Forging
Modern historiography sees the conquest of Valencia under the light of similar Reconquista efforts by the Crown of Castile: as a fight led by the king in order to gain new territories as free as possible of serfdom to the nobility. The new territories would then be only accountable to the king, thus enlarging and consolidating his power versus that of the nobility. Making it part of a growing trend evident in Spain in the Middle Ages (said to end in 1492 with the final acts of the Reconquista in the capitulation of Kingdom of Granada and the expulsion of the Jews) and well into the era of Habsburg Spain.
It is under this approach that the repopulation of the Kingdom is assessed today. The new Kingdom population was initially overwhelmingly Muslim and often subjected to revolts and the serious threat of being taken by any given fellow Muslim army put together for this purpose in the Maghreb.
The process by which the monarchy strove to free itself from any noble guardianship was not easy as the nobility still held a big share of power and was determined to retain it as much as possible. This fact marked the Christian colonization of the newly acquired territories, ruled by the Lleis de Repartiments. Finally the Aragonese nobles were granted several domains but only managed to obtain the inland, mostly mountainous and sparsely populated parts of the Kingdom of Valencia. The king reserved the fertile and highly populated lands in the coastal plains to free citizens and incipient bourgeoisie whose cities were given Furs or royal charters regulating civil law and administration locally, always accountable to the king.
This had linguistic consequences.:
- The innerland was mostly repopulated by speakers of the Aragonese language, a Western Romance language of the Pyrenean–Mozarabic group. Their language was a close relative of the Mozarabic language and a close relative of the Castilian language, which would evolve into the Spanish language also by adding traits from neighbouring Romance languages such as Aragonese.
- The coastal lands were mostly repopulated by speakers of the Catalan language from the Principality of Catalonia. Theirs was a Romance language of the Gallo-Iberian group. In particular, part of the Iberian Romance languages. The language of these settlers would evolve into Valencian, a distinctive variant of Catalan which has gained its own currency within the Catalan domain.
Another possibly primary driving force, but likely to be understated by modern historiography, was religious faith. In this regard, Pope Gregory IX recognized the fight as a Crusade and James I was known for being a devout king.
Read more about this topic: Kingdom Of Valencia
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