Chapter 1 examines the fourteenth-century emergence of problems that drove fifteenth-century developments. When necessary, this chapter places those fourteenth-century problems in their twelfth- and thirteenth-century contexts. The problems were three. Firstly, there was the diminution of the town’s population caused by bubonic plague. Secondly, there was swelling municipal debt; its existence and the measures taken to reduce it exacerbated social antagonisms that fuelled the third problem, distrust. Between the 1340s and the 1390s, suspicion and hostility between burghers and merchants, on the one hand, and tradespeople, on the other, deepened and became dangerously acute.

While captivity was the product of the violent confrontation between Jews, Christians, and Muslims, this essay uses Latin, Arabic, and Romance sources to argue that ransoming was also a phenomenon that intimately linked these communities. Grounded in a shared Roman inheritance, the tradition of ransoming brought Jews, Christians, and Muslims into a dialogic and reciprocal relationship with one another, one that depended on mutual understanding and expectations. It provided a channel to share ideas and institutions. Ransomers also helped pave the paths for commercial and diplomatic relations. Nevertheless, if ransoming drew these communities together, it also tore them apart. The physical and emotional cost of captivity, although shared, became the ground of separation.

The tenth chapter explores the practice of self-coronation in the kingdom of Aragon. It centres on Peter the Ceremonious’ self-coronation in Zaragoza (1336), where the king implemented a conscious triple strategy to ensure that his ceremony, performed previously by his father, King Alfonso IV the Benign (1328), would not remain an isolated gesture but would become tradition. First, he constructed an autobiographical historical account that would serve as the primary version of the event. Second, he fixed the rites of self-coronation by writing a new ceremonial. Third, he propagated an iconographic tradition through images of himself in miniatures, seals and coins – and, above all, of his gesture of self-coronation. Historiography, liturgy and iconography are brought into play by the king so as to perpetuate the memory of his self-coronation and thus ensure, through repetition, its transformation from an isolated event into a consolidated practice and part of inherited tradition. The chapter finishes with an analysis of the successive self-coronations performed by Peter’s successors.