Peter III of Aragon
Peter III of Aragon reigned nine years and in them took Sicily from the French, was excommunicated and deposed by the pope, had his kingdom given to a French prince and beat off the crusade sent to install him, and was forced by his own nobles to sign the charter that made the Aragonese parliament the strongest in Europe; Dante put him in Purgatory among the just kings. He was James I's elder son and had married Constance, the daughter of the Hohenstaufen Manfred whom Charles of Anjou killed at Benevento in 1266, so that his wife carried the Hohenstaufen claim to Sicily. He inherited Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia in 1276 and spent five years putting down the Valencian Moors and building a fleet, in touch through his admiral Roger of Lauria and the exile John of Procida with the Sicilian barons who hated Angevin rule. At Easter 1282 Palermo rose against the French at the hour of vespers and killed every Frenchman in the island within weeks. The Sicilians offered the crown to Peter, who happened to be with his fleet on the African coast, and he landed at Trapani in August and was crowned at Palermo. Charles of Anjou raised the siege of Messina and went home, and the war of the Sicilian Vespers had begun; it lasted twenty years. Martin IV, a Frenchman, excommunicated Peter in November 1282, declared his crown forfeit and gave it to Charles of Valois, a son of the king of France. Peter and Charles of Anjou agreed to settle it by a judicial combat of a hundred knights a side at Bordeaux in June 1283, and each arrived on a different day and claimed the other had defaulted. The Aragonese nobles used his weakness to extract the General Privilege at Saragossa that year, the charter of their liberties. Philip III of France invaded Catalonia in 1285 with the largest army of the century, took Gerona, and lost his fleet to Lauria at Les Formigues; the French army retreated through the pass of Panissars with dysentery, the king dying at Perpignan. Peter died a month later at Vilafranca, in November, leaving Aragon to one son and Sicily to another.
- Lived: 1239 CE – 1285 CE
- Nationality: Aragonese
- Roles: king, monarch
