 when a vicar of the Catalan village of Berguedá accused a local Jew of being a spy for Pedro I. This immediately led to the confiscation all of the man’s possessions, including a “certain musical instrument.” After hearing of this arrest, Pere ordered the suspects released and quashed any prosecution. The Jew in question was clearly not an intelligence agent, but rather a troubadour and retainer of Pere’s principal military commander, Enrique de Trastámara, who had accompanied Enrique on several occasions.66 While this case pointed to the doings of an over-zealous official, it also reflected the determination of the king to protect the reputation of his principal captain. The greater information we have about spying by Aragonese Jews once again reflects the far greater survival of Aragonese sources. These alleged Jewish spies hardly seem to have been professional intelligence agents. If anything, they were opportunists and impromptu sellers of information who quickly realized how lucrative the trade could become. No matter the real numbers of “spies” (exploratores), Pere and his officials continued to fear the damage they might inflict on the Aragonese war effort. Though mentioned only briefly in the sources dealing with the War of the Two Pedros, the use of intelligence agents appears to have been on the rise. During the following century, such activity would become a standard part of military practice, playing a not insubstantial role in the late-fifteenth-century conquest of Granada and in Spain’s sixteenth-century Italian wars. Spying, like the use of gunpowder artillery, would become an important facet of war, and, as such, was given increased attention in a burgeoning number of Spanish military manuals. In these instructional works, good intelligence seen as a significant component of victory. Spying activities, like scouting, were normally carried out by soldiers who “threw themselves into dangers of all kinds” by disguising themselves in order to observe enemy formations and movements, and then getting this vital information back to their commanders. What is more, to an increasing extent commoners, both men and women, were able to gather much the same intelligence with less trouble “since they are not observed very much nor are they considered of much importance.”67 65  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1678, f. 89. See also: Diago Hernando, “Movilidad,” 276. 66  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1180, f. 49. See also: Diago Hernando, “Movilidad,” 275. 67  Diego Navarro Bonilla, Cartas entre espías e intelegencias secretas en el siglo de los validos. Juan de Torres-Gaspar Bonifaz (1632–1638) (Madrid, 2007), 186–87, 200–04.

Chapter 13

Parliamentary Developments during the War of the Two Pedros 1 Introduction By the mid-fourteenth century when the War of the Two Pedros was fought, both belligerent powers possessed well-developed representative assemblies or parliaments. In the case of eastern Spain, there were several, one for each of the realms that comprised the Crown of Aragon. Known in Aragon, Castile, León, and Valencia as the cortes, in Catalonia the national assembly was the corts. Most parliamentary scholars date the beginning of these institutions to the twelfth century. The first such Spanish meeting to include the towns alongside the clergy and nobility met in León in 1188.1 From the start the cortes functioned not only as the adviser of the of the king, but also as a provider of funds needed to administer his kingdom in peace and (increasingly) in war. This chapter will examine the way in which such bodies influenced and were influenced by the prolonged conflict between Aragon and Castile. The functioning and evolution of such assemblies in Aragon can be better understood than those in neighboring Castile, given the different way in which each side used them and the different degree to which the parliamentary sources have been preserved. 2

Parliamentary Evolution and Military Funding in Aragon

While the War of the Two Pedros had manifold effects on the very different societies that constituted the Crown of Aragon, one of its clearest influences was on the region’s various parliaments. By the late-fourteenth century, the parliament already had a history dating back a few generations in the lands of eastern Spain. Springing from the expanded assemblies of the counts of Barcelona and the kings of Aragon, such meetings acquired the generic name of “full court” (plena curia) before the end of the twelfth century. They were 1  Castile and León were periodically ruled by separate though related kings until the reign of Fernando III in the thirteenth century. After this time, the two realms were controlled by a Castilian royal family until the fifteenth century. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004425057_015

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summoned to solidify political ties between the ruler and his principal subjects, promulgate peace and truce laws as well as consider other matters of common utility (comunis utilitatas) and common good (comune bonum).2 Under one of the region’s greatest kings, Jaume I “the Conqueror,” the assembly moved from the status of “an occurrence, an occasion, and not yet a separate court” toward existence as a permanent institution.3 Much of the parliament’s work under Jaume was to supply money and manpower for his massive military campaigns in the Balearics, Valencia, and Murcia. Indeed, this expansion had even given rise by 1261 to another parliamentary institution in the Crown of Aragon: the cortes of Valencia.4 While all of eastern Spain’s representative institutions engaged in “discussion and deliberation” (tractatu et deliberatione) in which the king demanded the “advice” (consilium) of those present, they also provided an invaluable source of support for all phases of the king’s military endeavors.5 Whether the “general court” (curia generalis), as these assemblies came to be called in Latin, supplied an entire fleet or army or simply provided a limited amount of operating funds, these institutions became important supports for Jaume’s waging of war.6 During the reign of his son, Pere II, and the latter’s inept offspring, Alfons II, what had been an occasional meeting of the parliament called at the king’s pleasure became a regular event in all of the realms of the Crown of Aragon, except Majorca.7 2  For the emergence of such expanded courts across Europe and in eastern Spain, see CAVC, I pt. 1:41, 68–71. See also: Luis Felipe Arregui Lucea, “La Curia y las cortes en Aragón,” Argensola 4 (1953): 1–36, esp. 4–9; J.C. Holt, “The Prehistory of Parliament,” in The English Parliament in the Middle Ages, ed. R.G. Davies and J.H. Denton (Philadelphia, 1981), 1–28, esp. 4–6; J.E. Jolliffe, “Some Factors in the Beginnings of Parliament,” in Historical Studies of the English Parliament, ed. E.B. Fryde and Edward Miller (Cambridge, 1970), 1:31–69, esp. 46–50; Donald J. Kagay, “The Development of the Cortes in the Crown of Aragon, 1064–1327,” (Ph.D. diss., Fordham University, 1981), 39–66; idem, “The Parliament of the Crown of Aragon as Military Financier in the War of the Two Pedros,” JMMH 14 (2016): 57–77, esp. 57–58; R.H. Lord, “The Parliaments of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period,” CHR 16, no. 2 (July, 1930): 125–44, esp. 128–29; Antonio Marongiu, Medieval Parliaments: A Comparative Study, trans. S.J. Woolf (London, 1968), 23–26; G.O. Sayles, The King’s Parliament of England (New York, 1974), 21–24. 3  H.G. Richardson and G.O. Sayles, Parliaments and Great Councils in Medieval England (London, 1961), 9. 4  C AVC, I, p. 1:37–39. See also: Kagay, “Development,” 128–29; Antonio Marongiu, Medieval Parliaments: A Comparative Study, trans. S.J. Woolf (London: 1968), 74. 5  C AVC, I, pt. 1:63, 77. See also: Thomas N. Bisson, “The Military Origins of Representation,” AHR 52, no. 2 (April, 1966): 1198–1218. 6  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 22, f. 105; BD, 73–77, 289–98 (chaps. 50–54, 388–400). See also: CAVC, I, pt. 1:121–22, 137–39; Kagay, “Development,” 97–99, 111–12, 138–29, 132–35, 139–41. 7  Real Academia de la Historia, Colección de Salazar y Castro, Ms. 139 (Anales de Aragón), f. 10 (art. 29). See also: CAVC, I, pt. 1:147 (art. 18); Kagay, “Development,” 169, 189, 201–6.

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When Pere III came to power in 1336, he, like all of his predecessors since Jaume, promoted a system that guaranteed money to the crown for episodes of warfare ranging from border skirmishes to major campaigns some of which might endure for months. The immediate sources of military funding open to Aragonese kings were both public and private. Various imposts closely associated with war-making provided a rapid but often disappointingly small monetary return. Other taxes, loans, free gifts, and arbitrary exactions from Christians, Jews, and Muslims also provided funds, but even these proved inadequate for extended period of conflict.8 If fighting against the Spanish Muslims was in the offing, Aragonese kings could tap into ecclesiastical revenues such as the “tithe” (decima), but only for a specific time. The user of such funds was formally declared to be a crusader about to fight one of the peninsula’s Muslim states. Consequently, there could be no leeway in the use of these church funds. They were not meant to be used to fight against fellow Christians. Jaume I would learn this lesson in the 1240s when Pope Innocent IV (r. 1243–1254) characterized him as an “indecent and shameful despoiler of papal subsidies” for not using church funds against Islamic foes.9 On the other hand, despite these other sources of financial support available to the crown, Pere III increasingly came to depend upon money provided by his parliaments. Not only did this funding play a major role in keeping the war effort afloat through a bloody and expensive decade, it also provided the various parliamentary bodies a golden opportunity to greatly increase their own power and influence. Until the fourteenth century, the funding power of eastern Spanish representative assemblies had been strictly limited. They were empowered to grant only such customary dues as the bovatge and monedaje. The bovatge could only be demanded by a king once in his reign. The monedaje would be collected over a seven-year period in return for a royal promise not to debase coinage. Neither impost was designed to finance warfare. Despite the strict limitations on the use of such parliamentary dues, the demands of Jaume’s frequent wars and those of his successors had placed ever-increasing pressure on eastern Spanish assemblies to enter the business of war financing.10 8   For Pere’s fiscal policies concerning the war, see Chapter 10, Section 3. 9  Kagay, “Army Mobilization,” 103; O’Callaghan, Reconquest, 33–35, 155–58. 10  Thomas N. Bisson, Conservation of Coinage: Monetary Exploitation and its Restraint in France and Aragon (c. 1000–1225 AD) (Oxford, 1979), 90–95; idem, “An ‘Unknown Charter’ for Catalonia (1205),” in Medieval France and her Pyrenean Neighbours: Studies in Early Institutional History (London, 1989), 199–21, esp. 204–5; Earl J. Hamilton, Money, Prices, and Wages in Valencia, Aragon, and Navarre (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), 89; Josiah Cox

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The mid-fourteenth century War of the Two Pedros in particular provided Pere III’s parliaments in all three of his major realms with an opportunity to enhance their power, and control over royal finances. From the first days of the conflict in fall, 1356, the Aragonese king spent much of his time in attempting to find money for military uses. Whatever his shortcomings as a warrior, as Castilian forces repeatedly threatened his lands, Pere showed a talent for military administration. During the first two months of the conflict, he demanded that frontier communities send to endangered areas great companies of both horse and foot.11 Despite this frenetic activity, the king soon came to realize that he simply did not have enough ready cash to keep these newly organized companies on the front lines for any prolonged period.12 By January, 1357, desperate for financial aid, he issued his first parliamentary summons of the war, calling on representatives of Catalan cities and towns to assemble at Lérida on February 4. This first meeting, which had been summoned to gain “advice and aid concerning … the war … with the king of Castile,” apparently never took place. Its failure to convene mirrored the instability of many eastern Spanish parliamentary meetings over the next decade.13 Because of the need to fight on many fronts, Pere often found his parliamentary schedule at the mercy of unpredictable enemy troop movements. For this reason, the king was not infrequently forced to prorogue or even postpone indefinitely scheduled parliamentary meetings. When he was unable to attend an assembly, he might send a substitute, normally his wife, Elionor, who was not only the queen, but also served as governor of Catalonia and royal lieutenant.14 This use of surrogates might in turn bring about another problem if the

Russell, “The Medieval Monedatge of Aragon and Valencia,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 106, no. 6 (1962): 483–504, esp. 484; Kagay, “Parliament,” 57–59. 11  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, f. 93v. 12  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1279, ff. 94v–95. See also: José Luis Martín, “Las Cortes catalanes en la guerra castellano-aragonesa,” in La Corona de Aragón en el siglo XIV (VIII Congreso de Historia de la Corona de Aragón), 2 vols. (Valencia, 1969–1970), 2:79–90, esp. 80–81. 13  C AVC, I, pt. 2:504–505. See also: José Luis Martín Rodríguez, “La Cortes de Pedro el Ceremonioso,” in Pere el Cerimoniós, 99–111, esp. 103; idem, “Cortes catalanes en la guerra castellano-aragonesa,” in La Corona de Aragón eb el siglo XIV, 3 vols., VIII CHCA (Valencia, 1967), 2:71–86, esp. 80. 14  For parliamentary prorogations and the use of royal substitutes, see Kagay, “Development,” 364–65; Esteban Sarasa Sánchez, “Los Cortes de Aragón en la Edad Media,” in Las Cortes de Castilla y León en la Edad Media, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1987), 2:492–539, esp. 500–1; Sylvia Romeu Alfaro, “Las Cortes de Valencia en la Edad Media,” in Cortes de Castilla, 2:540–74, esp. 570–71. For a fuller discussion of Elionor’s role in military financing, see Chapter 17, Section 3.

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members of the assembly raised the argument that they could not undertake any binding actions without the king’s presence. TABLE 2

Pere III’s assemblies during the War of the Two Pedros

Location

Opening date

Realm(s) represented

Cariñena Barcelona Valencia Zaragoza Cervera Valencia Monzón

July 30, 1357 October 15, 1358 December 30, 1358 January 22, 1359 September 29, 1359 May 12, 1360 October 12, 1362

Barcelona/Tortosa/Lérida Zaragoza

March 10, 1364–1365 August 14, 1365

Aragon Catalonia Valencia Aragon Catalonia Valencia Aragon Catalonia Majorca Valencia Catalonia Aragon

TABLE 3

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Common elements of Pere III’s parliaments

Summons a) Prorogation Opening speech of king or his representative Formal responses of individual estates Parliamentary checking of credentials of representatives Assembly appoints deputies or negotiators King hears grievances Statutes presented by assembly and approved by king Establishment of military subsidy by deputies Parliamentary approval of military subsidy Final session

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Cortes of Cariñena, 1357

In July, 1357, the first Aragonese assembly held during the War of the Two Pedros took place at Cariñena just to the southwest of Zaragoza. The Castilian king, Pedro, had recently violated a papally-sponsored truce, placing Aragon in considerable danger.15 This resulted not only in Pere complaining bitterly to Pope Innocent VI about Castilian perfidy, but also his decision to summon his clergy, great nobles, knights, and townsmen of the kingdom to a cortes. Standing before his people on July 30, the king delivered an emotional “opening speech” (praeposition, plática, proposicio) in which he announced a determination to “resist with all his strength the power of the Castilian king.” To demonstrate that they were his faithful subjects and retainers, the king called on the Aragonese to defend their homeland as well as his reputation. The various parliamentary estates then gave their opening “responses” (contestationes, contestaciones), assuring Pere that they would indeed play their role as faithful vassals.16 Following the initial ceremonies, the cortes devoted over a week to validating the credentials from all four estates.17 On August 7, the king again repeated his request for military aid, this time specifying a need for 700 horsemen to guard Aragon’s frontiers for the next two years. Two days later, the estates came back before him, stating a readiness to fulfill their duty by voting the crown an unconditional subsidy. They agreed on the daily salary rates for the horsemen, but specified that this payment would immediately cease if the war itself ended within the following two years. For his part, Pere insisted that there must be no delay in putting the grant into full operation since any such delay would damage Aragon and bring shame to him. Having promised to provide some military funding, the assembly attached several conditions: It called on the king to forego exacting any other extraordinary imposts or from summoning into the field at parliamentary expense any other forces of the kingdom of Aragon except for the specified contingent of 700 knights. The king was also prohibited from taking any clerical tithes granted to him by the pope beyond what the clergy had already contributed to this parliamentary subsidy. It was agreed that all landowners, including the king and royal family, were responsible for payment into the “hearth-tax” (fogaje) to raise funds for paying military salaries. This tax assessed a specified

15  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1381, f. 132v [for English translations, see Appendix, doc. 17]. 16  C RA. 20. See also: Cawsey, Kingship, 44–48; Kagay, “Development,” 393–94; idem, “Parliament,” 60.

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rate on every hearth ( fuego, foch) in every, city, town, village, and hamlet of a kingdom.18 The 700 man force provided for in the grant was to be recruited by clergy, nobles, and town councils. All the men selected for military duty had to be Aragonese; their captains had to be of noble birth. While on duty, these troops would pay for their own fodder, firewood, and lodging. If they broke the rules laid down for them, they would be considered “robbers” and treated as such. The cortes would see to the stationing and relieving of frontier troops. It made it clear that it would accept no excuses for the refusal to answer a military summon or the diversion of these troops from frontier service to other duties.19 4

Corts of Barcelona, 1358

In August, 1358, upon entering the third year of the conflict, Pere summoned his second wartime parliament, which convened in Barcelona. Included in the list of those summoned to attend were Pere’s uncle, Count Ramon Berenguer of Ampurias, his cousin, Count Pere of Urgel, and other Pyrenean barons such as Viscount Ugo of Cardona. None of these nobles showed more than lukewarm support for a war that they assumed would have no direct effect on the counties of Catalonia, that lay well east of the frontier.20 In fact, the great nobles were less interested in the Castilian war than in protecting themselves from the king’s powerful adviser, Bernat de Cabrera, and his political faction.21 Consequently, few of these men were ever present when the corts commenced.22 Entering the royal palace at Barcelona “to the sound of trumpets,” the king delivered his opening speech to those who had showed up. He argued that 18  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 557, ff. 8–10v. See also: CRA, 24–33; Silvia Romeu Alfaro, “Aportación documental a las Cortes de Valencia,” AHDE 43 (1973): 385–428, esp. 398– 403; Zurita, Anales, 4:338–39 (IX:xiii). The hearth-tax ( fogaje in Aragonese and fogatge in Catalan) was the principal means of raising subsidies to support military activities in Pere’s war parliaments. This tax assessed a specified rate on every hearth ( fuego, foch) in every, city, town, village, and hamlet of a kingdom. 19  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 557, ff. 9r–v, 10v, 11. See also: Romeu Alfaro, “Aportación,” 400–04. 20  C AVC, I, pt. 2:505–21. 21  Pere III, Chronicle, 3:425–26 (IV:39); d’Abadal i de Vinyals, Pere el Cerimoniós, 84–85, 88–89; Kagay, “‘Treasons’,” 41; Sitges, Muerte, 5. 22   C AVC, I, pt. 2:534–36, 561–64. In addition, Prince Ferran, the king’s half-brother, also failed to show up not because of any pressing antagonism toward Cabrera but rather because his duty as a royal captain had called him away to Valencia where he was mustering troops to meet a Castilian invasion.

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he now had no choice but to seek the help of his Catalan subjects due to the unjust war forced on him by his unrelenting adversary, the monarch of Castile. Because of the great danger Castilian forces posed to all of his realms, Pere would accept no excuses from the Catalans for their avoidance of war service. After strongly stating his case, he then awaited the responses of the archbishop of Tarragona and other parliamentary spokesmen.23 The absence of the great nobles surely weighed on his mind until their procurators explained they had absented themselves out of fear for their lives if they appeared in a crowded hall dominated by the Cabrera faction. Without a royal “safe-conduct” (guidamentum, guiatge), they refused to enter the parliamentary chamber.24 When the king failed to address their fears in a meaningful way, the Catalan nobles became increasingly suspicious of his motives and this distrust threatened to paralyze the workings of the entire corts. Despite the fact that Castile had just captured the Aragonese city of Tarazona and seemed on the verge of gobbling up more Aragonese territory, Pere proved unable to pressure this Catalan corts to take any meaningful action on the question of military funding. Instead, the body required almost two months just to approve the credentials of those who did show up, many of whom were procurators of the missing nobles. Eventually, the delegates appointed a committee of twelve members, drawn from all three estates, to address the pressing question of baronial non-attendance. Although unable to resolve this thorny problem, their action served as a model for future parliaments which appointed similar committees charged with determining how much of the subsidy each estate would be required to pay.25 Thoroughly frustrated with these two wasted months, on October 18, the king officially recognized the procurators of the great nobles who had absented themselves. He did this despite misgivings, explaining that any further delay on the part of the crown could be extremely hazardous, given repeated Castilian attacks along the Aragon’s western borders.26 23  C AVC, I, pt. 2:521, 639. See also: Cawsey, 149, 157. The speech of Archbishop Pere was “beautifully spoken and decorated with quotations.” 24  C AVC, I, pt. 2:522–34. See also: Kagay, “Parliament.” For the use of the safe-conduct in the medieval Crown of Aragon, see Robert I. Burns, S.J., “The Guidaticum Safe-Conduct in Medieval Arago-Catalonia: A Mini-Institution for Muslims, Christians, and Jews,” Medieval Encounters 1, no. 1 (1995): 52–113. For a fuller discussion of Pere III’s use of the safe-conduct, see Chapter 19, Section 8. 25  C AVC, I, pt. 2:623–82. For parliamentary office of tractador, see ACA, R. 308, f. 253. See also: Kagay, “Development,” 394. 26  C AVC, I, pt. 2:682.

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On the next day, Pere again sternly warned the assembled estates against any further delay in turning their attention to the matter of military funding. The members finally agreed to vote a Catalan subsidy that would be raised by a hearth tax levied on every “household” (foch) in Catalonia. This impost would also apply to all of Prince Ferran’s lands situated around Tortosa that had always been exempt from such taxation. The entire sum, to be paid in installments over the next two years, was earmarked for salaries of the cavalrymen called into service by Catalonia’s barons and knights. Ironically, although many of these men had resisted the subsidy at every turn, the monies collected would now pay them to serve as frontier captains for extended periods.27 5

Cortes of Valencia, 1358

Three months later, in December, 1358, after journeying to southern Valencia, Pere summoned that kingdom’s cortes to meet in its capital. The Valencian delegates showed an uncharacteristic interest in the earlier meeting held in Aragon, requesting a copy of the document announcing the parliamentary subsidy voted at Cariñena. Even before the delegates assembled, Pere had written letters to the towns of Valencia asking that they pay for three months’ service of 600 horsemen and up to 2,000 infantry. In this request, he said that he was continuing to work hard for the realm’s survival, and was certain that God would bring to the Crown of Aragon a successful end to its just war against Castile. This was one of the earliest instances when Pere referred to the Castilian conflict as a just war, an allusion that became a standard element of his wartime rhetoric. The king called upon the Valencian townsmen to emulate their counterparts in Aragon who despite suffering great losses, had willingly financed their own defense.28 Gathering his principal clergy, nobility, and townsmen at Valencia’s Gothic cathedral (Seu) on Saturday, December 30, Pere delivered his usual rousing opening speech. The address made clear how desperate the crown’s financial situation had become from standing up to Pedro I’s evil aggression. Having listened to the royal appeal, the Valencian estates enthusiastically agreed that 27  Ibid., 682–99; 719–29. See also: Martín Rodriguez, “Cortes catalanes,” 81–82. For the “hearth tax” in Catalonia and southern France, see Thomas N. Bisson, “Negotiations for Taxes under Alfonso of Poitiers,” in Medieval France, 49–74, esp. 51, 58–59; J.M. Pons Guri, “Un fogatjament desconegut de l’any 1358,” BRABLB 30 (1963–1964): 322–498, esp. 334–36. 28  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, ff. 152v–53.

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Pere’s cause was just. On the down side, it took them weeks to vote the requested funds.29 As with most of the assemblies he appealed for military funds, Pere soon found himself bogged down in both the procedural minutia of the cortes and the never-ending disputes among the estates themselves. Apart from the mind-numbing drone of credential checks for the procurators who were serving absent clerical, noble, and urban members, the king also had to wait out the settlement of matters that had nothing to do with the urgent military subsidies. A serious problem briefly arose concerning just who should attend the meeting and participate in decision-making. Since the princes and barons called to the Valencian assembly descended from Aragonese warriors who had helped win the land from Islam, they claimed they were not bound by Valencian law and thus did not have to attend the meeting or abide by its decisions. Knights and lesser nobles objected to their stance, arguing that everyone called to the cortes was subject to the single law of Valencia, not that of Aragon. The townsmen, highly offended that the knights had spoken for themselves as a group rather than for the noble estate to which they officially belonged, denied that they had any right to an independent voice in the parliamentary arena. Within the urban estate, representatives from the city of Valencia then filed a formal protest against the members from Jativa for their use of the title “city” since the site had always been considered simply a town.30 Aside from these multifarious internal struggles that slowed the proceedings to a crawl, the king also had to wait for the passage of a number of fueros designed to regulate his administration and judiciary as well as clean up certain aspects of private law.31 Having endured almost a week of this frustrating parliamentary side-show, Pere once again addressed the Valencian meeting, reminding it that his main aim in summoning its members had been to find money to pay troops defending Valencia’s frontier for the next two years. He used the meeting at Cariñena 29  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 557, f. 1. See also: Kagay, “Parliament,” 60–61; José Rius Serra, “Cortes de Valencia de 1358 (20 de Febrero),” Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español [hereafter AHDE] 17 (1946): 663–82; Romeu Alfaro, “Aportación,” 388; eadem “Catálogo de Cortes valencianas hasta 1410,” AHDE 40 (1970): 581–607, esp. 593; Vicent Lluïs Samó Santonja, Les Corts valencienes, 1240–1645 (Valencia, 1997), 157. 30  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 557, ff. 1–2v, 3v. See also: Romeu Alfaro, “Aportación,” 388–90, 392. 31  Simó Santonja, Corts, 159–61. These new fueros included a belated change for the dating of Valencian documents from the old Roman style to the year system of the Incarnation of Christ, an acceleration of litigation, another range of sumptuary laws, and the increased accessibility of Valencian legal documents by requiring they be written in the vernacular.

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as an example of how loyal subjects should act to protect their king and themselves. On January 4, 1359, after a short postponement, the king again came before the cortes to emphasize his pressing need for money. His frustration at this cortes’s failure to act now became increasingly apparent as he warned its members that Castilian forces were incessantly attacking eastern Spain by both sea and land. According to Pere, if the Valencian estates did not do their duty, he would be tied down in his southern realm accomplishing nothing while his other lands suffered from these increasing attacks. The royal harangue met with only a lukewarm response from the Valencian estates, though they did promise to meet separately and consider the king’s request for extraordinary aid. Upon returning to full session on January 8, the delegates announced they could not agree on the royal request. There followed two more unproductive sessions, during which Pere demanded from the Valencians a “good and useful response.” This finally seemed to rouse the estates from their lethargy and, as a result, they began a meaningful discussion of financial support, in particular the number of knights whose salaries they would have to agree to pay, whether this would be 500 or 700 men.32 Now that the Valencian estates had enter into serious talk with the crown, they sought more information about the workings of the subsidy and so again requested a copy of the Cariñena grant. The royal protonotary, who also served as the principal notary of the cortes, had copies of the document made and distributed them to the spokesmen of each estate. Despite this unprecedented request for records from another kingdom’s parliamentary proceedings, the Valencian estates that gathered before the king days later still remained undecided about the workings of their own grant. Infuriated by the delays and non-compliance, the king lit into the delegates. Once again, he swore that he would not leave the southern realm until his timid subjects had agreed upon the particulars of a subsidy needed to support at least 500 troops for the next two years. He complained that they were keeping him from visiting the borderland below Jativa which lay in imminent danger of Castilian attack. Despite this, he would not leave the capital or dismiss them until they fashioned a grant he could accept. Finally, the estates appointed twenty-seven negotiators (tractadores) who swore that they would do their utmost to craft a tax deal acceptable to the cortes as well as to the crown. Almost immediately, however, the estates began to squabble. Each tried to fashion a grant favorable to them and detrimental to the others. Meanwhile, the unwieldy committee of negotiators did nothing over one part of the 32  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 557, ff. 3v–6. See also: Romeu Alfaro, “Aportación,” 392–95; Simó Santonja, Corts, 162.

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subsidy each could have to contribute to. Forced with this intractable situation on January 23, 1359, the king called for the election of six new tractadores who would work closely with his royal counselors, Archbishop of Zaragoza, Lope de Luna, and Bernat de Cabrera, to formulate a grant acceptable to all. Finally by the first week of February, this new group, largely laboring outside the confines of the cortes, had taken the first step toward an acceptable formula for how the subsidy would be divided among the estates. After three more weeks of wrangling, the cortes finally approved an agreement that pledged the clergy to support 45 horsemen; the nobles, 265; and the townsmen, 190. The money, which the estates had to raise under their own auspices, would start flowing into royal coffers in June of that year and would continue in installments over the next two years. The final details of the grant were left to be hammered out by a group of parliamentary deputies along with Prince Ferran, a popular figure in Valencia whose recent appointment by the king as his second-in-command with the title “procurator of … the realms and lands on this side of the sea,” the cortes readily endorsed.33 6

Cortes of Zaragoza, 1359

Following the Valencian parliament, Pere journeyed to Zaragoza, where he convoked another Aragonese cortes on January 22, 1359.34 Once again, he opened the meeting with a dire picture of the current war effort, informing the estates that he could not long sustain military activities without their help and advice. Without their taking action, even their capital city, Zaragoza, might be lost to an enemy attack. He then directed the four estates to deliberate quickly and then vote a generous subsidy.35 The money Pere hoped to gain from this latest meeting of cortes was to be used to pay the salary of a mixed force of 1,320 heavily and lightly armored knights. To defray their part of any salary their expenditures, the nobles begged the king to give them control over income from the city of Tarazona which 33  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 557, ff. 13v–25v. See also: Romeu Alfaro, “Aportación,” 406–27; Simó Santonja, Corts, 162. To seal the “peaceful and acceptable reconciliation” with his half-brother, Ferran came into royal service, “moved by fervent emotion and fraternal love,” and in exchange Pere issued a safe-conduct for the next two months that shielded the prince from “legal or natural death, imprisonment, cutting off of limbs of the body, any other wound … or verbal injury.” 34  C RA, 37; Pere III, Chronicle, 2:527 (VI:28). See also: Zurita, Anales, 4:390 (IX:xxxi). 35  C RA, 39. Though the Aragonese cortes was traditionally divided into four estates, only three are mentioned in the 1360 Cortes—the clergy, nobility, and townsmen.

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had recently come back into the possession of Aragon. Unimpressed by their request, Pere refused to surrender any royal rents owed by the city in order to help the nobles pay their fair share of military expenses. On the other hand, he was quite willing to accept the services of the eighty knights who volunteered to fight at their own expense. For its part, the urban estate promised financial support for 1,000 infantrymen and a body of lightly-armored cavalry. In return for these commitments, the king pledged that he would not summon any other Aragonese subjects for immediate military service nor demand any further subsidies. He also agreed that any failure on his part to keep this promise would render the parliamentary subsidy null and void. Unlike the earlier meeting at Cariñena, the cortes of Zaragoza spelled out in detail just how its grant would be collected from the people of Aragon. Each of the four estates would select its own deputies armed with full power (pleno poder) to collect the taxes, hire the 1,320 horsemen, and see to their payment. While the king was not happy with what amounted to unprecedented limitations on the royal power to raise and pay troops, if it wanted these subsidies, he had little choice but to acquiesce. He did, however, warn the parliamentary representatives not to usurp any other functions regularly carried out by royal officials, except only those duties specifically assigned to them by the Zaragoza assembly. In another unusual provision, the estates were allowed to gather money through loans as well as taxation. For its part, the crown ruled that the representative of parliament would not be permitted to derive interest from any funds they collected. Instead, they were compelled to turn the money over to the royal treasury as soon as it was collected.36 7

Corts of Cervera, 1359

During the summer of 1359, Pere III was forced to deal with one of the conflict’s most dangerous moments. His adversary had fitted out a huge fleet to attack, not only Valencia but also Catalonia, and the Balearics.37 In response 36  C RA, 40–42. In the midst of their financial negotiations, the crown joined by the estates formally exculpated the Aragonese garrison that had surrendered Tarazona to Pedro in March, 1357. This was almost certainly to protect Aragonese soldiers from the king’s wrath which often equated surrender with treason. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 910, ff. 112v–13; R. 911, ff. 4–5, 7r–v; R. 1192, ff. 72r–v; R. 1198, f. 234v; R. 1220, f. 32v. See also: Ferrer i Mallol, “Frontera,” 292, 295, 297–98; Kagay, “Defending,” 87. 37  Pere III, 2:522–26; Ayala, Pedro I, 495–96 (1359, chaps. xii–xiv).

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to this first major threat to Catalonia, Pere summoned another Catalan assembly to meet on August 1 at Vilafranca de Penedes. Because of the pressing Castilian threat throughout the summer, the Aragonese king was forced to put off this meeting several times. In the end, it did not meet until early October at Cervera, a small town southwest of Tarragona.38 Opening the assembly on October 12, the king then spent over two months impatiently waiting for it to reimburse some of the huge military expenses he had incurred in defending the province.39 In mid-December, he finally obtained what was characterized as a “free will gift” in the form of a “hearth tax” ( fogatge) from the Catalan delegates.40 This amounted to an annual sum of 144,000 pounds (libras) which would be devoted to maintaining 1,800 horsemen at their posts for the next six months now that the Castilian naval threat had ended.41 The contribution was to be divided equally between the urban estate on one hand and the combined ecclesiastical and noble estates on the other. Aside from funding, Pere also approved statutes voted by the corts that involved the conflict with Castile. For one thing, they disallowed lawsuits during periods when the “national emergency clause” (Princeps namque) was convoked. They also forbade the conduct of all private feuds during the war. Those who engaged in personal and family disputes were threatened with the penalty of being declared an outlaw. In addition, the corts issued a stern warning to all Pere’s subjects to avoid harboring deserters from his armies and fleets.42 38  C AVC, II:1–37. The meeting was first rescheduled to take place at Tarragona but was again prorogued until early September, the Feast of Michaelmas (September 29), and the Feast of St. Luke (October 18). This last meeting date was once more pushed back a week, and moved from Tarragona to Cervera. 39  Pere III, Chronicle, 2:529 (VI:27). See also: CAVC, II:39; Martín Rodriguez, “Cortes catalanes,” 82–83. Pere is almost certainly incorrect in alleging in his chronicle that he first met with the corts on October 8 since he had written from Barcelona that he would be in Cervera “without fail” on Saturday, October 13. As it was, he arrived a day early. The king remained in Cervera until December 20. 40  C AVC, II:55–133, 391. See also: Martín Rodriguez, “Cortes catalanas,” 83. For the coinage types mentioned Pere’s war parliaments, see Joaquin Botet i Sisó, Les monedes catalanes, 3 vols. (Barcelona, 1976); Burns, Society, 1:108–10; M. Crusafont i Sabater and A.M. Balaguer, “La numismática navarro-aragonesa alto medieval: Nuevos hipóthesis,” Gaceta Numismática 81 (1986), 35–66; Felipe Mateu Llopis, “Sobre el curso legal de la moneda en Aragón, Cataluña, Valencia, y Mallorca, siglos XIII y XIV,” in VII Congrés d’història de la corona d’Aragó, 3 vols. (Barcelona, 1962–1964), 2:517–28. 41  C AVC, II:383–85. 42  C AVC, II: 41, 52. See also: Martín Rodriguez, “Cortes catalanas,” 83 (note 11). For the national emergency muster, see: Usatges, p. 80 (art. 64). See also: Kagay, “National Defense Clause,” 57–97; Sánchez Martínez, “Invocation,” 293–329.

Parliamentary Developments

8

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Cortes of Valencia, 1360

During the autumn of 1355, as the Catalan corts met at Cervera, a papal legate, Gui de Boulogne, was attempting to establish an acceptable peace agreement,43 despite which the war raged on around Valencia’s scattered and exposed settlements between Orihuela and Hellín. For his part, Pere entered 1360 with his attention firmly fixed on his older territories of Aragon and Catalonia. He left his southern realm under the shaky administration of his ten-year-old son, Joan, and his valiant but largely ineffectual cousin, Count Alfonso of Denia.44 Throughout the spring of 1360, however, as one after another his Valencian cities, towns, and fortresses came under enemy attack, Pere could no longer ignore the danger in the south. On April 24, his chancellery served sixty-five summonses for another Valencian cortes to convene on May 12 in that kingdom’s capital city. In this summons, the king gave as the reason for the meeting the need to recover Valencian fortresses recently occupied by Castilian troops. He asserted that their successful recovery was crucial for Valencian security. He also expressed regret that he was currently so involved with the recapture of the Aragonese city of Tarazona that he could not personally be present at the Valencian cortes. Consequently, he had delegated the responsibility for the meeting to his young son, Joan, who who was currently serving as the procurator general of Valencia.45 This emerging use of family members as the king’s substitutes in presiding over parliaments would later be repeated on various occasions especially when Pere would send his wife, Queen Elionor, to lead Catalan assemblies.46 Unlike his father who was often late for the opening sessions of his parliaments due to his frantic schedule, the young prince was early for his first official appointment. On May 11, Joan sent a public crier throughout the city of 43  For details of Gui de Boulogne’s diplomatic mission in 1358–1361, see Chapter 7. See also: Ayala, Pedro I, 489–91 (1359, chap. v). See also: José María Mendi, “La primera legación de Cardenal Guido de Boulougne a España (1358–1361),” Scriptorum Victoriense 12 (1964), 125–224; Zurita, Anales, 4:369–70 (IX:xxi). For Gui de Boulogne, see also: Chapter 7. 44  Pere III, Chronicle, 2:525–27 (VI:25–26). See also: Zurita, Anales, 4:388–89. For Prince Joan, see: Francisco de Asis de Bofarull y Sans, Generación de Juan I de Aragón (Barcelona, 1896), 27–29 (docs. 1–2). For Alfonso of Denia, see: Julia Campón Gonzalvo, “Consecuencias de la guerra de los Dos Pedros en el condado de Denia,” AUA 8 (1990–1991): 57–68, esp. 57–58. 45  Silvia Romeu Alfaro, “Cortes de Valencia de 1360,” AHDE 44 (1974): 675–712, esp. 678– 80; Simó Santonja, Corts, 164; María Rosa Muñoz Pomer, “Les assemblées médiévales de Valence et leurs actes parlementaires,” Parliaments, Estates and Representation/ Parléments, Etats & Représentation 28 (November, 2008): 27–53, esp. 38. 46  Romeu Alfaro, “Catálogo,” 594–95.

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Valencia to announce that the cortes would meet on the next morning in the principal chamber of the Franciscan monastery, an elegant structure built by Jaume I in 1239.47 Sitting on a throne when the assembly opened, the young prince looked out at the region’s clerics, nobles, and townsmen as they filed past him. He was soon disappointed to find out that some of the most important parties had not yet arrived in the capital. After a slight delay, Joan opened the assembly and then promptly turned over the duty of delivering the opening speech to his older cousin, the count of Denia. Count Alfonso brusquely instructed the estates to choose negotiators (tractadores) to facilitate consideration of the complicated but not yet named matters that might come before them. The spokesman for the cortes, Bishop Vital of Valencia, insisted that the estates would have to meet separately to discuss matters and select their negotiators. After these separate meetings had taken place, all of the delegates assembled once more on May 15 and listened as Joan rose to tell them why they had been summoned. After recognizing the tractatores appointed by each estate, he called for their help in beating back the very real Castilian threat to Valencia’s frontiers.48 He then turned the meeting over to his elder cousin. It was the count who spelled out just how much this support would cost. For their part, the estates had instructed their negotiators, who had already sworn to maintain secrecy about all matters brought before them, to act for the good of the king and of the realm.49 Up to this point, Joan had patiently gone through the first phase of the well-mannered parliamentary protocol that normally consumed the initial weeks of an assembly’s existence, a period when little of substance normally got done. By the beginning of the next week, however, the prince, perhaps influenced by Count Alfonso, became increasingly argumentative, sternly warning the Valencia assembly to get about its business of arranging for a military subsidy. When this show of juvenile temper had precious little effect on the members, Joan himself slowed things down by putting off the next session of the assembly for a further three days. Facing the estates again on May 21, he proceeded to explain in no uncertain terms the dangers that Valencia faced from an imminent attack by the Castilian king. The estates had to provide sufficient 47  Romeu Alfaro, “Cortes de Valencia de 1360,” 681; Simó Santonja, Corts, 164; Spanish Cities of the Golden Age: The Views of Anton van Wyngaerde, ed. Richard L. Kagan (Berkeley, 1989), 201. Not until 1363 did the Valencians officially endorse such an unusual parliamentary arrangement. At that time, they voted that their national assemblies should be presided over by the king himself or, in case of “urgent necessity” by the crown prince. 48  Romeu Alfaro, “Cortes de Valencia de 1360,” 684–87; Simó Santonja, Corts, 164–67. 49  Romeu Alfaro, “Cortes de Valencia de 1360,” 688.

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funds to pay for 500 horsemen. The negotiators and other deputies appointed by the estates were then charged with the responsibility for hammering out the details of this subsidy. Although at this time, the cortes made several promises, it fulfilled none of them. Joan again stood before the assembled delegates two days later. He now informed them that a great number of Castilian troops were surging across the Segura River near Murcia to attack Orihuela. He begged them to stand against the enemy’s “depraved undertakings” and “preserve his father’s honor” by preventing the Castilian host from causing great damage to their homeland.50 The estates finally gave in to the royal pleas, agreeing for themselves and for the realm of Valencia to fund the required troops.51 Moved by their young leader, the cortes formulated articles that would allow for the raising of new revenues, the recruitment of a relief force for Orihuela, and the distribution of salaries to other troops serving along Valencia’s frontier.52 The grant would come under the immediate control of “deputies, syndics, and procurators,” many of whom were chosen from the ranks of the tractatores. Each estate chose four of these representatives who, as in Aragon and Catalonia, would constitute an “executive committee” (called in Catalan the general) that would remain in existence for the term of the subside, a period that was ultimately set at two years. These agents were permitted to issue public letters with the parliament’s official seal affixed, which were to be regarded as equal in authority to royal directives concerning the subsidy. The cortes deputies were also made responsible for the recruitment, stationing, and payment of the 500 knights assigned to defend the frontier. They could appraise the value of war horses and animals used for transport, and were empowered to issue reimbursements or replacements for any of these beasts lost on campaign. As a part of their charge, they were also afforded the right to issue war bonds, negotiate loans, and sell future tax revenues as a means of raising money for the subsidy. If any Valencian citizen refused to contribute to the fund, the delegates could take legal action against him. On the other hand, the deputies could not collect more money than specified by the cortes, a sum which came to 65,000 libras. Any surfeit brought in by those parliamentary agents had to be returned to the taxpayers.

50  Ibid., 689–90. 51  Ibid., 704–06. 52  For Valencian sou and exchange rate with Barcelona and Jacan sous as well as with the Castilian mazumin and morabatin, see Burns, Diplomatarium, 1:108–9. For exchange rate of Aragonese florin and Barcelona sou, see CAVC, II:270 (art. 60).

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The executive committee was to collect and distribute this tax money. At the end of the two-year period, it would turn over its records to the estates that would then issue a final accounting to the royal government. If the prince, his father, mother, or their officials were to interfere in any way with this collection of the money, the cortes would have the power to declare the entire subsidy null and void. By creating the executive committee and conferring upon it full power to collect and then distribute the considerable sums involved in the subsidy, the Valencian assembly had entered a jurisdictional realm without precedent in the Crown of Aragon. In the past, such activities had rested entirely under the control of the crown. Interestingly, despite the increase in the powers of the cortes implied by these provisions, the members sitting at Valencia resisted declaring that by the unusual terms, they had set any precedent. Instead, the Valencians insisted that their customary privileges and future procedures would remain intact while simply ignoring the changes they had fostered in respect to the exercise of royal power.53 Despite Joan’s acceptance of the general articles, the estates themselves were not fully satisfied with all aspects of what had been agreed upon. The townsmen, in particular, demanded some clarification of their rights and duties in regard to the payment of the military grant. They brought before the crown prince for his approval of a slightly altered version of the subsidy, in which they declared they would gather their share of the pledged 65,000 libras.54 All of Valencia’s townsmen would have to contribute to that subsidy; none could claim exemption. Urban inhabitants were to pay a defined rate based on the value of their property, even if they were absentee landowners. Those who moved from one locality to another could not escape the duty to contribute to the subsidy. The townsmen attached the usual provision that if a truce or final peace was declared between Aragon and Castile, Valencia’s subsidy collection would immediately cease.55 Their version also defined in greater detail the rights and duties of the urban deputies. If any of these temporary officials failed to collect the share of the subsidy assigned, they would be compelled to make up the shortfall out of their own pockets.56 Urban agents were expected to submit to the crown a full fiscal accounting of their activities. Two “counselors,” appointed by the cortes,

53  Romeu Alfaro, “Cortes de Valencia de 1360,” 690–92, 706–09. 54  Ibid., 693–94. 55  Ibid., 697. 56  Ibid., 695, 697.

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would consider questions arising out of the process and their decision would be final.57 The alternate urban articles also defined the role of that estate’s deputies in managing military units supported by the subsidy. In return for the monetary sacrifice the grant represented, the urban estate argued while it was in force the townsmen whom they represented should not have to perform other military duties owed to the crown.58 As part of the deal, they also requested that the monarchy lift its embargo on various forms of cross-border trade with Castile since this stoppage of commerce had proved more harmful to Valencia’s merchants than any injury it might inflict on the enemy.59 In a noteworthy move, the urban deputies from the 1360 cortes had taken over many of the military functions normally exercised by royal officials. They drew up the muster rolls of frontier units, paid their salaries, and replaced their lost horses. They were authorized to appoint or replace any captains who commanded at least ten urban soldiers. They stationed forces along the border and provided for their lodging, a task that could make them extremely unpopular with frontier communities. Although, they could not confiscate mule trains, they were empowered to negotiate prices with the muleteers for their services. They could allow any urban citizens eligible for military service to hire a substitute. They also had authority to dock the salaries of urban soldiers who left their posts without a good reason or without the permission of their captain.60 The cortes of Valencia officially ended on June 7, 1360 when Prince Joan formally accepted the subsidy and all the articles associated with it. The 500 knights that the assembly promised for frontier duty were to serve for a specified period and be paid out of the subsidy. The prince officially prorogued the cortes until November when his father might be able to make a token appearance. In fact, the later meeting never took place nor was the subsidy of 1360 ever actually put in effect due largely to the outbreak of peace.61 Late in 1359, a palace coup in Granada deposed Castile’s most reliable ally, Muhammad V, and replaced him with a new emir more favorably disposed to Aragon. This raised the spectre of Granada not only deserting Pedro, but even joining Aragon to fight against him. This threat of a two-front war finally compelled the Castilian monarch to take seriously the papal peace efforts being 57  Ibid., 696, 698–700. The Valencian townsmen encouraged these counselors to conduct “investigations of past [activities] even when they might bring great damage to the agents and little profit to the lord king.” 58  Ibid., 695–96. 59  Ibid., 702. 60  Ibid., 698–700. 61  Ibid., 710–11; eadem “Catálogo,” 595; Martínez Aloy, Diputación, 145.

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conducted by the legate, Gui de Boulogne, and now supported by a high-ranking Portuguese delegation. As a result, for some months, hostilities tapered off while the two sides, prompted by the legate’s shuttle diplomacy, hammered out terms of peace acceptable to both. Finally, in May 1361, they reached an agreement and during the following month, both monarchs signed on to the Treaty of Terrer, which remained in force until May of 1362, when Pedro treacherously violated it. In the midst of these stepped up negotiations and the peace that followed, collection of the Valencian subsidy was first postponed and then abandoned. Ultimately, none of that money reached royal coffers. 9

Parlamentum of Monzón, 1362

After the failure to collect the funds voted by Valencia in 1360 and Pedro’s violation of the peace of Terrer two years later, Pere III fell into ever deepening fiscal straits. Needing to consult with representatives from all four of his realms at the same time, he relied on a highly unusual joint parliament (parlamentum) which was scheduled to convene in October, 1362, at the Catalan town of Monzón near the Aragonese border. In the presence of Aragonese, Catalan, Valencian, and Majorcan delegates who crowded together into the town’s principal castle in late-November, the king called upon them for a new subsidy to support the renewed war effort throughout the Crown of Aragon.62 Warning the estates of the renewed and now even greater danger from Castile, he requested immediate monetary and military support to throw back the invaders.63 Prince Ferran, Pere’s half-brother, responded for the entire assembly. He echoed the general approval of the estates for rehiring Enrique de Trastámara who had been languishing north of the Pyrenees since the peace of Terrer was signed and who had now brought the Castilian forces he led, 62  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1074, ff. 129v–130; R. 1103, f. 83v; R. 1181, ff. 73 v; “Actas de las Cortes Generales de la Corona de Aragon de 1362–63,” ed. Josep María Pons Guri in CDACA, 48:13; Pere III, Chronicle, 2:534–35 (VI:32). See also: CAVC, I, pt. 2:459; XI:465; Ferrer i Mallol, Entre, 396–412; eadem, “Southern Valencian Frontier,” 106; Kagay, “Government,” 126; Zurita, Anales, 4:412–18, 424–28 (IX:xxxiii–xxxvi). For layout of Monzón in the early modern period, see Spanish Cities, 150–54. For the parlamentum in the Crown of Aragon, see Glossari general lu·lia, ed. Miguel Colom Mateu, 10 vols. (Mallorca, 1985), 4:84; Donald J. Kagay, “The Emergence of ‘Parliament’ in the Thirteenth-Century Crown of Aragon: A View from the Gallery,” in On the Social Origins of Medieval Institutions: Essays in Honor of Joseph F. O’Callaghan, ed. Donald J. Kagay and Theresa M. Vann (Leiden, 1998), 222–41, esp. 228–29, note 21; Sarasa Sánchez, Cortes, 69–70. 63  C DACA, 48:54; Parlaments, 10–11. See also: Kagay, “Government,” 127–28.

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expelled by the peace terms, back across the mountains. The prince, however, disapproved of employing French mercenaries, whom, he argued, could not be trusted. Pere called for the appointment of the usual tractadores to hammer out the division of a new subsidy between his lands. Despite the king’s desperation, the members of the parliament failed to accomplish much of anything over the fall and winter of 1362.64 Pere’s frustration with the estates intensified in early 1363 as new Castilian attacks surged across the Aragonese frontier. On February 4, he dressed down the assembly, demanding that it appoint new negotiators. In the wake of this display of royal anger, a new body of tractadores then went into closed session and quickly presented Pere with a proposal for a subsidy of 250,000 libras which the four realms would contribute over the next year. When the overjoyed monarch asked the assembly if it formally agreed to this arrangement, its members “in a thunderous voice” shouted “Yes! Yes!” repeating it many times.65 After this rousing success, however, Pere faced the estates’ actual discontent with the war when he once again came before them a week later. Confronted by what he saw as their ingratitude, which severely questioned his administration of the conflict, the king bitterly responded that “no knight living or dead could better defend our crown” than he had.66 In turn, he berated the parliament for having engaged in treasonable activity by its obdurate failure to finance the crown’s military activities.67 Although Pere took this opportunity to vent his anger, his words did nothing to accelerate the parliament’s torpid pace of official business. Plodding along for the next few weeks in an attempt to lay out a suitable division of the subsidy, the parliament was repeatedly thrown off course by the usual disputes over urban and clerical credentials. The meeting was also forced to reconfigure contributions to the subsidy by taking into account the loss of urban sites to the enemy. As a result, some cities of Aragon and Valencia attempted to make others still under the king’s control pay a larger share of the total grant. Despite these frustrating delays, Pere was finally able to come before the assembly on March 3, 1363, and ask the estates if they accepted the size of the subsidy and 64  C DACA, 48:xv, 55–58; Pere III, Chronicle, 2:536 (VI:33). See also: Fowler, Mercenaries, 1:48; Kagay, “Parliament,” 126–27. 65  C DACA, 48:58–63. See also: Kagay, “Emergence of Parliament,” 229; idem, “Parliament,” 65–66. The division of the proposed grant was the following: Aragon: 60,000 libras; Catalonia: 122,000 libras; Majorca: 15,000 libras; and Valencia: 53,000 libras. 66  C DACA, 48:63. See also: Kagay, “Parliament,” 129–30. 67  C DACA, 48:63–64; Parlaments, 25–26 [For English translation, see Appendix II, doc. 52]. See also: Cawsey, Kingship, 137; Kagay, “Parliament,” 130.

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the arrangement for paying it. The members of the parliament are once again recorded as answering “in a single shout: It pleases us! It pleases us!”68 It was during this long meeting at Monzón that Count Enrique de Trastámara, who had recently returned from exile in France, made known to the Aragonese monarch his intention to challenge his hated half-brother for the throne of Castile. In a secret meeting between the two men, held while the parliament was in session, Pere committed his nation to backing this attempt, in return for Enrique promised to turn over to him extensive territories along the border, possibly amounting to one-sixth of Castile.69 10

Corts of Barcelona-Tortosa-Lérida, 1364–1365

Even with the large grant Pere anticipated from the parliamentum of Monzón, he encountered two clear difficulties with parliamentary subsidies: the considerable amount of time required to collect them and the lack of control the crown had over this process. Despite the Monzón assembly’s promise of financial aid, the continuing conflict meant that Pere soon found himself even more strapped for cash than he had been before parliament had convened. To make ends meet, he sold a number of royal castles and villages, pawned gold and silver jewelry, and took out large loans from Barcelona bankers.70 Even after negotiations produced another briefly observed peace treaty with Pedro during summer, 1363, Pere remained in a shaky fiscal situation, one which drastically worsened when his enemy violated the promise to stop fighting.71 With the re-emergence of hostilities, Pere had no choice but to turn once again to his parliaments for help. After visiting the Aragonese, Catalan, and Valencian capitals in the last weeks of 1363, he summoned a Catalan corts to meet Tortosa early in February of the next year. He soon changed the location of its meeting to Barcelona and its opening date to early March. In the midst of these preparations, the king was called south when his adversary began 68  C DACA, 48:64–69; Pere III, Chronicle, 2:536 (VI:33). See also: Kagay, “Emergence of Parliament,” 230–31; idem, “Parliament,” 67–68. With some relief, Pere declared: “[the Corts] gave us a great deal [of money] to help in the necessities of the war. When the offer had been made, we dissolved the Corts … by the wish of its members.”70 [etc] 69  Zurita, Anales, 4:457. 70  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1404, ff. 9, 16v–17v. See also: Martín Rodriguez, “Cortes,” 107; idem, “Cortes catalanes,” 85. 71  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 728, f. 163; R. 1192, f. 9v; R. 1404, ff. 11–12v; Pere III, Chronicle, 2:529 (VI:29). See also: Ferrer i Mallol, “Frontera,” 285–91; eadem, “Southern Valencian Frontier,” 106–8; Martín Rodriguez, “Cortes catalanes,” 84–85 Masiá i de Ros, Relación, 2:512–19; Zurita, Anales, 4:461–64 (IX:xlv–xlvi).

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the siege of Valencia.72 Although once again unable to attend the meeting at Barcelona, Pere did not dare postpone it, he again designated a stand-in. This time it was Queen Elionor who would represent the crown when the corts finally convened on March 10. In her opening speech, delivered expertly in Catalan, the Sicilian-born queen explained that her husband, who was leading an army to defend Valencia, could not be present at the meeting; she was certain, however, that the estates would do their duty in arranging for Catalonia’s protection.73 She reminded them that, though Catalonia was not yet under attack, it would soon be if Aragon and Valencia fell to Castile. Since the king did not have enough private funds to pay for the defense of all his realms at the same time, the Catalans would have to assume responsibility for their own defense. This duty would cost 120,000 libras for the next year, to be collected by a fogatge similar to that enacted at Monzón with half due from the clerical and noble estates and the other half from the townsmen. The receipts would be used to pay the wages of soldiers and sailors as well as the fitting out of galleys for war.74 The estates grudgingly accepted the need for yet another hearth-tax, but regulated its collection even more minutely than their counterparts had done at Monzón. To secure a more equitable division of the new subsidy, they forced their Pyrenean regions to pay a fair share. After three months of intense activity, the members of the corts finished their work in mid-July, 1364. The tax system they set up, however, proved so cumbersome and corrupt that for six months after the assembly had approved it, Pere repeatedly complained to his wife that his war effort in Valencia was chronically short of funds. He thus begged her to call the assembly back into session and demand that its members authorize an immediate levy of 20,000 libras, a sum that could then be deducted from the agreed-on grand total. Without this emergency contribution, he feared immediate defeat at the hands of Castile.75 The changing demands Pere imposed on the Barcelona assembly placed his long-suffering queen in an almost untenable position. Despite having finally dismissed the meeting, she found it necessary, against all parliamentary protocol, to call it back into session for All Saints Day (November 1). Then when the king seemed willing to break away from the Valencian campaign for a short 72  C AVC, II:135–48; Pere III, Chronicle, 2:544–48, (VI:40). See also: Ferrer i Mallol, “Frontera,” 285–91; eadem, “Southern Valencian Frontier,” 106–8. Pere asserted that he was acting for the “utility, good estate, protection, and defense” of Catalonia. 73  Pere III, Chronicle, 2:556 (VI:47); CDACA, 32:1–9, 14–21. See also: Kagay, “‘Treasons,” 46–47; Miron, Queens, 187–96; Sitges, “Muerte,” 36–41. 74  C AVC, II:148–50 (art. 1). 75  Ibid., 168–70. See also: Kagay, “Parliament,” 68–69.

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time, Elionor moved up the opening date of this meeting until October 18 and changed its site to Tortosa. Pere, however, found himself increasingly mired in the Valencian war, and was unable to keep this October appointment. As a result, the queen spent the rest of 1364 trying to arrange a Catalan meeting in accordance with her husband’s military schedule, all to no avail.76 When the delegates failed to accommodate Elionor’s financial demands by producing the promised subsidy, Pere took matters into his own hands and again delayed the proceedings, this time until early January, 1365. Desperate for money to fund his expensive Valencian campaigns, he traveled north to arrive at the new appointed site, the city of Lerida, just in time to call into session the often-postponed assembly. After suffering through almost three more months of the parliamentary delays he had grown to detest, the king finally got what he wanted. On April 7, 1365, the assembly formally granted him 350,000 libras to be paid off by installments over the next two years. As in the recent past, the money was once again to be raised through a hearth tax, a form of taxation that due to its frequent use had become thoroughly hated during the preceding decade.77 11

Corts of Barcelona, 1365

The vicissitudes of the repeatedly summoned assemblies of 1364–1365 and the manner in which the grant had been authorized greatly displeased the Catalans, who now focused their hatred on Queen Elionor. Despite the growing frustration of his wealthiest realm with these never ending royal exactions, the king complained that the Tortosa grant had not produced sufficient funds and so he was again in sore need of money. To provide for this, he ordered the corts of Catalonia to convene once more in Barcelona in mid-July, 1365. When forced to return to campaigning in Valencia, Pere again sent his longsuffering wife as a substitute to meet with the assembly that convened in the Catalan capital on July 17.78 At the opening session, while “sitting on a throne 76  C AVC, II:170–80. During this time, Elionor designated Lérida as the new meeting site for the corts. 77  Ibid., 181–207, 255–69; Pere III, Chronicle, 2:568–69 (VI:54). 78  C AVC, II:332–36. See also: María Teresa Ferrer i Mallol, “Les Corts de Catalunya i la creació de la Diputació del General o Generalitat en el marc de la guerra amb Castilla (1359– 1369),” AEM 334, no. 2 (2004): 875–938, esp. 918–28; M. Fibla Guitart, “Les Corts de Tortosa i Barcelona 1365. Recapte de donatiu,” Cuadernos de Historia Económica de Cataluña 19 (1978): 97–121; Manuel Sánchez Martínez, “Negociación y fiscalidad en Cataluña a mediados de siglo XIV: Los Cortes de Barcelona de 1365,” in Negociar en la Edad Media/Négocier

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in royal garb,” Elionor repeated her frequently voiced plea that her royal husband was still in considerable need of money to continue the Valencian war. She reiterated the crown’s claim that the corts of Tortosa had failed to raise the promised funds, making it essential for the Catalans to vote yet another subsidy.79 Desperate for the Barcelona assembly to begin its real work, Elionor allowed lesser nobles to stand in for the Catalan barons who were not at Barcelona due to their military service in Pere’s Valencian campaign. When the corts showed unexpected expedition by concluding procedural matters within a week, the delegates began to work on a new subsidy that would augment that of Tortosa. Shortly after the estates had taken up this matter, however, the queen dropped a bombshell on them by announcing her husband’s immediate need for a further 65,000 libras, a substantial sum which the assembly would have to raise just over a month simply to keep the royal army in the field. This peremptory and unexpected demand infuriated the estates that increasingly unleashed their anger on the queen and what they regarded as her high-handedness.80 Following the lead of the urban estate, the Barcelona assembly stubbornly refused to give in to this call for a new subsidy since they were still paying off the fiscal burdens imposed upon them by the crown at the meetings of Monzón and Tortosa. Although “vexed and burdened with these great expenses,” the estates did concede that they would be willing to pledge one-tenth of all their revenues for the next three years. But they accompanied this with a demand of their own: that they would retain control over how these funds would be spent. The money collected would be earmarked to pay for frontier troops and naval squadrons defending Catalonia and its coast. To clear up problems arising from the subsidies of Monzón and Tortosa, the members now demanded that the crown abrogate all of the uncollected funds voted by the corts since 1363.81 Increasingly alarmed at the hostile mood of the delegates, Elionor postponed another meeting of the assembly until late August. Then, convening it in Barcelona’s largest Franciscan monastery, she sadly complained of the many en la Moyen Âge. Actas de Coloquio celebrada en Barcelona los dias 14, 15, 16 de Octubre de 2004, ed. María Teresa Ferrer i Mallol, Jean-Marie Moeglin, Stéphane Pequinot, and Manuel Sánchez Martínez (Barcelona Madrid, 2005), 123–64, esp. 130–31. For Orihuelan campaign, see Pere III, 2:562–64 (VI:52–54); Ferrer i Mallol, “Frontera,” 309–18; eadem, “Southern Valencian Frontier,” 109–10. 79  C AVC, II:339–40. 80  Ibid., 340–49. 81  Ibid., 353–57. See also: Fibla Guitart, “Corts,” 100; Sánchez Martínez, “Negociación,” 133– 39; J.A. Sesma Muñoz, “Fiscalidad y poder. La fiscalidad centralizada como instrumento de poder en la Corona de Aragón,” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma 1 [Series III] (1988): 447–68, esp. 460.

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delaying tactics the members had engaged in, and came very close to accusing them of treason due to their failure to vote the critical funds. Near tears, the queen said she had suffered through a “month of fifty days” waiting for them to do their duty so the king could do his. If they were truly loyal subjects, they would support their royal master by agreeing to a new subsidy when they met again two days later.82 Much of Elionor’s forceful rhetoric and direct action in this latest Barcelona assembly owed its origin to a letter sent to her by the king on August 11, 1365, in the midst of his siege of Murviedro. This angry epistle had come in reply to her own short note penned during the opening days of the corts, explaining the many problems she was encountering. In this letter, Pere began by urging Elionor to treat the urban troublemakers with tact, but if this did not bring them back into line, she was to take legal action against them. According to Pere, while he was off fighting for the safety of all his realms, the urban estate of the Barcelona assembly seemed almost to be conspiring with his Castilian enemy. He ended by imploring the queen to stamp out parliamentary opposition. At the same time he assured her that she could depend on the crown prince whom he had authorized to take more forceful measures against the miscreants.83 On the same day he wrote his wife, the king sent a stern letter to the urban estate. In this communication, he angrily chided the townsmen for engaging far too much in fine “points and [legalistic] questions” that hindered their king’s military activities just at a moment when these were finally trending toward victory. The delegates now had to act as good subjects should by giving their wholehearted support to this last crucial stage of the war with Castile. It was now time for them to stand with the clergy and nobles and vote the necessary funds.84 When Pere received no reply from the townsmen, his fury spilled over in another letter sent on August 16. If the urban estate did not give up its pedantic opposition and join the loyal estates, they would severely undermine their royal lord who was just now at the point of “reviving his fortunes and repairing all the dishonor and loss” he had suffered since 1356. If they refused to do as he

82  C AVC, II:358–62. 83  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1206, ff. 22r–v. See also: Sánchez Martínez, “Negociación,” 158–59 (doc. 1). 84  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1208, ff. 33–34. See also: Sánchez Martínez, “Negociación,” 141, 159–60 (doc. 3).

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told them, he would loose upon them such a “great punishment that it would be an example for all time to come.”85 In the wake of this bitter correspondence, the queen conducted a dramatic session that took place “on the cloister grass” of the Franciscan monastery where they were meeting. Despite her efforts, however, the estates remained adamant, reiterating that they would raise 55,000 libras, but only if the crown agree to their conditions. The townsmen in particular held out against any payment of the earlier subsidies. Until Pere cancelled these, the towns would do nothing more to comply with what they regarded as the monarch’s excessive demands.86 Once again, Elionor seemed to have lost control at least temporarily of the Barcelona assembly, proroguing it fourteen times in the next three weeks. When she finally did convene another session in mid-September, she was confronted by the estates which were no less angry and were now dead-set against paying any further subsidies. On September 21, the queen, following her husband’s instructions, further enraged them by announcing that Pere had hired the mercenaries who were then streaming over the Pyrenees and that these men would have to be paid by October 1. She threatened that if the money were not forthcoming, the mercenaries might very well seek employment with Pedro I, who could then use them to attack Catalonia. Barely able to contain her own anger, Elionor rebuked the delegates saying that she had long suffered “great anxiety, confusion, and sadness of heart” at the hands of the Catalans, and that it was now time for them to serve the king and save their homeland.87 Determined to assert control over members of the Barcelona assembly, she compelled them to work out the long-delayed subsidy by direct threats of legal action. She even resorted to trying to keep them from their midday meals until they complied with her demands.88 After finally gaining the upper hand by making it clear that a very real threat existed, Elionor had no intention of relinquishing her advantage. She ordered the clerical estate to be lined up and had its members asked, one by one, if her monetary request was a just and reasonable one. Under the circumstances, each member had to agree that it was. When treated in the same way, many of the Catalan nobles hesitated and then declared that her query was truly a 85  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1208, f. 50v. See also: Sánchez Martínez, “Negociación,” 141–42, 160–62 (doc. 4). 86  C AVC, II:362–66. 87  Ibid., 369–72 [For English translation, see Appendix II, doc. 68]; Parlaments, 27–33; Pere III, Chronicle, 2:572–73 (VI:57). See also: Cawsey, Kingship, 116; Kagay, “Parliament,” 69–70; Sánchez Martínez, “Negociación,” 145. 88  Sánchez Martínez, “Negociación,” 147.

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difficult one. Openly opposed to their sovereigns only a day before, the townsmen now agreed with their clerical colleagues about the ultimate justice of the royal cause. With their resistance broken, the Barcelona estates appointed three representatives who, after a day of consultation, brought before the queen and the full corts a list of articles laying out how the revised Tortosa grant would be administered. On December 15, 1365, after a stormy debate, the instrument was approved in the presence of Pere himself (who had returned to Barcelona for the Christmas holidays), the long-suffering queen wife, and their eldest son, Prince Joan.89 12

Cortes of Zaragoza, 1365

In contrast to the high drama played out by the Catalan parliaments of 1364 and 1365, the Aragonese cortes during this same period operated in a fairly normal fashion. Nevertheless, it, too, was disrupted by the irratic schedule forced on the king. Although he had called for an Aragonese assembly to meet at Zaragoza in August, 1364, the war in Valencia demanded his presence in the south, making his participation in the assembly impossible. Although a new parliamentary session was scheduled for late-November, 1364, it did not actually take place until August 14 of the following year.90 With the Aragonese frontier still under threat of Castilian attack, Pere called on the cortes to support 1,000 knights for the next fourteen months. As usual, the subsidy it voted would be divided between Aragon’s four estates, with the townsmen paying the largest amount. Besides the establishment of this military fund, the cortes also set the price for basic commodities to be provided to the troops throughout the period of the grant.91 In every Aragonese city, town, and village, two citizens along with a notary would collect, record, and store the tax receipts. Every two months, this money was to be sent to Zaragoza where it would be stored in a strongbox with four different locks, the keys to which were kept by men chosen from each of the four estates.92

89  C AVC, II:372–76, 445. 90  C RA, 47–48; Pere III, Chronicle, 2:558–59 (VI:48). See also: Zurita, Anales, IV:535 (IX:lxi). 91  C RA, 50, 58. The full division of the estates was as follows: clerics: 22,580 sous; nobles 16,260s; knights: 4,000 sous; and townsmen: 37,250 sous. 92  Ibid., 50–51.

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Aragon’s highest judicial official, the justicia mayor, would oversee the administration of the subsidy in line with rules set by the cortes. Four deputies from each estate were responsible for collecting and storing the funds. These parliamentary agents were to serve under the authority of the justicia. Unlike the official representatives of Catalan and Valencian parliaments, they could not act as paymasters for frontier troops or reimburse soldiers for the loss of horses on active service. Instead, in a more traditional manner, the justicia and royal officials carried out these duties. These men were charged with administering subsidies and, in return, would themselves receive daily salaries and travel allowances.93 Like Catalan grants made throughout the war, those voted by the kingdom of Aragon could only be used in defense of the kingdom proper and not to subsidize “foreign campaigns,” which, in the minds of these delegates, included actions fought in Catalonia and Valencia. Some frontier sites such as Daroca attempted to work out a deal with the deputies that let them avoid paying into the subsidy, in return for maintaining fifty horsemen within their own borders for a year-and-a-half. If any such deal exceeded the authority of the deputies they had to refer it to the justicia. Limitations were also imposed on their ability to investigate and settle frauds and the violent disputes that arose in some of the Aragonese villages when the war tax was imposed.94 13 Summary The War of the Two Pedros led to critical changes in the history of the eastern Spanish parliaments. The conflict proved a catalyst for the emergence of freestanding bodies that represented the assemblies and worked alongside the king to administer the war effort in Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia. In each realm new-found parliamentary power was shared between the parliament itself and the executive committees to which it had given “full and sufficient authority” to administer subsidies. These appointed bodies eventually attained permanent status in the form of institutions called the Deputació del General in Aragon, the Generalitat in Catalonia, and the Generalidad in Valencia.95 93  Ibid., 56–58. 94  C RA, 59–60. See also: Kagay, “Parliament,” 71. 95  Kagay, “Parliament,” 72–76; idem, “Development” 146–47 José Martínez Aloy, La diputación de la generalidad de Valencia (Valencia, 1930); Ignacio Rubio y Cambronero, La Deputació del General de Catalunya, 2 vols., (Barcelona, 1950), 1:135–53; Peter Rycraft, “The Role of the Catalan Corts in the later Middle Ages,” EHR, 351 (April, 1974), 241–69, esp. 249–49; José Angel Sesma Muñoz and J.A. Armillas, La Diputación de Aragón: El gobierno aragonés

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While much of the money raised between 1356 and 1365 grew out of extraordinary grants collected over a two-year period, this source of funding became ever harder to extract as the conflict wore on. As a result, the crown increasingly fell back onto the use of regular tax revenues and the contracting of short-term loans.96 The major change came in how these funds were administrated. They increasingly fell under control of the delegates themselves and the representatives whom they had appointed. These men, who now became salaried parliamentary officials, retained their posts for the entire two-year period in which a subsidy was in effect. Marking their administrative documents with parliamentary seals, they were distinct from royal officials who were not permitted to interfere with them when they were carrying out their duties. In effect, a new bureaucracy, consisting of overseers of the subsidy, tax collectors, distributors of money, and treasurers, developed from the appointment of those parliamentary agents initially charged only with collection of war revenues.97 They soon began to assume other warrelated functions: they stationed and paid troops, purchased provisions and transported them to front-line units, and issued muster rolls, receipts, pay vouchers, and estimates for the value of horses.98 The “shadow government” that emerged from these wartime parliaments was not greeted with any warmth by the crown. Neither the king nor his officials were happy with a situation that they had not produced and could not control. On the other hand, in order to survive, Pere had little choice but to accept this new reality, even if it meant a temporary loss of his “initiative in policy and finance.”99 Although unable to reclaim his political autonomy as long as the Castilian war raged on, he eventually began to recover some of the lost royal initiatives. For example, during the last years of the war, he gained the right to audit the financial records compiled by the parliamentary delegates. The king clearly distrusted the agents of the eastern Spanish parliaments, a

del reino y la comunidad autónoma (Zaragoza, n.d.), 27–45; José Angel Sesma Muñoz, “Las transformaciones de la fiscalidad real en la Baja Edad Media,” in XV Congrés d’història de la corona d’Aragó [El poder real en la Corona de Aragón (Siglos XIV–XVI)], 5 vols. (Zaragoza, 1993), 1 (Ponencias): 238–91, esp. 386–89. 96  C AVC, I, 2:629–725; II: 55–133 281, 321, 325–26, 415–16 (arts. 1–19, 33, 78). See also: José Iglesia Font, “El fogaje de 1365–1370,” Memorias de la Real Academia de Ciencias y Artes 34 (1962): 254–62; Kagay, “Parliament,” 134–35; Martín Rodriguez, “Corts catalanes,” 85–86; Pons Guri, “Fogatge,” 351. 97  Kagay, “Parliaments,” 137–38. 98  Ibid., 138. 99  Bisson, Medieval Crown. 118.

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fact he demonstrated by banning them from any future employment in his own government.100 14

Wartime Role of the Cortes of Castile and Leon

One of the most obvious differences between the warring kingdoms lay in the extent to which each of the monarchs made use of his cortes to further the nation’s war effort. As we have seen, in the several realms composing the Crown of Aragon, representative bodies came to play a significant role. This was true not only in Aragon and Valencia, scene of most of the fighting, but in Catalonia as well, despite its relative removal from the front lines. In all three, the cortes quickly became a critical source of military funding, one on which the crown found itself forced to rely increasingly as the conflict progressed. In fact, throughout Pere III’s lands, delegates serving in the assemblies, in particular those belonging to the third estate, actually usurped powers that the royal government normally wielded, not only designating how funds would be spent, but even seeing to their distribution. The story was very different in Castile; here, the kingdom’s parliamentary body appears to have played a largely insignificant role in the conduct of the war.101 By contrast to his Aragonese counterpart, the Castilian Pedro appears to have summoned only four assemblies of the realm during his entire nineteenyear reign, two of which actually met before 1356 when the War of the Two Pedros broke out.102 In other words, only two meetings occurred during that 100  Kagay, “Parliament,” 139–40. 101  The surviving records of these representative bodies are gathered together in a multivolume collection entitled Cortes de los Antiguos Reinos de Leon y de Castilla/escrita y publicada de Orden de la Real Academia de la Historia [hereafter CLC]. Four volumes containing the documents were published between 1861 and 1882. Vol. 2 contains those records that survive for meetings of cortes held during the reigns of Pedro I and his successor, Enrique II. For an online version of this volume, see URL: https://catalog.hathitrust. org/Record/009263742. Access either: Full view T. II or Full View Vol. 2. In 1883–1884, a two-volume Introduction was added to this collection. The work of Manuel Colmeiro y Penido (d. 1894), a leading historian and economist of the period, it was divided into two parts: (1) Parte Primera: Historia de las Cortes de Leon y Castilla [Historia], 1:1–106; and (2) Parte Segunda: Exámen de los Cuadernos de Cortes [Exámen], 1:109–524 as well as the entire second volume. For the multi-volume Introduction online see URL: https://books. google.com/books/about/Cortes_de_los_antiguos_reinos_de_Leon. Subsequent scholars who have written extensively about the Castilian cortes invariably cite these careful studies by Colmeiro. 102  In his Exámen de los Cuadernos de Cortes (1:282), Colmeiro begins a relatively brief treatment of Pedro’s reign with an almost apologetic admission that the king never made

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decade long conflict, neither of them during its earlier stages. What is more, there is little indication that either of those meetings devoted much attention to military financing. 15

Origins and Early History

The Castilian cortes that met throughout the later Middle Ages and continued into the modern period appears to have been inspired by a memory of the earlier Councils of Toledo that played a critical legislative role during the centuries when Visigoths ruled Iberia.103 Following the rapid Islamic conquest of the peninsula in the decades after 711, the defeated remnants of Visigothic Spain retreated into the mountainous north where a number of small Christian successor states eventually reemerged between the eighth and tenth centuries. Among these states were both the kingdom of Leon and its offshoot, the county, later the kingdom of Castile. Here, as in eastern Spain, meetings of clergy and nobles were re-established as part of the governing structure. The concept of representation by the king’s subjects constituted part of a Visigothic heritage that Leonese monarchs readily assumed in order to bolster their own legitimacy. During the opening centuries of the Reconquista, this representation centered around the leading instrument of royal government, the “royal court” or much use of his royal power to summon Castile’s representative body, arguing that “the times were not calm enough (tan bonancibles) to permit the frequent celebration of cortes.” In evaluating Colmeiro’s excuse, it is worth noting that the war years were considerably less calm in the Crown of Aragon where most of the actual fighting took place and which witnessed large expanses of its territory being overrun and occupied by Castilian forces. Despite this, the turbulence associated with conflict did nothing to discourage the ruler of that kingdom from repeatedly summoning parliamentary assemblies in all three of his realms. In fact, it was precisely the royal need to finance the Aragonese war effort that pressured Pere III to rely increasingly on his cortes and in fact, promoted their growth in each of those realms. 103  A good short account of the cortes in Leon and Castile can be found in volume 1 of Roger Bigelow Merriman’s classic work, The Rise of the Spanish Empire in the Old World and in the New, 4 vols. (New York, 1962), 1:217–28. See also: Merriman, “The Cortes of the Spanish Kingdoms in the Later Middle Ages,” AHR 16, no. 3 (Apr., 1911): 476–95, esp. 479–86. Other useful sources include O’Callaghan, Cortes,13–14, 79–93, 96–98, 107–10, 114–28; Vladmir Piskorski, Las Cortes de Castilla en el periodo de tránsito de la Edad Media a la Moderna 1188–1520, trans. C. Sánchez Albornoz (Barcelona, 1930), 19–42, 58–91, 98–104; Procter, Curia, 8–13, 152–75, 203–23; Teofilo F. Ruiz, “Oligarchy and Royal Power: The Castilian Cortes and the Castilian Crises,” Parliaments, Estates and Representation 2, no. 2 (1982): 95–101, esp. 95–96.

