CHAPTER XXIV.

JAMES THE FIRST OF ARAGON.1

(1213—1276.)

I.-Catalonia and Aragon.

THE union of Catalonia with Aragon, by the marriage of Queen Petronilla with Ramon Berenguer of Barcelona, in 1150, was the foundation of the greatness of Spain. Barcelona was not only then, as it is now, the greatest and most prosperous seaport town in the Peninsula, but it was, as it is, inhabited by the sturdiest, the most energetic, and the busiest population in Spain. And the happy union between the hardy mountaineers of Aragon, and the no less hardy mariners of the coast, gave rise to a people who were not only able to drive out the Moslems from their borders, and to possess themselves of fairest Valencia, but who covered the great sea with their merchant ships, and filled the warehouses of Barcelona with the choicest goods of the Mediterranean and the Levant.

Barcelona was the only town in Spain where trade was not considered a disgrace. Yet no mere tradesmen were the sturdy Catalonian inhabitants. They established the first bank of exchange and deposit in Europe-in 1401. They compiled the most ancient code of maritime law in the western world—a code that embodied the commercial usages of all civilised nations, and formed the basis of the mercantile jurisprudence of Europe during the Middle Ages. Energetic alike in the pursuits of peace and the arts of war, they not only drove out the pirates of Majorca and the nobler Moslems of Valencia, but they made their prowess felt in Greece and Asia Minor, and won for their sovereign the splendid, if somewhat unprofitable title of Duke of Athens. Thus, while the nobles of Leon and Castile were slaughtering their

1 The standard English authority for the reign of James I. of Aragon is now Mr. Darwin Swift's Life and Times of James the First, etc., one vol. (1894), a work which, to my great regret and loss, only came into my hands as I was actually revising the sheets of this chapter, but which I have read with pleasure and admiration.

Moslem neighbours, and quarrelling with their Christian friends, the burghers of Barcelona were sailing the seas in quest of commerce and of adventure, and emulating the civilisation of the East. More than this, consuls and commercial factories were established, and resident consuls appointed, by these early Catalans, to watch over their interests in every considerable port in the Mediterranean,1 and even in the North of Europe.

But the peculiar glory of Barcelona was the freedom of her municipal institutions. The government, at least as early as the middle of the thirteenth century, consisted of a Senate or deliberative Assembly, of one hundred members, and a Council of regidores not exceeding six in number; the larger body intrusted with the legislative, the smaller with the executive functions of government. A considerable proportion of the members of these august bodies were selected from the merchants, tradesmen, and mechanics of the city. They were invested not merely with municipal authority, but with many of the rights of sovereignty. They entered into commercial treaties with foreign powers. They superintended the defence of the city in time of war. They provided for the security of trade, granted letters of reprisal against any nation who might violate it; and they raised and appropriated the public monies for the construction of useful works, or the encouragement of such commercial ventures as were too hazardous or too expensive for individual enterprise. The Councillors who presided over the Municipality were invested with certain honorary privileges not even accorded to the nobility. They were addressed by the title of Magnificos. They remained covered in the presence of royalty. They were preceded by mace-bearers, or lictors, in their progress through the country and their deputies claimed and received at the king's court the honours that were accorded to foreign ambassadors.

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The political institutions of Aragon in the fourteenth century were, without doubt, the most liberal that existed

1 Capmany, Mem. de Barcelona, i., 2, 3. Fine wool was imported into Barcelona from England in large quantities, and manufactured into cloth, which was afterwards sent back to London. Macpherson, Annals of Commerce, i., 655.

The most important Royal charters are those of 1249 and 1258.

3 These, it will be remembered, were plebeians, merchants and mechanics; for trade never was considered a degradation in Catalonia, as it came to be in Castile. They were the professors of the different arts, as they were called, organized into guilds or companies, constituted as so many independent associations, whose members alone were eligible to the highest municipal offices. And such was the honour attached to civic positions, that the nobles in many instances resigned their hereditary rank, in order that they might become candidates for civic employment. Prescott, Ferd. and Isabella, i., 66, 67.

in any country of medieval Europe. The king, escorted by twelve peers of the realm, knelt down before the Chief Justice or Justiciary as he swore to maintain the laws which were made by the representatives of burghers and nobles, assembled in annual or special Councils. This Aragonese Parliament consisted of four branches or brazos-(1) The RICH-HOMES or great lords of the State; 2 (2) the CABALLEROS, including the Infanzones or knights of lesser degree, and the Mesnaderos, or descendants of a Rich-home; (3) the CLERGY; (4) the COMMONS, who, as may be supposed in so democratic a constitution, enjoyed higher consideration and greater civil privileges than in any other country of mediaval Europe. The veto of a single member, as in the Diet of Poland, sufficed to defeat or postpone any measure introduced and supported by the most powerful majority in the Chamber. The first General Assembly of the Estates of Aragon and Catalonia was held in 1162, while similar Cortes, in 1163 and 1164, were certainly attended by representatives of the three, or, rather, four estates of the realm, six years before the first burgher was summoned to a National Assembly in Castile, and more than a century before the towns were admitted to full rights of representation in the Parliament of England.

