James I of Aragon
James I of Aragon reigned sixty-three years, took Majorca from the Muslims in 1229 and Valencia in 1238, gave the Crown of Aragon the Mediterranean face it kept for three centuries, drew the frontier with Castile that still divides Spain's languages, and wrote, or dictated, the first autobiography of a medieval king, the Book of Deeds, in Catalan. He was born of a marriage his father Peter II hated, was handed as a child to Simon de Montfort as a hostage, and was five when his father died at Muret fighting the crusade against the Cathars. The pope had him returned and the Templars raised him at Monzon. His minority was a civil war of the nobles that he ended, by his own account, by marrying at thirteen and taking the field at sixteen. The barons and the merchants of Barcelona wanted Majorca, whose pirates took their ships, and he sailed in September 1229 with a hundred and fifty vessels, landed at Santa Ponsa, and stormed the city of Majorca on the last day of the year; the island was parcelled out among the conquerors and settled from Catalonia. Valencia took longer. He crossed the Ebro in 1232, took Burriana in 1233 and sat down before the city in 1238, and the emir Zayyan surrendered it in September on terms that let the Muslims leave with what they could carry. The kingdom of Valencia was given its own laws and parliament, and the Moors who stayed, most of the countryside, rose twice in his lifetime. In 1244 at Almizra he and the heir of Castile fixed the line between the two kingdoms' conquests, leaving Murcia to Castile, and in 1258 at Corbeil he gave up the old Catalan claims north of the Pyrenees in exchange for Louis IX's giving up the Frankish claim to Catalonia. He married his daughters to the kings of Castile and France and to a Hohenstaufen, took the cross late and turned back in a storm, and divided his lands between his sons, Majorca going to the younger and beginning a quarrel that lasted seventy years. He died at Valencia in July 1276 on his way to become a monk, with the Moors of the kingdom in revolt again.
- Lived: 1208 CE – 1276 CE
- Nationality: Aragonese
- Roles: king, monarch, conqueror
