The Chronicle of James I, King of Aragon, Surnamed the Conqueror

[Ferran]

The Chronicle of James I,

King of Aragon

Surnamed The Conqueror

Translated by

John Forster

Introduction by

Pascual de Gavangos

Historical Introduction

[xi] Alfonso I of Aragon, surnamed "El Batallador" (He of the battles), succeeded his brother, Pedro I., in the kingdoms of Navarre and Aragon in 1104, when no longer young, for he had greatly distinguished himself as early as 1094 in a campaign against the Moors. At his accession, Aragon comprised only the mountainous fringe of the Pyrenean range, and part of those valleys through which the Aragon and other rivers pour their waters into the Ebro to the east of what is now called "Aragon." A marriage contracted about 1109 with Urraca, the daughter of Alfonso VI., and Queen of Castile and Leon in her own right, promised fairly for the Christians of the Peninsula, for shortly after Alfonso assumed the title of "Emperor of Spain," and prepared to invade the Moslem territory. Unluckily for the Christian cause a bitter quarrel sprang up between husband and wife, followed by a desultory and cruel war between their respective kingdoms, ending in the total expulsion of Alfonso from Urraca's dominions in Castile, Leon, and Galicia. Not at all discouraged by this reverse, [xii] Alfonso resumed with increased vigour the war against the Infidel, and conquered one by one the petty Moorish kingdoms in Aragon. In 1120 Saragossa, the capital, was taken, and in the ensuing years Calatayud and Daroca. He was prosecuting his successes against the Aragonese Moors, and endeavouring to secure further conquests to the east and south of Saragossa, when a campaign undertaken against Lérida and Fraga -- two important cities -- ended disastrously for him, he having been defeated close to the latter place on the 17th of July, 1134. Alfonso died soon after, in September of that year, worn out, as it is asserted, by old age and fatigue, if not in consequence of wounds received in the battle, as generally believed.(1)

After the foregoing sketch of Alfonso's field of action, it will seem rather strange -- though the fact is recorded both by Christian and Moslem writers -- that in 1123, just after his ejection from Castile, he should have personally led a most successful raid into Andalusia; should in his victorious career have approached Cordoba, reached the sea at Almeira, on [xiii] the coast of Granada, and returned safely to his own dominions. Only by taking into account the distracted state of the Moorish settlements at the time, and the feeble cohesion of their Mohammedan rulers, no energetic hand happening at that moment to grasp the sceptre, can faith be attached to the narrative of Al-makkarí and other Arabian historians, describing Alfonso's successful raid through the thickly populated provinces of Islam.(2)

One must, indeed, presume that this warrior-prince, one of the most remarkable men the Peninsula produced during the middle ages, must have believed himself invested with a mission from Heaven to restore the whole of Spain to the Christians and free his country from the Moslem invaders, for having no heir to his crown but a daughter, still a child and unmarried, and a brother -- a monk, and thereby excluded from the succession -- he sedulously [xiv] looked out for some prince capable of applying the national resources to the prosecution of the holy war, and finding no one to his taste, placed the government of his kingdom in the hands of the Military Orders of the Temple and Hospital at Jerusalem.

The consequences of such a will could not be but disastrous. The administration of affairs by the Military Orders, and the prosecution of the war against the Infidel, might have been carried on by a Council of Regency composed of Templars and Hospitalers during a minority, but who was ultimately to inherit Alfonso's already considerable dominions, comprising almost the whole of Aragon and Navarre? History does not record what steps the knights of those two Orders took to vindicate their right to their at first doubtful inheritance; but neither Aragon nor Navarre paid the least attention to Alfonso's disposition. Immediately after his death Ramiro, his brother, abandoned the cloister, and had himself proclaimed King of Aragon, whilst the Navarrese, whose union to that kingdom had not met with general approval, appointed a monarch of their own at Pampeluna.

