FORMER SOVEREIGN STATES OF THE PYRENEAN ISTHMUS (VIII).
KINGDOM OF VALENCIA
The Regne de València, was located in the eastern shore of the Iberian Peninsula, was one of the component realms of the Crown of Aragon.
The Kingdom of Valencia was formally created in 1238 when the Moorish taifa of Valencia was taken in the course of the Reconquista. It was dissolved by Philip V of Spain in 1707, by means of the Nueva Planta decrees, as a result of the Spanish War of Succession.
During its existence, the Kingdom of Valencia was ruled by the laws and institutions stated in the Furs (charters) of Valencia which granted it wide self-government under the Crown of Aragon and, later on, under the Spanish Kingdom.
The boundaries and identity of the present Spanish Autonomous Community of Valencia are essentially those of the former Kingdom of Valencia.
| Kingdom of Valencia Regne de València (Valencian) |
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| Realm of the Crown of Aragon | |||||
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| Capital | Valencia | ||||
| Language(s) | Catalan/Valencian, Castilian and Latin | ||||
| Religion | Majority religion: Roman Catholicism Minority religions: Islam, Judaism |
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| Government | Monarchy | ||||
| King | |||||
| - First | James I | ||||
| - Last | Philip IV | ||||
| Historical era | Middle Ages | ||||
| - Established | 1238 | ||||
| - Nueva Planta decrees | 1707 | ||||
The conquest of what would later become the Kingdom of Valencia started in 1232 when the king of the Crown of Aragon, James I, called Jaume I el Conqueridor or the Conqueror, took Morella, mostly with Aragonese troops. Shortly after, in 1233, Borriana and Peniscola were also taken from the بلنسية Balansiyya (Valencia in the Arabic language) taifa.
A second and more relevant wave of expansion took place in 1238, when James I defeated the Moors from the Balansiya taifa. He entered the city of Valencia on 9 October 1238, which is regarded as the dawn of the Kingdom of Valencia.
A third phase started in 1243 and ended in 1245, when it met the limits agreed between James I and the heir to the throne of Castile, Alfonso the Wise, who would succeed to the throne as Alfonso X in 1252. These limits were traced in the Treaty of Almizra between the Crown of Castile and the Crown of Aragon, which coordinated their Reconquista efforts to drive the Moors southward by establishing their respectively desired areas of influence. The Treaty of Almizra established the south line of Aragonese expansion in the line formed by the villes of Biar and Busot, today in the north of the Alicante province. Everything south of that line, including what would be the Kingdom of Murcia, was reserved by means of this treaty for Castile.
The matter of the large majority of Mudéjar population, left behind from the progressively more southern combat front, lingered from the very beginning until they finally were expelled en masse in 1609. Up to that moment, they represented a complicated issue for the newly established Kingdom, as they were essential to keep the economy working due to their numbers, which inspired frequent pacts with local Muslim populations, such as Mohammad Abu Abdallah Ben Hudzail al Sahuir, allowing their culture various degrees of tolerance but, on the other side, they were deemed as a menace to the Kingdom due to their lack of allegiance and their real or perceived conspiracies to bring the Ottoman Empire to their rescue.
There were indeed frequent rebellions from the Moor population against Christian rule, the most threatening being those headed by the Moor chieftain Mohammad Abu Abdallah Ben Hudzail al Sahuir, also known as Al-Azraq. He led important rebellions in 1244, 1248 and 1276. During the first of these, he briefly regained Muslim independence for the lands South of the Júcar, but he had to surrender soon after. During the second revolt, king James I was almost killed in battle, but Al-Azraq also was finally subjugated, his life spared only because of a long time relationship with the Christian monarch. During the third rebellion, Al-Azraq himself was killed but his son would continue to promote Muslim unrest and local rebellions remained always at sight.
James II called Jaume II el Just or the Just, a grandson of James I, initiated in 1296 a final push of his army further southwards than the Biar-Busot pacts. His campaign aimed at the fertile countryside around Murcia and the Vega Baja del Segura whose local Muslim rulers were bound by pacts with Castile and governing by proxy on behalf of this kingdom; Castilian troops often raided the area to assert a sovereignty which, in any case, was not stable but was characterized by the typical skirmishes and ever changing alliances of a frontier territory.
The campaign under James II was successful to the point of extending the limits of the Kingdom of Valencia well south of the previously agreed border with Castile. His troops took Orihuela and Murcia. What was to become the definite dividing line between Castile and the Crown of Aragon was finally agreed by virtue of the Sentencia Arbitral de Torrellas (1304), amended by the Treaty of Elche (1305), which assigned Orihuela (also Alicante and Elche) to the Kingdom of Valencia, while Murcia went to the Crown of Castile, so drawing the final Southern border of the Kingdom of Valencia.