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curia regis; a body regularly composed of the king’s family, his major officials and royal servants as well as nobles and clergy who were present at court. The curia’s main purpose was to provide a monarch with advice when called upon to do so and its membership tended to increase temporarily if the king was faced with a significant or unusual problem. Although most additional members brought in by the crown to form a “full court” (plena curia) were originally recruited from among the realm’s leading clerics and nobles who did not reside at court, in some instances, particularly when a king was in need of money, he might also summon representatives from the expanding cities and towns that were springing up throughout his kingdom. Starting around the eleventh century, it was this plena curia that began its evolution into a national assembly, originally referred to as a “concilio,” but which over time came to be known instead as the cortes. In the tenth century, the frontier county of Castile broke away from Leon and eventually became a kingdom in its own right. As a result, their national assemblies evolved separately until 1230 when the great reconquest ruler, Fernando III “el Santo,” permanently re-united the two under a single monarchy. Meanwhile, in 1188, the full court of León had already made a significant move toward becoming a more permanent institution with the regular inclusion of “elected citizens from each city.” As a result of having made this change, that year’s meeting was the first to be designated in the records as a cortes. 104 Over succeeding decades, attendance by the third estate did indeed become a regular feature of the new institution. And by the fourteenth century, what had once been a temporary advisory council attached to the royal court had taken on the role of a separate governmental body, one which began to create a customary set of standards and procedures. 105 16

Membership and Functions

In the early days, membership in the cortes could vary enormously; at one time up to 130 cities and towns claimed the right to be represented by their chosen deputies (personeros) who acted upon the specific instructions of their 104   C LC, 1:39–42 (Cortes de Leon, 1188). 105  Nilda Guglielmi, “La curia regía en León y Castilla,” CHE 22–23 (1955): 116–267; 28 (1958): 43–101; O’Callaghan, “Beginnings,” 1504, 1510–11, 1514, 1527; Procter, Curia, 112–13; Reilly, Medieval Spains, 138–39. González, Reino, 3:668–69,704–5; 736–37 (docs. 966, 987, 1009); Marongiu, Medieval Parliaments, 62; O’Callaghan, “Beginnings,” 1510–11, 1514; Evelyn Procter, “The Towns of León and Castile as Suitors before the King’s Court,” EHR 74 (1959): 1–22.

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municipal councils. The trend over time was to reduce this expansive representation and afford delegates more initiative in making decisions. By the reign of the Catholic monarchs, Fernando and Isabel (1474–1516), the number of cities and towns regularly summoned had fallen to eighteen. The cortes exercised little or no control over when or how often it met. Despite an attempt in 1313 to arrange for regular biennial meetings, a meaningful evolution in this direction never took place. Instead, its summoning remained a royal prerogative. Although a regency or troubled reign might inspire an increase in the number of meetings called by the crown (witness Alfonso XI’s youthful parliaments), this was not necessarily the case as the reign of Pedro I clearly demonstrates. Despite several years of intense civil strife followed by a decade of nearly continuous warfare, this monarch proved quite sparing in his use of the national assembly. Similar to what happened in eastern Spain, the Castilian cortes ultimately developed a strict ceremonial protocol that specified its procedures, including the arrangement of seating for the king, his family and great officials as well as the three estates. After the king’s opening speech and official responses from the customary spokesmen of the nobility, clergy, and townspeople, the assembly would set to work. Besides the official and often time-consuming approval of credentials, delegates spent the majority of their effort in dealing with issues brought before them by the king or raised in their own petitions. Among the matters delegates regularly considered were the staffing and final acceptance of regency councils, formal recognition of the crown prince as the kingdom’s future feudal lord and ruler, and the witnessing of royal wedding agreements. Although modern scholars differ concerning the true extent of the cortes’ legislative role, at the very least it seems to have engaged in formal approval of ordinances brought before it by the king as well as approving as laws of the land petitions formally submitted by the estates themselves and then accepted by the crown. The members of the national assembly were also called on to bear witness to declarations of wars and ratify instruments of peace. In regard to warfare and the king’s ability to wage it, this body’s paramount function was to vote both customary and extraordinary taxation used for paying military salaries and purchasing army provisions. Depending on the size of the force being put into the field and the amount of time it was on active service, military expenses could amount to millions of maravedis. Like many another contemporary monarch who was drawn into a war before having the money to pay for it,106 106  For military expenses of other European states of the fourteenth century, see Philippe Contamine, “Le coût de la guerre de cents ans en Angleterre,” Annales ESC 20 (1965):

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Castilian rulers seldom seemed to have operating funds before they took to the battlefield. If the campaign were short enough, the king might be able to sustain his army by living off the land, particularly when it was enemy territory, and paying his troops by division of captured booty.107 By contrast, in a long campaign involving large forces, monarchs usually had no choice but to cast their nets widely and haul in financial support from all available sources. To begin with, the king could draw on the various streams of royal taxation. There were regular imposts on merchandise such as the portazgo, martiniega, montazgo; war taxes such as the fonsadera, galera, and yantar; and sales taxes such as the alcabala and sisa as well as income from royal monopolies on salt and a few other commodities. In addition to taxes, there were forced loans, so-called “free will” gifts from individual clerics and laymen, and extraordinary grants demanded of Castile’s Jewish and Muslim communities. If the enemy were Muslim, the papacy could decree a temporary donation of clerical revenues to the crown in order to pursue a crusade. Despite these many sources of revenue, war was expensive and Castilan monarchs, like their Aragonese counterparts, not infrequently found it necessary to call on the cortes to help bear the burden of military funding. During his reign, Pedro’s father, Alfonso XI, made extensive use of this body (see below). In asking for parliamentary funding, a monarch often made promises to limit other royal exactions. While such promises might be made in good faith, the expense of keeping large numbers of troops in the field led Castilian kings on more than one occasion to violate the sworn terms of a parliamentary grant. For example, during their wars, Alfonso XI, and his father, Fernando IV, had steadily escalated the agreed-upon rate of the lucrative sales tax (the alcabala) from five to a whopping twenty percent. These same monarchs also repeatedly sidestepped the terms of the moneda forera, a parliamentary grant to the crown made in exchange for the reigning monarch’s promise that Castile’s coinage would not be debased. Though this revenue was only supposed to be claimed by the crown every seven years, monarchs of the period began to claim it more 788–91; John B. Henneman, Jr., “Financing the Hundred Years War: Royal Taxation in France in 1340,” Speculum 42 (1967): 275–98; Kagay, “War Financing,” 120–21; M.M.Postan, “The Cost of the Hundred Years War,” Past and Present 27 (1964): 34–53; Michael Prestwick, “War and Taxation in England in the XIIIth and XIVth Centuries,” in Genèse de l’état moderne: Prélèvement et distribution, ed. J.P. Genet and M. LeMené (Paris, 1987), 181–92, esp. 184. 107  Joseph Ángelo Davila, Historia de Xerez se la Frontera (Helsinki, 2008),135–37, 155–57 (chaps. 23, 27). See also: Luis Pablo Martínez, “La historia militar del Reino Medieval de Valencia: filón inestimable y asignatura pendiente,” Militaria, Revista de Cultura Militar 12 (1998): 169–81; Rojas Gabriel, Frontera, 184–85; Torres Fontes, Instituciones, 175, 481–82.

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often. To add injury to insult, they not infrequently continued their weak monetary policies despite a solemn pledge not to do so. In short, in time of war, military necessity might well trump all other considerations. Sovereigns not infrequently demanded grants from a cortes; then broke the promises made to that body in order to obtain those grants. In the face of this royal high-handedness, there was little or nothing that a Castilian cortes could do. Unlike the emerging power of national assemblies during this period in the neighboring Crown of Aragon, in Castile, the cortes never won a right to play any role in the collection or disbursement of the funds. What is more, only upon rare occasions did it mount any challenge whatsoever to how the crown spent the money it had provided. 17 Pedro I and the Cortes of Castile-Leon The nineteen-year reign of Pedro I was marked by almost ceaseless conflict, both foreign and domestic. Starting not long after he came to power, the young monarch was faced with an internal insurrection that for a time looked like it might eviscerate his monarchy. No sooner had the king managed to put down his rebellious aristocrats than he entered his decade-long struggle against Aragon. With its long history of military financing, one might expect that the cortes would play a significant role during such a war-torn period, as, in fact, it had during the equally war-torn reign of Pedro’s father. Instead, as one of the authors of this work has pointed out in a recent essay, the skimpy remains of a wartime parliamentary record “sheds relatively little light on how legislation influenced the waging of war during the period.”108 Table 4

Meetings held during Pedro I’s Reign

Cortes of Valladolid (1351) Ayuntamiento of Burgos (1355) Cortes of Seville (1362) Ayuntamiento of Bubierca (1363)

108  L.J. Andrew Villalon, “Legislation and the Financing of War: The None-Too-Enlightening Case of Castile in the War of the Two Pedros (1356–1366),” [paper presented at the 49th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Mich., Friday, May 9, 2014].

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A major theme we have stressed throughout this book is the asymmetrical nature of surviving sources bearing on the War of the Two Pedros. The cortes records are no exception. Those for the Crown of Aragon are far more numerous and infinitely more revealing than anything available for Castile. At their best, Castilian records supply little or nothing beyond the petitions submitted to the crown by the various estates and royal responses to those petitions. There is nowhere near the level of information about the actual functioning of the cortes that one finds in Aragonese sources. Rendering the problem particularly acute for Pedro’s reign is the fact that of the four meetings he summoned, there are no surviving records for three of them, including the two that date to the years of conflict. We know of these others because they are mentioned in the chronicle of Pedro López de Ayala.109 In the spring of 1351, roughly a year after his succession and almost five years before his long war with Aragon began, Pedro summoned to the northern city of Valladolid Castilian nobles, clergy, and townsmen for his first meeting of cortes which began on June 30 and stretched into November.110 Here, representatives of the realm swore allegiance to their new sovereign. At the time, a seventeen-year-old Pedro was still very much under the control of his leading advisers, most of whom, including the most prominent, the lord of Alburquerque were holdovers from his father’s reign. It seems safe to say that these men, along with the now-powerful queen-mother, María of Portugal, played a major role in setting the meeting’s agenda. For example, it was primarily Alburquerque and Doña María who dispatched a diplomatic delegation north across the Pyrenees on what would turn out to be an ill-fated mission of selecting a French bride the young monarch, a key step in cementing the French alliance both of them sought. This, along with the normal oath of allegiance, constituted the meeting’s most important pieces of business. The gathering at Valladolid is extremely well-documented; coverage in volume two of the Cortes de los Antiguos Reinos de Leon y de Castilla runs to 144 pages making it one of the most extensive in the history of medieval Castile. What is more, the king and his delegates engaged in a good deal of activity, not only reaffirming many earlier grants and privileges, but also attempting

109  Ayala, Pedro I, 460 (1355, chap. 2); 519–20 (1362, chap. 7); 525–26 (1363, chap. 3). See also: Colmeiro, Exámen, 1:305–306. In a rather hollow attempt to depict a king who ruled largely without his cortes as both a competent and involved promoter of legislative activities, Colmeiro alleges that in just the records of his first cortes held at Valladolid, “there is enough to recognize his high aspirations as a legislator.” 110   C LC, 2:1–144 (Valladolid, 1351). See also: Colmeiro, Exámen, 1:282–305. Ayala, Pedro I, 417– 23 (1351, chaps. 12–19).

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to break some new legislative ground.111 Despite this auspicious opening to Pedro’s career as a parliamentary ruler, Valladolid was definitely an exception. Nothing comparable would occur again throughout the rest of this reign. Thereafter, volume two of the Cortes de los Antiguos Reinos remains silent for a period of almost two decades. The next official cortes that it records did not meet until the fall of 1366 and lasted into the opening months of the following year.112 This meeting, however, occurred not under the auspices of Pedro I, who was currently residing in exile, but of his nemesis, Enrique II, when the latter enjoyed his first period in power during the year that followed the War of the Two Pedros. The new king had summoned this cortes to Burgos as part of his unsuccessful preparations to defeat an Anglo-Gascon army raised by the Black Prince; an army that soon descended upon Castile where it decisively won the battle of Nájera and restored Pedro to his throne. Only the records of this meeting, called by the enemy, break the silence that prevailed throughout the eighteen years of Pedro’s reign that followed his cortes at Valladolid. During that prolonged period, the king appears to have called only three further meetings; almost all we know about them coming not from the official records, but from the chronicle. The first of these missing meetings occurred in Burgos in 1355, and is referred to by Ayala as an “ayuntamiento” rather than a cortes, due apparently to the absence of clerical representation and an incomplete attendance by delegates from the third estate.113 Since it was held in the year before the War of the Two Pedros broke out, it sheds no light on the extent to which, if at all, the Castilian monarch used such meeting to finance the conflict. Instead, the funds Ayala mentions as having been voted to the king were to suppress the aristocratic coalition currently in full scale revolt against him. Pedro’s next meeting, this one referred to by the chronicler as a cortes, took place in Seville in 1362. Two things should be noted here: first, when the cortes was held, the conflict between the two kingdoms had already consumed nearly six years. If Pedro entertained any real worries about obtaining military funding, he had certainly waited until rather late in the day to invoke the Castilian parliament.114 By comparison, his Aragonese adversary, Pere III, had called a cortes to finance his war effort almost as soon as the war began. 111  Among other things, the delegates took on the vexing issue of the land grants known as behetrias. 112   C LC, 2:144–163 (Burgos, 1366–1367). Ayala, Pedro I, 547 (1366, chap. 19). 113  Ayala, Pedro I, p. 460 (1355, chap. 2); Colmeiro, Exámen, 1:305–306. According to the author, although Ayala does not refer to this gathering as a cortes, several other prominent Spanish historians do, including Juan de Mariana and Ortiz de Zúñiga. 114  Ayala, Pedro I, 519–20 (1362, chap. 7). Colmeiro, Exámen, 1:306.

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Second, at the very moment when the cortes met in Seville, Castile was at least nominally at peace with everyone; in particular, with Aragon. In May, 1361, roughly a year earlier, the two belligerents had signed the Treaty of Terrer (Deza), a treaty that, however uneasy, was still in effect. Not until some weeks later would the king suddenly abandon the solemn agreement he had made and launch his sneak attack against Calatayud. What is more, the king’s brief war against Granada had just ended in a perfidious victory. According to Ayala, Pedro chose this moment to hold his cortes due in large part to the fact that so many of the realm’s great nobles were gathered in Seville after having just returned from that year’s brief, but victorious conflict with the Moorish kingdom. Under the circumstances, Pedro could not have summoned the delegates to fund a current war effort since no war was currently underway! He might have appealed to the cortes to help pay for one or both of the past conflicts, but Ayala makes no mention this being the case. Instead, at Seville, Pedro wanted from the delegates something other than financial support. Here, in the presence of all three estates, he publicly announced that before his much-heralded wedding to the French-born princess, Blanche de Bourbon, he had already contracted a secret marriage to his beloved mistress, María de Padilla who had died the preceding year. In support of his assertion, the king produced a number of witnesses who swore that they had been present. As a result, Pedro now commanded that in future Doña María be referred to by all as queen of Castile, and declared that their four children—one son and three daughters—were legitimate. For its part, the cortes swore allegiance to Pedro’s infant son, Alfonso, as his rightful successor on the throne. The final assembly we know of that was held during Pedro’s reign occurred a year later (1363), not within Castile, but at a town called Burbieca to the east of Calatayud, in the neighboring kingdom of Aragon.115 Once again, Ayala refers to it as an ayuntamiento, due again to the absence of the clerical estate. The unexpected death of his son and the need to rearrange the succession had led Pedro to call this meeting. Its unusual venue in all likelihood resulted from the fact that the king was currently in the midst of a highly successful campaign against his adversary, one that he would at the very least have to suspend if not completely abandon were he compelled to withdraw into Castile to hold the meeting.116 In the course of this assembly held on the frontlines, Castilian nobles, many of whom were currently serving in Pedro’s army, as well as representatives of the cities, who had been summoned to take part, swore a new oath, this time 115  Ayala, Pedro I, 525–26 (1363, chap. 3). 116  Colmeiro, Exámen, 1:306.

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to the three royal princesses, “each of whom would succeed the other” in the order of their birth, beginning with the eldest, Beatriz, followed by Constanza, and then Isabel. This would be the order of succession unless Pedro were to produce another legitimate son, a not at all unlikely occurrence since he was still under thirty, or one of those daughters who succeeded gave rise to a line of her own. There are several possible explanations for the paucity of cortes records from Pedro’s reign. It may be just one more example of the largescale disappearance of state papers that plagues all of Castile’s medieval history before the fifteenth century. On the other hand, there is something else that must be factored in. Nineteenth century scholars who compiled the collection did manage to uncovered extensive records for both the preceding and the following reigns. For Alfonso XI, there are records of 11 meetings;117 for Enrique II, 7.118 It is only Pedro’s reign that is largely missing. The highly disparate nature of survival suggests a rather more sinister explanation. As we have noted earlier, not-a-few scholars who study the period (including ourselves) believe that following his victory in the long and bloody contest for the throne, the usurper may well have destroyed documents from the reign of his hated predecessor, documents that might reflect badly on himself or well on that figure whom he rarely named, but regularly referred to in such pejorative terms as “that evil tyrant who was called king.”119 Given what Ayala tells us about the three missing meetings, their subject matter would almost certainly fit into the category of things best consigned to the flames. The meeting of 1355 had been called upon to support Pedro against the rebel coalition of which Enrique was the principal leader and which would almost certainly have been roundly condemned in the document. Even more deserving of destruction would have been the records of 1362 and 1363, in both of which the cortes delegates recognized María de Padilla as the legitimate queen of Castile and her children as legitimate heirs to the throne. In short, 117  Records of Alfonso’s cortes take up most of the CLC’s volume one. They include Palencia (1313), Burgos (1315), Carrion (1317), Medina del Campo (1318), Valladolid (1322), Valladolid (1325), Madrid (1329), Burgos (1338), Alcalá de Henares (1343), Burgos (1345), and Alcalá de Henares (1348). This last meeting of his reign is perhaps the fourteenth century’s most significant. 118  In addition to Burgos in 1366–1367 and Enrique’s major cortes held at Toro in 1371, records survive in the CLC for a number of others that he assembled: Toro (1369), Medina del Campo (1370), Toro (1371), Burgos (1373), Burgos (1374), and the last of his cortes that met in Burgos in 1377. The Examen deals with these on pp. 308–39. Its author expresses strong doubts concerning one of these (Burgos, 1374) and another of which there is some mention in other sources, but no record in the CLC (Soria, 1375). 119   C LC, 2:146 (Burgos, 1366–1367).

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while it cannot be proven, it would come as no surprise if the “lost” records of Pedro’s cortes turned out to be the prime example of the winner culling documents to shape the history of what had happened. When all is said and done, the complete absence of those official records for both of the assemblies Pedro called during his war with Aragon prevents us from knowing with certainty to what extent (if any) the monarch used them to secure support for the war effort. There is always the possibility that at one or both of these, the king did indeed ask for aid and that Ayala, our only source, failed to mention this royal appeal (though given his usual attention to detail that seems unlikely). On the other hand, the fact that Pedro summoned only two such gatherings during that entire period, at both of which, according to the chronicler, he concentrated his attention on the succession question, does suggest that securing financial support from his cortes was never a major royal priority. A leading expert on the Castilian cortes in the fourteenth century, Julio Valdeón Baruque, characterizes the king as having possessed an open “scorn for the cortes” which led to his failure to summon Castile’s national assembly.120 Since no records survive showing that Pedro calling together any parliaments in which he requested and was granted war funding, Baruque wonders just how his war effort could have been adequately financed. Not-a-few historians share Baruque’s curiosity. One thing, however, seems pretty certain: the king was not defeated by any lack of military funding. For year after year, his armies advanced into Aragonese territory until they held a substantial part of that realm. Only the eleventh-hour insertion of the free companies into the conflict radically altered the balance and led to his defeat. Given these facts, Baruque’s accompanying conviction that Pedro’s avoidance of the cortes played a major role in his loss of the throne seems at best highly questionable. 120  Julio Valdeón Baruque, “Las Cortes castellanas en el siglo XIV,” AEM 7 (1970–1971): 633–44, esp. 643; idem, “Las Cortes de Castilla y León en tiempos de Pedro I y de los primeros trastámaras (1350–1406),” Cortes de Castilla y León, 1:185–213, esp. 187.

Chapter 14

The Fate of Aragonese and Valencian Jews before, during, and after the War Years 1

Jewish Settlement and Survival in Iberia

Since the War of the Two Pedros was essentially an extended border conflict causing great damage along the Aragonese and Valencian frontiers, it destabilized even further a region long known for its smuggling, rustling, cross border-raiding, slave trading, and widespread black market activities. Despite the Aragonese crown’s constant efforts to exert effective control over these wild lands from the reign of Jaume I onward, they proved only marginally successful.1 Few of the people who made these border lands their home were as exposed to these dangers as were the inhabitants of Jewish and Muslim ghettoes (the former known alternatively as aljamas, juderias, juerias, and the latter, morerías). Both constituted important sections of the towns and villages that dotted this frontier. Though this chapter focuses primarily on Jewish communities, it must be pointed out that the mudejares (Muslim living under Christian rule) of the region also suffered greatly during Aragon’s war with Castile. After undergoing conquest by Jaume I in the late-1230s, the populations of Muslim communities of southern Valencia lost both territory and privileges, ultimately becoming, in the words of one modern scholar, “an island in a Hispanic Christian sea”. Muslims “became mere guests in their own homes as the new owners [the Christians] moved in.”2 Though an equilibrium or sorts remained in Valencia as long as the great Muslim leader, al-Azraq, retained some power in the southern part of the kingdom, Pere II’s suppression of his revolt in the 1270s led to a gradual decline in Muslim control over their own communities which increasingly came under the legal dominance of Christian rulers and their Jewish agents.3 1  Kagay, “Border War,” 106–07. 2  Burns, Muslims, Christians and Jews, 23. 3  For further discussion of the suffering of mudejar populations of southern Valencia, see Chapter 19, section, 2. Burns, Islam Under the Crusaders, 37–45; idem, Muslims, Christians and Jews, 126, 243–47, 289, 291–92; Margarita López Gómez, “The Mozarabs: Worthy Bearers of Islamic Culture,” in Legacy, 1:171–75, esp. 173; L.P. Harvey, “The Mudejars,” in Legacy, 176–87,

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004425057_016

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With a presence dating back to the Roman Empire,4 Jewish settlements in Iberia survived the dangerously anti-Jewish era of Visigothic rule that stretched from the fifth to the early eighth century, eventually to enter into a golden age of sorts with the Islamic conquest that began in 711.5 While this lasted for several hundred years, it came to an end around the twelfth century when successive waves of puritanical Muslims, the Almoravids and Almohads, swept across the straits from North Africa. These invaders proved to be far less tolerant than their Muslim predecessors on the peninsula, compelling several generations of Jews to move northward into what had to become by comparison more tolerant Christian lands. Many of these Jewish immigrants sought new homes in territory recently reconquered by the advancing Christian armies along the Aragonese, Castilian, and Valencian frontiers.6 The movement of Jews even farther northward into the old realms of Aragon and Catalonia seems to have brought their population in the Crown of Aragon to a grand total of about 15,000 during the reign of Jaume I.7 Communities of various sizes with some degree of self government sprang up in the capital cities of Barcelona, Valencia, and Zaragoza as well as in frontier settlements such as Calatayud, Elche, Jaca, Jativa, Murviedro (Segunto), Orihuela, Tarazona, Tarragona, and Teruel.8 These pockets of Jewish population provided men talented in accounting and investment to the Aragonese monarchs esp. 182–83; Mark D. Meyerson, Jews in an Iberian Frontier Kingdom: Society, Economy, and Politics in Morvedre, 1248–1391 (Leiden, 2004), 25–33, 163. 4  The first major influx of Jews occurred in the second century following the Bar Kochba Revolt in Palestine when the Antonine emperor, Hadrian settled several hundred thousand Palestinian Jews in Hispania, the Roman province from which his family came. 5  Luis García Iglesias, “Los judíos en la Hispania romana,” Hispania antiqua 3 (1973): 331–66; Gerber, Jews of Spain, 1–27; Raúl González Salinero, “Los judíos en la Hispania romana y visigoda,” Desperta Ferro: Arqueología e Historia 9 (2016): 6–11; idem, Las conversiones forzasas de los judios en el reino visigodo (Madrid, 2000; idem, Un Antededente: la persecución cntra los judíos en el Reino Visigodo.” In El antisemitísmo en España. Edited by Gonzalo Álvarez Chillida and Ricardo Izquierdo Benito (Madrid, 2007), 57–88. 6  Máximo Diago Hernando, “La movilidad a ambos lados de la Frontera entre las Coronas de Castilla y Aragón durante el siglo XIV,” Sefarad 63 (2003): 237–82, esp. 237. For Jewish communities in medieval Spain, see Paul Borshenius, The Three Rings: The History of the Spanish Jews (London, 1963); Reuben Solomon Brookes, Spanish Jewry in the Golden Age (Birmingham, 1975); José Luis Lacave Riaño, “Los judíos en la España medieval,” Historia 16, no. 58 (1981): 49–61; Isabel Montes Romero-Camacho, Los judíos en la Edad Media española (Madrid, 2001); Abraham A. Neuman, The Jews in Spain: Their Social, Political, and Cultural Life during the Middle Ages, 2 vols. (1942; reprint, New York, 1982). 7  Baer, History, 1:138; Shneidman, Rise, 1:419. 8  Baer, History, 1:79–80; Ray, Sephardic Frontier, 104–6; César Tcach, “Las aljamas de la Corona de Aragón y su organización interna (siglo XIV),” El Olivo: Documentación y estudios para el diálogo entre Judíos y Cristianos 13, no. 29–30 (1981): 245–70.

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whom they eventually served as fiscal advisers, purchasing agents, and tax collectors. In turn, these trusted Jewish officials encouraged the immigration of other Jewish refugees to the Crown of Aragon. Jaume I aided this development by protecting Jewish travelers with royal safe conducts. The king reinforced this right to journey across his territories with the stunning declaration that: “Jews are as free as knights to go wherever they wish.”9 Ruled by a council of their own elders, all Jewish communities in medieval Iberia enjoyed a considerable level of autonomy. Their administrators rendered judgements on civil and criminal offenses, regulated trade and industry, supported religious education, and negotiated with the crown.10 The Jewish quarter of Calatayud provides a valuable example of the aljamas that grew and prospered on the Aragonese, Castilian, and Valencian frontiers. This community, every bit as large as that of Zaragoza, was, as Pere III readily acknowledged, “one of the principal parts of our patrimony.”11 Like many Christian settlements, Calatayud’s aljama divided into several political factions, often composed of merchants on one side and artisans on the other. Within that city, there was also another group known as “Free Jews” ( judíos francos). Drawn from Calatayud’s great Jewish families, they were powerful and wealthy enough to carry on their own negotiations with the crown separate from those conducted by the aljama.12 Whether Jews made their living from trade, manufacturing, or agriculture, they all shared the conviction that willingness to cross borders between Christian realms was essential for the improvement of their careers and the preservation of their lives. Some even maintained multiple residences as a means of dodging royal and urban taxes that increased throughout the fourteenth century.13 Because of their actual wealth and potential to earn it, 9  Ray, Sephardic Frontier, 17–29; J. Lee Sheidman, “Jews as Royal Bailiffs in Thirteenth Century Aragon,” Historia Judiaca 19 (1957): 55–66; idem, “Jews in the Royal Administration of Thirteenth Century Aragon,” Historia Judiaca 21 (1959): 37–52. 10  Miguel Angel Motis Dolander, “Régimen fiscal de las comunidad judías de Aragón en la baja Edad Media (la aljama de Huesca en el siglo XIV),” in Homenje al Profesor Alfonso García Gallo, 5 vols. (Madrid, 1996), 2:319–408; Alvaro López Asensio, “Organización y gobierno de la aljama judía de Calatayud,” Calatayud y comarca 2 (1997): 127–50. 11  José Amador de los Rios, Historia social, política y religiosa de los Judios de España (Madrid, 1950), 429–31; Máximo Diago Hernando, “La comunidad judía de Calatayud durante el siglo XIV. Introducción al estudio de su estructura social,” Sefarad 67, no. 2 (Julio-Diciembre, 2007): 327–65, esp. 328; Neuman, Jews, 2:150. 12  Diago Hernando, “Comunidad,” 330–46. 13  Diago Hernando, “Movilidad,” 240–45; idem, “La ‘quema’. Tragectoria histórica de un impuesto sobre los flujos comerciales entre las Castilla y Aragón durante los siglos XIV y XV,” AEM 30, no. 1 (2000): 91–156.

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Jewish settlements occasionally became the objects of a bidding war between Aragonese and Castilian royal adversaries. By attracting Jews through financial and social concessions, a king could strengthen his own economy while weakening that of his rival. On the other hand, the highly competitive nature of life along the frontier might lead to violent disputes, forcing Jews to flee in order to save their lives.14 Even though the Jews could move between kingdoms with relative ease and safety, they could not escape the wanton cruelty that the monarchs occasionally unleashed on their Jewish subjects.15 2

The Diminishing Status of Jews in the Crown of Aragon (1276–1356)

With the death of Jaume I in 1276, the enhanced status that Jews had enjoyed in the Crown of Aragon began to diminish. Jaume’s son, Pere II, found himself militarily and politically overextended, fighting not only Muslim rebels in his Iberian realm of Valencia, but also the Angevin rulers of Sicily, seizing from them the crown of that violent state in 1282. In the midst of these conflicts, his Aragonese and Valencian subjects demanded political and economic concessions, including increased parliamentary participation and greater control over royal taxation. These demands were embodied in documents the monarch was forced to sign in 1283—the Privilegio General of Aragon and Valencia’s Privilegium Magnum. Both of these documents had a negative effect on Jewish standing within the Crown of Aragon. Both reduced the power of the king’s administrators and provided that such offices would be strictly forbidden to Jews, even members of the great families from aljama society who had served the crown for decades.16 At the same time, the aljamas across the Crown of Aragon came under an increasing royal tax burden, much of which was used to pay for the king’s military activities.17 In an attempt to compensate for their steady loss of revenues, Jewish communities extended their moneylending activities, which, in turn, brought a deepening resentment among Christian debtors. This increasing anti-Jewish sentiment burned brightest within the urban middle class, but also affected residents of villages and hamlets. Complaints among these 14  Diago Henando, “Movilidad,” 253–54, 261, 264–65, 270–79. 15  Amador de los Rios, Historia, 394–401. 16  González Antón, Uniones aragonesas, 2:24 (art. 1); Kagay, “Development,” 180–81; Jesús Lalinde Abadía, Los fueros de Aragón (Zaragoza: Librería General, 1979), 71–75; Meyerson, Jews, 66–67; Esteban Sarasa Sánchez, El Privilegio General de Aragón: La defensa de las libertades aragonesas (Zaragoza, 1983), 35–38; idem, Sociedad, 45–47. 17  Meyerson, Jews, 104–05, 108–11, 145.

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populations not infrequently originated from a desire to avoid the repayment of debts to Jews.18 Over the course of the thirteenth century, the symbolic separation of the aljama from the surrounding Christian community and the stigmatizing of its Jewish residents increased. Starting as early as the 1230s, the papacy began issuing directives to reestablish Jewish segregation in a more formal manner by forbidding the Jews to wear Christian clothing. Jaume’s successors further enforced the newly imposed social separation by declaring that all Jews had to wear traditional garb to which they had to affix a badge identifying their Hebraic origins.19 In the Crown of Aragon as elsewhere on the peninsula, secular lawmakers joined church councils in separating Jewish activities from those of Christians. Many of these decisions focused on forbidding sexual relations between Christians and Jews.20 By the opening decades of Pere III’s reign, the influence and wealth of Jews throughout the Crown of Aragon had clearly declined. This increasing intolerance in the Crown of Aragon, so hazardous for the Jewish population, grew worse in the mid-fourteenth century as a result of two crises that afflicted the kingdom. On the one hand, there was the arrival of the plague in spring, 1348. Starting in Majorca and along Aragon’s Pyrenean border counties, the disease spread rapidly down the Catalan and Valencian coasts, then deeper into Aragon, and eventually west in Andalusia. The sheer devastation that came in the wake of this pandemic destabilized urban and rural communities throughout most of the territory affected. The death-rate reached staggering levels. For example, Pere claimed that during spring of 1348, 300 people died of the Black Death daily in the city of Valencia alone.21 18  Ibid., 176–209; Ray, Sephardic Frontier, 56–60; Joseph Shatzmiller, Shyllock Reconsidered: Jews, Moneylending, and Medieval Society (Los Angeles, 1983), 44–47, 189–90; Maya Soifer Irish, Jews and Christians in Medieval Castile: Tradition, Coexistence, and Change (Washington, D.C., 2016), 221–37. 19  Baer, History, 180–85; Ray, Sephardic Frontier, 156–62. For clothing as an identifier of Muslims in Iberia, see Javier Irigoyen-García, Moors Dressed as Moors: Clothing, Social Distinction, and Ethnicity in Early Modern Iberia (Toronto, 2017). 20  Jewish religious writers of the later Middle Ages also advocated such a sexual separation. Siete Partidas, 5:1436 (Part. VII, tit. xxiv, l.l. viii–ix); Ray, Sephardic Frontier, 162–75. 21   The Diocese of Barcelona during the Black Death: The Regista Notule Communium 15 (1348–1349), ed. Richard F. Gyug (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1994). See also: Amada López de Meneses, “Una consecuencia de la peste negra en Cataluña” el ‘pogrom de 1348’,” Sefarad 19 (1959): 92–131; William D. Phillips, Jr., “Peste Negra: The Fourteenth-Century Plague Epidemics In Iberia,” in On the Social Origins, 47–62; Shirk, “The Black Death,”357–67; eadem, “Violence and the Plague in Aragon, 1348–1351,” Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 5 (1984): 31–39.

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In assessing the effects of the Black Death on fourteenth-century Iberia, the economic historian, Charles Verlinden, asserted that ultimately the pandemic did little to change “the fundamental character of … political, social, or economic institutions.”22 Whether or not that statement is true in a general sense, the plague did have a highly pejorative effect on the Jewish population. On a basic level, that population underwent a considerable decline. Living for the most part in cities, Jews shared in the higher death-rates that generally afflicted urban settings. At the same time, as in much of Christian Europe, there existed a belief that they were responsible for the presence of plague. Those who saw the disease as a manifestation of divine punishment argued that God was punishing Christian society for permitting non-believers to live among them in peace; that only by purging that presence could divine anger be assuaged. There were also the ever-present rumors that they had actively caused this illness by poisoning the wells. The increase in anti-Jewish sentiment that characterized the mid-fourteenth-century, not only led to violence against the Jewish population, but also set the stage for the great pogroms that would rock most of the peninsula at century’s end. At almost the same moment that plague ravaged Aragon, recurrent civil unrest reached its final, critical stage. Ever since 1265, the kingdom had experienced an on-going social and political struggle, one that not-infrequently descended into violence, pitting the crown against a coalition of would-be reformers led by the upper nobility of Aragon and Valencia that became known as the Unión. During the summer of 1347, fearing opposition from most of the great nobles of these two realms, the king was forced to capitulate to their demands. Some months later, accompanied by the royal entourage, including the queen, Pere traveled south to Valencia where he established a royal headquarters in the town of Murviedro. Here, they found themselves separated from troops loyal to the royal cause, at the mercy of the town’s citizenry who largely supported the Unión. Although the king eventually escaped, he never forgot the humiliation he had suffered at the hands of Murviedro.23 In the face of these troubles, the beleaguered monarch complained bitterly that he was

22  Charles Verlinden, “La grande peste de 1348 en Espagne. Contribution à l’étude de ses consequences économiques et sociales,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 17, no. 1–2 (1938), quote on 145. 23  Pere III, Chronicle, 2:418–43 (IV:32–43). See also: Esteban Sarasa Sánchez, “El enfrentamiento de Pedro I el Ceremonioso con la aristocracía aragonesa: La guerra con la Unión y sus consesuencias,” in Pere el Cerimoniós, 35–45, esp. 40–42; M. Rodrigo Lizondo, “La Unión valenciana y sus protagonistas,” Ligarzas 7 (1975): 133–66, esp. 161–66; Shneidman, Rise, 2:494–501; Meyerson, Jews, 216–20.

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the victim of “factions, bitterness, hatred, and ill-will” fostered throughout his realms by those who opposed the crown.24 In summer, 1348, Pere won a decisive military victory over Unionist forces at the battle of Épila, not far from Zaragoza.25 After the battle, the king now triumphant spent several years inflicting retribution on many of those who had supported the Unionist cause. This royal vengeance extended to not a few Jewish aljamas that had earned his enmity by what he regarded as their lukewarm support for the crown. At the same time, former members of the Unión proved even more dangerous to the Jews. Viewing their Jewish neighbors as ready sources of plunder to offset royal exactions, the rebels took out their frustrations at suffering defeat, injuring and killing Jews of all classes after having extorted their goods and money. As a result of both plague and civil war, starting as early as spring, 1348, longstanding royal protection afforded Jewish aljamas began to decline across the Crown of Aragon. Some of Pere’s subjects, “driven by a diabolical impulse,” broke into Jewish homes and attacked the occupants with swords, wounding some and killing others. The crown could not allow such acts which were clear violations of royal law and of the Jew’s special status to go unpunished. Unfortunately, given the chaotic state of affairs during this period, the king was often unable to shield his Jewish subjects.26 As Pere became increasingly occupied with the re-establishment of domestic peace during the early 1350s, he came to realize that a great deal of the Christian anger against Jewish communities stemmed from the burgeoning debts his Christian subjects had incurred when they sought money from Jewish lenders. In an attempt to mollify both sides, the king established a moratorium of up to a year for the repayment of Christian debts to Jewish money lenders while at the same time releasing from the payment of royal taxes for up three years Jewish communities hard hit by the ravages of plague.27 While the king’s efforts eventually did restore some level of Jewish security, they did little to assuage the anger of many of his Christian subjects. As a result, over a decade after the first appearance of the Black Death, the king forced some of his most violent townsmen to swear that they would inflict “no injury or evil’ on the residents of his aljamas. Knowing that some of his 24  Pere III, Chronicle, 2:431–32 (IV:44). 25  Dualde Serrano, “Tres Episodios,” 352; Shneidman, Rise, 2:500–1. 26   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 887, f. 145v; R. 1062, f. 83v. See also: López de Meneses, Documentos, 298 (doc.8), 306 (doc. 18); Ziegler, Black Death, 10727 27   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 654, ff. 4, 129r–v; R. 708, ff 155r–v; R. 1134, ff. 36r–v. See also: López de Meneses, Documentos, 335–36 (doc. 54); 342–43 (doc. 61); 394–95 (doc. 116); 426 (doc. 150).

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Jewish communities did not fully trust his pledge of renewed royal protection, Pere occasionally took the extreme step of protecting the Jewish quarters in his more violent towns with armed troops.28 Facing repeated complaints about the worsening situation, Pere was ultimately forced to call on his local officials to provide a “just remedy” by stepping up to defend Jews under their jurisdiction.29 Acknowledging that this minorityad suffered repeated intimidation and property loss during and after his conflict with the Unión, the king once again announced the temporary reduction of royal taxation on the aljamas and a moratorium on the juxtaposition of any extraordinary subsidies during the years 1352–1353. Unfortunately, the king’s good intentions faded over the next few years as his need for extra funds became critical due to his wars with Genoa and Sardinia.30 For Jewish ratepayers, particularly in the beleaguered community of Murviedro, extra taxation proved particularly difficult to pay. As a result, many residents of the town’s aljama fled to other places, not only within the Crown of Aragon, but also across the border into neighboring Castile, and Granada. Furious with these developments, the king had public announcements made throughout the rest of Valencia compelling Jews who had deserted towns like Murviedro to return to the town.31 3

The Jews during the War of the Two Pedros (1356–1366)

When the war began, the aljamas had already been under increasing pressure. Now the Aragonese king would demand new subsidies from the Jews every two years throughout the conflict. In addition to this fiscal aid, he occasionally extorted loans and seized property from wealthier members of the Jewish community in order to fund his military operations.32 Pere even turned to Jewish recruits to supplement his Christian forces. In both the Sardinian and Castilian campaigns, the king was never above threatening his aljamas with property confiscations in order to gain the required fighting men. Some of these Jewish 28  López de Meneses, Documentos, 426–27 (doc. 150). See also: Ziegler, Black Death, 108. 29   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 655, f. 50v; R. 676, f. 32. See also: Meyerson, Jews, 217–19; idem, “Victims and Players: The Attack of the Union of Valencia on the Jews of Morvedre,” in Religion, Text, and Society in Medieval Spain and Northern Europe: Studies in Honor of J.N. Hillgarth, ed. Thomas Burman, Mark D. Meyerson and L. Shopkow (Toronto, 2002), 70–102. 30  Meyerson, Jews, 228. 31   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 64v–65. See also: Meyerson, Jews, 231. 32   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1085, f. 131v. See also: Diago Hernando, “Movilidad,” 254, 265, 273.

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soldiers served so effectively that, in gratitude, the king eventually began offering them life-long grants of land and remission of taxes.33 Jews in the frontier aljamas proved particularly vulnerable throughout the conflict. They faced heavy tax burdens as well as repeated attacks by local townsmen and royal troops. They also lived with the fear of being sold into slavery by their Christian neighbors or by Castilian conquerors. The hopeless instability of this situation is demonstrated by the fate of one wealthy Jewish family in Tarazona. With Pedro I’s conquest of the town in 1357, one of this family’s younger members was enslaved by the Castilians and transported to that kingdom. When the Castilian garrison deserted the site in 1366, the boy’s father left in search of his son. During his absence, his Jewish neighbors broke into his house and stole most of his property. This small vignette indicates how the social and political solidarity of some of Pere’s aljamas had begun to disintegrate.34 In the last half of the conflict between Aragon and Castile, the already dangerous condition of the Jewish communities worsened to such an extent that Pere was deluged with complaints from aljama leaders similar to those he had received during the conflict with the Unión. Attempting to find some solution to these continuing problems, the Aragonese monarch ordered his officials to comply with a temporary reduction of royal taxes on all of his aljamas. He again warned those officials to prevent attacks on the persons, property, or privileges of the Jewish population. The king also jealously maintained the right of the crown to address the “Jewish issue.”35 When his half-brother Prince Ferran, acting as governor general of Valencia, took it upon himself to extend the deadline for Jewish tax payments and to offer Jews secure travel across Valencia with official safe conducts, Pere reacted angrily. He even accused Ferran of lesè majesté since it was the sole prerogative of the crown to address this issue. For his part, the king attempted to deal with the negative conditions of the aljamas in more direct terms. He ordered that every moratorium on the repayment of debts owed to Jewish money lenders in Valencia was now to be rescinded.36 Even with these examples of royal concern for the financial state of his Jewish subjects, the king could hardly ignore the severe depopulation of their communities, a problem which led him to warn his officials that all fulltime residents who had fled and could be found were to be compelled to return 33   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1155, f. 65v. See also: Diago Hernando, “Movilidad,” 273, 277. 34   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 728, f. 68. See also: Diago Hernando, “Movilidad,” 280. 35   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 697, ff. 120v–121; R. 700, ff. 74v–75. 36   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 697, f. 117.

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and then forced to pay their customary taxation to the crown along with the other aljama members.37 Many of the problems faced by the Crown of Aragon’s Jewish population also afflicted its Muslims. The sad effects of the all-but constant warfare was especially clear among Muslim communities of Valencia: their once sizeable populations had fallen by one-fourth by the end of the conflict. The morerías that were not totally destroyed by repeated Castilian attacks faced unending challenges merely to survive. In the end, many Muslims joined their Jewish neighbors and fled south into Granada, the only surviving Muslim polity on the peninsula. Muslim communities across the Crown of Aragon’s southern regions steadily shrank due to the death or flight of inhabitants. Descriptions of southern Valencia’s Muslim communities tended to show depressing similarities: “the place was totally shattered and demolished.” This destruction included tearing down houses, religious buildings, ovens, mills, vineyards, orchards, olive groves, and irrigation canals. As early as the opening months of the Castilian war, many Muslims had already come to realize that their absentee masters could do very little to protect them. Those who did not flee feared the same compulsion as their Christian neighbors to seek shelter in fortified towns and castles. For some, the destruction of their homes, not by the Castilian invaders but instead by their own countrymen, drove them to change sides. With their communities caught in between contending armies, many spent the second half of the war attempting to survive by anticipating the military fortunes of the two sides and acting accordingly. In the meantime, they faced a harsh reality all too familiar to Saracen border morarías as well as Jewish aljamas—the danger of being captured and sold into slavery. At the end of 1365 when Aragonese military fortunes seemed to be on the rise, many of the mudejares shifted their allegiance once more, this time from Pedro to Pere. For his part, the king had become increasingly aware of their importance to the prosperity of his southern realm. Unfortunately, this royal realization came only after the illegal flight of many Valencian Muslims into Granada and Morocco had reduced the communities he controlled to mere shadows of their former vibrant selves.38

37   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 674, f. 167v; R. 699, ff. 230 r-v; R. 700. ff. 22v–23. 38  Compón Gonzalvo, “Consecuencias,” 61–62; Cabezuelo Pliego, Guerra, 149–51; Miguel Ángel Motis Dolander, “La comunidad de aldeas de Calatayud en lad Edad Media,” De la Historia. http://www.portal.aragon.es. [accessed November 11, 2011].

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The Fate of Minority Communities during the Transition to Peace (1365–1369)

During the closing months of 1365 and the opening ones of 1366 when the War of the Two Pedros morphed into the Castilian civil war, many towns and villages along the Aragonese and Valencian frontiers again suffered severe damage, this time resulting from the Free Company invasion and the scorched-earth retreat by Castilian forces. At the same time, whole segments of eastern Spain seemed to be on the move in search of new lives. Although sharing many of the same problems as their Christian neighbors, the Jewish and Muslim communities constituted extreme cases.39 Even where hamlets, villages, and small towns remained viable in Aragon and Valencia, the non-Christian population that was supposedly under the direct protection of the crown suffered the greatest demographic loss as a result of the Castilian war. Jewish communities ran afoul of Christian prejudices in urban sites such as Jaca in Aragon and Orihuela and Murviedro in Valencia. In Murviedro, the ravages of the conflict had either killed off or driven into exile so many of the long-suffering Jews that by 1366, for all intents and purposes there was no longer a Jewish aljama. To ameliorate the horrific effects of conflict, Pere fell back upon his old stand-by: he publicly announced his remission of all royal taxes among the Jewish population for up to five years.40 On the other hand, given the flight of Jews from many of Valencia’s cities and towns by the time the king sent forth his criers, in many places few if any Jews remained to hear their message. In more than one Jewish neighborhood the mills and ovens were totally destroyed, rendering not only payment of taxes, but even occupation exceedingly difficult. Desperate to reverse this situation, Pere ordered his officials to warn potential refugees and any of his subjects who might harbor them in their flight that they were committing a crime, one which could ultimately cost them their life and property.41 39   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1074, ff. 130r–v; R. 1171, ff. 60v–61; R. 1187, ff. 204r–v; R. 1195, ff. 35, 69r–v; R. 1204, ff. 63–65; R. 1205, ff. 45–46; R. 1209, ff. 44–45v, 54v–55v; R. 1385, f. 148v; R. 1569, f. 145. See also: María Teresa Ferrer i Mallol, La frontera amb l’Islam en segle XIV segle. Cristians i sarraïns al pais valencià (Barcelona, 1988), 311–25 (docs. 89–91, 93–99); Julia Campón Gonzalvo, “Consecuencias de la guerra de los Dos Pedros en el condado de Denia” AUA 8 (1990–1991): 57–68, esp. 61–63. 40  José Vicente Cabezuelo Pliego, “Las comunidades judiás del mediodía valenciana. De la vitalidad a la supervivencia,” MMM 29–30 (2005–2006): 75–104, esp. 89–91; Lafuente Gómez, “Comportamientos,” 266–67. 41   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, ff. 161r–v; Cartas reales [Pedro IV], no. 6100.

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Over the course of the war, destruction within the minority communities was not infrequently caused by Aragonese troops, especially those commanded by Pere’s best captain, Enrique de Trastámara. The fear that the Castilian mercenary leader and his companies engendered is perhaps best shown by Pere’s repeated messages reminding his subjects, especially those in the communities suffering foreign depredation, that the perpetrator was, in fact, on their side and would have to be treated as an ally.42 Increasingly the desolate condition in Jewish aljamas had been a source of concern to the Crown of Aragon since the 1340s, by the end of the War of the Two Pedros, Jewish society had fallen into a deep decline. Attempting to rebuild the physical and financial structures of these settlements following the conflict, the king continued to use both a carrot and a stick. While, on the one hand, reaffirming Jewish religious and fiscal privileges, he also mandated severe punishments for those Jews who had fled their homes and had not returned when ordered to do so.43 At the same time, he also engaged in an extensive policy of tax forgiveness and funneled back into the aljama economy a portion of the Jewish impost already paid. After a flurry of activity on the king’s part, Pere’s interest in such fencemending waned; as a result, he left it instead to his capable wife, Queen Elionor. Already controlling a number of Aragonese and Valencian aljamas by the terms of her dower rights.44 In her first interactions with the aljamas under her control, the queen ostensibly showed financial mercy to her Jewish vassals, instituting a policy of tax forgiveness and an occasional reduction of the tribute they owed her. Realizing how bad their fiscal condition had become, Elionor occasionally forbade any of her aljamas from contributing to subsidies proposed by her husband or first-born son. Despite her self-proclaimed understanding of the pain felt by aljama residents under her control, Elionor often showed herself to be a strict task master. Not infrequently, she increased Jewish taxes and punished members of Jewish communities who left their homes without royal permission.45 The harsh experience that Jews in the Crown of Aragon had suffered from the Black Death, civil war, and the prolonged conflict with Castile, ultimately proved to be only a prelude to the mass attacks and conversions that erupted as the fourteenth century turned into the fifteenth. In the summer of 1391, a few 42   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, ff. 117, 123r–v. See also: Kagay, “War Financing,” 145. 43   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1176, f. 46; R. 1384, f. 38v. Epistolari, 174–77 (doc. 27). 44   A CA Cancillería real, R. 1209, ff. 58r–v. See also: Meyerson, Jews, 241. By her dowry, she controlled Jaca, Huesca, and Teruel in Aragon as well as Tortosa in Catalonia and Alcira and Burriana in Valencia. 45   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1574, ff. 111v–12; R. 1577, ff. 33r–v. See also: Meyerson, Jews, 251–57.

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years after Pere’s death, an out-pouring of anti-Jewish rage began across the border in Seville, then spread throughout Iberia, eventually affecting Valencia, Catalonia, and the Balearic Islands. It severely damaged many aljamas and claimed the lives of thousands of Jews. A new Aragonese king, Pere’s son, Joan I (r. 1387–1396), attempted to prevent the actions of his Christian subjects who had instigated violence he branded as “criminal and inhumane.” Despite his efforts, however, rioters throughout his realms could not be stopped until their violence had run its course.46 Unfortunately, this fire-storm would erupt intermittently throughout the following two decades led in large part by the charismatic Dominican preacher, Vicente Ferrer.47 These outbursts against the Crown of Aragon’s Jewry pointed unerringly to the fate of all Spanish Jews expressed during the glorious reign of the Catholic Kings: conversion or expulsion. 46  Baer, History, 2:166–68, 170–71; Luis Batlle y Prats, “Un episodio de la persecución judía de 1391,” Annals de l’Institut Gironins (3 (1948): 194–97; Ram Ben-Shalom, “Conflict between Jews and Converts in Aragon Following the Persecution of 1391: New Testimonies from the Formulary of Mom Tov Ben H.annah of Montalbán,” Sefarad 73, no. 1 (Enero–Junio, 2013): 97–131; Enrique Cantera Montenegro, “Judios medievales: convivencia y persecución,” in Topicos y realidades en la Edad Media, ed. Eloy Benito Ruano, 3 vols. (Madrid, 2002) 1:179–252; Alexandra Guerson, “Jewish Conversion in the Crown of Aragon, c. 1378– 1391,” Jewish History 24, no. 1 (2010): 33–52; Miguel Angel Motis Dolader, “Convulsiones siniseculares y conflictividad social: La aljama judiá de Tarazona y los ‘pogroms’ de 1391,” Turiaso 10, no. 1 (1992), 192–224; Emilio Mitre Fernández, Los judios de Castilla en tiempo de Enrique III: el pogrom de 1391, (Valladolid, 1994); Rafael Narbona Vizcaíno, “Valencia 1389–91: Turbulencias cohetáneas al asalto de judería,” EEM 33 (2012), 177–210; David Nirenberg, “La generación de 1391: Conversión masiva y crisis de identidad,” in Furor et rabies: Violencia conflicto y marginación en la Edad Moderna, ed. José Ignacio Fonteu Pérez, Juan Eloy Gabbert González, Tomas Antonio Monecón Movellá (Santander, 2002), 318–28. 47  Baer, History, 2:171–72; J.E. Martínez Ferrando, “San Vicente Ferrer y la casa real de Aragón: Documentación conservada en el Archivo Real de Barcelona,” AST 26 (1953): 1–141, esp. 89–90 (doc. 53); Francisco A. Roca Traver, “San Vicente Ferrer y los judios: la ‘disputa’ de Tortosa,” BSCC 85 (2009), 203–02.

Chapter 15

The Fate of Four Frontier Towns Touched by War The War of the Two Pedros was a conflict that repeatedly endangered many of the same castles, cities, towns, villages, and hamlets, not just on one occasion, but almost every year. Although the worst victims of this constant damage and the cruelty that fed it were settlements perched on the exposed frontiers of western Aragon and southern Valencia, the ravages of war spread over a much wider area. By contrast, Pedro I’s staging points for Castilian attacks—places such as Almazán, Murcia, or Soria—seldom suffered actual destruction in the long border war, but eventually paid a serious price during the Castilian civil war that followed. On both sides of the conflict, it was not merely the urban core that suffered; the smaller, less well-fortified settlements that surrounded a targeted town experienced an even greater toll in deaths of inhabitants and the devastation of property due to their lack of royal protection. To better understand the wartime fate of Aragonese, Castilian, and Valencian towns and their exposed hinterlands, we must review the histories of four such urban sites: Daroca and Murviedro on the Aragonese side, and Calahorra and Murcia on the Castilian. 1

Daroca and the Surrounding Hamlets

After the Aragonese king, Alfonso I “the Battler” (r. 1104–1134), captured the Muslim settlement of Darūqa on the eastern bank of the Jiloca River in 1120, the site quickly emerged as an important Christian outpost along the Islamic frontier.1 Ruled by its urban council, Daroca also controlled a large hinterland covered with a “thin scattering” of hamlets (aldeas) that depended upon the town for protection, in exchange for the agricultural contribution and the military support afforded by their inhabitants.2 As a result of disputes that grew 1  Ford, “Hand-Book,” 3:1299; Makki, “Political History,” in Legacy, 1:65; Spanish Cities, 11, 138–41. Ford’s nineteenth-century description of the site is surely the best: “[a site] very picturesque placed in a hill-girt valley, around which rise eminences defended by Moorish walls and towers, which … follow the irregular declivities, and command charming views.” 2  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 94, f. 78. See also: José Luis Corral Lafuente, “La ciudad de Daroca segun el Libro de Actas de 1473,” AEEM, 4(1981): 152–94, esp. 166–69, 174, 177–79; José María Lacarra, “Les villes-frontière dans l’Espagne da XI et XII siècles,” Le Moyen Âge 69 (1963): 205–222, esp. 218. Like the Italian podesta, the justicia maintained the peace among the townsmen. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004425057_017

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up between the town and hamlets during the thirteenth century, these smaller settlements won increased autonomy which led them to form an independent “commune” (comunidad).3 Despite such local differences, both Daroca and its aldeas proved staunch supporters of the Aragonese crown, first in its struggle against Islam, later against the Unión, and finally in the War of the Two Pedros.4 Daroca’s commitment to Pere III’s war effort became clear during the first days of the conflict and never faltered for the next decade. During this period, the town and its environs suffered as much from Castilian attacks as any of Pere’s urban centers during the conflict. Nevertheless, the fortification network proved to be so stout that despite unflagging Castilian pressure—pressure that eventually broke the will of some of the region’s larger places—it could never break through the town’s impressive walls. To reward this record of stubborn resistance, in 1366 at the end of the conflict, Pere converted the town of Daroca into a city with privileges equal to its larger neighbors such as Calatayud and Teruel.5 Over the course of the conflict, several Aragonese captains chose Daroca as their headquarters. The first of these, Pedro Fernández de Hijar, was appointed to his post at the Aragonese cortes of Cariñena in 1357; later a second captain, Pedro Muñiz de Godoy, served here for a short period in 1359.6 Like all of Pere’s military appointees, these men had one principal task: to defend the settlement from enemy attack. The king chose them because they were proven warriors who had long “sweated in royal service.”7 Due to its central position between Zaragoza and the Aragonese frontier with Castile, Daroca served as a prime staging point for front-line troops as well as a storehouse for the provisions needed to feed them. As a result, the

3  José Luis Corral Lafuente, La Communidad de Aldeas de Daroca en los siglos XIII y XIV: Origenes y Proceso de Consolidación (Zaragoza, 1987); idem, “La genesis de la Comunidad de Aldeas de Calatayud,” AEEM 16 (2000): 197–213, esp. 205–6; Kagay, “Two Towns,” 35–37; M.V. Sánchez González, “La Comunnidad de Aldeas de Daroca en perspectiva histórica: los siglos medievales,” El Ruejo: Revista de estudios históricos y sociales 4 (1998): 15–28. 4  A CA, Cancillería real, Cartas reales, legajo 86; Pere III, Chronicle, 2:397–98, 409, 436 (IV:10, 23, 48. See also: CDACA, 38:375–81; José Luis Corral Lafuente, “El proceso de monopolización municipal en la ciudad de Daroca en la baja Edad Media,” AEEM [Homenaje a la Profesora María Isabel Falcón] 19 (2006): 125–34, esp. 128–29; Rafael Esteban Abad, Estudio historicopolitico de Daroca y su Communidad (Teruel, 1959), 60–65. 5  Pere III, Chronicle, 2:503, 577 (VI:4, 60). See also: Gutiérrez de Velasco, “Fortalazas,” 34. 6  C RA, 33. See also: Lafuente Gómez, “Aproximación,” 59. 7  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1383, ff. 132r–v; R. 1387, ff. 140v–41. See also: Kagay, “Pere III’s System,” 207–8. This is the literal wording to be found in a royal grant made to one of these captains.

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town swelled in size during the conflict. The place became a major depot for mule trains moving goods up the Jiloca River valley.8 In the midst of a series of Aragonese defeats that led to the loss of Tarazona in 1357, Calatayud in 1362, and Teruel in 1363, Daroca proved to be the exception. Under the skilled leadership of its municipal council, it not only managed to ward off Castilian attackers, but even expanded its military readiness by extending its formidable system of external walls. The council also took the painful step of leveling urban dwellings built too near the fortifications. In 1362, despite six years of crushing military expenses, Daroca’s leaders managed to raise yet another subsidy needed to pay many of the soldiers fighting throughout the nearby Moncayo region. The townspeople also began to transport weapons, armor, and other military equipment out to several of their strongest hamlets.9 For all of these actions in such disordered times, one later historian referred to the place as the “bulwark of all the [Aragonese] realm”.10 Daroca’s establishment of a special military commission of six townsmen in December, 1362, probably resulted from repeated Castilian victories along the frontier throughout that year. According to Pere’s instructions, this new body was to display all possible care in insuring their town’s survival. The king also warned the Darocan population, including its justicia, that disobedience to any official measures undertaken by the commission would be tantamount to treason.11 Like frontier towns in southern Valencia, the exposed location of Daroca made such an effective urban command structure absolutely essential for its survival. During particularly dangerous periods, the king occasionally narrowed the executive power of both the special commission and his own royal officials by temporarily putting them under the authority of one of his principal military commanders. Nevertheless, the duties of both groups remained essentially the same, focusing on wall repair and the provisioning of troops, as well as maintaining a centrally efficient command and control structure in the region.12 Even with this centralized command, however, Daroca would never have been able to hold out against so many Castilian attacks without its reliable defense 8  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, ff. 55v–57v; R. 1380, f. 135. See also: Gutiérrez de Velasco, “Conquista,” 76, 82, 86. 9  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1384, ff. 103r–v, 104, 115, 158, 159; R. 1385, f. 69v. See also: Gutiérrez de Velasco, “Fortalesas,” 15 (ftn. 24). 10  Zurita, Anales, 4:451 (IX:xliii). 11   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1384, f. 158. The city’s justicia was a municipal official not unlike the Italian podestà charged with maintaining the peace among the townsmen. 12   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1214, f. 77; R. 1379, ff. 110r–v; R. 1387, ff. 11v, 14v, 19r–v, 127v, 128v, 129v, 140r–v, 144, 151v, 166v, 168v–69, 171, 195v; R. 1382, ff. 50r–v, 174v–75, 179v. See also: Kagay, “Pere III’s System,” 208–9.

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force composed of a combination of paid soldiers and urban militia who mounted a stalwart resistance to attackers throughout the conflict.13 With effective leadership and consistent royal support, the town, despite steady enemy pressure, emerged from the conflict largely undamaged. The same, however, can not be said of its hamlets. The inhabitants of these exposed places had no choice but had to pay the exorbitant cost of defense forced on them by the crown and hope that with this payment the crown would help protect them against Castilian attacks.14 Many of the impoverished smaller communities suffered repeated Castilian incursions during which the inhabitants were not infrequently reduced to fighting with primitive weapons fashioned out of agricultural tools. Those inhabitants, despite being inexperienced as warriors, eventually so impressed the king with the military proficiency and courage that they demonstrated. As a result, as early as the second year of the war, Pere bragged that these hamlets performed so well that in the future he expected them to fully take on their own defense.15 On the other hand, although the small settlements had a generally good military record during the first half of the conflict, as the years went by and Castilian attacks intensified, the villagers began to value survival over service to king and country. Many of them, in order to continue collecting royal military salaries, conspired to keep their names on the muster rolls while at the same time avoiding active service.16 Despite this self-interested reflection or “war fatigue,” many residents still displayed heroism when it came to defending their own homes. The most wellknown of these small, but extremely violent encounters occurred during the extensive Castilian campaign of 1363 in hamlets located to the south and east of Daroca. During both actions, the defenders preferred death to the dishonor of survival under Castilian control. At Bueña, the municipality’s two leaders refused to surrender when Pedro’s troops threatened to behead their sons nor would they do so even after the bloody deed had been carried out. The most celebrated of these acts of resistance took place at Báguena where the castellan, Miguel de Bernabé, fought to the death in the burning tower of his hamlet’s fortress. He left behind for the victorious Castilians the grizzly relic of his charred forearm and hand with the keys to the castle still clutched in its fleshless fingers. The depth of his bravery would quickly enter into the realm of 13   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1387, ff. 126v–28; R. 1388, ff. 144v–49; R. 1463, f. 191. See also: Gutiérrez de Velasco, “Fortalezas,” 29; Lafuente Gómez, “Aproximación,” 62. 14   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1384, ff. 69v–70. See also: Gutiérrez de Velasco, “Conquista,” 80; Lafuente Gómez, “Aproximación,” 67. 15   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1152, ff. 117r–v. See also: Lafuente Gómez, “Aproximación,” 71. 16   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1387, ff. 127v–28. See also: Lafuente Gómez, “Aproximación,” 76.

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local folklore. At the Aragonese cortes of 1372, Pere recognized Bernabé’s deed by granting all of his immediate family noble status.17 Despite this rare instance, social advancement in recognition of valorous war service was seldom the fate of any aldeano, even though their actions were occasionally mentioned in royal dispatches.18 What these men and women more often experienced from the conflict was a cruelty and deprivation not all that different from the experience of modern war refugees. Some defenders suffered fates “more serious and miserable than death itself”; for example, the loss of a hand, eye, or nose.19 Far from occurring in the heat of battle, most of these wounds were inflicted on aldeanos at the hands of their new Castilian masters. Some of the captured inhabitants remained as permanent hostages or were even sold into slavery. Many of the goods and animals pillaged from their villages became commodities for resale in black markets existing along the Castilian and Aragonese frontiers. While Castilian raiders and their Granadan allies often committed the atrocities, a fair number were perpetrated by Pere’s own “foreign” allies, the Castilians fighting for Aragon. Many of these men, had very little regard for the populations of villages they occupied. In fact, courts within these small communities occasionally handed down guilty verdicts against them and even attempted to imprison them, though normally without success.20 Despite attempts to resist the depredations by their own allies, Darocan aldeanos were clearly at the mercy of the professional warriors serving Pere. Consequently, even when such soldiers were doing their duty, hamlet residents often displayed a deep-seated resentment concerning their activities. When several of Pere’s captains attempted to follow the king’s orders by demolishing severely damaged buildings near the town wall and moving their residents into more secure sites, many aldeanos resisted, trying instead to remain in the abandoned structures, some of which they had occupied for generations, even though the enemy threat to them was obvious.21 17   Agustín Ubieto Arteta, Leyendas para una historia paralela de Aragón medieval (Zaragoza, 1999), 198–203; Lafuente Gómez, “Aproximación,” 80–81. For the similar action of Colonel José Moscardo in 1937, see Geoffrey McNeill-Moss, The Epic of the Alcazar: A History of the Siege of the Toledo Alcazar (London, 1937); Cecil D. Eby, The Siege of the Alcazar (New York, 1965). 18   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1175, f. 136v. See also: Lafuente Gómez, “Aproximación,” 72. 19  Lafuente Gómez, “Aproximación,” 80; Zurita, Anales, 2:230 (VIII:li). For similarly experiences in regions of contemporary France, see Wright, Knights and Peasants, 62–79. 20   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1174, f. 49; R. 1379, ff. 14–15v. See also: Lafuente Gómez, “Aproximación,” 64, 68, 75–76. 21   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1385, f. 121; R. 1387, ff. 127v, 128v. See also: Kagay “Pere III’s System,” 209; Lafuente Gómez, “Aproximación,” 74.

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As so often happens in a long war, when the end finally came there was little official indication of it for those who had endured its ravages. No peace conference between the combatants took place until long afterwards, and no treaty was immediately signed. The first clear change the people of Daroca and its aldeas undoubtedly noticed came early in 1366 with the sudden Castilian evacuation of nearby Aragonese castles and settlements they captured. Following Pedro’s orders, the Castilian troops destroyed many of these places as they withdrew. Still uncertain how the military situation would turn out, the Aragonese monarch sent troops to reacquire places around Daroca. At the same time, he dispatched another contingent to guard the mountain pass at El Frasno, northeast of Calatayud.22 Despite the presence of these new Aragonese forces, many of the hamlets were left without adequate protection not only decamping Castilian troops, but also their own neighbors, both of whom took the opportunity to engage in looting. This shocked Pere who ordered that any of his subjects who engaged in such shameful acts should be treated as foreign enemies. Ironically, small communities that had stood for so long against a common enemy now fought against each other for the scare resources still available in the region. At the same time, not a few survivors fled to cities like Zaragoza that had never been under attack. This was not the only way Daroca’s hamlets felt the last sting of war; some, who through no fault of their own had been forced to suffer a long Castilian occupation, were regarded by their own monarch as supporters of his enemy. For this reason, they lost all their possessions to an Aragonese crown intent on balancing its books in the valley of the Jiloca.23 Even for those communities of southern Aragon that remained in Pere’s good graces, the Castilian war exacted a heavy social and economic toll, one that would take generations to pay off. 2 Murviedro Located in the kingdom of Valencia, the town of Murviedro suffered in the Castilian war as much as many of its Aragonese counterparts farther to the north. Both the town and the kingdom in which it was situated clearly demonstrate the transition of Pere’s lands from war to peace. Though the capital city, 22   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1214, f. 67 Ayala, Pedro I, 539 (1366, chap. iv). See also: Gutiérrez de Velasco, “Fortalesas,” 30–31; Zurita, Anales, 541–42 (IX:lxii). 23   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1213, ff. 78v–79, 80–81v, 86r–v. See also: Lafuente Gómez, “Aproximación,” 84–85.

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Valencia, was never captured, several of that southern kingdom’s larger towns like Alicante came under Castilian control for periods of time, even though were later retaken by Aragonese forces. Crevillente, Elche, and Orihuela, the largest Valencian communities near the border with Murcia, were captured in the closing months of 1364 and remained in Castilian hands until the following year. By 1363, Pedro I’s troops had already taken Murviedro, located on the Mediterranean coast just north of Valencia. For nearly two years, the captured town remained a Castilian outpost until September, 1365, when it fell back into Aragonese hands after a long siege, at the end of which many of the surrendering defenders switched sides, abandoning Pedro and going over to Enrique. Murviedro had a long history, dating back to Roman times. After changing its name twice—from the Latin Saguntum to the Arabic Ŝāgnt—, the town assumed its medieval designation after Jaume I conquered it in 1238. The name comes from the Latin phrase “old walls” (muri veteres).24 In 1348, it suffered a considerable population loss due to the Black Death. During that same year, Murviedro came out in favor of the Valencian Unión in opposition to the crown. This decision made its royal overlord, Pere III, into a formidable enemy. After Unionist leaders had confined the king and his wife as virtual prisoners within Murviedro early in 1348, he never forgot or forgave this affront, swearing on several occasions to avenge it at all costs.25 These events would help shape the town’s relatively friendly attitude toward its eventual occupation by Castilian forces. Murviedro was largely unaffected by the Castilian war until Pedro I’s offensive of 1363 that drove deep into Valencia, conquering nearby Lliria and other castles. The town itself came under attack enduring only a few days of Castilian siege operations before abjectly surrendering. Though there is no evidence of the Aragonese monarch’s exact reaction to this turn-of-events, we can assume it was similar to his angry response caused by Tarazona’s rapid surrender in 24  Udal ap Rhys, An Account of the Most Remarkable Places and Curiosities in Spain and Portugal (London: 1749), 165; Chaytor, History, 48–49; Chevalier de Bourgoanne, “Travels in Spain Containing a New Accurate and Comprehensive View of the Present State of the Country,” in A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels in all Parts of the World, vol. 5, ed. John Pinkerton et al. (Philadephia, 1912), 609–11; Curchin, Roman Spain, 82, 103, 148, 161; Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal, 165–66; Lomax, Reconquest, 73–74. 25  Pere III, Chronicle, 2:422–24 (IV:38). See also: The Archaeology of Medieval Spain, 1100– 1500, ed. Magdalena Valor and J. Avelino Gutiérrez (Sheffield, 2014), 64; Bisson, Medieval Crown, 65–66; Burns, Crusader Kingdom, 1:88, 127; idem, Medieval Colonialism, 44; Chaytor, History, 176–77; Juan Antonio de Estrada, Población General de España, sus reynos, y provincias, ciudades, villas, y purblos, islas adyacentes y presidios de Africa (Madrid, 1768), 220–21; Shneidman, Rise, 2:495–97.

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1357. In the earlier case, the Aragonese king angrily threatened to condemn all inhabitants of the town as traitors since they had agreed to surrender to Castile in such a short time and with very little loss of life. On the other hand, Pere later relented, albeit grudgingly, allowing the displaced people of Tarazona to resettle in Zaragoza.26 The Castilian conquest of Murviedro in 1363 forced Pere to hastily gather troops from the Mediterranean coast to prevent further conquest in the neighborhood by his adversaries. The next move, however, came from neither of the kings, but rather the papal legate, Cardinal Gui de Boulogne, who once more attempted to force peace on the two warring monarchs. Ironically, these new negotiations took place in Murviedro itself, now in Castilian hands.27 Despite reaching a tentative agreement, for many reasons it quickly fell apart, leaving the town as an important Castilian outpost which supported Pedro’s troops stationed near Valencia’s shipyard, El Grau. Throughout 1365, the two royal adversaries continued maneuvering against each other along this section of the Valencian coast. At some point during this period, Pere commenced the siege that would ultimately take six months to complete. Rather than trying to counter this latest Aragonese move by breaking the siege, Pedro returned to Castile, leaving in command of the beleagured city the Hospitaller prior, Gomez Pérez de Porres. For his part, the Aragonese king utilized a large force of galleys to tighten his control of the waters around Murviedro, while beating off the Castilian king’s belated attempts to relieve the town. Once surrender terms were arranged with Pérez de Porres, Pere entered the town on September 14.28 During the two years Murviedro had been in Castilian hands the king had come to view the town’s leaders as faithless and rebellious traitors who had done their best to harm the Aragonese crown. Less than a week after the city fell, the king abrogated Murviedro’s existence as a “separate municipality,” permanently revoking its privileges and transferring its rule to the city council of Valencia. The control of the community’s revenues had been given to the formidable Queen Elionor in September, 1363, but she did not profit from this grant until Murviedro was re-captured two years later. Besides controlling the site’s regular imposts, she also gained the use of the property confiscated from

26  Ayala, Pedro I, 526 (1363, chap. v); Pere III, Chronicle, 2:512–13 (VI:11). 27  Pere III, Chronicle, 2:538 (VI:34). See also: Ferrer i Mallol, Entre, 408–9. 28  Ayala, Pedro I, 532–34 (1365, chaps. v–vii); Pere III, Chronicle, 2:546, 569–70 (VI:40, 55); Ferrer i Mallol, Entre, 450.

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the “rebels,” the Muviedran townsmen who were enriched from the support of their Castilian occupiers.29 Pere treated Murviedro’s inhabitants as he would a defeated enemy. If he had his way, the king would have reduced the town to little more than a “Valencian street.”30 One modern historian has claimed that although the Aragonese monarch was capable of holding grudges for an inordinately long time, nevertheless he could ultimately “restrain his instinctive cruelty.”31 Pere’s hatred for Murviedro indeed seemed to soften somewhat in the weeks after its capture. This did not stop him, however, from attempting to drastically alter demography by resettling there refugees from across southern Valencia, a step he took to increase royal control over the site. After Castilian troops had surrendered, Pere’s first focused on expelling all Castilians who remained there or winning them over to his side. Recognizing that the Castilian hospitaller, Porres, had mounted an effective defense against him, Pere promised the prior a position in Enrique de Trastámara’s army that was currently preparing to invade Castile. If Porres would come over to the Aragonese side, the king also promised him an ecclesiastical position greater than that which he currently held. As a result of these royal inducements, both the commander and his men accepted the king’s generous offer and entered Trastámara’s service rather than face their former master, the “very dangerous man” who still held Castile.32 Though Castilian civilians living in Murviedro were able to buy their freedom by joining Trastámara, they lost almost all they had by moving from their homes in Castile to Valencia. When in 1366 Pedro pulled his forces out of the Valencian municipalities, the subjects he left behind were condemned to lose their property and possibly their liberty. The Aragonese monarch confiscated the goods owned by Castilians all across the region, but especially within the town of Murviedro. He then returned property formerly held by his Valencian subjects, granted a portion of it to Queen Elionor, and auctioned off what remained to the highest bidder. The tolls and other taxes in the Aragonese and Valencian communities captured and then freed from Castilan control were divided in the same way.33 Pere also declared that all debts Valencian citizens owed to the Castilians interlopers were immediately canceled.34 29  A CA, Cancilleria real, R. 1536, ff. 58–59v; R. 1577, ff. 181v–182. 30  Pere III, Chronicle, 2:570–71 (VI:55–56). 31  Chaytor, History, 192–93. 32   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 912, ff. 37–39; R. 1573, f. 125v; Ayala, Pedro I, 535 (1365, chap. iii). 33  A CA, Cancilleria real, R. 1574, ff. 17–18. 34   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1188, ff. 55v–56; R. 1569, ff. 93r–v; R. 1572, ff. 2v–3; 9v–10; 55–56. See also: Ferrer i Mallol, Entre, 459–60.

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In some ways, Pere III’s severe treatment of Castilian nationals proved far simpler to accomplish than the reestablishment of Murviedro’s life as a Valencian town. Such renewal would require not only the rebuilding of an economically viable structure, but also financial and social repair of the entire region. At the end of the conflict, southern Valencia was crowded with urban refugees, most of whom had suffered property or monetary loss at the hands of their Castilian adversaries. Many had been driven from their homes and forced to find new ones before the war came to an end. Pere had little choice, but to help these seemingly helpless subjects. To allow them the possibility of seeking a more secure life in lands less ravaged by war, the king issued safeconducts for their passage across the kingdom of Valencia.35 Despite this and other stop-gap measures, he still had to find a more lasting solution. It is here that Murviedro fitted into royal plans. In the last year of war the towns of Orihuela and Alicante has suffered considerable loss. Pere now decided that Murviedro could provide for the refugees. To carry on this resettlement, he established a commission, consisting of six Murviedran inhabitants and several royal officials. Claiming that he now held Murviedro by “right of conquest,” the king directed the commission to identify all unoccupied or lightly developed land within the town limits so that the refugees could be resettled on it. Perhaps still moved by his longstanding hatred of the place, Pere took care to warn its people that any objection to his plan would be met with a stiff royal fine and the king’s official displeasure.36 Pere’s distrust of Murviedro’s ruling council, coupled with the arrival of numerous refugees, badly blurred administrative roles within the town. The town’s officials thus found themselves compelled to protect the rights of the king’s new settlers, even while the original residents were seeing many of their long-established privileges done away with by the crown. The frustrating confusion that resulted from this system was especially apparent in the repair of Murviedro’s fortifications and other public works. Because of the great damage Pere’s siege had caused the town, he instructed its councilmen in December, 1366, to start rebuilding the walls. This immediately caused trouble with the newcomers who claimed that they were not bound to participate in such difficult and demeaning labor. Caught in the middle, the king made matters worse by forcing Murviedro’s councilmen to pay out 35   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 727, ff. 161r–v; R. 731, ff. 11r–v; R. 1204, f. 143v; R. 1207, ff. 113v–14; R. 1209, f. 174v. See also: Ferrer i Mallol, Entre, 453–54. See also: Chapter 19. 36   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 728, ff. 43r–v; R. 732, ff. 124v–25; R. 912, ff. 62v–65, 69v–70; R. 1210, f. 94v. See also: Ferrer i Mallol, Entre, 454–56; Zurita, Anales, 4:533–35 (IX:lxi). All of these commissioners had to be of a minor noble status, (doncell), not unlike that associated with the Castilian hidalgo rank.

