A History of Spain and Portugal

History of Spain and Portugal
Vol. 1
By Stanley G. Payne

Chapter One
Ancient Hispania

[1] The Hispanic peninsula lies at the extreme southwestern tip of Europe, in the direction of Africa and the outer Atlantic. It is partially separated from the rest of Europe by the Pyrenees and forms a geographic stepping stone between that continent and Africa. Despite its unique location, the peninsula does not form a fully unified geographic entity, for it is divided by steep internal mountain ranges and in some regions by virtual deserts. It is second only to Switzerland as the highest area in western Europe, the land rising rapidly from the narrow coastal lowlands to hill country. Save for the green belts that comprise the northern and northwestern fringes, it is a predominantly dry area, in most parts of which the rainfall scarcely exceeds fifteen inches a year. Though the peninsula contains mineral deposits of value, its soil has always been poor compared with that of most of western Europe. According to a classic categorization made in 1891, only 10 percent of the surface of the peninsula is genuinely fertile. Approximately 45 percent is moderately arable. Another 35 percent can be used for any sort of productive purpose only with difficulty, and l0 percent is totally useless.

Most formal histories of Spain devote considerable space to the peninsula's prehistory. During the past century some attention has been given to archaeology, and even more to hypothetical definitions of the various ethnic groups that inhabited the region before the [2] Roman conquest. A great deal of this remains speculation, for the data unearthed by archaeological study in Spain is still rather scant, and the origins, culture, and duration of pre-Roman ethnic groups are for the most part poorly defined.

During the first millennium B.C. the peninsula was inhabited by a complex variety of peoples, most of them organized into tribal groups. There has been much controversy over the ethnic and geographic origins of the ancient inhabitants. In the early twentieth century the "African" thesis was in vogue, postulating that the ancient Hispanic tribes were mainly the descendents of white migrants from northwest Africa. More recent interpretations, however, have stressed immigration and cultural influences from southern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. Conclusive proof for any single unified interpretation is lacking, but the weight of evidence now favors the "Europeanist" interpretation. At any rate, in ancient times the peoples of the peninsula were not radically distinct from but possessed many of the cultural characteristics of the population of other parts of southern Europe and the Mediterranean littoral. The largest single ethnic element were the Iberian tribes that moved into the peninsula at some point during the second millennium B.C.--whether from north Africa or southern Europe--and spread out over a broad area. The first clearly definable group of immigrants from central or northern Europe was a sizable wave of Celtic migrants who entered the peninsula during the eighth and ninth centuries B.C.

It appears that the main ethnic and genetic components of the historic Hispanic peoples were already present before the Roman conquest, and that the great majority of subsequent "Spaniards" (or "Portuguese") were descendents of the original highly diversified ethnic stocks established in the pre-Roman period. Though the peninsula has been subject to invasion and very light immigration throughout its history, population movement at any time since the Roman conquest was not heavy enough to alter the genetic or phenotypical composition of the inhabitants significantly. The Romans described members of most of the Hispanic tribes as rather short, dark-haired, white-skinned, and physically agile, if not particularly muscular-- characteristics which would seem to describe modern as well as ancient inhabitants of the peninsula.

Hispania, the name given by the Romans to the peninsula, was a strictly geographic label without specific cultural or political connotation. The peninsula had always been divided into geographic and ethno-cultural regions which differed greatly from each other. The most advanced of the ancient Hispanic communities was the kingdom of Tartessos in the south, covering roughly the modern region of western Andalusia. When first encountered by Greek traders, Tartesian [3] society was centered in a number of fairly large cities and had a well developed economy based on agriculture, cattle-raising, fishing, commerce, and mining. Its technology was comparatively sophisticated, as evidenced in its mining, shipbuilding, irrigation, and ox drawn plows. The society was highly stratified, dominated by warrior and priestly castes and a small class of large landholders and wealthy merchants. Much of its land cultivation and cattle production was undertaken on the large estates owned by the upper classes, and the bulk of the population were peasants with few rights. In general, Tartessos was not greatly dissimilar to other relatively advanced urbanized societies of the Mediterranean. It was governed by a despotic monarchy legitimized by divine myth and thaumaturgy. The Tartessian state reached its maximum strength in the late seventh and any sixth centuries B.C., dominating the southern part of the peninsula and wielding influence in the affairs of the west Mediterranean. By the fifth century it had fallen under Carthaginian domination, whence it later passed to Roman rule.

