Rhetoric and ideology in the Book of Ramon Muntaner

Abstract

The Book of Ramon Muntaner is one of the most original medieval chronicles in any language. The aim of this essay is to delineate how Muntaner's rhetorical work expressed a very powerful and highly ideological vision of the history of the Crown of Aragon and its expansion, at a time when James II had succeeded in weathering the storm of the Sicilian Vespers, but there still remained the threat of divisions between the various branches of the family. The article begins with an assessment of the significance of Muntaner's personal experience and cultural resources for his historical vision, through a biographical sketch, followed by a summary account of the novel context of dynastic history-writing of which he became a participant. This leads to a discussion of how Muntaner's political vision, centred on the providential role of the House of Aragon, illuminates the classic problem of a Catalan-Aragonese Mediterranean empire. I emphasize how an intense but secularized religiosity supported, through a theory of power, both an extreme monarchical ideology, and a socially biased aristocratic ethos of feudal origin, all of which must be read against a contrary background of political fragility and rapid social transformation. I note Muntaner's rhetorical effort to construct a dynastic harmony through the mechanisms of family compact and vassalage, yet without developing a theory of the state. I also consider his remarkable emphasis on the Catalan nation as fundamental to the success of the House of Aragon against very powerful enemies, offering some thoughts about the nature of ‘medieval nationalism’. The conclusion briefly considers the way Muntaner's active effort of dynastic, but also national propaganda, and his desire to overcome the potential separation of two cadet branches of the family in Majorca and Sicily, helps explain the emergence of the myth of a Catalan Mediterranean empire, and its persistence to modern times.

Keywords:

• Ramon Muntaner
• Crown of Aragon
• Catalan Mediterranean empire
• medieval historiography
• dynastic propaganda
• medieval nationalism

Notes

 1. On Muntaner and his Book (he did not call it ‘crònica’), see, to begin with, the annotated edition by Soldevila (ed.) Les quatre grans cròniques , 665–1000. From a literary perspective, see Riquer, Història, 449–80; Sobré, L'èpica de la realitat; Hauf, ‘Més sobre la intencionalitat’. From a cultural historian's perspective, Rubiés, ‘Mentalitat i ideologia’, with arguments to which I return, but also qualify, here. For a broader perspective, looking at the antecedents see Rubiés and Salrach, ‘Entorn de la mentalitat i la ideologia’, and Aurell, ‘From Genealogies to Chronicles’. Most recently see especially Cingolani, La Memòria, a much needed synthesis, and the most important contribution to the study of medieval Catalan historiography since the great works by Miquel Coll i Alentorn.

 2. Cingolani, Memòria, 163, sees an echo of Ramon Llull's writings in this vision, in particular his Fèlix o llibre de meravelles of ca.1289, but as he also notes, this was a common rhetorical device in the vernacular literature of the period, with both Biblical and classical precedents, and Muntaner would at least have been familiar with the former. The possibility of some direct knowledge of Llull is however not to be dismissed, as the lay cultural and courtly backgrounds of the two Catalan writers often intersected (for example in Majorca), and Muntaner might well have borrowed the idea of authorizing a very personal book through a religious vision, a novel trick in the historical genre.

 3. Muntaner, Crònica, 660. I quote according to Soldevila's edition (hereafter Muntaner, Crònica), making my own translations in preference to the meritorious English version by Lady Goodenough, The Chronicle of Muntaner .

 4. Muntaner, Crònica, 840.

 5. Muntaner's ethics seems to have been guided by the principle that virtue consisted in not abusing power. Hence, on the occasion of the massacre of the men, women and children of the town of Rodistro, where 27 messengers sent by the Company had been previosuly killed and quartered by order of the Emperor of Constantinople, Muntaner sought to distance himself from the almogàvers: ‘and truly this was a great cruelty, but this is the vengeance they had’ (863). Muntaner's charitative attitude was however compromised by the fact that throughout his narrative, devastating the lands of the enemy is accepted as a usual form of warfare. There is a discussion in Roger Sablonier, Krieg und Kriegertum.