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of their own pockets for the materials needed for such jobs. Adding fuel to the fire, he then assured the new settlers that they would not have to contribute to the cost of such public works.37 A similar problem involving who owed what plagued Murviedro’s economic administration. While the town council had the customary right to appropriate mules from individual muleteers for military use, these same officials soon found it all but impossible to compel townsmen, new or old, to provide such animals when needed. Because of the damage and depopulation Murviedro had suffered, some parts of the town were only sparsely settled. This spurred Pere to grant free pasturage rights to both new and old inhabitants within the town and across the huerta that surrounded it, even if this put some industrial or manufacturing concerns located there out-of-business.38 Though both groups spoke the same language, Catalan, Murviedro’s ruling class reacted to the newcomers with hostility. Its members looked on them as the king’s favorites who had privileges no long-time resident of town could claim. Though the king assured the original citizens that these refugees would pay the same taxes they did, he also conceded a special privilege to the newcomers protecting their rights to sell at any time property recently granted them in Murviedro. This, in turn, deepened the original inhabitants’ distrust of the crown that had failed to give them any similar assurances. The feeling of betrayal intensified when Pere attempted to confer upon this new segment of the population’s representation on the town council. Not surprisingly, portions of Murviedro society continued to harbor illfeelings against the king. In January, 1367, using as royal spokesman his cousin, Count Alfonso of Denia, soon to be captured at the battle of Najera, Pere formally exempted all of the town’s residents as well as their property from any legal action or penalties resulting from their recent opposition to the crown and its would-be reforms. According to Pere, this magnanimous gesture was meant to compensate the community for the “adverse fortune” that had resulted in the Castilian conquest, and the subsequent loss of the town’s liberty. The king also forgave the original citizens from any shame they may have experienced at having surrendered so easily to Pedro I in 1363. Henceforward, according to this royal re-writing of recent history, Murviedro’s long-time residents had “little involvement or responsibility” for an act Pere had previously condemned as traitorous.39

37   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 912, ff. 69v–70, 76v–77, 90v–91. 38   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 912, ff. 70v–72, 73–78. 39   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 912, ff. 67v–69v, 81–82.

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The Aragonese monarch’s attempt to calm the troubled waters of the town’s public life came only after a full year marked by a series of dismal royal failures. In June, 1366, he had openly accused the councilmen of causing the violence directed against the new population. While this may have been true, it did not serve to ease tensions. At the same time, the king also spurred the hatred of old citizens by allowing refugees to pay their first year’s taxes not in cash, but with pledges that they would eventually make good on the promised imposts. For its part, the municipal government bore its share of blame for the unstable situation by stirring up hatred among the older population. Groups of these townsmen surged past the newcomers’ houses attempting to make their new lives in the Murviedro so unpleasant and threatening that they would not long remain in the town. According to the disgusted monarch, the councilmen and other town officials treated the refugees “worse than if they had been Moors or Jews.”40 In another a royal letter written during this period, Pere described the councilmen’s actions against the refugees as a “great disservice” to the crown. He then sternly warned the municipal officials that unless they began to follow his instructions to the letter, he would punish them in such a way that “it would serve as an example to all others.”41 Despite the level of hostility that remained, by summer, 1366, the king felt confident enough to write that he had imposed a solution of sorts on the problem by establishing a more equitable tax structure in the town. This led him to claim responsibility for settling the town’s financial and administrative difficulties. He then dropped the problem into the laps of others, especially the governor of Valencia.42 As 1366 waned, peace began to return to much of Valencia and its environs, though its southern districts remained politically unsettled for several years thereafter. Afterwards the town maintained a record of under-achievement that would have pleased Pere III, who had held a grudge against it since 1348. As late as 1845, one traveler characterized the town, by then home to 5,000 inhabitants, as a “straggling and miserable [community].”43 3

Calahorra and the Region of La Rioja

Situated near the upper Ebro River and successively inhabited by Celtiberians, Romans, and Visigoths, the community was known in ancient times as 40   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 728, ff. 108v–9. See also: Ferrer i Mallol, Entre, 457. 41   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1079, f. 63. See also: Ferrer i Mallol, Entre, 457. 42   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 728, f. 124. See also: Ferrer i Mallol, Entre, 457. 43  Ford, Hand-Book, 2:680.

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Kalicoricos and later Calagurris. In the eighth century, following the Islamic conquest of Spain, the Muslims changed its earlier names to the Arabic, Qalahurra.44 Reemerging as a Christian city in 1045, it was fought over by Aragon, Castile, and Navarre for the next several centuries.45 Despite being caught in the middle of a lingering struggle for control of the surrounding region of La Rioja, during the early 1300s, the site, now known as Calahorra, grew into a prosperous banking and commercial center.46 For the people of this town and the nearby settlements, regional conflicts of the region during the fourteenth century eventually overlapped with the War of the Two Pedros. Despite standing at the convergence of three frequently hostile frontiers, Calahorra was fortunate in suffering little physical damage during the ten-year conflict between Castile and Aragon. Mountains lying somewhat to the south shielded the city from zones ravaged by bitter fighting between Aragonese and Castilian forces. Other Castilian border outposts to the south, such as Soria and Almazán, were far more involved in the war as staging points for the repeated attacks launched against western Aragon. On the other hand, like the rest of 44  For information concerning Calahorra’s history down to the Islamic conquest, see M. Cary, A History of Rome down to the reign of Constantine (London, 1965), 342–48; Santiago Castellanos García, Calagurris tardoantiga: Poder e ideología en las ciudades hispano-visigados (Murcia, 1999), 15–20; Curchin, Roman Spain, 32; Ford, Hand-Book, 3:1471; J. Gómez Pantoja, “La ciudad romana de Calahorra,” Symposium de ciudades augusteas, ed. Antonio Beltrán, 2 vols. (Zaragoza, 1978), 2:185–90; Pedro Gutiérrez Achútegui, Historia de la muy noble antigua y leal ciudad de Calahorra (Calahorra, 1981), 7–14, 66–70; Lomax, Reconquest, 13–14 42, 57–58; Keay, Roman Spain, 42–44; Tomás Sáenz de Haro, “Calahorra islámica (siglos VIII–XI). Notas sobre la organización de los espacios urbano y rural,” BROCAR: Cuadernos de investigación histórica 31 (2007): 107–54, esp. 108–12; Sutherland, Romans, 68, 93–94; E. Teres and M.J. Viguera, “Sobre las Calahorras,” Al-Qantara 2 (1981): 265–75; Agustín Ubieto Arteta, “Sobre la reconquista de La Rioja por pamploneses,” Princeps de Viana [Homenaje a José María Lacarra] 47 (1986): 755–63. 45  Guitiérrez Achútegui, Historia, 71–80. For the thagãr, see Jacinto Bosch Vilá, “Algunas consideraciones sobre al-Tar en al Andalus y la división poliítico-administrivo en España musulmana,” in Etudes de Orientalisme dédiées à la mémoire de Levi Provençal, 2 vols. (Paris, 1962), 1:25–36; Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain, 59–60; Carolina Carl, A Bishopric between Three Kingdoms: Calahorra, 1045–1190 (Leiden, 2011), 110; Sáenz de Haro, “Calahorra islámica,” 116–17. 46  For full discussion Castilian-Navarrese relations in the fourteenth century, see: Pilar Azcárete Aguilar-Amat, “La guerra de 1335 entre Castilla y Navarra,” Hispania 49, no. 173 (1989): 805–40, esp. 834; eadem, “Hostilidades en la frontera Navarro-Riojana durante el siglo XIV: El choque de los años 1344–5,” in Segundo coloquio sobre historia de la Rioja. Logroño 2–4 de Octubre de 1985 (Logroño, 1986), 1:333–43, esp. 336–41; eadem, “Navarra en estado de alerta. ¿Un projecto castellano-aragonés de intervención en 1329?” Principe de Viana [Ejemplar dedicado a: Primer Congreso De Navarre. Comunicaciones] 8 (1988): 313–20; eadem, “La nuevo episodio de la rivaldad entre villas navarras y riojanos: Los disturbios de 1355,” AEM 18 (1988): 329–36; eadem, “La relaciones castellano-navarras en el siglo XIV: La época conflectiva (1238–1366),” (Ph.D. diss., Universidad de Alcalá, 1987).

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Castile, Calahorra, despite being removed from the fighting, was called upon to show its support for Pedro I’s war effort, not only by turning over its customary tax revenues to the crown, but also gathering extraordinary subsidies to finance his military operations. In the longrun, the cost became enormous. The city’s bishop and churchmen bore the brunt of these fiscal demands. They were compelled to turn over most of their annual revenues to pay the salaries of Castilian troops. Calahorra’s clerics often complained about this extensive taxation, claiming (as so many others did) that the crown’s constant financial pressure was impoverishing the city and its principal taxpaying inhabitants.47 As the conflict dragged on, local ecclesiastical revenues that had helped underwrite the city’s economic well-being started drying up. Rather than lessen the burden, the Castilian monarch put even more intense pressure on all of his churchmen by insisting that they directly recruit and pay for the troops he needed to guard the frontier. As a last resort, not a few of these were forced to sell off large tracts of land held by themselves and the church to satisfy the king’s demands.48 The city and surrounding settlements also suffered military expenses not directly linked to royal taxation. In the rural villages, the greatest of these costs centered on the building of new fortifications and the repair of badly damaged older ones. Although ecclesiastical funds already under great pressure from the crown sometimes helped pay for the construction materials, the villagers were compelled to perform the necessary labor themselves.49 The economic effect on Calahorra steadily worsened during the last years of the conflict with Aragon. By 1365, ten percent of all the city’s horses and other livestock had been seized by the crown to be used for military service or to feed Castilian troops. Despite the imposition of ecclesiastical and royal penalties designed to force the city’s compliance with the king’s ever-increasing demands on its resources, the inhabitants found it increasingly difficult to comply. They seem to have approached their breaking point in the last months of the conflict. Although the population did not issue any ringing refusal to pay military subsidies, it utilized every means possible to impede and delay

47  C DPI, 3:400–1 (doc. 1.094); 4:107–8 (doc. 1.196). See also: Tomás Sáenz de Haro, “Notas sobre el ‘Trastamarismo’ de Calahorra. La ciudad ante la guerra civil y durante los primeros años de la nueva dinastia,” Kalakaricos 15 (2010): 403–36, esp. 406–7. The communities of western Castile and even those Aragonese outposts captured by the Castilian army aired similar grievances. During this period, many of Calahorra’s clergy had fled to these Castilian outposts. 48  Ibid., 4:26–27 (doc. 1.112). 49  C DPI, 3:327–28 (doc. 1.026).

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such payments.50 Ultimately, it would be the excessive demands placed on the city that helped push Calahorra into the arms of Pedro’s rival, the count of Trastámara. Adding to the turbulence of this period, a struggle erupted between the city and its French-born bishop, Robert Le Coq, looked upon by many Calahorrans as a foreign agent due to his having served the Navarrese king as chaplain, adviser, and ambassador. For whatever reason, this controversial churchman showed signs of favoring Calahorra’s ancient rival, the city of Logroño, rather than his own see. Not surprisingly, much of the population reacted angrily when he asked them to contribute to yet another subsidy that would be applied to safeguarding not themselves, but Logroño.51 Despite the bishop’s unpopularity, Pedro I seems to have seen in him a way to exert greater control over his city, a site the king found increasingly difficult to rule. Consequently, in October, 1364, he entrusted Le Coq to carry out negotiations with his Navarrese counterpart, Carlos II, at Viana. In the midst of this process, the Castilian king even sanctioned talks concerning the possibility of transferring Calahorra, Alfaro, and their surrounding territories to Navarre.52 While these proposals predictably came to nothing, they served to increase the townspeople’s already fast growing distrust of their king. As a result of all this, in 1366, Calahorra played a not insignificant significant role in the changing of the guard53 as it became the first major population center in Castile to change its allegiance from Pedro I to Enrique II and acknowledge his claim to the throne. In winter of that year, the count of Trastámara’s army advanced westward from Barcelona to Zaragosa and then to the Aragonese border, crossing into Castile at several points. The main contingent under Enrique and his principal general, Bertrand DuGuesclin, marched through the southern tip of Navarre and, early in March, entered the kingdom near the town of Alfaro, 28 km. southeast of Calahorra. When this force arrived at the city, it quickly became clear that the inhabitants were not about to put up a strenuous resistance in support of their 50  Sáenz de Haro, “Notas,” 408–10. Calahorra’s “rebellious” attitude has been explained by modern historians in different ways. Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada refers to it as a urban reaction to the king’s “paroxysm of royal power” when he exceeded the legitimate right to tax his people. On the other hand, Clara Estow attributes this urban backlash to a general tax exhaustion brought on by ten years of war. Estow, Pedro, 117–18; Ladero Quesada, Fiscalidad, 212 51  Elíseo Sáinz Ripa, “Robert Le Coq, consejero de Carlos II de Navarra, obispo de Calahorra (1362–1373),” Principe de Viana 55, no. 202 (1994): 331–76, esp. 346–47. 52  C DPI, 4:245–46 (doc. 1.351). See also: Sáinz Ripa, “Robert,” 349–50. 53  For more about the city’s role in 1366 invasion by Trastámara and the Free Companies, see Chapter 9.

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legitimate monarch, whose war had become increasingly unpopular. Under the command of their captain, Fernando Sánchez de Tovar, the city’s residents did not dare oppose the strong force that Enrique commanded fearing a bloody sack at the hands of the invader. Instead, the Calahorrans threw open their city gates, and welcomed Enrique and his men to enter. It was at this point that the army leaders all urged the count to officially declare himself king, a request with which he quickly complied.54 Calahorra’s readiness to surrender and its rapid acceptance of Enrique’s coronation in Burgos a few days later seem to have been an impromptu decision on the part of the inhabitants both out of a concern for the city’s survival, and a growing hatred of Pedro I, whom an ever-increasing number of Castilians had come to view as a cruel tyrant.55 Not all of Calahorra’s leaders, however, were present on March 16, when Enrique announced his claim on the throne. For his part, Bishop Robert Le Coq was absent, working for the other monarch he served, Carlos II.56 In line with his normal practice of gaining new recruits, the new Castilian king, who now adopted the regnal name Enrique II, may have offered Tovar, Calahorra’s commander, monetary or territorial inducements to surrender the post he commanded. The latter’s desertion of Pedro’s cause might also be attributed to Tovar’s long-standing resentment of his royal master who in 1363 had demoted him from his office as adelantado mayor.57 It did not help Pedro’s cause that even after his crushing victory at Nájera in April, 1367—a victory that once again, at least for a time, secured his rule over Castile—he continued to issue orders that angered his urban subjects. Some of the most hated of these last royal directives sent out by the king instructed all of Castile’s urban councils to supply “good lodgings and free food” to any forces he might decided to station in their midst, including Muslim troops supplied by his only remaining ally, the emir of Granada. Expanding on this unpopular policy, he ordered Calahorra’s municipal authorities to curtail violent disputes between such troops and city residents.58 54  Ayala, Pedro I, 537–38 (1366, chaps. ii–iii). See also: Fowler, Medieval Mercenaries, 176–77. 55  Cristoval Lozana, Los reyes nuevos de Toledo (Madrid, 1696), 109–10 (bk II, chap. 5); Sáenz de Haro, “Notas,” 417. 56  Sáinz Ripa, “Robert,” 352. 57  Díaz Martín, Officiales, 24. 58  Shortly before his death, Pedro instructed all of his town councils to form brotherhoods (hermandades) aimed at preventing the many “robberies, evils, and damages” that daily plagued the realm. Ibid., 4:284 (doc. 1.415), 4:262–63 (doc. 1.378). For information concerning Iberian brotherhoods of the later Middle Ages, see: Antonio Alvarez de Morales, Las hermandades, exposión del movimientos comunitario en España (Valladolid, 1974); T.R. Jusue, “Las cartas de hermandad de España,” AHDE 15 (1944): 387–463; O’Callaghan,

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While Calahorra’s acceptance of Enrique in 1366 was clearly a reaction born out of fear of the overwhelming force he brought with him, the city’s inhabitants afterwards demonstrated continuing loyalty to their new king. Despite his defeat at Nájera in April, 1367, the Calahorrans warmly welcomed him back the following September when once again he led a rebuilt army into Castile.59 Thereafter, until the end of the civil war in the 1370s, the city would remain as one of Enrique’s strongest urban supporters.60 4 Murcia Although Murcia never became a site of actual conflict, this frontline city in the southeastern corner of Iberia earned its place as the single most important urban center in Castile during the War of the Two Pedros.61 In large part, the war itself was fought over which of the two belligerent powers, Castile or the Crown of Aragon, would dominate the region known as the kingdom of Murcia, in particular, that part of the kingdom which Castile had ceded to Aragon early in the fourteenth century and which had remained in Aragonese hands for over fifty years. It was a region that had never been Castilian that Pedro I made every effort to regain for Castile.62 Throughout the conflict, the city of Murcia served as the principal jumping off point for repeated Castilian incursions into Aragonese-held territory, including attacks aimed at the neighboring city of Valencia, the Crown of Aragon’s southern capital. Finally, Murcia’s municipal archives provide modern scholars with a documentary record unrivalled by any other repository in Castile.63 Standing on the south bank of the Segura River, the city of Murcia lies in the center of a fertile band of farmland (huerta) and looks eastward toward the Mediterranean from which it is separated by roughly 40 kms. Although “Kings,” 129, 134; Luis Suárez Fernández, Evolución histórica de las hermandades castellanas (Buenas Aires, 1951). 59  Ayala, Pedro I, 577–78 (1367, chap. xxxiv) 60  Sáenz de Haro, “Notas,” 418. 61  For more about the multi-faceted significance of Murcia in the War of the Two Pedros, see Villalon’s article: “‘Cut Off Their Heads, or I’ll Cut Cut Off Yours’: Castilian Straegy and Tactics in the War of the Two Pedros and the Supporting Evidence from Murcia,” in The Hundred Years War (Part II): Different Vistas, ed. L. J. Andrew Villalon and Donald J. Kagay (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 153–84. 62  For more about the pre-war struggle between Castile and Aragon over control of Murcia, see Chapters 2 and 3. 63  For the scarcity of Castilian sources concerning the War of the Two Pedros and the resulting importance of the Murcian Archives, see the Introduction, esp. section 5, 20–25.

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surrounded by “semi-desert” uplands covered with only a light plant cover, the city of Murcia itself possesses an ample supply of water from the Segura to power an extensive system of irrigation, capable of producing rich harvests of grain, fruit, and vegetables.64 Only rarely has it suffered from flooding when the river overflowed its banks as a result of spring rains running off the mountains that tower above it. As a result of its crops and the large number of sheep the region can support, Murcia emerged as an important exporter of wine, olive-oil, and wool. In the ancient world, a small Roman outpost, known as Margi, stood on the site, to be replaced in the early Middle Ages by a Visigothic town.65 Early in the eighth century, during the Islamic conquest of the peninsula, a leader of the community managed to negotiate an agreement with one of the conquerors that allowed the town’s Christian population to maintain their lifestyle and religion in exchange for payment of a small annual tribute to their new Muslim masters.66 As a Muslim city, the settlement on the Segura (now known as Mursiah), evolved into an important regional farming and manufacturing center that became home to sizeable Muslim and Jewish populations living alongside the original Christian inhabitants. Following the 11th century collapse of the Caliphate of Cordoba, the city and its environs became a taifa or successor state, possessing greater autonomy and political power.67 Eventually, this region was overrun by waves of new and highly zealous Muslim invaders from North Africa, the Almoravids and Almohads. With the Almohad conquest in 1165, the city actually entered into a period of decline, one that paved the way for its conquest by Christian forces during the following century.68 Throughout this period, Murcia served as a military center, originally for its Muslim rulers

64  This ring of fertile farmland and orchards can be largely credited to the Arab’s “Green Revolution” that agriculturally transformed much of the arid land of the Middle East and Iberian Peninsula and fed increasing populations. 65  Curchin, Roman Spain, 188; Ford, Hand-Book, 2:614. 66  “El pacto de Tudmir con Abd Al-Aziz,” in Textos comentados de época medieval (siglo V al XII), ed. Manuel Riu et al. (Barcelona, 1975), 292–94; Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal, 15; O’Callaghan, History, 93–94. 67  The Muslim city of Mursiah possessed important architectural sites including its citadel, the al-Qasr al-Kabir, two palaces near the urban aqueduct (the Dar al-Sugra and the al-Qasr al-Sugir), and the massive Alhama baths. Archaeology of Medieval Spain, 186–89, 240; Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal, 17, 75, 227. 68   B D, 187–233 (chaps. 206–89); Garrido i Valls, Jaume I, 20–21; Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal, 218–19; W. Montgomery Watt and Pierre Cachia, A History of Islamic Spain (Edinburgh, 1965), 97–110.

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and later for its Christian conquerors. It became well-known for the manufacture and repair of artillery. Around the mid-thirteenth century, the fast-rising Christian threat to Murcia came at the hands of the Aragonese monarch, Jaume I, as well as his Castilian counterparts, King Fernando III, and his son, Alfonso X. In 1264, Alfonso, with the help of his father-in-law, Jaume I, managed to establish control of the city and its surrounding territory.69 In their interaction lies the beginning of the contest between Castile and the Crown of Aragon to dominate Murcia and its hinterland, a struggle that would last on and off for a century and reach its climax in the War of the Two Pedros.70 As with other Castilian cities of the later Middle Ages, fourteenth-century Murcia increasingly fell under the control of its urban aristocracy, led by such great families as the Fajardos and the Ayalas.71 The group exercised its dominance through a city council chosen by lot each year from among the city’s wealthiest inhabitants, the caballeros villanos. When incessant fighting for control of the council between noble factions reached a peak in the reign of Alfonso XI, the king appointed a corregidor, a royal official who during periods of crisis could step in and govern the city until peace was restored.72 Christian residents were divided into different social groups—lesser aristocrats (hidalgos or caballeros) and the taxpaying artisans and laborers (pecheros). The first of these groups profited from the crown’s extension of nobility to wealthy townsmen. On the other hand, in return for exemption from some royal taxes, the crown made these favored inhabitants responsible for maintaining horses, armor, and weapons, and called upon them to render military service when summoned.73 By the fourteenth century, commerce in the region 69   B D, 283–327 (chaps. 378–465). See also: Garrido i Valls, Jaume I, 43–120; Harvey, Islamic Spain, 44–48; Mariano Gasper Remiro, História de Murcia Musulmana (Zaragoza, 1905), 293–313. Murcia was one of Castile’s smallest provinces that was bounded on the east by Valencia, on the west by Granada, and to the south by the Mediterranean. 70  For more about the decades running up to the war, see the earlier chapters, esp. chapter 3, section 2. 71  For the Fajardos and their connection to Murcía, see: Isabel García Díaz, “Mayorazgo y Vinculacíon de la Propiedad Señorial en Murcia a Fines de la Edad Media in Miscelánea Medieval Murciana XV (1989), pp. 140–184. 72  Martin Lunefeld, Keepers of the City: The Corregidores of Isabel I of Castile (Cambridge, 1987); Denis Menjot, “L’elite à Murcia au Bas Moyen-Age,” in La ciudad hispánicasoglos XIII al XVI (Mardrid, 1987), 535–59, esp. 537–43; Emilio Mitre Fernández, La extensión de regimen de corregidores en elo reinado de Enrique III de Castilla (Valladolid, 1969); Angel Luis Molina Molina, “Don Martín López de Cordoba, Maestro de los ordenes de Alcántara y Calatrava y adelantado mayor del reino de Murcia,” MMM 4 (1978): 87–106, esp. 100–1 (doc. 3); Torres Fontes, “Evolución,”15, 17–36. 73  Crawford, Fight for Status, 17–20.

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had increasingly fallen under the control of Genoese merchants who had immigrated to Iberia and established a virtual monopoly over the transport and sale of Murcian products.74 The non-Christian segments of the Murcian population, composed of Jews and Muslims, had to endure considerably greater government interference in their lives under Islamic rule. Jews lived in a quarter, known as the judería, assigned to them by Alfonso X in 1266, two years after the conquest, on the condition that they would not attempt to move into Christian neighborhoods. Despite this royally-imposed segregation as well as other limitations on their freedom, Murcia’s Jewish inhabitants were for the most part protected by the city fathers. This may well have been due to their importance as artisans, moneylenders, and producers of luxury goods.75 In turn, this paternalistic attitude by city government may help explain the survival of their community later in the century, during the deadly pogroms of 1391. By contrast to the Christian and even the Jewish populations, Murcia’s Muslim inhabitants seem to have fared poorly after the conquest. While a number were killed, others fled into exile, either to neighboring Aragon, in the thirteenth century still home to many Muslims, or to the kingdom of Granada, the last Islamic stronghold on the peninsula. Although the Castilian crown made some attempt early in the fourteenth century to reverse this Muslim depopulation, its efforts enjoyed at best only partial success. Throughout this century, the lot of the remaining mudejares (Muslims living under Christian rule), who supported themselves in the lowest paying occupations, improved only slowly if at all.76 Not a few lived as slaves.77 We know more about Murcía during the War of the Two Pedros than about any other city in Castile, due entirely to its document preservation.78 As noted 74  Fisher and Bowen-Jones, Spain, 204–5; Glick, Muslim Fortress, 79–80; idem, Islamic and Christian Spain, 76–77; Ford, Hand-Book, 2; 613–14; Juan Manuel Moyano Martínez, “Familia y poder político en la Murcia bajomedieval (siglos XIV y XV),” MMM 17 (1992): 9–41, esp. 11–14; Juan Torres Fontes, “Genoveses en Murcia (Siglo XV),” MMM 7 (1976): 69–168. 75  Baer, History, 1:114, 196; Ray, Sephardic Frontier, 56, 86, 93–94; Luís Rubio García, Los judios de Murcia en la Baja Edad Media (1350–1500) (Murcia, 1997); Juan Torres Fontes, “Los judios murcianos á fines del siglo XIV y comienzos del XV” MMM 8 (1981): 55–117. 76  Juan Torres Fontes, “Los mudéjares murcianos,” in Actas de III simposio internacional del mudéjarismo (Teruel, 1984), 55–66; idem, “Los mudéjares murcianos: economía,” Actas de IV simposio internacional del mudéjarismo (Teruel, 1993), 365–74. 77  Torres Fontes, Instituciones, 234–339; Charles Verlinden, The Beginning of Modern Colonization, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Ithaca, N.Y., 1970), 37–38. 78  Although Ayala occasionally mentions Murcia in his chronicle, the information he gives is nowhere near enough to produce any detailed understanding of the city’s role in the

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in the Introduction,79 one great difference between the two warring kingdoms lay in the degree to which their documents have survived over the centuries. While Barcelona’s Archivo de la Corona de Aragon is replete with Aragonese source material from the conflict, what remains in Castile is indeed sparse. The documents preserved in Murcia’s archives are crucial to any understanding of Castile’s war effort for the simple reason that they are unique: nothing comparable has survived concerning that kingdom’s participation in the conflict in any other national or regional archive. They and they alone supply an idea of the wide-ranging demands made on a frontline city by the crown. The city’s documents have been gathered and published in what their principal editor represents as a complete collection.80 It is by no means all that one might desire. Most regular cartularies containing royal letters from 1354 to 1367 can no longer be found in the Archivo Municipal. What is more, a disproportionate number of the letters that do survive date to just two years—1364 through 1365—the result of the very fortuitous survival of one Libro de Actas Capitulares. In short, what we actually have from Murcia represents only a fraction of the total war-related correspondence between the king and his city.81 Even for the two year period from which we have substantial documentation, there must once have existed much more, not to mention the many years for which correspondence is entirely missing. Despite its short-comings, the

war. In fact, the chronicler other mentions other sites along the frontier at least as prominently as Murcia; in particular, the town of Molina. None of these other places, however, has left any comparable cache of documents from the period and it is from these documents that we derive much if not most of our detailed understanding of the Castilian war effort. Ayala’s even-handedness in treating Castile’s frontier strongholds comes despite his fairly close connection with Murcia, documents from which mention him and his role in the city on several occasions. For example, in January, 1365, Pedro sent Ayala, recentlyappointed frontero, to Murcia whose inhabitants were instructed to supply his cavalry and infantry with whatever they would need to carry out their task. At this point in the war, the king commanded that Ayala be obeyed “as if he were my very body.” See: DPI, docs. 121:179–80; 125:182–83; 128:185–86. 79  See: See Introduction, Section 5. 80  Decades ago, the Academia de Alfonso el Sabio, published this invaluable source under the title Documentos de Pedro I [DPI], ed. Angel Luis Molina Molina, Colección de Documentos para la Historia del Reino de Murcia, v. 7 (Murcia, 1978). To produce this collection, Molina combined what still exist with things printed by earlier scholars that have since disappeared. See esp.: DPI, vii–viii. 81  The disappearance of the major source books, the concentration of most surviving documentation in a two year period, and the absence of any Murcian responses to the royal messages, leads inexorably to the conclusion that there was once much more source material.

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cache, consisting of 102 relevant items, sheds crucial light on both the strategy and tactics of Castile during the conflict. We may safely assume that other major staging points for the Castilian war effort, in particular Molina, but also Alfaro, Gomara, Agreda, and Logroño, all carried on a similar correspondence with the crown.82 After all, each of these frontline places contained major royal garrisons.83 In all probability, then, the surviving Murcian documents constitute just the tip of an administrative iceberg. First and foremost, the city was called upon to supply troops. Royal letters mention both cavalry (omes de caballo)84 and footsoldiers (peones).85 Pedro repeatedly instructed his Murcian subjects to provide contingents to serve in the Castilian garrisons he placed within captured castles such as Guardamar, not far south of Valencia. The numbers being called up ranged from ten horsemen, sent to reinforce a garrison at Cartegena,86 to a force of 100 horsemen and 200 foot, charged with escorting the bishop of Cartagena and a royal party travelling through the war zone.87 The city also had to supply war materiel, foodstuffs, transportation; and, of course, there were royal taxes to pay. When Pedro’s tax collectors came into the region, Murcia was expected to house them as well as supplying both an escort to protect them and animals to transport what they collected.88 The city was required to turn over the royal fifth of booty its troops had won in Valencia. And the council had standing orders to maintain a fund of 10,000 maravedis, from which it could purchase horses and weapons for use in the war effort.89

82  Ayala, despite his fairly close involvement with Murcia, mentions other places along the frontier at least as prominently, in particular, Molina. The Murcian documents contain several that mention the future chronicler and his role in the conflict. For example, in January, 1365, Pedro sent his recently-appointed frontero to Murcia whose inhabitants were instructed to supply his cavalry and infantry with whatever they would need to carry out their task. At this point in the war, the king commanded that Ayala be obeyed “as if he were my very body.” See: DPI, docs. 121:179–80; 125:182–83; 128:185–86. 83  Ayala, Pedro I, 475 (1356, chap. xi); 477 (1356, chap. ii); 494 (1359, chap. x): 505 (1360, chap. xii); 523–24 (1362, chap. xii). 84  Alternatively, “hombres de caballo.” See: DPI, docs. 98:161; 101:163–64; 103:165; 106:167; 113:172. 85  While footsoldiers are most frequently referred to as “ballesteros,” there are documents that use the more generic term “peones.” DPI, doc. 123:181. 86   D PI, doc. 101:163–64. 87   D PI, doc. 113:172. 88   D PI, docs. 91:155–56; 112:171–72. 89  Ibid., 161–62, 182–83, 191–92 (docs. 91, 125, 136). [For English translation, see Appendix III, docs. 4, 16, 21].

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There were other exactions as well. From the siege camp at Elche, he ordered the Murcians to send him 60 oxen with their drovers and an escort to transport war engines and other materiel.90 Following this siege, the city became responsible for transporting back to Seville royal loot in the form of 61 Moorish captives.91 The king ordered the city to send 60 cahices of grain to the garrison in a nearby castle and charged it with supplying the mules necessary for transportation.92 On at least one occasion, the townspeople had to provide up to thirty mules to transport the king’s possessions and those of his mistress to Seville.93 Many of the men recruited to serve in the royal army received a daily salary from the crown for as long as they served. The king also called on urban administrators to come up with two months’ wages for the service of townsmen in his royal galleys.94 Soldiers from Murcia found themselves being frequently moved about from one place to another and reinforced by new levies.95 If any of these men failed to carry out royal orders, they were threatened with “loss of [the king’s] favor, [loss of] their lives, and [loss of] everything [they] possessed.”96 Contingents of foot soldiers are frequently referred to as ballesteros, most likely identifying them as archers or crossbowmen.97 The Murcian documents repeatedly allude to a force called the ballesteros de la nomina who seem to have been a regular militia maintained by the city. Members served at such sieges as Alicante, Callosa, and Elche.98 In December, 1364, Pedro commanded 90   D PI, doc. 114:172–73. 91   D PI, doc. 119:178–79. 92   D PI, doc. 93:157. 93   D PI, doc. 110, 169–70; docs. 129–30, 186. [For English translations, see Appendix III, docs. 13, 19]. 94   D PI, doc. 140: 194–95. From his siege camp at Orihuela, Pedro sent a letter calling for 85 men to help work the galleys “since some in their crews were sick or had deserted (son ydos).” 95   D PI, docs. 103:165; 123:181. Murcia received the royal order to dispatch ten horsemen to Cartagena early in July, 1364. Several weeks later, the king sent a second letter, this one ordering that these ten men be withdrawn and that Murcia send in their place ten horsemen and twenty foot to the castle at Alicante. The following January, Pedro commanded the city to double the Alicante contingent. 96   D PI, docs. 98–99:158–62; 123:181; 140: 194–95 [For English translations of these documents, see Appendix III]. 97  This is the major translation of the term ballestero, but not the exclusive one. A ballestero de maza, of the sort Pedro several times used to do his dirty work, was a mace bearer; a ballestero de corte was a royal porter; and the word ballestero alone could also refer to an armorer as well as an archer. For documents referring to ballesteros, see: DPI, docs. 94:158; 95:158–59; 96:159–60; 97:160; 103:165; 105:166–67; l13:173; 116:175; 117;176–77; 122:180; 124:181–82; 128:185–86. 98   D PI, docs. 96:159–60; 128:185–86.

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that these men be rotated every year in order to be able to look after their civilian interests, while others would be recruited to replace them.99 The letters leave no doubt that levies raised in the city were paid for their services, six maravedis daily for a horseman, one or two for a ballestero. Whether this came from the king or the city is less clear. At the same time, many of these men were expected to provide some or all of their own equipment. In December, 1364, the king reminded the inhabitants of military clauses in his father’s Ordenamiento de Alcalá, calling on Castilians to supply horses and arms in accordance with their means. Mentioned specifically were sword blades ( fojas), helmets (baçinetes), and shields (adargas). Higher-ranking troops were expected to absorb higher costs. In January, 1365, Pedro commanded that any inhabitant who possessed 10,000 maravedis would have to maintain a war horse worth a thousand, as well as appropriate arms and armor.100 At the daily wage of six maravedis paid a horsemen, it would take quite a while to recoup this expenditure.101 Numerous documents deal with Murcia’s logistical responsibilities. First and foremost, the crown called on its frontline city to billet troops on their way to attack Aragon, all of whom were to be housed at the city’s expense. This included not only Castilians, but also many coming from Pedro’s most reliable ally, Granada. In June, 1364, Pedro warned the council of the imminent arrival of 600 Moorish light cavalry who were to be provided with free lodging and reasonably priced supplies.102 In August, he ordered the council to house a Granadan noble and the twenty horsemen with him.103 And in April of the following year, the king ordered the city fathers to accommodate another force of Moorish cavalry. This time, he cautioned the council to see that no violence was directed at these Muslim allies, strongly implying that had not always been the case.104 The city council also had to pay the travel expenses and salaries of royal servants aiding in the war effort, ranging from spies to blacksmiths.105 When Granadan contingents advanced across the Segura into southern Valencia, urban forces that accompanied them were ordered by Pedro to exhibit the same brutal fighting spirit that the Muslims did and to wage “the

99   D PI, doc. 117:176–77. 100   D PI, doc. 125:182–83. 101   D PI, docs. 101:163–64; 103:165. 102   D PI, doc. 100:162–63. 103   D PI, doc. 107:167–68. 104   D PI, doc. 132:187–88. 105   D PI, docs. 104:164–66; 127:184–85. [For English translations, see Appendix III].

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cruelest war possible” against Aragonese and Valencian “interlopers.”106 In July, 1364, Pedro notified Murcia that he had dispatched a pair of brothers from Granada to repair royal war engines (ingenios bélicos) in Cartagena, the cost of their labor to be borne by their city.107 In September, he ordered the Murcia city to pay for putting four of its own siege engines into good repair as well as build a brand new weapon (trabuco or trabuque).108 Not only did he send his own royal engineer, to take charge of this project, he also gave permission to recruit as many carpenters as needed from neighboring places.109 Not all such undertakings were on that scale. When the castellan of Relleo began repairing fortifications, the king ordered Murcia to supply him with a blacksmith and pay the man three maravedis a day.110 Not infrequently, correspondence that spelled out the city’s contribution came in response to a military commanders complains of non-performance. As early as October, 1359, Pedro’s leading captain at the siege of Jumilla informed the king that towns around Murcia were refusing to make supplies available. For his part, the king immediately sent instructions that they do so.111 After receiving complaints from the alcaide of Callosa, he ordered the city to supply the men and animals needed to keep the place provisioned.112 And when the alcaide of Alicante complained that the Murcians would not transport supplies he had bought, Pedro informed them that at it would not do to have to evacuate the city or weaken its garrison because of their failure to perform their duty. Therefore, they would have to transport and protect the supplies when called on to do so—or else.113 The king also intervened in order to enable the city to meet its military commitments. When the council complained it did not have enough money to undertake the repair of siege artillery, Pedro graciously allowed them to charge the population of Murcia a further sales tax.114 And when it wrote to the king complaining that certain groups did not wish to pay for the common defense, Pedro commanded these “tax resisters,” including priests, their concubines (mancebas) and illegitimate children, hidalgos, and officers of the mint 106   D PI, docs. 100:162–63; 132:187–88. [For English translations, see Appendix III.] 107   D PI, doc. 102:164. The senior engineer, identified as Mahomet, would receive five maravedis daily; his brother, Ali, only three. 108  Almost certainly a trebuchet. 109   D PI, docs. 108:168; 109:169. 110   D PI, docs. 127:184–185;128:185–86. 111   D PI, doc. 88:153. 112   D PI, doc. 124:181–82. 113   D PI, doc. 94:156–57. 114   D PI, doc. 135:190–91.

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(monederos) to contribute their fair share to the construction of walls, bridges, and guard houses.115 In his dealings with Murcia, the king used both carrot and stick, though more of the latter than the former. On the carrot side, in May, 1361, he announced his intention to reward its inhabitants “for the entry you made into the lands of Aragon and the many other signal services you have performed since the commencement of this war.”116 The city obtained the right to add to its heraldic device of five crowns a sixth to symbolize its recent service. Two months later, Pedro enhanced the city’s crest still further, this time adding lions and castles, the royal symbol of Castile.117 In June, 1364, in answer to a petition from the city fathers, he ordered all captured enemy sites along the frontier to return property confiscated from the inhabitants of Murcia since the conflict began.118At the same time, there is some indication that the king also made an effort to win over lands seized from the Aragonese. A royal letter, dated October, 1357, conceded to conquered Jumilla the status of a royal town and conferred upon its inhabitants the municipal code or fuero enjoyed by the people of Murcia.119 Nevertheless, the stick usually prevailed. Severe punishment of his own followers, not only for outright disobedience, but for any and all shortcomings (even when their failure was the fault of the crown) constituted an important royal strategy. There is a standard medieval formula in documents issued by the Castilian crown: “so pena de mi merced” which can be translated by its English equivalent, “on pain of my displeasure.” Pedro’s documents are replete with this warning, accompanied by the not uncommon clarifier, “de los cuerpos e de los que auedes”; in other words, royal displeasure would affect both the body and worldly goods of the person at whom it was aimed. On the other hand, quite a number of this king’s instructions carry an alternative, more brutal formula that is nowhere near as common in royal documents: Pedro tells those to whom the commands are sent that if they fail him, “que los vuestros cabeças me tornaria por ello.” “Let your heads be returned to me as a result.”120 As bizarre as this invocation may sound to the modern reader, during the War of the Two Pedros, it proved anything but a laughing matter for a number of royal victims.

115   D PI, doc. 136: 191–92. 116   D PI, doc. 89:154. 117   D PI, doc. 90:154–55. 118   D PI, doc. 99:161–62. 119   D PI, doc. 87:152–53. 120  The following royal instructions contain some variant on this warning: DPI, docs. 93:157; 100:162–63; 103:165; 116:175.

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The Murcia letters provide considerable insight into the correspondence between the crown and one of its frontline cities and the sacrifices that city was called upon to undergo. If scholars extend Murcia’s experience to other border towns also deeply involved in the conflict, places like Molina and Soria, they can learn a great deal about the overall Castilian war effort. In 1366, with the sudden end of the War of the Two Pedros, Murcia’s significance in Iberian affairs considerably lessened. No longer was it the principal city from which Castile launched attacks against Aragon. During the ensuing Civil War, its loyalties wavered between Pedro I and Enrique II in their continuing struggle for the crown. Despite Pedro’s bloody death at Montiel in March, 1369, the possibility of renewed hostility between Castile and Aragon still existed along the Murcian frontier as Enrique and Pere III eyed each other uneasily across this war-torn boundary. In this tense atmosphere, the city fathers reacted to what they regarded as a threat emanating from an Aragonese troop build-up across the border in southern Valencia.121 To protect the region, the city joined with other Castilian towns to established an urban brotherhood (hermandad) charged with keeping the peace and policing the roads.122 The newly victorious monarch of Castile also ordered Murcia’s city fathers to “repair, rebuild, and pay more attention to” their fortifications, while at the same time dispatching troops to the frontier with Valencia to prevent any surprise attacks from that direction.123 Fearing that Castile’s enemies might use the continuing civil strife within that kingdom in order to unleash mercenary companies against Murcia, in early November, 1369, royal authorities within the city dispatched spies across the border to discover and report what, if anything, the other side was up to. Not to be outdone, during the following summer the Aragonese commander at Orihuela sent his own spies back across the Murcian border. He also reinforced his town against a possible Castilian attack.124 Despite its initial intensity, this suspicion and the hostility it engendered did not last for long. As early as June, 1369, Pere sent diplomatic envoys to begin final negotiations for a settlement with the Castilian king.125 These talks extended into the fall, at which point the two monarchs agreed to general principles 121   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1224, ff. 3r–v. See also: Ferrer i Mallol, “Frontera Valenciana,” 342. 122   A CA Cancillería real, R. 1081, ff. 39v–40. See also: Ferrer i Mallol, “Frontera Valenciana,” 343. 123   D EII, 47–48 (doc. 26). 124   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1224, f. 6. See also: Ferrer i Mallol, “Frontera Valenciana,” 343–44. 125  Ferrer i Mallol, “Frontera Valenciana,” 344; Russell, English Intervention, 153. Pere’s ambassadors were Archbishop Lope of Zaragoza and the Hospitaller representative, Juan Fernández de Heredía.

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on which to establish peace, beginning with a four-month truce.126 Although tensions along the frontiers could not immediately be suspended and rumors of renewed warfare continued to trouble the region well into the 1370s, by the middle of that decade, peace had in large part returned to Murcia.127 For his part, our nineteenth-century English travel writer and artist, Richard Ford, advised travelers new to Spain to spend no more than a single day in Murcia. According to the famously ascerbic Ford, it was the “dullest city in Spain.”128 Despite writing off this site on the Segura as a cultural wasteland and its inhabitants as dull, the Englishman had to admit that the “Murcians…are no cowards.”129 This they had proven during the fourteenth century by their frontline service in the War of the Two Pedros. 126   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1293, ff. 212–3v;. See also: Masia i de Ros, Relación, 1:322. 127   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1224, ff. 35v-36; R. 1543, f. 81v. See also: Ferrer i Mallol, “Frontera Valenciana,” 344–45, 347–48; Masía i de Ros, Relación, 2:576–77 (doc 251/15). 128  Ford, Hand-Book, 2:614. 129  Ibid., 2:616.

Chapter 16

Elionor of Sicily (1325–1375): Pere III’s Third Wife, Queen and Important Administrator One of the foremost administrators that helped the Aragonese government to function as well as it did during the War of the Two Pedros was Pere’s third wife, Elionor of Sicily. To this remarkable woman, a successful mother and royal bureaucrat during the time of war, we have dedicated this chapter. 1

Elionor’s Sicilian Background

To understand how queenly power functioned in the Middle Ages, we must see how the ruling coefficient of talent, opportunity, and determination for women who exercised any kind of power operated. Even when a royal title descended on a female heir, a predominately male administration prevented the possibility of unfettered power. Royal wives and mothers, however, often gained the opportunity to dominate a ruling situation by becoming trusted members of a regal bureaucracy as well as guardians of their minor children who might eventually assume the crown. In the realms of the Iberian Peninsula, Berenguela of Castile (r. 1197–1246), María of Aragon (r. 1401–1453) as well as a number of other medieval queens excelled at rulership, even though “poised ambiguously between family and bureaucracy.”1 They came into this situation as women with “suitable beauty” but more especially because of their “fitness for producing children.” Once offspring were born to these royal unions, the queen 1  Thersa Earenfight, The King’s Other Body, María of Castile and the Crown of Aragon (Philadelphia, 2010); eadem, Queenship in Medieval Europe (New York, 2013), 167–69, 225–34; Miriam Shadis, Berenguela of Castile (1180–1246) and Political Women in the High Middle Ages (New York, 2009); eadem, “Berenguela of Castile’s Political Motherhood: The Management of Sexuality, Marriage, and Succession,” in Medieval Mothering, ed. John Carmi Parsons and Bonnie Wheeler (New York, 1996), 335–58; eadem, Motherhood, Lineage, and Royal Power in Medieval Castile and France; Berenguela de León and Blanche de Castille (Duham, N.C., 1994; eadem, Political Women in the High Middle Ages: Berenguela de Castilla (1180–1246) and her Family (New York, 2001; eadem, “Women, Gender, and Rulership in Romance Rulership: The Iberian Case,” History Compass 1, no. 3 (May, 2006): 481–87; Nuria Silleras Fernández, Power, Piety, and Patronage in Late Medieval Queenship: María de Luna (New York, 2008); Theresa M. Vann, “Berenguela,” in Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia, ed. E. Michael Gerli (New York, 2003), 161–62.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004425057_018

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possessed indirect power through her own household and those of her children. Her influence, however, was often far greater as a representative and administrator for her husband. In these supportive functions, queens often gained the respect, if not the love of their husbands, who after the first few months of the marriage seldom saw their “most dear husbands and lords” except during important holiday seasons such as Christmas and Easter.2 For all medieval queens, marriage meant the exchange of one royal family for another. With Elionor, however, the path to the marital union with her uncle, Pere III, would not be so simple; for she initially proved unwilling to forsake totally the land in which she was born and raised for a new realm with many negative connections from the recent past to Sicily. The troubled ties of the island and the Crown of Aragon had indeed existed long before Elionor’s life had begun. After a Sicilian uprising against its Angevin masters during the Easter season of 1282 and the invited intervention of the Aragonese king, Pere II, which led to an aftermath for Southern Italy that Neopolitan historian, Benedetto Croce, characterized as ninety years of “much trouble and little greatness.”3 With decades of warfare between Angevin Naples and the Aragonese cadet branch that ruled Sicily, the island suffered a steep economic and social decline marked by failing trade, urban decay, and a continual lowlevel civil war between the island’s old baronial families and the Aragonese and Catalan newcomers who supported the Iberian sovereign.4 Like other colonial outposts stretching across the Mediterranean, Sicily had become a “middle nation …, one both distanced from the mother country and disliked by its indigenous population.”5 Unmarried until her mid-twenties, Elionor had grown hopeful of attaining the Sicilian crown with the death of her own father, Pedro I of Sicily (r. 1321– 1342), seven years before an Aragonese marriage was forced on her. This long progress to adulthood not only fueled her ruling ambitions, but also trained her in the elements of Sicilian government. With Elionor, the equation of 2  Roger Sablonier, “The Aragonese Royal Family around 1300” In Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study of the Family and Kinship. Edited by Hans Medick and David Warren Sabean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. 210–39, esp. 210–19. 3  Clifford R. Bachman, The Decline and Fall of Medieval Sicily: Politics, Religion, and Economy in the Reign of Frederick III, 1296–1337 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 29. 4  Abulafia, Western Mediterranean Kingdoms,158–59; Bachman, Decline, 29–33, 42–43, 66–67, 72–73, 83, 111; Francisco Giunta, Aragoneses y Catalanes en el Mediterráneo (Barcelona, 1989), 123; Giuseppe Quatriglio, A Thousand Years in Sicily: From the Arabs to the Bourbons, trans. Justin Vitiello (Mineola, N.Y., 2005), 59–65. 5  David Green, “The Hundred Years War, Colonial Policy, and the English Lordship,” in The Hundred Years War (Part III): Further Considerations, ed. L.J. Andrew Villalon and Donald J. Kagay (Leiden, 2013), 233–57, esp. 248. This quote was originally in reference to Ireland and Normandy.

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ruling was formed, first and foremost, from the example of her parents who always projected the image of foreign (Catalan) conquerors, even though well acquainted with the world of medieval Sicily which they controlled. She never forgot her island homeland, however, and spent the rest of her life in attempting to become Sicily’s true ruler by right of inheritance.6 The new Aragonese queen looked back to Sicily with horror at its steady decline and hope that she herself might be able to take the reins of power from her younger brothers, Lodovico and Federico who served as Sicily’s kings between 1338 and 1375. They died between age seventeen and twenty-two; though attempting to establish peace across the island, they could never overcome the hatred of the native barony for the Iberian power structure that led many to declare their preference for imprisonment to submission to the foreign rulers. In the incessant conflicts that these basic hatreds spawned, Sicily itself was subject to foreign interference from Pere III and the Angevin rulers of Naples, Louis of Taranto (r. 1327–1362) and Joanna I (r. 1326–1382).7 Both of the Sicilian kings claimed that they had acted faithfully for “peace, justice, and royal dignity,” only to receive “scorn” in return from their own people and their foreign adversaries who endangered their realm.8 In their hearts, however, they must have known that one of the most constant perils they faced sprang from their older sister, Elionor. 2

Elionor’s New Life in Aragon

The Sicilian political world that Elionor moved from in 1349 was almost as disordered as the marital métier she found in Pere III’s court. The Aragonese king had married the Navarrese princess, María, in 1337, who died ten years later, after presenting her husband with three daughters and a short-lived son.9 Determined to guarantee his succession with a male heir, Pere spent less than a year in taking another bride, the princess, Leonora, daughter of Portugal’s king, Afonso IV (r. 1325–1357). After some disagreements over the dowry, the marital 6  Pere III, 2: 449, 451, 518 (IV:64, 66; VI: 18); Prospero de Bofarull y Mocaró, Los condes de Barcelona vindicados de los Reyes de España, 2 vols. (Barcelona, 1836), 2:275–77; Miron, Queens, 187–89, 191–92; Zurita, Anales, 4: 180–81, 192 (VIII:xxxvi, xl). Elionor’s sons were Joan, Martí, and Alfonso; her daughter, Elionor. 7  Abulafia, Western Mediterranean Kingdoms, 135, 159; Giunta, Aragoneses, 158–61, 166; Zurita, Anales, 135–36, 158–61, 166; Nancy Goldstone, Joanna: The Notorious Queen of Naples, Jerusalem, and Sicily (London, 2010), 227–30; Zurita, Anales, 4–180–83 (VIII:xxxvi), 251–52 (VIII:lv), 276–78 (VIII:lx). Lodovico was king from 1338–1355) and Federico from 1355 to 1377. 8  Giunta, Aragoneses, 165–66, 169, 176. 9  Bofarull y Mocaró, Condes de Barcelona, 2:273–75; Miron, Queens, 177–81. The daughters were named Constança, Joanna, and María; the son, Pere.

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agreement was concluded and the Aragonese king brought his intended into Valencia, only to encounter further difficulties, including a baronial uprising and the appearance of “signs and wonders” among which was the changed course of the Ter River at Gerona, which flowed darkly “like a river of death.” These portents were soon fulfilled in regard to Pere’s new bride who died from the Black Plague on October 20, 1348.10 Having run through acceptable marriage partners in the Navarrese and Portuguese courts, Pere turned to his Sicilian family connections for a suitable mate. Based on the report of a “credible person,” he chose Elionor, the second daughter of King Pedro I, who was a young lady of “twenty-one or twentytwo” (she was actually twenty-four), with a ruddy complexion, and long, fine, black hair.11 When Pere’s embassy came before the Sicilian court at Messina, the Queen-Mother, Elizabeth of Carinthia, was overjoyed with Pere’s proposal. Many of her native barons, however, who had become increasingly frustrated with Aragonese influence over their island, insisted that the princess would have to renounce all ruling rights over Sicily for herself and her heirs if she intended to become Pere’s wife. Showing both a temper worthy of any man and an unshakeable belief in her royal destiny, Elionor refused to comply with this condition, only relenting after a month of virtual imprisonment. Leaving her home for good on July 9, she married her uncle at Valencia in August, 1349. Pere would soon find that his new mate was very much his equal in education and political acumen. Elionor showed herself to be a good wife, giving Pere three sons and a daughter in the next nine years, and a skilled royal helpmate, whose administrative skills were invaluable to her husband. Despite the widely assumed shortcomings of the union, the match persisted for a full quartercentury, binding Pere and Elionor in a relationship marked by both respect and true affection. The manner in which they referred to each other grew as a customary element of their correspondence. The king thus repeatedly called the queen our “dear companion,” while, in turn, she normally addressed him as her “most dear lord and husband.”12 Elionor’s Sicilian upbringing combined with her subsequent Aragonese political experience produced a woman whose strength and courage made her both a faithful wife and a talented manager, whom Pere respected. From her position as wife and mother, the queen emerged as Pere’s true partner in 10  Miron, Queens, 182–87. For the new queen’s death and the course of the plague in Catalonia and Valencia, see: ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1062, f.115; R. 1131, f. 108v. See also: López de Meneses, Documentos, 35–36 (docs. 40–41); Aberth, Black Death, 142–45 (docs. 35–36); Ziegler, Black Death, 32, 114. 11   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1131, f. 125; Epistolari, 101–2 (doc. 11). 12  They used these phrases in the salutations of many of the letters they sent to each other.

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government whose power reached its apex in the disastrous border conflict, the so-called War of the Two Pedros (1356–1366). From her long years of training inside the Sicilian and Aragonese royal court, Elionor emerged as a fearless defender of her royal standing and an agent who often tended to distrust the machinations of the clergy, nobility, and townsmen whom she blamed for the loss of her Sicilian crown. She thus viewed her rights of office through a lens of Sicilian judicial theory honing these beliefs after arriving in Catalonia and Aragon. The move to a new ruling environment was therefore not that of a complete foreigner, but rather represented a natural transition supported by the princess’s Catalan education that turned her into a persuasive speaker in that tongue for the rest of her life.13 The king’s respect for his third wife is illustrated by the fact that he held a coronation ceremony for her, something almost unheard of in the Aragonese kingship up to that time.14 As one scholar has characterized Elionor’s public life, “the queen [grew to] dominate her husband … [playing] an active part in the affairs of state.”15 The control she exercised over her own household extended to those of her two sons, Joan and Martí, and her daughter, Elionor. As a result, the queen was constantly negotiating with the royal treasurer who controlled the spending of government funds.16 Despite the widely-held belief that this marital union would not prove successful, it persisted for a full-quarter century, binding Pere and Elionor in a relationship marked by a deep affection. She was also a talented royal helpmate, whose administrative skills were invaluable to her husband. From her position as wife and mother she emerged as Pere’s true partner in government, whose power reached its apex during the long war with Castile.

13  Johnston, “Parliamentary Oratory,” 99–117; Cawsey, Kingship, 147. 14  Aurell and Serrano-Coll, “Self-Coronation,” 73–74, 92–93; Antonio Durán Gudiol, “El rito de coronación del rey en Aragón.” Argensola 103 (1989): 17–40, esp. 30–31; Carmen Orcástegui Gros, “La coronación de los reyes de los reyes de Aragón. Evolución políticoideológica ritual,” in Homenatge á Don Antonio Durán Gudiol. Huesca: Instituto de Estudios Altoaragonesas, 1995. 633–47, esp. 643–44; Jaume Riera i Sans Reina, “La Coronación de la Reina Elionor,” Acta historica et archaeological Mediaevalia [Homenatge a la profesora Dra Carmen Batlle Girart] 26 (2005): 485–92. 15  Sitges, Muerte, 4. 16   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1563, ff. 178r–v; R. 1566, f. 113v. See also: Els quatre llibres de la reina Elionor de Sicilia a l’arxiu de la Catedra de Barcelona, ed. Anglada Cantarell Margarida (Barcelona, 1992), 146.

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Elionor’s Financial and Political Management

The queen’s expenses took various forms; she reimbursed her officials for the loss of personal property and horses; she protected her bureaucrats as in 1361 when she bought one of her counselors out of Castilian captivity, and she rewarded faithful service through grants aiding them with expenses for their weddings. Many of these costs were included in large fiscal accounts connected with official trips such as Elionor’s journey to join her husband in the Sardinia campaign of 1354–55.17 Most of Elionor’s expenses, however, were on a much smaller scale, focusing as they did on the purchase and transport of provisions for her own household and for those of her sons and daughter. She also spent a good deal on the production of official letters and for the salaries of the messengers who delivered them.18 When the queen traveled across her new realms, she depended on local officials to keep her household supplied either with provisions or money to purchase them. Only occasionally were these agents reimbursed for this service.19 Elionor’s court consisted of some thirty advisors, both secular and religious, as well as double that number of servants (servents). Through the influence of her long-time treasurer and close adviser, Berenguer de Relat, she became a stickler for the issuance of receipts for all royal money spent by her household. The list of such queenly expenditures was a long and varied one. Included in the semi-annual audits, there are references to monthly alms to the poor, occasional grants to religious orders, as well as the settlement of bills for a court doctor, the nanny of her royal offspring, a trumpeter, troubadour, baker, and falconer, including the cost of a lost falcon. There were also fees for the work of “sculptors and purveyors in stone,” as well as payment for a number of religious and legal books.20 A good deal of the queen’s spending seemed to go for luxury goods. These included gold and silver plates and cups, as well as crowns, silken banners, and jewelry. Such items were often used to make up shortfalls in royal

17   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1565; ff. 148v–49, 173 v, 175v; R. 1567, ff. 79, 131r–v, 181v; R. 1570, ff. 120v, 156v–57. 18  Quatre Llibres, 148, 171–73, 175. 19  Ibid., 182; ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1565, f. 31. 20   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1079, f. 73; R. 1563, f. 40; R. 1565, f. 127; R. 1566, ff. 81, 85v; R. 1567, f. 53v; R. 1568, ff. 32r–v, 38; R. 1570, ff. 85v–86. See also: Documents per l’historia de la cultura catalana mig-eval, ed. Antonio Rubió i Llluch, 2 vols. (Barcelona, 1908, 1921), 1:148, 209 (docs. 46, 214); Quatre Llibres, 179, 197, 201, 227.

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finances by having them pawned, only to be redeemed when there was more money in the courtly coffers.21 During her husband’s war with Pedro I, Elionor’s courtly finances became so stretched that she occasionally had to beg for financial support from the royal treasurer and other fiscal officials of the crown. When they were unable to provide this money due to Pere’s unwillingness to divert funds from his military efforts, she turned elsewhere to gain alternate financial resources. During 1355–1356, she drew 100,000 sous from the hamlets subordinated to the city of Teruel in order to support her trip to Sardinia, which had yet again risen in rebellion. Three years later, the queen commanded the governor of Menorca to sell off that island’s grain surplus and send her the proceeds to help in defraying the “burden of costs for [her] household.”22 At times, Elionor was extricated from her fiscal “danger” by the “sheer generosity” of urban centers she administered.23 Despite all these actions, Elionor, like her husband, could seldom avoid living on borrowed money, which occasionally made her responsible to a whole class of bankers and moneylenders, some of whom used their fiduciary activities as a means of entering into her inner circle of trusted officials.24 In line with their marital agreement of 1349, Pere gave his new queen lordship over Minorca and Ibiza as well as several important Aragonese, Catalan, and Valencian cities. Since the revenues from these sites constituted one of the principal sources of her income, Elionor was forced to manage not only these assets, the urban populations that owed them and the officials who administered them. When the Castilian war broke out in 1356, she effectively turned her attention to forcing her urban vassals to provide support for her husband’s military efforts. Elionor’s principal activity in this regard was the raising of extraordinary funds to replenish Pere’s war chest. The money often became available only through the queen’s forceful demands on her Jewish and Muslim communities which were often called upon to provide emergency grants above and beyond the regular subsidies they owed the Aragonese crown.25 Such requests to the Christian populations of her towns proved more difficult since they were already providing troops, supplies, and money for royal military operations on a 21   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1565, ff. 179r–v; R. 1566, ff. 148v–150v, 171v–72; R. 1567, ff. 28v–29, 37, 115v, 187r–v; R. 1570, ff. 34, f. 46v, 76r–v, 83r–v. 22   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1566, ff. 40v, 46, 97; R. 1567, ff. 25v, 136v–37. 23   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1566, ff. 45v–46, 97, 147v; R. 1567, ff. 43, 139v. 24   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1566, f. 81; R. 1567, ff. 112v–15. 25   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1566, ff. 107, 110, 115v, 161, 185; R. 1567, f. 18. For these non-Christian communities of the Crown of Aragon during the reign of Pere III, see Baer, History, 2:28– 34; Boswell, Royal Treasure, 196–97; Ray, Sephardic Frontier, 142–43.

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group and individual basis. On the other hand, this rarely stopped Elionor from demanding extraordinary subsidies from her towns and their hamlets when she was in financial straits. She also claimed a tenth of anything that troops from her frontier towns might capture in their clashes with Castilian forces as well as any goods confiscated from enemy civilians in Aragonese or Valencian territory.26 Because of the damage suffered by her frontier properties, Elionor sometimes recycled tax revenues from these sites to rebuild the “homes, dwellings, and patios” of those affected as well as urban walls and bridges.27 4

Elionor as War Administrator

The unremitting effect of the Castilian war forced the queen to oversee economic functions undertaken by the town councils under her control; for example, the irregular round-up of horses to be used by her husband’s troops. She also saw to the protection of her townsmen against the unjust demands placed upon them either by her own officials or by the military captains appointed by the king.28 Though clearly a bystander to the fast-moving campaigns that were taking place on the Aragonese and Valencian frontiers, the Aragonese queen became an important source of information about the conflict for her Iberian and Sicilian vassals. In most of her dispatches, she adhered to her husband’s official line, claiming time and again that he was on the verge of attacking “his enemy and ours,” Pedro I. On the other hand, this belligerent tone faded somewhat when the war began in earnest. In the years after 1356, her references to the struggle were often prefaced by increasingly desperate calls for help in order to prevent “great damage to Pere … something God does not want!”29 As the years passed, the queen increasingly gave brusque advice to both her husband and his principal captains. During the chaotic summer of 1359 when Pedro I attacked the Balearic Islands and then turned back toward Valencia, Elionor warned Pere against diverting subsidy funds collected to support his 26   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1563, ff. 81v, 83; R. 1566, ff. 164r–v; R. 1567, f. 135. For hamlets of medieval Aragon, see Donald J. Kagay, “The Aldea in Medieval Aragon,” Mediterranean Studies 6 (1996): 29–38; idem, “Two Towns,” 33–43. 27   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1566, ff. 131r–v; R. 1567, ff. 40r–v, 86, 176. For how this process was carried out across the Crown of Aragon, see Kagay, “Shattered Circle,” 111–35. 28   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1567, ff. 22v, 73, 117r–v, 133v; R. 1568, ff. 13v–14. 29   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1148, ff. 104v, 124v; R. 1380, ff. 3v, 34v–35, 41r–v; R. 1566, f. 87v; R. 1567, ff. 102r–v; R. 1568, ff. 16v, 28v. See also: Epistolari, 124 (doc. 17); Kagay, “Defense,” 22; idem, “Societal and Institutional Cost,” 23–63.

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fleet to pay his principal military captain, Enrique de Trastámara. While not taking an imperious tone with her lord and master, Elionor sounded more like a commander in the letters she wrote to her husband’s captains such as Prince Ferran, Trastámara, the castellan of Amposta, and a number of other barons stationed along the Aragonese frontier. She assured these men that if they did not remain at their posts and any “scandal or damage” resulted from their absence, the responsibility would lay completely with them. When many of them threatened to leave because the salaries of their men were in arrears, she repeatedly promised to make up any shortfalls in what they were owed. She warned them that an active campaign was hardly the time to bring up a salary dispute. Instead, they needed to return to the frontier and stay there until relieved “no matter what the cost.”30 Though demonstrating her strength of character in these exchanges, the masculine tenor of her words offended both her husband and his principal commanders. In the area of finances, the king soon discovered that he possessed a heretofore unappreciated asset, his wife, who throughout the conflict proved to be a skilled propagandist and ruthless collection agent.31 Since royal officials and parliamentary delegates shared the authority for gathering customary imposts and emergency subsidies, it fell to the queen to use her position as governor of Catalonia, the lord of urban territories and the lieutenant general to force payment of grants for unspecified military needs. To raise money as quickly and as often as possible, she sent her fiscal advisers and lawyers into targeted areas armed with credentials that gave them the right to solicit contributions. Even though she assured residents that her officials would accept only what the communities were able to pay, she often produced lists of proposed contributions that could mount up to 2,000 libras of Barcelona or more.32 Elionor’s most remarkable feats of wartime administration involved her role in defending against the Castilian naval offensive of 1359 against the Crown of Aragon. In the spring of that year, Pedro I assembled a large fleet in Seville, consisting not only of Castilian vessels, but also squadrons supplied by Castile’s allies, the kings of Portugal and Granada. The king then spent the summer leading this armada along the Mediterranean coastline where it attacked Catalonia and Valencia, as well as Ibiza, and Alicante.33 Elionor’s initial 30   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1567, ff. 7v, 9–11, 15, 47; R. 1568, ff. 46r–v, 47v. 31  Kagay, “War Financing”, 125–27. 32   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1568, ff. 33v–34, 38–39v, 45, 46. For the coinage types of the Crown of Aragon, see Diplomatarium, 1:108–10; Miguel Crusafont i Sabater and Anne M. Balaguer, “Coinage and Currency, Catalonia”; idem, “Coinage and Currency, Aragon” in Medieval Iberia, 240–42. 33  Ayala, Pedro I, 454–509 (1359, chaps. x–xx); Pere III, Chronicle, 2:522–26 (VI:22–25).

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response to the deepening crisis was to raise funds in support of her husband’s own naval efforts against the Castilian fleet. Throughout these operations, she emphasized the financial desperation of the royal family, indicating that to raise money the king had “sold off his jurisdiction over castles and villages.” In addition, both she and her husband had pawned their jewels—all to support their fleet. To this end, Elionor promised her subjects that any money collected from them would be used to equip new galleys, and provide supplies to those already in service. In addition, some of the funds might even pay for horsemen to patrol the exposed Catalan and Valencian coasts that faced the constant threat of Castilian naval attack.34 When some ratepayers refused to contribute to her proposed subsidies, Elionor reminded them quite forcefully that her husband was under enormous pressure and it was their duty to protect him. Failing to provide the funds would brand them as “stubborn ingrates”, opening them to the charge of high treason.35 These repeated outbursts of the queen’s increasingly famous temper generally proved sufficient to raise surprisingly large sums of money. Elionor added to this amount by ordering the minting of new coinage, selling off grain surpluses, and borrowing “with a free spirit.” In this way, using all the powers of her position to extort increasing income from her subjects, the queen contributed enormously to her husband’s defense against the Castilian fleet.36 Besides fiscal actions taken on her own initiative, Elionor also acted for her husband in preparing towns and the countryside under her control for possible Castilian attack. She first carried this out by giving her castellans money to repair frontier fortresses that in many ways were indefensible. In the absence of enough laborers to work on these castles or from the fact that these structures were damaged beyond repair, she ordered them completely destroyed. The queen was also careful to see to the provisioning of these fortifications with all necessary supplies and weapons.37 She issued similar orders for many of the towns and villages under her control with the sincere belief that such settlements would be better protected it they had “walls and moats … [where] there now are none.”38 By and large, the queen advocated fortification of most 34   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1567, ff. 106r–v, 107v; R. 1568, ff. 12r–v, 23v, 27, 33r–v. For fogatge, see Kagay, “War Financing,” 134. 35   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1568, ff. 17v–18, 23, 32v–33, 35, 39v–40, 43v, 45. 36   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1566, ff. 37v, 87v, 99v; R. 1567, ff. 41, 139; R. 1568, ff. 28r–v. 37   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1566, ff. 158r–v; R. 1567, ff. 3v, 44v, 72. 38   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1566, ff. 153–54, 158r–v; R. 1567, ff. 129v, 184v, 187.

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of her urban sites so that the surrounding populations accompanied by their flocks could seek shelter within these city walls.39 She filled regions under her jurisdiction with horsemen who were ordered to defend scattered outposts, and were paid either by the local inhabitants or through extraordinary subsidies. Though many of these companies were marshaled by great nobility, emergencies like the naval war of 1359 compelled the queen to use her powers as governor of Catalonia to issue extensive military summonses to all the nobles, knights, and townsmen “accustomed to maintain a horse and weapons.” While these troops often engaged in temporary and very local defensive service, the queen at times linked them to larger royal operations. Such forces, for example, became involved in the attack on Alicante and the defense of Valencia (both of which occurred in 1359).40 In support of her husband’s naval operations against Castile, Elionor acquired, armed, and provided several galleys as well as other vessels to reinforce the king’s fleet. Toward this end, she summoned Catalan and Pyrenean clergy to Barcelona, ostensibly to gain their advice, but clearly to extort money and manpower to aid the the king’s naval operation.41 Both in person and through her dispatches, she provided news of the actions of the naval campaign. She increasingly linked each communique about the Castilian attacks on Ibiza and Valencia with direct demands for support of her husband’s various campaigns. Occasionally, her dispatches revealed just how hard she herself was working on the project. On her own authority, she was purchasing, arming, and equipping galleys—complete with crews and crossbowmen—from Provençal and northern Catalan ports. These were hoped to bring the weakened Aragonese fleet up to full strength.42 In July, 1359, she informed the king’s uncle, Count Ramon Berenguer of Ribagorza and Empuriés, of her desire to equip at least ten galleys from the ports of Narbonne, Collioure, and Sant Feliu de Guixols. These were to assemble at Barcelona, after which they would join the royal fleet at Majorca.43 The funds she raised were used to purchase sails, rigging, weapons, provisions, and wages to be paid to the captains and their crews. To man this squadron, as many as 250 men were drafted from Catalan sea-side communities. All told, this project was 39   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1566, ff. 108v, 176v, 188r–v; R. 1567, ff. 123v–34, 125. 40   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1563, f. 70v; R. 1567, ff. 38v, 66v, 100v, 107, 123v; R. 1568, ff. 2, 28v, 34v, 36–37. 41   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1568, ff. 1v, 5, 16r–v, 25–26, 30r–v, 32. 42   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1568, ff. 14v, 26r–v, 30v–31, 38r–v, 42r–v. 43   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1568, ff. 15r–v, 17v, 21v, 24, 37v.

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slated to cost up to 16,000 libras.44 To avoid having these expenses appear on that year’s treasury accounts, Elionor quickly paid off the interest on the money she had borrowed to carry out her naval project, but postponed any payment of the actual loans into later fiscal years.45 Whether any of these ships ever caught up with the Aragonese fleet then operating around the Balearic Islands or along the Valencian coast is unclear. What is certain, however, is the administrative skill and personal determination Queen Elionor displayed in carrying out this naval operation. As a successful administrator and trusted confidant of a husband and king who seemed increasingly harried by the pressures inherent in his military and political leadership, Elionor often assumed her many and varied roles, but possibly for much longer. She represented her husband at many of his parliaments and spent a good deal of time and energy in seeing that subsidies voted by these institutions would be collected on schedule.46 Besides these crucial services, Elionor also functioned as the king’s efficient diplomatic representative who initiated and concluded agreements with the papacy, as well as the rulers of Fez, Genoa, France, Morocco, and even Castile.47 5

Elionor’s Campaign against Bernat de Cabrera

Almost unnoticed in the midst of presenting her husband with healthy children was Elionor’s talent as a political operative whose influence within Aragon’s curia regis steadily increased as her child-bearing years passed by. Before the Sicilian princess appeared on the scene, the itinerant court had come under the dominance of Count Bernat de Cabrera, whose family was important on both sides of the Pyrenees.48 As a leader of Pyrenean courtiers, Cabrera had become indispensable in the dark days of baronial revolts during 44   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1567, ff. 101r–v; R. 1568, ff. 3r–v, 4r–6v,17v, 19v–20, 21v, 24v. 45   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1568, ff. 2r–v, 3, 7, 17, 45v, 47v–48. Despite her calls for such fiscal prudence, the queen also told the count to carry out all her commands, “no matter how great the expenses.” 46   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1563, ff. 85v–86, 116–17; R. 1567, f. 84, R. 1569, ff. 35, 53r–v, 66v–67. 47   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1563, ff. 85v–86, 116–17; R. 1565, ff. 91r–v, 113v, 118, 121v; R. 1566, ff. 58v, 147v–50v; R. 1567, ff. 116v–117; R. 1568, ff. 13r–v; R. 1570, f. 66v. 48  Donald J. Kagay, “Structures of Baronial Dissent and Revolt under James I (1213–76),” in War, Government, and Society in the Medieval Crown of Aragon (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007), Study VII, pp. 61–85, esp. 62; Santiago Sobrequés i Vidal, Els barons de Catalunya (Barcelona: Editorial Vicens-Vives, 1980), 35–38, 68–74.

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the late-1340s which he helped to defeat. As a result of this efficient service, Cabrera was rewarded with important territorial grants in Catalonia for himself and his son and namesake, the count of Osona. By 1351, the king trusted this man of “valor and prudence” to be the guardian of Duke Joan of Gerona, Elionor’s first-born son.49 This incensed the queen as both a mother and a political figure of growing importance. From the first years of her marriage, then, she looked on Cabrera and his faction as her bitter enemies, and never ceased seeking opportunities for revenge. These were finally presented to her in the last years of the Castilian war when her husband grew suspicious of his trusted advisor. Fittingly, for the queen’s refined Sicilian sense of vengeance, when Pere accused Cabrera of “shameful crimes of treason and lèse majesté,” he appointed his wife to mete out justice for these alleged crimes. As the head of a judicial assembly that stayed in session between April and June of 1364, Elionor quickly proclaimed proof of her old enemy’s “evil deeds,” and began to hector her officials and fourteen-year-old son, Joan, to put Cabrera to torture, and, with the “truth” that this would supply, to have the courtier “publicly executed.” Despite clear misgivings which led to repeated delays, the prince eventually gave in to his strong-willed mother and had his guardian—a man he was clearly close to—executed at Zaragoza on July 26, 1364 by having “his head cut from his shoulders.”50 6 Conclusion Even with the ugly light the Cabrera affair cast over Elionor’s reputation, it shows a woman whose strength and courage made her both a faithful wife and a talented political manager, whom Pere grew to respect. With the queen, the equation of ruling was formed, first and foremost, from the example of her parents who always projected the image of foreign (Catalan) conquerors, even though well acquainted with the world of medieval Sicily which they controlled from the late-thirteenth century. Elionor never forgot her island homeland, and spent the rest of her life in attempting to become its true ruler by removing her brothers from power. She could never win the allegiance of the 49  Pere III, Chronicle, 2:414–15 (IV: 30). See also: d’Abadal i de Vinyals, Pere, 88–89; Kagay, “‘Treasons’,” 40. 50  “Proceso contra Bernardo de Cabrera mandado formar por el rey Don Pedro IV,” ed. Manuel de Bofarull de Sartorio, 2 vols. in CDACA, 32: 96, 125–26. See also: Kagay, “‘Treasons’,” 39, 46–48; Miron, Queens,194; Sitges, Muerte, 45–47, 50, 52–54.

