Pedro II of Aragon
Pedro II of Aragon was the king who rode with Castile and Navarre at Las Navas de Tolosa in July 1212 and commanded the left wing that broke the Almohad line, and who fourteen months later, at Muret, was killed charging the crusaders of Simon de Montfort in defence of his Cathar vassals of Toulouse, which lost the house of Aragon everything it had north of the Pyrenees. He was called the Catholic for having gone to Rome in 1204 to be crowned by Innocent III and to make his kingdom a fief of the papacy, which his nobles never forgave. He was the son of Alfonso II and succeeded in 1196 to Aragon, Catalonia and the Provencal lands, which made him as much a lord of Languedoc as of Spain. His marriage to Marie of Montpellier in 1204 was a matter of policy. He tried for years to have it annulled and the one son it produced, James, was conceived, the story goes, by a trick of the Montpellier burgesses. He fought the Muslims on his own frontier, taking Ademuz and the castles of the Teruel country in 1210, and when Alfonso VIII of Castile called the kings of Spain together against the caliph al-Nasir he came to Toledo with the Catalan and Aragonese host and took the left of the line in the pass of the Sierra Morena. The victory was the greatest of the Reconquista and left him with debts he could not pay. The crusade against the Albigensians had begun in 1209 and Simon de Montfort had taken the lands of Pedro's vassals and brother-in-law, the counts of Toulouse, Foix and Comminges; Pedro, who was orthodox and had just been the pope's champion, tried mediation and then war. At Muret on 12 September 1213 he had perhaps two thousand knights and the Toulousain militia against Montfort's few hundred, put himself in the second line in another man's armour, and was cut down when Montfort's knights charged straight at him; the army fled at the news. His son James, aged five, was in Montfort's hands. The Catalan claims across the mountains died with him, and his son gave them up formally at Corbeil in 1258.
- Lived: 1178 CE – 1213 CE
- Nationality: Aragonese
- Roles: king, monarch
