useless-catalanfacts:Constança d’Aragó, considered the Catalan woman who has been more powerful in h
useless-catalanfacts:Constança d’Aragó, considered the Catalan woman who has been more powerful in history. Born in the year 1179 (aprox), she was the daughter of the count-king of Catalonia and Aragon Alfons I the Chast and sister of the next king-count Pere I the Catholic, she was educated in the prestigious Sixena Monastery (in Western Catalonia) with the other daughters of the highest Catalan nobility.Her marriage contract is the first one that included especifically the dowry of a queen consort. Her dowry was the income of two counties, and the contract specified that, if the king died, she would continue to receive this payment if she remained in Hungary, or else would be compensated with 12.000 marks if she decided to leave Hungary.King Emeric died of an illness in 1204. As he saw that he was going to die, the king crowned his 3-year-old son Ladislaus and left his own brother Andrew to rule as long as Ladislaus was too young. King Emeric hoped that Andrew would have forgotten their old rivalries, but his ambition led him to seize the crown and pressured Costança until she decided to leave: she took her son Ladislaus, the crown, part of the royal treasury and some of her supporters and went to Vienna.But a few weeks after arriving, Ladislaus suddently died. Costança then started to reclaim her dowry, as was assigned in her marriage contract. At 26 years of age, Costança decided to sell her dowry to the Venetians, who were merchants and had agents everywhere. This way, she left the work of getting back the money from Andrew to them. Alone and tired, she went back home, to the Sixena Monastery.She didn’t think about marrying again, but Pope Innocent III knew that the sister of the king of Catalonia-Aragon was worth a lot in the marriage “market” and was decided to marry her to Frederick of Hohenstaufen, king of Sicily, who was only 10 years old. The Pope was protecting the young king since he was orphan of both father and mother, and wanted him to have an intelligent and experimented woman like Constança to guide him.In 1206, a historical meeting was held in Sixena in which two vital decision were taken. The first one is that Constança and her mother Sança convinced Maria de Montpeller, who at the time was processing her divorce after years of not having sexual relations with her husband king Pere I and the crown didn’t have an heir, to get back together with him. The next year, Maria became pregnant and would give birth to Jaume I the Conquerror, probably the most important king ever in the history of Catalonia-Aragon, Valencia and Mallorca.The second decision was to marry Constança with Frederick of Sicily. Constança went to Sicily, accompanied by nuns from Sixena and 500 Catalan knights.With the years, Frederick gained more titles. In 1212 he was crowned King of the Germans, which meant he was the heir to the crown of the Holy Roman Emperror, which he became in 1220. And with this, Constança achieved what was considered the highest honour for a 13th century lady: she became Empress of the Holy Roman Empire.Contrary to Hungary, where she had always been considered a foreigner, she was very valued and influential in Sicily. This can be seen, for example, in the rare fact that both the king and queen’s faces appeared in the coins. When Constança died in 1222, still young, she was buried in an ancient Roman sculpted sarcofagus and Frederick himself gave her an imperial crown: a beautiful tiara decorated with gold and precious stones, which none of the two other wives Frederick had ever got.[There are no portraits of her done in her lifetime, this illustration in this post was made by the artist Leo Flores for the history magazine Sàpiens. Source for the image and text (translated and adapted).] -- source link
#history