The largest ethnic group in the peninsula, the Iberians, were strongly tribal and warlike, qualities characteristic of the population of ancient Hispania as a whole. The most advanced of the Iberians and the people to whom the name Iberian was originally given (the word was extended in Greek usage to refer to the peninsula) lived in communities on the eastern coast. The eastern Iberians were considerably influenced by Greek and Phoenician merchants and immigrant colonies, who contributed much to their culture and political organization. Their communities never formed a major state, as did Tartessos, but were organized in a variety of small city-states not dissimilar to the Greek. In the east as in the south, forms of monarchy prevailed. The Iberian alphabet in the east was one of two alphabets found in pre-Roman Hispania; the other was the Tartessian alphabet in the south. Rather similar in structure, they were both alphabetic and syllabic in form.

Ancient Hispanic societies were increasingly primitive and less politically and technologically advanced the farther they were from the south and east and the nearer to the north and west. The tribes of the southern part of the central plateau revealed a transitional pattern; they were partly urbanized and semiliterate but proportionately more rural and pastoral than their counterparts to the south and east. The central tribes were also more representative in political and social structure. Their larger towns were governed by a form of republican assembly dominated by a semiaristocratic oligarchy.

The northern and western groups were almost completely rural and illiterate and never formed organized states. The most distinctive ethnic community among them was that of the Basques of the western [4] Pyrenees and adjacent foothills. The origin of the Basques is shrouded in mystery. Whether or not they were indeed the original, pre-Iberian inhabitants of the peninsula, as is sometimes conjectured, their language--which has persisted in rural regions to this day--is unique and non-Indo-European. Their society was familial and tribal, and their economy, like that of most of the peninsular tribes, was essentially pastoral. They remained comparatively secluded in their hills until late Roman times.

Celtic immigration spread through much of the northern part of the peninsula during the eighth and ninth centuries B.C. In the northern sector of the central plateau and in the Duero valley in the interior of the northwestern area the Celts fused with the earlier population to form so-called Celtiberian communities. Some of these practiced extensive agriculture along with raising flocks and herds, and in the Duero valley tribal collectivist social patterns prevailed. In the northern hills of Asturias and the central Cantabrian range tribal life was more primitive. There the original population were mostly immigrants from southern France and northern Italy and were apparently taller and more muscular than the average Iberian. Partly because of the poorer soil, the economy of the northwest was largely pastoral, and social patterns tended toward matriarchy, possibly from Celtic influence.

The west, called Lusitania by the Romans, is set apart from the northern and central areas by watersheds. The Lusitanians had a better-developed agrarian culture than was to be found elsewhere save in the sophisticated south and east. More prosperous than the groups of the center and north, their society was also more sharply divided by class. During antiquity, this western area was largely ignored by the outer world and by the advanced eastern and southern cultures. It had few metals, the principal commercial attraction of the peninsula.

