For brief periods the Crown of Aragon also controlled Montpellier, Provence, Corsica, and the twin Duchy of Athens and Neopatras in Latin Greece.

Mercenaries from the territories in the Crown, known as Almogavars participated in the creation of this Mediterranean empire, and later found employment in countries all across southern Europe.

The Crown of Aragon has been considered an empire[8] which ruled in the Mediterranean for hundreds of years, with thalassocratic power to setting rules over the entire sea, (as documented, for instance, in the Llibre del Consolat del Mar or Book of the Consulate of the Sea, written in Catalan, is one of the oldest compilations of maritime laws in the world).

He married Agnes, sister of the Duke of Aquitaine and betrothed his only daughter Petronilla of Aragon to Raymond Berenguer IV, Count of Barcelona.

The rebellion of the Cathars or Albigensians, who rejected the authority and teachings of the Catholic Church, led to the loss of these possessions in southern France.

The conflict concluded with the Treaty of Meaux-Paris in 1229, in which the Crown of Aragon agreed to renounce its rights over the south of Occitania with the integration of these territories into the dominions of the King of France.

King James I (13th century) returned to an era of expansion to the South, by conquering and incorporating Majorca, Ibiza, and a good share of the Kingdom of Valencia into the Crown.

This caused Pope Martin IV to excommunicate the king, place Sicily under interdiction, and offer the kingdom of Aragon to a son of Philip III of France.

[16][17] When Peter III refused to impose the Charters of Aragon in Valencia, the nobles and towns united in Zaragoza to demand a confirmation of their privileges, which the king had to accept in 1283.

In 1347 Aragon made war on the Genoese Doria and Malaspina houses, which controlled most of the lands of the former Logudoro state in north-western Sardinia, and added them to its direct domains.

The rulers of Arborea developed the ambition to unite all of Sardinia under their rule and create a single Sardinian state, and at a certain point (1368–1388, 1392–1409) almost managed to drive the Aragonese out.

After some years during which Arborean rulers failed to organise a successful resurgence, they sold their remaining rights for 100,000 gold florins, and by 1420 the Aragonese Kingdom of Sardinia finally extended throughout the island.

The Greek possessions were permanently lost to Nerio I Acciaioli in 1388 and Sicily was dissociated in the hands of Martin I from 1395 to 1409, but the Kingdom of Naples was added finally in 1442 by the conquest led by Alfonso V. The King's possessions outside of the Iberian Peninsula and Balearic Islands were ruled by proxy through local elites as petty kingdoms, rather than subjected directly to a centralised government.

Thus, the new territories gained from the Moors—namely Valencia and Majorca—were given furs as an instrument of self-government in order to limit the power of nobility in these new acquisitions and, at the same time, increase their allegiance to the monarchy itself.

At that point both the Castile and the states of the Crown of Aragon remained distinct polities, each keeping its own traditional institutions, parliaments and laws.

The literary evocation of past splendour recalls correctly the great age of the 13th and 14th centuries, when Majorca, Valencia and Sicily were conquered, the population growth could be handled without social conflict, and the urban prosperity, which peaked in 1345, created the institutional and cultural achievements of the Crown.

[25] It was unable to prevent the separation of Sicily and Naples due to the establishment of the Council of Italy, the loss of Roussillon in 1659 after the Reapers' War in the Principality of Catalonia, the loss of Minorca and its Italian domains in 1707–1716, and the imposition of French language on Roussillon (1700) and Castilian as the language of government in all the old Aragonese Crown lands in Spain (1707–1716).

[25] The Crown of Aragon and its institutions and public law were abolished between 1707 and 1716 only after the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) by the Nueva Planta decrees, issued by Philip V of Spain.

[26] Thus, the history of the Crown of Aragon remains a politically loaded topic in modern Spain,[27] especially when it comes to asserting the level of independence enjoyed by constituents of the Crown, like the Principality of Catalonia, which is sometimes used [need quotation to verify] to justify the level of autonomy (or independence) that should be enjoyed by contemporary Catalonia and other territories.

[38] King Fernando II and Queen Isabella, as the Catholic Monarchs who began the Inquisition, were contrary to the more plural development that preceded in the Crown of Aragon.

The previous religious background was described as "longstanding tradition of Mudejarism, the royal sanctioning and protection of subject Muslim populations within Christian realms.

[40] The Mediterranean Lingua Franca was a mixed language used widely for commerce and diplomacy and was also current among slaves of the bagnio, Barbary pirates and European renegades in precolonial Algiers.

As the use of Lingua Franca spread in the Mediterranean, dialectal fragmentation emerged, the main difference being more use of Italian and Provençal vocabulary in the Middle East, while Ibero-Romance lexical material dominated in the Maghreb.

Linguist Steven Dworkin hypothesized that Catalan was the point of entry for Mediterranean Lingua Franca terms into Spain, arguably the source of several Italian and Arabic loanwords in Spanish, citing the DCECH.

[43] The crown was made up of the following territories (which are nowadays parts of the modern countries of Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Malta, and Andorra).