 6. To avoid any confusion, I adopt the convention by English-language historians of the Crown of Aragon of anglicizing royal names and prioritizing the Aragonese numbering (hence Alfonso III rather than Alfons II). Muntaner offers no numbering (he simply gives the personal names in Catalan), but from a Catalan perspective the title of Count of Barcelona was the one that mattered, and for the dynasty this distinction was important, because the male lineage was that of the counts of Barcelona. Indeed, the alternative Catalan numbering became dominant during the reign of Peter IV, a ruler who was obsessed with formalizing the dynastic memory. Hence Peter III of Aragon was Pere II (also ‘the Great’), Alfonso II was Alfons I (‘the Liberal’), Alfonso IV was Alfons III (‘the Benign’), and Peter IV was Pere III (‘the Ceremonious’). Peter IV hence requested that ‘aquesta és la libreria del rey Pere III’ be written over the vault of the historical library he donated to the monastery of Poblet in order to preserve the dynasty's memory. There are no possible confusions with Jaume I (‘the Conqueror’) and Jaume II (‘the Just’), or with the kings of Majorca Jaume II, Sanç I and Jaume III. For details see figure 1.

 7. It is important to clarify at the outset that Muntaner's allegiance to the House of Aragon was distinct from his national identity as a Catalan, rather than an Aragonese. After the union of Aragon and Catalonia through the marriage of the Count of Barcelona Ramon Berenguer IV and Petronilla of Aragon in 1137, Ramon Berenguer's successors adopted the royal title of King of Aragon as their principal title because it was hierarchically superior to that of Count of Barcelona, although they kept their patrimonial dynastic coat of arms, which became identified with the House of Aragon generally. The two realms however, and subsequent conquests, remained constitutionally distinct, creating a peculiar dynastic conglomerate. James I for example would title himself Jacobus Dei gratia Rex Aragonum Maiorice et Valentie, comes Barchinone et Urgelli et dominus Montispesulani. Hence in Catalonia the kings of Aragon ruled as counts of Barcelona according to the Usatges de Barcelona and (after 1283) Constitucions de Catalunya. There was never a kingdom of Catalonia, but the Catalan Parliament (Corts) extended their jurisdiction beyond the strict limits of the county of Barcelona (there were other counties such as Empúries, Urgell, Cerdanya and Roussillon) into what under James I was known as the Cathalonia Universa, and by the mid-fourteenth century the concept of Principality of Catalonia (Principatu Cathalonie), where the counts of Barcelona were sovereign princeps, became established. Muntaner, however, writing a couple of decades earlier, and more interested in symbols of unity than in legal boundaries, simply refers to ‘Catalunya’, or, when he wanted to incorporate all Catalan-speaking lands, ‘tota Catalunya’.

 8. For an assessment of Muntaner's perspective on the Greek empire, see Zimmermann, ‘Orient et Occident’, and more generally Marcos Hierro, ‘Els catalans i l'Imperi bizantí’.

 9. Some historians have emphasized the collective nature of ‘mentalities’, but Muntaner offers yet another example of how within any cultural system of knowledge and beliefs, experiences and their interpretation are in the last analysis individual. There is an insightful essay on Muntaner's sense of self by Fuster, ‘Lectura de Ramon Muntaner’. In a similar vein, Cingolani, ‘Jo Ramon Muntaner’.

10. For the sake of clarity I adopt the modern French names of Roussillon and Perpignan instead of the native Catalan, Rosselló and Perpinyà. For the peculiar constitutional logic by which the County was linked to Majorca between 1276 and 1343 see Abulafia, A Mediterranean Emporium, and Rubiés, ‘Review’.

11. Here I differ slightly from Cingolani, Memòria, 165–6, although I agree that the story of the Catalan Company might have been the original narrative project, possibly even written earlier. Cingolani also proposes (161) that the Sermó (a verse composition combining dynastic panegyric and practical advice) delivered in 1323 on occasion of the expedition to conquer Sardinia might have launched Muntaner as a writer, leading him to start writing his Llibre two years later – a suggestive hypothesis.

12. Muntaner, Crònica, 897. Following this logic, in the previous pages Muntaner had written in great detail about how he secured the island on behalf of Frederick III of Sicily. He also recounted his subsequent voyage to Majorca, where he met King James II and his sons Sanç and Ferrando, and then to Valencia, where Muntaner picked up his promised wife. Afterwards he returned (always via Majorca) to Sicily and then to Djerba, where he remained governor of the castle for three years entirely for his own benefit, as recompense for his previous services to Frederick. It is at this point that he stops giving details.