The complete lack of political or cultural unity among the disparate societies of the peninsula impeded rather than facilitated their conquest by Rome. The incorporation of Hispania into the empire was a long, slow process, lasting from 218 B.C. to 19 B.C. (though the major part was completed by 133 B.C.). This was a much longer time than was required to subjugate other major portions of the Mediterranean littoral. The fact also that it was highlighted by celebrated examples of diehard resistance--the most famous of which was the struggle to the death of the town of Numantia in 133 B.C.--has led some Spanish historians to view the ancient Hispanic tribes as already "Spanish" in their cultural characteristics, particularly in their xenophobia and obstinate resistance to foreign domination. In fact, the relative difficulties encountered in subduing Hispania stemmed in part from the [5] very absence of any such coherent entity as "Spain" or an "Hispanic culture." Many of the tribes had to be conquered separately, one by one, whereas in more advanced or unified regions defeat of the central government was enough to bring the whole area under Roman sway. The cultural particularism of the Hispanic tribes, together with the formidable geographic obstacles imposed by the peninsula, are as important as Hispanic xenophobia in explaining the long delay in consummating the Roman conquest.

Yet the discovery of enduring characteristics common to prehistoric Hispania and historic Spain may not be entirely the product of the cultural imagination. Then, as later, the peninsula was a marginal area culturally as well as geographically, and participated only with some lag in the major developments of antiquity. Most of the peninsula's societies were economically and technologically backward compared with the advanced areas of Mediterranean civilization--a gap that for the most part was never fully made good in Spanish history. The ancient population of the peninsula was less urbanized and not merely more agrarian but more pastoral than the more sophisticated regions of Mediterranean Europe. The social structure was obviously more archaic, and in much of the peninsula dominated by a kind of military aristocracy. The emphasis was on military much more than on productive values. In some respects, these qualities of ancient Hispania paralleled those of most of the rest of the ancient Mediterranean world, but in Hispania they were more pronounced and were less challenged by alternate developments. Historically, the tendency in the peninsula toward such ways of life has been more widespread and persistent than elsewhere in Mediterranean and western Europe.

Moreover, there is some support for the notion that the rather baroque quality of Spanish esthetics was also characteristic of ancient times. In the more developed areas there was considerable emphasis on the gaudy and sumptuous. Much of the gold in the ancient Mediterranean came from the peninsula, which seems to have been the "El Dorado" of ancient times, and Hispanic gold ornaments were known throughout the ancient world. It has even been conjectured that the valuing of gold as a precious metal originated in the peninsula. Certainly the opportunity to obtain gold and other metals whetted Roman interest.

The Romans brought political unity and juridical norms to the peninsula for the first time. Endemic warfare and raiding between the pastoral tribes and the more settled communities was brought to an end. The Roman road system was extended throughout, unifying Hispanic communications. During the golden age of Roman Hispania--from the first to the third centuries A.D.--the entire peninsula [6] was incorporated militarily and most of the population was incorporated culturally into the Roman world. Linguistic unity was slowly achieved as Latin-derived dialects replaced the former native languages, even among most of the common people. This process encountered the least resistance and went forward most rapidly in the more cosmopolitan south and east, where the upper classes, who controlled most of the land, often made common cause with the Romans. In other regions, tribal chiefs were brought into the Roman property system as latifundists.

There was extensive Roman immigration to the more developed eastern and southern areas of the peninsula. In other regions Roman culture was spread by administrators, educators, soldiers, merchants, and technicians. Sons of the Hispanic upper classes were sometimes sent to Rome for education. During the early part of the second century A.D. Rome was ruled by emperors of Hispano-Roman origin, and there were three more emperors from Hispania in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. Several important philosophers and writers of the empire, including Seneca and Lucan, came from the peninsula. Yet it should be noted that nearly all these major figures were the offspring of Roman officials and colonists living there, not of Romanized native Hispani.

Large numbers of Hispanic troops served in the Roman forces; the closing phases of the conquest of the peninsula itself had been carried out to a considerable degree by Hispanic auxiliaries from the conquered regions. Indeed, the majority of the "Roman" troops that besieged Numantia had been Hispanic auxiliaries. (But conversely, the loss of life in the Hispanic wars had been a major factor in decimating the old Roman citizen army and converting it into a professional mercenary force.) Hispanic warriors had served abroad as mercenaries under Carthage, and later fought under diverse foreign banners after the fall of Rome. Altogether, the peninsula was the major source of mercenaries in the Mediterranean for nearly two thousand years.