Ramiro's reign was not of long duration. At first he had to contend against Garcia IV., the newly-elected King of Navarre, as well as against Alfonso VIII. of Leon and Castile, both of whom molested him on the borders. Indeed, it was [xv] probably through disgust with the never-ceasing pretensions of the former and the intrigues of the latter, as well as from the stings of conscience at having broken his vows, that in 1137, in the third year of his reign, Ramiro resolved to marry his niece, Petronila, to the Count of Barcelona, resign his dignity to his future son-in-law, and return to the cloister, where he died in 1157. The choice then fell on Ramon Berenguer, Count of Barcelona and Provence, who immediately after entered on his duties as Supreme Governor and Prince Consort of Aragon.

The energy, self-control, and sacrifice of national vanity shown by the Aragonese barons during that eventful period will appear highly creditable, if we consider that they deliberately consented to place their land under a foreign prince, for such was Berenguer to them. Thus was the union of Catalonia and Aragon effected, though Navarre still continued under Garcia Ramirez till 1150.(3)

In the twelfth century Catalonia was, as it is now, a more important country than Aragon in point of population and wealth. It had a navy, and the trade of Barcelona with the ports of the Mediterranean coast, as far as Italy and Greece, was very flourishing. The same differences of [xvi] language,(4) character, and habits, which then divided the two nations, prevailed, and yet the Aragonese barons did not hesitate to consent to a union, which could not but be profitable to their country. Not only during Ramon's life did they allow their Queen Petronila to be a mere cipher, but after the death of the Count, on the 7th of August, 1162, an attempt was made to set her entirely aside, and place her son, though a mere boy at the time, on the throne. The Count died at San Damiano, between Genoa and Turin, on his way to meet the Emperor Frederic Barbarossa, and ratify the treaty previously made with his ambassadors respecting his own possessions, rights, and conquests in the east of France, which that emperor undertook to recognise and defend, provided the Count engaged himself to support the Antipope Victor against Pope Alexander III, in the great struggle between the Empire and the Papacy (1159). By a nuncupatory will, dated the 6th of August, the Count had made his eldest son, Ramon, heir to his possessions in Spain, and his second son, Pedro, to those in France, i.e. Cerdagne and Narbonensian Gaul, these last, however, to be held in fief of the eldest. To his Queen, Petronila, he left the town of Besalú in Catalonia, besides Ripas and the adjoining territory [xvii] for her residence; his realms, however, and his two sons, he left under the guardianship of Henry II. of England.(5)

On the death of her husband Petronila summoned the Cortes, both of Catalonia and Aragon, to meet at Huesca; and as the Count, her husband, had made no provision for a regency -- though his son Berenguer was only eleven years old at the time -- the Count of Provence (Ramon Berenguer) was then and there made Governor of Catalonia, whilst Petronila herself, with the consent of the Aragonese barons, assumed the administration of the kingdom. Presently there appeared on the scene an impostor, who pretended to be Alfonso I., dead twenty years before.(6) The evidence -- usual in such cases -- was produced in this instance, for the man, whoever he was, could remember and recall to the memory of persons still living many incidents in their past lives. He was, nevertheless, sentenced to death and hanged. What share Petronila herself may have had in this dark affair is not known; but the fraud, no doubt, brought to light her own unpopularity, for [xviii] on the 18th of June, 1164, she was obliged to abdicate, and her own son Ramon was put in possession of his father's inheritance, the youthful monarch changing his name from Ramon to Alfonso II.

On the death of his cousin, the Count of Provence, to whom his father had granted that fief in perpetuity, Alfonso II., surnamed "the Chaste," re-united to Aragon that lordship and others in France, besides Roussillon, to which he succeeded by inheritance. Following the example of his warlike predecessors, he assailed the Moorish settlements bordering on his dominions, and took several fortresses south of the Ebro (1168 - 1177). He also assisted Alfonso IX. of Castile, whose niece he had married, against the Almoravides, and though that king's defeat at Alarcos, and his own dissensions with Sancho of Navarre, somewhat retarded the aggrandisement of his patrimonial kingdom, he, nevertheless, was the first monarch of his race to free the whole of Catalonia and Aragon from the Mohammedan rule. He died at Perpignan in 1196, leaving his Spanish dominions, besides Roussillon, to his eldest son, Pedro; Provence and the rest to Alfonso; a third (Fernando) became monk of Poblet, and abbot of Montaragon.

