Inside the mind of a medieval king

Rowena Cockett on an extraordinary autobiography that offers rare insights into the challenges of monarchy

Today, autobiographies are everywhere, a staple of the book trade. Yet this was far from the case in the Middle Ages. Back then, autobiographies were so rare that some scholars claim the genre did not even exist. And those memoirs that did exist tended to be restricted to the religious sphere, accounts written by clerics such as St Augustine (354– 430) and French theologian Peter Abelard (1079–1142).

Thanks to his Llibre dels fets or Book of Deeds, King James I of Aragon (reigned 1213–76) provides a fascinating exception to this rule. Apart from an imitation by James’s great-great-grandson, Peter IV the Ceremonius (reigned 1336– 87), James’s is the only autobiography we have from a medieval king – and it lifts the lid on an incredible life.

Born in 1208, James lost both his parents at the age of five, leaving him to be raised by the Knights Templar while his newly inherited kingdom of Aragon, in the north-east corner of Spain, fell under the regency of his great-uncle, Sancho. A turbulent period of minority followed, during which James was subject to several kidnapping and assassination plots. He took part in his first battle aged 10 and was married at 13. His first military victory as an independent ruler came when he conquered Majorca from the Muslims in 1229, a triumph followed by the conquest of Valencia in 1238 and the suppression of Murcia in 1266. This effectively brought the whole eastern coast of Spain under Christian control and earned him the title ‘James the Conqueror’.

But The Book of Deeds is far more than a summary of his greatest achievements, although James clearly wants to memorialise these. It’s also a kind of handbook on kingship addressed to future generations of Aragonese monarchs, a volume that sheds light on James’s inner world – his self-perception, his ambitions, his anxieties – to reveal the peculiar challenges of being a 13th-century king. In short, it is an illuminating, first-hand account of what made a medieval monarch tick.