The vital centers of Roman Hispania were its flourishing cities, and the key unit of local administration, the civitas, combined both town and countryside in a single district organized around the city. The boundaries of the civitas were often based upon ancient Iberian or Celtiberian tribal districts but under the Roman system were geared to the social and economic needs of the urban centers. In 73 A.D. the right of Roman law and citizenship was apparently extended to nearly all Hispanic towns. During the first and second centuries there was a great expansion of urban wealth and a fairly strong Hispanic urban middle class was formed. During the troubled final centuries of the empire the Hispanic cities seem to have been somewhat more [7] orderly than those of the eastern part of the Roman world, and economic decline from the third century on apparently affected Hispania proportionately rather less than certain other regions of the empire, including the most advanced and prosperous sectors.

Roman capital dominated commerce, in which Hispania played an essentially colonial role. Hispanic metals, especially gold, and Hispanic wool were imported by Rome in great volume. The peninsula also shipped large quantities of the three Mediterranean food staples, grain, olive oil, and wine, to Rome. By the fourth century, Hispania bad begun to rival Egypt as the empire's most important granary and continued to sustain a considerable volume of Mediterranean commerce as late as the fifth century.

Under Roman rule much of the countryside was transformed. Extensive irrigation projects were completed and the area under cultivation greatly expanded. Yet despite extension of the latifundia system, a sizable proportion of the cultivated area was evidently exploited as small, individual properties during the first part of the Roman period, partly as a result of the Roman breakup of collective and communal patterns in the north-center and west. Moreover, Roman reorganization and expansion of agriculture relocated and stabilized part of the tribal population in the north and west, bringing the people down from the hills and settling them on small farming plots. In general, the concentration of land in large latifundia was not as extensive as in Italy or Gaul until the second or third centuries.

At its height Roman Hispania may have had a population of five million or more. This was concentrated particularly in the more urban south and east but was also fairly dense in the south-central region, in Lusitania, and in parts of the northwest. Yet the Romanization of the peninsula was far from complete. Much of the north and northwest was influenced little by Roman life. Resistance was always strongest among the more primitive, warlike tribes of the Cantabrian mountain range in the far north. A somewhat tenuous military dominion was maintained, but even at the height of the empire there were only a few Roman towns in the far north. The Basques offered less direct military resistance but remained even more impervious to cultural assimilation.

Christianity spread through Roman Hispania during the second and third centuries. There, as elsewhere, it was a predominantly urban religion. Large portions of the countryside remained for a long time almost untouched, as did most of Cantabria and almost all the Basque region. By the beginning of the fourth century, however, Hispania apparently had a Christian minority at least as large proportionately as that of the empire as a whole--upwards of l0 percent. After the official recognition of the church early in the fourth century, [8] its following greatly increased, until almost the entire peninsula had become Christian. The pattern of Hispanic church organization was similar to that of most other parts of the empire: bishoprics became coterminous with the urban-centered civitas units and archepiscopal sees were established in provincial capitals. By the fifth century there had developed a distinctively Hispanic church, whose individual religious culture was most evident in the use of the special Hispanic rite (later inaccurately called the Mozarabic rite) in its services until the eleventh century. Theologically the Hispanic church was orthodox Catholic, though the Priscillian heresy of the late fourth century originated in Galicia (the northwestern corner of the peninsula) and Donatism was temporarily widespread in the fifth century. Yet the orthodox Hispano-Catholic church became increasingly strong and well organized, and provided spiritual and cultural leadership and identity which a faltering imperial government could no longer offer.

Hispania could not escape the general effects of the Roman social and economic decline from the third century on. If at first the economic decline seemed less severe than in parts of Gaul and northern Italy, this was because Hispanic agriculture had never developed to as high a level and because, aside from the barbarian devastation of 264-276, it did not at first suffer as much from the Germanic incursions.