Pedro II., in the first year of his reign, had some disputes with his mother (Sancha) respecting certain fortresses left to her as a dowry by the late king, [xix] her husband. In 1203 he embarked for Rome to be crowned by the Pope. He was well received by the Sacred College of Cardinals, solemnly anointed by one of them, and presented with the crown, the globe, and the sceptre, by the hands of Innocent III. himself, and not only did he do homage on the occasion as a feudatory of the Church, but, by a public instrument, which is still in existence, engaged that Aragon, Catalonia, and the rest of his dominions should for ever remain a fief of the Holy See, and be considered the property of the successors of St. Peter. This disposition, however, did not meet with the approval of the Aragonese barons; in 1205 the States assembled at Saragossa, protested against the act as derogatory to the honour of the nation and injurious to its people, and, consequently, the deed was annulled, and remained without effect.

In 1204 Pedro married Maria, daughter and heiress of the Count of Montpellier, Guillaume VIII. Wishing moreover to secure his dominions in the south of France, already threatened by the Capetian monarchs, and ally himself with the feudal lords of Gascony and Provence, Pedro married his two sisters, Eleanor and Sancha, one to Raymond VI., the other to Raymond VII., both Counts of Toulouse, and prepared himself for the struggle, more political than religious, which, under the name of the "Albigensian War," was inevitably to take place soon in the south of France. In June, 1209, [xx] thousands of Crusaders, having at their head two Papal legates, Milon and Arnaud Amalric, the Duke of Burgundy, the Counts of Nevers, Saint Paul, and Auxerre, the ruthless Simon de Montfort, the English Earl of Leicester, two archbishops, eight bishops, and numerous other barons and knights, invaded the south of France, that is the country where Pedro II of Aragon, his brother-in-law Raymond VI Count of Toulouse, Raymond Roger Viscount d'Alby, Beziers, and Carcassonne, the Counts of Foix and Comminges, the Viscount of Beam, ruled, among whom the "detestable and pernicious heresy of the Albigenses," as it is called by the monkish writers of the time, had made and was making great ravages. "It was," as a modern French historian(7) observes, "the struggle between the North and the South; between the German and the Latin races, between Frank rudeness and Roman civilization." ... In such a struggle between the sworn enemies of the southern nationality and the rebellious barons excommunicated by the Holy See, Pedro's position must have been a difficult one. What could a monarch, whose orthodoxy had never been suspected, himself a dutiful son of the Holy See, who had accepted the title of "Catholic," and had on a former occasion by his excessive complaisance towards Innocent III brought on himself [xxi] the reproaches of his own subjects, do under such circumstances? How could he in the midst of the struggle forget and abandon his position as first national Prince of the South of France, and what could he do, placed as he was, between the standard of the Cross, which he was heroically defending in the Peninsula, and the great national cause of the South, of which he was the natural representative? Though his sympathies seem to have been for the Albigenses he remained neutral. After the taking of Beziers and the indiscriminate massacre of its inhabitants, when the Viscount of Beziers himself (Raymond Roger) had fled to Carcassonne and fortified himself against the Crusaders, Pedro did all he could to save his nephew from their hands. He went in person to the camp of the Crusaders, negotiated with the Papal legates, and obtained a promise that should the Viscount leave the place accompanied only by twelve of his own companions, he would be allowed to depart unmolested, the rest of his force and the city of Carcassonne remaining at the mercy of the conquerors. Such humiliating conditions were heroically rejected by the Viscount, who remained prisoner in the hands of the Crusaders.(8) The partition, however, of his property was the cause of dissension among the Crusaders. The Duke of Bourgogne, the Counts [xxii] of Nevers, and St. Paul, honourably refused to take part in the spoliation; most of them separating and returning to their respective estates, only Simon, Count of Montfort, L'Amauri (Amalric), and Leicester accepted from the Papal legates the confiscated domains and continued at the head of the Crusaders, the former fixing his residence at Carcassonne, which was a fief of Aragon. Montfort is known to have been of a stern, rapacious, and remorseless disposition. Most probably the complaints respecting his administration, which daily reached the ears of Pedro, may have been one cause, among others, of the latter refusing to receive the homage of the new Viscount ; yet in 1211, Pedro, being at Montpellier, was reluctantly persuaded not only to receive the Viscount's homage but to agree to the proposal of a marriage between his son James and a daughter of Montfort, he, Pedro, going as far as to deliver the young Prince into the hands of the Viscount, both as a pledge of his sincerity and that he might be educated in France according to the manner of the times under so renowned a leader.