13. The link between the Company and the rulers of Sicily, Majorca and Catalonia-Aragon was formally problematic, but not groundless. In 1307 Muntaner in fact sponsored the assumption of lordship by prince Ferrando of Majorca, second son of James II of Majorca, but the plan backfired and he was captured by the enemy. At that point Muntaner's personal loyalty to Ferrando was especially remarkable.

14. Much of the evidence for Muntaner's life is collected in Martí de Barcelona, ‘Regesta’ and ‘Nous documents’. For a synthesis, Tasis, La Vida.

15. The burning of Peralada by unruly almogàvers eager to join the main army is recounted in Muntaner's book, and leads to a consideration of the loss suffered by his family as the first in a long list of services to the House of Aragon (Crònica, 783–4).

16. Muntaner, Crònica, 819. According to a possible manuscript reading, during those years, that is during the reign of Alfons III of Aragon, Muntaner may also have been found in Valencia disposing of the goods obtained by the fleet of Roger of Lauria in North Africa during his corsair wars: ‘e així con ho prenia, sí em trametía a València al feedor seu’ (813); however as Soldevila notes (ibid., 974), the 1558 Valencia edition has ho trametia, so the possibility must be treated with great caution. In any case, it seems that at this stage Muntaner had started both his naval experience, and his business connections with the cities of Majorca and Valencia, all of which he would continue to develop throughout his life.

17. Frederick succeeded his brother James in Sicily when at the death of the eldest brother Alfons (Alfonso III) without heir, James returned to Catalonia, to become James II. I adopt the convention of referring to Frederick of the House of Aragon as Frederick III to distinguish him from Emperor Frederick II, although strictly speaking he was only the second Frederick to rule the island. In any case Frederick adopted that numbering himself, in defiance of the treaty of Caltabellotta, in order to strengthen his imperial and millenarian claims, as Muntaner explains.

18. See the interesting document of March 1302 in Rubió i Lluch, Diplomatari, 5, which explains how Guillem Miquel, citizen of Majorca, had been captured by Roger of Flor (as Rogerium de Brandusio) when travelling on the galley of Ramon Muntaner. Muntaner's precise role between his employer Roger of Flor, Flor's patron Frederick III, and the authorities of Majorca (of which Muntaner was citizen) seems important to understanding his social ascent, but the details are murky, since for a few years Roger de Flor's piratical activities targeted Barcelona and Majorca.

19. This is for obvious reasons the episode of the chronicle that has attracted most attention. There is an excellent critical edition by Lluís Nicolau d'Olwer: Muntaner, L'expedició dels Catalans. There is also a new English translation of the same: Muntaner, The Catalan Expedition. For a documentary history of the Company in Greece see also Rubió i Lluch, Diplomatari.

20. That is, although Muntaner had been active as military captain, governor and financial administrator for many years and for various lords, for most of his life he belonged to the third order, and for example participated in the parliaments (Corts) of the various kingdoms where he was naturalized as a citizen, in Majorca and Valencia for example. He therefore joined the military order (braç militar, or order of miles) in his late sixties.

21. Muntaner was a jurat in 1328 and 1331.

22. The aristocratic principle by which even enemy lords deserve credit for the sake of being lords is particularly striking: ‘All the lords of the world are of such high blood, and are so good, that they would never do anything that displeases God unless they have been ill-advised’, hence any moral responsibility in the afterlife accrued to their evil advisers (Muntaner, Crònica, 726). His economic ideals were also of a feudal kind, predatory and rentier, where one could be proud of not cultivating the land, but rather living off selling war booty (including enslaving Muslims), or exacting payments from North African kings.

23. Soldevila, ‘Ramon Muntaner i els clergues’, noted that Muntaner is extremely reticent about clerics and only rarely praises individuals, usually when they also happen to be princes of the Crown of Aragon (he was slightly ambiguous towards heirs to a Crown who renounce power to embrace a saintly life). His exaggerated account of the support given by the Catalan Church to Peter III during the French crusade in Catalonia is typically misleading. Muntaner's critical depiction of papal pro-Angevin policies is discussed in detail by Aguilar Àvila, ‘Lo rey d'Aragó’.