The social changes that took place in the Hispanic countryside paralleled those of the rest of the empire. Latifundia increased in size and the pressure against small farmers and shepherds mounted. Inflation, taxes, warfare, and the drop in commerce produced great unrest, climaxed by sporadic peasant revolts in parts of Gaul and Hispania during the fourth and fifth centuries. Several efforts at land reform were made by the imperial administration in Hispania to protect and encourage small farmers, mainly in the central plateau, but institutional weakness and uncertain economic conditions frustrated these attempts. By the fourth century a significant minority of the peninsula's population lived as enserfed coloni on great estates, seeking shelter from the want and violence which the decline of imperial order and prosperity had left behind. Moreover, free peasants tended increasingly to place their land and labor at the service and the protection of large landlords by clientage relations known as commendatio and patrocinium.

The dissolution of Roman authority and its replacement by that of a Visigothic monarchy was a long, slow process. There was no sudden Visigothic invasion or conquest. The small host of the Visigothic ruler Ataulf that crossed the Pyrenees into Hispania in 415 acted as a federated army of the feeble Roman state, charged with expelling Vandal invaders from southern Hispania and subduing the Germanic [9] Suevi who had dominated the northwestern quarter of the peninsula for several years. From their principal base in southwestern France, Visigothic bands slowly began to extend their control over the more lightly inhabited central plateau of the peninsula, sometimes acting in the name of the emperor, sometimes merely advancing their own interests. The imperial government had broken down and the Hispanic population lacked the civil or military means to defend itself. The main body of Visigoths did not enter the peninsula until the reign of Alaric II (484-507), and then largely as a result of military pressure from the Franks to the north. They may have numbered no more than 300,000 in a peninsula with 4,000,000 inhabitants. The Visigoths were superior to the Hispani only in the application of armed force; economically, socially, and culturally the Hispanic population was in most regions far more advanced.

Though before their entry into the peninsula the Visigoths were culturally more Romanized than any other Germanic group, they were an essentially pastoral people, unlike the Ostrogoths and Suevi, whose societies were agrarian. The Visigoths settled in greatest numbers in the more sparsely populated, largely pastoral north-central area of the peninsula, and were thereby isolated from the main social and economic centers of the Hispanic population.

The Visigothic monarchy as an independent state was first proclaimed by Euric in southwestern France in 476, after the deposition of the last emperor in Rome by the Ostrogoths. The political center of the monarchy was not moved to the peninsula, however, until the reign of Athanagild (551-567), when a new capital was established at the town of Toledo in the central plateau, moving the axis of Hispanic life from the coastal regions for the first time. Visigothic authority was slowly expanded throughout the entire peninsula with the conquest of the Suevi during the reign of Leovigild (568-586) and the expulsion of Byzantine forces from their last remaining toehold in the southeast by Swinthila (621-631).

Like other post-Roman rulers in different parts of the former empire, the Visigothic kings of Hispania considered themselves the heirs of Rome and adopted Roman insignia and symbols of authority. They viewed themselves as successors, rather than destroyers or even replacers, of the empire. The Visigothic monarchy accepted the Roman theory of the state as a public power resting upon essentially absolute authority, though the official conversion to Catholicism that occurred during the reign of Leovigild accepted a modification of royal sovereignty by the religious and ethical tutelage of the church.

At the top of Hispano-Visigothic society there emerged an elite of some two hundred leading aristocratic families associated with the court and a broader aristocratic class of perhaps ten thousand people who held possession of most of the best land. Under the Visigoths, [10] the aristocracy did not form a closed caste but were steadily recruited from below on the strength of personal achievement or royal favor. Over a period of a century or more there occurred a partial fusion of the original Visigothic warrior aristocracy and the socioeconomic elite of Hispanic society.