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island’s native barons, however, without surrendering that of the Aragonese and Catalan nobles who had controlled large swaths of Sicily since the latethirteenth century.51 In many ways, she stood as a gray eminence of sorts for her brothers who always feared her direct involvement in their affairs.52 This threat continued through the 1350s when her representatives repeatedly called for the planting of “flowers of peace” by bringing a forceful end to the “incessant war and battles … [spawned by] the divisions and hatred” that held sway in the island by repeatedly threatening an Aragonese naval invasion.53 Elionor’s claims to the Sicilian crown, like so many of her plans proved moot in 1363 with the birth of Federico’s daughter, María, who like her aunt, was an amalgam of Aragonese and Sicilian royalty. After María’s birth, Elionor’s concern with Sicily slowly began to fade, largely because of her duty as an essential cog in her husband’s war with Castile, an administrator of her own courts and that of her sons, Joan and Martí, and daughter, Elionor, the lord of many Aragonese and Valencian towns and castles, along with their Christian, Jewish, and Muslim populations, and an efficient royal bureaucrat who served for most of her married life as the Governor of Catalonia and occasionally as Pere’s lieutenant. Though no portrait of the queen survives except that etched on her well-used secret seal, her reputation as a dependable backer of Pere’s many wars and a formidable rival to his other important advisors was well deserved. As the Castilian war began to wind down in the mid-1360s, the confidence of Elionor—“a woman perfectly mistress of herself”—began to diminish. We can witness her sadness at this changing condition at the Catalan corts of 1365 when she spoke to the rowdy Catalan assembly like a mother deserted by her children and nine years later when she opposed the marriage of her only daughter and namesake to a Castilian prince, only to have her opinion angrily overridden by her husband who was himself seeking younger sexual partners at the time. The magnificent though bruised ego that was Elionor of Sicily died on April 20, 1375 and her body was fittingly buried in the royal pantheon at the monastery of Poblet, but only some two decades after her death. 51  Abulafia, Western Mediterranean Kingdoms, 135, 159; Giunta, Aragoneses, 158–61, 166; Zurita, Anales, 135–36, 158–61, 166; Goldstone, Joanna:, 227–30; Zurita, Anales, 4–180–83 (VIII:xxxvi), 251–52 (VIII:lv), 276–78 (VIII:lx). Lodovico was king from 1338–1355) and Federico from 1355 to 1377. 52  Giunta, Aragoneses, 165–66, 169, 176. 53   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1563, ff. 6, 10v–11v, 12v–13, 30, 32–33, 34v, 65r–v; R. 1565, ff. 2v–4v, 109.

part 4 Aftermath of the Conflict

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Chapter 17

Castilian Aftermath 1: The Campaign and Battle of Nájera 1 Introduction The surprising outcome of the War of the Two Pedro’s in an eleventh hour victory for Aragon set the stage for one of the greatest encounters of the fourteenth century, known alternately as the battle of Nájera or Navarrete, names derived from the two towns in Castile between which it was fought. Both are situated in the northeastern corner of the kingdom, close to the border with its neighbors, Navarre and Aragon. Despite the connection between the war and the battle which followed, Nájera was not actually a part of the conflict. It did not occur until April 3, 1367, almost a full year after the War of the Two Pedros ended in the flight of Castile’s King Pedro I into Portugal. Consequently, the encounter and the campaign leading up to it became the first stage in what we have called “the Castilian aftermath,” an aftermath we shall explore in this and the following chapter. It should be pointed out to the reader that the present account is a much reduced retelling of a story that forms the heart of our earlier book. As part of the process of abbreviation, we have made a conscious decision not “to reinvent the wheel” by supplying the highly detailed footnotes that appear in the other work.1 Consequently, readers who wish to understand in greater detail how we compiled this account and which information came from which source should consult our earlier book on the battle of Nájera.2 1  Throughout this chapter, most of our footnotes will be fairly general in nature. Almost all footnotes to a specific source will be to direct quotations taken from that source; see, for example, footnote 4. 2  Given the paucity of documentary sources relevant to the campaign and battle of Nájera, our account has been largely based upon material gleaned from the various fourteenth century chronicle accounts that mention it. Among these, two stand out, each written by a man whom historians believe to have been present at the battle. One of these, the Crónica del Rey Pedro I by the Castilian chronicler, Pedro López de Ayala, has been the single most important source for the present book since this chronicle is the single most important source for that monarch’s reign. The other major account is a verse chronicle by a man serving the English constable, John Chandos, known only as the Chandos Herald; a chronicle that scholars usually entitle Life of the Black Prince (La Vie du Prince Noir) after its central figure. The most important supplement to these first hand accounts is Book I of the massive work left

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Pedro’s Flight, Preparations, and Return (1366–1367)

The end of the War of the Two Pedros in spring, 1366, found Pedro I in headlong flight from Seville westward toward Castile’s border with the neighboring kingdom of Portugal. In a final attempt to win Portuguese backing in his desperate struggle to retain the throne, Pedro attempted to interest the Portuguese royal family in a marital union between his eldest daughter, Beatriz, and Portugal’s heir apparent, Prince Fernando. Due to the prince’s refusal to consider the match, Pedro’s offer failed to bear fruit, despite the fact that his daughter had been recognized by a cortes in 1363 as heiress to the Castilian throne. Following this setback, the king accompanied by his other daughters, Constanza and Isabel (Beatriz had already made the journey) with an evershrinking coterie of loyal followers crossed the frontier, having won the consent of the Portuguese monarch, also named Pedro I, to pass through his lands unmolested. The royal fugitive was escorted north through Portugal by two of the Portuguese king’s trusted advisers. Despite some reluctance on their part, after having been very well-paid by Pedro, this pair deposited the royal party safely at the border of Galicia, Castile’s northwestern province and one of several places that had remained loyal to the deposed monarch.3 by the foremost chronicler of his age, the Fleming, Jean Froissart. Scholars generally agree that much of Froissart’s information on the battle came from the Chandos Herald and that therefore he must have had access to the herald before the latter drafted his own Life of the Black Prince. Two other works round out the major sources we used in writing our book on Nájera. One was a lengthy and, according to various scholars who have used it extensively, rather tedious poem written by a troubadour identified in several manuscripts as Jean Cuvelier or Cunelier, first published in the early nineteenth century under the title Chronique de Bertrand du Guesclin par Cuvelier. Fortunately for historians, a far more readable prose paraphrase was produced within a few years after the poem’s appearance and it is this version that we have primarily used. Finally, there is another fairly lengthy poem describing the battle and the events leading up to it, one that is much less well-known than the sources mentioned above. It is a paean of praise directed at John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, written in Latin by a minor fourteenth century cleric, a monk from the monastery at Revesby in Lincolnshire, whom scholars call Walter of Peterborough. Walter may have been the duke’s confessor. The poem’s significance lies primarily in the fact that Walter may have been present at Nájera though this a matter of debate among scholars who have studied his obscure work. It is preserved in two incomplete manuscripts at Oxford that date very close in time to the battle. 3  Ayala supplies what little we know about the king’s flight through Portugal, his return to Galicia in the far northwest of Castile, and his journey for the most part by sea to the Englishheld lands in southwestern France. Although Ayala’s chronicle supplies only a few specific dates, these combined with several surviving royal grants from the period permit us to establish, if only roughly, the chronology of many of the events that unfolded within Castile leading up to the battle of Nájera. See: Ayala, Pedro I, 543–44 (1366, chaps. x–xi).

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During a stay of some three weeks in the Galician city of Monterey, one of the regions principal cities, the king and his remaining councilors debated what course of action he should follow. Eventually, Pedro rejected the suggestion by a majority of his council that he march across northern Castile and try to rally the people to his cause while Enrique and his army were far to the south in Seville. Instead, it was decided that Pedro’s last real hope lay in an appeal to his ally north of the Pyrenees, England. After all, the king’s woes in 1366 traced in large measure to his having negotiated the English alliance four years earlier. It was this more than any other factor that seems to have prompted the decision by both France and the French-leaning Avignon Papacy to throw in their lot with Aragon and help put together the military coalition that had overthrow Pedro and driven him from Castile. It was high time for the English alliance to pay some dividends. From Galicia, the fleeing monarch dispatched letters to several of his allies, including the Navarrese king, Carlos II, and the English Prince of Wales, Edward of Woodstock, asking both “what help he could expect from them.”4 Especially important was the one he sent to Prince Edward, best known to history as “the Black Prince,” who governed the extensive English lands in southern France for his father, Edward III. Any hope Pedro might have of restoration rested on the prince’s willingness to employ English arms in his behalf; consequently, in all of his communications and dealings with that illustrious military leader, the Castilian king, despite a well-earned reputation for being exceedingly haughty, adopted an unaccustomedly humble tone. Having reached the decision to appeal to England, the king and his entourage made the short journey from Monterrey to the region’s major port of La Coruña. The royal party traveled along the pilgrim’s route and into the pilgrimage center of Santiago de Compostela, where Pedro added two more to his already long list of victims; one of them was that city’s archbishop, the other, the dean of the cathedral. It was during these weeks in Galicia that Count Fernando de Castro achieved preeminence among Pedro’s advisers. His reputation began to take on an almost mythic quality as he became widely (if mistakenly) regarded as the one man who remained faithful to the king when all others deserted him. At the end of June, 1366, before departing Santiago, the king appointed Castro as adelantado mayor or governor general of Galicia. This gave him full powers to act for the crown both there and in neighboring León as well as supreme command over the forces loyal to Pedro that had been gathering in northwestern Castile during the weeks since his return. 4  Ibid., 543 (1366, chap. xi).

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After having arranged affairs for the governance of Castile in his absence, Pedro and the royal party travelled the remaining distance north to La Coruña where he ordered a well-armed galley fitted out for his journey to Bayonne, one of the leading ports in the English-held lands on the continent. This vessel was to be accompanied by others impressed into royal service in the harbor of La Coruña and at other ports along the way. The fugitives then raised anchor and having rounded Land’s End (Finistierra), sailed along Spain’s northern coast. After briefly making landfall at San Sebastian, the last important Castilian port before the border, Pedro’s small flotilla sailed north into English waters arriving at Bayonne sometime around the end of July. When word first reached the Black Prince concerning England’s ally south of the Pyrenees, he immediately consulted his principal advisers, including Sir John Chandos, the highly trusted constable of Guienne, as well as the seneschals of Guienne and Poitou. Chroniclers on the English side disagree as to just how enthusiastically Pedro’s request for English aid was at first received by this inner circle. On the other hand, any opposition voiced by the prince’s councilors was soon silenced when it became clear that the prince himself strongly favored intervention. Edward quickly set out to gather a massive expedition to invade northern Spain from across the Pyrenees and restore the suppliant to his throne. Accounts stress the prince’s concern not only for the Anglo-Castilian alliance that had been signed several years earlier and the English royal family’s kinship with Pedro, but also Edward’s belief that the proper order of nature had been violated when a bastard brother overthrew his rightful sovereign. Perhaps the earlier invasion had left Edward believing that he had little choice but to become involved. The rapid and near-bloodless victory that Enrique de Trastámara had achieved in Castile with French backing must have been seen by the English crown (if only in retrospect) as a potentially dangerous setback, one that badly upset the strategic balance. The new monarch, who owed his position in large part to France, could be expected not only to resurrect the Franco-Castilian alliance, but to align the two kingdoms more closely than before. Particularly worrisome was Castilian sea power that could endanger English naval control over the Bay of Biscay, putting at risk that kingdom’s hold on southern France. A second consideration may have been chivalric rather than geopolitical. A decade had now passed since the prince’s brilliant victory at Poitiers. Prospects for a full scale campaign in the exotic lands south of the Pyrenees holding out a chance to get back into the field and add to his military glory cannot have been unwelcome to this consummate warrior. Prince Edward immediately dispatched a number of English knights with orders to sail to Galicia and escort Pedro safely across the Bay of Biscay, an

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expedition that became unnecessary when the king’s flotilla showed up unexpectedly in Bayonne. Upon learning of Pedro’s arrival, the prince hurried south to intercept and welcome him during his journey to court.5 Again, sources indicate that at their first meeting as well as subsequent ones, the now homeless monarch showed an unaccustomed humility, one which he hoped would help him win over his host. With chivalric formalities and the inevitable feasting concluded, the pair quickly got down to the business of negotiating terms under which an English intervention could take place. Having reached his own decision to intervene, Edward quickly took the necessary steps to enlist the support of both the crown of England and the nobility of Aquitaine. A delegation sent across the channel obtained Edward III’s permission. When the king gave his approval, Prince Edward’s younger brother, John of Gaunt, recently installed as second duke of Lancaster, requested and received permission to join the expedition. The king readily granted it; in turn, Gaunt began gathering a sizeable force that would accompany him to France and reinforce his brother’s army. While the prince was sending his messengers back to England, Pedro appears to have made his own appeal to the English king. He ordered his messenger, the grandmaster of Alcántara, Martín López de Córdoba, to answer widespread charges of tyranny and murder that had been levelled against him. Cordoba was also instructed to reaffirm the king’s commitment to marry his daughters to English princes, in this way giving their English husbands a legitimate claim to the kingship of Castile. Prince Edward also dispatched letters summoning southern French nobles who owed allegiance to England to attend a Grand Council at Bordeaux. Here, the exiled king could lay before them his case. Although short of cash, Pedro had brought with him a fortune in gold and silver jewelry and precious stones. These he willingly turned over to the prince accompanied by extravagant promises to pay all the rest of the expedition’s expenses after having regained his kingdom, promises that not only pleased his host, but helped win over the hard men they would need in any campaign to restore him to power. Satisfied with these assurances (unwisely as it turned out), Edward then agreed to guarantee payment to any and all who joined his army and to lend the fugitive monarch large sums. For the Black Prince, it would prove to be a fateful decision. Subsequently, at a series of meetings held in summer and early fall, 1366, Pedro and the prince worked out the details concerning future payment of the 5  The Castilian chronicler places their first meeting at Capbreton, not far Bayonne. For his part, the Chandos Herald speaks of them meeting in the city itself. Ayala, Pedro I, 548 (1366, chap. xxiii); Chandos Herald, Life of the Black Prince, 59, 151 (1948–1951).

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former’s debt to the latter. In addition to his commitment to shoulder the full costs of the expedition, the deposed monarch promised several English leaders vast territories within Castile. In September, 1366, when the exiled monarch signed the treaties of Libourne that embodied the final terms, he signed away much of northeastern Castile, in part to the English, in part to the neighboring kingdom of Navarre through which the expedition would have to pass. Meanwhile, until all debts had been settled, Pedro’s daughters and the wives of several of his Castilian supporters were to remain in Bayonne as hostages.6 Following the assembly in Bordeaux, preparations for the expedition began in earnest. The forges of Aquitaine rang out with the work of swordsmiths and armorers as Edward stockpiled the materials of war. Thousands of arrows had to be manufactured for like any English field army of the fourteenth century, a substantial part of this one would consist of archers. During these decades, longbowmen tended to make up at least half of the English force, and that percentage seems to have been on the rise as the century progressed.7 In preparing the invasion, the prince leaned heavily upon his leading adviser, Sir John Chandos, despite the latter’s serious doubts about the expedition. It was Sir John whom Edward sent south to sign up members of the Free Companies currently encamped in and around the Pyrenees, heading off any possibility that his adversaries might preempt him by engaging their services. In bidding for their support, the prince had a trump card: not-a-few of these men and in particular their leadership were English subjects, many of them knights, all of whom owed him their fealty. A good many of the men Chandos approached had participated some months earlier in the expedition that placed Enrique on the throne. With his apparent victory over Pedro, the new king of Castile had paid them off and sent them home from Seville. They had then returned eastward across Castile, and despite local opposition along the route, traversed Aragon and Navarre in order to reach the Pyrenees. Now, to come to the prince, they would have to cross the lands of major Gascon barons, such as the count of Foix, who entertained no greater desire for their presence than the kings through whose lands they had already passed.

6  Ayala, Pedro I, 549 (1366, chap. xxiv). 7  The changing nature of English armies during this period is explored in Andrew Ayton’s Knights and Warhorses, particularly in chapter 1, “The Military Revolution in Edwardian England,” 9–25. Here, Ayton states “The emphasis on mounted troops and recruitment on the basis of individual retinues consisting of roughly equal numbers of men-at-arms and archers greatly enhanced the effectiveness of the English fighting machine under Edward III.” (16–17). See also: Hewitt, Organization of War, 65–71.

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Into this impasse stepped Chandos. Having successfully purchased the services of the companions, he then negotiated with the count and several other Pyrenean lords their safe passage to the prince’s territory, promising to pay handsomely for any damages they wrought on their journey. On their way, they smashed a French force near the southern French town of Montauban, a battle that in some respects may be seen as the first engagement of the Spanish expedition. Not satisfied with recruiting only those out-of-work men who had already returned from Spain, the prince sent heralds into Castile, recalling Englishmen and Gascons who were still serving Enrique II’s, men who owed their primary allegiance to England. These included Sir Hugh Calveley who had shared with his French counterpart, Bertrand DuGuesclin, command of the 1366 expedition that had placed Enrique on the throne. These Englishmen hastily took leave of their former employer and, like the Free Company troops who had been dismissed several months earlier, began their journey eastward toward the Pyrenees. In the course of negotiations, Pedro met with the prince and and his wife, Joan of Kent, in town of Angoulême, northeast of the English capital at Bordeaux. For her part, “the fair maid of Kent” seems not to have been favorably impressed with her husband’s royal guest nor with his plan to restore the exiled monarch to his throne. At this same meeting, the stage was set for a serious quarrel that would grow up between Edward and one of his leading Gascon vassals, the lord d’Albret, as a result of which d’Albret would several years later resume his allegiance to France. From the moment the Spanish venture was first proposed, one thing became abundantly clear to all those involved in its planning: to bring a massive AngloGascon army across the Pyrenees into Spain would require the cooperation of Navarre’s shifty monarch, Charles II, rather appropriately dubbed Charles “the Bad.”8 With the eastern passages into Spain controlled by Enrique’s ally, the king of Aragon, the prince’s army would have to cross the mountains at the fabled western pass of Roncesvalles that lay entirely within Navarrese territory. It would then have to traverse at least some part of that kingdom to arrive in Castile. Since Charles could either open or close the pass, both sides tried to buy his support. As the weeks passed, the offers escalated. As a result, throughout 8  Due to his control of the pass at Roncesvalles (better known by its French name as Roncevaux), French historian, Roland Delachenal, refers to the king of Navarre as “the gatekeeper of the Pyrenees,” in the same manner that the count of Savoy was “the gatekeeper of the Alps.” Delachenal, Charles V, 3:368.

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the summer and much of the fall of 1366, the three-cornered negotiations continued as the Navarrese monarch shifted back and forth, agreeing first to join one side, then the other. Two things governed the king’s calculation: for while he was not only keen to maximize his own advantage, he sincerely wished to minimize the harmful effects of an army marching through his lands. As a result, for some time, he chose to engage in a torturous double game. Not only did he play off both sides against one another, he eventually made promises to each that he would actually serve in the up-coming campaign “with his body.” Only after many weeks of hard bargaining, did Charles finally agree to open the pass to the prince and permit his massive force to march through Navarre. The final terms were embodied in a detailed agreement signed at Libourne, east of Bordeaux, in September, 1366, terms which included extensive territorial concessions to Navarre at the expense of Castile. Throughout the Crown of Aragon, the initial euphoria that had greeted Enrique’s victory in May, 1366, proved fleeting. Although Pere III was quickly able to reoccupy the extensive territories seized by Castile during the conflict, within several months, the Aragonese monarch began to receive disturbing news. Apparently his old adversary had escaped through Portugal, rallied forces loyal to him in Galicia, then journeyed to Guienne where he had successfully appealed to the English for aid in recovering his crown. Given his own close identification with and support for the 1366 expedition that had tumbled Pedro from power, support that included not only financial aid, but also a significant contingent of Aragonese troops, Pere began to fear that Pedro’s new ally, the Black Prince might unleash his powerful army against Aragon as a prelude to entering Castile. In the face of this threat, he began to vacillate; rather than continue supporting his former ally, he now adopted a wait-and-see attitude while once again placing his kingdom on a war footing. By mid-December, 1366, all was in readiness with Pedro and the prince. The prince spent Christmas in Bordeaux, afterwards remaining in the city just long enough to witness the birth of his second son, the future Richard II (r. 1377– 1399). Several days later, he marched out of his capital at the head of a large contingent of men at arms, headed south for the town of Dax, where the majority of the invasion force had already gathered. Here, Edward learned that his younger brother, the duke of Lancaster, had crossed from England to Brittany and was hurrying to join him accompanied by a considerable force. When the duke arrived at Dax, the prince rode out to greet him warmly. Afterwards, the count of Foix waited on the pair, at which time, Edward appointed him to help the princess of Wales govern Guienne in his absence.9 9  Froissart (Johnes), 1:357 (ccxxxvi); Froissart (Diller), 3:395.

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With Lancaster’s arrival, the prince now had in hand his full force. Only two final impediments stood in the way of crossing into Spain. One was King Charles of Navarre. Despite having signed the treaties of Libourne, he had entered into one final round of negotiations with Enrique II of Castile who even at this late date hoped to convince his neighbor to close the pass. Not until the last moment would the shifty Navarrese monarch finally end his waffling and come down definitely on the side of the English, in part because some of Edward’s forces, under the English captain, Hugh Calveley, were already present in Navarre, awaiting the arrival of the rest of the army. There they posed a very real threat to Navarrese territory. Shortly after their arrival, these mercenaries had gone on a rampage, seizing several places including the city of Miranda de Ebro.10 Whether or not their activities enjoyed the prince’s approval, they certainly served his purposes; Calveley’s depredations highlighted just how precarious the Navarrese monarch’s position might become were he to maintain an alliance with Enrique and oppose the English crossing. When Charles complained to Edward, the prince pointedly reminding him that he had not lived up to his commitments codified several months earlier in the treaty of Libourne.11 Shortly afterwards, the chastened ruler dispatched one of his leading advisers to reassure the prince that he had no intention of disavowing their arrangement, that news to the contrary was merely malicious gossip. At a final meeting, Charles signed a new convention reaffirming his earlier commitment to let the English pass through his kingdom—a commitment which he now kept.12 The second impediment was more intractable: the weather. The winter of 1366–1367 was proving to be a harsh one. Edward planned to enter Spain by way of the most-travelled pilgrim route in Europe, the road or camino to Santiago de Compostela, that ran through the foothills of the Pyrenees and across the pass at Roncesvalles. Winter still lay upon this road into Spain which at its higher altitudes was shrouded in snow and ice. In the face of this, the prince could only wait impatient for a crossing to become possible.13 That 10  Froissart (Johnes), 1:358. 11  Ibid. 12  Froissart (Johnes), 1:358–61 [chaps ccxxxvi–ccxxxvii]; Froissart (Diller), 3:395–96. See also: Delachenal, Charles V, 3:384. 13  In mid-summer, 2011, the authors of this book drove up the winding road from Pamplona as far as the monastery church built to commemorate the famed battle of Roncesvalles, fought by the rear guard of Charlemagne’s army under Roland in 778 CE. This monument is located on the south side of the pass a few hundred feet below the summit. Despite it being summer, we did not venture to the top due to an extremely cold rain that was lashing the site and our consequent fears for the rental car we were driving. We could only

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opportunity finally came in mid-February, 1367, at which point the first division of Edward’s massive army crossed the mountains and descended onto the plains around the Navarrese capital of Pamplona. 3 Enrique II’s Countermove As preparations for the new invasion of the peninsula were taking place north of the Pyrenees, in Castile, Enrique II readied his army to meet the invaders. During the halcyon days following Pedro’s flight into Portugal, the new king and the expeditionary force that had placed him on the throne had remained ensconced in the southern city of Seville. Fairly quickly, in a move to cut his expenses, he released many of the Free Companies that had made possible his victory, retaining the services of only some fourteen hundred lances under the joint command of Bertrand DuGuesclin and Hugh Calveley. At the same time, many of his Castilian followers also returned to their homes. According to Ayala, Enrique would have happily remained enjoying the pleasures of his southern capital had he not begun to receive disturbing news from the north. Word reached him that his hated rival had made it safely through Portugal, crossed back into Galicia and begun to rally his forces, after which he had sailed to the English-held territories in southern France to enlist English aid for an attempt to recover his lost throne. Meanwhile, Pedro’s surrogate in Galicia, Fernando de Castro, was continuing the fight, doing considerable damage to Enrique’s followers and their property. Reacting to this news, the king hastily marched his now much reduced army northward to Galicia where, for some weeks, they confronted Pedro’s supporters. Then, on All Saints Day (November 1, 1366) following an inconclusive campaign, the king left Galicia, taking with him most of his army. He marched east across Leon to Burgos where other companies, many of them from northeastern Castile, were already gathering to meet the new invasion that by now seemed certain to come. In an attempt to maintain his shaky position in the northwest, Enrique left behind only a relatively small holding force, but later withdrew most of these men as well, thereby leaving that corner of Spain solidly in the hands of Fernando de Castro. Having arrived at Burgos, Enrique received an embassy from the Aragonese king who had chosen this inauspicious moment to remind his Castilian counterpart of the earlier promise to surrender extensive lands along their frontier. imagine what the prince’s army encountered coming across this inhospitable ground in mid-winter.

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Enrique politely explained to his visitors that in the current crisis, he was simply unable to honor those commitments, but if fortune smiled on him in the upcoming battle he would accomplish all he had promised. It was during this period that the English and Gascon mercenaries still serving Enrique received their recall from the Black Prince and, as a result, under their leader Hugh Calveley, finally took leave of the usurper and continued eastward toward Navarre, where they might await the coming of the prince’s army in relative safety. Although their former employer seems to have been sympathetic to their plight—after all, Edward was their liege lord—other Castilians along the route were less inclined to observe chivalric niceties, and indications are that Calveley, like many of the free companies that had been dismissed earlier, faced considerable harassment on his way out of Castile. The loss of a substantial component of the Castilian army led to a rapid decision to have DuGuesclin leave immediately for France where he could recruit a new force of Frenchmen and Bretons larger than the English contingent that had just left. Stopping briefly in Aragon where he may or may not have checked on the lands conferred upon him by the crown, he then journeyed on to Languedoc to consult with its governor, the royal duke, Louis of Anjou, brother of Charles V. In January, 1367, Enrique called the first cortes of his reign to meet in Burgos.14 Here, he had his only legitimate son, Juan, recognized as heir to the throne he had recently acquired. Since Enrique had already distributed most of the treasure seized from Pedro to pay those who had helped make him king, he now had to appeal to the cortes to impose new taxes, in particular a sales tax (alcabala) of ten percent, to cover the extensive military expenses he incurred daily. The king informed the assembled delegates that he, Enrique, “stood ready to hazard his body for the defense of the realm.”15 For their part, the delegates responded enthusiastically that they would do likewise. Encouraged by this, Enrique sent out summons to his subjects, including both those who had been with him during the long years in Aragon and those who had come over since his arrival back in Castile. The king called on them to gather and arm their vassals and march to Burgos as quickly as possible. At this point, everyone was holding his breath to see which way Charles of Navarre would finally jump. As late as the opening days of 1367, there remained at least a remote chance that the Navarrese monarch would change 14  Unlike the records of all but the first cortes of Pedro’s reign (Valladolid, 1351) that have disappeared from the scene, those of Enrique’s cortes have survived. They are printed in the collection abbreviated CLC. For the 1367 cortes of Burgos see CLC, 2:144–64. 15  Ayala, Pedro I, 547 (1366, chap. xix).

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his mind once again, putting an end to the invasion before it got underway by closing the pass at Roncesvalles. Enrique made a last ditch effort to bring this about, meeting with his Navarrese counterpart at the town of Santa Cruz de Campeszo, near the frontier between their two kingdoms. Here, he increased his offer to Charles II to a point where, according to Ayala, the Navarrese monarch not only agreed once again to close the pass against the English, but made the same promise he had earlier made to the prince “to be with him [in this case, Enrique] in his body at the battle.” As surety that he would keep his word, he surrendered several Navarrese towns and castles into the keeping of Enrique’s supporters. Once again, however, Charles’ fervent promises proved to be worth nothing when Calveley’s activities in Navarre forced its king to hastily mend his bridges with the prince. Already in doubt that Charles would honor their recent agreement, Enrique no sooner returned to Burgos after this meeting than he put his waiting army in motion, marching eastward 70 kilometers to the city of Santo Domingo de la Calzada. This position was strategically important since it lay astride the two branches of the camino de Santiago, the Pilgrim Road from northern Europe that the faithful had been travelling down for centuries on their journey across to one of Christendom’s greatest shrines. While the main branch used by the majority of pilgrims ran south across Navarre to Logroño, then west to Burgos, an alternative route followed the Rio Araquil westward from Pamplona to the Basque city of Vitoria, only then swinging south to rejoin the main road. From Enrique’s new camp near Santo Domingo, his army could quickly move in either direction, throwing itself across whichever route the prince might choose to follow.16 4

The Nájera Campaign (Winter-Spring, 1367)

On February 14, 1367, Edward’s vanguard crossed the Pyrenees at Roncesvalles and descended to encamp on the plains around Pamplona followed during the next two days, by the rest of the army.17 (Maps 6–10 illustrating the campaign and battle of Nájera have been grouped together at the end of this chapter on pages 369–371.) The crossing went unchallenged. To make certain that Charles would not once again change his mind, he was compelled to accompany Pedro and the prince on their march through the pass. Nevertheless, it was by no

16  Ayala, Pedro I, 551 (1367, chap. iii). 17  Froissart (Johnes), 1:359–61.

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means uneventful. Troops had to contend with ice, snow, and bone-chilling cold. Men and animals fell off the mountain and, in the heartfelt if hyperbolic words of the Chandos Herald, “since the just God suffered death for us on the cross, there was no such painful passage.”18 Having learned of these developments at his headquarters in Santo Domingo, Enrique initiated a war of words. In a first letter to the prince, he expressed his “great wonder” at the English invasion, “for I have never done you wrong … wherefore you should … take from us that little land that God has lent us of His will.” He then challenged his adversary to name the point where he intended to enter Castile, that they might meet there to do battle.19 When a herald brought this message to Pamplona, Edward and his war council drafted a suitable reply, but delayed for some time sending it.20 Meanwhile, the prince dispatched a scouting party under Sir Thomas Felton to gather information about the enemy’s movements. Felton followed the logical route into Castile, riding southwest through the central plain of Navarre, crossing the Ebro into the neighboring kingdom at the city of Logroño,21 then moving westward to the village of Navarrete, where he established a listening post, a mere thirty kilometers from the Castilian camp.22 It was at this moment that the actions of Charles the Bad descended to the level of farce. Despite having promised both sides that he would serve in their respective armies “with his body,” the king had no intention of risking life or limb with either. He had already reneged on his commitment to Enrique. Now to escape Edward, he connived at his own capture by a Frenchman serving on Enrique’s side. As a result, Charles spent the next several months comfortably ensconced in a castle in Aragon. Only after the battle ended did he contrive to “escape” this captivity, managing in the process to cheat his captor out of a 18  Chandos Herald (1910), 154. See also: Froissart (Johnes), 1:361. 19  Chandos Herald (1910), 155. See also: Froissart (Johnes) 1:362. There appear to have been as many as three letters exchanged, albeit none of the chroniclers mentions all three. Enrique’s opening letter and Edward’s response are reproduced, with slight variation, by both the herald and Froissart. For his part, Ayala does not mention Enrique’s opening communication, but includes both Edward’s letter and a subsequent response from Enrique. See: Ayala, Pedro I, 555–56 (1367, chap. xi). The letters of April 1 and April 2 are printed in Rymer’s Foedera. See: Hardy, Syllabus, 444. They can also be found in Sitges, Mujeres 92, 94. 20  Ayala, Pedro I, 555 (1367, chap. xi); Chandos herald (1910), 160; Froissart (Johnes), 1:368. 21  Chandos herald (1910), 156. Froissart (Johnes), 1: 362–63. 22  Logroño supplied an excellent point at which to cross the Ebro River. Ayala (p. 543) specifically names it as one of the few places in Castile that remained loyal to Pedro [tenia su voz] when much of the realm deserted to Enrique in 1366. Ayala, Pedro I, 544, 554 (1366, chap. xi; 1367, chap. ix).

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promised reward. By prior arrangement, the king of Navarre’s principal adviser, Martin de la Carra, assumed the title of viceroy of Navarre and the obligation to serve “with his body!”23 Having rested the main army for a few days around Pamplona, Edward then began his advance; however, instead of taking the obvious route by following Felton southward to Logroño, he directed his own march west through the Araquil River valley toward Victoria. As a result, the army entered Castile near the town of Salvatierra, which had earlier embraced Enrique, but now immediately surrendered to Pedro to avoid being stormed.24 After resting there for several days, it required only a short march for the vanguard to reach Vitoria. One major question coming out of the Nájera campaign involves the route chosen by the Black Prince. Why did he strike out westward rather than follow Felton’s reconaissance south to the Ebro for a crossing at Logroño, one of the few places in Castile said to have remained loyal to Pedro? An argument can be made that from the very start of the campaign, Edward planned the westward move as a feint, designed to draw the Castilian army north to Vitoria, after which he could race southward and cross the Ebro at Logroño unopposed. If so, it was an elegant strategic move, uncharacteristic of medieval warfare. There are, however, several major problems with this argument. First of all, when Edward originally selected his westward route, he knew very little about Spanish geography and was almost certainly unaware of the enemy’s current location. At the moment he made his decision, his only conceivable source of information concerning the disposition of Castilian forces would have come from Calveley’s returning mercenaries. But these men had left Enrique well before he took up his “blocking position” at Santo Domingo. Not until Felton’s party rejoined the main body of the army around Vitoria did the prince gained any meaningful intelligence; long after such intelligence would help him to plan a feint westward followed by a forced march to the south. Another problem with interpreting the opening phase of the campaign as a brilliant piece of deliberate deception lies in the extent to which Edward committed his own forces upon arrival before Vitoria. Had the initial move westward been intended only to draw in the Castilian army, one would expect to see the prince begin his swing to the south almost as soon as Felton rode into the English camp with news that Enrique had invested the heights overlooking the south and east of the city. Instead, the prince doggedly brought up his entire army and subjected it to several weeks of demoralizing conditions,

23  Chandos Herald (1910), 156, 163. 24  Ayala, Pedro I, 553 (1367, chap vi).

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while showing every sign of eagerly awaiting a battle then and there, one that never materialized. An alternative explanation for the initial move up the Araquil lies in the uneasy relationship at the start of the campaign between Edward and his putative ally, Charles the Bad. Given earlier dealings with that slippery figure, the prince had no reason to repose much trust in him; consequently, Edward may have decided that an advance westward was simply the fastest and safest way out of Navarre. Arguing against this other explanation is the fact that with the English army safely through the pass at Roncevalles and encamped around the Navarrese capital, there was not all that much Charles could do to injure it and any move he made in that direction would subject his own kingdom to massive retaliation, dwarfing Calveley’s depredations of the preceding winter. In the end, to visualize the prince’s westward march as a well-designed manoeuver either to draw in the enemy or escape from an undesirable host credits him with considerably more than his share of strategic foresight or an unwarranted timidity. When all is said and done, the simplest answer for the move westward is probably correct: the route along the Araquil looked to be the fastest way to enter Castile and then move against its northern capital, the city of Burgos. As the crow flies, the way through Vitoria was shorter; little wonder that the prince, in his ignorance of Spanish topography might follow it without realizing the splendid defensive capabilities it afforded his enemy; an enemy willing to give battle only under inordinately favorable conditions. What is more, in all likelihood, the Navarrese monarch bent every effort to “steer” the prince westward, hoping that if he proved successful in doing so, he could limit the damage incurred by his kingdom due to the passage of this invading horde. After all, better to have the undesirable guests overrun a considerably less wealthy and less populous region than the fertile Navarrese heartland that ran south to Logroño. As soon as Enrique learned that the prince had indeed turned westward, he put his army in motion north across the Ebro and on to Vitoria, where anchored on the royal castle of Zaldiarán, it occupied the high ground overlooking the town. At this point, Felton’s scouting party that had shadowed the Castilian advance, rode into the English camp and informed the prince of the enemy’s arrival.25 Hoping for a speedy engagement, Edward hurried forward the rest of his force while challenging the Castilians and their French allies to come down and fight.26 Despite the defiant tone of his earlier letter, however, Enrique continued to heed the advice of his French captains who, following 25  Froissart (Johnes), 1:364. 26  Ayala, Pedro I, 553 (1367, chap. vi); Chandos herald (1910), 156.

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orders from their own monarch, urged upon their current employer a strategy of delay. As a result, Enrique failed to take up Edward’s offer of battle; instead, the English prince found that he could provoke an engagement only by assaulting his enemy’s strongly held position, thereby placing his own army at considerable disadvantage.27 Although not yet ready to exchange his commanding position to confront the English in the field, Enrique was fully prepared to engage in hit-and-run tactics. In the wee hours, a Castilian raiding party of several thousand, led by the king’s two surviving brothers, Tello and Sancho, quietly slipped off the sierra and, riding down a valley, proceeded to attack English foraging parties and exposed units of the vanguard. Having overrun Calveley’s men who were encamped somewhat in advance of the main army, the raiders then swept forward as a growing panic threatened to grip the entire English vanguard. At this point, the duke of Lancaster, awakened by the noise, grabbed his armor and hurried to a nearby hill where he raised his own standard, around which the fleeing troops could rally. Meanwhile, word reached the prince and Constable Chandos who hurriedly advanced from the main camp, forcing the now much outnumbered Castilians to withdraw. About a league west of Vitoria, the retreating Castilians stumbled upon Felton and his men, most of whom were either killed or taken prisoner. Overjoyed at this initial victory, Enrique’s confidence began to soar; however, once again the French introduced a cautionary note, arguing that rather than risk a larger pitched battle, they should seize the passes behind the prince, cutting off not only his supplies, but also his line of retreat. Even DuGuesclin, who had just returned from France with several thousand newly-hired mercenaries and whose bravery or even rashness was legendary, concurred in this cautious advice. For a time, Enrique continued to listen.28 Still hoping to draw his enemy off the heights, the Black Prince maintained his position despite the fact that it was rapidly deteriorating. A cold, winddriven rain fell on the English camp. Provisions ran short. In constant skirmishing, the Spanish light cavalry, which formed the basis of any Spanish army of the period, showed to its best advantage, sorely pressing the heavier English knights.29 A few days of this proved more than enough for Edward.

27  Ayala, Pedro I, 553 (1367, chap. vi); Chandos Herald (1910), 159; Froissart (Johnes), 1:367. 28  Chandos Herald (1910), 159. 29  The hardships endured by the English army before Vitoria are graphically depicted by the Chandos Herald whom most historians believe shared them. Chandos Herald (1910), 159; Froissart (Johnes), 1:367–68.

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Now, in what was by far and away the best strategic move of the campaign (unplanned as it seems to have been), he suddenly broke camp and swung southward along one of several possible routes,30 camping briefly at the Navarrese town of Viana, after which he crossed the bridge over the Ebro and on Thursday, April 1, 1367,31 he entered the city of Logroño.32 The move brought him back onto Castilan soil, this time astride the main pilgrim route to Campostela, just 106 kilometers east of Burgos. Not only had this manoeuver allowed the prince to cross the Ebro unopposed; it also placed him on terrain which did not inordinately favor either side, a far cry from the Basque mountains where he had recently operated at a distinct disadvantage. Here, he could force Enrique either to fight or let his army pass unmolested into the heart of Castile. While the move momentarily threw the Castilians off balance, Enrique and DuGuesclin recovered quickly. Although unable to make any attempt to impede the English retreat into Navarre, they now retraced their steps southward, re-crossed the Ebro, then swung eastward toward Logroño. Despite the prince’s head start, the Castilians were operating along interior lines and were therefore able to arrive at the town of Nájera, 29 kilometers west of Logroño, in plenty of time to block the path the English army would now have to follow in order to advance any farther into Castile. Enrique established his new camp in the vineyards west of the Rio Najerilla, a small, but swiftly-flowing river which lay across the route that the invaders would have to follow. While lacking the considerable tactical advantage they had once enjoyed in the mountains around Vitoria, they still held a river line Prince Edward would have to force in order to proceed farther into Castile. It was here that Enrique finally received a reply to his earlier letter. In it, the prince held out hope for avoiding a general conflict if only the recipient would surrender the crown to its rightful holder, his half-brother, Pedro. This he politely, but firmly refused to do. In this final verbal exchange that preceded the battle, while lip service was paid to a desire for peace and reconciliation between the warring brothers, it was clear that the two sides were too far apart for anything but the wager of battle.

30  For more about the question of which route he followed, see: Villalon and Kagay, Nájera, 211–15. 31  On April 1, 1367, Pedro wrote to the city council at Murcia informing it of his arrival in Logroño, extolling the people of Murcia for their loyalty, and commanding that they seize all followers of “the traitor” on whom they could lay their hands. The letter is reprinted in an editor’s footnote to Ayala, Pedro I, 554 (1367, chap. ix). 32  Chandos herald (1910), 159.

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At the same time this reply was dispatched, DuGuesclin issued his final warning about the dangers of seeking a general engagement, only to find that Enrique was now determined to fight. While publicly expressing confidence in the ability and steadfastness of his army, the Castilian king appears to have had his doubts: he privately voiced fears to his war council that any failure to fight the English might trigger a second mass defection—this time away from him to Pedro’s side.33 Consequently, on Friday April 2, both armies began to prepare for battle. The Black Prince broke camp and advanced to Navarrete. Meanwhile, Enrique, again acting against French advice, made the most serious tactical blunder of the campaign. Rather than maintain a position west of the Najerilla, where the river line would bolster his defenses, he determined to cross over and fight on the larger plain to the east.34 The Najerilla is the second largest river in the province of Rioja after the Ebro into which it flows, and there is evidence that at one time it was an even larger river than it is today. Even now, it can present very different faces depending upon the season when one encounters it.35 During late summer or early fall, it may be little more than a shallow, quietly flowing brook covering only the center of its channel. On such occasions, one would be hard put to understand how it could have impeded anyone from crossing on horseback or on foot much less drown men in large numbers as they tried to do so. On the other hand, starting later in the fall and then following the winter rains, it can rise to become a torrent, over-running its banks. In the words of an early nineteenth century source,

33  Although only one chronicler relates this conversation, it is Ayala, the one in the best position to know what was discussed within the Spanish camp. Ayala, Pedro I, 553 (1367, chap. vi). 34  Only Ayala’s account (p. 556) speaks of the river crossing. On the other hand, even though the Chandos herald fails to mention it, he does speak of a lengthy pursuit across the plain following the battle and the trapping of the Castilian army at the bridge across the Najarilla. Had Enrique not crossed the river and advanced out onto the plain, such a sequence of events could not have taken place. The Chandos herald (1910), 164. 35  The authors wish to express their gratitude to Dr. Scott de Brestian of Central Michigan University and Victor Martínez of Monmouth College who have jointly established the Najerilla Valley Research Project, a significant regional study in northeastern Spain “examining the transition in material culture between the Roman and Medieval periods in Nájera, La Rioja, and the valley of the Tirón river, in neighboring Burgos.” In conversations and emails, Dr. de Brestian has supplied valuable insight into both the river that would play a significant role in the battle and its history. For more information, readers are directed to the project website at http://www.najerillavalleyproject.org/.

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It carries enough water to frighten the inhabitants when the level rises. On occasion, the rise in the river can be very great, the result of extensive rains or when there are heavy snows in the mountains…. This does considerable damage to the orchards and fields and if there were not a strong wall fortifying the city, there would be flooding within.…36 The medieval chroniclers leave no doubt that the spring of 1367 was cold and wet and that at the beginning of April, the Najerilla still displayed its more tempestuous nature. Given the situation, although the Castilians lacked the overwhelming advantage of terrain they had enjoyed in the mountains around Vitoria, they still held a formidable river line, one that the Black Prince would have to force in order to proceed farther into Castile. At least in retrospect, Ayala regarded the abandonment of this barrier an unwise decision, which he attributed to Enrique’s courageous and spontaneous nature. It is even possible that the move was inspired by sound military doctrine—ideally, light cavalry of the sort that made up much of Enrique’s army should be able operate more effectively on an open plain than in defending a river line, though had this been Enrique’s motive for advancing, one would have expected the chronicler to have at least mentioned it. Whether the decision to sacrifice the tactical advantage afforded by the river resulted from a misplaced sense of chivalry, Enrique’s overconfidence in his own army, or even rational military calculations that at least in this case proved unwarranted, it helped set the stage for one of the worst defeats of the century. That night, each side slept under arms, fully aware the battle would come on the morrow. 5

The Battle of Nájera (Saturday, April 3, 1367)

As the sun rose over northern Spain, two of the century’s largest armies stood poised, facing one another across what one author who was present characterized as “a fair and beauteous plain, whereon was neither bush nor tree for a full league round.”37 Here, near the point where the three medieval Iberian 36  Padre Fraile Prudencio Bujanda (1803), “Noticias de la ciudad de Nájara [sic] y pueblos de su abadía” reproduced in Naxara ilustrada, ed. Juan de Salazar and Saturnino Nalda Bretón (Nájera: Patronato del Monasterio de Santa María la Real, 1987), pp. 317–38, for the quote, see p. 320. We are grateful to Dr. de Brestian for bringing to our attention this early nineteenth century description of the Najarilla. 37  This description of topography comes from the Chandos Herald whom virtually all historians believe to have been present at the battle.

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kingdoms of Castile, Aragon, and Navarre came together, thousands of men awaited a signal that would propel them into one of the century’s greatest battles. To the east stood the Anglo-Gascon army raised to restore Pedro I to his throne and, commanded by the Black Prince. Against these invaders was arrayed a Castilian force that included a considerable part of the kingdom’s upper nobility and their retainers. Although composed extensively of light cavalry of the sort spawned by medieval Spanish warfare (known in Spanish as ginetes or, in English translations, geneteurs), it also contained a large body of heavy cavalry, what the chronicles refer to as barded or armored horse, as well as thousands of native infantry, these last troops having been drawn largely from the northeastern region of the kingdom where the campaign was being conducted. Alongside Enrique’s native Castilian troops stood his Franco-Breton mercenaries, who, like their English and Gascon opponents, were hardened veterans of the decades-long struggle raging north of the mountains. They too were commanded by one of the era’s greatest warriors, the future constable of France, Bertrand DuGueslin. During the following decade, he would drive the English from most of their continental holdings. Rounding out Enrique’s army was a sizeable contingent of Aragonese volunteers, men who had served alongside and befriended the exiled count of Trastámara during the decade when he had served Pere III. What is more, according to several of the chroniclers, the force included numerous crossbowmen hired from the Italian city of Genoa, a place that trained and exported such men to serve in the armies of Europe, though surprisingly, the source give almost no indication that they played any significant role in the battle. Both armies had begun their final deployment well before dawn. Enrique and DuGuesclin had the easier task since their new camp across the river from Nájera lay considerably closer to where the two armies would eventually clash.38 They picked a likely spot along the main road from Logroño. Here they awaited Pedro and the prince. In the center of the Castilian formation, in a slightly advanced position, the pair placed what both probably regarded as their most reliable troops, the several thousand Franco-Breton mercenaries, dismounted and under the personal command of DuGuesclin and his colleague, the French Marshal Arnoul d’Audrehem, both of whom had seen a great deal of fighting against 38  In Ayala’s chronicle, the order of battle appears rather out of place in the narrative. Ayala sets it forth in a passage (Ayala, Pedro I, 552–53) placed before his treatment of English march to Vitoria and the events that occurred there.

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the English, having actually been captured in earlier battles.39 Most of the men they led were also battle-hardened veterans from the conflict north of the the Pyrenees, who had faced this same enemy and were therefore well-acquainted with English arms and tactics. To the left of the mercenaries in this advanced position were the elite of the Castilian army, members of the Order of the Sash (Orden de la Banda), who also fought dismounted and were led by Enrique’s most reliable brother, Sancho. Among the notable figures of Castile’s aristocracy fighting in this company was the future chronicler, Pedro López de Ayala, who carried the order’s banner.40 To the rear of this dismounted center and on either of its flanks, Enrique stationed the thousands of Castilian and Aragonese horsemen of which his army was largely composed. He assumed personal command of the largest contingent, stationed immediately to the rear of DuGuesclin and the marshal. On the right wing, Don Alfonso, count of Denia, a member of the Aragonese royal house and the highest ranking of his countrymen involved in the battle, held command. Finally, in what would become his second great error (crossing the Najarilla had been the first), Enrique entrusted command of the left wing of his army to his other brother, Tello, who despite success in the recent fighting around Vitoria, had a long record of being notoriously unreliable. In addition, there was a large force of native infantry, mainly made up of local levies drawn from the regions north and east of Burgos.41 While its placement on the battlefield is uncertain, it most likely brought up the rear. With the exception of slingers, “darters,” and crossbowmen, who found their way into the thick of the fighting and for a short time competed with the English archers,42 these footmen seem to have played a negligible role, serving only to swell the number of fugitives and magnify the casualty lists. As the prince marched westward from the night’s bivouac near Navarette, he had one last surprise in store for his waiting adversary. Before reaching the battlefield, his force turned off the main road and, crossing a line of low hills 39  After the battle, Edward would hold a makeshift court of chivalry in which the marshal was compelled to answer charges that in taking part at Nájera, he was breaking the parole given him after his earlier capture. He was found innocent on a technicality, something that seemed to please everybody including the prince. Ayala, Pedro I, 558–59 (1367, chap. xiv). 40  Ibid., 552 (1367, chap. iv). 41  Ayala (552) mentions in particular the provinces of Asturias, Guipuzcoa, and Vizcaya as having supplied large numbers of footmen (escuderos de pie). 42  The herald mentions crossbowmen and slingers trading volleys with the English. Chandos herald, 163.

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just to the north, entered the plain from a somewhat different direction, forcing a hurried readjustment of the Castilian line.43 When the two armies came face to face, the English vanguard under the duke of Lancaster and John Chandos took up its position in the center where it confronted the dismounted division under DuGuesclin and Don Sancho. Behind Lancaster and Chandos stood the main body, commanded by the prince of Wales. Part of Edward’s division, under the Captal de Buch, the lord d’Albret, as well as the king of Navarre’s stand-in, Martin de la Carra, would eventually angle forward to become the right wing of the English army. (Whether or not they made this move before the battle began is uncertain though some evidence suggests that they did.) In this position, they ultimately faced the Castilian left under Don Tello. Last to arrive on the field, the English rearguard commanded by the king of Majorca, the count of Armagnac, and Sir Hugh Calveley executed a similar, oblique advance to the left where it moved up to occupy a small hillock. Here, it became the army’s left wing, facing the Castilian right commanded by the count of Denia. Given the contradictory estimates supplied by the chronicles that constitute our major source of information about the battle, it is impossible to state with any certainty the numbers of men involved on either side. Even the best of the sources, Ayala and the Chandos Herald, disagree substantially while other chroniclers serve mainly to muddy the waters. Without any real basis to decide between the numbers, it seems safe only to say that many thousands, even tens of thousands fought at Nájera.44 On the other hand, the figures provided by the two major chroniclers do suggest that unlike other great battles of the age such as Crécy, Poitiers, and later, Agincourt, Nájera was probably a fairly equal contest, at least in a numerical sense. After all, only Froissart, who is not known for great accuracy in such matters, gives the Castilian army a huge numerical edge. A rough numerical equivalency would suggest why the English might depart from their modus operandi in the other great battles, launching an attack rather than merely standing on the defensive. Although the question of numbers remains (and almost certainly will remain) a matter for speculation, there can be little doubt that the English enjoyed an advantage, even a considerable one, when it came to combat effectiveness. After all, unlike the Spanish light cavalry which made up the majority of Enrique’s force, most of those who followed the Black Prince had fought 43  Chandos herald (1910), 161. 44  The question of numbers has been explored in considerably greater detail in our other book, but without reaching any conclusion.

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in the cutting-edge conflict north of the Pyrenees and brought with them into Spain their heavier arms and armor. And while the heavier armament of the English might impede their knights in skirmishes of the type fought near Vitoria, during a full-scale battle, it could prove to be a decisive factor. Of even greater importance, they brought with them thousands of longbows, the most potent missile weapon of the period as generations of French knights had learned to their chagrin. Even if the crossbows in Enrique’s army played a more substantial role than the sources lead us to believe, the fact remains that the bow was decisive factor in achieving English victory. As the sun rose, both armies stood poised in the cool morning air while leaders conducted the last minute business of medieval chivalry. Enrique, Pedro, and the prince all conferred knighthood upon deserving followers. According to Ayala, many on both sides wore on their person or had painted on their shields heraldic devices that would easily identify to which army they belonged: Castilian troops sported a distinctive sash on their surcoats while the English wore white surcoats over their armor containing the cross of St. George, whom they loudly implored for victory as they advanced against the enemy. The pageantry of the moment is epitomized in the actions of the English constable, Sir John Chandos. Splendidly attired, he galloped down the line between the armies. Reining in before the prince, he pledged in a loud voice his undying loyalty, and asked Edward to “bless” the banner which would lead his own contingent into battle. Afterwards, he rode back to his men, waving his banner, and in this emotion-charged atmosphere had them swear their own undying allegiance.45 Meanwhile, the prince exhorted his leading knights and others who clustered around him, in a speech that combined the usual appeal to God, honor, and material considerations. Having beseeched divine aid and called upon his subjects to do their duty, Edward concluded by reminded these hungry men that abundant food supplies could be found just across the field in the enemy camp. With the battle about to begin, the prince turned to his royal ally and uttered words to the effect: “Sir King, today you will know if ever again you will have Castile.”46 According to the principal English source, the Chandos Herald, the English center, commanded by the constable and the duke of Lancaster, set the battle in motion when, at a signal from Lancaster, it began to advance against the strong Castilian center anchored by the French and Breton mercenaries 45  Chandos herald (1910), 161–62. 46  Ibid., 162.

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under DuGuesclin.47 Interestingly, in his account of Prince Edward’s victory at Poitiers ten years earlier, that same author leaves no doubt that it was the French, present in overwhelming force, who had launched the attack. On that occasion, the badly out-numbered prince had even attempted (albeit briefly) to extricate his army from the battlefield. By contrast, when writing of Nájera, the herald mentions no such reticence to fight. For Edward, the Spanish campaign was not a chauvauchee, the success of which would be measured in burning and pillaging enemy territory, but instead a fullscale invasion, expected by the invaders to produce a battle–unless the enemy simply melted away as Pedro’s forces had done a year earlier. Nor was the English army in Spain vastly outnumbered as had been the case at both Crécy and Poitiers. Consequently, at Nájera, the prince had no need to stand on the tactical defensive, as other outnumbered English armies had done in the past and would continue to do in the future. In fact, for some weeks, Edward had been doing everything he could to provoke a general engagement. At Vitoria, he had been frustrated by the enemy’s unwillingness to trade an unassailable position for the wager of battle. His subsequent withdrawal and swing southward to Logroño was undertaken in order to force a battle under more favorable circumstances. It should come as no surprise that now, on the plain east of Nájera, the prince would seize the tactical offensive as the herald credits him with doing.48 In contrast to the herald, however, Ayala conveys a rather different impression. He states that on the morning of battle, as the two lines faced one another, a Castilian contingent from San Esteban del Puerto suddenly abandoned Enrique and rode over to Pedro’s side of the field. According to the Castilian chronicler, it was to prevent further such defections that Enrique launched his attack.49 Actually, this seeming contradiction on the question of just who began the battle may be more apparent than real. Each side appears to have attacked the other—in different parts of the field. In the center and on their own right wing, the English seized the initiative. By contrast, on the Castilian right (the English left), it was the great mass of Castilian light cavalry who flung themselves 47  The herald has the duke initiating the attack with the following command: “Forward, forward banner. Let us take the Lord God for our Protector and let each one acquit himself honorably.” If, as scholars believe, the herald was present at the battle, he would probably have been stationed in the company of his lord and so should have know better than most the sequence of events in the English center as well as the exhortation given by the duke. Chandos herald (1910), 162. 48  Ibid., 141–48. 49  Ayala, Pedro I, 556–57 (1367, chap. xii).

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against a smaller, but unyielding English left wing that had been the rear guard during the march to the battlefield. Such discrepancies between the accounts of Ayala and the Chandos herald probably result from their differing battlefield perspectives; in fact, when examined closely, they may actually yield significant clues concerning the battle’s progress. One such enlightening discrepancy involves the differing placement of Enrique in the two accounts. According to Ayala, the king began the battle in command of the main body of Castilian horse, just to the rear of DuGuesclin dismounted force. By contrast, the herald has him in charge of the Castilian right, a wing that according to Ayala, was actually commanded by the Aragonese count of Denia. Both chroniclers agree that Enrique did not hold back, but instead participated actively in the battle, fighting bravely before being forced to join the rest of his army in flight. When combined, the information given by the two accounts suggests that at some point fairly early in the battle, the king wheeled to his right, merging the main body of cavalry that he commanded with the count’s flanking force, and having assumed overall command of that wing of his army, led the mass of his horsemen in an all-out attack on the English left. This may well have occurred after a first assault against the English position by the count had been thrown back, since both chroniclers speak of Enrique desperately trying to rally his forces.50 Whether or not the king was present for the opening sally, it was only on the Castilian right that his army temporarily managed to seize the initiative and launch its one offensive effort.51 Meanwhile, it was in the center that the hardest fighting of the day would develop. While the Franco-Bretons of DuGuesclin may have waited stolidly for the on-coming English, the sources suggest that that they may have surged forward to meet the advancing enemy. The speed with which the two sides closed on one another and locked in a deadly, hand-to-hand combat suggests such a surge forward on both sides. It may also have limited the effectiveness of missile weapons in this part of the field, though the herald indicates that even after the two armies had come together, English archers managed to exchange pointblank fire with crossbowmen and slingers in the Castilian force. However, since there was always a danger of hitting one’s own comrades when fighting in such close quarters, the archers may have quickly abandoned their archery

50  Ayala, Pedro I, 557 (1367, chap. xii); Chandos herald (1910), 163. 51  My conclusions concerning who attacked whom at Nájera have been carefully reconsidered in light of a discussion of this issue that I had some years ago at the Medieval Congress with Clifford Rogers. I wish to thank him for his insights.

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and entered the melee, either wielding their bows as clubs or drawing their other weapons.52 In the poetic words of the herald, “Then, of a surety, was no heart in the world so bold as not to be amazed at the mighty blows they dealt with the great axes they bore, and the swords and daggers.”53 The experience of one English captain (as recorded by his herald) was probably not atypical of combat on the individual level: having grappled with a Castilian, Constable Chandos wrestled his foe to the ground where, after a desperate struggle, the Englishman managed to dispatch his larger opponent with a dagger. When the advancing English center met such strong resistance, the main body under the prince moved forward to assist in the attack. First came those on the left-hand side of Edward’s division, led by Lord Percy and the young Breton nobleman, Olivier de Clisson. In 1367, Clisson still served the Englishbacked duke of Brittany, John of Montfort, and was therefore fighting for the English at Nájera. A few years later, however, he would return to his French allegiance. During the 1370s, he and fellow Breton, DuGuesclin, now fighting on the same side, would lead France in its successful war effort against Clisson’s former allies.54 The new arrivals under Percy and Clisson almost certainly came up to the left of Chandos and Lancaster, thereby extending the English line farther in that direction, outflanking DuGuesclin’s already hard-pressed troops. There followed the rest of the main body under Edward that appears to come up directly from behind the vanguard and added its weight to the fray.55 Ironically, despite the intensity of this combat in the center, it was not here that the battle would ultimately be decided, but out on the two wings. In contrast to the complex picture presented by what was happening elsewhere on the field, no interpolation is needed to understand events on the English right (the Castilian left). Here, Enrique’s youngest surviving sibling, Don Tello, commanded another sizeable contingent of ginetes. For his part, Tello failed to follow the example of Castilian forces on the other end of the line, where cavalrymen similar to the ones he commanded were attacking the English position. Meanwhile, the English right pressed forward under the audacious Captal de Buch, the Navarrese stand-in, Martin de la Carra, and the Pyrenean lord d’Albret, periodically stopping just long enough to launch a 52  Compare with John Keegan’s reconstruction of the role of archers at Agincourt. John Keegan, The Face of Battle. (New York, 1976), 93–94. 53  Chandos Herald (1910), 163. 54  See: John Bell Henneman’s biography of this fascinating figure, Olivier de Clisson, 1996. 55  The Chandos Herald (1910), 163 devotes a full paragraph to the battlefield deeds of his namesake, including a victorious hand-to-hand combat between Sir John and a Castilian knight whom he identifies as Martin Fernández.

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flight of arrows at Tello’s light cavalry, then resuming its forward motion. As arrows rained down on his position, Tello refused either to attack or stand and meet this juggernaut. Instead, the royal brother once again demonstrated his unreliability by taking flight. In the cryptic, but damning words of the Chandos Herald, “before [the two sides] could come together, Don Tello departed.”56 Ayala’s account echoes this criticism of the king’s younger brother: “he and those with him did not wait [for the enemy to approach], but withdrew from the field in complete flight.”57 Tello was followed in short order not only by those clustered around him, but by most of the now leaderless left wing of the Castilian army. The collapse of the Castilian left without ever engaging the enemy proved to be one of the decisive moments in the battle; for while some part of the English right undoubtedly pursued the fleeing Castilians, preventing any significant rally on their part (if indeed, any such rally could have been contemplated), the rest, now almost unopposed, wheeled inward to fall on DuGuesclin’s dismounted left flank, held by the Orden de la Banda, at almost the same time that the prince’s division was joining the attack on the Frenchman’s front and Percy and Clisson were enveloping the Frenchman’s right. Meanwhile, out on the Castilian right wing, events right played out somewhat differently, despite which the outcome proved to be largely the same— an overwhelming Castilian defeat. Led by the king and the count of Denia, the Spanish cavalry of the right wing acquitted itself far better than the very similar force commanded by Tello. Here, Enrique’s army put up a real fight against the English, several times charging the higher ground that the enemy had initially occupied. It proved, however, to no avail, for on this side of the field, even more than on the left and in the center, the technological realities of fourteenth century warfare emerged with a vengeance, ultimately deciding the contest. To all appearances, at Nájera, Enrique’s army lacked the numbers of crossbowmen that had accompanied the French in both of their great battles against the English at Crécy and Poitiers. Judging from the herald’s account, many if not most of those who were present seem to have been stationed in the center with DuGuesclin.58 As a result, on the right hand side of the line, the Castilians had mainly slings and javelins with which to reply to one of the most terrible weapons of the day—the English longbow. The fourteenth century “queen of battle,” it compared favorably to the best existing crossbows, possessing nearly equal accuracy and penetrating power, as well as five or six times the firing rate. Clearly, English longbowmen against 56  Chandos Herald (1910), 163. 57  Ayala, Pedro I, 557 (1367, chap. xii). 58  Chandos Herald (1910), 163.

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Castilian slingers was an unequal contest. Three times Enrique managed to rally his troops for an attack on the Englishmen and Gascons defending the hillock, three times the withering fire drove them back. The Chandos herald accurately if all-too-briefly described the scene: The Spaniards hurled with might archegays, lances, and darts. [English] archers shot thicker than rain falls in winter time. They wounded [Enrique’s] horses and men, and [when] the Spaniards perceived well that they could no longer endure, they began to turn their horses and took to flight.59 For his part, Froissart, almost certainly borrowing from the herald’s account of these events and possibly incorporating the testimony of returning veterans, wrote a slightly more elaborate depiction of what happened:60 The Spaniards and Castilians had slings, from which they threw stones with such force, as to break the helmets and skull-caps, so that they wounded and unhorsed many of their opponents. The English archers, according to their custom, shot sharply with their bows, to the great annoyance and death of the Spaniards…. The Spanish commonalty [common foot soldiers] made use of slings, to which they were accustomed, and from which they threw large stones which at first much annoyed the English; but when their first cast was over and they felt the sharpness of English arrows, they kept no longer any order.61 There can be little doubt that in the end, the main body of Castilian light cavalry and the lightly armored horses most of them rode broke in the face of a terrifying weapon that relatively few of them had ever before faced in combat. This became the second decisive moment on the field, the first having been the flight of the Castilian left. The collapse of the cavalry on both wings apparently occurred well before a majority of the Castilian infantry could ever come into play. The overall chaos increased as these unused foot soldiers now joined the 59  Ibid. 60  While Froissart was not present and may have taken much if not most of his account from the herald, including the part about the unequal contest between English longbows and Castilian slingers, still his testimony has a certain probative value. After all, in later years, Sir Jean had access to many veterans of the battle and was in a good position to check the herald’s account against their testimony. Thus, his imprimatur upon this point is worth noting. 61  Froissart (Johnes), 1:371, 372–73.

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fleeing horsemen, all desperately trying to escape the field as the triumphant enemy fell on them from behind. Among the most mobile of all participants in the encounter may have been Enrique himself. This seems to be born out by the fact that the various accounts put the king at different places on the battlefield, all of them places that only someone leading from the front could have reached. No source disagrees on the valor the-man-who-would-be-king displayed. Nevertheless, with the right wing fast disintegrating despite his best efforts to rally it, Enrique could not fail to recognize that the battle was lost. Nor could he entertain any illusions about the quality of mercy he would receive from Pedro were he to be captured. Consequently, he now joined the fugitives and sought his own safety in flight.62 Although the French and Breton veterans in the center and the Castilian elite troops fighting alongside them held out as long as they could, stripped of support on both flanks, increasingly surrounded and attacked on all sides, now the sole target of English firepower, their collapse became inevitable. Few if any had an opportunity to flee as English knights and longbowmen closed in for the kill. Ayala estimates that more than 400 of the army’s men-at arms fell at this crucial point in the line; the herald puts the number at 500. In the midst of this carnage, many high-born prisoners were taken who had fought in the encircled center, including DuGuesclin and his second-in-command among the French, Marshal d’Audenham, the king’s brother, Sancho, his illegitimate son, Alfonso, and the Aragonese commander, the count of Denia, who appears to have joined his hard-pressed center rather than participate in the flight of the right wing where he had been stationed when the encounter began.63 6

Defeat, Pursuit, Massacre

The flight of both wings turned the battle into a rout that in turn soon became a massacre. All across the plain, Englishmen and Gascons pursued the foe, cutting down scores while herding the rest inexorably westward toward the swollen Rio Najarilla. The way was littered with the detritus of a military disaster as desperate men threw away arms and armor in the vain hope of escaping their 62  Ayala, Pedro I, 557 (1367, chap. xii) and 559 (1367, chap. xiv); Chandos Herald (1910), 104, 164 (3393). 63  Ayala, Pedro I, 557 (1367, chap. xii). Chandos herald (1910), 164. For a detailed reconstruction of how differing accounts of the movement of two leading figures, the count of Denia and Hugh Calveley, might contribute to our knowledge of how the battle unfolded, see: Villalon and Kagay, Nájera, 255–57.

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pursuers. Amidst this equipment lay the bodies and body parts of those who had been unable to outrun their enemy. The river that might well have aided Enrique had he drawn up his line on its western bank, now became a deathtrap for his fleeing army. In its swollen state it stood as a formidable obstacle, especially to men running for their lives. The Castilian army, in a state of panic, may very well have experienced what for want of a better term might be called “the wildebeest effect.” During their annual migration across the east African plains, these animals move in great herds that become hopelessly entangled when crossing a flooded stream and often die by the hundreds. Just such a phenomenon could help account for the vivid picture of drowning men drawn by several of the chroniclers. As the terrified mob surged westward over the few thousand yards that separated the battlefield from the town, much of it was naturally funneled toward the bridge, thereby creating a crushing bottleneck at that critical crossing point. Today, there are several bridges that cross into the old town, most of them designed for automobiles, though the one restricted to pedestrians still bears a plaque on its eastern end claiming that this was the point where the Castilian army was trapped trying to cross over to the town. Nevertheless, even though all of the existing bridges are substantial modern structures, they would be extraordinarily hard-pressed if not totally incapable of accommodating such an overwhelming rush of both mounted and dismounted fugitives, all of whom suddenly ran headlong up against the fast moving river while closely pursued by an unrelenting enemy. By contrast to today’s situation, a single, far less substantial fourteenth century bridge was soon hopelessly clogged with men and horses jostling to get across, forcing large numbers to try their luck in the river itself. Hundreds died at the bridge or were driven into the water where they drowned. In the words of the Chandos Herald (later echoed by Froissart), “there might you see knights leap into the water for fear, and die one on the other; and it was said that the river was red with the blood that flowed from the bodies of dead men and horses.”64 The troubadour, Cuvelier, paints an equally gruesome picture of the rout: The prince of Wales, wishing to profit from the disorder into which panic had throw [the Spaniards], ordered them pursued by his own men, who ran them through the back with lances like base men without the courage to turn and face their enemy. The fear that gave them wings made many of them throw themselves into the river where the water suffocated 64  Chandos Herald (1910), 105, 164 [3438–3444].

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them, preferring to let themselves drown rather than experience the pain caused by dying on the point of a lance or sword.65 The image of blood tinting the Najerilla red, repeated in several accounts, is best explained by the slaughter that was occurring along the eastern bank. Here, when the pursuers overtook the fugitives, they began chopping at what had become a compact mass of terrified men with sword, axe, and lance, killing many who had not already thrown themselves into the water or had stayed too close to the bank to avoid the swords and axes. Cuvelier’s cites as just one example of this merciless activity a knight who “killed more than 30 Spaniards in the water, whom he hacked to death with blows from an axe, and he made others plunge off into the deepest part of the river so they could not make good their escape.”66 Even those who managed to make it across the clogged bridge or ford the swollen river faced one final, daunting impediment, one which scholars of the past writing about the battle have largely failed to point out.67 A near vertical cliff runs along the western side of the river, leaving only a thin slice of land in which the old town of Nájera was located. Nowhere is the town more than four or five streets deep (in most places it is less so). The only exits from this deadly cul de sac are narrow passages to the north and south68 and these passages out of Nájera, especially the one to the north, are so narrow that they create yet another serious bottleneck against fleeing men. As a result, many survivors of the river crossing now found themselves trapped within the town, where they were killed or taken prisoner. The Chandos Herald speaks of 7,700 slain in the pursuit or possibly just at the bridge (the statement is somewhat ambiguous) and a further 1,000 in the town.69 Among those who meekly surrendered at this time were several who had bragged just a few hours earlier about their imminent victory: the grandmaster of Calatrava was found cowering in a cellar, while the future master of Santiago and the prior of the Hospitalers were dragged down from their hiding place high on a wall.70 65   Les Memoires de du Guesclin, vol. 5, no. 2:418. 66  Ibid., 491. 67  A recent volume on medieval warfare illustrates this general failing. A map of the battle which in most respects is quite good shows the town of Nájera stretching well to the west of the river, backed by fields similar to those found on the east bank across which escape would have been fairly simple. In fact, no such landscape exists. See: Matthew Bennett, et. al., Fighting Techniques of the Medieval World A.D. 500–A.D. 1500, Equipment, Combat Skills, and Tactics (New York, 2006), 158–59. 68  The pilgrim route itself runs out of town through the narrow southern passage. 69  Chandos Herald (1910), 164. 70  Ibid., 106, 164 [3455–3466].

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The Reason Why

In retrospect, it seems indisputable that the Anglo-Gascon force Prince Edward brought across the Pyrenees, encased in state-of-the-art northern European armor and armed with the finest missile weapon developed during the Middle Ages was the better of the two armies. On the other hand, the best troops do not always win a battle. Other factors frequently enter the equation and tip the balance. In this case, Enrique II made three crucial errors which, when taken together, severely handicapped the force he brought to Nájera and helped produce one of the greatest and most lopsided defeats of the Middle Ages, errors that even his outstanding bravery in battle could not begin to rectify. The first and the principal error was strategic: the king chose to fight rather than adopt the delaying tactics recommended by his French captains and, behind them, their wily monarch. All indications are that the English were on the verge of starvation when the two sides clashed. Perhaps only a few more days, certainly no more than several weeks of a Fabian Policy and the outcome in 1367 would almost certainly have been very different. The second error was tactical: Enrique abandoned the river line afforded by the Rio Najerilla and let himself be lured to fight on the open plain east of that river. The sources indicate that in making that fateful decision, he was influenced primarily by chivalric considerations. He certainly manifested a considerable overconfidence in the ability of his army. He may even have adhered to a military doctrine that would have cavalry fighting on an open plain in preference to defending a river line, though there is no evidence to suggest that this entered his thinking. Whatever the reason or reasons for Enrique’s decision to cross the river, east of the Najarilla his army enjoyed no geographical advantage of the sort it so desperately needed. The king’s third error involved a personnel decision: he entrusted command over the left wing of his army to Don Tello who, despite some success in the recent fighting around Vitoria, had a long record for unreliablity, a reputation he would more than live up to at Nájera. The king would have done better to choose his other surviving brother, Sancho, who had shown far more loyalty over the years than their mercuric sibling. In all justice, given the circumstances, it is hard to envisage how such a change in command could have made any real difference in the outcome. On the other hand, Sancho could have done no worse and might conceivably have done better. On the morning of April 3, 1367, these royal errors combined with the superiority of the Anglo-Gascon army and its “English bow” to determine the outcome of one of the later Middle Ages’ greatest battles.

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La Rochelle

France Limoges Clermont-Ferrand

Geneva

Libourne Bordeaux Montauban

Valladolid Zamora Nájera Salamanca

Porto

Madrid

Coimbra

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Campaign and battle of Nájera (1366) Dax Bayonne

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Advance of the English and Castilian armies to Vitoria and of Felton’s Party to Navarrete (February–March 1367)

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Spanish Army (1) Center: Bertrand DuGuesclin, Marshal Arnoul d’Audrehem, Don Sancho (king’s brother); French mercenaries and Orden de la Banda. (2) Main Body: King Enrique II and his illegitimate son, Alfonso. (3) Left wing: Don Tello (king’s brother) and Martín de Porres, Master of the Hospitalers. (4) Right wing: Alfonso, Count of Denia and Marqués of Villena; Pedro Moñiz de Godoy, Master of Calatrava. (5) Large body of Spanish infantry may have been placed here; no commander mentioned.

Battle of Nájera (April 3, 1367): Positioning of forces on the field

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Castilian Aftermath 2: Later Events and Consequences 1 Introduction By early afternoon, the battle was over. The Black Prince raised his standard on a small hillock as a rallying point around which his captains could gather. He was soon joined by those who had stayed on the field and later by those returning from the pursuit. As they rode up, a number of these leaders displayed their own banners to rally their returning men. King Pedro arrived on a black charger with the arms of Castile prominently displayed before him and surrounded by those Castilians who had fought on the winning side. Immediately seeking out Edward the king fell to his knees before him in gratitude. The prince raised Pedro up and, in good medieval style, credited the victory to a higher power. For both men, the battle of Nájera marked a highpoint. For the Black Prince, it capped one of the fourteenth century’s most successful military careers. For Pedro, it returned him to the throne from which he had been so ignominiously expelled a year earlier and from which he would again be tumbled two years later.1 The only shadow darkening the moment was their failure to discover their adversary’s whereabouts. English patrols sent out to scour the battlefield to either capture the usurper or recover his body all came back empty-handed.2 Only sometime afterwards did Pedro and the prince learn that Enrique had safely made his way to France (see below). On the other hand, even though he had eluded capture, his prospects seemed bleak. The highpoint for both men proved all-too-brief. Within three years, one of the triumphant pair, Pedro I of Castile, would not only have lost his crown for a second time, but died in the process, a victim of the man he had defeated at Nájera. The other, Edward of Woodstock, perhaps one of the greatest soldiers of his day (certainly the most successful) would be dying slowly of a disease he had probably contracted in Spain, a disease that was inexorably driving him

1  The gathering is pictured by both the Chandos Herald and Jean Froissart. See: Chandos Herald (1910), 107–8, 165 (3502–3508); Froissart (Johnes), 1:375 (chap. ccxlii): Froissart (Diller), 3:436. 2  When Pedro wrote to his subjects two weeks after the battle, the fate of his adversary was still unknown. DPI, 199 (doc. 144). © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004425057_020

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from the battlefield at the height of his military career.3 By contrast, the pair they had defeated—Enrique de Trastámara and Bertrand DuGuesclin—would become (respectively) king of Castile and constable of France while other leading figures on the winning side would join the opposition.4 It might almost seem as if the battle of Nájera had never taken place. 2

The Shattering Alliance

The day after the battle (April 4), Pedro and the prince had all enemy knights who had been captured paraded before them, including the foreign contingent that had served Enrique. The victor’s first act was to try one of the vanquished leaders, the French Marshal Arnoul d’Audenham, by an ad hoc court of chivalry on the charge of being a false traitor who merited death.5 The charge involved the marshal’s failure to live up to the terms of an earlier ransom agreement worked out after his capture at the battle of Poitiers by the terms of which d’Audenham agreed not to take up arms against the prince of Wales until the sum was fully paid. Despite the passage of ten years, it had not yet been paid; however, at Nájera the marshal had fought against Edward. When he indignantly denied the charge, the prince suggested that they commit the matter to a selected body of knights from the winning side.6 Instead of being presided over by the constable or the marshal, Edward proposed and d’Audenham accepted a procedure that resembled far more closely 3  The Black Prince was just under 37 years of age when he won the battle of Nájera. He would die nine years later, having spent much of the intervening time as an invalid. 4  During these same years, several of the other men now gathered around the prince—the count of Armagnac, Lord d’Albret, and Olivier de Clisson—shifted sides. In 1372, one of the three—Olivier de Clisson—would join DuGuesclin in driving the English from many of their conquests and later succeed him as constable of France. 5  Ayala, Pedro I, 558–59 (1367, chap. xiii). Ayala, who devotes an entire, highly dramatic chapter to recording this confrontation and its resolution, does not mention the term “court of chivalry” or anything comparable in Spanish. Instead, he has the prince asking the marshal “if he wished to be judged on this matter by the knights who were with him [i.e. the prince]” and the marshal assenting. 6  For more about medieval military trial procedures and how they functioned according to what contemporaries referred to as “the law of arms” see, the study by Maurice Keen, The Laws of War in the Late Middle Ages (New York, 1965). Keen explores not only what was and was not considered permissible in time of war, but also the courts that might adjudicate such matters. For a more recent work by that same author that devotes three full chapters to England’s courts of chivalry, see: Origins of the English Gentleman: Heraldry, Chivalry, and Gentility in Medieval England, c. 1300–1500 (Gloucestershire, England, 2002). A good recent summary of the concept and the actual practice of chivalry is Richard Kaeuper, Medieval Chivalry (Cambridge, 2016).