Modern historiography sees the conquest of Valencia under the light of similar Reconquista efforts by the Crown of Castile: as a fight led by the king in order to gain new territories as free as possible of serfdom to the nobility. The new territories would then be only accountable to the king, thus enlarging and consolidating his power versus that of the nobility. Making it part of a growing trend evident in Spain in the Middle Ages (said to end in 1492 with the final acts of the Reconquista in the capitulation of Kingdom of Granada and the expulsion of the Jews) and well into the era of Habsburg Spain.
It is under this approach that the repopulation of the Kingdom is assessed today. The new Kingdom population was initially overwhelmingly Muslim and often subjected to revolts and the serious threat of being taken by any given fellow Muslim army put together for this purpose in the Maghreb.
The process by which the monarchy strove to free itself from any noble guardianship was not easy as the nobility still held a big share of power and was determined to retain it as much as possible. This fact marked the Christian colonization of the newly acquired territories, ruled by the Lleis de Repartiments. Finally the Aragonese nobles were granted several domains but only managed to obtain the inland, mostly mountainous and sparsely populated parts of the Kingdom of Valencia. The king reserved the fertile and highly populated lands in the coastal plains to free citizens and incipient bourgeoisie whose cities were given Furs or royal charters regulating civil law and administration locally, always accountable to the king.
This had linguistic consequences.:
- The innerland was mostly repopulated by speakers of the Aragonese language, a Western Romance language of the Pyrenean–Mozarabic group. Their language was a close relative of the Mozarabic language and a close relative of the Castilian language, which would evolve into the Spanish language also by adding traits from neighbouring Romance languages such as Aragonese.
- The coastal lands were mostly repopulated by speakers of the Catalan language from the Principality of Catalonia. Theirs was a Romance language of the Gallo-Iberian group. In particular, part of the Iberian Romance languages. The language of these settlers would evolve into Valencian, a distinctive variant of Catalan which has gained its own currency within the Catalan domain.
Height of power
In the city of Valencia the Taula de canvis was created, functioning partly as a bank and partly as a stock exchange market; altogether it boosted trading. The local industry, especially textile manufactures, achieved great development and the city of Valencia turned into a Mediterranean trading emporium where traders from all Europe worked. Perhaps the feature which best symbolises this flamboyant period is the Silk Exchange, one of the finest European examples of civil Gothic architecture and a major trade market in the Mediterranean by the end of the 15th century and throughout the 16th century.
Valencia was one of the first cities in Europe to install a movable type printing press as per the designs of Johannes Gutenberg. Valencian authors such as Joanot Martorell or Ausiàs March conformed the canon of classic Valencian literature to the Valencian dialect of Catalan.
During the 16th century Valencia lost its status as a preeminent commercial center of Europe to the rapidly developing cities of Northern and Central Europe. Valencia was in frequent conflict with the Ottoman Empire which controlled most of the eastern Mediterranean. They prevented each other from reaching certain ports while Ottoman privateers such as Barbarossa preyed on trade ships. The Barbary pirates such as Dragut, operating out of Tunis, Tripoli, Algiers, Salé and ports in Morocco, attacked shipping in the western Mediterranean, which included destructive raids in Christian ports along the coast. This decline in trade greatly inhibited the economy in Valencia, which had already been economically affected by the Alhambra decree which had expelled the Jews back in 1492.
In 1519, the young King Charles I granted the Germanies (literally "brotherhoods") permission to arm themselves to fight off the Muslim raiders. The Germanies were artisan guilds who also, at first with the government's permission, served as civilian militias to fight raiding pirates. However, the Germanies also had an economic agenda favoring the commoner-dominated guilds that clashed with the aristocracy. After the recently appointed Viceroy of Valencia Diego Hurtado de Mendoza refused to seat elected officials who favored the Germanies in 1520, a full fledged revolt broke out, the Revolt of the Brotherhoods (Revolta de les Germanies).
Because of the exhausted forces left by the clashes between nobles and high bourgeoisie versus the general populace and lesser bourgeoisie, the king was able to use the power vacuum to enlarge his share of power and gradually diminish that of the local authorities; this meant that his requests for money in order to enlarge or consolidate the disputed possessions in Europe were progressively more frequent, more imperative and, conversely, less reciprocated for the Kingdom of Valencia.
Then the expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609 was the final blow for the Kingdom of Valencia, as thousands of people were forced to leave, entire villages were deserted, and the countryside lost its main labor force. In all, some 125,000 people are supposed to have left the land. This expulsion was broadly welcome with the Valencian citizenry, especially for its more popular segments. Since the expulsion meant the loss of a cheap workforce for the nobility, they and the upper bourgeoisie had to turn to the king seeking protection from the general populace, which meant they had to renounce their former check and balance role before the requests of the kings, which was one of the driving forces of the Kingdom's autonomy.
The Kingdom of Valencia as a legal and political entity was finally ended in 1707 as a result of the Spanish War of Succession. The local population mostly took the side of and provided troops and resources for Archduke Charles, the pretender who was arguably to maintain the legal status quo. His utter defeat at the Battle of Almansa, near the borders of the Kingdom of Valencia, meant its legal and political termination, along with other autonomous parliaments in the Crown of Aragon, as the Nueva Planta Decrees were passed.
