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.

A collection of studies, based on royal registers, examining relations between the three religious cultures in 13th-century Valencia following the Christian reconquest. Describes the Franciscan Ramon Llull's program to convert both Muslims and Jews. Ch. 5 (p. 126-141), "King Jaume's Jews: Problems and Methodology", argues that Jews played an important role in Valencian society and that stereotypes viewing them as mostly urban moneylenders should be corrected. During the anti-Muslim riots of 1275-76, Jews were not harmed although there is evidence of popular hostility, incited by the friars, toward the Jews.