ABSTRACT
Both Aragon and Castile faced severe economic and social challenges that arose from their acquisition of swathes of new territory in the reconquests of the mid-thirteenth century. Of comparable or even greater importance in both Aragon and Castile was the part that educated and numerate Jewish officials played in the administration of the money economy. In the case of Jewish privados this term seems almost exclusively to have been applied in Castile from the fourteenth century rather than in Aragon, perhaps indicative of a closer relationship there of a small Jewish elite to the Crown. The money never reached the men for whom it was destined but was seized by Alfonso's son Sancho who diverted it to his mother, the queen Violante, so that she might return to Castile from her exile in Aragon. The chronicler described vividly the privations suffered by the troops, which must have included scurvy through lack of fresh provisions.