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trial by a jury of one’s peers. Twelve knights who had fought on the winning side—four Englishmen, four Gascons and four Bretons—were charged with handing down a ruling that at its most extreme might involve the death penalty. When the group of twelve was selected, the prince first made his case.7 In the end, however, the trial was decided unanimously in the marshal’s favor on a chivalric technicality. D’Audenhan successfully argued that in fighting at Nájera, he had taken up arms not against the prince of Wales, but against an army in service to King Pedro I of Castile. In as tactful a manner as possible, the marshal reminded the prince that both of them were just the hired help. When all twelve judges weighed the marshal’s defense and returned a judgment in his favor, it became something of a fourteenth century precedent for dealing with similar cases. Incredibly, in the aftermath of the battle, the newly-restored monarch set about acting in a manner that soon negated an overwhelming victory by alienating the very people who had made it possible, his English allies. The initial rift between Pedro and the Black Prince appeared during the later stages of the engagement and had to do with the treatment of Castilian prisoners. In the Libourne Pacts, the king had agreed that he would not execute any of his captured subjects unless they had already been adjudged to be traitors.8 Despite this commitment, he had brutally executed several highborn Castilians on the field, men who had never been formally condemned and had already surrendered.9 7  What is essentially the same story, but with a different cast of characters, is told in another of the chronicles dealing with Nájera. The anonymous author of the CQPR identifies the French prisoner said to have broken faith as having been DuGuesclin himself, the English leader accusing him as Sir John Chandos, and the battle at which the one had captured the other as Auray (1364). The facts do not support this alternate version. In addition, the foremost Portuguese historian, Fernào Lopes, places his imprimatur on Ayala’s account. See: Lopes, The English in Portugal, 22–23. 8  Foedera, 3:517. It is to this clause that Ayala refers when he states in his chronicle that Pedro had agreed not to execute any of his subjects “until they had been legally judged, except for those he had already sentenced [to death].” Ayala, Pedro I, 562 (1367, chap. xix). Others whom the chronicler names as having died at Pedro’s hands in the aftermath of the battle were Gomez Carrillo de Quintana, Sancho Sánchez de Moscoso, grand commander (comendador mayor) of Santiago, and Garcí Jufre Tenorio. 9  While neither the Chandos Herald nor Froissart alludes to this killing of captives on the battlefield or mentions an aggrieved Gascon knight whose highborn prisoner, formerly a leading supporter of Pedro, was ripped from his hands and slaughtered, Froissart does tell in rather more graphic terms than Ayala of Pedro’s attempt to get his hands on all of the Castilian prisoners. According to the Flemish chronicler, the king began their dialogue by asking the prince, “Dear lord and fair cousin, I entreat and beseech you … that you will have the kindness to give up to me the traitors of my country, especially my brother Sancho the bastard and the others, that I may cut off their heads; for they have done me much injury.” Froissart (Johnes), 1:375 [chap. ccxlii]; Froissart (Diller), 3:437.

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When Pedro offered to pay ransom for all of the leading prisoners if they were turned over to him, Edward drew the line. Regardless of any promises by his ally to treat these captives mercifully.10 or any sum he might agree to pay,11 the prince refused to surrender them to Pedro believing (probably correctly) that in all likelihood, they would be massacred.12 In the end, the prince prevailed upon his very reluctant ally to pardon all but one of the Castilian prisoners,13 on the grounds that by doing so he might win back their allegiance.14 Under other circumstances, pardoning the Castilian prisoners might have been a wise political move as a means of once again winning their loyalty. However, it was far too late for that. Given all of Pedro’s past conduct, including his recent murderous rampage on the battlefield, the Castilian captives were not about to be won over by a pardon forced down his throat by the English. Instead, most removed themselves from Pedro’s presence at the earliest possible opportunity; and, when word reached them that Enrique was rebuilding his army on the other side of the mountains, many filtered back across the border into southern France to join up. Others simply withdrew behind their castle walls and awaited his return. In a purely political sense, there can be little doubt that imprisoning or even eliminating these men while they were still accessible would have been from Pedro’s perspective the best course to follow. The Black Prince, however, would not permit this to happen; whether for chivalrous considerations as the chroniclers suggest or financial considerations involving the payment of ransoms. After resting on Palm Sunday in the captured Spanish camp, on Monday, the army began its march westward along the pilgrim route to Burgos.15 While the prince remained some kilometers outside the city, Pedro was permitted to ride ahead and personally accept its surrender, some small compensation for not getting his hands on the prisoners. Several days later, Edward arrived with the 10  Ayala reports such a promise on Pedro’s part. Ayala, Pedro I, 562–3 (1367, chap. xix). 11  Froissart (Johnes), 1:375 [chap. ccxlii]; Froissart (Diller), 3:437. 12  This is certainly what Froissart believed. “If the king could have had them given up to him in his rage he would infallibly have put them all to death.” According to the chronicler, Edward replied the king that “even if [Pedro] offered a thousand times what each prisoner was worth he [Edward] would not surrender any of them in as much as he believed [the king] was paying to kill them.” See: Froissart (Johnes), 1:376 (chap. ccxlii). 13  Chandos Herald (1910), 109, 165 [3537–3545]; Froissart (Johnes), 1:375 (chap. ccxlii); Froissart (Diller), 3:437. Although Ayala does mention this figure as one of those who fell victim to Pedro’s wrath following the battle, he makes no allusion to the ceremonial execution that Froissart treats in some detail. See: Ayala, Pedro I, 558 (1367, chap. xii). 14  Chandos Herald (1910), 108, 165 [3520–3535]; Froissart (Johnes), 1:375 (chap. ccxlii); Froissart (Diller), 3:437. The troubadour, Cuvelier, in his chronicle of DuGuesclin, puts a very different spin on this incident. See: Memoires de du Guesclin, 4:422. 15  Chandos Herald (1910), 109–10, 165–66 (3558–3564, 3595–3599); Ayala, Pedro I, 563 (1367, chap. xix).

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main body of the army which spread out in towns and villages for five leagues surrounding the city.16 The gap that had opened between the allies over treatment of the prisoners now widened into a chasm when Pedro baulked at paying his war debts.17 Edward opened negotiations by summarizing all that had been done on behalf of the restored monarch and the enormous expense incurred. Although the king had already turned over part of what he owed, much remained to be paid to the prince and those who had fought with him. At Bayonne, the prince had acted as guarantor that the fugitive king would fulfill his promises. Without that occurring, he would find himself greatly in debt as a result of the expedition. Nor was it simply a matter of the money that was still owing. For not only had Pedro agreed to pay all of the expedition’s expense, he had also promised extensive lands to the leaders—the province of Vizcaya and the town of Castro de Urdiales to Edward and the city of Soria to John Chandos. The time had come to honor these commitments. Edward made several arguments for rapid payment one of which Pedro had to find compelling: the sooner Edward received his money, the sooner he could remove his army from Castile, thereby ending the damage caused by having so many foreign soldiers in the country. He admitted that this was very much in line with his own desire to return home as soon as possible in order to put down Free Companies made up primarily of Frenchmen that were raiding Guienne. For his part, Pedro acknowledged his commitments and made new promises to pay, but raised his own argument that the prince’s treasurers had given him an unfair rate of exchange for his Castilian money and had undervalued by half the jewels he had turned over. Consequently he demanded access to the expedition’s books and some correction of this “inequity” in the final accounting.18 In responding to this demand, the prince pointedly reminded Pedro that neither the king nor his treasurers had raised the issue of an unfair exchange rate at the time of recruitment. Instead, as he told Pedro, not a few of his men 16  Ayala, Pedro I, 563 (1367, chap. xix). 17  Ibid., 563–66 (1367, chap. xx). Including the initial negotiations of 1366, Ayala devotes nearly three times the space in his chronicle to financial aspects of the expedition than he does to discussing the battle itself. Froissart supplies a less detailed account. Froissart (Johnes), 1:375–77 (chap. ccxlii); Froissart (Diller), 3:440–41. 18  Ibid., 564–65 (1367, chap. xx). In writing of these negotiations, Ayala makes it sound as if most of the back-and-forth occurred not face-to-face, but through messengers: “As soon as the prince of Wales had heard King Pedro’s response to the issues he had raised with him though his messengers, he responded”—presumably once again through his messengers.

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felt aggrieved at the use of jewelry and precious stones in payment rather than cash (moneda llana). It was easier to secure arms and horses with money than with jewels they had to sell at discounted prices. Whatever the justice of Pedro’s claim, pressing it at this time could not help but make him look miserly and ungrateful in the eyes of his benefactor. Pedro also requested that 1000 English lances whose wages he would pay be left in Castile to help pacify the realm. Such a request made very good military sense since these English auxiliaries could be of use in crushing what resistance remained. And if somehow the king’s adversary managed to salvage his fortunes, they would help counterbalance the force of French knights and men-at-arms who now served Enrique on a more or less permanent basis. Unfortunately for Pedro, access to English fighting men would be possible only after he paid his debts to the prince and, in coming months, it would become increasingly clear that this was not going to happen. After the parties reached agreement in principal, it remained to determine just how much was owed. While the chronicles fail to provide a specific figure, according to Ayala, the sum “altogether amounted to a great quantity.”19 When, Edward demanded as a guarantee for its payment that twenty castles of his choosing be turned over to him immediately, Pedro refused, justifying his refusal on the grounds that his people would accuse him of alienating territory into the hands of foreigners and might again rise up against him. The king did agree to immediately dispatch throughout his realm royal collectors armed with letters instructing them to gather the necessary funds from the people of Castile. And he reminded the prince that his three daughters, Beatriz, Constanza, and Isabel, all of whom had been recognized by the Castilian cortes as heirs presumptive to the throne, remained in English hands at Bayonne, arguing that they were the ultimate guarantee he would pay his debts.20 Finally, the pair agreed to a schedule which mandated a money payment of one-half the amount owed by a specified date (dia cierto) within four months. During the collection of this first half, the English army would remain in Castile 19  Ibid. 20  When Pedro died two years later with payment still not having been made, his daughters remained in English hands. Although the Castilian cortes of 1363 had placed the eldest daughter, Beatriz, first in line to inherit the throne, her decision to take the veil left her younger sister, Constanza, as their father’s heir. It was the marriage of Constanza to John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, that gave the duke his claim on the Castilian crown, a claim he tried unsuccessfully to exercise in the late 1380s when another English army invaded Castile. The third daughter, Isabel, married Gaunt’s younger brother, Edmund Langley, later the duke of York.

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ostensibly to aid with pacification, but also to help see to it that the agreements were carried out.21 The money was to be brought to Valladolid, after Burgos the most important in city in northern Castile, where Edward would establish his headquarters. Only after this initial payment was complete would the English evacuate the peninsula. The agreement also called upon Pedro to do all that was necessary to obtain for the prince and his constable the territories promised them. Thereafter, as security for the other half of the sum owed himself and his men, Edward would continue to hold the king’s three daughters. Full payment was to be accomplished within one year, at which time England would restore the princesses to their father. At the same time, letters were also drafted and sent to the lands promised the prince and Chandos commanding that they surrender themselves forthwith to their new lords.22 Following the negotiations, the two parties met in the cathedral of Burgos where each swore a solemn oath at the main altar to uphold their agreement.23 Possibly as a result of the growing distrust between them, the English leaders entered the city with a large escort made up of men-at-arms and many of the principal captains of the army while other English troops including archers occupied the city gates. After the agreement was signed, Pedro suggested to the prince that he should personally go south in order to help raise the money.24 Edward agreed with this course of action, and his ally left Burgos, journeying first to Toledo and then on to Seville. Once outside of the prince’s control, the king again gave free rein to his penchant for murdering opponents, sending ahead messengers with orders to have a number of men seized and killed.25 The most egregious act occurred when the king arrived in Seville and learned of the flight of two men who had held the city for Enrique. Robbed of his prey, he seized the mother of one would-be victim, and, in Ayala’s words, “had her killed very cruelly.”26 Several weeks after Pedro’s departure from Burgos, the Black Prince led his army farther west, into the region around Valladolid where they settled into 21  Ayala, Pedro I, 566 (1367, chap. xxi). The herald refers to the Spanish city of Valladolid in French as “Val d’Olif.” Chandos Herald (1910), 112, 166 (3639–3643). 22  Ayala, Pedro I, 567 (1367, chap. xxi). 23  Ibid., 566–67 (1367, chap. xxi). 24  Ibid., 570–71 (1367, chaps. xxiii and xxiv); Hardy, Syllabus, 444. 25  Ibid., Pedro I, 571–72 (chap. xxiv). 26  Ibid., 573 (1367, chap. xxvii). Although the chronicler does not specify the method of execution, there is a strong tradition that she was burned at the stake. See: Diego Ortiz de Zúñiga, Anales eclesiásticos y seculares de la muy noble y muy leal ciudad de Sevilla, metrópoli de Andaluia, 4 vols. (Madrid, 1795–1796).

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surrounding towns and villages to await payment.27 They would wait in vain. Edward was never again to see the man he had put back on the throne. The date for Pedro’s return came and went with the English still sweltering through the hot Castilian summer, experiencing a climate to which few if any of them were accustomed.28 To avoid starvation in the midst of the increasingly hostile population, the prince found it necessary to extort food.29 Disease also ran rampant. One chronicler placed the death-rate extraordinarily high, alleging that “so many of the English died in Spain of dysentery and other diseases (de fluxu ventris et aliis infirmitatibus) that scarce one man in five returned to England.”30 Compounding the problems he faced in Spain, word now reached the prince that all was not well north of the mountains, that his enemies including Enrique’s supporters were mounting attacks on Aquitaine.31 Meanwhile, messengers sent to Seville came back loaded only with excuses. Pedro informed them that he was unable to collect money while a foreign army was occupying and pillaging his northern territories. He also claimed that the companies had killed and looted several treasurers bringing part of the agreed upon payment. And while he continued to pay lip service to the land grants conferred on the prince and his constable, Pedro now placed every obstacle he could in the way of their accomplishment, clandestinely ordering the inhabitants of these regions not to comply with the royal letters he had given the English leaders while all the time swearing he had not done any such thing.32 Finally, with the four months elapsed, Pedro wrote to Edward. While thanking him profusely for the great service he had rendered, the letter made clear that that service was no long needed. Therefore, it requested courteously that the prince and his army leave Castile.33 Only a few representatives of the prince charged with collecting payment were to remain. In addition, Pedro renewed 27  Different sources name several places in the region where the prince is said to have established his own headquarters: one, the large city of Medina del Campo, lay southwest of Valladolid and was site of a significant medieval fair; another, the town of Amusco, lay northeast of the city. 28  Chandos Herald (1910), 113, 166 (3671–3672). 29  Ibid., 113, 166 (3656–3670). 30  Henry Knighton, Knighton’s Chronicle 1337–1396, ed. and transl. by G.H. Martin (New York, 1995), 194–96. The Polychronicon Continuation while not supplying a precise death rate says much the same thing: “after having gained victory, many strongmen and nobles from England died in Spain from bloody flux and many other diseases ( fluxu et aliis infirmitatibus).” 31  Ayala, Pedro I, 575–76 (1367, chaps. xxxi and xxxii); Chandos Herald (1910), 114, 166 (3708– 3712); Knighton, 194–96. 32  Ayala, Pedro I, 571, 575 (1367, chaps. xxiv, xxxi). 33  Chandos Herald (1910), 113–14, 166 (3682–3694).

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his now forlorn request for a small force of English knights for whose services he would pay. For his part, the prince “marveled greatly” when he received this letter, and he immediately dispatched a reply accusing the restored monarch of breaking faith. Within several weeks, Edward decided he had had enough. With his army fast deteriorating as increasing numbers sickened and died and his own health failing in the unaccustomed heat of a Castilian summer, he found he had little choice but to retreat back across the Pyrenees.34 In early August, he began the long march home to Aquitaine all the while complaining bitterly of his ally’s perfidy.35 It now remained for Edward to find a safe route by which to extricate the remnants of his army from the peninsula.36 After negotiating for nerely a month, while the troops continued to face hunger and disease, both Pere III and Charles of Navarre agreed to open their respective kingdoms and the passes across the Pyrenees that they controlled to the retreating Anglo-Gascon force, receiving in return the prince’s personal guarantee to pay handsomely for any damage done to their respective realms.37 For his part, Edward took up the king of Navarre’s offer since re-crossing by way of Roncesvalles would provide a considerably faster and almost certainly safer route back to Aquitaine. He arrived in Bayonne to a hero’s welcome, and after remaining there for four days, moved on to his capital at Bordeaux where the welcome was repeated. Here, his wife and three year old son, Edward, rode out to greet him after which the family reentered the city in triumph. 3

Live to Fight Another Day/Enrique II’s Flight and Return

Chroniclers generally agreed that Enrique II fought well at Nájera. The king remained on the battlefield, trying to rally his men until the rout began and it became clear to all that the battle was lost. Only then, rather than risk capture 34  According to Froissart (Johnes), 1:379 (chap. ccxliii): “[The prince’s] people who were anxious to return [to Guienne] (for the air and heat of Spain had been very hurtful to their health, even the prince himself was unwell and in low spirits) recommended a retreat….” No comparable passage appears at this point in the Amiens manuscript. 35  Ayala, Pedro I, 576 (1367, chap. xxxii), see esp. the editor’s note (ftn. 1) quoting an alternate version of the chronicle. 36  Froissart supplies the best account of this final hurdle. See: Froissart (Johnes), 1:379–81 (chap. ccxliii). A much abbreviated mention appears in Froissart (Diller), 3:446. See also: Chandos Herald (1910), 115–16, 166–67 (3713–3767). 37  Kagay, “Disposable Alliances,” 126.

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and almost certain death at Pedro’s hands, did he join the army in flight. Following the battle, when the large stallion Enrique had ridden proved too tired to carry its rider to safety, the king’s squire turned over his own mount to the royal fugitive who then made good his escape, accompanied only by a small group of nobles.38 Although Enrique joined his troops in flight, he did not follow the same crowded path that most of the survivors took, a path that led inexorably to the bridge across the Najarilla where men and horses were hopelessly pressed together. If, as sources indicate, he numbered among the last to flee from the battlefield, any retreat in that direction would have been largely unavailing. Consequently, Ayala’s oversimplified assertion that Enrique “set out from the town of Nájera on the road to Soria, in the direction of Aragon”39 fails to do justice to the harrowing journey that actually transpired. The Castilian right where the king had fought lay on the southern side of the battlefield. With the victorious English army now advancing along the entire front, killing and capturing Castilians and Frenchmen, Enrique and his small entourage could only hope to avoid this net by swinging farther south before reaching the swollen river. The fugitives appear to have followed a road that ran south from Nájera until it connected with others that turn eastward toward the city of Soria, not far from the border with Aragon.40 Skirting Soria, a place that had remained loyal 38  Ayala, Pedro I, 559 (1367, chap. xiv). See also: Zurita, Anales, 4:559 (IX, lxvii). The chronicler names only a few of these men, but indicates that there were others as well. The story of Enrique’s flight finds an echo in what would famously occur nearly two decades later when Enrique’s son, Juan I, escaped from the battlefield of Aljubarrota (1385) on a horse given him by one of his leading advisers, Pedro González de Mendoza. At Nájera, Mendoza fought on the right flank with Enrique and the count of Denia. He had been captured and, in this way, managed to survive the battle. At Aljubarrota, he would not be as lucky. Minus his horse, he was killed by the Portuguese who, in their pursuit of the Spanish invaders, were considerably less inclined to take prisoners than the English had been at Nájera. 39  Ayala, Pedro I, 559 (1367, chap. xiv). While Ayala’s account may be oversimplified, Froissart is completely off the mark: “King Henry … escaped the best way he could and leaving his enemies behind him, conducted his wife and children as quickly as he was able to the city of Valencia where the king of Aragon resided…. King Henry then departed from the king of Aragon, leaving his wife and children in the city of Valencia.” Froissart (Johnes), 1:377 (chap. ccxliii). 40  On-site research conducted during the summer of 2011 has convinced us that the fugitives almost certainly followed this route during their precipitate flight into Aragonese territory. Today, the road south from the battlefield is the LR–136 which quickly runs into the LR–113. Following this beyond the westward turn-off for the monastery, one encounters a road—the LR–23—that runs east to the N–111, a main highway that in turn runs directly

Map 11

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Logroño

lllueca

Vitoria-Gasteiz Pamplona

Bilbao

Dax

Auch

Zaragoza

Huesca

Jaca

Lleida

PYRENEES

Lourdes

Orthez Bayonne San Sebastián Pau

Enrique II’s escape route from Nájera to Southern France

Valladolid

Palencia

Burgos

Santander

Tarragona

Béziers

Barcelona

Girona

Perpignan

Carcassonne

Albi

Andorra

Toulouse

Montauban

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to Pedro, the fugitive party continued its journey to the frontier with Aragon which it crossed41 just north of Calatayud, at a place that belonged to one of Enrique’s staunchest supporters in that kingdom, Juan Martínez de Luna. From here, another young member of the family, Pedro de Luna, who decades later would become the schismatic Pope Benedict XIII (r. 1394–1423), undertook to lead the fugitives northward on a safe route to the Pyrenees.42 At this point, such an escort through Aragon was by no means unwarranted since Enrique was now considerably more at risk than the last time he had stood on territory belonging to his longtime employer and ally, Pere III. The relationship between the two men had begun to sour months earlier when Castile’s newly-crowned monarch baulked at turning over to Aragon the Castilian territories he had promised his patron on numerous occasions. Now, following the crushing defeat at Nájera, Enrique was a man running for his life without an army and, at that moment, no very good prospects of getting one. At the same time, the party within Aragon that opposed once again supporting the pretender was now clearly in the ascendant. One notable member of this group was the highly-talented, strong-willed queen of Aragon, Elionor of Sicily, who had played a major role in conducting the War of the Two Pedros and who exercised considerable influence with her husband.43 She even referred to the old enemy, Pedro I, as “more honest” (mas honesta) that the former friend.44 On April 7, four days after the battle, news of its outcome reached Pere III. The king immediately wrote to several of his leading advisers, the bishops of Urgel and Gerona, informing them of what he had heard and of his decision to call the Catalan parliament into session in order to help raise forces for defense against any hostile action by the Anglo-Gascon army that had just smashed his erstwhile ally.45

south to Soria. The total distance is approximately 132 kilometers (82 miles). To visualize this route, see Map 11. 41  Ayala, Pedro I, 559 (chap. xiv). Ayala picks up the narrative only when the fugitives reached Soria. See also: Zurita, Anales, 4:559 (IX, lxviii). 42  Zurita, Anales, 4:559 (IX, lxviii). For more about the close connection between Enrique and the Aragonese house of Luna, see: L.J. Andrew Villalon, “Don Alvaro de Luna and the Indictment Against Royal Favoritism in Late Medieval Castile,” in The Emergence of LeónCastile, c. 1065–1500, Essays Presented to J.F. O’Callaghan, ed. James J. Todesca (Farnham, England, 2015), 161–83. 43  Ayala, Pedro I, pp. 560 [1367, chap. xvii]; Zurita, Anales, 4:566 [IX, lxx]. One of the authors of this book, Donald Kagay, is currently writing a biography of this fascinating medieval “woman of power.” 44  Zurita, Anales, 4:566 (IX, lxx). 45  Miret y Sans, “Négociations,” 113.

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At almost the same moment Pere received news of Enrique’s defeat at Nájera, he also learned of his former ally’s escape from the battlefield and flight into Aragon. The king immediately composed a letter to the fugitive, commiserating over the battle’s outcome.46 On the other hand, when Enrique asked that Pere assemble a new military force at Calatayud to continue the struggle against Pedro, the king made no move to comply. While expressions of sympathy might be all well and good, he had no intention of taking concrete steps to continue the fight. It became his new policy to avoid doing anything that might incite the victors to unleash their army against him. Reinforcing the king’s determination was a rumor that grew up in the immediate aftermath of the battle to the effect that the prince’s brother, the duke of Lancaster, and Pere’s old enemy, the king of Majorca, were about to lead the majority of the army into Aragon. At the same time he was divesting himself of his now inconvenient ties to a defeated ally, Pere hurried to open up contact with the winners. Consequently, it came as an enormous relief when he learned that on the Monday following the battle, the prince had dispatched a delegation bearing instructions to begin negotiations for a treaty of friendship with Aragon, a delegation that included Hugh Calveley who had served Pere the year before and been well-rewarded for his service.47 In response, after some preliminary contact, Pere named a high-ranking delegation of his own to conduct talks not only with Edward’s negotiators, but also representatives sent by his former enemy, Pedro of Castile. Notably, two of the men he appointed numbered among those most strongly opposed to extending any further aid to Enrique de Trastámara.48 The most pressing matter under discussion became the fate of the fugitive king. In return for obtaining a treaty that removed any immediate threat to Aragon, Pere agreed not to give any aid or show any favor to his former ally and protegé. Included in this overall commitment was a royal promise not to allow Enrique or any of his forces (if indeed he could raise any) to pass through Aragonese territory in order to make war on Castile. Having crossed into Aragon, Enrique, now a hopeless fugitive, quickly sensed the way the wind was blowing; the sooner he left that kingdom and reached French-held territory, the safer he would be. In light of this, his guide, the future pope, gave a wide birth to the capital of Zaragoza, following instead 46  Ibid. 47  See Chapter 9, esp. pp. 155–161. 48  Ayala, Pedro I, 560 (1367, chap. xvii); Zurita, Anales, 4:562 (IX, lxix). See also: Russell, English Intervention, 114–15, 123; Taggie, “Castillian Foreign Policy,” 354; Kagay, “Disposable Alliances,” 125, 128.

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a different route that led northward to Jaca, a town very near one of the major passes across the Pyrenees. From here, Enrique and his men quickly crossed the mountains, to a place held by the count of Foix, Gaston Phoebus. The count, ostensibly an ally of the Black Prince, now faced a serious dilemma: should he give hospitality to the royal fugitive or hold him for Edward. Although he ultimately decided to welcome rather than arrest Enrique, his respect for and fear of the prince led him to shuttle off his guest just as quickly as possible to the city of Toulouse (Tolosa) well to the east of Foix within the French province of Languedoc. Here, Enrique could finally feel safe as he was made welcome by the governor of the province, Charles V’s younger brother, Duke Louis of Anjou.49 On the other hand, although they welcomed the fugitive, neither the duke nor Pope Urban V in nearby Avignon, would actually meet with him, despite the fact that both men had been major sponsors of the 1366 expedition that had placed him on the throne. Clearly, Enrique’s presence, following his defeat, was an embarrassment, one that endangered the shaky peace with England. The duke also feared that his brother, the king, would react negatively to any willingness on his part to aid their former client. Eventually, a clandestine meeting was arranged in a tower guarding the French side of the bridge into Avignon during the course of which Anjou strongly recommended that his guest contact the king of France directly and appeal for renewed French assistance.50 The duke need not have worried. When an answer arrived from his royal brother in Paris, it strongly reaffirmed his support for Enrique. Despite any misgivings he might have had, Charles V ordered his younger brother to help resurrect their client’s cause and rebuild his shattered army. With the new resources made available by the French crown, the fugitive began recruiting fighting men from among the ever-present Free Companies while, at the same time, he greeted returning veterans of Nájera, purchasing arms and armor for them in nearby Avignon.51 Enrique was also able to retrieve his wife and family who had followed him to France. When news of the disaster first reached Burgos, the archbishops of Toledo and Zaragoza took charge of the royal household including Enrique’s wife, Juana, his children, Juan and Leonor, and the king of Aragon’s daughter, Elionor, officially affianced to Prince Juan. They and a small party of retainers left the city, taking care to elude first Pedro’s forces that almost immediately arrived there, then the bulk of the English army moving westward along the 49  Ayala, Pedro I, 559 (1367, chap. xiv). 50  Ibid., 574–75 (1367, chap. xxx). 51  Ibid.

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pilgrim route. Despite any and all dangers, the archbishops with the royal family in tow arrived safely at the Aragonese frontier. Eight days after the battle, Pere learned of their arrival.52 The king immediately wrote to the royal governor in Daroca, instructing him to extend a welcome to Doña Juana, but to allow her to rest there for only three or four days, after which the governor was to send her on to the king.53 When she arrived at Zaragoza, Pere immediately reclaimed his daughter and renounced the marriage treaty he and Enrique had drawn up, affiancing the princess to Enrique’s son, Juan. And while the king did not imprison Enrique’s family, their presence in Aragon was far from secure. Pere’s undisguised eagerness to begin negotiations with the Black Prince and Pedro I left Juana and her children as potentially valuable pawns in the king’s efforts to protect Aragonese interests. As negotiations progressed, the situation for Enrique’s queen and their children became ever more precarious. Eventually, when Juana consulted with members of the party that supported her husband, they strongly recommended that she depart for France while she still could. Having secured a royal safe-conduct to leave the realm, the queen followed her husband across the Pyrenees, eventually catching up with him in the county of Cessenon bestowed upon him by the French king.54 As the summer of 1367 wore on, Enrique continued to receive ever improving news from Spain. He learned that Pedro and the prince had quarreled due largely to Pedro’s failure to pay his debt. Many of the nobles released after the battle had retreated behind their castle walls and from there resurrected the struggle against the hated king. Towns and cities, including such important places as Segovia, Valladolid, Palencia, and Avila, had all announced for Enrique. Members of the military Order of Santiago, led by the grandmaster, were harassing Pedro’s forces in the south. Enrique even heard from some of the Englishmen who had once served him that they were ready to return to his side as soon as the prince evacuated Castile.55 Around mid-August, when it became known that Edward had decided to leave the peninsula, Enrique attended a meeting at Aigues-Mortes (Aguasmuertas) with representatives of the French crown. Here they signed a compact committing the French to back his second attempt to conquer Castile. 52  Ayala, Pedro I, 560 (1367, chap. xv); Chandos Herald (1910), 110, 165 (3565–3574). Froissart (Johnes), 1:377 (chap. ccxliii); Zurita, Anales, 4:560 (IX, lxviii). For his part, the herald records a sad lament (very likely apocryphal) on the part of Enrique’s queen as she is forced to flee for her life. 53  Miret y Sans, Negociations, 114. 54  Ayala, Pedro I, 560 (1367, chap. xvii); Zurita, Anales, 4:566–67 (IX, lxx). 55  Ayala, Pedro I, 575 (1367, chap. xxxi); Zurita, Anales, 4:567–68 (IX, lxx).

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Shortly after the signing, Enrique rejoined his family. Thereafter, leaving his daughter in France, he, his wife, and their son, Juan, crossed back into Aragon on their way to Castile.56 Early in September, Pere III received a letter from his former ally once again requesting military aid in this latest endeavor and informing the king of an intention to traverse his kingdom. The Aragonese monarch replied, telling of his recent treaty with the Black Prince in which he agreed to block Enrique’s passage.57 For his part, the returning fugitive expressed wonder at this hostile ultimatum given their long history of friendship, but warned his former ally that he and his army would move through Aragonese territory and if forced to do so, would fight to achieve that passage. In the end, with the aid of a party in Aragon that still supported him, Enrique managed to reach the Navarrese border without having to face the sizeable force Pere had gathered to stop him.58 (Just how determined the Aragonese monarch was to stopping his former ally from traversing the kingdom is debateable.) Afterwards, following a brief journey across the southern tip of Navarre, Enrique reentered Castile near Calahorra, the city where he had been proclaimed king a year and a half earlier.59 Having failed to arrest the passage of Enrique’s new army, Pere III now also failed (or perhaps did not even try) to stop the exodus of those Castilians, both men and women, who had taken refuge in Zaragoza after Nájera. When Enrique arrived in Calahorra, he summoned these men to rejoin him and sent out companies to meet them along the way, as they marched back into Castile led by the Archbishop of Toledo.60 According to Ayala, on approaching the frontier, the man who would again be king asked those around him if he had indeed crossed back into Castile. When told that he had, he dismounted and falling to his knees, drew a cross in the sand along the banks of the Ebro. Kissing it, he intoned in a loud voice, “I swear on this cross that never again in my life, whatever the circumstances, 56   Ayala, Pedro I, 576–77 (1367, chap. xxxii–xxiv); Zurita, Anales, 4:569 (IX, lxx). 57  Ayala, Pedro I, 576–77 (1367, chap. xxxiii); Zurita, Anales, 4:568–71 (IX, lxx). See also: Gutiérrez de Velasco, “Ingleses en España,” 252; Kagay, “Disposable Alliances,” 127–28. 58  Ayala was clearly mistaken when he wrote of a passage being made through the valley of Andorra. This would have placed Enrique far to the east and necessitated his marching through much of Catalonia as well as Aragon. Zurita cleared up this error in his history, a clarification repeated by the nineteenth century editor of Pedro’s chronicle as a lengthy footnote. See: Ayala, Pedro I, 576–77 (1367, chap. xxxiii, esp. note 5). Zurita, Anales, 4:570 (IX, lxx). 59  Ayala, Pedro I, 577 (1367, chap. xxxiii). 60  Ibid.

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will I desert the realm of Castile; instead, there I shall await death or whatever comes my way.”61 4

The King is Dead/Long Live the King

In retrospect, it is clear that English withdrawal sealed Pedro’s fate. During the autumn of 1367, when Enrique led his rebuilt army back into Castile, many of the nobles who had not already rejoined him in France now flocked to his banner. To confront them, Pedro I could muster only his Castilian supporters, some of whom were of dubious loyalty,62 and a large force of Moorish auxiliaries, supplied by his last real ally, the king of Granada. Gone were the battlehardened English veterans and their longbows that had achieved victory at Nájera. There followed over a year-and-a-half of intermittent civil war during which the two monarchs clashed with one another throughout the kingdom. On the whole, Enrique, with continuing backing from the French crown and the support of his Franco-Breton mercenaries, had the better of this military sparring as he slowly regained much of the ground lost after Nájera. Eventually, the war came to focus on the city of Toledo, held by an uncharacteristically loyal party of Pedro’s supporters and closely besieged by Enrique’s main army for over ten months. Early in the spring of 1369, threatened once again with the loss of the most important city in central Castile, Pedro finally marched north from Seville with a large relief force.63 Rather than await the enemy’s arrival, Enrique split his forces, leaving only part of his army to maintain the siege while he and his constable, Bertrand DuGuesclin, who had returned to Spain following his release from captivity, hurried southward with the rest, including a large force of the Franco-Bretons. Just before dawn on March 13/14, this force suddenly fell upon Pedro’s army which was encamped near Montiel, a small town belonging to the Order of Santiago. Taken completely by surprise, the king’s host fled from the field, while he and a small entourage were forced to seek shelter in the hilltop castle overlooking the town.64

61  Ibid., 577–78 (1367, chap. xxxiv). 62  One of Pedro’s final acts before marching north from Seville to relieve the siege of Toledo was to arrest and execute one of his own supporters, the master of Calatrava, Diego García de Padilla, a relative of his longtime mistress, María de Padilla. The king suspected that the grandmaster had been negotiating with members of the enemy party. Ibid., 585–86 (1369, chap. ii). 63  Ibid., 588–89 (1369, chaps. iv–v). 64  Ibid., 589–90 (1369, chap. vi). See also: Estow, Pedro the Cruel, 259.

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Ten days later, with provisions running low, Pedro tried to buy his way out of Montiel using for the purpose a trusted subordinate, a man once held prisoner by the French mercenaries with whom he was negotiating.65 Although at first, DuGuesclin refused these overtures out-of-hand, later he appears to have had a change of heart. After conferring with some of his advisers, the Frenchman decided to lay the whole matter before his employer. When informed of Pedro’s offer, Enrique thanked his general profusely, then made a counter-proposal: he would invest DuGuesclin with the same properties offered by his rival if he and the French mercenaries were able to lure Pedro out of the castle. DuGuesclin agreed. Afterwards, assurances were conveyed to Pedro through their go-between. Believing that he had struck a bargain with the French leader, in the wee hours of the morning, Pedro led a few close supporters out of his hilltop refuge. During the next several hours, a great medieval drama unfolded beneath the castle walls. At the foot of the hill, the royal party was prevented from going any farther by those same Frenchmen Pedro thought he had bribed. Instead, they escorted the king and several of his followers to one of their tents. A short while later, Enrique arrived. Upon entering, he asked in a loud voice, “Who is the son of a Jewish whore who calls himself king of Castile?” Apparently, without hesitation, Pedro replied, “Thou art the son of a whore, I am the son of Alfonso.” The two men grappled and tumbled to the ground and, for a brief moment, Pedro, the larger of the two, held the advantage. However, any pretense of a fair fight ended as Enrique’s men intervened. One of them, possibly the bègue de Villaines, gave his master time to draw a dagger and use it. The rest then closed in to finish off the wounded monarch. Afterwards, they tossed Pedro’s body out of the tent where, for three days, it lay, exposed not only to the elements and camp animals, but also to the monarch’s former subjects, some of whom took this last opportunity to avenge themselves on the corpse. Only then was the body given a hasty burial while the head was sent on to Toledo where it had the desired effect of encouraging the city’s surrender. By the grace of God (and the stroke of his poniard), Enrique II had put an end to his rival and become the first monarch of the Trastámaran Dynasty. 65  The story surrounding these dramatic events is told in a number of contemporary sources whose accounts differ in several important respects. See: Ayala, Pedro I, 591–92 (1369, chap. viii); Froissart (Johnes), 1:388–89 (ccxlv); Pere III, Chronicle, 2:580–81; CQPV, 198–99. Here, we have largely followed the version set forth by Ayala, although we have adopted Froissart’s rendition of a brief verbal exchange that took place between the two men. Villalon analyzes in some detail the differences between the various accounts in his article, “Pedro the Cruel,” 201–2.

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Even this brutally conclusive deed did not terminate the political and military crisis that beset Castile.66 The new king still had to face an array of enemies that included not only the unreconciled supporters of the murdered monarch, but also the kingdoms of Portugal, Aragon, and Granada, all of which were seeking to profit at the expense of their war-weary neighbor. Enrique II would spend nearly five more years of fairly constant campaigning before he managed to solidify his hold on the realm.67 Even after having ended the threat from his Iberian neighbors, he still faced the danger that England might once again invade Castile, this time to make good a claim to the throne which the duke of Lancaster had secured through his marriage to Pedro’s second daughter, Constanza.68 And although this did not actually materialize in his lifetime, just such an invasion did eventually take place in the late 1380’s, during the reign of his son, Juan I (r. 1379–1390). 5

Long Term Consequences for Castile

To begin with, the War of the Two Pedros settled once and for all the boundary between the two kingdoms—Castile and the Crown of Aragon—a boundary that had been left relatively fluid by the great thirteenth century advances of the reconquista. This was especially the case in the south where Murcia and Valencia abutted one another. Despite the severe turbulence that continued throughout the half dozen years immediately following the war, the boundaries established during that conflict would remain in place throughout the final century of the two kingdoms’ independent existence. These boundaries were the same on October 19, 1469, (one hundred years after Pedro’s assassination at

66   A prominent Spanish medievalist, Luis Suárez Fernández, characterizes the situation: “the death of Pedro the Cruel, far from being the definitive solution to the civil war, amplified it.” And while this may be something of an overstatement, it is not all that far off the mark. Enrique II would have to undertake nearly five more years of fairly constant military campaigning before managing to solidify his hold on the realm. Through much of that period, French military support remained critical. See: Luis Suárez Fernández, “Política Internacional de Enrique II,” Hispania 16 (1956): 16–129. 67  Having successfully made the transition to serving the new dynasty, Ayala would also write the chronicle of the second king he served, a good part of which dealt with the continuing political and military problems that Enrique II confronted. See:Ayala, Enrique II, 1–64. 68  For a brief summary of the intervention and the events surrounding it, see: L.J. Andrew Villalon, “War and the Great Schism in the Iberian Peninsula: The Interrelated Cases of Castile and Portugal,” JMMH, 12 (2014): 217–37.

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Montiel) when the heirs to the two kingdoms—Fernando of Aragon (r. 1479– 1516) and Isabel of Castile (r. 1474–1504)—united them through marriage.69 The War of the Two Pedros and the civil war for the Castilian throne that grew out of it brought to power in Castile a new dynasty, the House of Trastámara, that drew its name from the title conferred upon its founder, Enrique II, by his royal father, King Alfonso XI.70 Early in the following century (1412), one branch of this dynasty also came to power in the neighboring Crown of Aragon; and in 1469, the two branches were reunited by the marriage of Fernando and Isabel. Through their joint efforts, the royal couple, who soon became known as the Catholic Monarchs, managed to add to their holdings two missing pieces of the Spanish puzzle—Granada in 1492 and Navarre in 1512—giving rise to a Spanish kingdom that would in short order become the most powerful state in early modern Europe. This unification of most of the Iberian Peninsula into this single political unit as well the concurrent launching of Spanish expansion in the New World were by far and away the most important contributions of the Trastámaran dynasty. They would also be the last. When Isabel died in 1504, the heir apparent to the throne of Castile was her eldest surviving daughter, Juana, whose unbalanced behavior gave rise to the unflattering sobriquet, “la Loca” (the Mad). In an attempt to mitigate the problem, one of the queen’s last acts was to appoint her husband, Fernando, as regent of Castile for their daughter. Despite the clear terms of her will, the Castilian nobles threw their support instead to Juana’s Flemish husband, Philip “the Handsome,” heir to the ancient house of Hapsburg, who then reigned briefly as Philip I (r. 1504–1506). Following Philip’s premature death in 1506, Fernando returned as regent of Castile, a position he would retain alongside the Crown of Aragon until his death in 1516 when he was succeeded in both realms by Philip’s and Juana’s eldest son, Charles I of Spain, better known among non-Spanish scholars by his imperial title, Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire. Since the new emperor’s mother was still alive, the two of them would be declared co-monarchs in Castile, a situation that would endure until 1555 when this last, female member of the house of Trastámara finally died, following a lifetime of confinement to her palace in the city of Tordesillas. The War of the Two Pedros initiated a long hiatus in the reconquista, one that would endure for the better part of a century-and-a-half. Throughout most of the reign of Alfonso XI, Castilian energies had been directed southward, first 69  In 1474, Fernando and Isabel succeeded to the Castilian throne. Not until 1479 did Fernando came into his own inheritance, the crown of Aragon. 70  O’Callaghan, History, 410; Russell, English Intervention, 15.

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in a successful effort to crush the final wave of Islamic invaders from North Africa, then to launch an attack on the one remaining Islamic stronghold on the peninsula, the mountainous kingdom of Granada. There is no reason to believe that the king would have abandoned these policies had he not contracted plague and died during his ill-fated siege of Gibraltar in 1350. Almost immediately upon succeeding to the throne, the king’s son, Pedro I, began what would ultimately become a near complete renunciation of his father’s diplomatic and military policies. One of the new king’s first actions was to establish a peace with the ruler of Granada, Muhammad V. Several years later, when Pedro redirected his nation’s military efforts eastward against the Crown of Aragon, Muhammad became one of his principal allies in the war, as a result of which the Muslim kingdom regularly supplied Castile with both troops and ships. After Pedro alienated the English who had put him back on the throne, the ruler of Granada became his only remaining ally. As a result, much of the army that Enrique and DuGuesclin defeated at Montiel was composed of Muslim troops. Despite the end of the conflict with Aragon and Pedro’s assassination three years later, the reconquista that had dominated Alfonso XI’s efforts did not find a new champion in that monarch’s illegitimate son. Even though Enrique II had begun his long and for the most part successful military career fighting beside his father at the siege of Gibraltar, the events of his own turbulent reign left him no time to resurrect Castile’s ancient crusade. Instead, this first Trastámaran was forced to devote almost all of his military efforts to solidifying his hold on the throne he had usurped. Even his two short wars with Portugal were undertaken for the preservation of the fledgling dynasty. In fact, Enrique’s only military endeavors not directed to this end were on behalf of France in its renewed struggle with England. Nor did Enrique’s son, Juan I (r. 1379–1390), reignite the war against Spanish Islam. Early in his reign, this second Trastámaran monarch became embroiled in a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to make good his wife’s claim on the throne of Portugal; an attempt that saw plague decimate one Castilian army besieging Lisbon in summer, 1384, while another was crushed at the battle of Aljubarrota on August 14, 1385. Just under a year later, in July, 1386, came a second English invasion of Castile, this one led by the Black Prince’s younger brother, the duke of Lancaster, and backed by the Portuguese. Lancaster, who had married Pedro I’s eldest surviving daughter, Constanza, landed an English army in northwestern Spain in hopes of placing her on the throne. Although the invasion ultimately proved unsuccessful when most of the Castilian population continued to support the house of Trastámara, it would absorb Juan I’s

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complete attention for the next two years, until a marriage between his eldest son and the duke’s daughter finally settled the conflict. In short, in the roughly four decades following Alfonso XI’s death, the momentum of the reconquista died away. Several fifteenth-century attempts to resume the fight against Islam were either unsuccessful or too brief to accomplish much. Not until the end of the century with the succession of the last and greatest Trastámaras, Fernando and Isabel, did the new Spain that they were building finally resurrect and complete the struggle of over eight centuries to erase Muslim rule in Iberia. In January, 1492, Granada opened its gates to the conquering royal couple. The War of the Two Pedros also helped create one of the hallmarks of the Trastámaran period—a Franco-Castilian alliance that would play a significant role in western European diplomacy for well over a century. Only at the end of the fifteenth century would a rapidly changing international situation not only shatter this longstanding agreement, but convert the two powers into the foremost adversaries of the early modern age. French influence in Castile was nothing new. Throughout the reconquista, French knights had regularly journeyed onto the peninsula to take part in the on-going conflict against Islam, helping to push the kingdom’s borders ever farther southward. Meanwhile, French churchmen, in particular, members of the Cluniac Order, entered Iberia to establish churches and monasteries. Their presence was such that the Camino de Santiago, the famed pilgrim route that runs across northern Castile, was occasionally referred to as the via francorum, “the way of the French.” This historical connection between France and Castile took on new life in 1366, when the French monarch, Charles V, decided to back Enrique de Trastámara’s bid to seize the Castilian throne. Not only did King Charles help finance the multi-national expedition that brought this about, he also paid to the English a good part of Bertrand DuGuesclin’s ransom, making it possible for that nobleman to command the Free Companies that would play a crucial role in the expedition’s success. On the other hand, what may have been the most critical moment in forging this new alliance between France and Castile came during the following year, after Trastámara’s disastrous defeat at Nájera. Having been deserted by one of his two major sponsors, Pere III of Aragon, Enrique fled to France, where he appealed to the king’s brother, Duke Louis of Anjou, for renewed French aid. While inclined to help the fugitive, neither the duke nor Pope Urban V would actually commit to supporting his cause without an explicit statement of support by the French king.

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Although Enrique had rashly accepted the wager of battle, thereby rejecting the French monarch’s wise advice not to fight a stand-up encounter against the English, Charles proved ready and willing to restore his backing to what at that moment probably seemed to be a highly unpromising venture. Despite any misgivings he might have had, he ordered his younger brother, Louis, to help the fugitive resurrect his cause and rebuild his army. The king ordered Anjou to immediately turn over 50,000 gold francs, an amount that would be levied on the city of Narbonne. He also conferred upon the suppliant the castle of Pierapetusa outside of that city as well as the small county of Cessenon which Enrique had once briefly held while serving the previous French king as a mercenary. Duke Louis added to the pot 100,000 francs of his own. This French backing made possible the rebuilding of Enrique’s force. Around mid-August, 1367, as the Black Prince was in the process of evacuating the peninsula, a meeting took place in southern France at a place called Aigues-Mortes (Aguas-muertas) between Enrique and representatives of the French crown led by the duke of Anjou and Cardinal Guy of Boulogne, long the papal legate to Spain. Here, the participants signed a compact committing France to back this second attempt to seize the throne of Castile. It became the first written expression of the Franco-Castilian alliance that would endure for more than a century.71 Throughout the ensuing struggle for the crown, the relationship between France and the founder of the Trastámaran dynasty became ever closer. A significant segment of Enrique’s army consisted of French mercenaries, serving under several of the same French captains who had previously fought for him at Nájera. These included DuGuesclin who, despite having been captured at the battle, hurried back to Spain as soon as his new ransom had been paid, once again by the French crown. As a result, in spring, 1369, Enrique was able to surprise and overwhelm Pedro’s army near the castle of Montiel. A few days later, with an assist from DuGuesclin’s mercenaries, he lured his hated halfbrother out from behind the castle walls and assassinated him.72 Only when his client’s victory seemed assured did the French monarch finally recall these Frenchmen to take part in their own kingdom’s renewed struggle against England; at which time, he appointed their leader, DuGuesclin, to the realm’s supreme military position, constable of France. In November, 1368, a few months before the battle of Montiel, Charles V had sent another diplomatic delegation to meet with Enrique at his siege camp

71  Ayala, Pedro I, 576–77 (1367, chap. xxxii–xxiv); Zurita, Anales, 4:569 (IX, lxx). 72  For a lengthier account of Pedro’s dramatic assassination below the walls of Montiel, see Villalon “Pedro the Cruel,” 201–16.

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outside of Toledo.73 Here, both parties reaffirmed the mutual commitment made at Aigues-Mortes a year earlier, emphasizing in particular its military aspects. First, that King Charles of France and King Enrique of Castile would be friends of friends and enemies of enemies (amigos de amigos, é enemigos de enemigos) and that they would aid one another against any other person in the world; and that this (agreement) would remain firm between them and their sons and heirs, born and yet to be born; and that none of these persons would make any treaty with any enemy without the consent of the other….74 These terms would very soon propel Castile into the Hundred Years War on the French side. At almost the same time Enrique achieved victory over Pedro, the great conflict once again broke out north of the Pyrenees. Upon his return to Aquitaine in the autumn of 1367, the Black Prince had received a conqueror’s welcome, first in Bayonne, then with even greater ceremony in Bordeaux.75 Unfortunately for Edward, this warm welcome could not erase the fact that his glorious adventure in Spain had turned into a costly fiasco.76 The prince now faced the pressing question of just how he was going to satisfy the debts which he had contracted at the beginning of the expedition and which he had been unable to collect from Pedro. Most of the hard-bitten warriors who had signed onto the expedition had done so due to Edward’s guarantee of compensation; consequently, in the end, he was forced to absorb much of the cost. For his part, all he really had to show for his trouble were a few spectacular jewels77 and two impecunious princesses (the eldest of the three, Beatriz, having chosen to take the veil.)78 73  Ayala places this meeting in the beginning of 1369. The treaty, however, is dated November, 1368. Ayala, Pedro I, 585 (1369, chap. i), see editor’s note 1. 74  Ibid. 75  Chandos Herald (1910), 116, 167 (3747–3749, 3754–3756). 76  It is Froissart who lays out clearly how the financial demands of the expedition led to the imposition of a hearth tax and how opposition by the great Gascon lords sparked the renewal of conflict between England and France. Neither Ayala nor the Chandos herald explores this connection. For his part, the herald makes it sound as if the Gascon lords chose to desert the prince simply because of his having fallen ill. See: Froissart (Johnes), 1:381–84 (chap. ccxliv), 390–96 (chap. ccxlvi–ccxlviii). The Amiens manuscript of Froissart is far less expansive on this issue. Chandos Herald (1910), 118–19, 167–68 (3815–3840). 77  One of these, the so-called “Black Prince’s Ruby” (which is in fact not a ruby), numbers among the oldest of England’s crown jewels, now incorporated into the Imperial State Crown, the first version of which dates to the fifteenth century. 78  Ayala, Pedro I, 549 (1367, chap. xxiv).

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In order to honor these commitments, he taxed the treasury of Aquitaine to the breaking point, overstrained as it already was by years of the prince and his lady presiding over one the most splendid and expensive courts in Europe.79 Now, in an attempt to recoup his losses without endangering his costly lifestyle, Edward decided to impose a new hearth tax ( fouage) throughout all English lands on the continent for a period of five years “or until he should have satisfied the large debt which had been caused by the Spanish expedition.” Once again, as with the Spanish expedition itself, Edward’s loyal constable and longtime comrade-in-arms, John Chandos, inveighed against what he regarded as a hazardous course of action. According to Chandos, new taxes would simply increase the already spreading disenchantment with English rule. Once again, he was overruled. This time, the constable requested and received permission to withdraw to his estates in Normandy. Here, he would remain for many months, until the outbreak of hostilities led to his recall and, shortly thereafter, his death. In order to ram through his fouage, the prince summoned a council of leading vassals and representatives of the major towns to “discuss” the issue. Although some grudgingly accepted it on the condition that the prince would not debase his currency for seven years, not so the great lords of Gascony, including several who had recently fought on Edward’s side at Nájera. They now argued that such taxes had not been imposed on them while under French rule and that they should not now be imposed by the English. The Gascon lords journeyed to Paris where in clear violation of the reaty of Brétigny, they appealed directly to Charles V as their supreme overlord for redress.80 Although hesitant at first, in late January, 1369, at the urging of both the war party in his council and the Gascon lords, the king ordered his chancellery to draw up an imperious letter, summoning the Black Prince to appear before the parlement of Paris to answer the Gascon complaints.81 Edward’s reply 79  In speaking of the prince’s financial embarrassment, immediately after citing as a reason the expenses of the Spanish expedition, Froissart adds the following statement: “The establishments of the prince and the princess were so grand, that no prince in Christendom maintained greater magnificence.” This is but one of many such allusions to their luxurious lifestyle found in the sources. See: Froissart (Johnes), 1:383 (chap. ccxliv). 80  At first, the king cautiously agreed only to consult with his advisers and his lawyers concerning the terms of the treaties he had signed with England. Later, having concluded that it was time to renew conflict with England and seizing the opportunity to win support in territories he hoped to regain, he intervened. Froissart (Johnes), 1:383–84 (chap. ccxliv). Froissart (Diller), 3:459. 81  The letter, reproduced by Froissart, is dated January 29, 1369. Froissart (Johnes), 1:394–95 (chap. ccxlvii). See also: Froissart (Diller), 3:459.

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was anything but conciliatory. He threatened to march on Paris at the head of an army. In the end, the Gascons rebelled against both the tax and what many regarded as the overbearing nature of English rule. France swiftly came to their aid, and, by the end of the 1360s, the conflict was back in full swing. This time, however, the results would be very different. Throughout the next decade, there were to be no great English victories. Instead, employing a Fabian policy, the French king and his new constable won back much of what the English had taken during the first two decades of their conflict. In this phase of the war, France enjoyed extensive military support from Castile. Ironically, English intervention in Spain had helped bring about exactly what the Black Prince had sought to prevent by returning Pedro to the throne. Following the disaster at Nájera and Charles V’s generous response, Enrique II’s gratitude to the French crown grew immeasurably. Upon completing his own civil war, the first Trastámaran entered the struggle against England.82 Just as French troops had consistently supported him, he now made an important contribution to the French war effort. Although the Castilian king briefly led a Spanish invasion of English territory in southern France,83 it was not on land that Castile was destined to play a critical role. The Franco-Castilian alliance of November, 1368, had stressed the importance of Castilian naval support. Since the battle of Sluys nearly thirty years earlier, the English navy had largely controlled the Bay of Biscay, facilitating contact with it major port cities in Guienne, including Bordeaux, Bayonne, and La Rochelle. The insertion of the Castilian fleet would quickly change the equation. Castile’s major contribution to the war effort came as early as June, 1372, five years after Nájera, when its navy smashed an English relief fleet off the port of La Rochelle and captured the English leaders.84 Afterwards, the inhabitants of the city, having lost all hope of relief from England, surrendered to a besieging French army.85 Not only did the French regain this important port city giving them another base from which to carry out their naval operations, they also captured one of the leading English captains and a veteran

82  Hardy, Syllabus, 448. 83  For more about this brief and largely unsuccessful attack on the English, see L.J. Andrew Villalon, “Battle-Seeking, Battle-Avoiding or Perhaps Just Battle-Willing? Applying the Gillingham Paradigm to Enrique II of Castile,” JMMH 8 (2010), 131–54. 84  For an analysis of the battle, see: James Sherborne, “The Battle of La Rochelle,” in War, Politics and Culture in Fourteenth-Century England, ed. by Anthony Tuck (London: The Hambledon Press, 1994), 41–54 85  Ayala, Enrique II, 2–3, 7, 14–17, 22. Froissart (Johnes), 1:469–74 (ccciii–ccciv).

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of Nájera, the Captal du Buch, who lived out his remaining years in a French prison. This and similar activities on the part of the Castilian fleet helped the French regain control of the Bay of Biscay as well as the initiative in the war at sea. Nor was naval aid forthcoming only along the Atlantic coast. Later, when the French king’s brother and Enrique’s benefactor, Louis of Anjou, invaded Italy, the French fleet supporting his abortive campaign contained a number of Spanish ships.86 Thereafter, for decades, the Castilian navy would continue to serve French interests, even well after the war with England entered another inactive phase following the deaths of both Charles V and DuGuesclin in 1380 and the beginning of lengthy peace negotiations. As late as the opening years of the next century, a Castilian flotilla in French service sailed as far north as the Channel, raiding along the English coast from Cornwall to Plymouth and launching a successful attack against the island of Jersey.87 In only one important respect did Enrique II fail to back his French benefactor. During the spring of 1378, almost immediately after the papal return from Avignon to Rome, a disputed election brought Urban VI (r. 1378–1389), the first Italian pope in over seventy years, to the throne of St. Peter.88 This irascible figure managed within several months to alienate a majority of the cardinals who had elected him. They, in turn, decided to “cancel” his election and choose a new pope. This ushered in an era in Church history known as the Great Schism (1378–1417),89 one of the most divisive periods experienced by the Roman Catholic Church of the Middle Ages.90 During the forty years it endured, the 86  Luis Suárez Fernández, Castilla, el cisma y la crisis conciliar (1387–1440) (Madrid, 1960), 14. 87  These events are reported in an account of the flotilla’s commander, entitled El Victorial, Crónica de Don Pero Niño, Conde de Buelna, por su alférez, Gutierre Díez de Games. An abbreviated version of this late medieval Castilian chronicle has been translated as The Unconquered Knight, A Chronicle of the Deeds of Don Pero Nino, Count of Buelna, trans. Joan Evans (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2004). For more on this very interesting source, see Villalon’s review of the Boydell translation on the De Re Militari website, URL: http:// www.deremilitari.org/REVIEWS/Gamez_UnconqKnight.htm. 88  For a detailed account of the Great Schism and its effect on Castile, see Villalon’s article: “War and the Great Schism,” 217–37. 89  The term “Great Schism” is actually applied to two major events in the history of Christianity which occurred som centuries apart: (1) the split in 1054 between the Roman Catholic Church of the West and the Greek Orthodox Church of the East; and (2) the division of the western church over whether to recognize a pope in Rome or a rival pope (now reckoned by the church as an anti-pope) in Avignon. 90  There are a number of good general histories in English including Clinton Locke, The Age of the Great Western Schism (New York, 1896); Walter Ullman, The Origins of the Great Schism, A Study in Fourteenth- century Ecclesiastical History (Leeds,1967); John Holland Smith, The Great Schism 1378: the Disintegration of the Papacy (London: Hamilton, 1970).

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schism forced most western and central European states to choose which of two and eventually three squabbling popes they would acknowledge as the true successor to Peter, the one ensconced in Rome or his rivals in Avignon and Pisa. In fall, 1378, the majority of cardinals held a second conclave which began the schism by electing a replacement pope. This time their choice fell on the leader of the French cardinals, Robert of Geneva, widely known as the “butcher of Cesena.”91 who assumed the papal name Clement VII (r. 1378–1394). The following spring, Clement laid siege to Rome with military support from his principal backer, the French king Charles V, but was compelled to withdraw when forces loyal to Urban defeated his French mercenaries. In the wake of this military set-back, the rival pope and the cardinals who had elected him returned to Avignon where they reestablished their papal court.92 Throughout these months of conflict, as both claimants first fought for control of Rome and then set up their respective papacies, each appealed to the monarchs and churches of Western Europe to acknowledge him as the legitimate pope. News of the dispute first reached Castile as early as August, 1378, when Urban’s representatives met with Enrique in the city of Cordoba and assured him that their man’s election had been fully canonical. In turn, these envoys asked that the king and his kingdom recognize Urban’s legitimacy.

Several recent works focus on specific aspects of the conflict: Alison Williams Lewin, Negotiating Survival: Florence and the Great Schism 1378–1417 (Cranbury, NJ, 2003); Renata Blumenfeld-Kosinshi, Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism 1378–1417 (University Park, Penn., 2006). An excellent short account of the troubles faced by the western church in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, including the Great Schism, can be found in Edward P. Cheyney, The Dawn of a New Era (1250–1453) (New York, 1936), see especially, chapter 6: The Decline of the Church: The Weakening of the Papacy.” Another excellent and considerably more recent summary of the schism, especially the events surrounding its onset, appears in what is almost certainly the all-time best-seller on medieval history, Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror, The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (New York, 1978), chapter 16, pp. 320–39. In addition, there is a collection of short essays apparently reprinted from the web under the title Western Schism, including Council of Constance, Pope Martin V, Pope Gregory XII, Pope Urban VI, Avignon Papacy, Dietrich of Nieheim, Council of Pisa, Antipope Benedict XIII, Antipope Clement VII, Papal Mint, Petrine Doctrine, Thomas de Rossy (n.p., n.d.). 91  In 1377, while serving as papal legate in northern Italy, the cardinal had undertaken to put down a revolt against papal rule in the town of Cesena. Despite promising clemency to get the inhabitants to lay down their arms, when his mercenary troops had secured the place, he ordered them to massacre the population, hence his nickname. 92  For Clement’s failed attempts to take the city by force and subsequent return to Avignon, see Froissart (Johnes), 1:571–75.

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Enrique informed them that before acting he would first have to consult his council. During its meeting, a rather different story of the Roman election began to emerge—one that portrayed it as having been dictated by a threatening mob and therefore raised questions about its legitimacy. In the face of conflicting accounts of what had transpired, Enrique temporized. He informed Urban’s messengers he would soon head north to Toledo, where he would consult with his son, Juan, after which he would deliver his answer.93 In Toledo, Enrique encountered a second delegation, this one hurriedly dispatched by his benefactor Charles V. The French messengers conjured up visions of a violent Roman mob forcing a college of cowering cardinals to elect Urban, cardinals who as soon as possible had removed to a safe location where, no longer threatened by the mob, they had held a second and truly canonical election.94 The French king therefore asked Enrique to recognize “his pope”.95 Despite his enormous debt to Charles and their close connection, Enrique now hesitated.96 Almost apologetically, he informed his French counterpart that such a delicate matter involving the well-being of Christendom as well as his and his subjects’ salvation demanded most careful consideration and until he saw the right path, he would have to remain neutral. In fact, Enrique never found that path; he died at the end of May, 1379, with Castile still in the neutral column. In Enrique’s actions, we encounter an instance (albeit temporary and fairly rare) when even the closest of political and military ties between states did not automatically dictate the same choice in respect to the Schism. The old adage about friends of France adhering to Avignon while enemies went with Rome would eventually prove true, but not during Enrique’s remaining months of life, throughout which this ordinarily quite cynical monarch appears to have been more concerned about his conscience than his alliance. Despite the king’s soul-searching, Castile, for both political and military reasons, did ultimately adhere to the “friends-of-France-Rule”; the final decision, however, being left to Enrique’s son, Juan I. Shortly after his succession, the new king cemented ties with France, reaffirming the all-important military alliance and dispatching the annual flotilla to aid in the war against England.97 On this occasion, French ambassadors sent to Castile by Charles V were charged not only with conveying their king’s pleasure at this, but also reminding Juan of the 93  Ibid., 34–35. 94  Actually, it had taken them approximately five months to replace Urban. 95  Ayala, Enrique II, 35. 96  Ibid., 35–36. 97  Pero López de Ayala, Cronica del Rey Juan primero de Castilla, in CRC, 68: 65–159, esp. 67–68.

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unresolved papal issue. Not long thereafter, Castile supported Louis of Anjou’s invasion of Italy under a Clementist banner, while French troops aided Juan in a new war against Portugal.98 Under the circumstances, Juan’s eventual choice of Avignon seems something of a foregone conclusion. On May 19, 1381, Castile, in the person of its king and a council he had called to consider the issue, declared for Clement and condemned Urban. Afterwards, Juan followed the French lead and issued a lengthy declaration explaining his choice; creating both a Castilian text for his own people and a Latin one, directed primarily at a European-wide audience.99 The War of the Two Pedros had a significant effect on the history of Iberia and the kingdom of Castile that lies at its center. The rise of a new dynasty, the establishment of a generally-accepted boundary between Castile and its eastern neighbor, the slowing to almost a halt of the Reconquista, the signing of a long-lived Franco-Castilian alliance and the kingdom’s choice of sides in the Great Schism; all of them were at least in part outgrowths of this later medieval conflict; one that ranks as the greatest to have been fought between Christian states on the peninsula. 98  Ibid., 68; Suárez Fernández, Crisis conciliar, 14. 99  Ayala, Juan I, 70–75. The chronicler reproduces the text “in the language of Castile.”

Chapter 19

Prequel and Aftermath of Conflict in the Crown of Aragon Though the War of the Two Pedros could be an exceedingly brutal and bloody conflict, it was never fought on the scale of the reconquest campaigns of the previous century. It was, however, a border war fought on several fronts that affected many aspects of life not only on the combatants’ frontiers, but also across their heartlands. Largely a war of raid and counter-raid punctuated by a few sieges that resulted in the conquest of Aragonese towns and cities, the duel between the two kings reawakened societal fears that in many parts of Christian Spain had been forgotten since the first phases of the reconquista. The borderland between Iberia’s Christian realms had become by the midfourteenth century zones beset by famine, a pandemic, internecine warfare, economic dislocation, and outbursts of intense local violence among Christian populations. The situation was already fraught with danger when the actual conflict broke out. 1

Iberian Borders in the Grip of Plague, Violence and War (1348–1366)

Between 1348 and 1350, the eastern half of Spain underwent the horrors of the Black Death, known to contemporaries as the “great dying” (la mortandad grande), that swept through Barcelona, Zaragoza, and Valencia before making its way south into the kingdom of Granada. Said to have claimed one third to one half of the population, it took even the lives of the Castilian king, Alfonso XI, Pere III’s wife, Leonore of Portugal, and many other highplaced victims.1 Because of his fear of plague, Pere forbade his nobles from 1  For the steady malnutrition of European communities between 1315 and 1348, see John Aberth, From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Conflicting Famine, War, Plague, and Death in the Later Middle Ages. New York, 2001. 12–36; William Chester Jordan, The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (Princeton, N.J., 1996), 11, 186; Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300–1500 (New York, 2000), 28–44. For first report of the Black Death in eastern Spain, see ACA, Cancellería real, R. 1128, f. 178; López de Meneses, Documentos, 2 (doc. 1). Pere III, 2:431–32, 439 (VI:44, 52); ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1063, f. 61v; R. 1131, f. 107v; R. 1562, f. 15; López de Meneses, Documentos, 11, 33–34 (docs. 11,37–38); Miron,

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004425057_021

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engaging in foreign warfare, an order that eventually undercut recruitment of soldiers in his own realms.2 Plague may also have killed half of the Crown of Aragon’s agricultural classes, causing enormous dislocations as farms and pastures returned to scrub land.3 Though less effected, Castile also suffered from the “great mortality” which forced its kings, first Alfonso XI and then Pedro I, to attempt to control the wide fluctuations of prices and wages brought on by the death of so many workers.4 Even before the war that was to descend on the two realms in 1356, this plague ravaged the border regions that divided the two kingdoms making their defense even more difficult. Though the border war affected both the Crown of Aragon and Castile for a full decade, it touched some regions more than others. Castilian troops were repeatedly stationed at border staging points such as Soria, Almázan, and Murcia for attacks on Aragon. Pedro I’s companies also drove into Valencia territory north of the Segura River. They then used the Valencian places they had captured to mount further attacks on the kingdom’s capital. By contrast, except for Trastámara’s campaigns in 1359–1360, Castile suffered relatively few incursions by Aragonese forces. For any major damage resulted from crossborder assaults, the Castilians would have to await the Free Company’s invasion of 1366 and Pedro’s triumphant return a year later at the head of an AngloGascon army. The site of most of the fighting was along the Aragonese and Valencian side of the frontiers with Castile. The Aragonese part of this frontier was marked by an acute southeastern slant along which lay Tarazona, Calatayud, Daroca, Albarracin, and Teruel, all of which came under attack. It includes the

Queens, 186–87. It is not clear if Pere had directly seen the effects of the disease except on his wife and servitors; he seemed to have a stock answer about the number of plague victims whether in Valencia or Zaragoza. 2  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1002, ff. 158, 163r–v; R. 1062, f. 139; R. 1131, ff. 96r–v. See also: López de Meneses, Documentos, 31–32, 41, 57–58, 60 (docs. 34, 48, 67–70). 3  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 654, ff. 4, 6. See also: López de Meneses, Documentos, 47, 49 (docs. 54, 58). 4  Angel Vaca Lorenzo, “La peste negra en Castilla: Aportación al estudio de algunos de sus consequrncias económicos y sociales,” Studia historica: Historia Medieval 2 (1984): 89–107, esp. 92, 97–98; idem “La peste negra en Castilla: Nuevos testimonios,” Studia historica: Historia Medieval 8 (1990): 159–71, esp. 163. For the best general works in English see; Philip Ziegler’s work, The Black Death and Rosemary Horrox’s collection of primary sources of the same name. For the principal codes regulating commodity prices and wages, the Ordenamiento de Alcalá, see José Orlandis Rovira, “El pseudo ordinamiento de Alcalá,” AHDE 17 (1946): 683–711; Alfonso Oteros Varela, “Las Partidas y el Ordinamiento de Alcalá en el cambio de ordenamientos medieval,” Estudios histórico-juridicos 1 (2005): 397–502.

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watersheds of the Jiloca, Jalón, and Turia Rivers while at the same time encompassing a broad band of harsh uplands. Perhaps the bitterest fighting, however, took place around the towns of Alicante, Elche, and Orihuela and the heavily fortified villages of Almansa, Jumilla, and Mula. These were all parts of the kingdom of Murcia that had been in Aragonese hands for over half a century. An equally hard-hit region was the county of Denia held by Pere’s cousin, Count Alfonso.5 On several occasions, the entire eastern Spanish littoral from Cartagena to Barcelona and out to the Balearics experienced a naval conflict that exposed Catalan, Majorcan, and Valencian coastlines and shipping to Castilian attack. In Catalonia and Valencia, violence had a localized cast about it, that often reflected feuds that had gone on for decades. Warring clans and factions fought over urban territory, the municipal offices that controlled it, and the revenues that sprang from it. Not infrequently oblivious to the national conflicts raging around them, old enemies continued their, street riots and individual assassinations. In 1362, as the War of the Two Pedros wore on, Pere III issued royal instructions demanding that such personal fights had to be for combat with the real enemy, Castile. That this problem persisted following the war’s end is exemplified from the work of the great preacher, Vicente Ferrer who later devoted considerable time and effort to bringing peace to violent communities such as Vich and Castellon de la Plana.6 In Aragon, disputes often emerged between cities such as Albarracin, Calatayud, Daroca, and Teruel and the hundreds of smaller hamlets under their control. While some of the cities were expected to provide military protection to their aldeas, this relationship seems to have become strained over the decades as the aldeanos eventually came to feel that they were giving more than they were getting in return. As early as the end of the thirteenth century, clusters of hamlets had begun standing together as communes designed to protect their interests from over-control by the cities.7 During the War of the Two Pedros, the division growing out of this jostling for power clearly weakened

5  Campón Gonzalvo, “Consecuencias,” 57–58. 6  A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1184, f. 1; R. 2160, f. 152v; R. 2206, f. 169; R. 2208, ff. 153v–57. See also: DHC, 19–20; J.E. Martínez Ferrando, “San Vicente Ferrer y la casa real de Aragón: Documentacióm conservada en Archivo Real de Barcelona,” Analecta Sacra Terraconensia 26 (1953): 1–141, esp. 36, 40–47, 93 (docs. 14, 17–19, 57). 7  Martín Almagro Basch, “Las tierras de Teruel antes la reconquista cristiana,” Teruel 57–58 (1977): 35–62, esp. 53; Domingo J. Buesa Conde, Teruel en el edad media (Zaragoza, 1980), 50–51; José Luis Corral Lafuente, “La génesis de la comunidad de aldeas de Calatayud,” AEEM 16 (2000): 197–214; Kagay, “Two Towns,” 38–43.

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Aragon’s defenses, often aiding Castilian raiding parties in their efforts to overrun hamlets and besiege border towns.8 Though Pere III initially hoped that the frontier settlements could defend themselves from Castilian attack, much as they had held off Muslim raiders in past centuries, he was soon disabused and as a result turned to hired commanders and troops as a more workable solution.9 At the same time, it became apparent to the king that the local population often viewed these new “protectors” (many of whom were Castilian exiles) as just one more band of foreign interlopers put into control of their lives and property.10 Many of these communities that came under Castilian control faced a much more brutal regime. Pedro I, readily used cruelty to break the will of both Aragonese troops and urban populations. This cruelty was rendered more shocking by the fact that it was often carried out by Castile’s Muslim allies whose mere presence awakened terrible memories in the minds of the townsmen.11 Ultimately, Aragonese and Valencian frontier settlements seemed to be rendered numb by the bloody and cynical aspects of the conflict and the foreign domination that resulted from it. The inhumanity of Castilian attacks occasionally passed a normal line of brutality. On one such “black day”—the Feast of St. Mark (April 25, 1363)—, Pedro besieged Teruel with 24 counterweight artillery pieces. Repeated barrages from these weapons demolished churches, a royal palace, and so many private houses that the harried inhabitants found their only refuge in the city’s principal cathedral. Castile’s regular military practices included acts of mutilating prisoners, holding captives for ransom, selling Muslims into slavery, rustling livestock, and selling property plundered from the Aragonese in black markets on either side of the border.12 Such acts constituted a “Strategy of Terror” that was pursued by the Castilian monarch. Pedro even used the threat of violence against his own subjects to be certain they would follow his orders and engaged in the most horrific actions possible against Aragonese and Valencian defenders. In the king’s mind, such brutality would instill a very useful state of fear among his enemies who would as a result quickly surrender and never again rise in rebellion. He repeatedly 8   Lafuente Gómez, “Comportamientos,” 245–46; idem, “Aproximación,” 58. 9    A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1382, f. 173; R. 1543, ff. 25v–26, 36v–37, 38. See also: Kagay, “Pere III’s System,” 218–19; Lafuente Gómez, “Aportación,” 59–60. 10  Lafuente Gómez, “Comportamientos,” 246–49. 11   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1822, ff. 180v–81. See also: Diaz, Itinerario, 403 (doc. 864); Kagay, “Defending,” 89. 12   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1213, ff. 80–81v; R. 1384, f. 14v; R. 1388, ff. 28–29. See also: DHC, 88; Lafuente Gómez, “Aportación,” 78–84; idem, “Comportamientos,” 262–66.

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drove his own soldiers to “do such a good job in devastation that there is nothing left to destroy.”13 If his own men failed in this awful business, Pedro left them with the ultimate threat: succeed or “let your heads be returned to me.”14 Like his Aragonese adversary, the Castilian king equated surrender with treason. As a result not a few Castilian military leaders who had already gone through terrible deprivations for their allegiance to Pedro, had no trust in his forgiveness and eventually threw in their lot with his enemy.15 In addition to the ever-present fear of Castilian troops, Aragon’s frontier settlements had to live with the violent and often unpredictable behavior of the captains and companies their own king had sent to defend them. Although they distrusted “foreign” leaders such as the Castilian count of Trastámara, they soon came to detest even their own countrymen, many of whom willingly obeyed royal orders to destroy exposed settlements and move their populations into more defensible sites.16 The local outposts quickly grew tired of having to pay wages and provide supplies for the often overbearing troops the king had imposed on them. This resentment grew as Pere was forced to expropriate whole sections of his frontier villages to accommodate the professional soldiers he had hired. Late in 1365, when the Free Companies began to enter Aragon, the situation became even more charged as the mercenaries left a trail of destruction behind them across land they had been paid to defend.17 Occasionally, the disputes boiled over, leading the local population to the point of revolt against their paid defenders, and forcing Pere to step in. Although the king warned those in his service to avoid violent acts against the townsmen and aldeanos, he never really punished their offenses. On the contrary, he often chastised his subjects for their record of bitter complaint and refusal to support the forces stationed among them.18 2

The Crown of Aragon’s Ruined Countryside (1365–1366)

Though the War of the Two Pedros virtually rolled to a stop in the spring of 1366 with Trastámara’s invasion of Castile and the civil war it spawned, the 13  D  PI, 157, 162–63, 165, 175 (docs. 93, 100, 103, 116). See also: Villalon, ‘Cut Off Their Heads,’ 175. 14  Villalon, “Cut Off Their Heads,” 175. 15  Ibid., 178. 16   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1381, ff. 72r–v; R. 1385, ff. 84r–v, 88; Lafuente Gómez, “Aportación,” 73–74; idem, “Comportamientos,” 254–58. 17  Lafuente Gómez, “Comportamientos,” 258–60; Fowler, Medieval Mercenaries, 1:163–69. 18   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1381, f. 2v; R. 1543, ff. 26v, 38v. See also: Kagay, “Pere III’s System,” 219; Lafuente Gómez, “Comportamientos,” 259.

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effects would continue to be felt for years to come along the Aragonese and Valencian frontiers. Pedro I’s raids and large expeditions had repeatedly targeted both large towns and outlying settlements. As a result, wide swaths of farmland, vineyards, and fertile pastureland were destroyed. Not a few districts that were at the point of depopulation became a “wasteland caused by the great slaughter.”19 Many Aragonese hamlets and Valencian villages were in such a dilapidated state that there was little will to rebuild them. As a result, communities that had been in existence for centuries completely disappeared. The walls and buildings of those that remained were partially ruined from arson and artillery barrages, leaving them open to the ravages of the climate 20 Most of these settlements were thus either completely deserted or filled with penniless refugees.21 Although the main scene of violence moved away from the Crown of Aragon in 1366 and into Castile, the former war zones did not witness a reign of peace. Instead, those long-established feuds among nobles and townsmen in these regions retained their earlier intensity, while banditry increased in both the urban sites and across the countryside.22 In this environment, even clerics were “daily abused, oppressed, and injured.”23 Pere was accurate in saying that many of his lands were held in the grip of “indescribable poverty”. At the same time, he surely must have seen that some of his borderlands were slipping out of his control. Along the frontier, a brisk black-market, fed by extensive rustling and slave-hunting enterprises existed in both the Crown of Aragon and Castile. Ten years of official and unofficial acts of war made both sides dangerous places to start an argument without being prepared to back it up with superior force. Raiding had been such a regular occurrence during the war years that as late as 1373, seven years after the war had reached its unexpected conclusion, large parties of Castilian horsemen regularly invaded Aragon, damaging castles and villages as they went.24 19   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1383, ff. 194v–195. See also: CLC, 2:149; Kagay, “War Financing,” 145. 20   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1380, ff. 81–82; R. 1381, ff. 31r–v. See also: María Desamparados Cabanes Pecourt, “Cartas de población en el dominio verolense,” AEEM 6 (1984): 95–124, esp. 102; Gutíerrez y Velasco, “Conquista,” 79; Donald J. Kagay, “A Shattered Circle: Eastern Spanish Fortifications and Their Repair during the ‘Calamitous Fourteenth Century’.” in War. study III, 111–35, esp. 133; idem, “War Financing,” 145. 21   A CA, Cancillería reak, R. 1381, f. 12. 22  Esteban Sarasa Sánchez, “El bandolerismo medieval en Aragón,” Historia 16, no. 46 (1980): 52–57; idem, Sociedad y conflictos sociales en Aragón. (Estructuras de poder y conclictos de clase) (Madrid, 1981), 99–130. 23   D S, 466–67 (doc 616). See also: Kagay, “War Financing,” 145. 24   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 1214, ff. 53r–v, 88r–v; R. 1380, f. 53; R. 1381, ff. 28v–30; R. 1543, f. 125. See also: Kagay, “War Financing,” 146; Lafuente Gómez, “Comportamientos,” 266–267; Masiá i de Ros, Relación, 2:596–97 (doc. 258/35).