After the campaign of 1212, in which the Almohades, under Mohammad An-násir, were completely defeated at Las Navas, near Ubeda, Pedro was urgently pressed by his brother-in-law, Raymond of Toulouse, as well as by his relatives, the Counts of Foix and Beam, all protectors of the [xxiii] Albigenses, to arm in their behalf. Pedro had every reason to be dissatisfied with the Crusaders, who in the last war had seized several fortresses belonging to the appanage of his sister, married to the former of those barons; he, therefore, listened to their pressing demands for help, and passed the Pyrenees at the head of a considerable force; yet his object appears to have been rather to act as a mediator than as a belligerent. Whatever his proposals to the two Papal legates may have been on the occasion, certain it is that he formally declared that he could not forsake his allies. At the head of a combined army of Aragonese and Catalonians, Pedro advanced against Muret, a fortified town on the Garonne, about two leagues from Toulouse, where on the 12th September, 1213, he met with his death,(9) "for such had ever been," remarks his son James, "the fate of my race 'to conquer or to die in battle.' " (P. 18.)

Pedro had been married since 1204 to Maria of Montpellier, daughter of Guillaume and of Eudoxia [xxiv] Comnène, the daughter of Manuel, Emperor of Greece. It is a singular destiny, that of both mother and daughter. Alfonso II. of Aragon having asked Eudoxia in marriage, she was about to join her future husband, when she heard, at Montpellier, that the king had already married Sancha of Castile. Guillaume then married her, and had a daughter named Maria, but shortly after he repudiated her and married Agnes (Inés), a relative of the King of Aragon. Maria's fate was equally sad; she fell a victim to Pedro's lust of power, as well as to the political views of the people of Montpellier. As Muntaner, the Chronicler, says : "King Pedro lowered himself much by such a marriage; if he took Maria to wife, it was merely for the sake of Montpellier, for she was not of royal descent, though honest and of pleasing manner enough. He, therefore, from the very beginning deserted her, and would never see or hear of her." Such is the account given by Muntaner and Desclot, and confirmed from hearsay by James himself in Chapter V., beginning with the words: "Now I will relate how I was begotten."(10) (P. 9.)

[xxv] James was only six years of age on his father's death, living at Carcassonne under the keeping of Montfort, whose daughter, it appears, he was to have married according to stipulation. The Count at first refused to surrender him to his subjects; but Pope Honorius III., at the instance of the Aragonese nobles having summoned him to deliver the Royal child into the hands of his legate, Pietro di Mora, the order was promptly obeyed, an assembly of the States convoked for Lérida, and young James recognised and sworn as dominus and hæres of his father's realms, under the guardianship of the provincial Master of the Templars in the castle of Monzon ; the administration of the kingdom during his minority resting in his uncle Don Sancho, Count of Roussillon, assisted by two colleagues, one for Aragon, the other for Catalonia.

We need not record here the various events of James's reign, they will be distinctly set out by his own autobiographical narrative, without dispute one of the most remarkable productions of the middle ages. It will be seen how, with a courage and wisdom hardly credible at his tender age, he contrived to establish his authority over the ambitious and turbulent nobility (richs-homens) of his dominions, conquer the Balearic Islands, and drive the Moslems of Valencia and Murcia to their last rampart in the Spanish Peninsula, the beautiful city of Granada, at the foot of Sierra Elvira.

