The kingdom's founder earned his epithet the hard way. James I of Aragon wrested Mallorca and its sister islands from the Almohad Caliphate, a feat that won him the name James the Conqueror and folded the Balearics into the Crown of Aragon. When he died, he split his inheritance among his surviving sons: Peter, the eldest, took the mainland as Peter III of Aragon, remembered as Peter the Great, while the younger James received the islands and reigned as James II of Majorca. On paper it was a tidy division. In practice James I had created a fragile Mediterranean enclave, wedged between two rivals forever at odds — the Capetian kings of France and the Crown of Aragon — and no amount of careful maneuvering, not even a failed attempt to marry his son into the House of Savoy, could make its position secure.

The trouble was baked in from the start. After 1279 Peter III decreed that the King of Majorca must hold his crown as a vassal of Aragon, and the demand set brother against brother. James II tried at first to steer an independent course, but his kingdom was thin — no parliament, no unifying institutions, always short of the machinery a state needs — and independence proved impossible to hold. That same year he submitted, recognizing the Aragonese king as his overlord under the Treaty of Perpignan. Later, when James II threw in his lot with Pope Martin IV and the French against Aragon, the reprisal was swift: Alfonso, son of the Aragonese king, invaded and seized Mallorca in 1286. Only a decade later did the Treaty of Anagni hand the islands back.

Money, more than armies, undid the little kingdom. When James II died in 1324, his son Sancho inherited a strained treasury, and an invasion of Sardinia drove it deeper into debt. In 1325, to settle the question of who would follow him, Sancho named the kings of Aragon as his heirs — a decision that steadied the succession but did nothing for the accounts. War with the Republic of Genoa between 1329 and 1336 cost the kingdom overseas markets it could not afford to lose. To cover the shortfall the crown turned, as medieval rulers so often did, to its Jewish community, levying special taxes and fines on people with little power to refuse. Even so, the debts kept mounting, and the strain would help pull the kingdom apart.

By 1341 Peter IV of Aragon had decided the arrangement had run its course, and he broke off relations as a prelude to war. In May 1343 he invaded the Balearics; the following year he took the mainland counties of Roussillon and Cerdanya, leaving James III of Majorca with only his French possessions. James sold even those and, in 1349, gambled everything on winning his islands back by force. He was defeated and killed at the Battle of Llucmajor on 25 October 1349. With his death the Kingdom of Majorca lost its independence for good, surviving thereafter only in personal union with the Crown of Aragon — the same islands, under the same distant king.

Yet the kingdom did not simply vanish. For nearly four centuries it persisted as a distinct realm within the Crown of Aragon, keeping its own viceroy and political identity even as it shared a monarch. Its position, though, never grew any safer. Caught among the Hundred Years' War, the long struggle against the Marinids of North Africa that drew in Castile and Aragon alike, and Genoese schemes to turn the Balearics into a satellite, a small kingdom bound by vassalage to both France and Aragon could never simply stand aside. The end came with the War of the Spanish Succession. The Crown of Aragon backed the losing claimant, the Archduke Charles, and when Philip V triumphed he abolished the old kingdom outright, sweeping it away with the Nueva Planta decrees of 1715.