An island with more than a king
The Kingdom of Mallorca was born when Jaume I the Conqueror, Count of Barcelona and King of Aragon, began the conquest of the Balearic Islands in 1229, although its constitution was not made official until the following year.
The island of Mallorca was the central point of a territory that entered as an equal in the kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon, along with the islands of Menorca, which was incorporated (1231) maintaining its autonomy as a territory governed by Andalusian authorities, Ibiza and Formentera (1235).
During the reign of Jaume I the islands maintained a certain autonomy within the new kingdom, to the point that Mallorca participated in the courts of the Crown of Aragon, and Menorca in the Catalan courts.
But the kingdom of Mallorca, as an independent entity, began its history in 1276. In that year, James I decided to bequeath his territories, to which he had added the kingdom of Valencia in 1239, divided.
The Balearic kingdom, which together with the counties of Rosselló, Cerdanya, the viscounty of Carladès and the lordship of Montpeller - bequeathed by his mother, Maria - had been constituted as a political unit in 1262, to his son Jaume.
This should dislike the eldest son, Pere, who had inherited the rest of the territories ruled by Jaume I, and who suddenly began hostilities to recover the unity of the Crown of Aragon. Hostilities that his heirs would continue.
Meanwhile, Jaume II of Mallorca assumed the royal title, although he did not take long to do so as a vassal of his brother, although he experienced a Catalan-Aragonese invasion soon, in 1285, as a rebound of the war in Sicily between France and the Crown of Aragon. This imposed a parenthesis on his reign until 1298, which ended in 1311 with his death.
King Sanç assumed the government of the kingdom of Mallorca with more peace than his father, strengthening the feudal ties with his cousin Jaume II of Aragon, with whom he participated in the conquest of Sardinia, a collaboration that meant he did not have to pay vassalage.
His possessions received his attention equally, as he established residences both in Mallorca and in the counties of Rosselló and Cerdanya -which were bordering both France, to which he paid homage through Montpeller, and Catalonia.
In Mallorca, one of the residences to which he dedicated more interest was the hunting lodge that he extended in Valldemossa, a town in the Tramuntana mountain range. The building is attributed to have been the castle of an Arab nobleman named Musa, who gave his name to the town, but it seems that it was Jaume II of Mallorca who had it built in 1309.
In this way, the palace acquired the name of the second private king of the Mallorcan lineage, and continued to attract the attention of his nephew, Jaume III, who succeeded him in 1324. Jaume III was the son of Prince Ferran of Achaia, who followed the campaign of the Almogavars of the Catalan Company in Greece, where he died in 1316 without knowing his son.
Jaume III had to face his brother-in-law Pere the Ceremonious, who in 1343 reincorporated the kingdom to the Crown of Aragon. In 1336 he had married Constança, daughter of Alfons IV of Aragon, but that did not prevent his father-in-law's successor, his brother-in-law Pere, from demanding that the kingdom of Mallorca return to the main lineage of the Casal de Barcelona.
Once the reunification of the Crown of Aragon under a single monarch had been formalized, in 1399 King Martí the Humane, known to have been a religious man, donated the palace to the Carthusian order to create a cloistered monastery. The monks adapted many of the original rooms to their needs.
The disentailment of Mendizábal (1835) caused the monks to abandon the monastery, and the building passed into private hands. The successive owners renovated and modernized the rooms, which were maintained to the current appearance of a stately home of the rural Majorcan nobility.
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