24. He refers to it twice, almost in identical fashion. See Muntaner, Crònica, 774, 806. The Jaufré had been dedicated to a King of Aragon, possibly James I, although its date of composition remains controversial.

25. Riquer, Història, 461–6, offers a detailed discussion of Muntaner's literary references, including the French and Provençal romans of Lancelot, Troy and Jaufré. The Sermó was meant to be sung to the meter of the Gui Nanteuil by a joglar (jongleur) called Comí, ‘who sings better than any other man in Catalonia’.

26. The literary influence of epic chansons does not imply a pre-existing oral narrative. The thesis of underlying pre-existing narrative poems, defended in the early decades of the twentieth century by Manuel de Montoliu, Ferran Soldevila and Miquel Coll i Alentorn, has been questioned in the last two decades by Stefano Asperti and others. Instead, Asperti suggests that the apparent echoes of rhyme simply betray the rhetorical influence of the epic tradition upon which thirteenth-century prose was based, in order to facilitate its oral delivery. See Asperti, ‘La qüestió de les prosificacions’.

27. I accept the reasoned hypothesis of Miquel Coll i Alentorn who in an important study identified Bernat Desclot with Bernat Escrivà of the king's chancery, as this makes very good sense of the text he produced. He later went on to become the chamberlain of Peter's successor Alfons, but died soon afterwards, albeit he had already completed his chronicle. See Desclot, Crònica, I, ‘Introducció’, 123–74.

28. For a discussion see Cingolani, Memòria, 78–85. Cingolani is preparing a critical edition.

29. MS 241, Biblioteca de Catalunya. See the important work by Cingolani, Historiografia, propaganda.

30. Cingolani, ibid. Note however the strong reservations expressed by Aguilar Àvila, ‘Review’. Aguilar considers that Desclot's supposed ‘first redaction’ (MS 152, Biblioteca de Catalunya, already identified by Miquel Coll i Alentorn) was, in fact, a later compilation, one that combined materials from both Desclot and Muntaner. Muntaner therefore never read Desclot, he was instead read together with Desclot.

31. Some critics such as Miquel Coll i Alentorn have traditionally emphasized Desclot's empirical value, but as Cingolani has rightly emphasized more recently, he was also an active myth-maker. The primacy of his catalanism emerges not only in his choice of literary language, inevitable in the political circumstances of his moment, but also in his creation of a myth of the great good count of Barcelona, where he conflated Ramon Berenguer III and Ramon Berenguer IV (Cingolani, Memòria dels reis, 108–10).

32. Crònica General , 123. Cingolani discussed the third redaction of the Gesta Comitum upon which this passage was based in Memòria, 149–50, and in more detail in Historiografia .

33. The principle of 1319, by which ‘quicumque sit rex Aragonum, inde eciam sit rex regni Valencie et comes Barchinone’, was as soon extended to other territories such as Majorca-Roussillon and Sardinia, as they became available.

34. Consider Desclot's detailed account of Peter's journey to Perpignan in 1285 and James's desperate escape. Desclot, Crònica, IV, 73–102. Desclot was in no doubt about James's guilt.

35. Muntaner, Crònica, 768, 776. Muntaner's elaborate justification of this secret pact ‘according to popular opinion’ also included the idea that it was better for Peter to be attacked in Catalonia rather than in the frontier between Navarre and Aragon. Many of Muntaner's inventions are noted by Soldevila (for example, ibid., 965, notes 5 and 8 to chapter 112).

36. In order to explain the seizure of Majorca from James II in 1285, Muntaner invented an extraordinary dialogue between Peter II and Roger of Lauria, which allowed the king to explain how James II of Majorca had secretly agreed to the plan, and even ordered that the citizens of the city should offer some token resistance in order to better fool the French. Of course, according to this story, the idea was always to return the island as soon as peace had been established (Muntaner, Crònica, 801–2).

37. In order to explain the seizure of Majorca from James II in 1285, Muntaner invented an extraordinary dialogue between Peter II and Roger of Lauria, which allowed the king to explain how James II of Majorca had secretly agreed to the plan, and even ordered that the citizens of the city should offer some token resistance in order to better fool the French. Of course, according to this story, the idea was always to return the island as soon as peace had been established (Muntaner, Crònica, 801–2), 933.