Yet, upon the whole it must be owned that, apart [xxvi] from his brilliant qualities as a ruler, there is little left in James's long reign to command our respect. His private conduct appears to have been exceedingly profligate. Himself the son of Pedro, a prince who revelled in debauchery, and the grandson on his mother's side of Simon de Montfort, said to have been equally licentious, James surpassed those princes in his passion for the fair sex, disregarding altogether, for the sake of its gratification, any tie of honour, religion, and even decency. His marriage with Eleanor of Castile, daughter of Alfonso IX. of Leon, was at his own solicitation declared null by Pope Gregory IX., on account of their being within the forbidden degree of consanguinity, although the Infante Alfonso, issued from the connection, had formerly been declared legitimate.(11) In 1235 he sued for, and obtained, the hand of Ioland, an Hungarian princess, the daughter of Andrew, at the time that he was about to contract, or had already contracted, a morganatic marriage with Theresa Gil de Vidaure. On the death of Ioland, in 1252, he again took to his bed his discarded wife Theresa, with whom, however, he was soon disgusted, for soon after he himself made pressing solicitations to the Holy See on the plea that some women of her household, and that princess herself, had been attacked by leprosy ; but [xxvii] in reality because he wished to make Berenguela Alfonso, a princess of the royal blood of Castile, and the daughter of Alfonso de Molina, son of Alfonso IX. of Leon and brother of St. Ferdinand, his queen.

In 1246, as his confessor, the Bishop of Gerona, a most honourable and learned ecclesiastic, who had hitherto enjoyed his favour, undertook to reprimand him for his excesses, or, which is more probable, was imprudent enough to reveal part of his confession, he was punished by the loss of the offending member, and had his tongue severed at the root.(12) James, of course, was excommunicated,(13) his kingdom placed under interdict, and himself subjected to a penance and to finish at his own expense the monastery of St. Boniface of Morella. Yet the year before his death, the seventy-sixth of his age, [xxviii] he forcibly carried off a married woman, who had the misfortune to please him, and when upbraided in a Papal brief for the unhappiness introduced into her family, and the scandalous example afforded to his subjects, the hoary sinner replied, with unusual bitterness, that he considered he had a right to do as he pleased in such small matters. Neither was he a particularly loving father to the many sons issued from his various morganatic marriages. In 1274 Fernan Sanchez, baron of Castro, his own natural son by a noble Aragonese lady named Blanca de Antillon, after a quarrel with his stepbrother, the Infante En Pere, the presumptive heir to the crown, was surprised at Pomar, and cast into the river Cinca. On the receipt of such intelligence his father coolly observed : "I was glad to hear of that, for it was a very hard thing that he, being my son, should have risen against me, who had done so much for him, and given him so honour able an heritage in my kingdom." !! (P. 663.)

The Chronicle is a commentary(14) on the principal events of James's reign (1218-76). It is divided into four parts, the first of which relates to the troubles that followed his accession to the throne down to the final conquest of the Balearic Islands in 1233. In the second, the stirring events which preceded the invasion and conquest of Valencia, and the [xxix] surrender of that capital, are graphically narrated. The third refers to the war of Murcia (1266), undertaken entirely for the benefit of his kinsman Alfonso, surnamed "the Learned," (El Sabio) ; whilst in the fourth and last, the embassies received from the Khan of Tartary, Abagha-Khan, and from the Emperor of Greece, Michael Paleologus, as well as his own unsuccessful attempt, in 1268, to lead an expedition to Palestine, are recorded.(15)

An Abstract of the Chronicle, or rather of that part of it, the second, which, as above stated, relates to the conquest of Valencia, was published as early as 1515 in that city,(16) the first in Spain, as generally acknowledged, to receive the admirable invention of typography;(17) the complete work, however, did not make its appearance till 1557, to satisfy, as it is emphatically stated in the preface, a " craving and requisition of Philip II." The edition, however, though handsomely printed, is anything but correct; [xxx] passages and even chapters are frequently omitted; indeed, had it not been for a second one made at Barcelona within the last three years, many passages would have remained for ever unintelligible.

As to its merits, this much can be said about it. It is written in a simple and manly style, which, without any pretension to elegance, sets before us in living reality the events of a long and agitated reign, frequently exhibiting a happiness of manner and phraseology which a monkish scholar of those times seldom could attain. Whether the work was undertaken in consequence of the impulse given by Alfonso the Learned to vernacular stories, and in imitation, as it were, of the Gran Conquista de Ultramar, and the Cronica General de España, or whether the idea originated in Catalonia or Aragon, then the residence of the exiled Provencal troubadours, it is not easy to determine.(18) Most probably both James's Commentari and Alfonso's Cronica were produced in obedience to the demands of their age; but as the Aragonese king was by many years Alfonso's elder, and on more than one occasion his wise and efficient counsellor, it may be conjectured that he was the first on the field.

