ABSTRACT
The city of Valencia, halfway down the east coast of the Iberian peninsula, passed from Muslim to Christian control in the thirteenth century. From that time onwards it began to play a fairly important maritime and mercantile role in the western Mediterranean. The process culminated in the fifteenth century, when Valencia achieved the rank of a centre of middling importance for European coastal transport and communication routes. The city developed along these lines as the capital of the kingdom of Valencia and as part of the crown of Aragon. The latter was the state-level structure that in different phases eventually comprised, along with the Valencia area, the Catalan counties and the kingdoms of Aragon and Majorca in the Iberian sphere, and Sicily, Sardinia and Naples in what is now Italy. Thus, Valencia was incorporated in a political unit to which other outstanding commercial centres also belonged, such as Barcelona, Majorca, Palermo and Naples.
