One of the main reasons for this formal renunciation of most of the once Catalan territories in Languedoc and Occitania, and any expansion into them, is that he was raised by the Knights Templar Crusaders, who had defeated his father, who was fighting for the Pope alongside the French.

King James I compiled the Llibre del Consolat de Mar,[1] which governed maritime trade and helped establish Aragonese supremacy in the western Mediterranean.

[2] As a child, James was made a pawn in the power politics of Provence, where his father was engaged in struggles helping the Cathar heretics of Albi against the Albigensian Crusade led by Simon IV de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, who were trying to exterminate them.

Peter endeavoured to placate the northern Crusaders by arranging a marriage between his two-year-old son James and Simon's daughter, Amicie de Montfort.

James was then sent to Monzón, where he was entrusted to the care of Guillem de Montredó,[4] the head of the Knights Templar in Aragon and Provence; the regency meanwhile fell to his great-uncle Sancho, Count of Roussillon, and his son, the king's cousin, Nuño.

From 1230 to 1232, James negotiated with Sancho VII of Navarre, who desired his help against his nephew and closest living male relative, Theobald IV of Champagne.

By the Treaty of Corbeil, signed in May 1258, he ended his conflict with Louis IX of France, securing the renunciation of any historical French claims to sovereignty over Catalonia, including the County of Barcelona.

After his false start at uniting Aragon with the Kingdom of Navarre through a scheme of mutual adoption, James turned to the south and the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean Sea.

On 5 September 1229, the troops from Aragon, consisting of 155 ships, 1,500 horsemen and 15,000 soldiers, set sail from Tarragona, Salou, and Cambrils, in southern Catalonia,[8] to conquer Majorca from Abu Yahya, the semi-independent Almohad governor of the island.

According to the continuator of William of Tyre, he returned via Montpellier por l'amor de sa dame Berenguiere ("for the love of his lady Berengaria") and abandoned any further effort at a crusade.

They found that Baibars, the Mameluke Sultan of Egypt, had broken his truce with the Kingdom of Jerusalem and was making a demonstration of his military power in front of Acre.

James's sons, initially eager for a fight, changed their minds after this spectacle and returned home via Sicily, where Fernán Sánchez was knighted by Charles of Anjou.

Notwithstanding his early patronage of poetry, by the influence of his confessor Ramon de Penyafort, James brought the Inquisition into his realm in 1233 to prevent any vernacular translation of the Bible.

When one of the latter, Fernán Sánchez, who had behaved with gross ingratitude and treason toward his father, was slain by the legitimate son Peter, the old king recorded his grim satisfaction.

The photograph of the head of the mummy clearly shows the wound in the left eyebrow that the king himself explained in a passage from his Llibre dels fets (Book of Deeds):

In anger I struck the arrow so with my hand that I broke it: the blood came out down my face; I wiped it off with a mantle of "sendal" I had, and went away laughing, that the army might not take alarm.

Though he later had the marriage annulled, his one son by her was declared legitimate: In 1235, James remarried to Yolanda, daughter of Andrew II of Hungary by his second wife Yolande de Courtenay.

They had numerous children: James married thirdly Teresa Gil de Vidaure, but only by a private document, and left her when (as he claimed) she developed leprosy.