A Mediterranean city on the Turia: capital of an eleventh-century taifa, conquered by El Cid in 1094, taken for Aragon by James I in 1238, and in the fifteenth century the richest city of the Crown of Aragon, home of the Silk Exchange.
Valencia stands a few kilometres from the Mediterranean on the Turia river, at the centre of the huerta, the irrigated plain of orchards, rice fields and mulberry trees that fed it. Founded by Rome, it grew under Muslim rule into Balansiya, capital of an eleventh-century taifa kingdom. In a century and a half it passed from taifa kings to El Cid, then to the Almoravids and the Almohads, and finally, in 1238, to James I of Aragon.
Under the Crown of Aragon it became the capital of a kingdom with its own laws, the Furs, and by the fifteenth century the most populous city of the Crown, with a municipal bank, the Silk Exchange and one of the first printing presses in Spain.
The Roman consul Decimus Junius Brutus founded Valentia in 138 BC for veterans of the Lusitanian wars. By tradition the deacon Vincent was martyred there in 304, and the Visigothic city was a bishopric subject to Toledo. It surrendered to the Arab and Berber armies by 714. According to Arabic sources Abd Allah, a son of the first Umayyad emir, governed the region at the end of the eighth century and built a country palace, al-Rusafa, whose name survives in the Russafa district.
When the caliphate of Córdoba collapsed after 1009, Mubarak and Muzaffar, two freed slaves of the Amirid household who had managed Valencia's irrigation, made the city independent in 1010–1011. From about 1021 Abd al-Aziz, a grandson of the dictator al-Mansur, ruled it for forty years and built a new wall around a much larger town, fragments of which survive inside houses of the old quarter.
Rich but weak, the taifa could not stand alone. After Ferdinand I of León attacked it in 1065, al-Mamun of Toledo took it over. When Alfonso VI captured Toledo in 1085 he installed al-Mamun's heir al-Qadir in Valencia as a tributary ruler backed by Castilian troops, and in October 1092 the qadi Ibn Jahhaf seized power with the help of an Almoravid detachment and had al-Qadir killed.
Rodrigo Díaz, El Cid, a Castilian exile who had made himself al-Qadir's protector and collector of tribute across eastern al-Andalus, answered by blockading the city and burning its harvests. After about twenty months the starving city surrendered, and El Cid entered it on 15 June 1094. That autumn he broke an Almoravid siege with a sally against their camp, had Ibn Jahhaf burned alive, and turned the main mosque into a cathedral under a French bishop, Jérôme of Périgord.
El Cid ruled Valencia as an independent prince until his death on 10 July 1099. His widow Jimena held it until the spring of 1102, when Alfonso VI evacuated the Christians and burned the city behind them, and the Almoravid commander Mazdali took possession in May. The Cantar de mio Cid, written down about a century later, made the capture of Valencia the high point of its hero's career.
When Almoravid rule collapsed in 1145 Valencia became a taifa again. From 1147 Ibn Mardanish, called the Wolf King by Christian writers, ruled Valencia and Murcia for twenty-five years, paying tribute to Castile and Aragon and hiring Christian troops against the Almohads, who took the city only after his death in 1172.
As Almohad power broke up after 1212, the governor Abu Zayd was driven out in 1229 and went over to James I of Aragon. The new ruler, Zayyan ibn Mardanish, could not halt James's advance down the coast. Beaten at El Puig in 1237, he watched James close round the city in April 1238 while Catalan ships turned back a relief fleet from Hafsid Tunis. Valencia surrendered at the end of September, and James entered on 9 October, still the official day of the Valencian region.
The king's own chronicle, the Llibre dels Fets, puts the number of Muslims who left under safe-conduct at about 50,000. Their houses and fields were shared out among Catalan and Aragonese settlers, and James made Valencia the capital of a new kingdom with its own law code, sworn for the whole kingdom as the Furs in 1261.
Christian Valencia kept the Muslim street plan. The cathedral was begun on the site of the mosque in 1262 and its bell tower, the Micalet, in 1381. As war with Castile threatened, Peter IV ordered a new wall in 1356 to take in the suburbs, and its northern gate became the twin Serranos towers in the 1390s.
In 1347 the nobles and townsmen formed a Union against Peter IV's plan to leave the throne to his daughter Constance; the Black Death struck in the middle of the revolt, and the king crushed the Unionists at the end of 1348. On 9 July 1391 a mob attacked the Jewish quarter, part of a wave of massacres that had begun in Seville that June. Many Jews were killed, and most survivors were forced to accept baptism.