Under Pedro III, the knightly monarch,--“girded,” as Dante says, “with the cord of every virtue,”--the Aragonese, exasperated by the burdensome taxes which the king was compelled to levy for his costly enterprises, had extorted such great privileges and liberties in the General Privilege of Saragossa (1283) that after Pedro’s successor, Alfonso III, a man of milder temper, had amplified the _Privilegium_,[40] by fresh concessions to the union of the nobles, the kingdom of Aragon was less like a hereditary monarchy than a republican commonwealth with a responsible chief. The king was not only bound to secure the consent of the estates of the kingdom (_cortes_) in all important public affairs, especially for the declaration of war, the conclusion of peace, the enactment of laws, the imposition of taxes, and the selection and appointment of the advisers of the crown (the ministers), but it was further decreed that “without previous sentence of the justiciary and the cortes of Saragossa, the king might not proceed against any member of the union by way of capital punishment, imprisonment, or other injury, and that should he nevertheless do so, the union had power to exclude him and his descendants from succession to the throne, without thereby incurring the guilt of wrong-doing or disloyalty.” On Alfonso’s death without issue (1291) he was succeeded by his brother James II, up to that time king of Sicily, a well-meaning, kindly, and (as the surname he bears in history testifies) “just” sovereign, who thought more of perfecting the laws and constitution and maintaining peace and prosperity amongst his people than of enlarging the borders of his kingdom. He handed Sicily over to his brother Frederick as a separate kingdom; but on the other hand, after protracted wars with the Genoese, he won the island of Sardinia which the pope had bestowed upon him in fee. A war against the Moors, which he undertook in conjunction with Ferdinand, king of Castile, led to no important results. In an attempt to break down the overweening power of the aristocratic families, James had the assistance of the great jurist Martínez de Salanova; the power of the justiciary was strengthened. But the greatest benefits which James conferred upon the Aragonese nation was a law enacted in the assembly of Tarragona, by virtue of which the kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia, the county of Barcelona, and the suzerainty of Majorca were united in perpetuity and incapable of division by will or gift, though each was to remain a kingdom possessed of its separate constitution and cortes. The king, however, reserved the right of assigning to his sons and other members of his family the possession of particular cities and castles, a right of which his successors frequently availed themselves to excess, and which often provoked internecine quarrels and feuds.[b]