The Blue Room of the Calpe Town Hall has hosted this afternoon the presentation of the book and the Didactic Guide to the The Knight of Ifach. The decline of the medieval city, an exhibition that can currently be visited at the Provincial Archaeological Museum of Alicante MARQ, which displays a fragment of wall with a graffito that shows the first representation of the human figure that appeared in this enclave of the medieval Pobla de Ifach and reveals important information about the history and society that inhabited it in the 14th century.
From now on, the schools in the town of Calpe will receive the didactic material produced around this exhibition, which will allow the students to get to know in depth one of the most interesting chapters in the history of the town.
The research team led by MARQ archaeologist José Luis Menéndez found this piece of wall in 2014 among the remains of a large building next to the access system to the medieval town of Ifach called Domus Lauria. It is a caput mansum or construction destined for the accommodation and exercise of the lordly power of the representatives and members of the House of Lauria, lords of Ifach, during their stays in the territory or castrum during the first half of the 14th century.
This piece was found among the remains, showing a medieval knight, painted in graphite, wearing a helmet with chain mail and a shield in his left hand from which a heraldic emblem also appears in the wind. This coat of arms corresponds to the arms of the Ampuritan branch of the Casal de Barcelona, specifically of Juan I of Aragon and Xérica, who was Count of Ampurias between 1364 and 1398, and whose troops defended Ifach and the territory of the castrum of Calp during the siege of King Pedro I of Castile in the winter of 1365 in the conflict known as the War of the Two Peters (1356-1369).
The research carried out by the MARQ has revealed all the details of this attack, which resulted in the decline of the medieval town and the progressive abandonment of a population that ended up occupying the present-day enclaves of Calp, Benissa and Teulada.
The presentation ceremony was presided over by the mayoress of Calpe, Ana Sala, and also attended by José Alberto Cortés, managing director of the MARQ Foundation, who acted on behalf of the vice-president of the Provincial Council and deputy for culture Julia Parra Aparicio, the archaeologist José Luis Menéndez and Francesc Joan Monjo, from the Institut d'Estudis Calpins, who acted as the book's presenter and moderator.
