Domingo Ram y Lanaja
Domingo Ram y Lanaja (1345–25 April 1445) was an Aragonese politician and diplomat who served as Viceroy of Sicily from 1415 to 1419. He helped shape the politics of Aragon, the papacy, and the late medieval church. He was born in Alcañiz, in the area of today’s Teruel province.
He studied with the Canons Regular of Saint Augustine and earned a doctorate in canon and civil law (utroque iure) at the University of Lleida in 1406. In the 1390s he held church duties in Alcañiz and Zaragoza and took part in the Aragonese Courts. By 1405 he was the archdiocesan collector for Zaragoza, handling funds for the papal court at Avignon.
Under Antipope Benedict XIII he rose to prominence. He was admitted as referendary in Monaco in 1406 and became a personal attendant to Benedict XIII in Perpignan in 1407. Ram y Lanaja acted as a papal nuncio in Spain and was one of seven ambassadors sent at the start of 1409 to negotiate with the Council of Pisa and Pope Gregory XII, a mission that failed. He attended the Council of Perpignan in 1409 and was elected Bishop of Huesca on 5 May 1410.
During the Caspe succession crisis around 1412, Ram y Lanaja was one of three Aragonese judges charged with choosing a new king. The outcome was the selection of Infante Fernando de Antequera (Ferdinand I of Aragón). He consecrated the new king on 15 January 1414.
In early 1415 he went to Naples to arrange the marriage of Infante Juan of Aragón (later John II) to Queen Joan II of Naples. That year he was made a nuncio for Benedict XIII in Naples and the western Mediterranean, but Joan II chose to ally with Rome rather than Avignon. Ram y Lanaja then became Viceroy of Aragonese Sicily, a post he held from 1415 to 1419.
He was moved to the see of Lleida in November 1415, with Alfonso de Borja (the future Pope Callixtus III) as one of his vicars general. He took part in the Council of Lleida in October 1418 and eventually shifted allegiance from Avignon to Rome.
In 1423 he was secretly made a cardinal priest with the title of Santi Giovanni e Paolo. He led the Council of Tarragona in 1424 to end the remaining elements of the Western Schism and admonished King Alfonso V of Aragon for supporting schismatics at Peñíscola. He became president of the Generalitat of Catalonia on 14 July 1428 and played a major role in the Council of Tortosa in 1429 to reform the church, including catechetical provisions.
Ram y Lanaja governed the see of Lerida from 1430 to 1435 and helped negotiate a five-year truce with Castile near Soria, announced in July 1430. He did not participate in the 1431 conclave that elected Eugenius IV but was named cardinal protoprete in 1434. He administrated Tarragona again from August 1434 and, in 1435, urged Alfonso V to press his claim to Naples; he entered Naples on 10 July 1438.
He attended the Basel Council in 1439, opposing the deposition of Eugenius IV, and was briefly removed as Tarragona’s administrator by the pope before being restored on 4 July 1440. On that date he was promoted to the metropolitan see of Tarragona and returned to Aragon as a counselor to Alfonso V during his war with Castile. In 1444 he acted as an arbiter between Castile and Navarre, and Eugenius IV appointed him bishop of the suburbicarian see of Porto e Santa Rufina the same year.
Domingo Ram y Lanaja died in 1445 in Rome and was buried in the Basilica of St. John Lateran.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 01:12 (CET).