Mario LAFUENTE GÓMEZ

Original title: Una nueva aproximación a la biografía de Pedro Jiménez de Samper, un caballero de frontera al servicio de Pedro IV de Aragón (ca. 1314-1364)

Published in Returning to Eden

Keywords: 14th Century, Crown of Aragon, Military History, Nobility, Peter IV of Aragon, Social History, War.

Pedro Jiménez de Samper was a prominent member of the Aragon’s middle nobility, who lived during the central decades of the 14th century and developed an intense military career in the service of King Peter IV of Aragon, the Ceremonious. In this text, we offer a revised and expanded version of his biography, which we first published in 2008 in this journal’s number 8. The current version preserves the original text while incorporating new content, which refers to all the stages of Samper’s life and allows us to considerably widen the repertoire of issues previously addressed. Among the most important new features presented here are the location of his family origins, the identification of his clientele networks and the dating of his death. The result is a case study that provides an accurate illustration of the relationship between aristocracy and war in the Crown of Aragon in this period of the late Middle Ages.