Kingdom of Valencia

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Kingdom of Valencia Regne de València ( Latin )
1238–1707
Associated emblem[1]
Latin
Religion	Majority religion: Roman Catholicism (official)[2] Minority religions: Islam[citation needed], Judaism[citation needed]
Government	Monarchy
King
• First	James I of Aragon
• Last	Philip V of Spain
Legislature	Valencian Courts
Historical era	Medieval / Early modern
• Established	1238
• Nueva Planta decrees	1707
Preceded by Succeeded by Taifa of Valencia Taifa of Dénia Bourbon Spain
Today part of	Spain

The Kingdom of Valencia (

During its existence, the Kingdom of Valencia was ruled by the laws and institutions stated in the Furs (charters) of Valencia; these charters 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

The conquest of what would later become the Kingdom of Valencia started in 1232 when the king of the

The matter of the large majority of Mudéjar (Muslim) 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

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.

At the end of the process, four taifas had been wiped out: Balansiya, Alpuente, Denia and Murcia. Taking into account the standards of the day, it can be considered as a rather rapid conquest, since most of the territory was gained in less than fifty years and the maximum expansion was completed in less than one century. The toll in terms of social and politic unrest which was to be paid for this fast process was the existence of a large Muslim population within the Kingdom which neither desired to become a part of it nor, as long as they remained Muslim, was given the chance to.

Forging

Modern historiography sees the conquest of Valencia in the light of similar

The process by which the monarchy strove to free itself from any noble guardianship was not an easy one, as the nobility still held a large share of power and was determined to retain as much of it as possible. This fact marked the Christian colonization of the newly acquired territories, governed under the Lleis de Repartiments. Finally the Aragonese nobles were granted several domains, but they managed to obtain only the interior lands, mostly mountainous and sparsely populated parts of the Kingdom of Valencia. The king reserved the fertile and more densely populated lands in the coastal plains for free citizens and the incipient bourgeoisie, whose cities were given the Furs, or royal charters, regulating civil law and administration locally, but holding them always accountable to the king.

Linguistic outcome

These facts had linguistic consequences, which are traditionally sketched this way:

• The interior would have been mostly repopulated by people coming from the kingdom of Aragon, speakers of some variety of the
  Mozarabic language and of the Old Castilian language, from which the modern Spanish language
  stems.
• The coastal lands would have been mostly repopulated by speakers of the Catalan language from the Principality of Catalonia. This was one of the Occitano-Romance languages. In this traditional view, the language of these settlers replaced entirely the previous languages and became modern Valencian, generally considered a variant of Catalan.

A few authors have promoted an alternative view, in which the languages of the conquerors were mixed with a local Romance (

Height of power

The Kingdom of Valencia achieved its height during the early 15th century. The economy was prosperous and centered around trading through the Mediterranean, which had become increasingly controlled by the Crown of Aragon, mostly from the ports of Valencia and Barcelona.

In the city of Valencia the

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.

Modern Era, the Germanies, and decay

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In 1479, Ferdinand ascended to the throne as

Meanwhile, the rising Spanish Empire had left behind its former status as a Kingdom of the Iberian Peninsula and had emerged as a Great power. The Empire shifted its focus to the Spanish colonization of the Americas and its possessions in Europe, rather than its Iberian territories.

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. Within Spain, the Atlantic trade favored the cities of Andalusia such as

In 1519, the young

Because of the exhausted forces left after clashes between the nobles and their allies in the high bourgeoisie versus the general populace and the 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, just as they were elsewhere for the rest of the Spanish Kingdom territories.

The expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609 was the final blow for the economy of the Kingdom of Valencia, as tens of thousands of people—mostly peasants serving the nobility—were forced to leave; in the process, entire villages were deserted and the countryside lost its main labor force. Some 125,000 people are supposed to have left the land.^[3] The expulsion was broadly welcome within the Valencian citizenry, especially for its more popular segments. The expulsion meant the loss of a cheap labor force for the nobility, and consequently a massive socio-economic destabilisation. The nobles together with the upper class bourgeoisie felt threatened by an increasingly self-confident general populace, and sought the king's protection of their privileges. As a concession to the monarchy, they had to gradually relinquish their check and balance role on its power, which had been one of the distinguishing traits of the Kingdom's autonomy before the Crown. In line with similar processes in other parts of feudal Europe, the power vacuum left by rapid socio-economic change was readily filled by an increasingly emboldened monarchy.

The Kingdom of Valencia as a legal and political entity was finally ended in 1707 as a result of the

• Conquest of Valencia by El Cid
• List of Valencian monarchs
• Generalitat Valenciana
• Valencian Parliament
• Palace of the Borgias

References