King James was more far-seeing than his subjects and held a different view. The Moors were weak at the moment; but, owing to the influx of fresh warriors from North Africa, they had always been able to rally their power in the past and might do so again. ‘If the King of Castile happen to lose his land I shall hardly be safe in mine,’ was his shrewd summary of the case; and with this he invaded and overran Murcia, which he gave to his son-in-law in 1262. This date, 1262, though it marked no fresh acquisition of territory for Aragon, was nevertheless an epoch in her history. Hitherto her main interest had been identical with Castile’s--namely, the freedom of Spain from the infidel--but now, owing to the conquest of Murcia, she was surrounded by Christian neighbours, and what remained of the crusade had become the business of Castile alone. Early in his reign also, King James had closed another chapter in Aragonese history, when, as a result of his father’s defeat and death, he had been forced to cede all Catalonian claims to Provence, and thus to put away for ever the prospect of absorbing France that had dazzled his ancestors. Where, then, should Aragon turn her victorious arms? King James, a true Aragonese, had already answered this question, when in 1229 he began the conquest of the Balearic Islands, thus clearly recognizing that his country’s natural outlook for expansion was neither north nor south, but eastwards. Already Catalan fishermen and the merchants of Barcelona were disputing the commercial overlordship of the Mediterranean with their fellows of Marseilles and the Italian Republics, and thenceforward Aragonese kings were to take a hand in the game, supporting commerce with diplomacy and the sword. [Sidenote: Peter III of Aragon] James ‘the Conqueror’ did not die in battle-harness, as he had predicted, but in the robe of a Cistercian monk, expiating in the seclusion of a monastery the sins of his tempestuous, pleasure-loving youth. His tradition as a warrior descended to his son Pedro III, under whose rule Aragon entered on her campaign of Italian conquests. Both the excuse for this undertaking and the occasion have been noticed elsewhere in another connexion. The excuse was the execution of Conradin,[33] last legitimate descendant of the Neapolitan Hohenstaufen. As he stood on the scaffold calmly awaiting his death, the boy, for he was little more, had flung his gauntlet amongst the crowd. The action spoke for itself, the one bitter word ‘revenge’; and a partisan who witnessed it, kneeling swiftly, picked up the glove and bore it away to Spain. Here he presented it to Pedro III, to whose wife Constance, the daughter of an illegitimate son of Frederick II, the claims of the Italian Hohenstaufen had descended.