Second king of
the Crown of Aragon
Pedro II of Aragon, the Catholic (Huesca,
July, 1178 - Muret (current France), September 13, 1213), king of
Aragon, count of Barcelone (1196-1213) and gentleman of Montpellier
(1204-1213). Son of Alfonso II the Chaste of Aragon and Sancha
of Castile and of Poland.
He was born in July, 1178 in Huesca,
city in which there was reigning his father Alfonso II who,
the same month, granted at least two documents. He received the baptism
in the cathedral of Huesca and his infancy passed in the Upper
Aragon capital raised by his nanny Sancha de Torres.
In general lines, the reign of Pedro
II was dedicated to the politics in the trans-Pyreneans territories,
with limited results and finally failed, what, apart from the chronic
decrease of financial resources and the indebtedness of the crown
during his reign, determined a minor attention to the Hispanic border,
achieving scarcely some position advanced in territory andalusí
(Andalusia), like Mora de Rubielos (1198), Manzanera
(1202), Rubielos de Mora (1203), Camarena (1205) and
Serreilla, El Cuervo, Castielfabib and Ademuz
(1210), although iy had a political support role to a joint Christian
action that would brake the force of the Almohad power in the peninsula,
and took part actively along with Alfonso VIII of Castile and
Sancho VII of Navarre in the campaign that culminated in the
battle of Las Navas de Tolosa -1212-; a Christian victory,
decisive according to many, and of big resonance already in those
moments.
Pedro II renewed the vassalage of Aragon
to San Pedro (as Sancho Ramírez and Pedro I were
already doing time behind) with his coronation for pope Inocencio
III in the monastery of San Pancracio of Rome in November, 1204, acquiring
also the commitment of the authorization to the Papacy of an annual
sum. This politics of papal legitimization turned him into the first
monarch of the kingdom that was crowned and anointed. From him and
by authorization of the Holy See, in bull dictated on June 6, 1205,
the Aragonese monarches will be crowned in the Cathedral of Saragossa
of hands of the archbishop of Tarragona, after requesting the
crown the Pope (formality that was implying the permission of Rome),
this prerogative would be extensive to the queens in 1206.
He married in 1204 Maria de Montpellier;
a marriage guided by its interests in the French midday that provided
the sovereignty to him on the city of Montpellier. His scarce marital
life was on the point of creating a situation of succession crisis
for lack of heir. The queen Maria gave finally a son, Jaime
I, who guaranteed the continuity of the dynasty although there
was an attempt of divorce, which the Pope did not grant, to marry
Maria de Montferrato, nominal heiress of the crossed kingdom
of Jerusalem, for then nonexistent already in practice.
Pedro II did not resign from the politics
in Occitania and with him is happen, simultaneously, the culmination
and the defeat of this politics in the Crown of Aragon that inherited
from the count of Barcelone from the XIth century and the campaigns
with help of trans-Pyrenean magnates of Alfonso I of Aragon,
his father Alfonso II had increased in his double condition
of Count of Barcelone and King of Aragon.
Ramón Berenguer I had initiated,
in opposition to the counts of Toulouse, a penetration politic in
Occitania of the county of Barcelone, with the acquisition
of the territories of the counties of Carcasona and Rasés
(later lost to hands of the Trencavel), that continued in the XIIth
century with Ramón Berenguer III and IV consolidating
their position in the area like counts of Provence and obtaining,
between 1130 and 1162, the vassalage of numerous gentlemen in the
area.
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Throughout the XIIth and XIIIth centuries, the influence of the catarismo,
a Christian confession with origins in Asia Minor and the Balkans,
had been spreading in the Occident Latin and consolidated strongly
in the called Occitania or territories of the current French
midday, where a Cathar Church was structured with several episcopates
and which epicenter was the area of the city of Albi, by what also
it is named an Albigensian movement. The coexistence situation with
this church rival tolerated by the powers of the area, was threatening
there the hegemony of the Roman Church.
The event that untied the conflict was
the murder in January, 1208 of Pierre de Castelnau sent to Toulouse
like papal legacy to come up on behalf of Rome, which induced the
Pope to excommunicate the count of Tolouse and promulgate the crusade
against the Albigensian.
The «lightning« war in 1209 went initially
against the viscountcies of the Occitan dynasty Trencavel, where the
brutal capture of Béziers took place, with a generalized slaughter
without distinction of creed. This initial phase of the crusade finishes
with the place and the subsequent capture of the city of Carcasona
in the Summer 1209, after which there were granted to the Frenchman
crossed Simón de Montfort, for the proper papal legacy, the submitted
grounds of the family Trencavel..
After the defeat of the conciliation
between Occitan and Simón de Montfort, Pedro II declared himself
a protector of the threatened Occitan dominions and of Toulouse. Although
his son was remaining under tutelage in power of Simón de Montfort
and to the excommunication of Inocencio III, he had chosen
to support finally the French cause; there assembled finally an Aragonese
and Catalan army with whom he crossed the Pyrenees and together the
Occitan Allied Forces he put encirclement to the city of Muret, where
Simón de Montfort came. Departing from a profitable situation by the
forces and provisionings, in the campaign, it seems to be, his hosts
acted with precipitation and lack of organization, without waiting
for the arrival of all the contingents. He would be dead when being
isolated by the French gentlemen in a combat in which the king was
occupying a danger position in the second line, instead of, as it
was the habitual thing, of being located in the rearguard. The death
of the king brought the disorder and the rush between the tolosano-Aragonese
forces and the consequent defeat. Muret supposed the defeat and abandonment
of the pretensions of the Crown of Aragon on the territories ultra-Pyreneans-
and, according to author Michel Roquebert, the end of the possible
formation of an Aragonese - Occitan powerful kingdom that would have
changed the course of the history of Spain.
Excommunicated by the same Pope who
crowned him, Pedro II of Aragon remained buried in the Hospitable
of Toulouse, until in 1217 the Pope Honorio III authorized
the transfer of his remains to the real pantheon of Santa Maria
de Sigena in Huesca, where he was buried out of the sacred
enclosure.
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