38. In order to explain the seizure of Majorca from James II in 1285, Muntaner invented an extraordinary dialogue between Peter II and Roger of Lauria, which allowed the king to explain how James II of Majorca had secretly agreed to the plan, and even ordered that the citizens of the city should offer some token resistance in order to better fool the French. Of course, according to this story, the idea was always to return the island as soon as peace had been established (Muntaner, Crònica, 801–2), 934.

39. That is, James as king of Sicily was concerned that his brotherAlfons would move against him in order to secure peace with France and the papacy. However, in this respect the treaty of Brignoles did not go as far as Anagni, according to Soldevila, who corrects Bartolomé de Neocastro and Zurita. See Soldevila, ‘A propòsit del tractat’.

40. As recently noted by Péquignot, Au nom du roi, the various positions divide between those authors such as Vicente Salavert Roca, J.E. Martínez Ferrando and Andreas Kiesewetter who believe James knew exactly what he was doing, expecting Frederick to be able to defend the island, and a Sicilian historiography emphasizing the theme of betrayal, a view echoed by Steven Runciman in his classic narrative The Sicilian Vespers. More recently Backman, The Decline and Fall, 42–6, tends to support the idea of underhand Catalan-Sicilian collaboration.

41. Muntaner, Crònica, 830.

42. According to the Chronicon Siculum, or (in the medieval Catalan version) Libre de les conquistes de Sicília, when James informed the Sicilian ambassadors of his renunciation of the island, he also told them that his brother, as the good knight that he was, would know what to do, and so would they – a subtle invitation to proclaim Frederick king (Biblioteca de Catalunya, MS 2084, fol. 59r). This was the version later incorporated by Jerónimo Zurita in his Anales de la Corona de Aragón. An alternative tradition suggests that Roger of Lauria and other Sicilian lords who had been at the service of the king of Aragon tried to convince Frederick to accept the papal proposal that he should marry Catherine of Courtenoy, which could lead him to claim Constantinople. See Runciman, Sicilian Vespers, 295.

43. On those efforts of mediation see Finke, Acta Aragonensia. A letter by Bernat of Sarrià (III, 83–4) suggests that James only fought Frederick in order to push him towards a deal, never to destroy him. Also Salavert Roca, ‘El tratado de Anangni’; Péquignot, ‘Interponere partes suas’. Muntaner's treatment of these events has also been the subject of detailed analysis by Aguilar Àvila, ‘Lo rey d'Aragó’, II, 111–23.

44. Muntaner, Crònica, 834.

45. This was the belief of J.E. Martínez Ferrando, Els descendents, 81. However Soldevila disagreed, as he thought that Muntaner never returned to Peralada, according to what he had declared earlier in his book (Crònica, 977; in fact, Muntaner had only said that he never returned to live in his native town). Alternatively, Muntaner might have also been informed by Bernat of Sarrià, former captain of almogàvers in the war of Sicily and now a royal treasurer who assisted James II in the peace negotiations. He would later move back to Sicily, and employed Muntaner as his agent in València after the latter left the government of Djerba.

46. Muntaner, Crònica, 840. At that point (December 1300) Muntaner was in Sicily, while James II had returned to Spain. The passage is particularly striking because Muntaner goes on to immediately declare that it was an affront for Charles of Valois to personally move against Frederick after he had already sought to dispossess Peter II, concluding that the House of France obtains little honour from its efforts because its aims lack justice!

47. For a more detailed discussion of the lack of development of an explicit imperial ideology in Catalonia see Rubiés, ‘La qüestió imperial’.

