Context
Formally, the political center of the Crown of Aragon was Zaragoza, where kings were crowned at La Seo Cathedral. Leading economic centres of the Crown of Aragon were the cities of Barcelona and Valencia. Finally, Palma (Majorca) was an additional important city and seaport.
The Crown of Aragon eventually included the Kingdom of Aragon, the County of Barcelona, the Kingdom of Valencia, the Kingdom of Majorca, the Kingdom of Sicily, Malta, the Kingdom of Naples and Kingdom of Sardinia. For brief periods the Crown of Aragon also controlled Montpellier, Provence, Corsica, the Duchy of Neopatria in Latin Greece and the Duchy of Athens.
The countries that are today known as Spain and Portugal spent the Middle Ages after 722 in an intermittent struggle called the Reconquista. This struggle pitted the northern Christian kingdoms against the Islamic taifa petty kingdoms of the South and against each other.
In the Late Middle Ages, the expansion of the Aragonese Crown southwards met with the Castilian advance eastward in the region of Murcia. Afterward, the Aragonese Crown focused on the Mediterranean, acting as far as Greece and Barbary, whereas Portugal, which completed its Reconquista in 1249, would focus on the Atlantic Ocean. Mercenaries from the territories in the Crown, known as almogàvers participated in the creation of this Mediterranean "empire", and later found employment in countries all across southern Europe.
The Crown of Aragon has been considered by some as an empire which ruled in the Mediterranean for hundreds of years, with the power to set rules over the entire sea (for instance, the Llibre del Consolat del Mar or Book of the Consulate of the Sea, written in Catalan, is one of the oldest compilation of maritime laws in the world). It was indeed, at its height, one of the major powers in Europe.
However, its different territories were only connected through the person of the monarch, an aspect of empire as early as Achaemenid Persia. A contemporary, the Marqués de Lozoya described the Crown of Aragon as being more like a confederacy than a centralised kingdom, let alone an empire. Nor did official documents ever refer to it as an empire (Imperium or any cognate word); instead, it was considered a dynastic union of autonomous kingdoms.
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