The Visigothic monarchy remained an elective institution, each new king nominally chosen or ratified by the aristocracy. The crown was assisted in decisions and administration by an aula regia or royal council, but until the next to the last generation of Visigothic rule broad assemblies of notables were called to ratify important decisions, a last residue of the earlier tribal assemblies of the Germanic peoples. Administratively, the Visigothic monarchy relied on much of Roman usage and employed Hispanic personnel in local administration. By the sixth century, however, the Roman administrative system had fallen into such decay that it could not be revived, and in place of the old provincial system there evolved a new pattern of regional and local overlordship based upon regional dukes (duces) and heads of smaller districts or territoria called counts (comes). The new ducal administrative regions tended to coincide with the old Roman provinces, and the territoria of the counts with the old civitas units. The old municipal system also fell into desuetude and was slowly replaced by a pattern of royal administration and local overlords nominally ratified by the crown. Most of the Hispanic population remained juridically free, but the process of commendatio continued, as peasants pledged parts of their land or services to local overlords for security, and the class of enserfed coloni grew larger. Yet there were still a number of relatively autonomous local rural communities that preserved their legal identity.

The cultural and economic life of Visigothic Hispania was carried on almost exclusively by the native Hispani, to whom was due the relative prosperity of part of the sixth and seventh centuries. Roman law had to be relied upon in administering the affairs of the social and economic infrastructure, and over a period of two centuries there evolved a slow fusion of Visigothic custom and Roman common law. The general trend was away from the Roman system of explicit private property toward more communal, reciprocal, usufructural relations in the ownership and use of property. The Hispano-Visigothic modus vivendi found codified expression in the promulgation of the Liber ludiciorum (later commonly known in Castilian as the Fuero Juzgo) in 654. This fusion of aspects of Visigothic personal codes with Latin civil and property law superseded several less complete codifications and provided an organized code on which to base property rights and civil administration for the Visigothic aristocracy and, to some extent, the Hispanic common people.
[11] It has sometimes been maintained that under the Visigothic monarchy a mode of theocracy developed that thereafter characterized Hispanic religion and government. Such a notion is considerably exaggerated. Even during the Arian period of the Visigothic monarchy, when a great theological gulf existed between the rulers and organized Christianity, the Hispanic bishops proved themselves to be obedient to legally established authority. They rarely hesitated to uphold the power of the state in the secular realm, even to the extent of supporting one Arian king against his rebellious (but orthodox Catholic) son. When finally the monarchy accepted Catholicism in 589, it was made clear that this conversion was not forced upon the state by the church but was freely decided upon by the monarchy to promote its own interests. The church lost a significant measure of independence by recognizing the right of the crown to appoint the members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The king became the nominal head of church councils and took a formal responsibility to see that church affairs were properly run. The subsequent Councils of Toledo were organized along more or less Byzantine lines as mixed assemblies of high ecclesiastical and state officials, with the clerics responsible for church affairs and the secular officials bearing primary responsibility for state legislation.

Thus rather than theocracy there developed a church-state symbiosis in which the power of the crown was uppermost but in which the church played a major role in trying to stabilize public institutions and authority. After the Fourth Council of Toledo in 633. approval by the councils was required to legalize succession to the nonhereditary Visigothic throne, anathematize usurpers, and ratify amnesties. Church leaders were increasingly employed by the crown in administration because they were the primary source of educated, technically competent, and trustworthy personnel. Yet the crown did not intervene in the theological affairs of the church; religious councils were presided over by an archbishop, not the king. The Christian church became the only cohesive institution in Visigothic Hispania.

The early Hispanic church reached its cultural height during the era of Isidore of Seville (first third of the seventh century), shining briefly as the brightest center of learning in western Europe. For the common people it provided the only identity and hope which they knew during this period. Hispanic monasteries played a special role, becoming quite numerous, and the most active force in raising spiritual standards, expanding the influence of the church, and providing a spiritual leadership for the church.


Toward the end of the Visigothic period the church had become a major property holder, with almost every parish and monastery of note possessing lands or rights that provided it with income. The [12] church had achieved a special legal status, developing a code of canon law and special tribunals for the clergy and their affairs. The Hispanic church thus came to constitute a fairly well ordered state of its own within the poorly structured Visigothic political framework.