48. Muntaner, Crònica, 833, where admiral Luria is presented as making a coronation speech in Palermo in December 1296 arguing that the Aragonese prince ‘was that third Frederick of whom the prophets said that he would become king of the Empire and of the major part of the world’. Unlike Frederick, the kings of Aragon never claimed an imperial title, but they consistently resisted the Castilian claims to the empire of Spain. Spain was for Muntaner an important concept, most usually as a term of comparison, to enhance the value of the achievements of Aragon. It was of course a territorial concept, without a political, let alone a national, meaning. Muntaner however suggested that the Spanish kings could work together to forestall the power of France – an insight that many decades later became central to the political vision of Ferdinand of Aragon when he married Isabella of Castile. There is in reality a profound continuity from the ‘Catalan-Aragonese’ imperial vision of Muntaner, through the pan-Hispanic but also anti-French and crusading policies of the Aragonese Trastamaras, to the dynastic empire of Charles V.

49. The question has been discussed by Jocelyn Hillgarth in his excellent essay, ‘The Problem’, emphasizing the crown's lack of imperial consistency against the exaggerated accounts by J. Lee Schneidman and Pierre Vilar. The topic is worth re-visiting.

50. Of course Muntaner had no concept of the state as a sovereign entity, as it emerged in the sixteenth century in writers such as Jean Bodin, and the word was absent from his vocabulary. He was however an important participant in the articulation of a vision of the legitimacy of monarchical authority in relation to divine power, feudal hierarchies, and popular participation – it is only in this indirect sense that he wrote about ‘the state’.

51. Moreover, whilst taking advice from men of experience – citizens as well as the greater and lesser nobility – was a good thing, the good intentions of lords and princes should never be questioned. Indeed, vassals should always be reverent towards their lords, in an attitude of fear and love that mirrored the relationship of men to God.

52. Muntaner, Crònica, 750.

53. Muntaner, Crònica, 749–50. In fact the Catalans had met in their own separate Corts in Catalonia, and Muntaner invented the idea of a general meeting in order to suggest a unity of all the realms at a time when it was especially lacking. His rhetorical strategy was often to dilute peculiar Aragonese positions by emphasizing the more compliant Catalan element. It is interesting to note that Desclot had followed a different strategy, staying closer to the facts when criticizing the Aragonese for their unwillingness to help and their unreasonable demands (Desclot, Crònica, IV, 6 and 62), but saying nothing about the slightly more constructive meetings in Catalonia and Valencia. He nevertheless made it clear that kings were obliged to protect the rights of their subjects in order to keep them loyal (ibid., III, 58–9), an emphasis on justice absent in Muntaner, for whom the loyalty of the vassal was unconditional.

54. I discussed the importance of the festa in ‘Mentalitat i ideologia’, 84–5. More recently see also Péquignot, Au nom du roi, 450–4.

55. The words ‘poble’, ‘nació’ and ‘provincia’ are all used occasionally by Muntaner to refer to ethnic-linguistic groups, sometimes mixing peoples and territories. More often he simply refers to ‘Catalans’, ‘Aragonese’, ‘French’, etc.

56. This is the standard view held by historians. For example see Bisson, The Medieval Crown, 83, 90. Muntaner made Pope Honorius IV (1285–7), a great opponent of the House of Aragon in Sicily, recognize this: ‘each knight of those of Catalonia is like a devil incarnate, that nothing can stop them, neither by sea or land. If only they were reconciled to the Church, with these people we would conquer the whole world, and would subject all the infidels’ (Muntaner, Crònica, 806–7).

57. See note 7 above.

58. Muntaner, Crònica, 931. As a matter of fact, the conquest of Sardinia mainly involved Catalan support and relatively few Aragonese participated. But it is clear that the kingdoms of Valencia and Majorca (the latter with a separate king) were meant to be included in this glorification of ‘tota Catalunya’. In previous pages Muntaner insisted on their substantial naval contributions, and he had himself been involved in supporting the expedition by organizing a fleet in the city of Valencia. It is worth noting that ‘e tota Catalunya’ is the reading in some of the best manuscripts followed by Soldevila, but the important edition of Valencia of 1558 emends to ‘la Casa d'Aragó e de Catalunya’. This makes no sense (there might have been a ‘House of Aragon and Barcelona’ but not a ‘House of Catalonia’). The emendation is nevertheless a sign that by the sixteenth century, and probably much earlier, Muntaner's vision of a greater Catalonia no longer made sense either.

