Alfonso IV of Aragon

Alfonso IV of Aragon, the Benigno (Naples?, 1299-Barcelona, 1336). King of Aragon, of Valencia, of Sardinia, titular king of Córcega and count of Barcelona (as Alfonso III), between 1327 and 1336.

Early Years

Second son of Jaime II of Aragon and his second wife, Blanca de Anjou, he became king after the resignation of his brother Jaime, who took the habit in 1319. He married twice: in 1314, with Teresa de Entenza and in 1329 with Eleanor of Castile.

During his father's reign, when the Infante Alfonso was Crown Prosecutor, he led the Aragonese expedition that took the island of Sardinia (1323-1324) that had been adjudicated to the King of Aragon by the Pope in the Treaty of Anagni (1295). For the conquest of Sardinia he came into conflict with Pisa and Genoa since both Italian cities had possessions and commercial interests in it. For the conquest he had 80 large ships and many smaller ones, 1,000 knights, 4,000 infantry, 2,000 crossbowmen and 3,000 auxiliaries. Faced with Pisan resistance, he was unable to take Cagliari for less than a year. Upon returning from his conquest of Sardinia, he laid the first stone of the temple of Santa María del Mar in Barcelona.

Reign

He acceded to the throne in 1327 after the death of his father Jaime II of Aragon and the resignation of his brother Jaime, heir to the throne, who preferred to enter a convent as a monk. He had been widowed by his first wife, Teresa of Entenza, only five days when the king died. Alfonso was first sworn to the Usatges of Catalonia and was recognized by his subjects as Count of Barcelona on Christmas Day 1327. Later, on Easter Sunday 1328, he was crowned King of Aragon in Zaragoza with great solemnity, which was collected by Ramón Muntaner in his Chronicle.

Internal Policy

While during his reign Catalonia began a demographic and economic decline, the Kingdom of Valencia began to have an importance that would continue to grow in subsequent reigns.

During his reign, the first signs of a strong demographic crisis began, especially in Catalonia, which would last from the middle of the XIVth century until the late XV, mostly due to the Black Death. Although the year 1333 cannot be considered the beginning of the famines that affected both their states and the rest of the peninsula, France and Italy, people perceived them more intensely and this year was called the bad any primer (the bad first year), a year in which a severe famine appeared due to the shortage of wheat, the result of bad harvests and, above all, the blockade carried out by the Genoese fleet that prevented the arrival of wheat from from Sardinia and Sicily. The famine affected both rural areas and cities; It is estimated that the city of Barcelona lost about 10,000 inhabitants.

In the Kingdom of Valencia, the struggles for the distribution of benefits from the exploitation of the powers of justice exercised by the lords over the vassals and between the supporters of the Aragon and Valencia jurisdictions continued, since both coexisted, using that of Aragon the nobles of Aragonese origin. These confrontations ended in 1328-1329, at which time Alfonso promulgated the alfonsine jurisdiction, in which the Valencian jurisdiction was retouched and in which it tended to make it more stately, proliferating the lords even without being of noble origin, a fact that led many nobles to accept the jurisdiction of Valencia between 1329 and 1330.

As a consequence of his second marriage to Leonor of Castilla, and after pressure from his wife, Alfonso planned in 1332 for the children of this union to obtain considerable possessions in the border regions of the Crown, especially in the Kingdom of Valencia, consisting mainly of separating from his jurisdiction the most important cities of the kingdom and that they passed to his son Fernando as a kind of own fiefdom. Thus, in 1333 he donated to his son Fernando the lordships and towns of Játiva, Alcira, Morvedre, Sagunto, Alicante, Morella, Castellón and Burriana, violating the promises made in 1329 and 1330 before the Cortes. This represented the possibility of a division of the kingdom, which was strongly opposed by the Valencians and the heir and son of the first marriage, Pedro. In the year 1333 the juries of the city of Valencia headed by the jurat en cap Francisco de Vinatea admonished the king. The king, who was in the city with the rest of the Court, had no choice but to give in to the pressure of his subjects, who let him know that they would rather die than consent to these donations contrary to the rights and privileges of the kingdom, and he reaffirmed his father's ordinance declaring the kingdom indivisible.

He continued with his father's policy of marrying between the royal house and the barons to try to diminish the power of the latter. As for the treatment he gave to the Muslims, this was more tolerant than the one given by his father and the one that his successors would give.

He tried to promote culture and give stability to universities. In 1328 he promised to give a fair salary to the professors (which never happened) and to provide four new classrooms for the study of law at the University of Lérida.

