page_title: Maria de Luna
section_title: Day to day administration
hierarchical_section_title: Maria de Luna / Day to day administration
caption_attribution_description: Català: Església de Sant Martí (Sogorb) This is a photo of a building indexed in the Valencian heritage register as Bé de Rellevància Local (BRL) under the reference 12.07.104-010.
context_page_description: Maria de Luna was queen consort of Aragon, as the spouse of King Martin I of Aragon, from his ascension in 1396 to her death in 1406. In the early years of Martin's reign, she served as regent of Aragon while her husband tended to affairs in Sicily, a kingdom to which he had also had a claim.
  She was the daughter and heiress of the Aragonese noble Lope, Lord and 1st Count of Luna and Lord of Segorbe and his second wife Brianda d’Agout, an aristocratic woman from Provence.
  Maria was betrothed to Martin as a child, and brought up at the court of Martin's mother, Queen Eleanor of Sicily. The couple married in Barcelona on 13 June 1372, and Maria became queen upon her husband's accession in 1396. At the time of his accession to the throne, Martin was in Sicily, so Maria acted as regent alongside Queen Dowager Violant of Bar, and Matthew, Count of Foix until Martin's return in 1397.
  Maria was politically active and exerted influence upon both policy and society, and was considered by some a more talented ruler than Martin himself.
context_section_description: Records of Maria de Luna's court's food consumption, purchases, food quality and quantity, and methods of preparation have implications for structures of daily life in the Iberian Peninsula during the early fifteenth century. Compared to those surviving for other households of similar rank in this period, the accounts of Maria de Luna in "Food in the Accounts of a Travelling lady: Maria de Luna, queen of Aragon, in 1403" contain more detail, describing specific dishes cooked for the queen's table, the food consumption per person, the weight of the animals used for meat, and the amounts of wheat used to make a certain quantity of bread. 
  As with the king, every meal Maria de Luna ate was a public display; what she ate, drank, and how she behaved distinguished her from others and made her a model for those around her. Customs were distinct in every royal household, and Maria de Luna's was defined by "her close relationship with the mendicant orders and with charity, but also through the attention she paid to medical advice, given her fragile health." Even during Lent, for instance, she ate poultry at her doctors's advice due to the "vitality [it] brought to sick bodies".
  Maria de Luna's accounts from 1403 also reflect the lavishness of the court in Valencia and the consistency and variety of foodstuffs also indicates the queen's prestige. An analysis of the accounts of 1403 describes how at stake "was the image that the queen projected to her guests, and in general to her subjects; food and the general levels of display that went with it on a daily basis were among the principal elements of prestige available to her."  Valencian agriculture was able to provide a wide variety of food to the city's market. But even as Maria de Luna travelled to smaller locations during the year of 1403, the court was still able to provide a plethora of food to the household. This suggests that suppliers could have been following Maria de Luna as she travelled.
caption: Statue of Maria de Luna outside the Church of St. Martin, Segorbe
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