Was the Chronicle written by James himself, or [xxxi] was it the work of a contemporary historian? It has already been stated elsewhere(19) that the late Mr. Forster, its translator, firmly adhered to the almost general opinion, in and out of Spain, that the Commentari dels feyts, &c., was the work of that king, and that the arguments produced by Villarroya against that assertion had no weight at all in a question of this sort. Such is also the editor's opinion. Both Marsilio, who wrote before 1314, and Muntaner (Ramon), whose chronicle bears the date of 1325,(20) must necessarily have known in their youth King James, who died in 1276, on the 26th of July, and they agree in ascribing the authorship to him. Various passages of the Chronicle give besides evidence of the fact, as, for instance, that of chap. xvi. (p. 29) where, whilst treating of the siege of Albarracin, in the confines of Aragon and Valencia, the King says: " I had with me at the time .... Don Guerau de Poyo (Pueyo), father of En Guillen de Puyo (Pueyo), who is with me at the time that I am writing this present book." The charming story of the "horeneta," or swallow, that came to rest on the top of the royal tent (p. 322) on the road to Burriana, is for us another evidence of it; no one but James could have recorded the fact. True it is that the last chapters of the Chronicle, in which the king himself speaks [xxxii] of his last illness, cannot be attributed to him; they are no doubt the work of some monk of Poblet, or scribe of the Royal Chronicle, who having heard of James's illness, voluntarily recorded its fatal progress, and noted the king's death. As to other kinds of argument founded on occasional anachronisms, such as the wrong date assigned to the conquest of Valencia, and other mistakes of minor importance, they have been sufficiently refuted by M. de Tourtoulon. The taking of Valencia, says the Chronicle, happened on Saturday, the 9th of October, 1239, whereas the date of its capitulation and surrender is 1238; but the difference of one year in so remarkable an event can easily be explained by the king adopting indiscriminately the two eras then in use, the Incarnation and the Nativity, the former of which ought logically to have preceded by nine days that of the latter, and his believing that the month of September, A.I. 1239, coincided with September, A.D. 1238.

Occasional mistakes of this sort prove nothing against James's authorship; on the contrary, they constitute a further argument that the Chronicle, or Commentari, was entirely the work of that king, though we admit that the same monk of Poblet, who, as before stated, added the final chapters, may possibly have put it into its present form, either from James's dictation, or from loose materials in his own handwriting.

Notes for Historical Introducion

1. The battle was fought under the walls of Fraga, which Alfonso was besieging at the time. The Almoravides being commanded by Aben Gania (Ibn Ghániyah). Whether Alfonso, himself, fell on that day, as asserted by three ancient authorities, or, as we are informed by a contemporary monk of San Juan de la Peña, he retired to that monastery of Benedictines, and died there of grief and disappointment, is doubtful; but the circumstance of his body not having been found on the field of battle, makes us believe that the latter conjecture is more probable, inasmuch as it gave rise to an imposture, which will be mentioned hereafter.

2. The account of Alfonso's successful raid to the shores of the Mediterranean is too minutely described by Al-makkarí Ibnu-s-seyrafí and others to leave any doubt on the subject. The last-named historian says that Alfonso's raid was chiefly undertaken at the desire of the Muâhidin, or Christians, living in those districts under the Mohammedan rule, who furnished himwith provisions and guides. They were, however, well punished for their treason, for by order of Ali Ibn Yúsuf, the Almoravid, thousands of them were transported to Meknesah, Salee, and other places in Africa. Ibnu-1-Khattíb, the historian, who visited the latter port about 1360, bears testimony that the adjoining town of Rabát was entirely inhabited by Christians, the result of that expulsion, whence the name of Rabatines given to the corsairs of that coast in the fifteenth century. See Al-makkarí, Mohammedan Dynasties, vol. ii., p. 305.

3. Garcia Ramirez, the Fourth, was the son of Sancho. He was succeeded by his son, Sancho V., whose daughter, Berengaria, was married to Richard I. of England.

