Aragonese Empire
From 1035 until 1479 Aragon was the name of an independent kingdom ruling not only the present administrative region but also from 1137 Catalonia, and later the Balearic Islands, Valencia, Sicily, Naples and Sardinia. The real centre of this kingdom was Barcelona, since it was the Catalan counts that inherited the Aragonese Crown and not the other way around. Present-day historians, generally Catalan nationalistic, usually call the kingdom the "Catalan-Aragonese Confederation" or, some of them, simply "Catalonia-Aragon". Barcelona was the center of what was in many ways a Mediterranean Empire, ruling the Mediterranean Sea and setting rules for the entire sea (for instances, in the Llibre del Consolat del Mar (in Catalan).
The country that we now know as Spain spent the Middle Ages after 722 in an intermittent struggle called the Reconquista. This struggle pitted the northern Christian kingdoms against the Islamic kingdoms of the South.
In the Late Middle Ages, the Aragonese expansion southwards met with the Castilian advance northward in the provine of Murcia . Afterward, the Aragonese empire focused in the Mediterranean, acting as far as Greece and Barbary.
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The dynastic union of Castile and Aragon in 1479, when Ferdinand II of Aragon wed Isabella I of Castile, led to the formal creation of Spain as a single entity in 1516. See List of Spanish monarchs, Kings of Spain family tree and Spanish Empire
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