Yet despite its outwardly imposing strength, the Hispanic church failed to incorporate all the population of the peninsula within its following even as late as the seventh century. The peoples of the northern hills remained vague in their religious identification, while the Basques were almost untouched by Christianity. Even among the more densely inhabited southern and eastern districts, conversion of much of the rural population remained nominal at best. Hispanic Christianity was still to a considerable degree an urban religion, and tended to become weaker the farther one moved from the principal centers of population.

This was the more significant because it may be roughly generalized that throughout the Visigothic era the urban economy and society of southern and eastern Hispania continued to decline. The failure of administration, which the Visigothic crown was unable to restore, the absence of monetary order, progressive disruption of trade routes, and the decline of economic opportunities all continued even after the disorders of the fifth and sixth centuries had ended. The rise of Muslim power in the east Mediterranean during the seventh century presaged new commercial and military challenges. By that time Hispanic urban society had lost most of the vigor and prosperity that it had known during the high Roman period.

Even at its height, Roman rule had been unable to eliminate the strong regional and ethnic differences that divided the peninsula, and these became more pronounced again under the Visigoths. Fusion between the Visigothic elite and the Hispani population was never complete. The northwestern corner of the peninsula, ruled for two hundred years by the Suevi monarchy, remained a distinctive, not thoroughly assimilated region. The southwestern tip of France, known as Septimania, remained under Visigothic rule and tended to link northeastern Hispania with France. The sophisticated eastern coastal region had long been interconnected with the commerce and culture of the Italian peninsula, while the equally sophisticated towns of the south were closely associated with northwest Africa and with Byzantine commerce. In the far north, Asturians and Cantabrians were at best only partly assimilated, and the Basques remained almost entirely apart. Finally, there was a significant Jewish minority in the southern and eastern towns that played a major role in manufacturing and commerce. Subjected to attempted conversion and sporadic persecution by the Visigothic crown in the seventh century, Hispanic Jews were a politically disaffected and potentially rebellious element in the major towns.

[13] The Visigothic monarchy never developed a cohesive polity. Visigothic aristocrats and military leaders deemed themselves part of a personal power association with the crown and resisted extension of control. Royal succession remained elective, and the entire history of the monarchy was one of revolt, assassination, and internecine feuding. This insecurity placed a premium on military power, but the monarchy could not marshal resources to restore the independent standing army of Rome. Instead, a process of protofeudalization developed early and was expanded more rapidly in Visigothic Hispania than in Merovingian France. Decentralization was unavoidable, and power became a matter of personal relationship and example. The chief lieutenants of the crown were rewarded for their services by salaries or stipendia in the form of overlordship of land or temporary assignment of income from land held in precarium, that is, on a nominally revocable basis. This system was actually first used by the church to support local establishments, and by the seventh century was widely employed by the crown and also by the magnates (the high aristocracy) to pay their chief supporters and military retainers. The process of protofeudalization inevitably carried with it a splintering of juridical and economic sovereignty that further weakened political unity.

If the Visigothic aristocracy was unable to develop a unified, viable political system, it was nevertheless itself the beginning of the historic Hispanic master class. In this Visigothic caste the military aristocracy of the peninsula had its roots, creating a style and a psychology of the warrior nobleman that provided the dominant leadership for Hispanic society for more than a thousand years; this psychology ultimately managed to superimpose its values and attitudes on much of the society as a whole. Yet the success of the aristocratic ethos was a consequence of the experience of medieval Hispania, not of the rule of the Visigothic oligarchy, which largely proved an historic failure.

In the seventh century the caste relationship between the ruling group and much of the peasantry was little better than that of master to serf. A large proportion of the peasantry had been reduced to a kind of serfdom, and as the economy declined, economic exactions very likely increased. Evidence indicates that many Hispanic serfs and even many free peasants did not consider the protection and leadership they received worth the service demanded of them. During the last Visigothic century there were a number of peasant revolts and urban riots in protest against economic conditions.

