We give the name Crown of Aragon to an amalgam of territories that, over the territorial cohesions rooted in the evolutions in the Early and High medieval centuries, led, in the Late Middle, to a specific political entity in the Mediterranean. This, a plural and diverse political entity, became one of the European models of mixed monarchies. It had accessible institutions and a representativeness of the estates, and cultural traits converted into unifying factors, an economy involved in the great maritime routes and, with all this, a plurality under one crown, that of the kings of Aragon. The memory of this peculiarity of this structure has survived in a dense, widely varying, network of archives and diverse sources that need to be duly explored and analysed.
Indeed, the later articulation of society and historical research under the parameters of the nation-state, so deeply rooted over centuries, has even hindered our understanding of what entities like the Crown of Aragon were, to the point that its participative institutions or the membranous traits of its culture could be claimed to be immature from the conceptual rigidities imposed later.
It is undoubtedly necessary to facilitate the coming together, through debate and interdisciplinary relations, of everyone who, from history, art history, philology (literature and language) or any other perspective, studies different aspects and geographies of what was the Crown of Aragon.
The Association of Historians of the Crown of Aragon (Societas Historicorum Coronae Aragonum, HISCOAR) aims to contribute to facilitating relations and exchanges between researchers who, anywhere in the world, focus their research on the Crown of Aragon. That enables to increase the circulation of the interpretative paths and also defend adequately what the Crown of Aragon was and represented.
Collaboration between diverse branches of work and sometimes disperse geographies enables the improvement of the results of research targets closer than it might sometimes seem. HISCOAR sums the effurts of everyone to seek common strategies for the research, foster the exchange and the interdisciplinary work, endorse support and encourangement in order to open new ways of knowledgement and, finally, spread the diferent fields of work.
This is, in the end, a scientific and amiable adventure that benefits from the constructive spirit in sharing the common illusions and, therefore, in which all of us can take part.
Aymat Catafau, Université de Perpignan Via Domitia
Pietro Corrao, Università degli Studi di Palermo
Charles Dalli, L-Università ta’ Malta
Fulvio Delle Donne, Università degli Studi della Basilicata
Antoni Furió, Universitat de València
Luciano Gallinari, Istituto di Storia dell’Europa Mediterranea- CNR Cagliari
Carlos Laliena, Universidad de Zaragoza
Flocel Sabaté, Universitat de Lleida
Eleni Sakellariou, University of Crete
Nada Zecevic, University of London
