12845192.
King Pedro III OF ARAGON el Grande
via malragenealogy.com
King Pedro III "el Grande" of Aragon, etc,, became in 1282 King of Sicily (to which he was
welcomed after the Angevins were expelled); b.1239, d.Villafranca del Penedes 1285;
m.Montpellier 1262 Constance von Hohenstaufen (d.Barcelona 1302), dau.of King Manfredo of
Sicily
via Wikipedia Nov 2006
Peter III (Catalan: Pere, Spanish: Pedro) (1239 – November 2, 1285), called the Great, was the king of Aragon and Valencia (as Peter I) and count of Barcelona (as Peter II) from 1276 to 1285.
In 1262, he married Constance, daughter and heiress of Manfred of Sicily. Peter gained much military experience fighting in the Reconquista during the reign of his father, James I. On James' death, the lands of the Crown of Aragon were divided, with Aragon and Valencia, along with the Catalan counties, going to the eldest son, Peter, while the Balearic Islands (the Kingdom of Majorca), alongside the territories in the Languedoc (Montpellier and Roussillon), went to the second son, James. Peter and Constance were crowned in Zaragoza (the capital of Aragon) in November by the archbishop of Tarragona. At this ceremony, Peter renounced all feudal obligations to the papacy which his grandfather Peter II had incurred. Peter first act as king was to comlete the pacification of his Valencian territory, an action which had been underway on his father's death. In 1278, a succession crisis in the County of Urgel was settled and, in 1280, Peter defeated a stewing rebellion led by Roger-Berengar III of Foix. In 1284 or thereabouts, his brother James declared a vassal of Peter for his kingdom.
The emir of Tunisia, Muhammad I al-Mustansir, who had put himself under James the Conqueror, died in 1277 and Tunisia threw off the yoke of Aragonese suzerainty. Peter sent an expedition to Tunis in 1280 under Conrad de Llansa to re-establish suzerainty. In 1281, Peter prepared a fleet of 140 ships with 15,000 troops to invade Tunisia on behalf of the governor of Constantine. The fleet landed at Alcoyll in 1282 and began to fortify themselves in. It was to these Aragonese troops that Sicilians sent an embassy after the Vespers on March 30 asking Peter to take their throne from Charles of Anjou.
Peter himself was the direct descendant and the heir-general of Mafalda of Hauteville, daughter of Robert Guiscard, Duke of Apulia, the Norman conqueror, and his official wife Sigelgaita of Salerno, a Langobard princess. After the ducal family of Apulia became extinct with William II in 1127, Mafalda's heirs (then counts of Barcelona) apparently became de jure heirs of the Guiscard and Sigelgaita: thus Peter was dormantly a claimant to the Norman succession of Southern Italy. The Two Sicilies were to be a tenaciously pursued inheritance for the Aragonese royal house and its heirs for the next five centuries. Peter landed at Trapani on August 30, 1282. He was proclaimed King in Palermo on September 4. Charles was forced to flee across the Straits of Messina and be content with his "Kingdom of Naples."
Peter also had to deal with the French relatives of Charles, who had the support of the pope. His navy, under the admiral Roger of Lauria, defeated the invading French crusaders at Roses, and his armies crushed them in the course of their retreat at the Coll de Panissars in 1285.
Peter left Aragon to his eldest son Alfonso III of Aragon, and Sicily to his second son James I of Sicily. Peter's third son, Infante don Fadrique, in succession to his brother James, became regent of Sicily and in due course its king. Peter had also a daughter, Elizabeth (Elisabet), who married Denis of Portugal.
In the Divine Comedy Dante sees Peter "singing in accord" (d'ogni valor portó cinta la corda) with his former rival Charles I of Sicily outside the gates of Purgatory