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The Unclear Termination of Conflict (1366)

In the second half of 1365 when Pere III was still fighting to save his Valencian capital from Castilian conquest, the fate of the long conflict with Pedro I of Castile, seemed thoroughly unsettled. This lack of certitude concerning the conflict’s outcome would continue into the new year of 1366 when Pere’s captain, Enrique de Trastámara, made good on the contract he had signed some three years earlier by invading Castile. This highly successful expedition drove Pedro from Spain, and for all intents and purposes ended the War of the Two Pedros. On the other hand, the old adversary—what Pere refers to depreciatingly as “the one-time king of Castile” (olim Castille Regem)—was very much alive and soon managed to gain the aid of his English allies in a bid to recover the throne. As a result, the Aragonese monarch still lived in terror that the conflict plaguing him for a decade might actually be renewed due to the AngloGascon invasion of 1367. After all, it was conceivable, at least in the mind of Pere III, that the Black Prince might chose as part of his ambitious scheme to invade not only Castile, but also Aragon. Consequently, even though the king began as early as 1366 to refer to the conflict as having occurred “in past times” (temporibus praeteritis),25 a judgment he would reaffirm years later when writing his chronicle,26 in point of fact, his actions at the time show that he was not all that certain. Thankfully, from Pere’s perspective, the defeat of his ally, Enrique, did not lead to a resumption of conflict between the two realms. Neither Nájera nor the ensuing civil war for the throne of Castile had any real spillover into Aragon. So while the king continued to worry until the ignominious death of Pedro I in 1369, he was able to turn his attention to multifarious schemes to take advantage of Castile’s time of troubles. Even during the many months between Trastámara’s second invasion of Castile in late-1367 and Pedro’s inglorious death at Montiel in 1369, Pere continued to fear a renewed struggle with Castile. That fear is obvious in various royal communications with his officials and subjects. Though he repeatedly celebrated the coming of peace throughout 1367, he found it almost impossible to let down his guard against an enemy he had fought for a decade. He 25  This is just one more instance of the mocking nature of most of Pere III’s reference to his younger opponent. ACA, Cancillería real R. 913, f. 46; R. 914, f. 126. 26  In his chronicle, finished only in the 1380s, Pere clearly marked the end of the war with Trastámara’s invasion of Castile in the spring of 1366. Pere III, Chronicles, 2:583 (VI: 65). For more about the production of Pere’s chronicle and the king’s role in its drafting, see: Villalon and Kagay, Nájera, Introduction, Chapter 2 and Appendix C.4. See also: Gubern Domenech, “Notes,” 142–45; Aurell, Authoring, 168–75.

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repeatedly reminded his people of their earlier feats of courage against Castile, and demanded that they continue to “manfully resist our enemies.” To do so, hamlet and village populations would still be required to support the soldiers dispatched by the crown to defend their homes. They would also have to take up arms to protect their own communities.27 The same tone of painstaking surveillance against the recent enemies was sounded in 1368 when Pere summoned his Catalan subjects to a corts at Barcelona where emphasis was placed on vigilant maintenance of the peace.28 4

Pere’s Plans for Repair of War Damage (1366–1368)

While the Aragonese king could not always be sure in the opening months of 1366 that the war had truly ended, there was one reality he could not ignore during this same period—the staggering destruction and human loss ten years of conflict had inflicted on his realms and people. The reports of widespread destruction suffered by towns, villages, and hamlets that had begun to come to him in the first weeks of the war in 1356 continued and even increased in the period after fighting largely ended in late-1365. Due to Castile’s continued offensives in the mountainous Aragonese region bounded by the rivers Ebro, Jalón, and Jiloca as well as across the broad swath of Valencian territory above the Segura River, small towns and villages were especially hard-hit. The settlements on which this destruction was unleashed fell into two categories—those that suffered chronic ruin early in the war and those which came under attack later in the conflict. In addition, there was the extensive damage inflicted by Castilian forces when they withdrew early in 1366. No matter when the damage the description was graphic. All were described as having suffered “very great destruction and irreparable damage,” “the very greatest of depopulation and destruction,” and loss carried to the “point of desolation.” According to Pere’s officials who reported what they had seen in the war zones, whole regions, such as southern Valencia bordering on the kingdom of Murcia, were thoroughly “devastated and burned.”29 Another class of destruction had taken place most recently, and could be attributed to one group—the members of the Free Companies, what the Aragonese characterized as “French men who had come to our aid against …

27   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 913, ff. 133r–v, 188v. 28  C AVC, 3:1. 29   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 912, f. 167v; R. 913, f. 98; R. 914, ff. 119, 167v.

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Castile.”30 Though ostensibly on Pere’s side, these companies could not be completely controlled even by their own leaders. By the time they had passed through Aragonese territory and reached Castile, they had left a trail of death and destruction across the kingdom they were supposedly serving. They committed multiple crimes in the mountainous territory of Roussillon, and sacked the Catalan outpost of Granvilliar after plundering all of its possessions. They then burned the Aragonese town of Barbastro and the nearby village of Alcolea de Cinca, while leaving the small settlements of Puesta and Tiermas totally destroyed.31 In addition to the shock that this destruction was committed by their king’s allies, the inhabitants of these settlements, few of whom had suffered in the war’s earlier campaigns, had little warning of what to expect from mercenaries experienced in living off the land, no matter whose land it was.32 As his frontier settlements were damaged over and over during the war years, Pere had to find ways of repairing and improving their fortifications without putting even more financial strain on their residents. With little money to spare from his tax revenues and parliamentary subsidies, the Aragonese king turned to fiscal manipulation in an attempt to relieve the glaring poverty apparent among many of his townsmen and villagers. With no surplus to remedy this situation, he often diverted funds raised by local taxes to long-suffering frontier communities or declared the sites that had suffered the greatest war damage exempt for one to ten years from the payment of every tax, toll, or feudal due. The king attained a similar result by declaring a period during which the townsmen and villagers were absolved from the repayment of all other debts they might owe. Since these actions often brought negative responses from his wealthier subjects and officials to whom the debts were owed, Pere warned them that any push-back against such exemptions would immediately trigger his own “ire and indignation.”33 Beyond this manipulation by the crown of the taxes and debts of frontier settlements, the Aragonese king occasionally turned to more direct involvement. For some particularly hard-hit places, such as the Aragonese hamlet of Embid de Ariza (just west of Calatayud), he put in place a direct annual 30   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 913, ff. 179r–v. The Latin term for these newcomers was francigeneii. 31   A CA, Cancilleria real, R. 912, ff. 34, 97, 185v; R. 913, ff. 41v, 179, 243v; R. 914, ff. 23, 74. 32  For Pere’s preparations for the coming of the Free Companies, see ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1387, ff. 150v–53, 159v–160v, 161r–v, 164, 169v–70v. See also: Fowler, Medieval Mercenaries, 166. 33   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 912, ff. 32r–v, 73, 86, 88, 97–98, 140v–141, 150r–v, 185v–186; R. 913, ff. 37r–v, 41v–42v,59v, 98–99v, 129, 132–33, 167v, 243–44, 246r–v; R. 914, ff. 13, 15, 74v, 156, 158, 187v.

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grant from the government of 200 sous, a sum that amounted to one-third of the aldea’s tax bill to the crown.34 To reestablish the fiscal and defensive footing of such sites, Pere granted their ruling councils the right to collect various tolls for their own use. Some were even allowed to auction off the lucrative right to farm future municipal taxes as a means to underwrite the rebuilding of their defenses. With some fortresses, such as the Catalan castle of Corniliano (near Gerona), he made the unpopular decision that they were too badly damaged to be properly defended. He therefore ordered their complete demolition and the removal of everything from the site that the enemy might find useful.35 If Pere had maintained this tax exemption and debt forgiveness for a broader segment of his war-weary populace, his actions might have led to a swifter recovery. In reality, his temporary shifting of money from one source to another brought only temporary relief. His concern for the fate of the devastated communities along his frontiers seemed real enough, but it was also clear that he had no extra funds to solve the extensive problems they posed. Residents of ruined outposts could celebrate their fiscal good fortune for only a short time before the financially hard-pressed crown imposed new imposts on them. Rather than the free use of tax money to rebuild their communities as it suited them, royal officials now diverted this money to a fund specifically designed for the rebuilding of walls, moats, and other defensive structures.36 To free his own officials from overseeing this time-consuming construction, Pere allowed the urban councils to choose supervisors who were empowered to compel the urban population to contribute to the building fund in a number of installments over several years. The authorities were also responsible for appointing foremen and inspectors to guarantee the quality of the new “works.” These king’s men even used fogatge records associated with recent parliaments to show how the collections might take place.37 When serious depopulation of affected sites often made this kind of imposed self-help impossible, Pere simply forbade any such repairs until “happier times come about,” an eventuality that did not always take place.38 Despite such setbacks, municipal improvement through the diversion of local funds 34   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 914, f. 19v. 35   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 912, ff. 111v–12, 126; R. 913. ff. 179v–80; R. 914, ff. 185–87. The residents of the settlements around Corniliano were to shelter in Gerona with their possessions and animals during times of enemy attack. 36   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 912, ff. 135v, 190r–v; R. 913 ff. 73r–v, 203r–v; R. 914, ff. 23r–v, 40v–41, 119r–v. 37   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 912, ff. 34, 44v, 60, 92v–93, 120r–v; R. 914, f. 46. 38   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 913, ff. 46–53.

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did prove successful enough for the king to use it repeatedly in his last years for the construction or repair of other public works.39 5

Pere’s Protection of Aragon (1366–1370)

Once Pedro’s conflict with his half-brother, Enrique de Trastámara, gripped Iberia in the spring of 1366, Pere (probably to his great relief) became a secondary figure in the ongoing struggle. Nevertheless, it became clear that that he still had to defend his kingdom against the new threat. To this end he reverted to his defensive strategy of the Castilian war in order to safeguard his lands against the warring Castilians and the mercenary hordes still entering the peninsula. To face these mounting dangers, he exchanged war planning for diplomatic stealth. Facing threats from many quarters, the Aragonese king knew that matters of defense could only be effectively carried out by summoning yet another parliament. Shortly after the battle of Nájera (April, 1367), Pere informed his principal clergy, aristocrats, and townsmen of Catalonia that Enrique’s defeat had made it necessary for him to convoke a Catalan corts at Lérida.40 Such a meeting, summoned for the defense of Catalonia, did not actually materialize until October 15 at which time Pere convened a corts generals at another site, Villafrancha de Penedes. Taking his opening speech as an opportunity to announce the recently negotiated truce with the old adversary, Pedro I, the Aragonese king reminded members of the assembly that the war with Castile might not truly be over. Consequently, they had to maintain their vigilance against the dangers erupting across their borders in Castile.41 After the danger emanating from the Castilian civil war continued for over two years, Pere found yet another occasion in 1370 to once more appeal to 39   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 912, ff. 178, 193–94. In the sodden June of 1366, the rivers Ebro and Arba de Biel overran their banks and, in doing so, destroyed or serious damaged important “stone bridge(s) (ponte lapideo) at Zaragoza and Luna”. For the “usefulness of the commonwealth,” Pere allowed the councils of these sites to divert tax money or raise a construction subsidy by placing a toll bar on the bridge to collect a small charge for each person who crossed it. 40   A CA, Cancellería real, R. 1217, f. 145. See also: Miret y Sans, “Négociations,” 113. The king convened an Aragonese cortes at Tamarite de Litera on February 20, 1367 and then prorogued it until September for Zaragoza, but this assembly has left no record that it dealt with Enrique’s invasion. CRA, 63–74. See also: Chapter 12, Section 11. 41  C AVC, 2:495, 492–93. For the royal use of the parliamentary “opening speech” (praepositum) for stirring support among the members of the assembly, see: Cawsey, Kingship, 35–37.

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the Catalans for financial and military help in a corts at Tarragona. He began by lecturing the participants in the meeting of his duty as a good king and brave defender of the realm as well as their manifold obligations as loyal subjects. Afterwards, he called for a parliamentary vote of funds for troops, weapons, provisions, and other supplies to hold off future attacks across Catalonia’s borders.42 The forces raised, consisting of 300 armored knights, 400 men-at-arms, and a like number of crossbowmen was to be recruited and paid for by the corts for the next two years.43 In the end, despite the king’s best assurances, this company was able to do little more than patrol Aragon’s northern frontiers in a vain hope of keeping mercenary forces from moving back and forth across the Pyrenees and repeatedly violating the exposed frontier to supplement the work of this clearly inadequate force, Pere soon fell back on the activities of his far-flung administrators as a front line of defense. As Enrique’s French supporters continued to stream across the Pyrenees throughout 1367 and 1368, Pere attempted to have each of his officials steer these so-called great companies away from his lands without creating a major military incident. In September 1367, when Enrique’s second Castilian invasion was in the offing, the Aragonese king wrote his son, Joan, with sage advice about how to frustrate the invaders’ instinct for plundering along their route. He counseled the prince to gather a sizeable force by invoking Princeps namque and to dog the invaders so thoroughly that they would suffer a “great lack of food.” Despite any provocations he might suffer or the chance for a glorious victory, Joan was to avoid at all costs inciting any major military confrontations with the invaders.44 This hand-cuffed style of resistance characterized the nature of Aragonese defense for the next year. The first phase of Pere’s strategy consisted of establishing a loosely-connected line of defense around the Pyrenean passes above Jaca. Since he was strapped for cash, the king formed frontier forces from urban militias whose members had to serve at their own expense.45 The principal thrust of Aragonese planning did not call for any head-on engagement of Enrique’s troops, but instead emphasized preventing them from easily acquiring supplies. Pere attempted to accomplish this not only through the efforts of individual military units, but also by seizing all control of boats “good and bad, small and great” that might serve as enemy grain transports.46 42  C AVC, 3:47, 50–51. According to the king intended to use these men and material to beat back “the great multitude of highwaymen and robbers who have risen in the world.” 43  Ibid., 3:64. 44   A CA, Cancellería real, R. 1218, f. 9. See also: Miret y Sans, “Négociations,” 128; Russell, English Intervention, 128–29. 45   A CA, Cancellería real, R. 1387, ff. 188, 198. 46   A CA, Cancellería real, R. 1387, f. 186.

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Never one to lose an opportunity to gain unpaid service from his subjects, Pere instructed several of his Catalan frontier towns to engage at their own expense in massive fortification projects. He spurred on this work by constantly reminding the townsmen that without stout defenses their homes might be burned to the ground by the marauding mercenaries.47 While tending to the survival of his lands, Pere increasingly turned to an activity perfectly fitted to his crafty nature—diplomacy. As the Castilian situation grew more fluid and unpredictable, the Aragonese king risked the dangers inherent in foreign alliances both to seek protection for his own lands and gain profit from a collapse of Castile. 6

Generous Rewards for Service and Lax Punishment for Treason (1367–1370)

In the meetings of his Catalan corts between 1367 and 1370, Pere laid out in clear terms his philosophy of restitution for the brave services rendered by his people in the brutal war with Castile, service which had often left many seriously wounded or permanently disabled. To deal with this nagging problem, the king insisted that his people who had suffered in war service be properly recognized and compensated.48 Consequently, he considered subjects who were active participants in or victims of the long conflict to be special populations worthy of being rewarded in meaningful ways. Pere occasionally granted those who had died or were seriously wounded in combat tax exemptions for life on all of their property. Some soldiers were indemnified with general pardons for any crimes they might commit in the future or for standing legal charges, which even included murder.49 Men who supplied the king’s commanders with weapons, horses, and provisions without asking for immediate remuneration often received lucrative positions from the crown, occasionally consisting of tax-collection rights for up to three years. The crown even granted military contracts that had little to do with past service, but were offered to guarantee future allegiance to the king. As with other commanders of the Free Companies, the English knight, Matthew de Gornay, became one of Pere’s military advisers in 1367 receiving a blanket sum of 2,000 47   A CA, Cancellería real, R. 1387, ff. 192, 193v–95v. 48  C AVC, 2:484; Cawsey, Kingship, 141. 49   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 914, ff. 126r–v, 145. For similar use of pardons in England during the same era, see L.J. Andrew Villalon, “‘Taking the King’s Shilling’ to Avoid ‘The Wages of Sin’: English Royal Pardons for Military Malefactors during the Hundred Years War,” in The Hundred Years War (Part III), 357–435.

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gold florins and full rights to a number of villages, including Novelé on the banks of the Turía River above Valencia.50 Besides simply extending financial favors to those who had loyally served the Aragonese crown, Pere felt it essential to foster a reputation as a “valiant king” by promoting the well-being of subjects killed, seriously wounded or captured in the Castilian war. The king took a great interest in those soldiers and civilians who had endured great suffering when captured by Castilian forces. The most noteworthy punishments Pedro I of Castile had inflicted on his captured enemies had been the dishonoring and disfiguring of prisoners by having their right hands and noses cut off. This type of maiming was clearly aimed at better controlling large Aragonese and Valencian populations that the Castilian monarch now ruled over. Though the shock of this brutal treatment often led to lingering illnesses and early deaths for such captives, a surprising number of them survived the war. This presented Pere with a serious administrative problem. He often found it impossible to draw funds from his treasury to care properly for these victims of Castilian cruelty. As a result, he regularly found it necessary to turn the process over to his towns and villages. On at least a few occasions, the king did divert small amounts of money drawn from urban tax revenues to remedy the “miserable lives” of the war victims. He also allowed many of the survivors to move toward new lives by giving them various types of tax exemptions.51 Since reentering normal civilian life was never easy for these amputees, Pere turned to a form of local charity by earnestly requesting or even compelling his own officials, urban councils, and wealthy individual townsmen to contribute “pious gifts” to help their fellow citizens find lodging and work.52 This charitable aspect of Pere’s character at times even guided his official decisions touching on pacification. After active campaigning died down along his borders, the Aragonese king could afford to issue merciful judgments for those accused of engaging in treason and “disservice” to the Aragonese crown. For example, in 1368 after studying the report of local townsmen, he declared a castellan of the southern Valencian fortress of Crevillente not to have been guilty of its surrender to Castilian troops. He blamed, instead, Muslim members of the garrison for the treason. The accused castellan, who earlier in the 50   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 912, f. 78v; R. 913, f. 242; R. 914, ff. 32v–33v, 35, 148v–49; R. 1214, f. 34. See also: Fowler, Medieval Mercenaries, 171. For de Gornay family of this era, see T.J. Pettigrew, “The Ancient House of Gournay,” in Collectanea Archaeologica: Communications Made to the British Archaeological Association 2 (1871): 174–218, esp. 212–13. 51   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 912, ff. 21v, 35r–v, 73, 83v, 142v, 155v–55; R. 914, f. 19v. 52   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 912, ff. 55v, 61, 62, 66.

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war, might have been condemned to death for simply being in charge when the castle was surrendered, was now given a full pardon and indemnification from any future prosecution connected with the matter.53 In the same year, the king also decided to overlook a proven charge that one of his own officials had violated several royal directives by crossing the Aragonese border into Castile in a frantic effort to free his nephew, who was then incarcerated in a Castilian castle.54 While Pere’s decisions to show mercy in these cases were often motivated by extenuating circumstances, he also showed forgiveness for acts that clearly involved treason. In 1367, the king was moved to cancel all charges against one of his subjects who was a convicted deserter and had attempted to influence the surrender to Castile of the Aragonese town of Albarracin. Since the culprit had rendered subsequent services to the crown, Pere chose to overlook his earlier crimes rather than exact judicial retribution.55 A year earlier, the king had exercised the same kind of measured mercy in regard to residents of Aranda de Montcayo, a small Aragonese village north of Calatayud who had surrendered to Pedro’s troops without a fight and then campaigned on several occasions against his own Aragonese forces. For any or all of these actions, the king could justifiably have executed the offending villagers; instead he attributed their conduct to the “tumult of war,” and chose to forgive them.56 It is worth noting that none of the Aragonese king’s judgments between 1365 and 1368 would have involved such a forgiving attitude had they taken place in the first half of the Castilian conflict. With peace at hand, however, he could afford to tread lightly and avoid draconian decisions, even if they were warranted by existing law. 7

Prohibited Violence or Personal Protection in Catalonia (1365–1367)

After ten years of war, the populations of both Aragon and Castile were well acquainted with and inured to societal violence of all kinds. The many sharpedged agricultural and industrial tools easily accessible to most classes facilitated acts of physical violence on a regular basis. In medieval Catalonia, both peasants and townsmen routinely carried a type of machete (cuchiello serranil) 53   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 912, ff. 83v–84. 54   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 914, f. 239v. 55   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 914, f. 137v. 56   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 912, ff. 190v–91.

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for both work and personal protection. Royal authorities had long attempted to control the use of these blades which could be utilized as a dangerous weapon.57 From the eleventh century onward, Aragonese monarchs used the peace and truce of God, legislation sponsored by the medieval church, as a means of lessening all attacks with edged weapons.58 According to royal legislators, neglecting to control violence was no better than putting a “sword in the hands of a madman.”59 Unfortunately, one of the first casualties in the War of the Two Pedros had been Pere’s determined attempt to check all types of societal violence. Anyone living on the Aragonese, Catalan, or Valencian frontiers of the mid-fourteenth century knew personally how weak an advocate law could be against the reality of war. They would have agreed with Montaigne’s observation that “statutes cannot hold out against armed men,”60 ruling authorities seemed ready to admit this fact. For his part, Pere III found it necessary to compromise with the violent activity of his own people in order to better fight his Castilian enemy. The Aragonese king legitimatized societal violence at some level by sidestepping on a case-by-case basis the longstanding rule concerning “prohibited weapons” (arma prohibita). From the twelfth century onward, territorial law codes and municipal fueros throughout the Crown of Aragon had attempted to limit social violence, allowing its expression only within legal limits. A person who delivered a formal challenge (diffidamentum, desafio, desafiament) to an adversary had to wait for ten days without taking action before being legally permitted to engage in violent behavior and then only of a sort that placed each of the adversaries on an equal footing.61 Even with this carefully spelled-out legal precaution, individual acts of violence seemed far too difficult to control fully. This led Aragonese and Catalan lawmakers to regulate the possession of weapons with which such acts could be most easily carried out. Knives above a certain length could not be brought into urban public spaces under the penalty of a heavy fine or even exile. Carrying such weapons into the presence of the king could be construed as an act of treason punishable by imprisonment 57  Manuel Gómez de Valenzuela, La vida cotidiana en Aragón durantela alta Edad Media (Zaragoza, 1980), 140; Donald J. Kagay, “The Use and Misuse of ‘Prohibited Weapons’ in Frontier Texas and Medieval Iberia,” Lamar Journal of the Humanities 22, no. 1 (Spring, 1996): 5–17, esp. 7–8; Powers, Society, 131. 58  Usatges, trans. Kagay, 103–08. 59  Los Fueros de Aragón, ed. Gunnar Tilander (London, 1937), 3; Kagay, “Use,” 7. 60  The Essays of Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, trans Charles Cotton, ed W. Carew Hazlitt, vol. 25 of The Great Books, ed. Robert Hutchins, 54 vols. (Chicago, 1952), 387 (Essay III.1). 61  Usatges, trans. Kagay, 92 (art. 110). See also: Kagay, “Iberian Diffidamentum”, 73–82.

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or death.62 Despite the legal highroad the law took in regard to the ownership and spread of weapons, kings like Pere III sometimes had no choice but to bow to the reality of “prohibited weapons” often being sold in the black market that fed the economies of both Christian and Muslim Spain. In fact, a weapon culture seemed so pervasive among both the nobles and townsmen of Pere’s realms that they found it advisable to “go secretly armed,” even when the king’s law forbade this.63 As Pere’s war with Castile dragged on, the control of private feuds and the weapons with which they were fought increasingly seemed an exercise in Futility to the Aragonese king. By the last months of the conflict, he began to heed the advice of his courtiers by approving the issuance of licences for carrying knives or other arma prohibita “by day and night for personal protection.” The king warned his officials to honor these licenses as they would any direct royal orders.64 Judging from the surviving examples of weapon privileges issued between 1365 and 1367, Pere III seemed fully amenable to extending the right to go armed into places where it formerly had been illegal to do so. The licenses indicate that these newly legalized bearers of “prohibited weapons” sprang from the ranks of numerous and widely divergent trades: barbers, butchers, carpenters, finishers of various types of cloth, fullers, knife makers, silversmiths, and weavers.65 Why Pere abrogated statutes designed to suppress urban violence that had been in effect for over a century is difficult to understand. Established in the first place to extend the power of the Aragonese crown over the private lives and public behavior of its subjects, the control of weapons similar to the building of castles became royal prerogatives. Across medieval Iberia and ultimately into the New World colonies of Spain, kings would habitually forbid the proliferation of cannon, and other “prohibited weapons”66 without written royal permission. 62  Bergua Camón, “Fueros,” 469–70 (art. 366); Colección Diplomatica del Concejo de Zaragoza, ed. Angel Canellas López, 2 vols. (Zaragoza, 1975), 2:116–17 (doc. 123); El Fuero Latino de Teruel, ed. Jaime Caruana Gómez de Barreda (Teruel, 1974), 313–14 (arts. 354–55); Jaca: Documentos Municipales, 971–1276, ed. Antonio Ubieto Arteta (Valencia, 1975), 66 (doc. 16). 63  Pere III, Chronicle, 2:410–11 (IV:23). 64   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 914, f. 144v. 65   A CA, Cancillerá real, R. 912, ff. 18v, 23, 29r–v, 36v, 42v–43, 94v–95, 119v–20, 122, 123v, 124v– 25, 128, 143v, 158v, 186r–v; R. 914, ff. 144v, 145v, 155, 157, 158v, 162v, 214. Such licenses were issued to residents of Barcelona, Borja, Gerona, Lérida, Majorca. Montblanch, Puigcerda, Sarriá, and Villafranca de Conflent. 66  Teatro de la legislación universal de España y las Indias, ed. Antonio Javier Pérez y López, 28 vols. (Madrid: 1791–1798), 4:158–84.

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Since such legislation was carried out in defense of the commonwealth and promote royal rule (cosa publica), the repeal or at least the partial sidestepping of arms control laws points directly to Pere’s recognition of the basic danger the Castilian war posed to his ruling position. His willingness to lessen his authority on a temporary basis with a nascent middle class was not greatly different from the temporary concessions to his parliaments in the administration of war subsidies. With so many demands on his time and money, Pere was more than willing to allow at least some of his middling urban citizens to look after their own personal protection, even if it increased the levels of urban violence that had brought about the “prohibited weapons” ban in the first place. 8 Pere III’s Safe-Conducts (1365–1368) As the years of Pere’s conflict with Castile passed, travel between the warring states became even more dangerous than it had been earlier in the fourteenth century. These conditions made the royal safe-conduct/passport (guiaticum, guiatge) that permitted travel into and through Aragon absolutely essential for travelers of all types. Normally applying only to Pere’s own subjects during the Castilian war, its application in later years expanded to include Castilian, English, German, and Sardinian agents passing through the Crown of Aragon on both personal and governmental business.67 With a history stretching back into Spain of the eleventh and twelfth centuries,68 this standard form of travelers’ protection had changed very little. Addressing his territorial officials, especially those who guarded the Pyrenean passes, Pere’s safe-conduct identified the traveler by name, described his companions and/or servants, explained the reason that he or she was entering or leaving the Crown of Aragon, provided the time-limit during which the safeconduct was valid, specified which of the traveler’s goods would be protected by royal and municipal officials, and sometimes declared that the wayfarer would be immune from any legal charge by the crown or its functionaries.69 A review of those applying for and receiving guiatge from the Aragonese crown between 1365 and 1368 demonstrates clearly how important the Pyrenean passes were for the many different types of travelers fleeing eastern Spain during the Castilian conflict. These included refugees from Pedro I’s 67  Burns, “Guidaticum,” 51, 113. 68  Burns, “Guidaticum,” 52–50; Usatges, trans. Kagay, 82 (art. 71); 103 (app. 1). 69   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 913, ff. 23, 118, 133, 198, 200r–v; R. 914, ff. 18, 34v, 92, 94v, 191; R. 1384, f. 79v [for English translations, see Appendix II, doc. 56]. See also: Burns, “Guidaticum” 75.

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vengeance after Nájera, Muslims and Jews from the dangerous frontier regions of Aragon and Catalonia, mercenaries in service to the Aragonese king or of his sometime ally Enrique II, diplomatic delegations serving Castile, France and Aragon, missions dispatched by Aragon into Navarre or France, as well as shady individuals engaged in espionage for one or another of the players in the Spanish game. Because of the limited number of passes across the eastern Pyrenees and the remaining Roman road network that ran down along the Mediterranean coast to Barcelona, most of the routes specified in Pere’s safeconducts were fairly similar.70 People involved in this demanding travel, though differing in language, class, and outlook, were all touched in one way or another by the dynamics of war between Aragon and Castile. In the midst of a conflict that unsettled many Castilian, Aragonese, and Catalan frontiers, even families of prominent individuals sometimes needed, for safety’s sake, to use a guiatge. Enrique II’s wife and queen, Juana Manuel, who had spent most of the war years in Aragon when her husband served as Pere’s principal captain, was issued a safe-conduct in June, 1366 to join her husband in Castile and share his triumph against Pedro. In the following year, when Enrique suffered defeat at Nájera, his queen and his daughter made their way into France to which her husband had fled one step ahead of the now victorious and ever-vengeful King Pedro.71 The wild swings of fortune during the period which first witnessed the triumph of Enrique de Trastámara in his bid for the Castilian throne followed almost exactly a year later by his disastrous defeat at the battle of Nájera is clearly reflected in the safe conducts issued by Pere’s government during 1366– 1367. Many of these went to both his own subjects and foreign mercenaries joining the usurper’s successful invasion of 1366 and not-a-few went to the same people as they fled after their defeat a year later. For example, in December, 1366, Pere granted a guiatge to one of his great lords and a company of twenty-five horsemen, permitting them to leave the realm “along with their clothing and goods” to take up service with the newlyinstalled king of Castile.72 The same intention motivated a company of horsemen who applied for safe-conduct early in January, 1367, to cross the frontier into Castile and enter the service of “the Illustrious Enrique, king of Castile.”73 70  Fisher and Bowen-Jones, Spain, 143–44; Vila, Resum, 1:18–19. The principal passes into Pere’s northern realms were Perxa, Ribes, Pendís, Bagà, and Creus. 71   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 912, ff. 165v–66; R. 913, ff. 222–23; R. 914, f. 166. The Castilian queen was the daughter of Juan Manuel, a powerful noble leader in both Aragon and Castile. 72   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 912, f. 35 73   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 913, ff. 184r–v, 193.

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Several months later, in March, 1367, during the actual campaign leading up Nájera, the king issued a guiatge to a Pyrenean aristocrat who had expressed an intention to fight against the English supporting “the one-time king of Castile,” if they dared to cross the mountains and entered Pere’s lands.74 Late in that same month, just days before the battle, Count Pedro of Urgel and several lesser Aragonese nobles received safe conducts conditioned on their joining Trastámara in his continuing struggle against Pedro and the Black Prince.75 During the first week after the battle was fought on April 3, most of the safe conducts went to associates of Bertrand DuGuesclin who decided after their leader was captured at Nájera to pass through Aragon on the way to greater safety in France. These included his confessor and his Jewish accountant.76 While some of these men may have been in Castile with the future constable, others had probably been left in Aragon to watch over the extensive properties conferred upon him by the crown on the eve of the 1366 invasion. One of those listed as having received a safe-conduct was the future constable’s close relative, Olivier DuGuesclin, who had “entertained” the pusillanimous king of Navarre, Carlos II, allowing him to avoid fulfilling his commitment to serve personally in the campaign.77 All recipients were given the right to leave the kingdom while the crown agreed to take any properties they held there under royal protection.78 Later, in the summer of 1367, safe conducts were issued to the winners of the battle, men such as John Chandos and Matthew Gournay, as the Black Prince evacuated the peninsula with the remainder of his army.79 One even went to Hugh Calveley who had participated in both foreign invasions of Castile and who, as a result of his service in the first invasion that put Enrique on the throne, still held extensive lands in Aragon. Pere’s lifelong practice of international negotiations had made diplomacy second nature to the king, a fact reflected in the many guiatges granted to official delegations seeking to visit the Aragonese court. Between May and August, 1367, the king received envoys from his recent enemy’s principal ally, the prince of Wales, calling for peace negotiations with Pedro and an alliance between Aragon and the English crown prince. This meeting was clearly a prelude to a much larger Castilian delegation that came into Pere’s presence shortly before 74   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 913, f. 198 75   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 913, f. 133. 76   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 913, f. 119. 77  See: Chapter 17, Section 4. 78   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 914, ff. 18, 34v, 75v, 92, 94v, 101v, 113, 115v, 121, 172v 79   A CA, Cancillería real; R. 913, ff. 200r–v, 227r–v; R. 914. Ff. 20, 66v, 68v, 82r–v, 171, 230–237.

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Christmas, 1367.80 During the same period, other ambassadors came from his largely undependable neighbor, Charles II of Navarre, almost certainly to discuss plans that would seriously weaken Castile, no matter who ruled it.81 Finally, in the late fall and early winter of that same year, delegations from Charles V of France and several of his great nobles received guiatges for travel across the Pyrenees.82 During the tumultuous years after the War of the Two Pedros, Pere also extended a number of safe-conducts to his own officials who were sent on various missions to safeguard the kingdom’s borders against any and all foreign threats. In February, 1367, he issued one to a leading Aragonese noble, Count Ugo of Pallars, a safe-conduct that specified the recipient was exempt from punishment for all “crimes and offenses” he might commit during the the period that the instrument was in force. Like so many of Pere’s officials at that point in time, the count was engaged in the business of keeping Aragon and Catalonia safe during the advance of Free Companies into Castile to support Trastámara. With his government increasingly overstretched during the last years of the Castilian war and the uneasy peace that followed, the Aragonese king repeatedly called on his subjects to help protect his realms. For example, in the winter of 1365, when Pere’s Valencian campaigns were beginning, he gave a royal pardon to a Muslim of Lérida in exchange for service in a naval expedition being readied against the Castilians. Being freed from prison shortly before this, the recipient of the royal favor swore before an important official (qādī) of his aljama that he would serve faithfully in the Aragonese king’s armada.83 In early June, 1367, the king granted a safe-conduct for military service at the battle of Nájera to another townsman of Lérida, calling upon him to recruit for up to four months armed bands to be used against any attempted invasion by Pedro and the Black Prince.84 Many of the individuals and families who received the king’s safe-conducts during this eventful period seem to share the same driving desire to get away from homes where they had lived for many years but now had been destroyed. One Aragonese traveler who had been captured during the war spent considerable time in a Castilian prison. Having finally secured his release, he 80   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 914, ff. 24r–v, 31v, 83 r–v, 197. 81   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 914, f. 43. 82   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 914, ff. 121, 151v, 168, 183v. 83  Burns, “Guidaticum,” 73–74; Josefa Mutgé Vives, L’Aljama sarraïna de Lleida a l’etat mitjana: Aproximació a la seva història (Barcelona, 1992), 339–40 (doc. 161). 84   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 914, ff. 41r–v.

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received a guiatge from Pere permitting him to return to Aragon.85 Another refugee, a Catalan this time, had lived near a castle held by the important baron, Guillem Galceran de Rocabertino. He was given the right by Pere’s guiatge to escape the baronial bully and to find a new home anywhere he might chose to settle.86 The vast majority of the individual recipients of Pere’s safe-conducts all seemed to be looking for new homes, although few specified their desired final destinations. Two Catalan lesser nobles, apparently sick of the war culture their land had fallen into, preferred to use Pere’s guiatge, not to resettle within the Crown of Aragon, but to travel across the peninsula to the Algarve, the southernmost region of Portugal where they did resettle.87 One Jewish applicant for the safe-conduct needed its protection to engage in trade across France and then to return to his hometown of Cervera. Another Christian resident of a Pyrenean village who tried to use the safe-conduct as a statement of royal protection for his black-market trade in Navarrese wine was disappointed when Pere abrogated the guiatge, which led directly to the culprit’s arrest.88 Some of Pere’s individual bearers may very well have been spies.89 The varied stories encapsulated in these royal documents demonstrate how uncertain were the fortunes of men and women in the years after the Castilian war subsided. Between 1365 and 1368, royal, noble, and urban families crossed the borders of the Crown of Aragon seeking to improve their political or social positions or to escape from the dangers of war. Members of Jewish and Muslim communities not infrequently took the hazardous step of deserting their Christian lords in the Crown of Aragon for relative safety in the infidel communities of Castile and Granada. By contrast, not-a-few holders of guiatges seemed to have viewed the dangerous times in which they lived as an opportunity for trading across borders and making a profit in all kinds of goods including military intelligence. 85   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 914, ff. 154r–v. 86   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 914, f. 132. 87   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 912, f. 67v; R. 914, ff. 70, 165r–v, 214r–v. 88   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 913, ff. 87v–88; R. 914, f. 42v. 89   A CA, Cancillería real, R. 914, ff. 16v, 165r–v. Although the murky world of espionage manipulated by Pere III is seldom open to the researcher, a tantalizing reference from 1368 remains, which talks of an exchange of spies between the Aragonese king and the Judge of Arborea. For espionage during Pere III’s reign, see Chapter 12, Section 5. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 912, f. 61v.

Chapter 20

Conclusion A leading authority on the War of the Two Pedros, Antonio Gutiérrez de Velasco, has characterized the conflict as “one of the most far-reaching events of the fourteenth century.”1 For the largest realms of late-medieval Iberia, this assessment is most decidedly on point. The Crown of Aragon and Castile had long been rivals in the race for the conquest of the peninsula’s Muslim lands. The long-standing disputes of the two powers during the 1260s resulted a half-century later in a decade of warfare between the Aragonese king, Jaume II, and his Castilian counterparts, Sancho IV and Fernando IV. These hostilities were initiated to determine which dynasty would control the rich and strategically-placed region of Murcia. This conflict that ended with the Treaty of Torellos in 1304 failed to supply a definitive answer. Instead of awarding Murcia in its entirety either to Castile or Aragon, the negotiators on both sides tried to divide the region between the two claimants. Ill-feeling over their abortive settlement lingered for another half-century until it once again erupted in August 1356 when the unfortunate privateering activities of Pere III’s adviser, Francesch de Perillós, undertaken before the eyes of the Castilian king, provided a pretense for renewed conflict. The decade-long conflict influenced the inter-linked course of political events in Castile and Aragon for decades to come. The undeclared ending of this conflict came in the opening months of 1366 when Pere’s long-time captain, Enrique de Trastámara invaded Castile and seized the crown. The civil war that followed fell into two distinct phases: The first (1366–1367) which ended with the battle of Nájera temporarily put Pedro back on the Castilian throne. A second phase led to Enrique’s return to power in Castile and ended in Pedro’s death at Montiel in 1369. Though Pere III had little to do with later events in neighboring Castile, for some years, he attempted unsuccessfully to acquire the Castilian properties promised him by Enrique when he backed the latter’s claim on the Castilian throne. However, with Trastámara firmly established in power by the early 1370s, Pere had to fight merely to maintain full control over his own lands. With the death of Pere’s last son, Martí I, in 1410 and the election of a Trastámaran prince, Fernando of Antequera as the new Aragonese king, Ferran I (r. 1412– 1416), the Crown of Aragon’s future existence as an independent state soon fell 1  Gutiérrez de Velasco, “Conquista,” 71. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004425057_022

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into doubt. At the same time, Castile pointed the way to its dominance over the peninsula. Besides these wide-ranging political effects of the War of the Two Pedros and the Castilian civil war which grew out of it, the conflict also gave rise to a number of military trends that would affect medieval Iberia for the next century. Primarily, the conflict with Aragon had drawn Castile away from the campaigns it had pursued so successfully in the 1330s and 1340s along the Strait of Gibraltar. This seminal thrust against the last Muslim stronghold in Spain, the kingdom of Granada, would now have to wait over a century until the critical reign of the Catholic Kings in the late-fifteenth century brought about its completion. The interrelated conflicts brought with them major military changes. In the campaigns of the first war, both Aragon and Castile made increasing use of counterweight artillery. On the other hand, since Pedro was largely on the offensive throughout most of the struggle, he seems to have utilized such weapons on more occasions and with greater effect than did his Aragonese adversary. The sources indicate that there were even a few sieges, skirmishes, and naval battles in which gunpowder weapons may have been used. The War of the Two Pedros appears to have played an important role in introducing into Aragon and Castile new military products, the most important of which was plate armor. This revolution in military technology had advanced substantially during the decades of the Hundred Years War in such countries as France, England, Italy, and Germany. Plate armor had begun to penetrate into Catalonia even before the conflict with Castile but thereafter, it spread increasingly among combatants on both sides. As in northern Europe, this influx of new styles of body armor led first to a mixture of mail and plate that afterwards gave way to the late medieval panoply of plate armor. The War of the Two Pedros also brought changes to the way in which soldiers were compensated for their service as well as the sources from which their compensation originated. In the decades before the war, Aragonese monarchs had come to understand that the old feudal way of assembling an army and maintaining it in the field could not keep up with the larger and longer conflicts that the century brought with it. As early as the 1320s and 1330s, Pere III had already learned this lesson in Sardinia and in other Mediterranean conflicts. Although this could occasionally lead to the surrender of some fiscal power by the king and his regular administrators, Pere gradually accepted it as one of the new and more efficient ways of conducting military business. As the years passed, regular payment of Aragonese, Catalan, and Valencian troops became a standard part of war making. Such payments also allowed great nobles such as the count of Denia to utilize paid troops in assembling small armies which served him on a largely permanent basis.

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As usual, we have much less information from the Castilian side. In respect to military recruitment, Pedro I appears to have continued making due with a broadly feudal system during most of the conflict. Nevertheless, he, too, seems to have begun relying on paid troops if only to a lesser extent. Such changes set the stage for the powerful Spanish military establishment that would dominate European warfare throughout much of the early modern period. One of the saddest effects of the decade-and-a-half of warfare that held the Crown of Aragon and Castile in its grasp was the depopulation and destruction that took place, especially in Aragon and along the common frontier. Large numbers of towns, hamlets, and villages experienced extensive destruction and some disappeared altogether. Many of the refugees from these urban sites were the residents of Muslim and Jewish communities. Unable to pay their normal taxes and extraordinary war subsidies, members of both groups fled to Castile, Granada, or even farther afield. Repeated commands for their return by the king and his wife, Queen Elionor, were often ineffective, even when the Aragonese crown promised a temporary reduction of all taxes for its nonChristian subjects. One result of the fiscal problem brought on the extended conflict seems to have been an increase in anti-Semitic riots that led inexorably toward the great pogrom of 1391. At the end of the War of the Two Pedros, Aragon retrieved its independence and separate existence despite Castile’s attempts to overrun much of its territory. Nevertheless, the conflict ultimately pointed the way toward a future in which a united Spain largely dominated by Castile incorporated most of the Iberian Peninsula. The army of this new Spanish kingdom would become the premier military force in Europe for well over a century. Finally, by its role in exacerbating religious tensions on the peninsula, the conflict helped bring about the destruction of the centuries-old regime of three religions to be replaced by an increasingly militant and intolerant Catholicism.

Appendix I

Correspondence between Pere III of Aragon and Pedro I of Castile, 1356 The following documents come from the Cancilleria real (Royal Chancellery) section of the Archivo de la Corona de Aragón. They consist of correspondence between the kings of Castile and Aragon in the first years of the War of the Two Pedros that contain accusations between the two sovereigns which attempted to determine which was guilty for starting the conflict and laid out conditions for the re-establishment of peace. Each document is given a specific number and is headed by a summary of its contents, the place and date of issuance, the language in which it was written, and a full citation of its archival source.

1

Letter of Defiance Sent by the Castilian King, Pedro I, against Pere III of Aragon. Seville, August 8, 1356

This letter, while serving to break feudal ties between the two kings, is a virtual declaration of war. Original Language: Castilian. Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó [ACA], R. 1379, ff. 12v–13v. Translation of Catalan version: Pere III, 2:496–99 (VI:3). Minor alterations made by the authors. Letter of defiance of the king of Castile sent to the lord king whose name is written below: To the king of Aragon From the King of Castile and León We, the king, inform you that we have seen your letter that you sent us concerning the matter of a ship about which a merchant of the city of Majorca, Ramon de Frexanete complained to us. He said that the ship, loaded with iron and other things as well as the men who came with it, was commanded by Juan Pérez de Xuaga, son of Pero Jaime de Xuaga from Bermejo of the county of Vizcaya. You have entreated us that we should hand over the said things that were plundered or robbed or the quantities he estimated

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004425057_023

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(which were contained in your letter) along with interest and expenses. If we thus do not carry this out, you cannot be excused from acting about this in such a way that the said Ramon de Frexanete must have all of this restored to him. Concerning this, you have sent to us concerning this matter by your sworn messenger, Iñigo de Lorbes. You ordered this man that after he delivered your letter, he was to get the testimony of a public scribe [that he had carried this out]. However, if he could not find one, you would take him at his word. We understand all the other things contained in your said letter. King, we are amazed that you have sent to say such words with your letter. You know well that at the time you say the ship was taken the county of Vizcaya had risen in rebellion and was waging war against us. Therefore, we bear no fault for damage that anyone has suffered [during this revolt]. Nevertheless, up to now, we have considered you a friend. You have received from our father, the king [Alfonso XI], (may God pardon him) aid which you are aware of. Likewise after we have begun to rule, we have safeguarded for all time you, your honor, and your land and all that you gained in your conquests. If anyone from our lordship did harm you in your person, we have established in this manner what we have to do. In return for this, we have received from you the complete opposite in many ways. You know that the orders of Santiago and Calatrava in your realms are under the command and obedience of our masters who are in our kingdom. Yet you have alienated these offices for other persons after removing and dispossessing the said masters from their jurisdictions, though you had no legal right to do so. Likewise your galleys have come into our ports and made war on us as if we were enemies, seizing ships from our ports that had come loaded with bread and other merchandise for Seville and for other places on the frontier. Because of this, all the frontier has been in danger from the great scarcity of bread from that time. During the same period, our subjects have suffered many other evils, damages, robberies, and crimes from yours. We have suffered all of this when we ourselves are in great need. Yet we sent our justice (alcalde), Gil Blasquez, to complain and protest about this, but you never issued a warning about it; we and those of our land have suffered the opposite. While we were in our city of Cadiz, where we had gone to tend to our villages and castles some of your armed galleys and their crews killed inhabitants of the city of Seville who had lived there for a very long time. Then, they plundered and robbed merchandise and other things which they came across in the same port. Furthermore, we have sent to them [the galley owners] to state and beg that they should desist, but they did not wish to do so and have sent to us to say they would not do so and they were not legally responsible to anyone but you. They plundered and robbed in other of our ports and they took what they could from men who were our subjects. They threw into the sea what they could take off with them—and we saw this with our own eyes. We, who considered you to be our friend, have suffered this from you and yours. King, for one who was truly guarded and defended by our father, the lord king, (may God pardon

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him) as you were and also receiving from us the good works you have had from us until now, we should have a different bond with you than this one. Even though we have suffered all these things from you, we have still considered you our friend until now, and do not wish to make accusations against you in order to protect our friendship and the relationship that was between us and you. If we had not been in some difficulties when most of these things took place, we would have been able to deflect and restrain them in a way worthy of our honor and service. But we held back from this because you always were and are one whom we consider to be a clear and true friend. But now since these deeds and crimes have been committed against us by you and your people and because of the said letter which you have now sent us contained such words that have not shown the respect to us they should, we cannot restrain ourselves from feeling angry about this and many other things and crimes we and those of our realms have suffered from you and your people nor can we hold back and restrain ourselves as we should. It is now our responsibility to act in order to protect our honor and our state. In order to safeguard the friendship that was between us and you, until now, we did not want to make accusations against you concerning some grievances you have caused to the queen, our aunt, and the princes, our cousins. From now own, we do not consider you to be our friend and wish to retaliate for this matter as we must and as it is fitting for our honor [to do so]. Issued in the noble city of Seville on the eight day of August sealed with our secret seal. In the era 1394 [1357]. I, Juan Fferiz, had this written at the command of the king.

2 Pere III’s Response to Pedro I’s Defiance. Perpignan, September 4, 1356 Original Language: Castilian. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, ff. 13v–15v. Translation from Catalan version: Pere III, trans. Hillgarth, 2:500–3 (VI:4). Minor alterations by the authors. Letter in response to the aforesaid letter the inscription of which is this: To the King of Castile and León from the King of Aragon The contents follow with these words: King, today, Sunday, September 4th of the above-written year we received the letter which your messenger, Martin López, delivered to us. The matter that you have

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informed us of concerned a letter which we had sent to you to protest the issue of a merchant and subject of ours who complained before us that some men of the kingdom of Castile had robbed his merchandise. A fuller discussion of this is contained in the letter we have sent you in which we state that if you do not wish to render justice, we will have to carry it out for the said merchant what we are bound to according to justice and equity. In line with this and other affairs that are more fully expressed in your letter, we respond to you that in our aforesaid letter that this missive which came from our chancellery in the form and manner that is customary when one king demands justice from another in such a circumstance, the sovereign does not normally see the writ that emerges from his court in pursuit of justice. Thus we know next to nothing of this letter. Yet, we were given some confidence after we received the said letter of yours that the king, your father, and other kings have written to us and we to them in the format of this same letter. But, Matheo Adrian, our main scribe who holds our seals, informed us that after agreements were made between us and you, a certain format was agreed on in Zaragoza between Francisco de Prohomne, who was our main scribe at the time, and Matheo Fernández, who was yours, for writing concerning matters like this one from us to you and vice versa. The said Matheo Adrian states that the said format was not followed since he was not in our court and the scribe who produced the said letter did not know the aforementioned format and issued the letter in a style customary for writing other kings in such matters. Thus, this was a mistake of the said scribe, but you must not be upset by this because careless things occur every day. In regard to the other point you have raised with us; that is, until now you have considered us a friend and that we were the recipient of many good turns from your father, the king, and from you as is fully contained in your letter. King, we respond to you about this that it is true that your father, the king, and we were always friends and he did us many good turns, but God knows and everyone is certain that we gave him great aid and did him good turns in his undertakings. We do not want to say more about this because one should not praise his own actions. King, we understand that you have respected our position as a friend and we have done the same with you; if you have respected us, we have just as fully respected you. In regard to the other point, king, that you have informed us of; that is, concerning the matter of the master of Calatrava, this accusation appears unjust to us since the brothers of Calatrava (who are in Alcañiz, which is within our lordship) say that in accordance with their rule, they elected and designated Lord Juan Fernández as their master. They were able to do so in accordance with God and their rule. Since the brothers of this order based in Castile were excommunicated and the masters designated there were not designated in accordance with God and the rule. A lawsuit concerning this matter has come before the pope. For two reasons, it is not right for you to be aggrieved. The first is that the question of the order is an issue of the church and does not apply to laymen. The other is that this is within our realms, neither you nor any other

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king should issue orders in our realms. But if one or any of these brothers should come to demand justice in our court, legal action shall be taken for them as it must be in line with justice and equity. And concerning the point you informed us of; that is, the galleys which have done damage in your seaports and the other evil deeds which you say we have committed, but do not want to talk about … [specifically], we respond that you should be certain that you have not committed evil deeds against us, since we never willingly took such action against you nor even had the intention of doing so. If you have discovered that our subjects have committed such unjust acts and if you would have them punished, then this must be done between kings who are friends and are at peace. Thus, it is not our fault that you have not informed us of these things by letter or a demand concerning what must be done and what we should have fulfilled for you. If you, king, should wish to know the things that our enemies, the Genoese, have committed against our people in your ports, we would have greater reason to complain than you do. And concerning the matter you informed us of; that is, about the queen, Lady Leonor, your aunt, and the princes, your cousins, we respond to you that we do not believe we have done any injustice to them. When they sent to us to make some legal demand, we shall act toward them exactly as we have to in line with justice and equity. You know well that when you sent your letter to entreat that we should be willing to put under our authority everything they possess in our realms and lands, we did not want to do so since they or you for them might demand from us more than was just and which we thus are not bound to carry out. In regard to the other things you have informed us of in your letter (namely, when you make mention of the peace treaties that have been in effect between us and you), God knows what was between us and you and sees the whole truth that we, as much for good love as by the letter of the agreements, have completely fulfilled for you these pacts which were confirmed between us and you with oath and homage. If you would have informed us of any matter, we always would have attended to it as we have to and are bound to carry out. But we are thoroughly shocked that before this letter was sent to you, we have sure news from the governor of Valencia that foreign (your)1 men from the kingdom of Murcia with their battle banner unfolded have come and overrun the villages of Chinosa and Montover (which are inside the kingdom of Valencia), then setting them on fire. We have also received accurate intelligence from the said governor that the inhabitants of Requena2 have overrun and sacked the village of Sieteaguas which is in the kingdom of Valencia. At the same time, we have had certain news from 1  “Foreign” (estranyes) is crossed out and replaced with “your” (vestras). Pere had apparently considered being diplomatic, but was surely convinced in short order that the invasion of his Aragonese and Valencian frontiers was being carried out by Castilian troops. 2  Castilian town on Valencian border due west of Valencia city.

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the governor of Aragon that your men who came from the region of Molina3 have overrun and torched some hamlets of Daroca.4 All this was done without any notification or formal breach of the peace and of our alliances. Because, king, you have committed such acts against us, know that from now on we do not consider you to be our friend and we respond that neither should you consider us to be your friend. Issued at Perpinyan under our secret seal on September 4th in the year of the birth of Our Lord 1356.

3

Pedro Sends a Second Letter to Pere. Seville, October 18, 1356

Original Language: Castilian. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, f. 83v. Second Letter sent by the king of Castile to the Lord King whose inscription this is: To the Lord of Aragon From the King of Castile and León King, we have informed you that we have seen the letter that you sent us and Iñigo Lorbes, your messenger, delivered to us in our city of Seville on Wednesday, October 11. Yet, by this missive you have not sent to us to respond to some of the points that we raised for you to discuss by our other letter which we mailed to you. King, after your people have committed crimes and caused dangers in our land, it is fitting that we send to you to discuss these matters. After we dispatched Gil Blasquez, the justice of our court, to make claims and confront you about this matter, you have neither ordered that this should be emended nor even sent us a suitable response. After this, your officials and men of Majorca captured ships of our lordship and imprisoned or killed the men who had come in them. Your men sold and auctioned off for money these ships and the cargoes which they carried as if they were from enemies. King, after you have done this to our vassals and subjects, you have sent to us to say that they deserved to be treated in kind for what they have suffered and if they should do even more, you would not consider this action unjust. After you wrote us to say you are not our friend, we sent to you a knight of ours to raise several points about this. You then sent a letter of surety to the queen so she might go and come back secretly and in safety. If you 3  Molina de Aragón is a Aragonese border town on the Rio Tajo to the south of Calatayud, a major Aragonese frontier town to the southwest of Zaragoza. 4  Aragonese frontier town to the southeast of Calatayud.

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should wish to send to us a good knight, you can do so in safety. Thus the messengers of kings must be safe. Issued in the said city of Seville sealed with our secret seal October 18th Era 1394 [1356]. Juan Ferriz had this written at the king’s command.

4

Pere Responds to Pedro’s Second Letter Written on October 18, 1356. Calatayud, December 6, 1356

Original Language, Castilian. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, ff. 83v–84v Printed Translation: Pere III, 2: 507–9 (VI:7) Minor revisions made by the authors. The letter in response to that which was written above: To the king of Castile and León From the king of Aragon King, on the fifteenth day of November we received your letter that was delivered to us by Juan Ferrandez de Arcos and Pero Ferrandez de Segovia who said they were your messengers in response to a reply we have made to another letter of yours that you first sent to us. Likewise [an assertion] was contained in your said letter that, considering the wrongs that our people have committed against your subjects, and since you have sent Gil Blasquez, your justice of the peace, to examine and reproach us in regard to this matter and since we did not give him a suitable response after our people and officials of Majorca captured ships from your jurisdiction, killed the men on them, and then conducted a public auction for [the sale of] their merchandise and property. If your vassals and subjects have caused some damage in our lands in revenge and retribution for that which they have undergone, we would not think it an unreasonable response. King, to all of this which has been said, we respond to you that we, by the answer we made to you in regard to your first letter, have answered to that which you sent us to say that we have now had our response reexamined once more with care. But if you want to point out to us that we did not respond to you concerning this matter, we will now answer. And concerning the response we made to the said Gil Blanquez which you made mention of in your letter, we are making clear to you that we took action by coming before our council with the said Gil Blanquez present and had fulfilled the agreements between us and you, concerning which you carried out and we did all that was required as we were obliged to in accordance with the said agreements,

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fulfilling in fact all that had to be carried out. This was done in the presence of your envoy who agreed with our council. Therefore, King, you must consider this a bad response. Concerning that which you have informed us of; namely, the ship that was captured in Majorca, know that this is true, King, according to the legal proceedings carried out by our officials, and that the master of the said ship had a suit before our governor of Majorca. He had secretly kidnaped four very rich Majorcan merchants in the port of the city of Majorca and had then set sail. On discovering this, our governor sent to say that he [the master] had committed a crime by leaving before the suit had been resolved, completed, and finished. And he had even committed worse wrongs since he had kidnaped the merchants after the governor had demanded that he return them. And then the master and other crew members of the ship shot arrows at the governor and those left on the ship. And then the governor, seeing this great cruelty and lack of reason, armed or rather had armed a ship with which he chased and caught up with the master, demanding that he release the merchants. The master did not want to and they fought over this and during this conflict the master and some of his crew were killed. For the crime committed in our jurisdiction, a judge of Majorca impounded the said ship with all its cargo for our treasury. King, in your first letter you sent, you did not say anything about this matter, and thus we could not respond to you about it. And know well, King, that monarchs who have good peace treaties and solid truces must do no wrongs to each other without a formal complaint, so they might understand by this if these matters were carried out justly or not. King, know well that your subjects, because of the damage you say they have endured, did not on their own arm the twelve galleys and four ships that came to Majorca with your banners and admiral to cause damage to our people since these were armed in your villages. Nor would your people with your officials and standards have overrun our lands. And though you say that we have sent to you to state that we did not want you as a friend, you were the first to make this known to us and we have answered you in the same way. We have informed you, King, of all these matters because God and all the world knows of our great justice and the great crime you committed from your side. In regard to the knight whom you have told us is coming to Requena, we are informing you that we are sending a letter of safeconduct and this will apply to all those messengers that come to us from your side. Issued in Calatayud under our secret seal on the 6th day of the month of December in the year of the birth of Our Lord 1356.

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435

Pere Writes to His Ambassador and Vice-Chancellor, Francesch Roma, Ordering Him to Deliver to Pedro I Pere’s Formal Challenge to a Duel. Sant Matheu, March 5, 1358

Original Language: Catalan. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1158, f. 6v. Printed Edition: Epistolari, 159–60 (doc. 22). We have received your letter and understood the things contained in it. You have informed us of a few of the words that our beloved chamberlain, Lord Francesch de Perellós, must say to the messengers of the Castilian king. We respond to you that this can be carried out in the following manner; that is, Francesch de Perellós should say these words before issuing the challenge: “I am prepared to place myself on a field of battle with you without any advantage to one or the other of us and there Our Lord will show which of us is maintaining the truth.” By those words “without advantage” that Perellós will utter, the Castilian king will be assured that he will not be the one awaiting the challenge. Indeed, if there are other general words that seem good to you for him to add without dishonor, you may have him use them. But since you have settled on the battle of 100 knights, we will not say much about that since in that type of duel there is not much of a challenger or one who awaits the challenge. There are a few other things that you have made known to us concerning the confirmation of the lawsuit. We respond to you that we approve those things you have informed us of. By another letter, we commanded our beloved counselor, Francesch de Bellcastell, that from now on he should not interfere with you in the confirmation of the lawsuit. Issued at the place of Sant Matheu under our secret seal on March 5th in the year of the birth of Our Lord, 1358.

Appendix II

Pere III’s Administrative and Military Letters, 1356–1365 The following documents come from the Cancilleria real (Royal Chancellery), specifically from the Register (Registro) and Royal Letters (Cartas reales) sections of the Archivo de la Corona de Aragón. They consist of correspondence between 1356 and 1365 between King Pere III of Aragon, his third queen and important administrator, Elionor of Sicily, other members of his government, his important clergy, town representatives, several popes and their legates, and other European rulers and their representatives. A parliamentary address of Queen Elionor is also included. Each document is given a specific number and is headed by a summary of its contents, the place and date of issuance, the language in which it was written, and a full citation of its archival source. The documents are divided among the following subjects: clerics: 5, 8, 9; foreign monarchs: 10, 40 45, 56; legal rulings: 4, 7; Jews and Muslim: 33, 43, 51; military matters: 1–2, 6, 11, 18–19, 21, 24–25, 27–29, 32, 34–36, 38–39, 46, 48, 50, 53–54, 58–60, 62–64, 67; officials: 3, 20, 30, 34, 41–42, 47, 51; parliamentary matters: 52, 66; proposed attack on Castile: 44; Queen Elionor: 14, 66; urban matters: 12–13, 15, 23, 28, 31, 49, 61, 65.

1356 1

One of Pere III’s First Official Letters concerning the Castilian War. Addressed to Pere’s Uncle and Principal Adviser, Count Ramon Berenguer of Empuries (r. 1341–1364). Perpignan, August 20, 1356

Original Language: Catalan. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1148, f. 104v. Printed Edition: Epistolari, 123–27 (doc. 17). The King of Aragon Dear Uncle: We have received your letter concerning the course of the war that the king of Castile has unjustly and without any reason begun against us and our people. Since you have informed us of this matter in another letter and we have not yet answered you, consider this my answer to the said letter along with the directives and orders concerning

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004425057_024

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this matter that we have already sent you. Yet we understand that you did not receive this letter since your messenger has already left. Thus as we have already written, we entreat that you take care and supervise these matters [of Valencia]1 so that, God willing, these matters (that is the safety and utility of our realms and of our people) should reflect on our honor, that of our crown and of your own honor. Therefore since we are not able to leave here, these matters could be administered by no better person than you. Therefore, we beg that you show great diligence and care in this affair. Thus since you have informed us that you do not have a company there and that salaries should be given to those companies you do have, we respond to you that we have made the following provisions. We have instructed Lord Bernat de Serra, your procurator in the county [of Empuries], and have told him what you have already told him about rapidly coming to Barcelona with the said companies, where they would be paid and reimbursed. You have also discussed with us a military subsidy, but for a cause just as important as the defense of our lands, we have not granted such an aid. In the year we crossed the sea,2 we gave no grant to anyone and have even less of an intention to do so now. Therefore, it is equally just that we not pay the salary for those troops of the kingdom of Valencia if we have not done so for the campaigns they have already carried out. Therefore every man must be prepared to defend the land and kingdom where he lives. The Aragonese then would demand a similar thing from us and this would be a matter impossible for us to fulfill. Thus recognize that what we are doing is right. You have inquired about where we are going from here. We respond that the general opinion that you and the others hold greatly amaze us. You must see that it would not be good for the over-all situation if we were to advance into the kingdom of Valencia in a weakened state since we would suffer damage and our kingdom, dishonor. Yet if we launch a powerful attack, its expense will be wasted. Because the kingdom of Valencia is not a land from which we can launch a strong attack against Castile, it would not be good for us to remain … [there], wearing out ourselves and consuming the resources of that realm, of which there is not a great abundance. Therefore, understand that it is sufficient for you to guard the kingdom and its frontiers with your companies. You should remain on the defensive there while waging war against the enemy as much as you can. Do not think that we remain here diverted by pleasure or fear. Indeed, we are prepared to advance since we want a situation from which we will curb the arrogance of our enemies and then if they have laid waste to our lands, we, for our honor and that of our realms, will do the same to theirs. We entreat you most dearly that you prepare and

1  Pere had already appointed Ramon Berenguer the military leader of the southern kingdom of Valencia. 2  Pere led a naval expeditions against Mallorca in 1343 and against Sardinia in 1354.

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make ready this realm and yourself for such a defense so that with your brave men you may oblige us to carry out our intention which, God willing, will take place for His enjoyment and for the honor of our crown….3 We have hope in God that we will demonstrate that our power is such that it must not be condemned by Him or any other king. Issued under secret seal at Perpignan on August 20 in the year of the birth of Our Lord 1356. Pere The same [Jaume Conesa in the council with the lord king present].

2

Pere Contacts Aragonese Nobles and Commands Them to Proceed to the Aragonese Frontier. Perpignan, September 12, 1356

Original Language: Aragonese. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, ff. 20v, 21. The King of Aragon Having informed you of the Castilian war by the letters we have already written, we have ordered you to personally go on to the frontier to inflict as much damage as possible on the Castilian king and his lands. Therefore, God willing, we intend to be in Aragon on Sunday, October 15 for the same reason and entreat you to attempt to inflict as much damage as you can on the said king of Castile and his land in such a way that will advance our honor and that of our crown. We also beg you to guard the frontiers well and not fail to carry out what we have written you in other letters. You should act so that on the said day you may assemble as many of these companies as possible to come and follow us in the said undertaking. Indeed we will pay your salary and for your provisions as we are accustomed to. Issued at Perpinyan on September 12 in the year of the birth of Our Lord 1356.

3  The last paragraph of this letter deals with a matter not directly connected with the Castilian war: Pere’s attempted peace settlement with his half-brother, Prince Ferran. The king had been attempting to come to some kind of negotiated settlement with Ferran since the defeat of the Valencian Unión in 1343. As the Valencian leader of this baronial brotherhood, Ferran was a great danger to the king in his southern realm. Ferran’s importance was quickly proven in 1356 when he defected to the side of the Castilian king, Pedro I. In this passage, Pere informed his uncle that he had broken off negotiations with Ferran for the time being.

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To our noble and beloved counselor, Lord Pedro, lord of Xerica To our noble and beloved counselor, Lord Lope, count of Luna and lord of the city of Segorbe, knight To the noble Lord Eximen de Urrea, son of the noble and beloved counselor Lord Juan Ximeno de Urrea, knight, who holds the city Alcañiz To the noble Lord Luis Cornell To the noble Lord Juan Martínez de Luna To the noble Lord Ato de Foçes To the noble Lord Blasco de Alagon, knight To the noble Lord Pedro de Luna To the noble Lord Fernández de Vergua To the noble Lord Jaime de Xerica

3

Pere to Vicars, Bailiffs, and Other Officials of Roussillon, Cerdanya, Conflent, Varitan, Cabrera, and Vallespir concerning the Transport and Acquisition of War Horses and Pack Animals. Perpignan, September 20, 1356

Original Languages: Latin; Catalan. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1380, ff. 21v–22. Pere to his beloved and faithful vicars, bailiffs, and others of our officials in the counties of Roussillion and Cerdanya and the lands of Conflent, Cabrera, Varitan, and Vallespir or to their deputies to whom the present letter comes. Salutations and greetings. Because of the lack of horses and pack animals that exist in our realms and lands, we have ordained and wished that no one in any way should transport outside of our realms and lands horses and pack animals suitable for carrying weapons. Yet charges of this should be thoroughly made by you and others of our officials and proven against those who own the said horses. Moreover, we expressly order and command you and your men once you see the present letter that you should act to publicly announce by the voice of a crier what we have ordered concerning these matters to our subjects in the important villages entrusted to your jurisdiction so they cannot claim ignorance of these matters in any way. The contents of the aforesaid public announcement should take the following form.4

4  The announcement is in Catalan.

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Appendix II Here ye now that the Lord King commands everyone of whatever rank, whether cleric or laymen, to not be so insane or impetuous as to transport a war horse or pack animal out of the king’s realms. Whoever violates this shall pay the penalty of his body and life since this is contrary to the defense of the king’s realms and lands to which everyone is duty-bound. Therefore, the said lord commands that everyone, no matter what his rank, who has a war horse or pack animal or knows someone else who has one must pass on this information under the penalty of the loss of the horse or of its value to the vicar of the village where the person who has the horse lives.

Also we order you and your men by the above form or another concerning war horses or pack animals in the jurisdiction entrusted to you or any of your men that you should require and take great care that, after these animals and their owners have been registered by two good men [councilors] of the town or village where the war horse or pack animal was found, you should act to legitimately appraise them. With these same appraisals issued from these men, you should receive a bond from those who owned the war horse or pack animal or from their representative. You should also deliver these to us or to whomever we wish in our place and to pay the owner the price they [the good men] had set for the horse and pack animal. Issued at Perpignan on September 20th in the year of the birth of Our Lord 1356.

4

Pere to Berenguer Bonet and Joan Villarteç de Estagello Who Are Charged with Murder, Granting a Safe-Conduct until They Return from Valencian Frontier Service. Perpignan, September 23, 1356

Original Language: Latin. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1380, f. 27. We Pere … [are] aware that you, Berenguer Bonet and Joan Villarteç de Estagello, have been charged with murder recently committed against the person of Pedro Bernardo Portamo of the said location [Perpinyan] and that after his murder you left the county of Roussillon, fearing (as you assert) that from the prejudice there you might suffer or from an accusation concerning these evil deeds for which you are defendants and claim to be innocent and exempt from all charges, you claim that the said Pedro Bernardo Portamo had worked to have you cleared before he died. This was proven to have taken place by a certain public letter. You also claim that you have to set out for the kingdom of Valencia in our service; namely, for the defense of this kingdom and also in favor of the military expeditions between us and the king of Castile and the

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forces of both that are known to be occurring in the said regions. Since by our present letter, we safeguard and indemnify you, the said Berenguer and Joan, as innocent of the above-mentioned charges, especially while you shall be in our military service and for two months after you have returned from the afore-said expedition. Thus while you are in our service and at war and especially for two months after you have returned from the expedition, you can remain, go, and come both safely and securely in each an every place, land, and jurisdiction subjected to our lordship. Commanding by the present letter to the procurators and governors of our realms and lands, our vicars, bailiffs, and other officials in the present and future that they should firmly observe and fulfill this safe-conduct and not contravene or allow it to be contravened by anyone for any reason. In testimony of this matter, we have ordered that this present letter of ours be marked with our seal. Issued at Perpignan, September 23rd in the year of the birth of Our Lord 1356.

5

Pere Writes to the Principal Clergy of the Crown of Aragon to Ask That They Insert New Parts into the Mass Which Are Dedicated to Blessed George the Martyr and Beg for His Intercession on the Aragonese Side in the War against Castile. Pina November 5, 1356

Original Language: Latin. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1380, ff. 70v, 71. Printed Edition: DS, 425–26 (doc. 561); Kagay, “Theory and Practice,” 608–10. Pere to the reverend father in Christ, Sancho, by divine providence, archbishop of Tarragona, our beloved adviser, or to his chapter. Affectionate salutations and greetings. Because of a disposition of sincere devotion that we have and bear to the virtuous dignity of Blessed George and since we have ordained and willed that for the time being a commemoration should be included in the Eucharist services in masses celebrated each day, therefore we affectionately beg you that in whatever churches of your diocese you want to send a transcript of the contents of the aforesaid commemoration, you should order their rectors that every day they should be willing to devotedly chant this commemoration in reverence to God and Blessed George. From this, we hope that by the good offices of this saint and with the help of God our affairs will prosper with glory and triumph. Indeed in this, you will greatly please us and we will greatly appreciate it. Issued in the village of Pina November 5, 1356 Pere de Gostemps made this at the command of the king by the noble counselor, Bernat de Cabrera.

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Likewise to the reverend and venerable fathers in Christ, the archbishop of Zaragoza and the bishops of Valencia, Tortosa, Barcelona, Gerona, Lérida, Elna, and Urgel or their chapters There follows the commemoration of George the martyr that was mentioned above: Protect me, God, from the company of the hateful one and from the multitude of evildoers. Verse: Hear, God, my prayer when I pray. Snatch away the fear of the enemy from my soul. Glory be to the Father and Son … Prayer: God, who granted to your martyr, George, for His merits and victory in wars, concede very favorably that we, who are earnestly requesting His favors, may gain victory over our enemies with his help and through God … Epistles: The blessed man, who was found without the stain of sin and who does not wander after gold nor hope for the hoards of money. Who is this and we will praise Him. Indeed, He performed miracles in his life. He who was proven in Him was found perfected in Him. And he will have eternal glory. Who can cross over and not be a transgressor? Who commits evil deeds and does no wrong. Therefore all his goods are founded on the Lord and all the church of the saints will praise His gifts. Verse: The just man will flourish as does the palm and will multiply as does the cedar. Gospel: Second Luke: At the time, Jesus said to his disciples, “If one should wish to follow me, let him deny and daily take up his cross and follow me. Indeed, whoever wishes to save his soul, let him deny himself and daily take up his cross and follow me. Indeed, whoever loses his soul because of me, let him save it because indeed what does it profit one if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul and causes its ruin. Indeed, whoever would be ashamed of me and my sermons, let the Son of Man be ashamed when He shall come in His majesty or in that of God the Father and of the holy angels. Moreover, I say to you that truly there are some who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God.” Offertory: They will profess your miracles to heaven and your virtue in the church of saints. Secret: Lord, having offered blessed gifts and with Blessed George the martyr interceding for us with you, purify us from the stains of our sins, by the Lord….

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Communion: The just man will rejoice in the Lord and all with a righteous heart shall be praised. Postcommunion: We, as suppliants, beg you, Omnipotent God, to renew us with your sacraments and through the intercession of Blessed George the martyr, may you bestow by the customary agreements that we should merit from you the accomplishment of a victory over our enemies.

1357 6

Pere Issues Another Emergency Order to the Counts of Trastámara and Luna concerning Castilian Threats against the Aragonese Town of Aranda. Zaragoza, January 11, 1357

Original Language: Aragonese. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, f. 111v. The King of Aragon May you know that the noble, Juan Martínez de Luna, by his squire and retainer and by his letter has notified us that Lord Juan, son of Lord Luis Alvaro de Guzman, and the inhabitants of Soria with great frontier companies of horse and foot in their districts have advanced to overrun the village of Aranda. With half of the companies you have, you should come to oppose them as you see fit. He [Juan Martínez de Luna] has entreated us that we should supply you and we have informed him that we have instructed you that in case a great number of men come against the said village then one of your companies can justifiably enter Castile to inflict as much damage as it can, you should choose from these companies so that each should have the required supplies you have provided for it. Therefore, we command and order that each of you— by letters and trustworthy messengers for some of the said reasons—as with the said noble that you should provide what is required for you to stand against some of these [Castilian] companies of horse and foot. Likewise, you should not abandon these sites they have supplies with which one could defend these sites and from which one would be able to inflict whatever damage he could in this action. Issued at Zaragoza January 11th in the year of the birth of Our Lord, 1357. The aforesaid letter was sent to the count of Trastámara. A similar letter was sent to the count of Luna.

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Pere Writes to Jordan Pedro De Urries, Governor of Aragon, specifying the Punishment of Crimes between Soldiers of the Same Company and of Different Companies as Well as with Civilian Populations. Zaragoza, January 24th, 1357

Original Language: Latin. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, ff. 123r–v. Pere … to our beloved counselor, Jordan Pedro de Urries, knight of Aragon, who holds the office of governor of Aragon and to our other officials of the said kingdom. Salutations and greetings. Behold that for the good and tranquil estate of the frontiers of the aforesaid realm, we have ordained by the contents of this letter that neither you nor any of your men shall punish in civil or criminal law any horsemen or foot soldiers who are or will be with our noble counselor, Lope, count of Luna, or who are or will be dispatched to the frontier with the said count. Neither will you arrest any of them for any brawls they engage in or for any other reason. Therefore we order and command that the said count or those specified by him should be empowered to exercise civil and criminal jurisdiction with each and every one of the horsemen and foot soldiers and with others who were dispatched to be stationed on the frontiers. Nevertheless, if a brawl breaks out between any one from the count’s household or from Luna’s frontier troops or others not of his household or of his frontier troops and this leads to death or wounds, we wish the investigation and punishment [for this] should be under your purview and not that of the said count or his officials. Therefore, we command that you tenaciously observe this and not allow anyone for any reason to contravene it. We likewise command you who exercises the office of governor that if the said count or you are out of our kingdom and any number of people should have legal disputes [with the count], you are to make claims on him for their part by letters or personally when you are outside our aforesaid realm and should come to his aid when necessary. Issued at Zaragoza on January 24th in the year of the birth of Our Lord, 1357.

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Pere to Cardinal Guillaume de la Jugée, Deacon of Santa María in Cosmedin Expressing Caution about His Peacemaking Visit to Aragon. Zaragoza. February 6, 1357

Original Language: Latin. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1380, f. 157v. To the reverend father in Christ, lord Guillaume, deacon of Holy Mary in Cosmedin, cardinal, and our special friend. Pere by the grace of God, king of Aragon … Salutations and increase of honor for your paternity. We wish you to know that we have received a letter from the noble count of Luna which some time ago he wrote us along with another letter you have recently sent to us and which was delivered along with the count’s letter. He continued that we should permit you and your attendants to approach and enter our domain. Yet we have responded that it does not seem to us suitable or useful that any Castilian should come into our domain since it may be assumed that the enemy will enter with them. But we have commanded him [the Count de Luna] that he should defend you and your company from the enemy just as it is fitting to protect you from our own subjects. Therefore notifying you, father, of the aforesaid matter, we entreat you not bring along with you into our domain those who will bring suspicion down on you. Issued at Zaragoza on February 6th in the year of Our Lord, 1357.

