30 Copyright © 2021, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. Chapter 2 DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-6614-5.ch002 ABSTRACT The medieval Kingdom of Valencia was created in 1238, after the conquest of Islamic lands in the Eastern part of the Iberian Peninsula by Catalan and Aragonese people. New Christian settlers arrived from Catalonia and Aragon with distinct identity feelings, but after a century a new identity was formed, whose frst expression was the creation of a gentilic, “Valencian,” for all the inhabitants of the new kingdom, regardless of their Catalan or Aragonese origins. As this chapter explains, this process was closely linked to the development of the political and fscal structures of the kingdom, based primarily on the Valencian Parliament, where subsides and laws were negotiated between the king and the community of the realm. INTRODUCTION Modern-day Spain is composed of four large ethnolinguistic groups—Castilian, Catalan, Basque, and Galician—and the Spanish state is divided politically and legally into seventeen autonomous commu- nities, some of which coincide with former historical territories, such as the Kingdom of Navarre, the Basque Provinces, and the Kingdom of Galicia. The Catalan ethnolinguistic group is divided into three autonomous communities that correspond to former historical territories: the Principality of Catalonia, the Kingdom of Majorca, and the Kingdom of Valencia, all of which developed distinct collective iden- tities during the Middle Ages and the early modern period, which still exist today. To be precise, in the Principality of Catalonia, a Catalan collective consciousness was formed within the political territory bounded by Sales, Tortosa, and Lleida (Cingolani 2015; Sabaté 2015); in the Kingdom of Majorca, composed of the Balearic Islands, feelings of identity emerged that were linked to each of the three main From Catalans and Aragonese to Valencians: The Role of Politics in the Making of the Medieval Valencian Identity Vicent Baydal Sala Jaume I University, Spain