The Cortes of Aragon was not only a legislative and deliberative assembly; it was the High Court or Parliament of the realm. The General Privilege, which has been called the Magna Charta of Aragon, and which was granted by Peter III. in 1283 to the Cortes of Saragossa, is a noble monument of the prudence and liberality of the sovereign, and of the courage and independence of the people. It contains a series of provisions against arbitrary taxation, royal spoliation, and secret tribunals, against sentences even of the Justiciary, without the assent of the Cortes, against the appointment of unfit persons as judges, against the use of torture, and against trials beyond the sea. It declares in plain language that absolute power never was nor shall be the Constitution of Aragon; and that men shall only be judged according to the laws, customs, and privileges which have been anciently used in the kingdom.3

The General Privilege was confirmed in the Cortes of Saragossa in 1325, when, among many other admirable enactments, the use of the Question or Torture, applied to

1 No King of Aragon was qualified even to assume the royal title until he had taken this coronation oath. Zurita, Anales de Aragon, tom. i., f. 104; and tom. ii., f. 76.

2 The word has nothing in common with rico, or rich; but is from a root akin to Reich Empire.

3 Fueros de Aragon, 9. Zurita, fol. 265.

witnesses in judicial proceedings, was formally abolished. This odious and absurd practice remained part of the procedure of most other European countries for long years after 1325.1

The Great Charter of England was wrung from a distressed and contemptible monarch; the Great Privilege of Aragon was granted by a bold and successful king. Both John and Peter, indeed, were so far in the same position that each one had been excommunicated by the Pope. But Peter, who defied the thunders of the Vatican, was no less liberal in his grant of popular rights than our own Lackland.

The

But from the necessities of the King of Aragon, some five years later, a still more remarkable Charter was obtained in the Privilege of Union,2 which appears to have authorised any members of a great confederation of subjects to combine or unite in making war upon the king, in case of a denial of justice, or any attempt on the part of the sovereign to act independently of the Justiciary. How far this legalization of the highest form of treason may have extended, we cannot now be certain, for every copy or record of the dangerous Charter was destroyed by order of Peter IV. at the time of its abrogation in 1348; and the destruction was so complete that even the words of the instrument are not remembered. year before the abolition of this strange privilege the independence of the Aragonese nobles had become so complete that they had caused a seal to be prepared, representing the king sitting on his throne, with the Confederates kneeling, indeed, before their sovereign, but backed by a long line of tents and lances, denoting their ability or resolution to defend themselves if needful. But the Confederates were defeated by the king at the battle of Epila, and the original Charter of the Privilege of Union was cut in pieces by Peter with his own dagger. Yet did not the king abuse the victory. All good laws and reasonable privileges were confirmed, and Aragon enjoyed a greater and more legitimate liberty under more ancient and more constitutional safeguards.

But the great glory of the kingdom of Aragon, greater by far than the most liberal of her laws or the most extensive of her privileges, was the loyal attachment of the people to monarchical institutions, and to the principle of hereditary succession, joined to a noble determination to resist all arbitrary power-a love of law, and a love of liberty.4

1 The application of torture in judicial proceedings had been an exclusively royal privilege in Aragon. Swift, op. cit., p. 152. See also Hallam, Middle Ages, vol. ii. chap. i. and Documentos ineditos, tom xl., pp. 434-573.

2 See Castelar, Estudios Historicos (1875), pp. 40, 41.

3 The legend on this most remarkable seal is Sigillum Unionis Aragonum. 4 See Prescott, Ferd. and Isab., I. 63, note, 65.

The popular revolutions aimed not at dethroning the king, after the manner of Leon and Castile,-still less at his assassination, but at the maintenance of the popular rights, and the subjection of the sovereign to well ascertained national laws. The greatest code of laws in mediæval Europe was the work of Castile; but the great principle of legitimacy-of a free and law-abiding people, ruled by a free and law-abiding king-lived in the heart of Aragon. With their personal liberties secured, not only by the General Privilege, but by many earlier and later laws, with a Cortes endowed not only with legislative but with judicial powers, and distinguished by an uncommon boldness and independence of action, with the Justiciary ever at the king's side, to maintain, if need were, the rights of the humblest subject, the people enjoyed an amount of personal and political liberty, superior, without doubt or question, to that of any other people of medieval Europe.1

Two special powers call forth the admiration of a distinguished English historian, that of Jurisfirma or Firma del derecho, by which causes were transferred from the cognizance of any court in the realm to that of the Justiciary himself-being in fact an extended form of our writ of Certiorari, and that of Manifestacion, by which the person of any applicant was at once wrested from the hands of the royal officers-answering to some extent to our writ of habeas corpus.2 But good laws are worthless without good administrators. And one of the happiest accidents of Constitutional Government in Aragon was that the Justicias were almost without exception men of virtue and probity, who did not hesitate to use, but who scrupled to abuse, their enormous powers.

II.-James the Conqueror.

James the Conqueror, in Catalan En Jacme, lo Conqueridor, the most celebrated of all the Sovereigns of Aragon, was but six years of age when his father met his death under the walls

1 The powers of this Justiciary did not exceed, according to Hallam, those of the Chief Justice of England. But he admits that these powers were exercised in Aragon in a way that English judges, more timid or more pliant," never presumed

to act.

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2 Hallam, Middle Ages, ii., 50, 51.

3 The title of Don Jayme of Aragon, by which this king is usually known, is attractive and picturesque, but decidedly inaccurate. Jayme is rather a modern or foreign modification of the Catalan Jacme, as the king himself wrote his name. See Chronicle, cap. v. Nor was he even by himself or any of his contemporaries spoken of as Don, which was the Castilian prefix of nobility, representing the Aragonese En, of which the feminine was Na, or lady.