ABSTRACT

The chronicle written by Bernat Desclot in the final decades of the thirteenth century renders the following image of Violant of Hungary, queen of the AragoCatalan realms between 1235 and 1251: '[King Jaume] took to wife . . . the daughter of the king of Hungary, who was named Lady Violant; and she was the queen of Aragon. She was a very beautiful woman, and was good and pleasing to God and to her people'. Desclot then went on to list a number of the children that sprang from this union and to describe briefly their subsequent dynastic triumphs.1 Another major Catalan chronicler who lived and wrote in the later thirteenth and early fourteenth century, Ramon Muntaner, had even less to say about Queen Violant. He wrote that Jaume had married the daughter of the king of Hungary and mentioned the names and important marital alliances of some of her children, but he left out altogether any personal characteristics of the queen, failing even to supply her name.2