Foreign Policy

Relations with the Kingdom of Castile and its monarch Alfonso XI were good and initially friendship reigned between the two monarchs. In fact, already king and widower of Teresa de Entenza Alfonso IV, the Castilian monarch offered his sister Leonor in marriage. This matrimonial alliance sought Aragonese help in the reconquest, which was given in the form of a blockade of the strait by Aragonese ships to prevent the passage of Muslim troops to the peninsula.

Alfonso tried to carry out a crusade against the kingdom of Granada that Alfonso XI of Castile did not support, since he had good relations with the kingdom of Granada to the point of obtaining its vassalage in 1331. Alfonso started the crusade against Granada on year 1329 and in 1331 the Muslim kingdom attacked the south of the Kingdom of Valencia, taking Orihuela and Elche, which were recovered. Between 1330 and 1333 the conquest of Almería was attempted but the attempt ended in failure and peace was finally signed in 1335.

In 1329 he signed alliance treaties in economic terms with the sultans of Bugia and Tunis.

Sardinia and conflict with the Ligurian Republic

He had to put down a rebellion in Sardinia due to mismanagement by Catalan administrators. For control of the island, he had divided the territory among the barons and knights who had accompanied him in the conquest. The domain was reinforced with the establishment of feudalism, colonization and the founding of the city of Bonaire. The Sardinian rebels had the support of the Ligurian Republic (Genoa) with the aim of taking the island and to a lesser extent Pisa. The war against Genoa lasted between 1329 and 1336, the year in which Alfonso died and a precarious peace was achieved, but for the moment it ensured possession of the island. The conflict would continue until well into the XV century, and Genoa and the Aragonese Crown, especially Barcelona, the domain of of trade in the western Mediterranean, as well as possession of the island. The city of Sácer, key to the domain of Sardinia, rebelled three times since it was taken by Alfonso in 1323, although it was taken again, as was Cáller. Alfonso promoted the repopulation of Sardinia by people from the peninsula between 1329 and 1330.

Marriages and offspring

He married Teresa of Entenza in the cathedral of Lleida on September 10, 1314. Teresa was the heiress of the county of Urgell, the last independent county of the Crown. In her testament granted on October 23, 1327, Teresa stipulated that the county would be inherited by her son Sancho, and if he died without descendants, it would pass to his son Jaime I of Urgel, so the county did not become part of the real domains. From this marriage were born:

• Alfonso (1315-1317). Dead in childhood and buried in the Church of Santa Maria de Almatar de Balaguer, according to the Chronicle of Peter IV. Some sources point out that later the tomb with the remains of the infant was transferred to the Convent of Santo Domingo de Balaguer, where it would be destroyed during the Spanish War of Succession.
• Constanza (1318-1346), wife of Jaime III de Mallorca.
• Peter IV the Ceremony (1319-1387), buried in the Monastery of Poblet.
• Jaime I (1320-1347), Count of Urgel, who also inherited from his mother Entenza, Antillón, Agér, Alcolea de Cinca, and other lordships.
• Isabel (1323-1327), buried with her mother and brother Sancho in the missing Convent of San Francisco de Zaragoza.
• Fadrique (n. 1325) who died very young and is buried the Altar Mayor of Barcelona Cathedral in a tomb shared with his brother Jaime and King Alfonso III of Aragon.
• Sancho (1326-1327), buried next to his mother and sister Isabel in the missing Convent of San Francisco de Zaragoza.

For a second marriage, he married Leonor of Castilla, daughter of Ferdinand IV of Castile, in the Church of San Francisco de Tarazona, on February 5, 1329. Leonor had been the fiancée of Alfonso's heir and older brother, the Infante Jaime, with which this marriage came to normalize relations with the kingdom of Castile after the slight received by the Aragonese. Fruit of this marriage were born:

• Fernando, Marquis of Tortosa, married Infanta Maria, daughter of King Peter I of Portugal. He was killed in Burriana by order of his brother Pedro IV The Ceremonies. (1329-1363)
• Juan, the husband of Isabel Núñez de Lara and sent to murder by his cousin Pedro I of Castile.

He died in Barcelona on January 27, 1336. The kingdoms of Aragon, Valencia and Sardinia, as well as the County of Barcelona and the other territories subject to it were inherited by his second son, Pedro, while the possessions of his first wife, the county of Urgell and the lordships of Entenza and Antillón were inherited by her third son Jaime. Two months before his death, when he had already fallen ill, his wife and the two infants from the second marriage fled to Castile helped by Pedro I of Jérica, fearing reprisals from the heir Pedro.