The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 06: (From Barbarossa to Dante)
Philosophy
The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 06: (From Barbarossa to Dante)
World history
Cataloni and Castile furnished a great number of crusaders; the King
of Portugal, and James, King of Aragon, took the cross. Doña Sancha,
one of the daughters of the Aragonese prince, had made a pilgrimage to
Jerusalem, and had died in the hospital of St. John, after devoting
many years to the service of pilgrims and the sick. James had several
times conquered the Moors, but neither his exploits against the
infidels nor the remembrance of a daughter who had fallen a martyr to
Christian charity could sustain his piety against the attacks of his
earthly passions, and his shameful connection with Berengaria
scandalized Christendom.
The Pope, to whom he communicated his design of going to the Holy
Land, replied that Jesus Christ could not accept the services of a
prince who crucified him every day by his sins. The King of Aragon, by
a strange combination of opposite sentiments, would neither renounce
Berengaria nor give up his project of going to fight against the
infidels in the East. He renewed his oath in a great assembly at
Toledo, at which the ambassadors of the Khan of Tartary and of the
King of Armenia were present. We read, in a Spanish dissertation upon
the crusades, that Alfonso the Wise, who was not able to go to the
East himself, furnished the King of Aragon with a hundred men and a
hundred thousand marvedis in gold; the Order of St. James, and other
orders of knighthood, who had often accompanied the conqueror of the
Moors in his battles, supplied him also with men and money. The city
of Barcelona offered him eighty thousand Barcelonese sols, and Majorca
fifty thousand silver sols, with two equipped vessels. The fleet,
composed of thirty large ships, and a great number of smaller craft,
in which were embarked eight hundred men-at-arms and two thousand foot
soldiers, set out from Barcelona on the 4th of September, 1268. When
they arrived off Majorca, the fleet was dispersed by a tempest; one
part of the vessels gained the coasts of Asia, another took shelter in
the ports of Sardinia, the vessel that the King of Arragon was on
board of was cast upon the coast of Languedoc.
The arrival at Ptolemais of the Aragonese crusaders, commanded by a
natural son of James, restored some hopes to the Franks of Palestine.
An envoy from the King of Aragon, according to the oriental
chronicles, repaired to the Khan of the Tartars, to announce to him
that the Spanish monarch would soon arrive with his army. But whether
he was detained by the charms of Berengaria, or whether the tempest
that dispersed his fleet made him believe that heaven was averse to
his pilgrimage, James did not arrive. His departure, in which he
appeared to despise the counsels of the holy see, had been severely
censured; and his return, which was attributed to his disgraceful
passion, met with an equal share of blame. Murmurs likewise arose
against the King of Portugal, who had levied the tenths, but did not
leave his kingdom.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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