The Catalan kingdom of Majorca was a political failure. Its rulers did not manage to keep Aragonese pretensions to overlordship at bay, even though the will of the kingdom's founder, James I of Aragon, had stipulated that Majorca and its continental dependencies were to be independent of Aragon. Within three years of James I's death, the Majorcan king had to acknowledge Aragonese suzerainty. The sole way to hold off the Aragonese was to allow the king of France a degree of influence over the kingdom's external relations that only resulted in an Aragonese counter-attack and the loss (between 1285 and 1298) of the Balearic islands to the king of Aragon. The inability of the kings of Majorca to maintain their independence culminated in the crisis of 1343–9, when Peter IV of Aragon conquered the kingdom and James III of Majorca met his death in a vain attempt to recover the Balearics. At the same time, the kingdom appeared to have formidable strengths of another sort. It occupied a prime position on the international trade routes, at a time of expanding commerce in the western Mediterranean and of the opening of regular trade routes linking Italy and Catalonia to Atlantic Morocco, Portugal, England and Flanders. Already an important base for Genoese and Pisan businessmen when under Muslim rule, Mallorca became in addition the home of influential communities of Catalan merchants, of naturalised Italians and Provençaux and of Jewish merchants from southern France, Spain and North Africa.