Palma

That independence did not last long. Peter IV of Aragon invaded the Balearics in 1343 and within a year had taken the islands from Jaume III, who came back with an army in 1349 and was killed at Llucmajor. Palma lost its king but kept its own government, the Jurats and the Great and General Council of the city and kingdom, which ran its affairs until the Nueva Planta decrees of 1715.

The harbour also made Palma a city of maps. Its Jewish quarter, the Call, was home to chart-makers such as Abraham Cresques, who with his son drew the Catalan Atlas of 1375, a picture of the known world from the Atlantic to China. That world ended in 1391, when a mob stormed the Call and the Jews who survived were forced to convert. The Christian merchants stayed and built: between 1426 and 1447 Guillem Sagrera raised the Llotja on the sea wall as their exchange. A century later the city's artisans rose against the nobles in the Germania of 1521; when royal troops retook the island, its leaders were executed and the head of Joanot Colom was hung in a cage on a city gate.