9

Pere Writes His Officials in Aragon Instructing That They Expedite the Cardinal’s Visit While Not Allowing Castilians to Enter Aragon. Zaragoza, February 6, 1357

Original Language: Latin. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1380, f. 157v. Pere … to each and every one of our beloved and faithful officials and subjects or the lieutenants of these officials to whom the present letter comes. Salutations. Since, as we have heard, the reverend father in Christ, Lord Guillaume, deacon of Holy Mary in Cosmedin and cardinal, is returning from the kingdom of Castile and will direct his journey to these parts. Therefore we say and command to you and each one of your men that you should permit the cardinal and all his attendants, their animals, jewels, money, and other goods to freely pass through our domain while nevertheless they are not accompanied by Castilians. Nor should you cause any impediment or obstacle

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to the cardinal himself or others traveling with him who are not Castilians Thus you should take care that this will be done in regard to his passage and departure. Issued at Zaragoza on February 6th in the year of Our Lord 1357.

10

Secret Instructions Issued by Pere for Troops of Charles Ii “The Bad” of Navarre Who Planned to Serve in Aragon as well as for the Purchase of Essential Commodities in Navarre. Zaragoza, February 24, 1357

Original Languages: Aragonese, Latin. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1380, ff. 187v, 188. These are the articles included in the messages entrusted by the Lord King of Aragon to Otho de Castro, archdeacon of Teruel and counselor of the said Lord King that he was to relay to the prince, Lord Luis of Navarre, brother and lieutenant of the distinguished Lord Charles, king of Navarre in his realm. First by virtue of the secret communique entrusted to him, say to the said prince that he knows well or should know how certain agreements, pacts, and treaties were made between the lord king and the distinguished Lady Juana of happy memory, queen of Navarre, mother of the king of Navarre, and the prince, for herself and her successors. Thus within the agreements that the messenger is carrying, there is copy of this pact which was afterwards ratified and confirmed between the lord king [of Aragon] and the king of Navarre. After the said messenger had explained the meaning of the agreements, he entreated and required that the said prince and his lieutenant must observe the agreements in accordance with their terms. Likewise as some ricoshombres, knights, squires, and others of the kingdom of Navarre might wish to serve and aid the lord king [of Aragon] in regard to the war that he has with the king of Castile and for the defense of the kingdom of Aragon, the lord king entreated that if he [the king of Navarre] should wish to consent to this and yield in this matter, then the aforesaid men might come without incurring any penalty; for this should be observed in accordance with the agreements. Likewise since some Aragonese merchants have bought and still wish to buy wheat, barley, and fodder in the kingdom of Navarre for the sustenance of their own kingdom, and for the requirements of the war which the lord king needs, the king of Navarre should allow them to obtain the wheat, barley, and fodder from the said kingdom and to transport it into the kingdom of Aragon. The messenger should entreat the said prince concerning the aforesaid things and persuade him of even more and better supplies as it seems fitting to him.

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Ten closed letters of secret instructions concerning the aforesaid matters were closed with seals; in these he included the above-written text as well as those things which seemed suitable to the members of the prince’s council. This instruction should state what appears good and advantageous in regard to these aforesaid things and other matters that have come about and emerged from them in accordance with other subjects that are more fully known about due to espionage intelligence. Pere to the distinguished prince Louis, brother of the illustrious Charles, by the grace of God, king of Navarre, or to his lieutenant in the kingdom of Navarre or to your brother who is most dear to us. We wish to inform Your Highness distinguished and successful in the mark of succession that we have recently sent our beloved counselor, Otho de Castro, archdeacon of Teruel, into Your Majesty’s presence and have entrusted him with a certain message which he would repeat to you from us. Therefore, we urgently entreat your majesty that after this message is delivered to you by our said counselor, if pleased you should show good faith and quickly, successfully, and fittingly send him back to us. Issued at Zaragoza on February 24th in the year of Our Lord, 1357.

11

Pere Writes to His Cousin, Alfonso, Count of Denia, and War Captain in Valencia, Asking Him to Stop Private Feuds in the Kingdom. Monzón, February 27, 1357

Original Language: Catalan. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1184, f. 1. Printed Edition: DHC, 19–20. The King Dear cousin. We understand a disagreement and feud between Lord Berenguer de Vilargut and Rodrigo Diç is expected to flare up and come back into being for the reasons and causes that developed between them this year. Likewise, we have been informed of the dispute between Pere Bohill, son of Lord Philip, and Lord Joan de Bellvis concerning the village of Menitzers. You should inform each of the aforesaid that they are powerful vassals and are greatly loved in the city and kingdom of Valencia. If they were at war and not engaged in feuds, such a great part of the kingdom of Valencia would be involved in war, there would be such a small number left that none of them for no reason would engage in private feuds. Instead, they would consider, intend, and wish to make war, damage, and offense to our enemy, the king of Castile. Since he has waged powerful war against all of our subjects, they must wage war with all their might

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[against him]. In this struggle, there must be forged between us unity, love, and charity. If possible they should wage good war against our enemies and, if they do not do this, they should continue in performing their other duties. Therefore, we—by our royal jurisdiction in times when we wage war with another king—can act to prevent all feuds between our subjects in case they are so ill-informed that they should wish to become involved in them. Therefore, we order and command that, as the Captain of the kingdom of Valencia and especially by the extraordinary power that we are giving you with the present instrument, you should induce all the aforesaid to make peace among themselves or at least to arrange for truces and pledges while we are at war. If despite your persuasion, they do not want to agree to our request, then you can impose great penalties on their lives and goods so in no way will they wage war on each other. Thus, you should issue a public letter when it seems right for you to do so. If any of them is insane enough to try and act against your order, you can distrain them and seize their possessions and act against them as vigorously as against those who commit sedition and treason in our kingdom. This is because they are putting our kingdom in the position of being lost when we are in the midst of such a serious war with a most powerful enemy. In this matter, we wish you to exercise suitable diligence and therefore we entrust you with full power. We are writing to each of the aforesaid so they will believe in whatever you command them in our name. Issued at Monzón under our secret seal on February 27th in the year of the birth of Our Lord 1357.

12

Pere to Officials, Town Councils, and Clergy of Tarazona Concerning the Desertion of the Villages of Vera de Moncayo and Alcalá de Moncayo5 Held by the Monastery of Santa María de Veruela. Zaragoza, March 2, 1357

Original Language: Latin. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1379, ff. 161r–v. Pere … to our beloved and faithful sobrejuntero of Tarazona as well as the justicias of Tarazona and Borja and other officials, nobles, and ecclesiastics of the royal villages or their deputies to whom this letter come. Salutations and greetings. Since after some of the men, vassals, and subjects of the abbot and community of the monastery of Santa María de Veruela abandoned their homes and left behind their non-moveable property on the pretext of the present war, in which they have not been conquered, 5  Villages to the south of Tarazona.

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they took it on themselves to immigrate with all their chattels to other places without the abbot’s permission. Certainly, the villages of Vera [de Moncayo] and Alcalá [de Moncayo], which are bound by the said monastery and are very strong and defensible, have become uninhabited without any threat or dread from our enemies. Therefore, since these justicias have demanded a solution from us, we expressly order and command each and every one of you that has his jurisdiction entrusted to him whenever he is requested on the part of the said abbot, should have proclaimed by the voice of a public crier the following: Each and every man of the aforesaid monastery who under the pretext of the said war immigrated from those above-mentioned villages should immediately return with all their goods to the said villages of Vera and Alcalá or to any other village (provided they are defensible) where the said abbot designates and wishes under the pain of the loss of the non-moveable property which they possess. Thus in regard to whatever was taken or removed before, then the said immoveable property must be brought back under the abbot’s control. We confirm that this should be provided for with full power and order each and every one of you and also those men who live in other villages, that you should allow them to withdraw freely from these villages with all their goods and to return to the aforesaid ones. You, the aforesaid sobrejuntero and your deputies, should have all obstacles removed from the villagers. Thus we firmly order and command that you constrain those who oppose this just as is specified according to custom and law. Issued at Zaragoza on March 13rd in the year of the birth of Our Lord 1357.

13

Pere Writes to the Council and Officials of the Aragonese Village of Castellar Concerning Aid in the Repair of Zaragoza’s Fortifications. Zaragoza, March 29, 1357

Original Language: Aragonese. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1381, f. 14. Lord Pedro … to his faithful justicia, jurates, and councilors of the village of Castellar. Salutations and greetings. Since from the great and clear necessity for the restoration and protection of the kingdom of Aragon, for the care of the commonwealth, and especially for that of the city of Zaragoza, which is the head of our principality, we have ordained and arranged that the walls, towers, and moats (which were and still are totally destroyed) should be repaired with great diligence. For this reason, we order,

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command, and even require and entreat that you freely permit all the lumber, stone and other things that will be necessary for the walls and towers and you not raise or allow any or impediment to the city of Zaragoza within the limits of the village of Castellar. You should not change this if you esteem the honor of our crown. Issued at Zaragoza, March 29th in the year of the birth of Our Lord, 1357.

14

Pere Writes to His Wife, Queen Elionor, Requesting that She Pawn Her Banner and Jewels Because He Is in Such Desperate Need of Money. Calatayud, April 22, 1357

Original Language: Catalan. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1152, f. 172. Printed Edition: DHC, 59 The King of Aragon Dear companion. Because of the many immense expenses that weigh us down because of the waging of the Castilian war, we have to procure money from all quarters. Therefore we affectionately entreat you to pawn your banner and greatest jewels, for which you should be able to borrow 50,000 Barcelona sous. You should then be willing to turn this over to a faithful man of our treasury, Lord Joan Adrian, whom we are sending to you for this purpose and whom you may believe what he tells you from our part about these matters. Issued in Calatayud under our secret seal on April 22nd in the year of the birth of Our Lord, 1357.

15

Pere Writes to Sancho Çapata, Knight, and Pedro dez Bosch, Royal Scribe, concerning the Inability of Christian, Jewish and Muslim Communities in Fariza to Meet War Expenses. Zaragoza, July 4, 1357

Original Language: Latin. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1381, f. 62. P … to his faithful Sancho Çapata, knight, and Pedro dez Bosch, scribe of the estates of our household. Salutations and greetings. By messengers of the council of our village

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of Fariza, both Christians, Jews and Muslims have informed us that because of the war with Castile they have suffered great damages and few inhabitants remain in the village and those that do are paupers who cannot bear customary tax burdens. They petitioned us to provide a suitable solution that should seem worthy to us. Therefore favorably considering this petition, we order and command you to hasten to the village, look into these things for us, and take care of them as it seems good to you. If you have any doubts about the aforesaid things, you should resolve to notify us immediately by your letters. Issued at Zaragoza, July 4th in the year of the birth of Our Lord 1357.

1358 16

Pere Writes to the Papal Legate, Guillaume de la Jugie, Declaring That He Had Sent Agents to Rome to Continue the Suit the Legate Had Preferred against the Castilian King. First Mention of Pere’s Desire for a Duel with Pedro. Valencia, January 13, 1358

Original Language: Latin. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1381, f. 99v. Printed Edition: DS, 438 (doc. 576). To the Reverend Father in Christ, Lord Guillaume, by divine providence, deacon of Santa María in Cosmedin, cardinal and legate of the Apostolic See, our special friend, from Pere by the grace of God king of Aragon … Salutations and an increase of honor. We are informing, Your Paternity, that we have recently received from the hands of the venerable and religious Seguin, abbot of San Tiberio, a certain apostolic bull and two of your closed letters. We knew of the contents of this bull before we received it and we are responding to the lord pope in accordance with the bull’s contents. We have also written concerning this to the cardinal of Aragon and to the knight, Francesc de Bellcastell, our ambassador to the Roman Curia. We have ordered that the contents of these letters be handed over to the abbot of San Tiberio so he might deliver to you a certain letter composed of all of these. Since as we certainly know, the king of Castile sent to the Roman Curia Pedro Juan, doctor of Roman law and one knight so that he could defame you with many falsehoods and attack the legal proceedings you have preferred. We have therefore arranged to immediately send to the said court our counselors, the knight, Francisco de Perellós, our chamberlain, and Francisco Roma, doctor of law and our vice-chancellor, so that lawyer might respond to lawyer and knight to knight as it will be fitting. Thus indeed the said Francisco should maintain at Rome the

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legal proceedings preferred by you and respond to everything pertaining to the law; the knight, Francisco de Perellós, should respond to a Castilian knight in those matters to be carried out, offering a duel to him for your honor. This should be single combat or with a certain number of knights, parity being maintained on both sides. Indeed, we have declared that we are prepared to act for you, for the conservation of your honor and advantage, and for whatever you wish and have written for us to do. Certainly, we entreat you that you should wish to write to cardinals similar to you or to those others that seem fitting to you so they might maintain your legal proceedings and show favor to other messengers of ours both for your honor and your sake and for ours. You should not be astonished at this, Your Paternity, since, if you are willing, the abbot of San Tiberio has offered and is offering to return to you. Indeed at the cortes celebrated here [Valencia] the matter for which he had come was postponed. What is more, the cortes has recently ended and the abbot will return from it to you without delay. We entreat that in the meantime you should be willing to excuse him. Issued at Valencia, January 13th in the year of the birth of Our Lord, 1358.

17

Pere Writes to Pope Innocent VI Complaining of Pedro I’s Multiple Violations of the 1357 Truce. Gerona, June 22, 1358

Original Language: Latin. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1381, f. 132v. To the most sacred and blessed father in Christ and our lord, Innocent, by divine providence, supreme pontiff of the sacrosanct, Roman, and universal church. Pedro, by grace of God, king of Aragon and the humble and devoted son who kisses your holy feet. Most dear father, we believe that his apostolic holiness recalls that he has written to us by his letters so that, after ambassadors of the king of Castile were sent to the Roman Curia, your clemency ordered that this same king should completely withdraw and, within two-and-a-half months, deliver to the custody and control of his apostolic holiness the city of Tarazona and other villages of ours that he has captured and occupied and that we must do the same with the said king’s villages we have captured. We entreat and beg further for our part that in the meantime no new rulings should be carried out against the said king. After we gathered and de-briefed our ambassadors returning from the same Curia, they informed us among certain other things that Your Blessedness dispatched the following words to them: that is, in case the king of Castile delays in fulfilling the aforementioned terms to affirm the law suit and other rulings of the reverend father in Christ, Your Holiness undoubtedly has intended to prefer legal proceedings against the aforesaid king. In this case, we as with the obedience of a son

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to a father’s commands, will not delay your instructions past the aforesaid time-limit [two-and-a-half-months]. We have ordered that, no matter how often the Castilian king violates the truces concluded between us and him, that we will inviolably observe them. Thus he held the village of Jumilla under siege for the two-and-a-half months, while acting to have the castle of Ferrilon captured by his men. During the truce, he occupied the castle, maintained control over it, and attempted to possess it by force and violence. Since the two-and-a-half month time-limit established by Your Blessedness and our decree has expired, we have humbly begged his Apostolic Holiness that he should see fit to have us excused from the aforesaid decree by Your Clemency and nevertheless to compassionately affirm the legal proceedings carried out by Cardinal Guillaume as mentioned above and other ruling tribunals against the said king since he has committed and fomented opposition against the ordinances and precepts of the Mother Church just as Your Holiness declared or now declares. Indeed, no doubt should arise that the aforesaid offenses and damages were committed by the same king and were suffered by us under the obedience to and confidence in those of the Mother Church under whose rule we intend to remain in every way. May the Creator of the world see fit to keep safe your beloved person for sacred service to Him for many years to come. Issued at Gerona on June 22nd in the year of the birth of Our Lord 1358.

18

Pere Writes to His Frontier Captain, Enrique de Trastámara, Instructing Him to Ready the Castle of Montagudo and Several Others Which Were Soon to Be Threatened by Castilian Attack. Barcelona, September 20, 1358

Original Language: Castilian. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1381, ff. 165–66. The King of Aragon Count, after we received your letter from your squire, Anton Martínez de Villareal, in which you informed us that the king of Castile was besieging the castle of Montagudo and you begged us to send a relief party of companies and we should be able to since they could be sheltered by those inside the castle, we have received a letter from the governor [of Aragon] in which he informed us that the said king is raising the siege of the said site and is passing by Almazán because it is said that he will turn off to besiege the castle of Montagudo. Therefore, count, it appears to us that, in the meantime, you must agree to find out whether or not the castle can be occupied. If you see that it can be held, it must be supplied with enough companies and food so you would not have to

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leave its shelter for one, two, or three months. If you see that you cannot hold or supply the castle, then you should abandon or destroy it as much as you wish so that if it were not besieged, one would not be able take shelter in it. Therefore, we do not understand why it is good to take shelter in a castle which, if surrounded, one cannot engage in battle or combat from it. If you see that you are not going to take action in this way that it could be carried out and would not cause a great loss, we consider it good, Count, that if the fortresses can be held for a certain time it should be occupied and you should act to abandon or destroy the other fortresses in line with how we have issued this order. Otherwise, we are acting to inform you our sources claim that the king of Castile will bypass Montagudo. We will not believe this unless we find out he has turned toward Molina and will then cross the plain of Celpha. Therefore, you should act well in the time that you have left to supply the Grange of the Black Eyes (Cortigo d’Oyos Negros), and the castles of Montreal del Campo, Signa, and other castles and granges of this district since it is certain that the said king will come where he can inflict the most damage on the land and villages. Otherwise, Count, manifestly command that the force of new troops should be very well supplied and fortified since it is certain that if the enemy takes this village, it will prove very dangerous [for us] since they could then control the ford of the Ebro and nothing could come across that river from Navarre to Aragon. Therefore it is necessary that if you carry out great activity and other necessary things for the said village, it should be done immediately. Otherwise, we are informing you that we are taking care to remain as silent as we can before our arrival. Therefore, we beg that you direct the affairs of the war diligently, carefully, and as well as you have customarily done and, in such a way you have to according to your grant and privilege. Issued at Barcelona on September 20th in the year of the birth of Our Lord, 1358.

19

Pere Exempts Two Valencian Townsmen and Their Families from Actions for Debt while They Were on War Service. Zaragoza, December 18, 1358

Original Language: Latin. ACA, Cancilleria, R. 1381, f. 185. P. to each and every one of our beloved and faithful officials to which the present letter comes. Because of their support for the war that we have with the king of Castile, we have extended to Ramon Eran, our porter, and Bernat Eran, residents of Valencia and their wives that while they are in our service in the said war so they should not be legally bound over for themselves or their property as debtors or guarantors with all penalties and interest ceasing for each and every debt they or any other person

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attached to them should owe for this reason. And also we are providing that this should refer to each and every case, legal question, and claim pertaining to the said Ramon and Bernat, their wives, or any person of theirs as long as they should be in our service as it is carried forward and for four months afterwards. We say and command you and all men … that our extensions and suspensions should be in effect for Ramon and Bernat, their wives, their creditors and their possessions until they are absolved and you should not act against this nor permit any of this to be violated for any reason. Issued at Zaragoza, on December 18th in the year of the birth of Our Lord, 1358.

1359 20

Pere commands each Aragonese Officials to Persuade the Inhabitants of His Villages to Engage in Frontier Service. Calatayud, February 1, 1359

Original Language: Latin. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1381, f. 192. Pere to each and every official of ours in Aragon. Salutations and greetings. We understand that we have expressed our great and notable displeasure to many different inhabitants of our royal villages since it is good for them to be compelled as soldiers into our armies … [and] summoned to fight against the king of Castile. When, as the year ended, the Castilian king set out to invade our realm, they moved themselves, their vassals, and retainers from their own beloved homes to villages of prelates and barons [ricoshombres] and without a hint of shame they committed such a great and enormous crimes that, even if they had rendered this service, their action could not be passed over without the proper punishment. Therefore, we say and command you and your people should issue public announcements in villages subordinated to your jurisdiction that within fifteen days counting from the day of this announcement each and every one of the aforesaid persons should return to the villages from which they have left and render customary service to us. Otherwise after the fifteen days have passed, we declare by our royal name, that all of their property shall be taken and confiscated after public records will be issued concerning the jurisdictions of your offices. What is more we wish and command that after you make these confiscations from them and these are received and then are well captured and guarded, you should act to strictly punish these villagers for the aforesaid matters and you must not delay or change this in any way.

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Issued at Calatayud on February 1st in the year of the birth of Our Lord, 1359.

21

Pere Writes to Prince Ferran and Count Bernat of Osona, Ordering That the Banners of Frontier Companies Had to Bear the Cross of St. George. Calatayud, February 6, 1359

Original Language: Catalan. ACA, Cancillería real, R 1162, f. 136. Printed Version: DHC, 63. The King of Aragon Dear Brother Know that we, from the great devotion we have for the worthy St. George, have ordered that all the companies of horse when engaged in battle should have banners with the cross of St. George on them. Thus, we command and entreat you that you yourself have this done and especially have the banners made for each of your men. These should be all white with an extremely broad red cross on them. Thus the front and back of the banners should be made to look similar to the cross of the worthy St. George. Issued at Calatayud under our secret seal on February 6th in the year of the birth of Our Lord, 1359.

22

Pere Writes to the Apostolic Legate, Bishop Gui of Boulogne Asking to Be Excused from Scheduled Meetings Because of Military Exigencies. Zaragoza, March 29, 1359

Original Language: Latin. ACA, Cancillería real, R 1381, ff. 204r–v. To the reverend father in Christ, Lord Gui, by divine providence, bishop of Boulogne, apostolic legate of the Holy See. [From] Pere, by the grace of God, king of Aragon … Salutations and increase of honor. From a report by the Reverend Archbishop of Zaragoza, our beloved counselor, and Nicolau de Valcalciata, we ordered that you should come before us for an interview at the city of Zaragoza. Therefore, as we purely and intimately have offered our affection to Your Paternity in an exchange for these

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services of love, we announce that it has become evident to us that we cannot in the said city to confer with you concerning matters of ours and otherwise to give thanks to you in a friendly fashion. Yet since we have found out for sure that the king of Castile intends to invade our cities and villages along the sea coast. Since he can approach from the sea and unleash huge and rapid raids against them, it is fitting for us to rapidly go to those shores and prepare as quickly as we can fleet and and equip it. With these initial moves made as quickly as possible we can powerfully resist the plans and undertakings of the said king by this strong force and the supporting help of God. Begging Your Paternity, that since for these aforesaid important and necessary reasons we cannot receive you we beg you should consider us totally excused. And if it should please Your Paternity to come to this city or other places or ours, this would please me very much. Notifying Your Paternity that along with the letter we are now sending to you that we are firmly giving commands to all our officials and subjects that they should receive you, your household goods and property honorably and to treat you kindly and to preserve you from any damage or injury by providing for safe transit if necessary. Issued at Zaragoza on March 29th in the year of the birth of Our Lord 1359.

23

Pere Writes to Officials of Calatayud Ordering Them to Transport His Tents Back to Zaragoza. Zaragoza, March 30, 1359

Original Language: Latin. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1381, f. 204v. Pere … to his faithful justicia, jurates, and others of our officials of the town of Calatayud. Salutations and greetings. We expressly say and command, strictly ordering you that you should provide the oxen or pack animals that are necessary to transport our tents which are now in the city of Calatayud. After bringing them to Zaragoza, you should hand them over to our faithful chamberlain, Guerau de Muro, whom we have ordered to be there. You should not change this but be willing to carry it out for us and to make known that if from your fault or neglect the tent(s) should suffer any damage and this was determined to be your fault and not that of the enemy, then Guerau himself should make compensation by impounding as many oxen or pack animals as seem necessary to pay for the damage. Issued at Zaragoza on March 29th in the year of Our Lord 1359.

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Pere’s Orders Outlining General Military Appointments in 1359. Calatayud, March 25, 1359 (Announced to Enrique de Trastámara at Zaragoza, April 1, 1359)

Original Language: Aragonese. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1381, ff. 205v–207. Ordinances Made in Regard to the Kingdom of Aragon On Monday, March 25 in the year of the birth of Our Lord, 1359, the lord king, being in Calatayud, issued the provisions that follow below. First, the lord king ordained that the count of Trastámara should be the captain general of all the kingdom of Aragon and from then on his power as captain general of the lord king should be granted in all of the king’s realms and lands down to the sea. A charter [concerning this] should be made and then by the voice of a public crier and by letters to all of the kingdom of Aragon should generally be notified so no one can claim ignorance of the fact. Likewise the lord king ordains that the nobles Lord Pedro de Luna and Lord Eximinez de Urrea should be captains of the village of Borja and for the length of its river; that is, from Novales6 to Talamantes,7 and that they should be granted and assigned by the generalidad of the Realm (deputación) 300 horsemen whom the aforesaid nobles will command and with whom they should wage war and damage on the enemy, and then defend the town of Borja and other villages of the said frontier and the captaincy commanded by them. In this district, these nobles should be frontier captains. Likewise in Calatayud, Fariza, Çetina, and in other villages of this district and within the boundaries of these towns, the count of Trastámara and Lord Tello should be frontier captains and are with 700 horsemen which the lord king pays for and will pay for from the dinars of Catalonia. With these 700 horsemen, the count and Lord Tello will defend the city and general villages of the district and, in command of them, will damage the enemies of the lord king. Likewise in Daroca, Montreal, Cubells, and in this district, it is ordained that the frontier captains should be under the archbishop of Zaragoza (by whom an honest and rigorous defense will be mounted) and Lord Juan Martínez de Luna and should command 250 of the 700 horsemen which the generalidad of Aragon must maintain in the service of the lord king and in defense of the frontier.

6  Village to the southeast of Huesca. 7  Village to the southwest of Borja.

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Likewise in Teruel and Albarrazin and in their boundaries and districts, it is ordained that Lord Pedro de Exerica and the master of Calatrava will be captains with 150 horsemen with whom they should protect all of the district and frontiers under their command and do as much damage to the enemy as they can. Likewise it is ordained that by the lord king that the aforesaid can and must establish in whatever principal headquarters they wish all of the 6,000 men-at-arms which the generalidad of the realm of Aragon has promised to maintain in the defense of the realm. These men-at-arms are to be stationed where the captains know them to be necessary for the defense of the realm so it will be well protected and the lord king well-served. Likewise certain persons should be chosen by the aforesaid captain and frontier captains who must collect the fifths of all cabalcada dues which the lord king wants and wished to be exacted from all the said cabalcadas which were within the kingdom of Aragon for any of the said frontier captains and captains. Likewise the aforesaid captain and frontier captains are bound to inform if the governor and Lord P. Eximenez de Sant Pere have used the diligence and care that is appropriate and which they must have in the garrisoning of the castles. And if by chance they have or will remove persons they should not remove, assign others in their place, and make all other constraint that does not seem right and do not have to be done so the castles can be well garrisoned and supplied, thus the aforesaid captain and frontier captains may agree to constrain the governor and Pedro Eximenez de Sant Pere and legally impound their goods. Likewise the aforesaid captain and frontier captains can make, have made, and order repairs and all other things necessary for the castles of the frontier and to constrain the residents of frontier hamlets in their persons and property to complete the aforesaid matters and other things deemed necessary for the good, profit, defense, and restoration of the castles by those issuing these orders. Likewise the aforesaid Captain and frontier captains must have the power to command and assemble a conference with all the councils of the cities towns, and villages of the kingdom of Aragon and there to convene and have gathered the barons, knights, and others of the kingdom for the good service of the lord king and for the good standing of matters pertaining to the war. They should act in this regard by carrying out all advantageous things for the profit and good of these matters and thus these should be done in full by the aforesaid with their good supervision. Likewise the lord king ordains that Lord Pedro dez Bosch, scribe of accounts of his household, should remain in Aragon to receive the vouchers of the horsemen of Aragon. Likewise the lord king ordains that the distribution of money from the subsidies of the kingdom of Aragon should be carried out at the command and order of the aforesaid Captain and frontier captains (or of two of them). But in regard to the said money

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collected by those who now carry this out in the ordained form, these sums should be paid to the 700 horsemen which the generalidad of the Realm has to maintain in service of the lord king and in defense of the frontiers of the realm. Likewise a letter should be made that will generally notify all those of the realm that the lord king has ordained the count of Trastámara as captain general of the realm. Likewise the aforesaid captain and frontier captains have the power to pay all of the salaries owed for the time that has past time to whatever person in accordance with the pay vouchers of the scribe of accounts. They should have this done by letter so no one may be excused from going to the frontier for the lack of pay, and the service of the said lord should not be diminished nor delayed.

25

Pere Raises the Alarm concerning a Castilian Attack on Valencian Cities. Barcelona, June 6, 1359

Original Language: Catalan. ACA, Cancillería real, Cartas reales [Pedro IV], caja 49, no. 6003. The King of Aragon Know that we have certain news that the king of Castile, our public enemy, has captured the settlement of Guardamar in the kingdom of Valencia which for some days he held under siege by land and sea and thus he has arrived with a great naval force to capture the city of Valencia, having made great preparations to invade it as well as the kingdom of Valencia. Therefore we entreat you dearly and affectionately that in such a great and urgent case, you should wish to be with us in the defense and aid of the said city and realm. Thus on the twentieth of this month if at all possible and with the greatest number of horsemen you can raise, you should be in the city of Tarragona where, God willing, we will be waiting without doubt.… We will be more than pleased for you to be in the city of Tarragona on the specified day with only a few men rather than for you to stay away with many. You should inform us for sure by the bearer of this letter the day you can be at the city of Tarragona and the number of horsemen that will be with you. Issued at Barcelona on June 6th in the year of the birth of Our Lord, 1359.

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461

Pere Writes to Cardinal Gui of Bologne, Refusing to Engage in Further Peace Talks with Pedro I. Barcelona, June 10, 1359

Original Language: Latin. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1169, f. 53. Printed version: DS, 445 (doc. 585). To the reverend father and our most dear friend. Though we have not yet assembled our fleet, the king of Castile, our public enemy, with a great armada of galleys and ships on the vespers of Pentecost forced a landing and, as we have found out, has recently drawn you away from your trip to us. Indeed, since your journey to us might be so unpleasant for this reason, therefore you should come to us anywhere else for a discussion and just negotiation. But yet this is so commonly believed by nearly everyone, we affectionately beg you, Your Paternity, that under no circumstances should you come to us at present since we have convinced you that should you be willing to engage in a trip of this kind for our sake, you might not find us at all. When the time is right, we will be able to maintain the peace without any discussion or negotiation with you. We are prepared to extend an audience to you and for the Holy Roman Church, but nevertheless never for this matter. Issued at Barcelona under our secret seal on June 10th in the year of the birth of Our Lord, 1359. King Pere.

27

Pere Writes to Catalan Villagers Requiring the Military Service under the Usatges Article, Princeps namque. Barcelona, June 18, 1359

Original Languages: Catalan, Latin. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1383, f. 58. Lord Pere to each and every one of our officials and their lieutenants to whom the present letter should come. Salutations and greetings. Omitting the reason for which we have called out the hosts of Catalonia and have ordered them by authority of Princeps namque, therefore we oblige and order you neither to threaten nor force them to come but to permit those who are on the road to come. We authorize you in this by the authority of the present letter. [Latin] Likewise a letter was made word for word under the same date which was delivered to the syndics and good men of Figueras.

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Likewise this letter was made word for word under the same date for Dalmau, viscount of Rocabertino, for the hosts of his jurisdiction. Likewise this letter was made word for word under the same date and delivered to the men of the village of Sant Celodon.

28

Pere Scolds the Council of Zaragoza for Not Paying the Installments of the 1358 Subsidy. Barcelona, July 11, 1359

Original Language: Aragonese. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1381, f. 243. The King of Aragon We are greatly amazed that you have acted with such tremendous presumption to … convince the jurates and good men of the city of Zaragoza that they were not bound to pay the advance installments for the months of February and March which have now passed—this is contrary to the truth for it is certain that the advances were granted—namely, for one month to us and for the other to the Justicia. You have affirmed the contrary to us by causing a hindrance to our affairs and from this hindrance great damage might be caused to the kingdom of Aragon—which God does not wish as well as submitting worthy men to great repression should appear evil to you. Therefore we say and command you that from now on you take care in saying anything that could constitute disservice and bring harm on us. Therefore we warn you to cease your great disservice and in displeasing us so much. Issued at Barcelona on July 11th in the year of the birth of Our Lord, 1359.

29

Pere Writes to All the Frontier Captains of Aragon, Ordering All of Them to Obey Enrique de Trastámara as Their Military Commander. Barcelona, September 7, 1359

Original Language: Aragonese. ACA, Cancillería, R. 1382, f. 44v. Lord Pere … to each and every one of our noble and beloved captains. Salutations and greetings. Since in the endeavors of war between kings and princes of the world obeying orders and commands issued by lords and great men is a very great virtue and

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causes great success in conflict. For otherwise if the orders and rules are not carried out and obedience maintained, the direction of the war is thrown into disarray and consequently by such disobedience and disorder of lesser men, damages, dangers, and confusion happen to greater men. Indeed from now on as long as there is war between us and the king of Castile, we say, commanding and entreating by direct word and messengers to you and to all the frontier captains, that you should do whatever the count of Trastámara, captain general of Aragon, says or commands concerning the conduct of the war. We understand that you have not done this or wished to do so on various occasions and damages and dangers have resulted from these actions. You would do well in not being guilty of perpetrating actions. Therefore, it is necessary that we say, command, and entreat you as much as we can to do better and if the king of Castile should come into our frontier lands (as he has already done according to the intelligence that we have), you with all your companies and lacking not even one should be on the frontier carrying out this command as well as maintaining obedience and allegiance to the count without challenging the jurisdiction by which he has commanded and issued orders to you by word or in writing. You also should diligently take care and maintain the good protection and defense of the frontiers that you are in charge of so you may be able to protect our service and honor and render to us as good an account of yourself as you can concerning that which you are in charge of, and so no damage or danger might occur through your negligence or fault nor—something that God does not want. Know that because of the corts that we intend to celebrate in Catalonia, it is fitting for us to travel from here to the said meeting so it may be held on the scheduled day and in them, God willing, a discussion might take place concerning the form and manner in which we can maintain more companies of horse on the frontier than we now do. Therefore, in the midst of these events you should subordinate yourself to show yourself as good and loyal retainers customarily do. Among other things, you should take care that the castles and companies of the frontiers should be well organized and supplied with troops, weapons, and food so the enemy may not cause destruction and if they come before this, can be repulsed with damage and confusion. We now have written of this by our letters to procurators and good men of the hamlets of Teruel, Daroca, and Calatayud. Nevertheless, it is fitting that you take care that this should be done. Issued at Barcelona on September 7th in the year of Our Lord, 1359.

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Pere Writes to the General Bailiff of the Kingdom of Valencia Announcing the State of War against the Emir of Granada Because of His Alliance with Pedro I. Barcelona, October 1, 1359

Original Language: Catalan. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1382, f. 68v. The King of Aragon May you know that we have been informed by noble and trustworthy persons that the king of Granada has made an alliance and treaty against us with the king of Castile, our public enemy, and for this reason, it is fitting for us to wage war against the said king and his realms, lands, subjects and their property as we would with our other enemies. Therefore, we say and command that by the voice of a public crier you should notify and act to inform everyone generally that the said king of Granada, his realms, lands, and subjects are at war with us and thus that our subjects and retainers should inflict damage on the king and the realms held by him nor should our people be restricted in doing anything, but each of our subjects should be bound to wage war by land and sea against the above-said realms and likewise to occupy and claim all their goods. This is allowed them because they are involved in a good and just war. Issued at Barcelona under our common seal on October 1st in the year of the birth of Our Lord, 1359. This was sent to the general bailiff of the kingdom of Valencia.

31

Pere Writes to the Judge and Council of Teruel, Warning Them of Castilian Troop Movements That He Has Discovered from His Spies in Castile. Reference to Battle of Araviana. Cervera, November 1, 1359

Original Language: Aragonese. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1382, f. 83. The king of Aragon As we have come to understand from our spies and agents, the king of Castile was saddened at the death of Juan Fernández and the others who died in the engagement on the Aragonese frontier that took place the other day between our forces and his. He had sent between the Aragonese frontier and that of his own kingdom the master of Calatrava with many companies of horse to invade the kingdom of

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Aragon—something God has not commanded—to draw us out unprepared into the resulting dangers. Because of this, we order, command, and beg you and others that as our good and loyal vassals, subjects, and retainers who have never failed us in a similar matter or in any other greater or lesser one that if by chance the said master or other companies of the Castilian king should come into the frontiers of our kingdom of Aragon in order to invade it—something that God does not want—, you, for our honor, should carry out your service to us, and the defense of the frontiers, each time the captains and prefects wish it, should send 600 men (half of them, crossbowmen; the other half, lancers) wherever the captains and prefects wish and require you to. By this, we determine you to be in distinguished service, declaring that no prejudice nor diminution shall come to the privileges, liberties, and immunities granted to any of you or to the said city collectively or separately, but these would remain in force as they had from the beginning. Issued at Cervera, November 1st in the year of the birth of Our Lord, 1359.

32

Pere Summons out the Catalan Coastal Population under the Catalan National Defense Clause, Princeps namque When Castilian Fleet Threatens Barcelona. Cervera, November 13, 1359

Original Language: Catalan. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1382, ff. 89v–90. Lord Pere … to our beloved counselor, Lord Bernat Çes Torres, knight. Salutations and greetings. Since in this year the king of Castile, our public enemy, has come with his fleet into the sea of Sitges8 or thereabouts, the men of the vicarate of Villafranca and others of the principate of Catalonia were obliged to go to the seashore by the Usatge, Princeps namque. Some men of the said vicarate and from places on its border are not bound by the penalties imposed for those who act against the article notwithstanding the imposition of corporal punishment, damages, and other penalties imposed on them by us. They should not be made to go to the seashore with the vicar or by the subvicar of Villafrancha. Let those who come not flee nor turn back without our permission or that of the sub-vicar which would leave our coasts in great peril and confusion. May you not engage in this matter of such evil example without punishment and may these be imposed on your person and property since you should act to carry out the

8  Between the mouth of the Ebro and Barcelona.

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letter of the said Usatge, as well as the other commands issued by us or the sub-vicar. Commanding each and every one of these things while guiding and diverting this to you in our place and fully in our name, thus since by this action we have issued an adjournment to councils of the royal towns and to all the lords who served with us in our fleet against the king of Castile, we wish that you may observe this adjournment. And for the discussion of the said things you should answer specifically to our beloved counselor and treasurer, Lord Bernat d’Olzenells, knight and doctor of laws acting for our court. Issued in Cervera in November 13th in the year of the birth of Our Lord, 1359.

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Granting the Petition of a Jew from One of the Hamlets of Teruel, Pere Orders the Judge of Teruel to Punish the Council of the Hamlets for Its Actions in Gathering Bread for Frontier Troops Despite the Fact That the Site Was Depopulated. Zaragoza, January 23, 1360

Original Language: Latin. ACA Cancillería real, Cartas reales [Pedro IV], no. 6100. Pere, by the grace of God, King of Aragon, Majorca, Sardinia, and Corsica and count of Barcelona, Roussillon, and Cerdanya. To our faithful judge of the city of Teruel. Salutations and greetings. After a humble petition was tendered to us by Abraham Arripal, a Jew of the said city, he claimed that the men and council of the site of Santa Eulalia, a hamlet of the aforesaid city, were bound and obliged to provide a great quantity of bread which the officials were striving for because of their need from them and that of the Jews. He continued that it is not possible in any way to recover such a quantity from these men, even though he said this many times before when great amounts were demanded, no other goods were found by constraining them on the pretext of the said obligation since the mills, ovens, and defenses of the aforesaid site have not survived and the very place has been depopulated because of the war. Therefore because of the supplication made to us to care for these matters as we are obliged to, we say and command you that in accordance with the tenor of the aforesaid legal obligation you should constrain the goods of the aforesaid men or of the council of the aforesaid place just as is should be done in accordance with the fuero and law for those especially implicated in all crimes. Issued at Zaragoza on January 23 in the year of the birth of Our Lord, 1360.

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Pere Writes to Count Enrique Warning of Castilian Attacks on the Villages of Aranda and Fariza. Zaragoza. June 16, 1360

Original Language: Castilian. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1382, f. 141. The King of Aragon Count, may you know that we have found out that enemy companies are in those regions we have told you of and we command you to send to those villages in which there will be a greater need as many horsemen as it seems and appears good to you. And with the villages of Aranda and Fariza, there should be a greater need than for and from the other villages of that frontier. Therefore you should act as it seems good to you to make our villages well-defended. Issued at Zaragoza on the 16th day of June in the year of the birth of our Lord 1360.

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Pere Writes to His Military Salary Commissioners, Saying That, though Enrique de Trastámara and His Aragonese Villages Are Obliged to Pay into the Parliamentary Subsidy for 700 Horsemen to Defend Aragon for the Next Two Years, They Should Not Be Pressured to Do So. Barcelona, January 24, 1361

Original Language: Latin. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1382, f. 173. Pere by the grace of God king of Aragon … to the faithful men, Domingo López Sarnes and Pedro de Rochafort, commissioners appointed by us to administer the subsidy of the kingdom of Aragon. Salutations and greetings. After coming into our presence, the distinguished Count Enrique de Trastámara humbly requested from us that, though he himself, through the villages he holds in the said kingdom, has agreed to contribute to us the portion that applies to him from the salary of the 700 horsemen that we have demanded for the defense of the same realm, it is said that you must compel him and the men of his villages to contribute to the portion assigned to them … and it is also said that you must force the men of his villages to contribute to the said subsidy for the 1,000 horsemen from the many homesteads that are there and the men who reside in the said villages. And this applies to everything in these homesteads as well as to the

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men of his aforesaid villages which he has in this realm that may trend toward legal prejudice or forfeiture. Therefore concerning this matter that was humbly petitioned by the said count, therefore we make, proclaim, and order you firmly and expressly (since it is incumbent on us) that the aforesaid count should contribute nevertheless to this salary of the 700 horsemen, but you should not press the count or the men of his villages to contribute to the subsidy for the 700 horsemen and you should compel in no way the said men of his villages to contribute from the many homesteads and in those places that they live. And if you have taken legal proceedings against them you should immediately reduce the standing debt. Likewise, in making rulings on these matters, you should not in any way burden the count or his men for the aforesaid matters. Issued at Barcelona on the 24th day of January in the year from the birth of the birth of Our Lord 1361.

36

Summons Issued to Various Grades of the Valencian Nobility, Instructing Them to Be Ready for Military Service on May 7. Barcelona, February 13, 1361

Original Language: Catalan. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1382, ff. 186–89. Nobles The king of Aragon We have known for some time that the king of Castile, our enemy, has come to the frontiers of the kingdom of Aragon with great companies of horse and foot and is already in the village of Almazán. And we understand that the said king is invading the kingdom of Aragon and we must seek battle with him. Therefore, we entreat that with as great a company of horsemen as you can raise that you should be prepared in such a way that as soon as you have word from us you should come into our service without delay to the place we will indicate to you. Likewise we will act to pay you the accustomed salary. And you should make your response to the bearer of this letter if you can or wish to take action concerning this. Issued in Barcelona on the 13th day of February in the year of the birth of Our Lord 1361.

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To the distinguished baron, Lord Count Pere of Urgel and viscount of Ager, our very dear nephew. Likewise letters were sent to those written below (8 names). Knights (25 nobles). Gentlemen (3 names). Similar letters were issued to the below-written nobles, knights and gentlemen of Catalonia. To the very distinguished Lord Count Ramon Berenguer of Empuries, our very dear uncle. (37 names). Knights (32 names). Young noblemen (3 names).

37

Pere Originally Orders His Counselor, Guillem de Palau, to Go from a Mission in Roussillon to the Aragonese Frontier, but Then Leaves Him on His Original Assignment. March 18, 1361

Original Language: Latin. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1384, f. 3v. Pere … to our beloved man of his council, Guillem de Palau, knight. Salutations and greetings. Although by another of our letters, we have ordered that you inquire concerning the validity of the agreements issued about the Society of Saint George, but from these you were to go to the frontiers of the kingdom of Aragon where we are presently traveling to resist the king of Castile who, it is feared, will attempt to overrun those frontiers with all his personal power. For certain reasons, however, your presence is greatly needed in the county of Rousillon and therefore you are held excused from the said request. We therefore say and command you that, after putting off these certain matters, you should go personally to the said county from which you should in no way return until we have ordered something ordained about these matters or until the matter for which you went there is resolved. Issued at Lérida on the 18th day of March in the year of the birth of our lord 1361.

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Pere Writes to His Uncle, Count Ramon Berenguer II of Empuries, Asking That He Defend Roussillon from the Proposed Attack of Joan de Armangac. Pina, March 20, 1361

Original Language: Catalan. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1384, f. 5v. The King Dear uncle, we are informing you that we have had certain news that the count of Armanyac or his son, Joan, have been asked by the retainers of the king of Castile to enter Catalonia and especially to invade and damage sites in the counties of Rousillon and Empuries—something that God does not wish. We have written about this matter to the governor of Rousillon and to all the vicars of Catalonia so they should act to summon those hosts by the authority of the Usatge which begins Princeps namque by which all horsemen and infantry should be summoned to come with their weapons into this force for the defense of the land and for the attack of the enemy as soon as they should be commanded to do so by us or by you in our place. Since we cannot understand this situation as you can nor can we be personally present for the defense of the said land nor of the said counties because the king of Castile is in the realm of Aragon, we have established you in our place to defend the said land and counties and to attack the enemies as it is contained in the letter previously issued which you may see in greater detail. Therefore we affectionately entreat you to diligently attempt the defense of the principate of Catalonia and of the said counties as it pertains to you. We trust you will have found out about the enemy by having good spies. And if you feel or become certain that the said count or someone else should wish to invade the said counties or lands, you should advance into the said counties, acting in such a way with the aid of God that the said enemies cannot do any evil or damage by invading them. Issued in Pina on 20th day of March in the year of the birth of Our Lord 1361. To the prince Lord Count Ramon Berenguer of Empuries, our very dear uncle.

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Pere Summons the Nobles and Knights of the Order of Saint George for the Defense of Catalonia. La Almunia, April 6, 1361

Original Language: Catalan. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1384, ff. 9v–10v. Convocation of the nobles and knights of the Order of Saint George. The below-written letter was delivered by Francisco de Fonte Cubierta.

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The King The other day we wrote to you with our letter by virtue of the command of the [Order of] the Blessed Saint George to which you are subordinated and because the king of Castile, our enemy, has put under siege our land inside Aragon and has captured some of our villages. We have taken to the highway to advance toward him and expel from our land that king with all our power. So we may engage in combat with him, you should come immediately with horses and weapons when you know where we are in Aragon. When there is certain news that a company of horse and foot from the kingdom of France that has appealed to us to enter our land and we have written to you by our letter, you should remain in Catalonia for its defense. Now we have had certain news that the said company is approaching the county of Prenza. And we have become certain that the king of Castile has recently come with all his force to the village of Aranda [del Moncayo]9 and has recently besieged it. And for this reason we are coming to the village of La Almunia and there we will draw up our forces to take actions to raise the siege and to engage in battle with him if he wishes to attack us. Therefore by virtue of the said covenant [of the Order of Saint George], we require you that once you have seen the present letter, you should come to us with as large a company as you can to be with us in the said battle. You should not delay since it must be clear that this action does not allow delay, but rather great haste. Therefore we will pay you and the people that come with you the customary salary in the city of Lérida. Issued at La Almunia,10 6th day of April in the year of Our Lord 1361. Similar letters were sent to those written below (21 names).

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Pere Writes to Francesch de Perellós, His Representative at the French Court, to Warn Him of the Possible Invasion of Pyreanean Nobles and Mercenary Troops across the Pyrenees and to Instruct Him on How to Establish Defenses against Them. Las Almunias, April 11, 1361

Original Language: Catalan. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1176, f. 44v. Printed Version: Epistolari, 170–74 (doc. 26).

9  Aragonese village on the Aranda River to the northwest of Calatayud. 10  Aragonese village to the east of Huesca.

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The King Having received your letter and knowing what it contains, We are very grateful since you have exercised such great diligence in collecting information about the actions of Lord Jean de Armanyac, and in personally coming to me with it. Yet we ask that you gain inside knowledge by good spies and find out diligently everything that these companies are doing every day and with what you have found out you should often write about what they are doing. We are likewise grateful about what you have arranged and carried out in these matters to hinder and slow down these companies. It is doubtful how much remains to be done and demanded concerning the alliance to be established among our officials, the town councils of Roussillon, and the seneschal of Carcassone. We respond to you that there is some doubt that they will establish such an alliance. This is so because the men, as you well know, are a defeated, weak, and unemotional people and to form an alliance or a company with such people is a dangerous matter since … when they might come to the crisis, one would find them a less powerful company that could not endure danger and scandal. But this is what you must do to oppose or better defend against any invasion that Jean de Armanyac wishes to carry out. Seeing that it would be profitable to make the said defense together (that is, with our men and those of the said seneschal), it would please us if you could bring this about. But we wish that this shall be done with the agreement and counsel of the Lord Prince Ramon Berenguer, governor of Roussillon, Lord Jaspert de Tregura, and the two “good men” of Perpignan (those whom you will bring with you). And if all of your men agree with you to form the said alliance or unite to put up a defense against the said invasion and this shall be done, it could be organized from the counties of Roussillon and Cerdanya. Thus we command you … since you are there and we are not, you should arrange to find out better what must be done and what is not very expedient for these matters. The other, more permanent alliance that existed before this invasion cannot bring it to a halt for the above-said reasons. But if the troops of the communes of France would therefore come more willingly to the defense against this invasion, you must do this under the following conditions: you should carry out the mustering of one company before the other (that is, our section which you command and the other one of the king of France) with a term of three months. And if one or the other does not grow to full size, you should not take seriously the alliance … We have written about this matter to no one except you. Therefore you should not talk to the above-said men nor to others, for what has been told to you must not be revealed to many persons. Therefore you should not bring this to the attention of those with whom the agreements were made. It is true that we have now written to the prince, governor, and Lord Jaspert Fregura by letters of credence entrusted to you and thus you should discuss these matters with them and proceed as stated above and may God direct you. Issued at Las Almunias under our larger seal on the 11th day of April of the year 1361.

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Pere Writes to Jaume de Mas, Lieutenant of the General Bailiff of the Kingdom of Valencia, and Joan d’Olit, Scribe of the Bailiff’s Court, concerning the Mass Exodus of the King’s Muslims into Castile. Las Almunias, April 13, 1361

Original Language: Catalan. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1176, f. 46. Printed Version: Epistolari, 174–77 (doc 27). The King You should know that we have received a letter from a lieutenant of the governor in the realm of Valencia. In it, there was a great rumor concerning an exodus of Moors from the said realm. We have acted to confer with the king of Granada about this departure in accordance with the articles confirmed between us and Sir Pere Boïl, acting as our messenger and procurator, and the said king of Granada. We have sent you the said letter to transfer it since it would harden the said governor. We are greatly amazed at you if this matter is as pressing and harsh as the governor says it is and you have not written about it. But, be that as it may, we are writing and taking provisions concerning the exodus of the said Moors in the following way, namely, that you should make a public announcement that no Moors should dare to travel unless they have permission since they might pass over to the land of the king of Castile, our enemy. Because the king of Castile can stop and interrogate them about matters of our land, we do not wish that he should be informed from the said Moors about the things that take place in our lordship—since God will not have this done. Likewise we wish that when they want to travel by sea, you should limit these means as much as you can so they might be able to travel as little as they can. Thus you should exercise these limitations as much as you can but secretly and by good means so that the messenger of the king of Granada should not know or feel that we are acting other than according to the agreement made by us with him since we do not intend to do so. But we wish that you should show yourself strong and generous concerning the said exodus, even though your action and work should be different. And hereafter you should talk with the said governor to whom we have issued a letter of credence that will empower you in these matters. You should declare to him our intention and the provisions that we are carrying out concerning this, but you should speak to him in secret and as our counselor. Therefore the said messenger should not know this nor should you give any offense to the king of Granada so it cannot be said that you brought less to him than that which was agreed between us and him.

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And likewise in talking to Lord Berenguer de Codinachs and Sir Arnau Johan to whom we have written by a letter of credence entrusted to you, you should say to them that they are not bound to you, nor you to them. Because of who they are and how you are bound to them, Sir Joan de Olit and they should compel the said Moors concerning the journey of Sir Pere Boïl and by the expenses the said Moorish messenger incurred. Therefore we will shortly supply from another source all that you and they are bound to pay for. Likewise we consider it a good thing that you should speak in our place with Abrahim Abencoa and he for himself in formulating a secret agreement and, as it appears good to him, to have it arranged that the said Moors may not go just now, but less than they could bring to an end to this rumor and so they may render service. Issued in Las Almunias under our larger seal on the 12th of April of the year 1361.

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Pere Instructs the Justicia and Sobrejuntero of Exea to Restore and Extend the Walls of the Town. Cariñena, June 15, 1361

Original Language: Aragonese. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1384, f. 24v. We Lord Pedro, by the grace of God, King of Aragon. Trusting fully in your faith and loyalty and in our other faithful men, Martin Eximen de Pueyo justicia and, Sancho Miranda, knight, the sobrejuntero of Exea, we command that you should be good workers and act to build well and with great diligence the walls and moats of the town of Exea as well as other construction for the necessary defense and restoration as it seems good to us in ordering it done in this matter. And we wish that the work of the crown should be finished before all other labor is engaged in. After this is done, half of the town [wall] should be repaired and the individuals of the said town must be forced against their persons and goods to labor on and continue the said construction as it seems good to each and every one of you in our service. Yet the manner in which the construction projects are to be carried out must be arranged by us. We command the inhabitants of the said town that they fulfill and complete the aforesaid things and that they should obey your commands as if they were our commands if they want to avoid our anger. Issued at Cariñena on the 15th day of June in the year of the birth of our lord 1361.

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Pere Writes to Garces de Loris, Representative of the Governor General of Valencia concerning the Matter of Castilian Jewish and Muslim Prisoners. Barcelona, September 21, 1361

Original Language: Latin. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1384, f. 38v. Pere to our beloved counselor, Garces de Loris, knight and representative of the governor general in the kingdom of Valencia or his lieutenant. Salutations and greeting. While we by our other letters have arranged to free from internment or enslavement Jews and Saracens of the kingdom of Castile captured by our subjects while the war between us and the king of Castile continues, and yet the said king of Castile nevertheless retains in custody Jews and Christians of our land captured by his subjects and he hardly commanded nor presently commands that action should be taken to free them. Therefore we direct and command you by virtue of our order made by us to you that you should not act to free the said Jews and Saracens from the kingdom of Castile captured by our subjects unless you have another ruling from us concerning the captives. Issued at Barcelona on the 21st day of September in the year of the birth of the Lord 1361.

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Agreement between Pere and Prince Ferran concerning the Proposed Conquest of Castile. Barcelona, January 31, 1362

Original Language: Latin. ACA, Cancillería real, Pergaminos de Pedro III, no. 2260. Printed Version: Masía i de Rós, Relación, 2:495–97 (doc. 224 ter/128bis). In the name of Christ. May it be resolved at the present time and in the future that on this last day of the month of January in the year of the birth of the Lord 1361(2) the following was discussed, agreed to, and settled on between the most illustrious prince and lord, Pere by the grace of God king of Aragon, Valencia, Sardinia, and Corsica and count of Barcelona, Roussillon, and Cerdanya on one side and Lord Ferran, Marquis of Tortosa and lord of Albarracin and brother of the lord king, on the other. Namely by reason of the war existing between the said lord king on one side and the king of Castile on the other, Ferran, for the confusion and extermination of the said king of Castile, the common enemy of the said lord king of Aragon and the lord prince,

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must invade along with others the realm of Castile and the said lord king of Aragon, and as a subsidy for the said invasion, will owe a grant for the salary of 2,500 knights for three months—the next three months of February, March and April—and also for the subsequent month of May. Likewise Pere will present under the same format a grant for the salary of 500 horsemen and crossbowmen at the rate of two Barcelona sous per crossbowman per day. And if the prince should spend more than four months in carrying out this war, the king will present to the troops a good subsidy as well as generously as he can. And he promised to present the aforesaid subsidy to the lord prince and put up all the goods he has or would have by swearing through the lord God and physically touching His holy Four Gospels to abide by and fulfill and not violate nor act against the aforesaid in any way. Conversely, the said prince, in compensation for such a notable grant, then agreed to what he had promised to the aforesaid king; namely, if he and those with him in the Castilian invasion should acquire and conquer realms and lands of Castile in the said invasion, they are bound to give to the said lord king [of Aragon] the kingdom of Murcia with all its rights and appurtenances as well as the belowwritten villages; namely, Requena,11 Concha,12 Farizia, Salmerón,13 Valdolivas, Alcoçer, Escomiella, Birta, Molina[de Segura],14 Almazán,15 Berlanga,16 Soria,17 Gomara,18 and Agreda with all their castles, hamlets, boundaries, and appurtenances. If they should not acquire or conquer all the realms in the lands of Castile, the prince should only give half of the said villages … And concerning the above-said matters, the said Lord King and the lord prince wished that two identical documents with a common seal and signed with their hands, should be prepared. This was done on the last day of January in the above year in the throne chamber of the king’s palace at Barcelona and with as witnesses the serene Lady Elionor by the grace of God queen of Aragon, the consort of the said lord king; the venerable and religious brother, Juan Fernández de Heredía, castellan of Emposta and prior of San Egidio of Castile and León; the noble Bernat de Cabrera, knight; Acardo de Nuro, a young nobleman; and Francisco Roma, doctor of letters, counselors all of the said lord king.

11  Castilian town to northwest of Valencia. 12  Castilian town to the north of Molina. 13  Murcian village to the west of Murcia on the south bank of the Segura River. 14  Murcian town on the north bank of the Segura River. 15  Castilian town on the Duero River across from Aragonese frontier. 16  Castilian village on the Duero River to the west of Soria. 17  Castilian town on the Duero River north of Almazán. 18  Castilian village to the southeast of Soria.

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Pere Breaks Ties with Carlos II of Navarre Because He Considered the Navarrese King a Traitor to Earlier Agreements with the Aragonese Ruler. Perpignan, June 25, 1362

Original Language: Castilian. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1384, f. 59. To the king of Navarre, we, the king of Aragon, inform you that we have seen your letter and that contained in it which says that you are a prisoner in the power of the king of France. We are requesting by your permission to break relations with the king of France, but we do not wish to do so with you since we are in an agreement and association with you. To this, we respond to you in regard to your demand and position that the king of France was not involved in the agreement that existed between you and us because he was and is your lord. Since one is not the other, we do not have to help you against the said king. Thus we are not obliged to nor will we break ties with the king of France since we are at war with the king of Castile. It would be well for you to be silent about our agreement since you know well that you have never wished to help by virtue of this agreement against the said king of Castile who was not removed from it. Know that you are required by the other reason that you wish us to make war against the king of Castile and from this we with you should carry out useful things because we and our house have always protected the truth. The other reason that we have informed you of this in writing is that we have established agreements and we respond to you that it is untrue that you want to be our friend, but rather wish to help the king of Castile against us with as great a treason as has been perpetrated. Yet God who is the Supreme Judge who knows the truth will not take your side. And we intend to assault and attack you and the said king of Castile as well as our people can defend against and attack your people and his. Issued at Perpignan under our common seal on the 25th day of June in the year of the birth of Our Lord 1362.

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Pere Grants His Cousin Count Alfonso of Denia a Captaincy over the Count’s Ancestral Lands in Valencia. Perpignan, June 25, 1362

Original Language: Latin. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1384, f. 61. Captaincy of the count of Denia We, Pedro, by the grace of God king of Aragon. Since it is especially pressing and necessary in these times with the strength and clear force of wars, that it should be known that we are appointing from our side such a great and vigorous person who is tested in the use of weapons for the defense of the kingdom of Valencia and its inhabitants which the king of Castile, our public enemy, who after announcing it ahead of time has waged war on us. With him, were the perfidious king of Granada and others of our angry and jealous subjects with whom the king of Castile, who finds himself without an alliance, attackers, or vigorous defenders, made alliances against us. Therefore in you the distinguished Count Alfonso of Ribagorza and Denia, knight and our most dear relative, proved by his faith and circumspection, we trust fully in your command of our army completely and by the tenor of the present document order you to be appointed and ordained as a captain of war in the lands of the kingdom of Valencia. Thus we make you, said count, and no one else captain of war in the said kingdom and the selected vigorous defender for these lands and their inhabitants. By the attack against all our hostile subjects and enemies and the defense of all the realm, you should be in command in our name of the army and may summon barons, nobles, knights, and others as many times as it seems fitting to you. You may carry out all other things that you know are necessary for our honor, the defense of the realm, the attack of our enemies, and the completion of the office of captain in whatever way you can and must since we fully trust you in our place concerning each and every one of the things that touch on or emerge from the said office. Commanding by this same document to each and every baron, knight, young nobleman, gentlemen, as well as the officials and jurates of the cities and towns of the kingdom of Valencia and our other subjects, dependents or their lieutenants or officials at present and in the future that they should hold and consider you, the said count, as the Captain of the said realm and should follow, obey, and carry out your instructions and orders as if they were ours. In testimony of the present letter, we order our seal hanging down be attached. Issued at Perpignan on the 25th of June in the year of the birth of the Lord 1362 and the twenty-seventh year of our reign.

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Pere Warns the Sobrejuntero of Huesca and Jaca That the King of Navarre Was About to Invade Aragon. Barcelona, July 26, 1362

Original Language: Aragonese. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1384, f. 72. Lord Pedro … to our beloved and faithful Pedro Ximenex de Pomar, knight and sobrejuntero of Huesca and Jaca, their lieutenants, and whichever of them to whom the present letter should come. Salutations and greetings. Since by the report of several credible persons we have discovered that the king of Navarre with great companies is invading our kingdom of Aragon across the boundaries of the city of Jaca and has inflicted damage to the persons and property of some villages within the boundaries of Jaca and we, in response to this, have arranged that all persons in the villages within the boundaries of Jaca of the monastic orders, churchmen, knights, hidalgos, and townsmen who cannot defend and protect themselves from our enemies should return with all their property to the city of Jaca. For this reason, we say to each and every one of you expressly and with a sure conscience to constrain the said persons forcefully and compel them so they will remove themselves and their goods to the said city if it should become necessary. And if the said persons should refuse or become rebellious, you should deprive each of them of their goods as if they were not acquired in a good war and these should be converted to the good advantage of the said city. You cannot be held legally responsible in this matter for any guilt or negligence since you have been empowered to act with diligence. Issued in Barcelona on the 26th day of July in the year of Our Lord 1362.

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Pere Writes to Lope de Gurrea, Chamberlain of Prince Martí concerning the Provisioning of Castles on the Frontiers of Exea and the Destruction of All Structures Too Near to Exea’s Largest Castle. Barcelona, August 9, 1362

Original Language: Latin. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1384, ff. 72r–v. Pedro to our beloved counselor, Lope de Gurrea, chamberlain and companion of the illustrious Prince Martí, our most dear son. Salutations and greeting. Since it is said that on the frontiers of Exea several castles are badly provisioned and, because of this, irreparable damage could occur to them and also to these regions, therefore, we say, entrust, and command you to order that provisioning and mandatory labor be carried

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out by the distinguished Prince Ferran, our most dear brother and governor general in the realms and lands on this side of the sea. And if perhaps the said prince has made some arrangements concerning this, you should carry out your own general provisioning or you should bring this about with men-at-arms, victualing, and other matters so that nothing sinister shall occur to these castles for the lack of provisions since it is therefore good to mount a defense against an enemy victory. We also entrust and order you to thoroughly destroy neighborhoods of the town of Exea that are outside the walls; namely, those that are called “of Huesca,” “of Zaragoza,” “of Saint Peter” and the “Green Neighborhood” within all their limits since if the structures in the said neighborhood should otherwise remain, they may cause the destruction and loss of the said town. And indeed you should act to destroy all the houses and buildings that are near the wall in front of the Castles of the Jews of the said town for forty paces all the way from the wall to the houses. And wherever this destruction was carried out, a good ditch and barbacans should be made for the town since it is not too small in its layout to be strengthened. We wish and command that you thus diligently carry out the aforesaid matters since delay must in no way be risked because of your negligence or favoritism to anyone, perhaps in blocking the aforesaid destruction or causing delay for money. Indeed we fully entrust you in our place with the present letter concerning the above-discussed matters. Issued at Barcelona on the 9th day of August in the year of the birth of the Lord 1362.

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Pere Grants a Safe-Conduct to Ramon Grueta, Inhabitant of Almanara for Travel across the Crown of Aragon. Barcelona, August 16, 1362

Original Language: Latin. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1384, f. 79v. We Pedro, by the grace of God, respectfully maintain that you, our faithful Ramon Grueta, inhabitant of the village of Almanara, has set out to come to us during the present war that the king of Castile is waging war against us and our realms and we safeguard and secure you the said Ramon in our royal faith. Thus because of any crimes or offenses you might perpetrate in any way or with those with whom you are involved, you cannot be arrested detained, hindered, or molested by us or our officials. Therefore you can be and shall remain safe in all our lands and dominions provided nevertheless you are not a traitor, imposter, sodomite, peace breaker, or counterfeiter or was a deserter from our armed forces, involved in the death of the abbot of San Cugát de Valls, or had committed the crime of lèse majesté or was proven guilty of a

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violation of homage. We command for our part to our governor general and his lieutenants, the constable of our household, our vicars, bailiffs, and other officials that are and will be established everywhere to whom the present letter comes that they should act to have the security and safe-conduct of this type equally and inviolably observed. They should also have this carried out without fail against anyone who brings about or allows it to be violated for any reason or does not want to extend or maintain the safe-conduct while you remain in our service and for four months afterwards counting from the day that you first returned home. In testimony of this matter, we order that the present letter be validated under the protection of our seal. Issued at Barcelona on the 16th day of August in the year of the birth of the Lord 1362.

50

Pere Issues a General Order for the Defense of Tarazona. Barcelona, August 18, 1362

Original Language: Aragonese. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1384, ff. 81r–v. The King Since for the greater defense of the city of Tarazona, we have ordered and arranged that the Count’s Gate and all the other city gates except for the gate of the Zuda and that of the meat market from where people leave for the neighborhood of San Miguel should be closed. Therefore with a sure and deliberate conscience, we say and order each of you that the said gates of the Count and the other gates of the city and that of the Zuda and the other one of the meat market where people go to neighborhood of San Miguel should be well closed with a stone without any delay. Issued at Barcelona on the 18th day of August in the year of our Lord 1362.

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Pere Writes to Count Alfonso of Denia about the Border Village of Lliria Becoming Depopulated since Not One Knight Can Live There. Barcelona, November 8, 1362

Original Language: Latin. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1384, f. 139v. Pedro to the distinguished count of Ribagorza and Denia, our most dear relative, a Captain of the Castilian war. Salutations and greetings. We believe that you well remember that we have written to you concerning the village of Lliria which is the property of the illustrious Queen Elionor of Aragon, our most dear consort. Located on the frontier that is nearly depopulated because of casualties, and thus it is advantageous for some knights to take up residence there. Thus you should appoint someone from the number of those knights granted to you by the generalidad of the kingdom of Valencia in aid of the said war for the defense and protection of the village as we have ordered, but, up to this point, you have not carried this out. Yet the said queen recently entreated us since the men of the village for fear of the enemy did not dare to plant their fields unless there were knights there who would declare whether one could plow and reap if enemies were present And unless the fields are planted, the village will generally be depopulated. Therefore we wish and beg you to dispatch as many of those knights from the general number to the village as seems good to you for its protection and defense. Therefore may this agreeable fact take place because of the afore-said reasons and especially from our wishes. Issued at Barcelona on the 8th day of the month of November in the year of the birth of the Lord 1362.

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After Three Months at the Parliamentum of Monzón, Pere III Addresses the Assembly, Forcefully Demanding a War Subsidy. February 11, 1363

Original Language: Catalan. CDACA, 48:63–64. Parlaments a les Corts Catalanes, 24–26. Partial Translation of Catalan Original: Cawsey, Kingship, 111, 137.

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It has pleased Our Lord God that we should be your king and prince, not because we deserve it, but because He acted through His grace and virtue. And in regard to this, He bestowed His grace on us twice over: first, since the lord king, our father, was not born first, but the first-born, the Lord Prince Jaume, renounced the kingdom and then entered the Order of Montesa,19 in which he died, and second because of primogeniture of the kingdom passed to our lord father. Neither were we born first, but the first-born, the lord prince Alfons died and the primogeniture and the realm passed to us. Still God did not make us great of stature and yet we have a will and heart great enough so there is no knight in the world who would so die or live as well as us in defending our crown and realm as our predecessors had. And with your help in following the footsteps of our predecessors, up to now we have worked hard in conquering and winning. Now, we are faced with a great disaster and misfortune, through which we might lose in fifteen days that which we have spent five-hundred years in conquering. We have purposefully said fifteen days and no more, for, according to the news we have had which we informed you of today before lunch, the king of Castile is attacking these regions with a great force and we should assume that he will march on Zaragoza. And though we are safe here, Zaragoza, as you know, has an inadequate defense and provisions. Consequently, if it is lost, he will not stop until he comes to the sea and then to Barcelona. Barcelona is not such a large city that it can endure a great siege since it is not the kind of site that can store or bring in many supplies. It would therefore lose a long siege for lack of supplies. And this did not come about unexpectedly either through our fault or yours except that you did not have the heart and will to serve well as your ancestors have always served ours and if only you had maintained the practice for us. But overall it came from this misfortune of arguments and debates that you have among yourselves, each one wishing for his own property and guarding his privileges and liberties. The clergy and knights say that they should not pay as much as our townsmen and our people say they should. And in this debate we have spent the fall and into the spring, except for the Catalans who agree with us. In fact, however, they have acted no better than the others, but have not granted us the subsidy. And in regard to this debate, we and you are ruining ourselves. And if our people and those for whom you are here should find out how you are acting for yourselves as their negotiators, we believe that they would all cry out from Tarazona to the Salses River and from the Salses River to Guardamar:20 “May all those negotiators die and go to the devil! Let those perish who wish to die safely!!”

19  Montesa was an Aragonese military order founded in 1317 during the reign of Jaime II. 20  Guardamar de Segura is a small port on the Valencian coast below Alicante.

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Therefore, if we have to die, you may certainly assume that we are not remaining here, but wish that all of you—prelates, clergy, knights, townsmen, and villagers— should follow us to Zaragoza, and whether riding, on foot, or in ships, know that you all must go there. Whether it is wished that we should hold a cortes there or not, we shall either live or die there. And thus we require and say to you with all the greatest expression of our heart and with great sorrow concerning our losses and yours.

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Pere Arranges for the Formation of a Large Army from the Inhabitants of His Largest Catalan Cities to Serve for No Longer Than Six Months against Castile. Monzón, March 17, 1363

Original Language: Catalan. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1184, f. 50. Printed Version: DHC, 92–93. Lord Pere by the grace of God. To each and every one of our beloved and faithful officials and their lieutenants to whom the present letter comes. Salutations and greetings. Know well that the king of Castile, our enemy, is in our land with a great force and has captured and occupied several different castles and villages of ours. He takes and occupies these every day and this is because we cannot carry out the resistance that must be made without the aid and help of our people. Therefore since we are their king and prince, we, however, as with anyone else, are but one person. Thus we may wish to abandon our life to die for the honor of our crown, for the life and restoration of our kingdoms and land, and for the repose of our subjects. Therefore our abandonment of life cannot be profitable if our loyal and true vassals did not have a similar intention or will. And since we cannot leave the town of Monzón even if we should, our departure cannot be profitable without our people, with whom we should advance to drive the said [Castilian] king from our lordship and to engage him in combat. Therefore we are confident in our Lord God who is the true justice who will give victory to us and [take] honor from the said king (a fact that is well-known, proven, publicized by the Holy Father) who violated against us the peace that had been established with him under the control of the Legate of the Apostolic See. And therefore there can be no lesser solution for these matters than if he should be routed and dead on the field of battle on which God will show us His justice while unleashing His vengeance on our enemy. Since by our sins or those of our people, you must decide if dying for us on the said battlefield is dying for the defense of our crown so the commonwealth of [our] realms and lands should not seem deserted and dishonored. Therefore, wishing in this to look after each and every one of you, we say to and command you firmly and expressly by the tenor of the present letter that each of you should act to make an announcement publicly and solemnly in which are recounted the said things we have requested by

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the faith and allegiance which are required from every nobleman, urban citizen, or residents of honored towns, or those who customarily have a horse and weapons who should and must come immediately to Zaragoza to be with us, their king, prince, and lord and must intend to act without any doubt against the said king of Castile. It is necessary for those summoned not to desert. And whether or not they have horses or rounceys or come with or without mules in whatever way they choose, they should be armed on the day of the battle with all their hearts. And we have acted to give and pay the customary salary in the city of Barcelona to those who live on this side of the Llobregat River and for those on the other side of the Llobregat, this will be paid in the city of Lérida. And we therefore order you, by the faith under which all of you are bound that each of you should send to us in writing the names of all those you know of who remain in some villages of your jurisdiction so that we may know which of them felt sorry for the destruction of our realm and which did not and in this case how we can do what is useful. And nevertheless we wish that the said announcement should maintain the directive that all men who should come to the frontier for this said reason should be guarded and protected by our royal faith. Thus, with our authority, [the terms of] their debts should be extended while they are going to, remaining at, and returning from the frontier and for six months after they have returned to their homes. Issued at Monzón under our secret seal on the 17th of March in the year of the birth of Our Lord 1363. The lord king sent this to me, Jaume Conesa.

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Pere Writes Pedro Ximenez de Pomar to Prepare and Have the Aragonese Infanzones Made Ready for Service against Pedro. Monzón. April 14, 1363.

Original Language: Aragonese. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1386, f. 16. Lord Pedro to our beloved counselor, Pedro Ximenex de Pomar, knight and sobrejuntero of Huesca and Jaca. Salutations and greetings. Since we intend to leave from here tomorrow morning to enter into combat with the king of Castile, therefore we say and command that, once you see this present letter, you should require all the infanzones of your company, under the penalty of fealty and allegiance by which they are bound to us, to be immediately prepared to come with you tomorrow to the place we have made known to you by other letters. Each and every one of the infanzones should be

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prepared to come with you and to obey any other command of ours that you should receive concerning this. You should not change or delay this in any form or manner if you wish to avoid our ire and indignation. Issued at Monzón on the 14th day of April in the year of the birth of Our Lord 1363.

55

Pere Assigns to His Vice-Chancellor, Francisco Roma, a Mission to the Papal Court to Discuss the Aragonese King’s Differences with the King of Navarre, Carlos II. Zaragoza, April 19, 1363

Original Language: Catalan. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1184, f. 110. Printed Version: DHC, 85–86. The King May you know that it is of great necessity and cannot be greater for the good of our honor that the pope by his papal edict should write to the king of Navarre. In this, he should entreat and require that the king not wish to openly or secretly or in any other way [act for] the king of Castile nor by the great attack he has made against the holy church by not carrying out anything he has promised and sworn to, and that remains better for the king of Navarre to help us against the king of Castile. And for this, many good reasons can be applied that you know and are well-known to the pope and church of Rome; namely, the great harm that the king of Castile has done as well as the attacks and threats he has carried out against God and the church and because we have been favored and helped by the said church and by all the Christian princes of the world. Therefore we say and command you expressly and with a sure conscience that you, loving our honor and caring for our good, should make a journey as quickly as you can to the court at Rome. As soon you are there, you should have the said letter or bull prepared and it should be sent by the pope through his messenger to the king of Navarre. This should be as good and effective as it can be made. You should involve the cardinal of Boulogne in this. We have not nor should you speak to any other person in the world but to him. And thus we command that you by your diligence and good industry care for this as much as you can. Issued at Zaragoza on the 19th day of April in the year of Our Lord 1363. It was sent to Francisco Roma, vice-chancellor.

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Pere Writes to the Bishop of Elna to Influence the King of Navarre to Make War on Pedro I of Castile. Zaragoza, April 20, 1363

Original Language: Catalan. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1184, f. 113. Printed Version: DHC, 87–88.0. Lord Pere … to our honored father in Christ, by the grace of the providential God, bishop of Elna. Salutations and greetings. May you know that the bishop of Valencia, the vicars of the archbishop of Zaragoza, the bishop of Huesca, and others of our realm have considered the evil war that the king of Castile with a great multitude of his own people, and other Christians and Moors has waged against us, the churches of our lordship, castles, towns, and villages, and has done so with such great cruelty that is contrary to all humanity by cutting off noses and beheading our subjects, raping virgins, dishonoring married women and widows, and likewise in destroying and pillaging the holy churches, altars, and other things dedicated to the service of God in the said realms. This is known by the cardinal of Boulogne, legate of the Holy Father, who has made such charges against the Castilian king. The three divisions of linked laymen have acted by the witnesses of the cities, towns, and villages of the archbishop and bishops have granted generously to us … a loan under certain conditions, which were agreed to and confirmed between us and the bishop and his vicars. What is more, this is fully discussed in the articles that were prepared and which we have sent to you and are to be brought to you by the bearer of the present letter. Since you should pay attention to the aforesaid things in this letter that have caused us such great need and since we cannot come to the aid of the honor of our crown, of the commonwealth and of the restoration of our realms and lands if then a similar loan is not made by you and the other prelates of our land. Therefore we affectionately entreat you as much as we can to consider the above-said reasons and to give in the form of a grant or loan like those the laymen … of your bishopric … have granted us. Believe all the things that the faithful men of our household, the young nobleman, and Sir Pere Vallespir, one learned in law from Perpignan, who will all speak for us about this matter. Issued at Zaragoza on the 20th day of the month of April in the year of the birth of Our Lord 1363.

