Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar was a Castilian knight and ruler in medieval Spain. Fighting both with Christian and Muslim armies during his lifetime, he earned the Arabic honorific as-Sayyid, which would evolve into El Çid, and the Spanish honorific El Campeador. He was born in Vivar, a village near the city of Burgos.
The Reconquista or the reconquest of al-Andalus was a series of military and cultural campaigns that European Christian kingdoms waged against the Muslim kingdoms following the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula by the Umayyad Caliphate, culminating in the reign of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain. The beginning of the Reconquista is traditionally dated to the Battle of Covadonga, in which an Asturian army achieved the first Christian victory over the forces of the Umayyad Caliphate since the beginning of the military invasion. The Reconquista ended in 1492 with the fall of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada to the Catholic Monarchs.
James I the Conqueror was King of Aragon, Count of Barcelona, and Lord of Montpellier from 1213 to 1276; King of Majorca from 1231 to 1276; and King of Valencia from 1238 to 1276. His long reign of 62 years is not only the longest of any Iberian monarch, but one of the longest monarchical reigns in history, ahead of Hirohito but remaining behind Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Victoria, and Ferdinand III of Naples and Sicily.
James II, called the Just, was the King of Aragon and Valencia and Count of Barcelona from 1291 to 1327. He was also the King of Sicily from 1285 to 1295 and the King of Majorca from 1291 to 1298. From 1297 he was nominally the King of Sardinia and Corsica, but he only acquired the island of Sardinia by conquest in 1324. His full title for the last three decades of his reign was "James, by the grace of God, king of Aragon, Valencia, Sardinia and Corsica, and count of Barcelona".
The Crown of Aragon was a composite monarchy ruled by one king, originated by the dynastic union of the Kingdom of Aragon and the County of Barcelona and ended as a consequence of the War of the Spanish Succession. At the height of its power in the 14th and 15th centuries, the Crown of Aragon was a thalassocracy controlling a large portion of present-day eastern Spain, parts of what is now southern France, and a Mediterranean empire which included the Balearic Islands, Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, Malta, Southern Italy, and parts of Greece.
The Kingdom of Valencia, located in the eastern shore of the Iberian Peninsula, was one of the component realms of the Crown of Aragon.
Francesc Eiximenis was a Franciscan Catalan writer who lived in the 14th-century Crown of Aragon. He was possibly one of the more successful medieval Catalan writers since his works were widely read, copied, published and translated. Therefore, it can be said that both in the literary and in the political sphere he had a lot of influence. Among his readers were numbered important people of his time, such as the kings of the Crown of Aragon Peter IV, John I and Martin I, the queen Maria de Luna, and the Pope of Avignon Benedict XIII.
The Llibre dels fets is the autobiographical chronicle of the reign of James I of Aragon (1213–1276). It is written in Old Catalan in the first person and is the first chronologically of the four works classified as The Four Great Catalan Chronicles, all belonging to the early medieval Crown of Aragon, and its first royal dynasty, the House of Barcelona. James I inherited as a child the titles of King of Aragon, Count of Barcelona, and Lord of Montpellier, but also became by conquest King of Majorca and King of Valencia. James emphasises in his chronicles his conquest of Majorca (1229) and of Valencia (1238).
Montaverner is a municipality in the Comunitat Valenciana, Spain. It belongs to the province of Valencia, in the region of Vall d’Albaida.
The siege of Oreja was a siege by the forces of Alfonso VII, Emperor of Spain, that lasted from April until October 1139 when the Almoravid garrison surrendered. It was the first major victory of the renewed Reconquista that characterised the last two decades of Alfonso's reign. The fortress of Oreja (Aurelia) was located in the left (southern) bank of the Tagus, within the current-day limits of the Spanish municipality of Ontígola.
The siege of Burriana was one of the battles that occurred during the Conquest of Valencia by James I of Aragon. Burriana was an important Muslim city, being the capital of La Plana, Valencia. It was known as the "Green City". The city was besieged for two months, finally falling to the forces of James I in July 1233.
The Battle of the Puig of 1237, also known as the Battle of the Puig de Santa Maria, the Battle of the Puig de Enesa, or the Battle of the Puig de Cepolla was a battle of the Iberian Reconquista and of the Aragonese Conquest of Valencia.
The Mural paintings of the Conquest of Majorca is a group of Gothic paintings, created on 1285-1290, conserved at the National Art Museum of Catalonia, in Barcelona, Spain.
The conquest of the island of Majorca on behalf of the Roman Catholic kingdoms was carried out by King James I of Aragon between 1229 and 1231. The pact to carry out the invasion, concluded between James I and the ecclesiastical and secular leaders, was ratified in Tarragona on 28 August 1229. It was open and promised conditions of parity for all who wished to participate.
The Llibre del Repartiment is a record book in which the king's scribes recorded the pledges of properties at the completion of a conquest. The document includes only properties that were ceded to the monarch after the conquest of the island of Majorca in 1229. It meticulously recorded the houses or land donations made by James I to the Aragonese and Catalan nobles and ultimately to all who participated in the crusade for the conquest of Majorca. Of course, the properties had been expropriated from the Muslims who had previously inhabited the island of Majorca.
The Battle of Portopí was an open field military conflict between the Almohad troops that occupied the island of Majorca and the Christian army led by King James I the Conqueror with the aim of annexing it to the Crown of Aragon in order to expand their domain and return it back to Christiandom. It was carried out at various points in the current Sierra de Na Burguesa, approximately halfway between the current resort town of Santa Ponsa and the City of Majorca. It was the second major battle in the campaign for the conquest of the island of Majorca initiated by the Aragonese king.
The history of Valencia, one of the oldest cities in Spain, begins over 2100 years ago with its founding as a Roman colony under the name "Valentia Edetanorum" on the site of a former Iberian town, by the river Turia in the province of Edetania. The Roman consul Decimus Junius Brutus Callaicus transferred about 2,000 veteran soldiers who had fought under him to Valentia in 138 BC. Valentia lay in a strategic location near the sea on a river island that would later be crossed by the Via Augusta. Pompey razed Valentia to the ground in 75 BC; it was rebuilt about fifty years later with large infrastructure projects, and by the mid-1st century, was experiencing rapid urban growth with many colonists from Italy.
Carpesa is a village under the local government of the municipality of Valencia, in the province of the same name, in Spain. It was an independent municipality until 1888. It borders with Benifaraig, Alfara del Patriarch and Vinalesa to the north, Bonrepós i Mirambell and Tavernes Blanques to the east, Pueblo Nuevo to the east and Brobotó to the west. Its population was 1,215 inhabitants in 2017 (INE).
The Four Great Catalan Chronicles were written between the late 13th century and the mid 14th century. The Chronicles narrate events of the lives of James I of Aragon, Bernat Desclot, Ramon Muntaner and Pere el Cerimoniós. The four chronicles were written with the same purpose: to justify the political actions of the rulers as well as passing their political knowledge onto their descendants. They are among the most complete historiographical sets of documents of medieval Europe, and are valued by historians for their detailed descriptions of the social and political aspects of Catalan feudal society.
The conquest of Valencia by the Catalan and Aragonese troops of King James I of Aragon took place on 9 October 1238.