59. Muntaner, Crònica, 931. As a matter of fact, the conquest of Sardinia mainly involved Catalan support and relatively few Aragonese participated. But it is clear that the kingdoms of Valencia and Majorca (the latter with a separate king) were meant to be included in this glorification of ‘tota Catalunya’. In previous pages Muntaner insisted on their substantial naval contributions, and he had himself been involved in supporting the expedition by organizing a fleet in the city of Valencia. It is worth noting that ‘e tota Catalunya’ is the reading in some of the best manuscripts followed by Soldevila, but the important edition of Valencia of 1558 emends to ‘la Casa d'Aragó e de Catalunya’. This makes no sense (there might have been a ‘House of Aragon and Barcelona’ but not a ‘House of Catalonia’). The emendation is nevertheless a sign that by the sixteenth century, and probably much earlier, Muntaner's vision of a greater Catalonia made little sense either, 691.

60. Muntaner, Crònica, 931. As a matter of fact, the conquest of Sardinia mainly involved Catalan support and relatively few Aragonese participated. But it is clear that the kingdoms of Valencia and Majorca (the latter with a separate king) were meant to be included in this glorification of ‘tota Catalunya’. In previous pages Muntaner insisted on their substantial naval contributions, and he had himself been involved in supporting the expedition by organizing a fleet in the city of Valencia. It is worth noting that ‘e tota Catalunya’ is the reading in some of the best manuscripts followed by Soldevila, but the important edition of Valencia of 1558 emends to ‘la Casa d'Aragó e de Catalunya’. This makes no sense (there might have been a ‘House of Aragon and Barcelona’ but not a ‘House of Catalonia’). The emendation is nevertheless a sign that by the sixteenth century, and probably much earlier, Muntaner's vision of a greater Catalonia made little sense either, 691–2. Muntaner was thinking of Galician and Castilian as distinct, possibly Basque also. He does not recognize the proximity of Aragonese to Castilian, nor are his numerical calculations in any way reliable.

61. Obviously Muntaner was not making this up. For example, in this period the Christian settlers of Majorca usually called themselves ‘Catalans de Mallorca’ when abroad, and simply ‘Catalans’ when at home, opposing that identity to that of the Muslim slaves. See the illuminating study by Mas i Forners, Esclaus i Catalans.

62. ‘And after he took the said city [of Murcia] he populated it all with Catalans, and also Oriola, Elx, Alacant, Guardamar, Cartagena and the other towns. And you can be certain that all those who live in the city of Murcia and these other places I have mentioned are true Catalans, and speak some of most the beautiful Catalan in the world…’ (Muntaner, Crònica, 681). The full extent to which Catalan was spoken in Murcia remains controversial. Although, honouring his agreement with his son-in-law Alfonso X, James I had delivered a large portion of the kingdom to Castile, the decision was disliked by his successors, and here Muntaner is against heir to the views of King Peter III and his sons. Hence he also claimed that the the Aragonse king had reserved the right to claim those territories back, offering support for the arguments deployed by James II in his negotiations over Murcia in 1296–1304. For the origins of the complex history of the involvement of the Crown of Aragon in Murcia see Garrido i Valls, Jaume I i el regne de Múrcia, and for subsequent involvement, Ferrer i Mallol, ‘La conquesta’. Menjot, Murcie castillane, discusses the Castilian perspective.

63. In a passage Muntaner writes about how following the great victories of Roger of Lauria in Sicily, Catalans and Sicilians intermarried and became ‘like brothers’, and indeed ‘never before two nations [nacions de gents] got on better’ (ibid., 738).

64. At no point in his writings did Muntaner reflect any fear of Aragonese dominance, as at the time he was writing the Catalans were in all respects, politically and demographically, the dominant partners. He was nevertheless sensitive to Aragonese susceptibilities, and there is no equivalent in his book of the kinds of criticism one finds in Desclot, or indeed in the speeches of various kings who, from James the Conqueror to Peter the Ceremonious, occasionally noted that the Catalans had been more loyal.

65. The concept of Catalan nation therefore did not simply mean ‘from Catalonia’, but in a number of fourteenth-century documents also acquired linguistic, political and sentimental undertones. For example, James II of Aragon claimed to be capud dominus of the cathalanorum nacio, gens et lingua, including those under the intermediate jurisdiction of the king of Majorca. See Mas i Forners, Esclaus i Catalans, 115–26.

