‘THE rise of Aragon’ is a term that hides a great deal: in the thirteenth century it was not so much the highland kingdom of Aragon, from which they drew their royal title, as the seaboard county of Barcelona that was the jumping-off point for a remarkable series of successes, military, commercial and political, which catapulted the kings of Aragon from their lowly status as second-rate Spanish rulers into primacy in the western Mediterranean. Nor were these successes confined to the Catalan lands around Barcelona, as Majorca fell to the kings of Aragon and itself became the forward position of Catalan navies poised for the commercial penetration of Africa, and as Valencia became the capital of a newly acquired kingdom rich in potential resources. From 1282 Sicily also fell within the political sphere of the Catalan-Aragonese rulers, and it also had begun to play a role in the provisioning of Barcelona and Majorca which should not be underestimated. The relationship between trade and the flag was not, however, a simple one. There were areas intensively penetrated by the Catalan merchants which were never conquered by the king of Aragon; and there were political successes which were not, at least immediately, matched by generous favours to Catalan traders. The dynastic interests of the crown of Aragon were not necessarily the business interests of the merchant community of Barcelona; equally, those dynastic interests could rarely be fulfilled without the aid of Catalan navies, and thus some measure of reliance on the merchant community.