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Kingdom of Valencia
Kingdom of Valencia Regne de Valencia | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1238–1707 | |||||||||||||
.svg) Flag
.svg) Coat of arms
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| Capital | Valencia | ||||||||||||
| Common languages | Valencian (main) Unofficial: Aragonese, Castilian and Andalusi Arabic | ||||||||||||
| Religion | Catholic | ||||||||||||
| Government | Monarchy | ||||||||||||
| King | |||||||||||||
• 1239–1276 | James I | ||||||||||||
• 1700–1746 | Philip IV (V of Castile) | ||||||||||||
| History | |||||||||||||
| September 28 1238 | |||||||||||||
| June 29 1707 | |||||||||||||
• End as a territorial division | 1833 | ||||||||||||
| Area | |||||||||||||
| 1239 | 24,000 km2 (9,300 sq mi) | ||||||||||||
| Population | |||||||||||||
• 1239 | 50,000 | ||||||||||||
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The Kingdom of Valencia[1] (Valencian: Regne de València), also known as Lo Regne[citation needed] ("The Kingdom," in Castilian), was a kingdom within the Crown of Aragon. It spanned from the reconquest of the Taifa of Valencia in 1238 by James I the Conqueror, King of Aragon and Count of Barcelona, until 1707, the year in which, with the promulgation of the Nueva Planta decrees for the kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia, its institutions were abolished and its fueros replaced by the Castilian ones; from that date until the 1833 territorial division of Spain undertaken by Javier de Burgos, the Kingdom of Valencia kept that name as a territory within the various administrations of Bourbon Spain.[2]
After the initial conquest it was extended south of the Biar-Busot line. James I began the resettlement of the kingdom with settlers coming from other territories of the Crown of Aragon, mostly Catalans,[3] although the Aragonese component was present in all the comarcas and was the majority in many of them.[4][5] In 1261 the Fueros of Valencia (Els Furs) were proclaimed, by virtue of which the conquered territory was constituted as a kingdom in its own right,[3] integrated within the Crown of Aragon but with its own legal personality and administration, on the same level as the other territories making up the Crown. The creation of the kingdom provoked an irate reaction from the Aragonese nobility, who thus saw it made impossible to extend their lordships into the Valencian lands.[4]
History
Middle Ages
After having been the cradle of Iberian culture, and the recipient of various ancient cultures (Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines, Visigoths, Muslims, etc.), in the year 1233 King James I the Conqueror began the conquest of the Valencian territory, marked at that time by five centuries of presence of the Saracens: the taifa kingdoms of Balansiya, Alpuente, Denia and Murcia.
Once the Balearic Islands had been conquered, James I's military efforts were redirected toward the Islamic territories of the south. In the year 1233 the campaign of Alcañiz was planned, carried out in three stages:
- The first was directed at the lands of northern "la Plana," with the taking of Burriana in the year 1233 and other strongholds, such as Peñíscola.
- The second covered the central area with the conquest of Valencia (1238) and the flatlands up to the Júcar; to carry it out, the general Cortes of Monzón of 1236 granted the necessary aid and Pope Gregory IX gave the enterprise the character of a crusade. El Puig was taken in August 1237, with the failure of a squadron sent by the King of Tunis to the aid of Valencia. The capitulations were signed on September 28 and the King entered the city on October 9.
- The third phase spanned from 1243 to 1245 and reached the limits stipulated for the conquest between Aragon and Castile in the Treaty of Almizra of the year 1244, signed between James I and Alfonso X the Wise, at that time a Castilian infante, to delimit the areas of reconquest of the Crowns of Castile and Aragon. The lands south of the Biar-Busot-Villajoyosa line were reserved for Castile, with the Kingdom of Murcia (with all the Alicante lands south of Biar-Busot) remaining in Castilian territory. Later, taking advantage of the death of Sancho IV of Castile and the minority of his successor, Ferdinand IV, the territories of the Kingdom of Murcia located north of the bank of the Segura were incorporated into the Kingdom of Valencia with the invasion of these Castilian lands by James II, following the Arbitral Sentence of Torrellas (1304) and the Treaty of Elche (1305).
In the year 1283 King Peter III of Aragon authorized the establishment of the Consulate of the Sea in Valencia, this being the first in Spain.
In 1305 this kingdom would be divided, with the western zone going to Castile, which would constitute the Kingdom of Murcia within the Castilian Crown, and the eastern zone going to Aragon, which would become part of the Kingdom of Valencia, by virtue of the Arbitral Sentence of Torrellas and the Treaty of Elche.
The kingdom was, at first, of Mudéjar, Muslim and Mozarabic majority. With the conquest, the Kingdom of Valencia received Christians mainly from the Crown of Aragon and Navarre, but also from other European countries. The process of settlement of the Kingdom of Valencia was a long process that would not end until the 17th century, after the expulsion of the Moriscos. The population of the Kingdom of Valencia was, from the beginning, of diverse origin, although the bulk of the settlers came from Catalonia and Aragon, who were distributed in unequal percentages in each comarca.[4][5] To a lesser extent, settlers of other origins also came, most of whom were of Castilian origin.[4][5]
These populations, together with the Jews, resulted in a multi-confessional and multicultural society, with the Christians being the ones who had full rights in comparison with the rest of the cultures. These same people laid the foundations of an economic system taking advantage of the existing Arab infrastructure (weirs, terraces, irrigation systems, mosques, watchtowers, etc.), as well as the established agricultural products (citrus fruits, raisins, almonds, rice, tiger nut, vegetables, palm trees, etc.).
Despite sharing a king with the territories of the Crown of Aragon (Kingdom of Aragon, Kingdom of Majorca and Catalan counties), King James I established the fueros of Valencia, thereby founding a kingdom with its own political identity, with its own institutions, its currency, administration, and tariffs. These fueros would be maintained until 1707, with Bourbon centralization.