4. It is a very remarkable fact, but one that cannot be contested, that though Aragon remained ever since the eleventh century incorporated with Catalonia, the Provençal language did not penetrate north of the Ebro.

5. During the war which Ramon Berenguer waged against the Count of Toulouse (Raymond V.), in 1193, he sought and obtained the alliance of Henry II. of the house of Plantagenet, who claimed the Duchy of Aquitaine as the inheritance of his wife Eleanor, the repudiated queen of Louis VII. of France.

6. Ramon Berenguer died in 1162, leaving only one daughter, Doulce (Dulce), who had been promised in marriage to the son of Raymond V., Count of Toulouse. The latter naturally attempted to establish his right to the succession, though in vain, for Provence remained to the house of Aragon.

7. Études sur la maison de Barcelona. Jacme I., le Conquerant, by M. Ch. dc Tourtoulon; Montpellier, MDCCCLXIII., tom. i. pp. 104-9.

8. Gomez Miedes, De vitâ et rebus gestis Jacobi primi, lib. i. ; Blancas, Aragonensium Rerum Commentarii, p. 650.

9. James, himself, alludes to his father's death in a manner that leaves no doubt as to the causes of his defeat. "Don Pedro," says he, "had passed the previous night in debauchery, and was so exhausted by it that he could hardly stand up at mass on the ensuing morning; so much so, that when the priest came to the gospel, he was obliged to sit down. Neither would he wait for the arrival at the camp of several of his knights, who had remained behind, and begged him not to engage the enemy ; he would not listen to their prayers, and fought the battle with those few who were with him." This is the only passage of the Chronicle where the battle of Muret, or Murel, as it is erroneously called in the two printed editions, is alluded to.

10. His birth took place on the 2nd of February, 1208. The circumstances attending it, possibly much adorned by Muntaner, must have reached Bocaccio before 1358, since his Giletta di Narbona is evidently based upon it. To say nothing of Shakespeare, who borrowed them as the theme of his All is well that ends well, several Spanish dramatists, and among them Calderon, have made use of the story.

11. The brief dated xii calendas Mai, and year ix of his pontificate (1235), is abstracted in Raynaldus, Annales Ecclesiastici, continued by Baronius, ann. 1235, No. 32.

12. As James himself does not mention the fact in his Commentari, the evidence rests entirely on the authority of Muntaner, Desclot, and the chroniclers of Aragon. Raynaldus (Annales Ecclesiastici, ad annum 1246) copies the letter written by James on the occasion -- or rather the brief of Innocent IV. in reply to it -- in which the king, in justification of his conduct, says that Father Castellbisbal, already Bishop of Gerona, had conspired against him, "Alias complura contra se gravia machinando." There can be no doubt, however, that the cause of the bishop's ill-treatment was his espousing the cause of Theresa Gil de Vidaure, James's mistress, who, having learned in 1234, that James was about to contract a marriage with Ioland, daughter of Andrew, King of Hungary, applied through him to Gregory IX., then Pope.

13. In 1237 James had been excommunicated by Pope Gregory IX. on account of certain injuries done to the Bishop of Saragossa. What those injuries were, which caused the Papal anathema, is nowhere specified, that we are aware. We only know that at the king's own request an absolution was granted, of which the bearer was St. Raymond de Penyafort.

14. The original title was Commen. tari dels feyts esdeuenguts en la uida del molt alt senyor, &c. Instead of "Commentari" one of the copies preserved at Barcelona has Libre, &.c.

15. The division, however, is not observed. The chapters follow each other numerically, and have no headings at all. Only on two occasions, after Chap. 289, and after Chap. 456 - and that only in one of the copies - is something added to indicate the beginning of a new subject. The chapters have no titles of any sort, though in the Valencia edition the deficiency has been supplied by a Table of Contents, which might well have been added to this translation had it been considered of any use to the readers. Another table of vocables obscurs at the beginning, doing very little honour to the Valencian editor in 1557, has likewise been suppressed, and replaced by a Glossary of antiquated words used in the royal book.

