ABSTRACT
The years between 1348 and 1416 constituted an era of crisis for the Jews of Morvedre (present-day Sagunto). Housed in a town located some 20 kilometers north of Valencia, the capital of the kingdom of Valencia (part of the federated Crown of Aragon), this Jewish community was attacked, in November 1348, by the forces of the Union of Valencia, then in the final weeks of a rebellion against King Pere III (1336-87); it next endured the Castilian occupation of Morvedre between the winter of 1363 and March 1365, when the Castilian garrison expelled it from the town; and, finally, after surviving through the horrific summer of 1391, when most Jewish communities in Castile and the Crown of Aragon were engulfed by a wave of anti-Jewish violence, it faced, among other threats, aggressive papal inquisitors, the inflammatory preaching of the charismatic Dominican Vicent Ferrer, and the proselytizing policy of King Fernando I (1412-16).1 Two queens played a crucial role in the survival of the Morvedre community through a good number of these calamitous years: Elionor of Sicily (1349-75), the third wife of Pere III, and Maria de Luna (1396-1406), the wife of Marti I (1396-1410). Elionor worked successfully to repopulate Morvedre's Jewish quarter (juerid) after her husband recovered the devastated town from the Castilians in September 1365. Maria continued to foster the revived aljama (a legally constituted Jewish or Muslim community) and shielded it from inquisitors and mischievous municipal officials. Neither queen acted out of what one might call 'philo-semitism'. Both were pious, conventionally so, which precluded anything more than an Augustinian toleration of the Jews.2 Elionor and Maria were motivated, first and
ARV (Arxiu del Regne de Valencia), C (Cancilleria), MR (Mestre Ractional). For the history of this community, see two studies by M. D. Meyerson, A Jewish
Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), and Jews in an Iberian Frontier Kingdom: Society, Economy, and Politics in Morvedre, 12481391 (Leiden: Brill, 2004). 2 On the piety and religious interests of these queens, see U. Deibel, 'La reyna Elionor de
foremost, by fiscal pragmatism, since the aljama pertained to their particular queenly treasuries.