66. As Stéphane Péquignot notes (‘Les instructions’, 37), the chancery of James II used Aragonese for peninsular affairs, and Catalan for its Mediterranean business, with Latin used most often to write to the papacy and northern European powers.

67. There are no traces in Muntaner or indeed any earlier Catalan chroniclers of the modern debate about whether the flag or senyal of the House of Aragon was originally the coat of arms of the counts of Barcelona, rather than the kings of Aragon. But the question might have been simmering. Less than twenty years after Muntaner finished his chronicle, Peter IV (Pere terç, as he called himself) made official the idea that the four red pallets over gold was the original insignia of the counts of Barcelona, which they kept when Ramon Berenguer IV acquired Aragon through marriage. The idea was eventually incorporated into the more extended versions of the official royal Chronicle of the Kings of Aragon and Counts of Barcelona, commissioned by the same king, and which combined the history of the Aragonese and Catalan dynastic lineages. Catalan, Valencian and Aragonese historians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from Tomic to Beuter and Zurita, accepted this interpretation.

68. Interestingly, while the royal genealogist Jaume Domènec, working for John I in 1380, continued to insist on the idea made official by Peter IV that the royal coat of arms was originally the distinctive sign of the counts of Barcelona, in 1406 Martin I, John's brother, radically widened the scope of its significance, and referred to the dynastic flag as also being the ancient flag of the Principality of Catalonia, la bandera nostra antiga del principat de Cathalunya. The symbol had by then become identified with the various territories of the Crown of Aragon, and this collective identification persisted even after a new Trastamara dynasty succeeded a few years later.

69. Muntaner, Crònica, 680.

70. This is not the place for a detailed history of the impact of Muntaner, but it is worth noting that its influence goes well beyond the Catalanist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of Muntaner's themes were influential in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, from the political speeches of Martin I to the chivalric novels Curial e Güelfa and Tirant lo Blanc. The echoes of Muntaner's dynastic nationalism in the political oratory of Peter IV and his son Martin I are particularly notable – see in this respect Cawsey, Kingship and Propaganda, 71–121. After 1558, early modern readers also had the printed book at their disposal, and it influenced the historical vision and political thought of notable writers such as Jerónimo Zurita, Franciso de Moncada, or Francisco Gilabert.

71. See, for example, Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities.

72. This is not the place to summarize the important debate about whether nations and nationalism are a purely modern phenomenon generated by the European experience of modernization, or can be found earlier as an expression of ethnic and cultural identities independent from the emergence of the modern idea of the state. Obviously I do not here employ ‘nation’ in the modern sense of an exclusive ‘nation-state’, but rather in its late medieval sense, simply meaning a distinct people. Rather than trying to fit Muntaner into a pre-existing definition of ‘medieval nationalism’, I hope to offer this study as an exploration of the assumptions peculiar to his work and context, that is, as a case-study which might help sharpen further theoretical analysis.

73. Hence, ‘You can never know a man, of whatever condition, until he is given power’, possibly Muntaner's most personal proverb.

74. For this impact see Rubiés, ‘The Idea of Empire’.

75. In his Western Mediterranean Kingdoms, David Abulafia found his answer to the problem with a series of parallel lives.

76. In September 1985 in Montpellier I delivered my first conference paper at the XIIth Congress of the Crown of Aragon, with the title ‘Mentalitat i ideologia de Ramon Muntaner’. I was then only a student in the midst of his degree at the University of Barcelona, and possibly too young to be speaking at that illustrious venue, but thanks to the enthusiasm and support of Josep Maria Salrach, who had been listening with patience to my thoughts about medieval Catalan historiography, I had just embarked into what would become a serious career as a historian. During the conference trip to Aigues-Mortes, I also met David Abulafia, who kindly encouraged my then tentative plan to eventually pursue a Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge. The publication of the conference essays by the Mémoires de la Société Archéologique de Montpellier (edited by Charles-Olivier Carbonell, vols. XV–XVII, Montpellier, 1987–9) unfortunately has remained highly obscure, and twenty-five years later I very much welcome the opportunity to return to the topic of Ramon Muntaner, most fittingly in honour of David Abulafia, with whom it has remained a continuous topic of conversation. This article has also benefited from the comments of Stéphane Péquignot.