St. Vincent's Day

Today is St. Vincent's Day, patron saint of Valencia. He was a Dominican preacher and a very important person in Valencian politics six centuries ago. If you want to do something special you should go to the outsides of the Cathedral, next to the Plaza de la Almoina, and look for a tiled picture located in the wall (just above this text). There you can see two armies that are about to fight each other and, in the middle, there is one single man in a black and white robe trying to make peace between them. This man is St. Vincent and the two armies are the Centelles and the Vilaraguts, two ancient valencian families confronted, a kind of Montagues and Capulets before Montagues and Capulets. These two families were always fighting and whatever issue happened was one more reason to fight again: a misstep, a dirty look... Finally they found the perfect excuse to exterminate definitively with the enemy: a succession war between Castile's Crown and Aragon's Crown. The Vilaragut family decided to support the Aragonese candidate, Jaime de Urgel, and the Centelles family decided to give their support to the Castilian candidate, Fernando de Trastámara. After some time of violent confrontations, both sides decided to solve the problem through diplomatic channels. Six hundred years ago, in 1412, in the so called Compromiso de Caspe (commitment in which St. Vicent took a crucial part), the most important people of both kingdoms chose to elect the Castilian candidate, Fernando de Trastámara, as King of the Aragon's Crown under the name of Fernando I. With this election, and as the winner party, the Centelles family gave a hard blow to their Vilaragut rivals. No love affair, nor Romeo or Juliet is known between those two families but that doesn't mean that it didn't happen. Today is a good day to toast to this unrevealed and tragic love.