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Pere Requests the Archbishops of Tarragona and Zaragoza and Bishops to Have Their Clergy Pray for Pere’s Victory in the Proposed Duel with the Castilian King. Lérida, May 28, 1363

Original Language: Latin. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1385, f. 135. Pere to the reverend father in Christ, Pedro by divine providence archbishop of Tarragona, our beloved counselor and chamberlain. Salutations and greetings. We generally believe that the news has come to you that the king of Castile, our public enemy, captured and occupied some cities and castles as well as holding many villages of the aforesaid realms of Aragon and Valencia under a harsh siege. Therefore wishing an action of this sort to be placed under the judgement of God, we have proposed to enter into combat on the field with the king of Castile and, driven forth for us and our troops, we may trust in divine clemency in the ecclesiastics and clerics of your apostolic dioceses. Therefore we urgently require and beg that this should be done by the said ecclesiastics and clerics of your dioceses during the elevations of the host while the divine office is being celebrated. Of if you should act to fight for this and yourself against the said enemy and his men, let God show you how to gain his right. Issued at Lérida on the 28th day of May in the year of the birth of the Lord 1363. Similar letters were sent to the prelates written below. The archbishop of Zaragoza. The bishop of Tarazona.

58

Pere Accused the Commander of Onda of Not Punishing Traitors under His Jurisdiction. Zaragoza, September 9, 1363

Original Language: Catalan. ACA, Cancellería real, R. 1385, f. 149. To the beloved [Commander of Onda], we are amazed since you have taken it into your heart to overturn our affairs which we have discovered from our faithful porter, Sir Bernat Sant Marti, who had wished to make confiscations of some of the goods in the village of Betxi from persons who are traitors to us by the favor they have given to the king of Castile and his men as well as the disservice they have shown to us and our men and for the evil deeds they have done. Therefore, we promise that if you should interfere with the said confiscations the said porter is making, we will carry out such

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a punishment for you that it will be an example to others. Thus we hope that this is extremely clear to you. Issued in Zaragoza on the 9th day of September in the year of the birth of Our Lord 1363.

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Pere Writes to the Captain of Mosqueruela, Commending a Villager in His Company for His Consistent Valor. Zaragoza, September 18, 1363

Original Language: Aragonese. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1386, ff. 44r–v. Lord Pedro to our faithful Jaime Sahera, captain of Mosqueruela21. Salutations and greetings. Since We have discovered by credible persons that our faithful Pedro Gombau, a resident who customarily lived in Serrio, has served in the present war very strongly and nobly, shunning no danger that might occur to his person. And since when he was in our service, he lost the property he had inside the village of Serrio and lost all the chattels, plants, and fruit he had in his fields and vineyards in another place when the Castilians destroyed the houses he had in the said village of Serrio. Therefore since we have written concerning these things, we wish to be fully informed as to the service he has rendered us and concerning the value of what he has lost for which you can recompense him with our permission and favor. By this, we say, command, and order you to gather information from credible witnesses concerning the service that the said Pedro Gombau has rendered us in the present war and the value of the property, chattels, and fruits of his property and other things he has lost by being in our service according to the information received and prepared by a public scribe, and having closed this letter, marked it with your seal and sent it to our court. Issued at Zaragoza on the 18th day of September in the year of Our Lord 1363.

21  Aragonese village to west of Teruel in th Sierra del Rayo.

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1364 60

Pere Announces to the City and Kingdom of Valencia That He Was Sending His Son, Prince Joan with a Company of Horse and Foot. Zaragoza, January 14, 1364

Original Language: Catalan. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1386, f. 80. The King Since we for the defense and restoration of the city and kingdom of Valencia have ordered sent to the city and realm of the Valencia the distinguished and magnificent Lord Prince Joan, duke of Gerona and count of Cervera, with certain horsemen and infantry, we have ordered you to go with them with as many horsemen as you can gather. Therefore, we affectionately entreat you that you should immediately come with all you horses and herds and that all those who come with you should go to the city of Barcelona to receive your salary. Near the city, you will continue your journey along with the said prince who is now at Tortosa. And we further beg you not to fail or delay in the said city of Barcelona in claiming the money prepared for paying your salary … And thus we will have your response by the bearer of the present letter concerning how many horsemen we can count on from you. Issued at Zaragoza on the 14th day of January in the year of the birth of Our Lord 1364.

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Pere Instructs His Catalan Officials to Bring to Barcelona All the Ship Masters, Oar-Makers, and Shipwrights to Help Fit Out Galleys for War Service. Barcelona, April 3, 1364.

Original Language: Catalan. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1387, f. 77. Pere to each and every one of our beloved and faithful officials to whom the present letter comes or to their lieutenants. Salutations and greetings. Because of our previous hope for a certain number of galleys which we are presently having fitted out and repaired in the city of Barcelona by reason of the of the war with Castile, there will be a great need for the masters of these vessels as well as oar-makers. Therefore we proclaim and expressly order you, under the penalty of our ire and indignation, that once you see the present letter, you bring to the said city all the masters, oar-makers, and

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shipwrights who live within the jurisdiction of your command, forcing them to this with the impositions of fines and exactions and finally by the arrest of their persons and confiscation of their goods, and by any other means that should seem good to you. Yet we will satisfy them with a suitable and customary salary. Thus you should not put this off nor change it since there is great danger in delay. You should consider that it will be through your fault if the said galleys do not set out to sea. Issued in Barcelona on April 4 in the year of the birth of Our Lord 1364.

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Pere Appeals to His Uncle and Other Catalan and Pyrenean Nobles Who Are Members of the Order of St. George to Send Companies to Help Him Raise the Castilian Siege of Valencia. Sant Matheu, April 19, 1364

Original Language: Catalan. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1386, ff. 84r–v. Lord Pere … to the distinguished Lord Prince Ramon Berenguer, count of Empuries, our dear uncle. Salutations and greetings. Since according to the articles of our Company of St. George, by which you are to serve us by taking an oath of homage that you must strictly carry out, you are to come to us in person with the best troops you have with our certain salary in defense of our realms each time some king or foreigners should wish to damage our realms and lands. Because the king of Castile has cruelly and evilly besieged the city of Valencia and has captured and occupied a great part of this realm, you by the present letter should approach the said king to fight with him and help the said city (which is critically low in provisions) and then should go to the defense of the said realm by virtue of the oath of homage under which you are bound and under which you are required as said. Thus, we affectionately entreat you to come immediately with the largest company of horsemen you can to be with us in the battle and for the defense of the said realm. Therefore, we will pay you a salary in Barcelona. And we … will indemnify and secure you from all crimes and offenses that you may then commit and from all you have carried out in going to, remaining in our service and returning from it. Issued at the village of Sant Matheu on the 19th day of April in the year of the birth of Our Lord 1364.

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63

Harangue Pere III Delivered on a Sloping Beach Near Murviedro in Anticipation of Battle with Pedro I of Castile Who Was Forming Up His Troops on the Other Side of the Beach. April 29, 1364

Original Language: Catalan. Pere III, 2:549–50 (VI:41). Good People At no time have we taken pleasure in speaking badly or for the dishonor of others, but now when I recognize that the king of Castile and I stand before the judgement of God, I say of him that he is wicked and false and as great a traitor who has waged and is waging war in my land. I request that Our Lord King will on this day grant me justice against him [the Castilian king] and we have unshaken confidence that He will do so. And now I address those of you who are gathered together with me and [especially] you Castilians who know that I have welcomed you into my kingdom, and shared my possessions with you, not as much as you deserved or as I wished, but as much as I was able. You know well concerning the king of Castile who is over there and there is not one of you against whom he has not killed a father, son, brother, or relative and dishonored wives, daughters or sisters, after taking all your goods and theirs and treating all as traitors. Because of this, I say to you that today you should remember the evil deeds that the said king has committed against you and the good deeds I have done for you. Therefore, I want to speak to you and beg that if there are any who want to go over there [to the Castilian lines], they may go now before the battle begins. Indeed we give you permission to go and neither your horses nor weapons will be touched. It is better that you leave now rather than turn traitor once we have commenced battle…. Now I say to those of you who are my vassals and countrymen, let your hearts consider your ancestors. How many valiant deeds have they carried out with my ancestors. Remember whose sons you are, for it is in my heart that I am the son of one of the best kings in the world and I trust in the goodness of God that I will prove this on this day. And I will ask you one favor: that I will be the first in battle and that the front hooves of your horses will line up with the rear hooves of my horse. This will be enough for me.

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Pere Instructs the Representative of the Governor of Roussillon and Cerdanya about Mounting a Defense against Foreign Invaders with Local Troops. Barcelona, May 3, 1364

Original Language: Catalan. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1387, ff. 87r–v. Lord Pere, king by the grace of God, to our counselor, Lord Arnau Orcau, lieutenant of the governor of Roussillon and Cerdanya. Salutations and greetings. Since we have had some news that certain great companies are moving toward the regions of Conflent and have carried out their purpose of entering the said counties to inflict damage—a thing which God does not want!—, therefore we declare and especially command that as soon as you have seen this letter, you should take all provisions for the protection and defense of the said counties, both by the summoning of hosts and in any other way that seems fitting to you for our subjects to advance by these incitements and appeals so they cannot be damaged or captured in any way whatsoever by the said companies. And in this case you should find out for certain how many and how great are the numbers of the said companies coming against the said counties and how much help would be necessary for their defense from the regions of Catalonia. We wish and command you to require by your letters the vicars of Gerona, Campredon, or their lieutenants with all the hosts of their vicarates to come and rush to our aforesaid aid and defense since we by others of our letters previous to the present one expressly command each one at present to announce through the voice of a public crier and act to have these hosts called out. Once they were demanded by these letters, they should come with their men for the said aid and defense of those parts where you will notify and demand them to go. You have to carry out the said things with such diligence that we trust you can be praiseworthy and that you cannot be held back by negligence in any way. Issued in Barcelona on the third day of May in the year of the birth of Our Lord 1364.

65

Pere Writes to the Vicar of Cervera and Other Officials Protecting the Property and Jurisdictions of Those Who Are in Service in Valencia. Barcelona, May 30, 1364

Original Language: Latin. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1387, f. 92v.

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Pere … to our faithful vicar of Cervera and other officials of ours or their lieutenants to whom the present letter should come. Salutations and greetings. Since Pere de Ulugia who is a resident of the castle of Ulugia and is subordinate to us and is in our service in the kingdom of Valencia with his horses, weapons, and other equipment, we are thus warning you that enemies of the said Pere have threatened to cause damage to his men, property, and goods in the said castle. Since Pere is in our service, it is fitting for us to defend and protect his men, property, and goods from any damage or attacks whatsoever. Therefore we expressly proclaim and command you and any of your men ordering very secretly you and any of your men whom you appoint to carry out a public announcement made as they customarily are by the voice of a public crier and to have it announced that the said Pere de Ulugia is currently in our service. By this it should be made clear to each and every person of whatever class or status that they are expressly commanded against committing any damage or evil to the said Pere, his men, his property or theirs under the penalties in the [article of the] Usatges of Barcelona that begins “By the authority and request” along with orders added to or applied to this. By this Usatges article we likewise will proceed against transgressions of this sort by you or rather by your command according to the style of our court and their punishment will be an example to others. We therefore command you to compel manfully each and every one of those wishing or threatening to cause damage or evil to the said Pere, his men, or their property not to carry this out. Likewise the same Pere, his men, and their property will be totally preserved unharmed. Thus you should change this in no way if you wish to evade our ire and indignation. Issued at Barcelona on the 30th day of May in the year of the birth of Our Lord 1364.

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Pere Instructs Miguel de Palomar and Other Deputies to Make a Rapid Reimbursement to Sancho González for the Loss of His Horse in Battle. Barcelona, July 31, 1364

Original Language: Catalan. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1386, f. 100v. Lord Pere to our faithful Lord Miguel de Palomar and to all other deputies of the kingdom of Valencia to whom the below-written things pertain. Salutations and greetings. Since we have been clearly informed that Sancho González de Villel, shieldbearer of our noble and beloved Rodrigo Diaz, knight, during the first time the king of Castile put Valencia under siege, lost his horse which was estimated to have been in good condition by the deputies of the time, we know well that the said Sancho is reported to be and is a good retainer who would abandon his person to die in our service and is a poor man who does not have the wherewithal with which to provide himself with a

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horse and wishes in every case to have whatever amount of money is to be paid immediately from the generalitat, along with the deputacio or from others, for the estimated value of the said horse so he could buy another and continue in our service. Therefore, we oblige, command and order you to pay without any delay to the said Sancho the estimated value of the said horse, knowing by this you are doing great service and by doing the contrary will displease us greatly. Issued in Barcelona on the last day of July in the year of the birth of Our Lord 1364.

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Pere Commands His Aragonese Barons and Nobles to Fight Off Castilian Raids around Tarazona. Tortosa, January 4, 1365

Original Language: Aragonese. ACA, Cancillería real, R. 1387, f. 118v. Lord Pere to our beloved and faithful nobles, ricoshombres, knights, and infanzones who remain in Aragon. Salutations and greetings. We have come to discover the truth concerning the companies of horse which the king of Castile has in the districts of Tarazona, Borja, and Magallon up to the river [Ebro] which have caused and are causing great damage in the districts of Tauste and Exea which they overrun every day. We have further come to find out that the governor and deputies of Aragon have ordered you and those equipped with horses to bring fifty horsemen to Tauste to block the passage of the said companies, for which you should be paid as a daily salary of five sous per horsemen. And although some of you may be required to forego the said salary, and may desire not to carry out this duty, nor might have no blame for this, we thus require you through the faith and allegiance by which you are bound to us and we thus proclaim and order those of you who have been commanded to hold Tauste for the governor and justicia of Aragon to go there and receive the salary of five sous [per day]. You should know that if you do not carry this out, we will take legal action against you and your property and against those who are disobedient to our commands and who act against the fuero and good reason. Furthermore, we wish that you should know that for those troops who go, we will grant the said salary for the said service, the term of which we are agreeable to and have carried out by this grant and donation. Issued in Tortosa on the 4th day of January in the year of the birth of Our Lord 1365.

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Queen Elionor Delivers a Speech to the Corts of Barcelona Requesting the Vote of an Emergency Subsidy to Support Her Husband’s Campaigns in Valencia. September 21, 1365

Original Language: Catalan. CAVC, 2:369–72. Parlaments, 27–33. Sánchez Martínez, “Negociación,” 161–64 (doc. 5). Good People If you consider the great allegiance that your predecessors and you yourselves have owed and still owe to the lord king and his predecessors; if you consider how greatly the said lord king and his predecessors have been served by you and your predecessors down to this very day; and if you consider how above all the nations of the world your fame and that of your predecessors has shone and still shines throughout the world from the true allegiance, loyalty, fealty, and great love toward your lord, no one, neither the lord king nor us, would think that in this crisis you could allow the said lord king, the realm, and you yourself to perish since if it is not taken care of, the realm is at the point of perishing for the following reasons, among others. Know that an agreement, confirmed by your will, counsel, and consent, was made between the lord king or his procurators and some important barons and captains of the great companies of France and the said companies must come to the aid and defense of the Lord King and of his realm against his adversary, the king of Castile, and help invade the realm of Castile and there, along with the counts of Trastámara and Dènia and other companies, to wage war against the said king of Castile and carry out an attack into Castile. According to the opinion of the Lord King and those that are with him (including us and you), the completion of such an invasion of Castile will bring about the restoration and repose of the lord king and the peace of his realm along with the destruction of his enemy. In the many days that have passed, we have said all of these things in the present corts. To have the great companies take part in the aid and defense of the lord king and of his realm and wage war on the said king of Castile within his realm, a certain sum of money must be given all at once to the said great companies. This has to be collected and in hand from the grant and subsidy, the approval of waits on the present corts. According to the intention of the Lord King and us, we have cared and hoped to have the said sum of money collected and in hand during all the present month of September. And this will be necessary for the said companies to come as quickly as was stated: that is, that they would be in Castile for all the said present month. And as

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God has ordained, they have not hurried as much as they said they would. And this has proved right and necessary for the delay which has occurred in the present corts, not so much from the great insistence we have continually made to speed up and finish the said corts, but from the actions of the great companies. Now even if the arrival of the said companies should be delayed, they have already begun to arrive today according to the news we have received. We must count on the fact that, with the great diligence and speed that must be devoted to this matter, the money must be collected and in hand for all the upcoming month of October and that it will be in hand through the work of God. Night and day, we personally have spent great anxiety and care and for a month during which we have changed our abode and living quarters to continually be in this monastery22 where you have held the said corts so that all day we may frequently be able to bring up, hurry along, and request that you move the corts to an end. Besides those of our council have all day at suitable and unsuitable hours brought up, stirred up, and made petitions—now with us and then without—to terminate the matters of the corts. Afterwards by our great insistence and pointed requests, we have made of you by word and in writing to force you to agree to the subsidy; that is, by clarifying and supplementing the grant of Tortosa23 and adding to it for the effective defense of the commonwealth. You have already proclaimed and have written down the articles by which you intend to carry out the grant or subsidy. Yet, you have written about other intrigues and new matters, not wishing to carry out and deliver the said grant to us who acts in the place of the Lord King, since this is customary and must be done. From this matter, many great and irrepairable dangers have come about; namely, those which we know about from the letters we received and have shared with you. From the Lord Prince Pere and the castellan de Amposta who are in Avignon and Sir Francesch Roma who is in Perpinyan but is coming here, [we know] that we will shortly have the companies with us. And there were letters from Toulouse sent to some citizens of Barcelona saying that a public announcement had been made in Toulouse concerning the procuring and storing of provisions for the great companies which are coming to aid the king of Aragon. Moreover, you know that Sir Francesch de Perellós, standing in the place of the Lord King and likewise as his messenger and procurator, is in the regions of France to take care of the said companies and you can imagine that he will, has, and is doing his best to have the said companies come and care for them, especially since when he left here, we and you informed him in certain terms that he would be given free access to the money that must be given the companies.

22  The Franciscan monastery in Barcelona. 23  The Catalan parliamentary meeting held in late 1364.

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And if that which has been promised for the said companies is not ready for them when they arrive, you can imagine how they will act in being so offended and how they will mistreat and destroy all of this land. Then suppose that they should be here under our hope and yours so that our promise will be carried out for them. But if our hope is cast down and the promise is not kept for them, one can imagine that we will consider them as enemies. And it could be worse if the king of Castile knew or had the feeling about this (please God that it should not be so). It is feared that he would negotiate with them or he has already done so for his own aid and against us, giving them a similar or even greater sum than that which we have already promised them. With these said companies, he will be too powerful and we too weak. And we will be at the point of ruin, for it is said that the said companies are so great and numerous that if they can wage war for the king of Castile, there will be no greater army than he has. Furthermore, you know that the Lord King is almost at the point of returning to his crown the village of Murviedro, the loss of which was the occasion of such scandal and evil. Understand that in powerfully prosecuting the war and in moving toward Segorbe, Xèrica, Teruel, and forward from there, he is neglecting himself—as he has done and is still doing—in giving all of the effort that he can in returning to his crown those sites and others occupied by the king of Castile with the sustenance and help of the barons and other companies of Catalan horse who have to be paid and repaid their salary from the grant or subsidy which is hoped to be carried out in present corts. And if you, the [members of the] said corts, do not wish to come to a conclusion and move forward in this matter, the evident presumption is that you want the above-said contrary things and finally the ruin of the lord king and his realm—something that God does not wish. Therefore we, not without reason and being in great anxiety, confusion, and sorrow of heart from the aforesaid things, entreat and require you as if from the lord king and our faithful and loyal vassals and from that faith and allegiance that you owe him and us and from that obligation you maintain and owe to the commonwealth and to its defense and to prevent all the aforesaid dangers and the many other irreparable difficulties that can follow from them and to abandon all intrigues and novelties, know furthermore that you have agreed to the grant or subsidy, have deliberated on mounting a defense for the commonwealth, and have just promulgated the articles according to which you intend to carry out the said subsidy. Therefore, you have to finish these and present them to us without delay. What is more, since it is customary and must be carried out that these have to be read to us, we must respond in place of the lord king to each of the articles since they require a response. And thus we wish and require that you should act now before having lunch for we never intend to eat until you make the presentation of the said grant to us for we see that a delay of one day from now could mean, as it has been said, the death and

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destruction of the lord king and the realm. And what is more we see and understand this and we, in place of the lord king, wish to avoid it. And these articles should not be given, read, or disclosed to anyone with the wish that it will not be publicly proclaimed that either the Lord King or the realm are at the point of destruction. And we command you, Sir Jacme Conesa, to write down the names of all those who are in the present corts, to whom we have ordered that immediately each should individually respond by the faith and allegiance that they owe to the Lord King whether this request that we have made is just and reasonable and takes into account the objective of the defense of the commonwealth as well as the avoidance of the above-said dangers and difficulties.

Appendix III

Pedro I’s Administrative and Military Letters, 1364–1365 The translated documents in this appendix are drawn the Archivo de la Corona de Aragón (ACA) and the Documentos de Pedro I (DPI). Except with one exception, these documents date from 1364–1365, originated in archival collections of Murcia, and consisted mostly of military instructions Castilian frontier cities.

1364 1 Pedro I of Castile Announces the Ratification of Peace with Pere III of Aragon. Murviedro, July 4, 1363 Original Language: Castilian. ACA, Cancillería real, Varia, no. 68, f. 231. Printed Version: Masiá i de Rós, Relación, 2:517–18 (doc. 229/151). Instrument of approvals and ratifications by the king of Castile. Let all to whomsoever this letter comes know that we Pedro, by the grace of God, king of Castile, León, Toledo, Galicia, Seville, Cordoba, Murcia, Jaén, and the Algarve, lord of Vizcaya and Molina, have seen and diligently understood certain articles concerning a marriage between us and the Lady Princess Juana, daughter of the said king of Aragon and one between the Lord Prince Alfonso, his son with the Lady Princess Isabel, our daughter. These were negotiated, agreed upon, and confirmed between Lord García Alvarez, Master of Santiago; Martin Yañez, our principal treasurer and our chief judge of Seville; Mateo Fernández, chancellor of our secret seal; and Juan Alfonso, our principal accountant (all our special deputies for this matter) and the Lord Count Alfonso of Ribagorza and Denia; Lord Bernat de Cabrera; Lord Ramon Almany de Cervello, governor of Roussillon and Cerdanya; and Berenguer de Pau, counselors and procurators of the king of Aragon. This agreement was made under certain conditions and provisions contained and declared in the said articles confirmed, sworn to, and made in our spirit and established through an oath of homage by our said procurators and confirmed and sworn to in the spirit of the said king of Aragon and through an oath

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004425057_025

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of homage made by his procurators … as it appears in greater detail by the preparation of two similar public letters made under the authority of Pablo Gomez, my scribe and public notary in my court in all of our realms and Jaume Conesa, secretary of the said king of Aragon and his public notary for all his land and lordship. On Sunday, the second day of the present month of July, we retained one of these letters and the other was sent to the said kingdom of Aragon. By this for the greater validity of these said things, we, the said king of Castile, confirms, approves and ratifies with good will all the said articles contained in them and in the said letters made concerning this by the tenor of the present letter so it will firmly retain its validity. So they can be made better by the good and full understanding of the said actions, we swear by the Cross, Our Lord God, and by physically touching the Holy Gospels that we shall hold, guard, and fulfill each and every one of the said chapters contained in the said articles. And we must not come against these things that have been negotiated, confirmed and sworn to by our procurators for any reason. We have made this oath of homage to you and it has been received from us according to the fuero and custom of Spain with good faith and with no deceit and this shall maintain and protect the articles as they were negotiated by our procurators as is said above. If we do act as is suitable than it is not fitting for a king who took the oath of homage to fail to abide by it. In testimony of this thing, we command that a public letter be prepared by our aforesaid scribe and notary and we command him to seal it with our secret seal. This letter was issued in our town of Murviedro (which we have won from the king of Aragon) on the 4th day of July in the era of 1307 [1363].

2 Pedro I Writes to Murcian Citizens Ordering That Muslim Artillery Engineers Be Sent to Cartagena. No Site Listed, June 8, 1364 Original Language: Castilian. Printed Version: DPI, 164 (doc. 102). I, the King, make known to you, Pascual Pedriñan, resident of Murcia, that I am sending there the engineers, Mohamat, son of Master Ali, and his son, so they can work at and repair that which has to be repaired in my war engines which are in Cartagena. Therefore I command that you should dispatch them immediately since they can repair and adjust the way in which the engines operate. And you should take steps for the council to give what is necessary for the completion of these repairs. Act so they should carry out and have what is necessary for the trip from Murcia to Cartagena. And

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those of Murcia should pay all these costs and give to the said Mohamat 5 maravedis a day and to his son 3 maravedis a day until the day they come back to Murcia. Issued on 8th day of July in the era 1402 (1364).

3 Pedro I of Castile Sets Penalties for His Troops Who Deserted Garrison Duty in Alicante and Burriana. Murviedro, June 17, 1364 Original Language: Castilian. Printed Version: DPI, 158–59 (doc 95). Lord Pedro by the grace of God, king of Castile, León, Toledo, Galicia, Seville, Córdoba, Murcia, Jaén, the Algarve, and Alcira, lord of Vizcaya and Molina. Salutations and greetings. To you, Pascual Pedriñan, resident of Murcia. Know that the council of the said city of Murcia, sent to me to say that you demanded from them a penalty since the hundred crossbowmen have been reduced from the number who came into my service at Alicante. This was done without my command and likewise the other hundred who had come into my service at Burriana had also declined against my orders. And for this reason, the population of the said city was diminished and they sent to me for permission to have mercy on the said crossbowmen so they might waive the said fines. Know that I consider it good to waive the penalty for one set of a hundred crossbowmen and that the other group that was considered more guilty should pay the penalty and it should not be abrogated by the council. And if the said hundred crossbowmen or some of them do not have property from which to pay and this is what is missing from the said fine and you cannot collect it, you may do so from the justices of the peace, the constable, and from those who had to oversee the treasury of the council, all of whom were in office when the said crossbowmen were sent to this service. Therefore, I command that you should not demand from the said crossbowmen more than the fine for the unit of the two that was more reduced and this you have to collect. And you should demand this from the hundred crossbowmen whom you determine are more guilty in this matter. If they do not have property, you may collect from the said officials as mentioned. And if you do not do this, do so under the penalty of the loss of my favor. Issued in Murviedro with my secret seal on the 17th day of June in the era of 1402 (1364).

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503

Pedro Writes to the Castellan of Alicante That He Send to Murcia for Twenty More Horsemen. Arcos, June 20, 1364

Original Language: Castilian. Printed Version: DPI, 161–62 (doc. 98). Lord Pedro by the grace of God king of Castile … to you Pedro Fernández Niño, my castellan of Alicante. Salutations and greetings. Know that the residents of Murcia have sent to me to say that there were twenty horsemen of Murcia in Alicante and another ten in Guardamar. I consider it good for these twenty horsemen who are there to go to Murcia since it is necessary to protect the city from troops of Orihuela. And the other horsemen who are in Guardamar should remain where they are now. Therefore, I command you not to hinder these twenty horsemen who shall go to Murcia and you shall not detain them under the penalty of the loss of my favor. Issued at Arcos, a hamlet of Teruel with my secret seal on the 20th day of June in the era 1402 (1364).

5 5

Pedro Orders the Councils of Elche, Alicante, and Guardamar to Restore the Murcian Cities Lost during the War. Moya, June 21, 1364

Original Language: Castilian. Printed Version: DPI, 161–62 (doc. 99). Lord Pedro by the grace of God, king of Castile … to the councils, justices, and jurates and other officials of Alicante, Elche, Guardamar, and all the other villages that are in the realm of Murcia that I have won from the king of Aragon and to whomever of you who sees this letter. Salutations and greetings. Know that the council and officials of the city of Murcia sent to me that before this war that I have with the king of Aragon had begun, to say that some of its residents had possessed within the boundaries of some or all of these sites properties and other chattels. After the war had begun, the king of Aragon; the queen, his wife; the traitor, Lord Prince Ferran; the Lord Prince Juan; and some of their men had given these properties to some persons. They [the Murcians] sent to me to beg my favor and since these places are mine, they asked that their properties should be returned to them and we considered it good.

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Therefore we order that one of you who have seen this letter or a transcript of it sealed by a public scribe must grant, turn over, and act to remove legal obstructions for those of the said city of Murcia for all the properties or chattels that they or some of them within the boundaries of the said places before (as it was said) the war had begun. You must not refuse to do this because you claim the said king, queen, princes, or anyone else gave it [the property] to you. And I consider it a good thing that these properties should be returned to them as was said. And if you should do one or the other of these things, you should come under the penalty of the loss of my favor and should pay a fine of 600 maravedis for each instance. Issued in Moya, sealed with my secret seal on the 21st day of June in the era 1402 (1364). I, Mateo Ferrandez acted to write this by the command of the king.

6

Pedro Informs the Council of Murcia concerning the Arrival of a Cavalry Unit from Granada, Moya, June 21, 1364

Original Language: Castilian. Printed Version: DPI, 162–63 (doc. 100). Lord Pedro by the grace of God, king of Castile … to the council, justices of the peace, the constable of Murcia, and the knights and good men whom you have authorized to supervise or to any of you whomsoever. Salutations and greetings. Know that Lord Farax, son of the castellan, Lord Rodoan, is coming into my service with knights whom the king of Granada sent to my aid for this war which we have with the king of Aragon and they have now come to be in Murcia and will serve there for the first time. Therefore I command you to welcome the said Lord Farax and the Moorish horsemen who come with him and you should act to give him good lodgings and provisions without cost and other necessary things for their money. You should not charge more for these things than they are worth and from the time the Moorish horsemen arrive you should not assent to others acting contrary to this or in any other improper way. And when Enrique Enriquez and the said Lord Farax should wish to go and lay waste to Orihuela and carry out some other things in line with their service to me, you should not hold back from anything in laying waste and waging the cruelest war you can. Regarding the men you capture, cut off their heads and do not lose your resolve so that every man of Aragon taken should then be killed. But if it is certain that you have not acted in this way, then your heads shall be returned to us for this. And for this matter, I have sent there Alfonso Pérez, my crossbowman, who has to show this letter of mine

Pedro I ’ s Administrative and Military Letters, 1364–1365

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to you and say in my stead that you should act in this way. Thus you should act to carry out and fulfill this and if it does not please you to carry out what you are obliged to before me on the day on which you are supposed to, you are bound for nine days under the fine of ___ maravedis per day. Issued at Moya and sealed with my secret seal on the 21st day of June in the era 1402 (1364). I, the King.

7 Pedro I Writes to Murcia and All the Towns and Villages of His Realm Telling Them to Give Free Passage to His Scout, Juan Fernández de Latron, Who May Have Been Serving as a Spy. No Site Listed. August 23, 1364 Original Language: Castilian. Printed Version: DPI, 165–66 (doc. 104). Lord Pedro by the grace of God, king of Castile … to the council, jurates, justices of the peace, and constable of the city of Murcia and all the other towns and villages that are in its realm and to the knights, squires, and others of whatever class from our towns and villages who are on the frontiers in my service and whichever one of you should see this our letter. Salutations and greetings. May you know that I consider it good that Juan Fernández de Latron, who shall be an agent for the release of captives, and shall go into and come from Aragon securely without any fear. Therefore I command you that once you have seen this letter, you will consider the said Juan Fernández as an agent for the release of captives and when he goes into and comes from Aragon, you will not interfere with him nor do anything improper to him. And if you do not do one or the other of these things, you will come under the penalty for the loss of my favor. And forward to him this letter of mine sealed with my secret seal. Issued on the 23rd day of August in era 1402 (1364).

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8 Pedro I Commands the Murcian Council to Pay for the Construction of a Trebuchet and the Repair of Other Engines. No Site Given, September 12, 1364 Original Language: Castilian. Printed Version, DPI, 162 (doc. 108). I, the King, inform you the council and officials of the city of Murcia and to whichever one of you that I have commanded Pascual Pedriñan of Murcia that he should act to repair some war engines from the parts which are there and to construct a new trebuchet. And he should have everything ready and well-arranged. And I consider it good that you should pay what it costs to repair the said trebuchet. Therefore, I command you that you should pay all the maravedis that the repair of the said war engines and the construction of the said trebuchet cost. In this matter, you should put up no excuse nor act in any other manner under the penalty for the loss of my favor, as well as corporal punishment, and the loss of everything you have. Know that you should fulfill as much for my service as you are able to do. Issued on the 12th day of September in the era 1402 (1364). Likewise you should act to carry out that which will be necessary for each project and then have it transported. I, the King.

9

Pedro Writes to the Council and Justices of Murcia to Establish the Amount of Plunder That Should Go to the Castilian Crown as the Result of Raids into Aragon. Castelhabib, October 11, 1364

Original Language: Castilian. Printed Version: DPI, 169–70 (doc. 110). Lord Pedro by the grace of God, king of Castile … to the council, justices of the peace, and constable of the city of Murcia and to each one of you. Salutations and greeting. Know that I consider it good that all raids that are made from now on into the land of Aragon should be carried out in this way—those who fulfil these raids should give my fifth to those who have to collect it for me from the Moorish men and women, from the beasts of burden and livestock, from all the other things they bring away from the said raids, and from everything else they keep for themselves. And Christians who take away all this should collect for me that which they have to for my said fifth because it protects them to carry out those things that must be done for my favor.

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Therefore, I command you that immediately upon seeing this letter of mine, you should act to publicly announce to this town and throughout its limits that all of those who should make raids from now on into the lands of Aragon should collect my fifth as they have to for me; namely, Moorish men and women, beasts of burden and livestock as well as all the other things they capture and all the other things they keep for themselves. And the Christians who plunder from the said raids should give and hand over to those who have to collect my fifth so they may protect and so they should do this under the penalty of the loss of my favor, corporal punishment, and the loss of all they have. Issued in the camp above Castelhabib with my secret seal on the 11th day of October in the era 1402 (1364). I, Pedro González, acted to write this by the command of the king.

1365 10 Pedro I Orders the Council of Murcia to Send Cavalrymen and Infantry to Alicante to Fill Out an Earlier Contingent. Alicante, January 4, 1365 Original Language: Castilian. Printed Version: DPI, 181 (doc. 123). Lord Pedro by the grace of God king of Castile … to the council, justices of the peace and constable of the city of Murcia and to each and every one of you good men of the said council who have to oversee the action of the said council. Salutations and greetings. Know well that there are in my service ten horsemen and twenty foot-soldiers from the said city and since they are not numerous or well-equipped enough to fulfill my service, I consider it good that you send me another ten horse and twenty foot who are sufficiently numerous and supplied to carry out my service. And give them the same salary for two months as you have given to each of those who are in my service. And know that you should fulfill as much of the service for me that you are currently carrying out and if you do not accomplish this in any way, you do so under the penalty of loss of my favor, your lives, and of everything you have.

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Pedro Orders the Council of Murcia to Maintain a Fund of 10,000 Maravedis to Pay for Horses and Weapons. He Also Answers Another Murcian Petition concerning the City’s Military Service. Alicante, January 12, 1365

Original Language: Castilian. Printed Version: DPI, 182–83 (doc. 125). Lord Pedro by the grace of God king of Castile … to the council and officials of the city of Murcia. Salutations and greetings. Know that I have seen your petitions that you sent me with your messengers and I understand what is contained in them. And to your response to me that you were shown one of my letters in which we commanded that all of your residents and inhabitants were to maintain 8,000 maravedis for horses and weapons and that you had a letter of King Alfonso, my father (may God pardon him) in which he instructed you to maintain a sum of 12,000 maravedis and since you [claim you] are very needy and cannot fulfill this, you have petitioned for the favor that you may maintain for the said horses the sum of 10,000 maravedis, know that I consider it good that you should maintain this sum. And you have sent to me to say that as it was contained in my letter that each of the horses were to be worth the sum of 1,000 maravedis and because horses are very expensive in my land, I have issued a favor to you that the price of each animal should be valued at 600 maravedis. Thus, by our permission, each of the said horses should be worth the sum of 600 maravedis. You should well understand that a horse worth 600 maravedis is not a good one nor does it fulfill my service well. In regard to this I consider it good that each horse should be worth the sum of 1,000 maravedis and I command you to act accordingly. And as you have sent to me to say that the horsemen and crossbowmen that you have maintained in my services in the castles have been there for three months as I have ordered and you have petitioned us for the favor that they may be sent back to the said city [of Murcia], understand well that the said horsemen and crossbowmen are carrying out my service. And to that letter which you sent to me to speak of the matter of the oxen, these are not excused from transporting the war engines and I will act as quickly as I can to release them and will send them there (Murcia). And to that letter which you sent me to address concerning the matter of Pedro López de Ayala, know that I hold it as good that he should be in service at Elche. And to the letter that you sent me to petition for the favor that there should be no crossbowmen on my payroll and that each year you should serve me with eighty crossbowmen to be paid every three months, know that since this fulfills the period of their service which binds them, I consider it good that you act in this way. I have sent before to command you this. And to that letter which you have sent to speak of the gambling house which you used to have near the walls of the city … know that the said gambling house is one of my rents and it is not right that it should be given you and thus know well that you have to repair well the city wall for its defense.

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Issued at Alicante on the 112th day of January in the era 1403 (1365). I, Matheo Fernández, acted to write this letter by order of the king.

12

Pedro Orders the Council of Murcia to Send a Blacksmith to the Castle of Relleu. No Site Given, January 21, 1365

Original Language: Castilian. Printed Version: DPI, 184–85 (doc. 127) I, the King, inform you, the council, justices of the peace, and constable of the city of Murcia and to whichever one of you to whom I am sending to command Pedrarias de Elche, my castellan in the castle of Relleu,1 to carry out some work in the said castle. Therefore, I command that you should immediately send to the said site of Relleu a blacksmith to repair the equipment that is necessary for this work. You should give him a salary as long as he remains in the said place at a rate of three maravedis a day. For not doing one or the other of these things, you will incur the penalty of the loss of my favor, that your bodies, and for as much as you have. But if you are uncertain that you should carry this out and the work is not carried out by your failure to send the said blacksmith, then for this your heads … shall be returned to me. Issued on the 21st day of January in the era of 1403 (1365).

13

Pedro Commands the Council of Murcia to Carry Out All Commands Given by the Royal Chamberlain. No Site Given, February 7, 1365

Original Language: Castilian. Printed Version: DPI, 186 (doc. 129). I, the King, inform you the council and officials of the city of Murcia that I have sent there so that your service should be directed to Guillen López, my chamberlain and butler and the chief mayordomo of Lord Sancho, my son, and I order that you believe everything he tells you for my part and to carry out all the things that he should say to you that pertain to my service which you should do for my own body. Therefore you should not act otherwise. Issued on the 7th day of February in the era 1403 (1365). I, the King. 1  Castilian castle to the west of the modern town of Benidorm.

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Pedro Commands the Council, Justices of the Peace, and Constable of Murcia to Provide Thirty Mules to Transport the King’s and Queen’s Court to Seville. No Site Given, February 9, 1365

Original Language: Castilian. Printed Version: DPI, 186 (doc. 130). I, the King, command the council, justices of the peace, and the constable, jurates, and other officials of the city of Murcia that you should donate twenty mules for the transport of my household to Seville and ten mules for the transport of Lady Isabel, mother of my son, Lord Sancho. And if you should not do this, you shall incur the penalty of loss of my favor. Issued in Murcia on the 7th day of February in the era 1403 (1365). I, the King.

15

Pedro Orders the Councils of the Cities and Towns of His Realms to Provide Lodging and Provisions for the King’s Muslim Allies. Seville, April 17, 1365

Original Language: Castilian. Printed Version: DPI, 187–88 (doc. 132). Lord Pedro by the grace of God king of Castile … to all the councils, justices of the peace, jurates, judges, justicias, magnates, constables, and other officials whatsoever of all the cities and towns of my realms and to whichever one of you who sees this letter. Salutations and greetings. Know that the king of Granada sent these Moorish horsemen to support me for the war that I have with the king of Aragon and that my crossbowman, Alfonso Pérez is coming there with them. Therefore I command each one of you in whatever location you are in that when my crossbowman and the said Moorish horsemen should happen to arrive, you should provide them good lodgings for free and provisions and other necessary items to be paid for by their money. And you should not permit any person or persons to do any evil, damage, or anything improper to them. And you should treat them with as much honor as you can. Nor should you allow others to pick fights with them and if anyone does so, correct this severely in such a way that no one else will dare to do such a thing. Each and every one

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of you who does not carry this out shall incur the penalty of loss of my favor, of your bodies, and as much as you have. If any of you whomsoever do not arrange to have this carried out, I command my crossbowman that he should summon you before me for whatever charge applies to you for nine days under the penalty of 600 maravedis for each day to say for what reason you have not fulfilled my command. Issued in Seville with my secret seal on the 6th day of April in the era 1403 (1365).

16

Pedro Orders the Officials of Murcia to Force Clergy, Prostitutes, Minters, and Hidalgos to Pay a Tax for the Repair of the Urban Defenses. Seville, May 12, 1365

Original language: Castilian. Printed Version: DPI, 191–92 (doc. 136). Lord Pedro, by the grace of God, king of Castile … to the justices, constable, and other officials of whatever kind of the city of Murcia or whichever one of you who see my letter. Salutations and Greetings. Know that the council of the said city of Murcia sent to me to complain and say that there are in the said city some clergy, their prostitutes and children, some hidalgos, some counterfeiters, and some other men who do not wish to pay along with them (the other citizens) on their property for the cost of the labor that is necessary for the wall of the said city and for the bridges and in that which they contribute [for the construction] of observation, listening, and guard posts of the land for the war that I have with the king of Aragon, just as the residents and inhabitants of the said city pay. And in this they have received a grievance and they sent to me to entreat my favor and command for that which should be considered good. Therefore, I command you that once you see my letter that you should constrain and force all the clergy, their prostitutes and children, hidalgos, counterfeiters, and all others whomsoever who live in the said city to pay for the work on the walls, the bridges as well as the observation, listening, and guard posts which they have set up to protect the said territory in accordance with how much the other residents and inhabitants of the said city should pay. Therefore, I consider it good that no one should be excused from paying into this as it was said. And if you do not do this, you shall incur the penalty of the loss of my favor and a fine of 600 maravedis for each instance. Issued in Seville, sealed with my secret seal on the 12th day of May in the era 1403 (1365).

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Pedro Orders the Council of Murcia to Provide 85 Men for His Galleys for the Next Two Months. Camp near Orihuela, June 5, 1365

Original Language: Castilian. Printed Version: DPI, 194–95 (doc. 140). Lord Pedro by the grace of God king of Castile … to the council, justices of the peace, and constable of the city of Murcia and to the good men of the said council whom you have to oversee and to whichever one of you. Salutations and greetings. May you know that more men are necessary for the galleys that came with my fleet because some of those who came are ill and have left. I consider it as good that you should send to me at the camp where I am 85 men from the said city to enter [into service] on the said galleys and that you must give them a salary for two months at the rate of two maravedis a day for each man. Therefore I command you that immediately and without any delay you send for the galleys the said 85 men who are good youths and give them the salary for two months at a rate of two maravedis per-day for each man. And they should take the maravedis they raised and which were lent by every man and woman they have. Afterwards scatter this money across the said city and its boundaries and give back to them what they lent because this money is not to be kept. And if you do not do this, you will incur the penalty of the loss of my favor, your bodies, and all that you have. Issued in the royal camp above Orihuela sealed with my secret seal in the era 1403 (1365).

Appendix IV

Chronicle Chapters of Ayala and Pere III, 1359–1369 The translation of the following passages were made by Donald Kagay and L.J. Andrew Villalon. They refer to events of the War of the Two Pedros in the years 1359–1360 and 1363. They also discuss the background events leading the battle of Nájera (April 3, 1367). The two principal chronicles from which the passages are drawn are Pedro López de Ayala’s Crónica de Pedro I and Pere III’s Cronica (Chronicle). Each passage is given its own number and contains the bibliographical information of year, chapter, and page numbers of the printed edition.

1

Pedro López de Ayala’s Account of the Battle of Araviana, September 22, 1359

Original Language: Castilian. Ayala, Crónica de Pedro I, 499–500 (1359, chap. xxii). In this year in the month of September, Lord Ferrando de Castro, Juan Ferrandez de Henestrosa, and other knights whom the king had posted as frontier troops in Almazán and Gómara and in their territory (as we have said) learned that his brothers, Count Enrique and Lord Tello, as well as Lord Pedro de Luna, Brother Artal de Luna of the order of the Hospital, brother of the said Lord Pedro de Luna, and other barons who were natives of the realm of Aragon had entered the territory of Agreda. There were up to 800 horsemen [in this force]. Lord Ferrando de Castro, Juan Ferrandez de Henestrosa, and those who were with them joined together and went there, having up to 1,500 horse. It occurred in such a way that they had to fight near the [Sierra de] Moncayo in a place called Araviana. Lord Ferrando de Castro and Lord Juan Ferrandez de Henestrosa were defeated. Lord Ferrando de Castro escaped on a horse. Juan Ferrandez de Henestrosa was killed and Iñigo López de Orozco was taken prisoner. On this day, there also died among the Castilian troops in this battle Lord Gomez Suarez de Figueroa, commander general for the land of León in the Order of Santiago whom the king had arranged to be the master of Santiago had he lived. Ferran García Duque, Pero Bermudez de Sevilla, Lord Gonzalo Sánchez de Ulloa, standard bearer of Lord Ferrando de Castro, Juan González Benabon, and other knights were among the prisoners. On this day, Lord Ferrando de Castro, Juan Ferrandez de Henestrosa, and Iñigo López de Orozco had sent messengers to Diego Pérez Sarmiento, captain general of Castile and Juan

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004425057_026

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Alonso de Benavides, chief justice of the royal court (which was then in Agreda) so they would join them for this conflict. Juan Alfonso and Diego Pérez came but by the time they arrived the battle had already begun. They established themselves on a little hill and some have said that they did not wish to come down into the battle because of the evil they wished for Juan Ferrandez de Henestrosa. Others claimed that they could not get to the battle [on time] and when they arrived the others had already been routed. Yet the king harbored great hatred for Diego Pérez and Juan Alfonso. From that day onward, Diego Pérez Sarmiento never again saw King Pedro for he did not dare to appear before him.

2

Description of Enrique de Trastámara’s Castilian Raid around Nájera. Last Week of April, 1360

Original Language: Castilian. Ayala, Cronica de Pedro I, 500–1, 503–55 (1360, chaps. i, vii–x). [Chapter i] … After the battle of Araviana1, the Lord Count Enrique, and all of the Castilian knights who were with him grew to a great force … He said to the king of Aragon that if it pleased him, he would arrange for a good company of men to invade Castile. The count would go with them, but he did not believe he would engage in battle, but if he did, his [the king’s] war would come to an end. [Chapter vii] When the king [Pedro] was in Burgos, he found out that the Lord Count Enrique and Lord Tello, the count of Osona, and the other knights who came with them had already entered Castile, arrived at Nájera, and acted to massacre the Jews there. The count arrived at Pancorvo and rested there for several days. He stationed men in a fortified house of Pero Ferrandez de Velasco which was nearby. This house was a half-league (1.75 miles) from Briviesca. When the Lord King Pedro discovered that the Lord Count Enrique was at Pancorbo2, he sent Gutier Gomez de Toledo, who was the prior of San Juan, and with him up to 700 horsemen who had been at Briviesca. Since the king was not feeling well, he could not quickly leave Burgos and likewise could not do so since the companies he had summoned had not yet arrived. A few days later, the king left Burgos and came to Briviesca and then had artillery set up around the fortified house that was nearby on the road. It was the property of Pero Ferrandez de Velasco, but was under the control of the Lord Count Enrique. Those in the house could not defend it and had to surrender to the king. The Lord Count Enrique, Lord Tello, the count of Osona, and those who were with them at Pancorvo 1  River to the northeast of Calatayud surrounded by high ground. 2  Small Castilian village west of Burgos on the Aragonese border.

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may have amounted to 1,500 horse and 2,000 foot. The king’s companies increased every day; he had companies in Briviesca of 5,000 horse and 10,000 foot. He took their advice to go and fight with the count and ordered a reconnaissance party to find out how many companies Enrique had. [Chapter viii] … Likewise since King Pedro was in Briviesca while reconnaissance was being carried out, messengers informed him that the Lord Count Enrique and those with him had left Pancorbo. Lord Sancho, brother of the king and the count, had gone to Alfaro3 while the count made for Nájera. Later that day, the king left Briviesca for Grisaleña, a league (3.5 miles) away. On the next day, he was at Santo Domingo de la Calzada and from there moved toward Nájera which the count and those with him had captured…. The king advanced on Nájera from a place called Azofra.4 He arranged to go and fight the count on the next day. [Chapter ix] When the king was in this village of Azofra near Nájera, there came from Mass a cleric who was a native of Santo Domingo de Calzada. He said he wished to talk privately with the king and Pedro said that he was pleased to hear what he had to say. The cleric said the following words to him: Lord, Santo Domingo de la Calzada came to me in a dream and said to me that it was certain that if you are not careful, the Lord Count Enrique, your brother, will kill you with his own hands. The king was very frightened and asked the cleric if someone had advised him to say this and he said no one had except Santo Domingo who had commanded him to say it. The king ordered that the cleric should be brought before the entire host and then told him to repeat before all of them what he had privately said to the king and he repeated what he had said before. Thinking that the cleric had been induced to say it by others, the king then commanded that he should be burned there where the royal tents were. [Chapter x] Later on this day of Friday after eating, the king left the village of Azofra where he maintained his camp. It was the Friday in the last week of April when he went toward Nájera. On a hillock in front of the town of Nájera, the count had ordered set up a tent with his banner in front of it. He and the count of Osona and up to 800 horsemen and 2,000 foot were outside the town. The king’s men who had advanced in the vanguard fought with them and then the count and his men withdrew. The king’s men captured the count’s tent and banner and they also took Lord Tello’s banner. A knight called Diego Ruiz de Rojas (who was later killed) brought back Lord Tello’s banner. They killed and dispersed the count’s men; the count could not escape through 3  Aragonese town on the Ebro River to the south of Calahorra. 4  Aragonese village to the east of Nájera.

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the town gates since the king’s men had already engaged his own troops in combat. Enrique came to the wall of a fortress called the “Castle of the Jews” and his men who were inside came out from behind the town wall and there the count and his other men entered. Likewise on the same day, the count’s men captured a structure that was called the “Castile of the Christians.” Then Lord Ferran Osores, commander of Santiago; Ganzalo González de Luzio; Pero Ruiz de Sandoval, a knight of the Order of Santiago; and many other knights and squires strongly fought there with the king’s men. There they defended themselves and had a great skirmish on this day. Master Gonzalo Mexia who was away from Santiago and was on the count’s side, could not join his men on that day and he fought at the town wall with some 500 horsemen. When they lost their horses, those [of the count’s men] who were inside defended them from the town wall. On that day, a knight from the king’s side called Gutier Ferrandez Delgadillo died, after being wounded by a crossbow quarrel to the head. The king remained there until it was almost dark before returning to the camp he had in Azofra. He planned to return to Nájera on the next day to fight against and besiege the town. Those with the count were already prepared; they held in defense the castles and protecting hillocks, but if the king had struggled to besiege those sites, they had no way to defend themselves. On the next day when the king was going to Nájera, he met on the road a squire of the light horsemen who was from Jaén. He came with great weeping since on that morning some light horsemen had approached the town to discover news of what the count was going to do so they could inform the king about it. Those who were with the count had killed a good squire who was a vassal of the king, a native of Jaén who was called Diego López de Grañon who was the uncle of the squire [the king had me]. The king took as a strong sign this meeting with the squire who was weeping. Thus the king did not go to Nájera, but returned to his camp. No matter how the majority of the king’s men … counseled him to besiege the count [of Trastámara] and put an end to this war, it was not the will of God that he should do so.

3

Discussion of the Murder of Prince Ferran. Castillon de Burriana, July 15–16, 1363

Original Language: Castilian. Ayala, 528–30 (1363, chap. vii). [Chapter vii] The king of Castile was in Mallén5 for some days and from there traveled to Calatayud, then leaving there for Seville. And during these days the king of Aragon was in Castellon de Burriana when he discovered that his brother, Prince Ferran, 5  Aragonese village to northeast of Borja.

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marquis of Tortosa, was not content with the ways of Pere’s court and thus said to his brother, the king of Aragon, that he wished to go to France. It was then said that the war between England and France had resumed again and the Lord Prince Ferran had drawn away many of the best knights and squires to [serve] in it. They were serving with the Lord Count Enrique, with his brothers, Lord Tello and Lord Sancho, and even those with the Lord Prince Ferran. The prince then had all of his companies in a place called Almanzora6 near Burriana. Prince Ferran and Count Enrique greatly disagreed about these matters. It was reported to the king of Aragon that his brother, the prince, had summoned all the Castilians who were in Aragon, which could have been as much as 1,000 very good horsemen. If the prince had left with these men for France and had deserted the kingdom of Aragon, it would have caused great need for the [Aragonese] king. Because of this, the king agreed with the advice of the Lord Count Enrique and Lord Bernat de Cabrera that he should arrest his brother, the said prince. The king of Aragon ordered the counts of Urgel and Cardona who were favorable to the Lord Prince Ferran, to send a message to him to say that he was to come there to Castellon de Burriana and that the king of Aragon desired to give the prince everything he wanted so that he would not wish to leave the kingdom of Aragon. The counts of Cardona and Urgel were then very happy. The count of Cardona then went to Almazora where Prince Ferran was. The count said to him what the king of Aragon had sent him to say. He likewise spoke to the prince concerning the Aragonese king’s positions. He said that the prince should dine with the king on the next day and at this prince was pleased. And on the next day which was Sunday [July 16], the prince went to Castellon de Burriana, where the king was, and dined with him. Once they had eaten, the prince went to his bed chamber in the king’s domicile. With the prince, there was Diego Pérez de Sarmiento, Lord Luis Manuel, son of Sancho Manuel, nephew of Lord Juan Manuel, and two Aragonese knights, one named Lord Juan Ximenez de Urrea and the other Lord Gombal de Tremacen. All that took place concerning this was known to have been ordered by the Count Enrique and Lord Bernat de Cabrera. After Prince Ferran had eaten and was already in his bed chamber in the king’s palace, the king sent a constable of his named Lord Bernat de Escala, through whom the king ordered that the prince was to be taken prisoner there. The constable went to the prince in his bed chamber and informed him of this. The prince was a man of great courage and strength. The constable had come there through the advice [to the king] of Lord Count Enrique and Lord Bernat de Cabrera who wished him evil. Yet the wish of the king of Aragon, his brother, could not be discounted for it was he who commanded that the prince be arrested. The prince said to the constable that he was not a man to be made a prisoner. The constable returned to the king and said this to him. By the king’s command, the constable then returned 6  Aragonese village to the northeast of Borja

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to the prince, saying to him that he did not consider it dishonorable for him to be his prisoner. Then Diego Pérez Sarmiento, who had come there with the prince, said to him, “Lord, it is better to die than to be a prisoner!” Then the prince put his hand on the sword that he had. When the king of Aragon found out that the prince had taken up arms, he commanded that the prince’s chamber be broken into from sections of the roof. And when this occurred, the prince left the chamber where he was, sword in hand. He killed one of Count Enrique’s squires there named Rodrigo de Montoya who fell before him. Montoya had placed himself in front of the Lord Count Enrique with whom he had lived. The Lord Prince Ferran died on this day and on that same day, they killed with him Lord Luis Manuel and Diego Pérez Sarmiento. The king of Aragon was very badly thought of because of the prince’s death since he was the king’s brother and a noble lord for whom all the realm of Aragon greatly grieved. For this reason, the king afterwards executed Lord Bernat de Cabrera by whose advice the king had carried out the princes’s death. The two knights named Lord Juan Ximenez de Urrea and Lord Gombal de Tramecet who were with the prince left by one of the windows of the bed chamber and escaped.

4

Discussion of Pedro I’s Desertion of His Realms after Enrique de Trastámara’s Invasion of Castile in Spring, 1366 and His Negotiation of an Alliance with Edward the Black Prince

Original Language: Castilian. Ayala, 544–49 (1366, chaps. xi–xxiv). Year 1366 (537–49). Chapter XI: Of the Council that the King Don Pedro held in Monterrey (543–44) After King Pedro arrived in Monterrey, a town in Galicia, he received news that the fortress alcazar of Zamora was held by Juan Gascon, a commander in the Order of Saint John [the Hospitalers], who was on his side (tenia su voz). [The king] immediately dispatched letters to him as well as other letters to Soria and Logroño which were also for him to encourage them and to inform them that he had arrived in Galicia and that he wanted to aid them (e que los querria acorrer). Moreover, he sent his letters lain to the king of Navarre and to the prince of Wales to make known to them his presence in the land of Galicia.

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519

Description of the Battle of Nájera, April 3, 1367

Original Language: Castilian Ayala, Pedro I, 556–57 (1367, chap, xii) The king, Don Enrique, as we have said, had established his camp in such a manner that the Najarillla River lay between himself and the place from which the king, Don Pedro, and the Prince would have to come. Enrqiue decided to cross the river and fight the battle on a large space (plaza) facing Navarrete from which the enemy was coming, and he did so. And this [decision] weighed heavily on many who were with him, because the earlier position gave them a greater advantage than where they afterwards encamped. But Don Enrique was a man with a great heart and great strength and said that he wanted to fight the battle on flat ground without any advantage. On Saturday morning, King Pedro and the Prince and their entire company left Navarrete arranging their forces (batallas) in the order we have related and they marched a considerable distance before they arrived where Don Enrique’s men were located. And the said Enrique arranged his forces as we have indicated above. And before the armies came together, the light cavalry (ginetes) from San Esteban del Puerto with their banner passed over to the side of King Pedro (557). Immediately, the two sides moved against each other. And the count, Don Sancho, King Enrique’s brother and Monsieur Bertrand DuGuesclin, along with the Knights of the Sash and all the men whom (as we have said) Enrique had stationed on foot came together with the [English] vanguard in which were to be found the duke of Lancaster, the constable of Guienne, Sir John Chandos, and many good knights. The party supporting King Pedro and the Prince of Wales wore as a sign on their white shields and ensigns a bright red cross of St. George; and all of King Enrique’s party this day bore ensigns depicting a sash. The two sides came together so vigorously that the lances on both sides fell to the ground as men closed on each other, fighting and inflicting wounds on one another with swords, axes, and daggers. Those supporting King Pedro and the Prince of Wales shouted as their war cry “Guienne and St. George” while Don Enrique’s men countered with “Castile and Santiago.” And those of the prince’s vanguard fell back a few feet in such a way that Don Enrique’s vanguard, sensing victory, pushed more strongly than ever against the others and began again to strike. Meanwhile, Don Tello, Enrique’s brother, lord of Lara and Vizcaya, who was mounted on the left-hand side of Enrique’s vanguard, did not move to engage the enemy (non movia de pelear) while those on the right wing of the prince’s vanguard, including the count of Armagnac (Armiñaque), the lord d’Albret (Lebret), and many others who were stationed on the [English] right (que venian en aquella haz) moved straight at Don

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Tello; and he and those with him did not await their coming, but broke and fled from the field. Those [i.e. the attacking English] who were facing Don Tello, when they saw the [enemy] cavalry flee in such a way that they could not come up against them or stop them (que non los podian alcanzat nin empescer) turned inward against the flank (espaldas) of Enrique’s dismounted vanguard where the banner of the Order of the Sash was located and striking them quickly began to kill them. Those on the left-hand side of the prince’s vanguard acted in a similar manner when they faced no mounted men with whom to fight, they too turned to attack those placed on foot in the center of Enrique’s vanguard in such a way that they were soon all dead or captured because no one came to their aid as they were surrounded by the enemy. And King Don Enrique arrived (llegó) to aid his men fighting on foot leading those who were with him on horseback, coming close enough to see where stood the banner of the Order of the Sash, when its members had not yet been defeated. When he arrived at the hottest point of the battle and found that his men were no longer fighting, he had to retreat, having been unable to endure the enemy who were very strong. All of Enrique’s cavalry who were with him also retreated from the field, pursued by the English, Gascons, and Bretons to the town of Nájera. Thus the cavalry with Don Enrique turned its back [and fled], but was unable to rapidly escape from the village on the road used to flee from the enemy and [as a result] many were killed or captured. From those of the vanguard that Enrique had stationed [to fight] on foot under the banner of the Sash with his brother, Count Sancho, and with Monsieur Bertrand DuGuesclin, the following were killed: Garcilaso de la Vega, Suer Pérez de Quiñones, Sancho Sánchez de Rojas, Juan Rodríguez Sarmiento, Juan de Mendoza, Ferrand Sánchez de Angulo, and some 400 men-at-arms. And there were captured among those who had served on foot in the said vanguard the king’s brother, Don Sancho and Monsieur Bertrand DuGuesclin, and the Marshal d’Audenham (Audenehan), who was a marshal of France, and the bègue de Villaines and Don Felipe de Castro, and Pero Fernández de Velasco, and Don Garci Alvarez de Toledo, one-time Master of Santiago, and Pero Ruiz Sarmiento, and Gómez González de Castañeda, and Juan Diaz de Aillon, and Juan González de Avellaneda, and el clavero de Alcántara, who was named Melen Suárez de Tovar, and Don Juan Remírez de Arellano and others. Moreover, of those mounted in the party of Don Enrique, there were captured the count of Denia whom Don Enrique had made marquis of Villena, and Count Alfonso and Count Pedro, and Don Pero Moñiz, master of Calatrava, and Men Rodríguez de Biedma, and Don Alvar de Albórnoz, and Don Beltran de Guevara, and Juan Furtado de Mendoza, and Pero González de Mendoza, and Don Pero Tenorio, later Archbishop of Toledo, and Don Juan García Palomeque, bishop of Badajoz, and Pero González Carrillo, and Don Pero Boil, and Don Juan Martínez de Luna, and Don Pero Fernández Dixar, and Don Pero Jordan de Urries, and Don Ferrand Osores, Grand Commander

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of León in the Order of Santiago (Comendador mayor de tierra de León de la Orden de Santiago), and Garci Jufre Tenorio, and Sancho Sánchez de Moscoso, and Gómez Carillo de Quintana, camarero mayor of Santiago. after this, he killed Garci Jufre Tenorio, the son of the admiral. Don Alonso Jufre, who was captured on the day of the battle.

6

Murder of Pedro I at Montiel, March 23, 1369

Original Language: Castilian Ayala, Pedro I (1369, chap. viii) And then the king, Don Pedro, arrived there and lingered in Monsieur Bertrand’s tent. As we have said, the king, Don Enrique, had already been prepared and, armed with all his weapons and with a helmet on his head, was waiting for this action. He approached there fully armed and entered Monsieur’s Bertrand’s tent. Thus as the king, Don Enrique, approached, he came upon the king, Pedro. Enrique did not recognize Pedro since it had been a long time since he had seen him. They say that one of Monsieur Bertrand’s knights said to Enrique, “See that this is your enemy.” King Enrique still doubted whether it was him. They report that King Pedro said: “I am he! I am he !!” (Yo só, Yo só). Then the king Don Enrique recognized him and struck him on the face with a dagger... Don Pedro and Don Enrique fell to the ground and... Enrique stabbed and inflicted other wounds on Pedro while he was on the ground. The king, Don Pedro, died on the twenty-third day of March. There were then great murmuring in the royal court, first when the king Don Pedro went out from the castle of Montiel and then at another time when he was dead. King Pedro died when 35 years and seven months old. He was born in the year 1333. He ruled from the year of Our Lord 1350 and ended his rule in the year of Our Lord 1369. He was an avid hunter of birds, tolerated a great deal of work and was temperate … in eating and drinking. He slept little, loved many women, toiled greatly in war and coveted the acquisition of treasures and jewels.

7

Another Version of King Pedro’s Death

Original Language: French Sir John Froissart, Chronicles of England, France, and Spain, (trans. Johnes) 113 (bk. I, chap. 5) Don Pedro himself fled to Montiel, but that castle being wholly unprovided with provisions, his situation became one of the greatest danger, and he was advised to attempt an escape at midnight with his staunch friend Don Fernando de Castro and about

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eleven companions. It was very dark and the party had quitted the castle, and were descending as quietly as they could, when the bègue de Villaines, who had command of the watch, heard the sound of horses’ hooves upon the causeway, advanced to a man who was close to Don Pedro, demanded who he was... The bègue then addressed himself to Don Pedro … saying, “Who are you? Surrender this moment or you are a dead man.” Don Pedro … quietly informed him that he was the King of Castille, and by the promise of a large sum of money sought to gain his assistance; the bègue seemed to comply with the request and conducted Don Pedro into his tent, but he had not been there for an hour before King Henry (Enrique) entered; an angry altercation ensued, and the two brothers fought, till King Henry drew his poniard and plunged it into Don Pedro’s body. His attendants then entered the tent and helped to dispatch him.

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Index Administrators Bernat Cabrera, Aragon 183–184 Queen Elionor 326–332 Aragonese command structures Pere’s captains feudal troops 203–205 foreign captains Prince Ferran early hatreds 205–206 service in Castile 206 Ferran as Pere’s captain 206–207 Ferran’s murder 207 Enrique de Trastámara Pere’s main captain 208–209 Pere’s changing strategies defensive 209–211 offensive 211–212 Aragonese military administration Parliamentary executive committies  175 cullidores 175 diputaciones 175 oidores 175 recibidores 175 tesereros 175 royal government 176–181 expenses (estimes) 178 household tax ( fogatge) 179–180 letters of credits (cartas de creencas) 178 muster lists (mostras) 178 payment receipt (apochas) 178 special account (compte) 179 Aragonese military financing bonds (censals morts) 185 clerical grants 187 forced exactions (questiae) 185 future tax revenues (violaris) 185 pawning of territory 185–186 taxes 184–185 Aragonese military recruitment numbers 222 feudal troops 222–223 foreign captains 225–226

movement to paid troops Almeria, 1309–1310 227 Majorca-Roussillon, 1340s 227–228 Sardinia, 1344–1345 228 Two Pedros 229 Count Alfons of Denia 229 Princeps namque 226 religious military orders 224–25 urban troops 223–224 Al-Azrak 24 Al-Masūr 12 Almohads 12 Almoravids 12 Andalusia 12 Appian xix Aragon xxii–xxiii Archivo de la Corona de Aragon xxvi, xxxvii–xxxviii Archivo General de Simancas xl Asturias xx Ausona 15 Balearic Islands 3, 15 Battles Agincourt 358 Crécy xxxv, 363 Las Navas de Tolosa 13 Montiel xxiii Nájera xxi, xxiii, xxvi Poitier 363 Sagrajas 12 Sluys 397 Baetica 5 Black Death 402 Boundaries 21–24 Byzantine Emperor xix Castile xx–xxii, 11–15 Castilian assemblies early history of Castilian cortes 270–71 lack of meetings, Pedro I 277–279 membership and functions 271–274 Pedro I’s assemblies Burbieca 1363 277–78 Burgos 1355 276

583

Index Seville 1361 276–277 Valladolid 1351 275–276 Castilian Civil War, 1366–1369 international background Pedro I moves away from France to England 137–139 Pedro I’s troubles with the Papacy 141–143 Pedro I’s English alliance 143–45 Pedro I’s Escape 366, 169–72, 338–339 Pedro I meets Black Prince 338–341 Pedro I and Black Prince form army 341–343 Invasion of Spain 343–346 Trastámara as king French alliance 145–148 Enrique’s initial victory over Pedro I 164–166 Enrique’s surrender of Aragonese fiefs 167–169 Free Companies out of France and into Spain 148–162 preparations for Pedro I attack across the Pyrenees 346–348 Nájera campaign approach of the two armies 348–352 battle’s prelude 353–355 battle of Nájera, April 3, 1367 355–365 Nájera’s aftermath 365–367 Nájera’s reason why 368 Last stage of Castilian civil war breakdown of Castilian-English alliance 373–38 Enrique’s survival and new French alliance 380–381, 383–388 Montiel: Enrique’s final triumph 388–390 Consequences of Castilian Civil War 390–401 Castilian command structures army structure artillery 214 infantry 214 leadership 215–216 military theory 212–213

captains Juan Fernandez de Henestrosa 216–218 Gutier Fernandez de Toledo  218–220 Castilian military recruitment foreign troops 234–235 military summons 232 religious troops 232–233 royal host of feudal troops 229–231 troop numbers Alfonso XI (6,000–10,000) 231 urban troops 233–234 Castilian war administration aristocratic agents 190–192 court officials 188–90 churchmen 193 execution of administrators 195–196 Castilian war financing money fiefs 198 excise tax (alcabala) 201 taxes 197, 199–200 royal rights 199 tribute (parias) 201 unpaid services 198–199 Catalonia xx Celestina xx Corniliano, castle 411 Corsica 68 Crown of Aragon xx, 14–17 Catholic King xx espionage 236–238 Jewish agents 237–238 Frontier Town during the War of the Two Pedros Crown of Aragon Daroca 292–298 Murviedro 298–304 Castile Calahorra 304–309 Murcia 309–320 Free Companies xxi, xxvi, 422 Galicia xx guiatge, safe conduct 419–423 Granada xx, xxii, 14 Greeks xix

584 Heraclitus xix Hispania xix historians Albert, Ricart xlv Ayala, Pedro Lopez de xxiv, xxvii–xxx Bonet, Honore 203 Bergua Camon, Jesus xlv Coroleu, Johan xlv Chandos Herald xxxvii, 359 Diaz Martin, Luis Vicente xli–xlii Delachanel Roland xliii Frossart, Jean xxxvi Gassiot, Johan xlvi Gubern, Ramon xlvi Gutierres de Velasco, Antonio xliv Lopes, Fernao xxxii, xxxiv Marse Francisco xlvi Menendez Pidal, Ramon xxx Meremee Prosper 194 Miret y Sans, Joaquin xliii Molina Molina Angel Luis xl–xli Russell, Peter xxxviii, xliii Sarasa Sánchez Esteban xlvi Sesma Muñoz, Angel xlvi Jerónimo Zurita 26 historical works Anales de la Corona de Aragon xxiv Cronica de Enrique III xxix Cronica de rey Don Pedro xxiv

Index Dinis I, Portugal 29 Duarte I, Portugal xxii Enrique II of Castile (Enrique de Trastámara) xxi, xxiii, 20 Felipe II, Spain xxiv Fernando I, Portugal xxxii Fernando III, Castile 7, 13, 18, 22 Fernando IV, Castile 424 Fernando V, Aragon xxiii, xl, 391 Guifré I, Barcelona 14 Henry IV, England xxxv Henry V, England xxxv Ibn Abī ʿAmir 12 Infantes de la Cerda 29 Jaume II, Majorca 28 Jaime I, Aragon xxv, 17, 27 Juan I, Castile 390 Jean II, France 82 Martí I, Aragon 424 Pedro I, Castile xx–xxii, xxiii, li, 40–54 Pedro I, Portugal xxii Pedro III, Aragon 17 Pedro IV, Aragon xx, xxii, xxv–xxvii, 54–60 Petronilla, Aragon 16 Ramon Berenguer I, Barcelona 15 Richard II, England 344 Sancho III Garcés 16 Sancho IV, Castile 424

Jews in War of Two Pedros Jewish settlement in Crown of Aragon 260–263 Status of Jews falls 283–287 Fate during War of Two Pedros  287–288 Fate during undefined peace 290–292

Land’s End 340

kings/rulers Alfonso I, Aragon 16 Alfonso VI, Castile 12 Alfonso X, Castile 19, 23 Alfonso XI, Castile 76, 391 Carlos II, Navarre li, 90 Charlemagne 14 Charles I, Spain 391 Charles I, Sicily 28 Charles II, Naverre 343, 422 Charles V, France xliii, 400, 422

Navarre xxii, 16 nobles Audenham, Arnoul xxxvi, 373–374 Calveley, Hugh xxxvi, 342, 345, 346, 420 Captal de Buch 362 Carra Martin, de la 350 Chandos, Sir John xxxv, 342, 396, 421 Clisson, Olivier de xxxvi, 361 DuGuesclin, Bertrand xxii, xxxv–xxxvi, 343, 346, 393, 421 DuGuesclin, Olivier 420

Majorca 83 medieval kingship 36–40 Mediterranean Sea xix, 6 Merinids 13 meseta 4, 6

585

Index Edward Black Prince xxiii, 341, 355, 394 Gaston III, count of Foix 75, 385 Gourney, Matthew 414, 420 Grailly, Jean de xxxv John of Gaunt xxxv Juan Manue 34 Louis of Anjou 347 Knolles, Robert xxxvi Muñiz de Godoy, Pero 74 Nuñez de Lara, Juan 34 Pedro de Urgel 421 Rocabertino, Guillem Galceran de 423 Tello 357–358 North Africa xix, 10 Nunez de Luna II, Juan 19 Orden de la Banda 357, 363 Pax Romana xix Perellos, Francesch de 79–81, 96, 424 popes Benedict XIII 383 Clement VII 399 Urban VI 398 Portugal xxix Princeps namque 95 prohibited weapons 417 Prince Alfons 22 Prince Pere 31 Pyrenees xix, xxii Queens Constanza Aragon 23 Elionor, Aragon li early life and marriage 321–29 queen’s attack of Bernat Cabrera 332–334 Isabel I Castile xxiii Juana Manuel, Castile 420 María de Padilla, Castile 78 María of Portugal, Aragon 67 Violante of Hungary, Aragon 22 rivers Duero 5 Ebro 5, 15, 349, 353 Guadiana 5 Guadalquivir 5, 71 Jucar 5

Llobregat 5 Segura 5, 19, 95, 126, 409 Tajo 5 Turia 5, 9, 415 Rojas, Fernando de xx Romans xix Roncesvalles, Pyrenean pass 380 Saint George 86 Sardinia 68, 83 Santa María de Varuela, monastery 90 Sicilian Vespers 28 Sierra de Guadarrama 4 Sierra Morena 4 Sierra Nevada 4 Spanish March 14 Strait of Gibraltar 13 Strabo of Amaseia 3 taifa states 8 treaties Agreda 28 Aigues Mortes 395 Almizra 22 Deza xxii, 89 Lilbourne 342, 345 Terrer xxii Verdun 14 urban sites Agreda xli Albarracin 9 Alcala 31–32 Alcañiz 22, 95 Alcantara 341 Alcolea de Cinca 410 Alfaro xli, 23 Alicante xxii, 9, 31, 404 Almeria 3 Angouleme 343 Avignon 385 Barcelona 3, 5, 14–15 Bayonne 341, 377, 397 Biar 24 Bordeaux 344, 395, 397 Borja 101 Burgos 346 Cadiz 5 Calahorra 8, 23, 387

586 urban sites (cont.) Calatayud xxii, 134, 410 Calloso 31 Calpe 97 Cartagena 3, 33 Castellhabib 132 Castellon de la Plana 108, 404 Cetina 100 Cieza 32 Cordoba 5 Cubells 101 Crevillete 31 Daroca 106 Denia 358, 404 Elche 9, 31, 404 Embid de Ariza 410 Fariza 100 Genoa 80 Gomara xli Granvilliar 409 Guardamar 31 Jativa 18, 24 La Almunia 101 La Coruña 340 Logroño xli, 351, 353 Lorca 32 Medinaceli 93 Molina xli, 89 Monterey 339 Montreal 101 Murcia xl, 9, 18–19 Murviedro 134 Nájera 8 Narbonne 394 Orihuela 9, 31, 136, 402 Palma de Majorca 3 Pancoorvo 104 Piacenza 71 Riqueña 23 San Lucar de Barrameda 5, 70 Santa Domingo de la Calzada 8 Santiago de Compostella 339 Santo Domingo 350 Segorbe 132 Sevilla 93 Sitges 79 Soria 23, 84, 376 Tarazona 32, 91, 134

Index Terue 9, 101, 132 Toledo 12 Tordesillas 391 Torrelles 32 Tortosa 5 Toulouse 385 Valencia xxii, 3, 23 Valladolid xl–xlii Viana 353 Vich 404 Villafranca de Penedes 412 Vitoria 8, 348, 368 Zaragoza xxxi, 8, 132 Valladolid, Fernán Sánchez de xxxii Via Augusta 5 Vandals xix Visigoths xix War of the Two Pedros xx, xxi, xli War of Two Pedros Initial Year, 1356–1357 casus belli 69–72 first months of war 81–85 initial verbal exchanges, 1356 72–77 origins 67–69 Pere’s call for divine help 81–85 responsibility for war 78–80 Middle Years, 1357–1363 battle of Araviana, 1359 100–103 battle of Nájera 103–107 campaigns of Ferran Trastámara, 1357 98–100 campaigns on Aragonese border, 1358 1358 93 capture of Tarazona, 1357 89–92 Castilian naval offensive 94–98 Fall of Prince Ferran, 1361–1363 107–108 Papal Attempts at Peace, 1357–1363 First Papal Mission, 1356–1358 Guillaume de la Jugie 109–114 Second Papal Mission, 1359 Gui de Boulogne 115–120 Fall of Peace of Terrer, 1361–1362 120–123 Rise and Fall of Peace of Murviedro, 1363 123–25

Index Ultimate Campaigns First Struggle for Valencia, 1363–1364 126–129 Lasting Campaigns in Aragon and Valencia, 1364 129–131 last years of war, 1364–1365 131–34 their commanders 134–136 War’s aftermath destruction of Pere III’s towns 402–406, destruction of Pere III’s territory 606–407 Pere III’s control of Catalan violence 416–419 Pere III’s lax punishment for treason 414–416 Pere III’s protection of Aragon 412–414 Pere III’s repair of war damage 409–412

587 Pere III use of safe conducts 419–423 unclear termination of conflict 408–409 war parliaments in the Crown of Aragon parliamentary assemblies during War of the Two Pedros meetings Carineña, 1357 244–45 Barcelona, 1358 245–247 Valencia, 1358 247–250 Zaragoza, 1359 250–251 Cervera, 1359 251–252 Valencia, 1360 253–258 Monzon, 1362 258–260 Barcelona-Tortosa-Lerida, 1364–1365 260–262 Barcelona, 1365 262–266 Zaragoza, 1365 266–267 parliamentary funding 239–240