Between 1356 and 1365, Kings Peter I of Castile and Peter IV of Aragon confronted each other in a bloody war whose main theater was the Kingdom of Valencia, owing to the Aragonese monarch's interest in controlling the Kingdom of Murcia. Cities such as Alicante were besieged for several years, and as a reward for its bravery in twice resisting the assault of the Castilians, the city of Valencia received the two "L"s of its coat of arms (doubly loyal), and its royal banner was granted the royal crown. From this concession was born the Valencian flag that has come down to our days. During this war, moreover, the towns of Villena and Sax, which had passed to Valencia through the Sentence of Torrellas in 1304 (although they remained within the Castilian Lordship of Villena), would be returned to Castile and would not return to Valencia until the 19th century.
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Early Modern Period
Likewise, the Kingdom of Valencia financed the expansion of the Crown of Aragon during the 15th and 16th centuries, whereby it reached its greatest splendor during the Golden Age, thanks to the consequent maritime trade with the new extra-peninsular territories of the Crown (Sardinia, Sicily, Naples, etc.) and the creation of the Taula de Canvis, the first stock exchange in history. This period coincided, moreover, with a notable literary explosion in Valencian, it being one of the first societies to enter the era of the Renaissance, with important writers, humanists and philosophers.
With the effective dynastic union of the Crown of Castile and the Crown of Aragon in the Emperor Charles I, the Kingdom of Valencia continued to maintain its political independence. Nevertheless, the kingdom began to be subjected to the pressure of an increasingly centralist policy on the part of the hegemony of the Castilian Crown, giving rise to important social conflicts such as the Revolts of the Germanies of the Valencian guilds and farmers against various viceroys and lieutenants. Another important problem was the drastic demographic reduction, of up to a third of the population, as a consequence of the various expulsions of Jews and Moriscos from the Kingdom, which caused its economy to enter a serious crisis owing, mainly, to the lack of the cheap labor that had existed with the Valencian Morisco population (called tagarins), and to the flight of capital and assets accumulated by the Sephardim.
In 1700, with the death of Charles II, Philip of Anjou was proclaimed King of Castile and of Aragon, which provoked the War of the Spanish Succession. The Crown of Aragon sided with Archduke Charles, the other claimant. The resistance of the Kingdom of Valencia was concentrated especially in Játiva, Denia, Altea and Alicante, which were burned on repeated occasions (hence the demonym socarrats, "burned ones" in Castilian, proper to the city of Játiva), and their population massacred. When the war ended, Philip V promulgated the Nueva Planta decrees, by which all the institutions of the Crown of Aragon and of the Kingdoms that composed it were abolished; these disappeared and were integrated into the Crown of Castile, with the fueros of the latter kingdom being extended to the entire territory; nevertheless, in order for it to be assimilated into Castilian legislation and the Castilian political system, the King had to suppress numerous uprisings and social revolts throughout the territory led by former combatants of the Austrian side, the migueletes.
Territorial division: the governorates and the viceroyalty
The Kingdom of Valencia was divided into two governorates from the 14th century onward, that of Valencia and that of Orihuela. The Governorate of Valencia was divided into three territories: the Governorate of Játiva or dellà Xúquer, for the area between Jijona and the Júcar; the Governorate of Castellón or dellà Uixó, for the territory north of the Uixó; and the Governor of Valencia, who had jurisdiction between the Júcar and the Uixó, in addition to the supervision of his lieutenants in Játiva and Castellón.
In 1520, while maintaining the governorates, which lost a great part of their political importance, the Viceroyalty of Valencia was established with the appointment of Diego Hurtado de Mendoza y Lemos, which was the trigger of the War of the Germanies.
The various attacks that revealed the weakness of the coastal defense led to the creation in 1594 of the Battalion of the Effective Militia of the Kingdom of Valencia, a defensive army of the kingdom, with ten thousand men assigned to respond to any attack; but with the expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609 and the support and information they gave the raiders, the number and virulence of the attacks declined, and the battalion also gradually reduced its size over the years.
See also
- List of monarchs of Valencia
- History of the city of Valencia
- History of the Valencian Community
- Institutions of the Kingdom of Valencia
Notes and references
- ↑ See the 1st sense of the term reino in the Dictionary of the Real Academia Española.
- ↑ See the 2nd sense of the term reino in the Dictionary of the Real Academia Española.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Thomas N. Bisson (1986). The Medieval Crown of Aragon. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198202369.
The Aragonese, who had marked out Valencia for their own, found themselves outnumbered by Catalans in the Christian resettlement
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Enric Guinot (1999). Fundadors del Regne de València (in català). Tres i Quatre. ISBN 8475025919.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Guinot Rodríguez, Enric (2002). "El repoblament aragonés: colonització i llengües (segles XII-XIII)". Caplletra. Revista Internacional de Filologia (in català). 32: 85–94.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Pardo de Guevara y Valdés, Eduardo (2008). "Armas de Reyes y Armas de Reinos. La materia heráldica en el atlas de Pedro Texeira". In Juan José García Gil; et al. (eds.). Atlas de Pedro Texeira : descripción de España y de las costas y puertos de sus reynos (siglo XVII) : estudios y transcripción (PDF) (in español). Burgos: Gil de Siloé. p. 106. ISBN 84-934136-1-5.
{{cite book}}: Explicit use of et al. in:|editor=(help) - ↑ Alberto Montaner Frutos, El señal del rey de Aragón: Historia y significado, Zaragoza, Institución «Fernando el Católico», 1995, p. 185, PLATE XVII. ISBN 84-7820-283-8.
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