The crusade which conquered Mediterranean Spain in the thirteenth
century resulted in the domination by an alien Christian minority of a
dissident Muslim majority and an unusually large Jewish population.
Professor Burns' research into previously untapped archival sources
reveals the tensions and interaction between the three religious
societies after the crusade. A principal source for the author's
research has been the revolutionary paper registers of King Jaume the
Conqueror. These abundant and neglected documents shed new light on
Jaume's pluri-ethnic kingdom during its first generation of settlement.
The chapters, each a pioneering work for its topic, are radically
different in subject and in approach, and yet concern the same theme,
the symbiosis of cultures in the redeveloping kingdom, and the same
time-span, the reigns of Jaume the Conqueror and his son, Pere the
Great.