16. In the Aureum Opus, privilegiorum Regni Valentiœ.

17. Barcelona has disputed for some time the priority, but on such feeble and unsupported foundations that the best Spanish bibliographers have not hesitated in giving that honour to Valencia, where the Certamen Poetich was printed in 1474, in 4to.

18. Alfonso X. was born in 1221, on the 23rd of November ; James thirteen years before, in 1208 (the 2nd Feb.) ; but as the latter began certainly to write before the conquest of Valencia (1238), and the Cronica General comes down to the death of Ferdinand III. in 1252, it is hard to decide to which of the two kings the priority of composition is to be ascribed.

19. Pref. p. x.

20. Of the former author (Marsilio) we only have the Spanish version by José Maria Quadrado (Palma, 1850, 4to.). Muntaner's Cronica was printed twice - Valencia 1558, and Barcelona 1562, fol.



Full work: http://libro.uca.edu/chronicleofjames/chronicle.htm

[Kolganov]

Ferran
Your opinion in occasion of authorship of the Chronicle?

[Menydh]

Kolganov, as the text says it is not clear who was the material author (i.e. writer) of the Chronicle.

The Chronicler Ramon Muntaner was 11 years old when our good King Jaume El Conqueridor died.

There are other texts which were indeed written during the life of King Jaume, and who he wrote (or most probably dictated) himself. Among them there is the Libre dels Feyts (Llibre dels Feïts in modern Catalan), i.e. Book of Deeds.

[Ferran]

Originally Posted by Kolganov

Ferran
Your opinion in occasion of authorship of the Chronicle?

What Mynydd says is correct, although in modern Catalan, "Feyts" would be "Fets", not "Feïts".

[Kolganov]

Simply, for me James's authorship not obviously.

_____________________________________________

“Whether he wrote this book himself is doubtful; some have denied that he could write at all, as his signature has not been found upon any document of the period; but in any case, it is likely that he would have dictated the book to one of his scribes. James was not the kind of man to keep a private diary with any sort of regularity, and many of the inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the narrative are best explained by assuming that it was written or dictated some time later than the events which it describes.<…> While it cannot be regarded as reliable history, it remains a very readable narrative, informed by an artless simplicity and a vigorous straightforward style which suggest a definite personal authorship; and there is no sufficient reason for denying that James was that person, nor for refusing to him the honourable position of the first of the Catalan prose writers”.

HENRY J. CHAYTOR. A History of Aragon and Catalonia. — Methuen, 1933. — P. 94
__________________________________________

“If King James himself were asked about his greatest achievements, he would probably pass over legal, educational, institutional, political-commercial, and other phases of his reign, and present us instead with a copy of his autobiography, the Llibre dels feyts. This combined his proudest achievement, the conquest of the Balearics and Valencia, with a revelation of his inner sentiments and self-view, done vigorously in his vernacular Catalan. He worked at it, on and off, through most of his busy reign; and it sparkles with life even today. James did not pen the book himself, of course, but rather worked through redactors and secretaries, whose identities and personal contributions to the whole have long been under debate. These were not ghostwriters but collaborators, and they incorporated many prosified poems through which the king's exploits had been broadcast in his own day. Martí de Riquer, the premier literary scholar of Catalonia, sums the current consensus on the book's basic authenticity: "without any reserve" it is the king's own, and "its essence is the personal memories of the monarch." It was already famous in a Latin version, some thirty-five years after James's death, when King James II ordered a copy from his own original, and when the king of Majorca requested such a copy for himself. Our earliest surviving Catalan version is a splendid copy made in 1343 at Poblet monastery from a lost original. "The most superficial reading" of the Catalan, as Riquer's examination concludes, shows it to be "the personal work of James," his "autobiography or memoirs." Miquel Coll i Alentorn analyzes the stages of redaction as two -- at Játiva in 1244 for the first three hundred chapters, and at Barcelona in 1274 for the remainder, with the last twenty chapters and the prologue wholly the work of assistants”.

ROBERT I. BURNS, S.J. Castle of Intellect, Castle of Force: The Worlds of Alfonso the Learned and James the Conqueror. //The Worlds of Alfonso the Learned and James the Conqueror/Robert I. Burns, S.J., ed. — Princeton University Press, 1985. — P. 10 - 11.