In sum, the political and social structure of Visigothic Hispania was brittle and incohesive. It survived only until the first major challenge from without, then collapsed much more rapidly than it had been built.

Bibliography for Chapter I

[333] There are four recent multivolume general histories of Spain. Ramón Menéndez Pidal, the dean of Spanish philologists and a leading medievalist, has edited an Historia de España composed of contnbutions from the leading specialists in each period. Publication was begun in 1935, and the most recent volume (26) extends the history through 1833 only. Parts of the six-volume Histona de España edited by Luis Pericot Garcia (Barcelona, 1935-62) are of high quality, but this work is less full and more uneven. The older singleauthor work, Antonio Ballesteros y Beretta's Historia de España y su influencia en la Historia Universal, 12 vols. (Barcelona, 1918-41), is especially notable for its copious bibliographies. Ferran Soldevila's Historia de España 8 vols. (Barcelona, 1952-59), is the only multivolume general account written from a Catalan viewpoint. Luis Garcia de Valdeavellano began a multivolume Historia de España (Madrid, 1955), but the two volumes completed extend only through the early Middle Ages. See also his Curso de historia de las instituciones españolas: De los orígenes al final de la Edad Media (Madrid, 1968). On social and economic history, see Jaime Vicens Vives, ed., Historia social y económica de España y América, 5 vols. (Barcelona, 1957-59), which is uneven but very useful, and Vicens's own Historia económica de España, rev. ed., 2 vols. (Barcelona, 1964), now available in an English translation published by Princeton University Press. Though somewhat out of date, the basic bibliographical reference to Spanish historiography is B. Sánchez Alonso, Fuentes de la historia española e hispanoamericana, 3d ed., [334] 3 vols. (Madrid, 1952). Sánchez Alonso has also written the principal account of early Spanish historiography, Historia de la historiografia española, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1947-50).

The dean of Spanish prehistorians and leader of the "African" school is Pedro Bosch Gimpera. His two most important general works are Etnología de la Peninsula Ibérica (Barcelona, 1932), and Los pueblos de España (Barcelona, 1946). A somewhat similar interpretation is given by Luis Pericot García, La España primitiva (Barcelona, 1950). The best recent general synthesis of the history of ancient Hispania is Julio Caro Baroja's España primitiva y romana (Madrid, 1957). Martín Almagro, Ongen y formación del pueblo hispano (Barcelona, 1958), is also useful. Concerning ancient Hispanic art history, see José Camón Aznar, Las artes y los pueblos de Ja España primitiva (Madrid, 1954), and Luis Pericot García and Eduardo Ripoll Perello, eds., Prehistoric Art of the Western Mediterranean and the Sahara (Chicago, 1964).

There are a variety of monographs dealing with individual regions, cultures, or aspects of prehistoric Hispania. On Tartessos, see Adolph Schulten, Tartessos, rev. cd. (Madrid, 1950). Other significant works of Schulten are Hispania (Barcelona, 1920), and Numantia, 4 vols. (Munich, 1914-31). On Greeks, Phoenicians, and Carthaginians in the peninsula, see Antonio García y Bellido, Fenicios y cartaginenses en Occidente (Madrid, 1942), and Hispania gracca, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1948). For the Iberians, see Antonio Arribas, The Iberians (New York, 1965). The two best works on the peoples of the northern mountain ranges are Julio Caro Baroja, Los pueblos del norte de la Península Ibérica (Madrid, 1943), and Julio González Echegaray, Los cántabros (Santander, 1966).

On Roman Hispania, see R. Thouvenot, Essai sur la province romaine de Bétique (Paris, 1940); J. de Sena Ráfols, La vida en España en la época romana (Barcelona, 1944); C. H. V. Sutherland, The Romans in Spain 217 B.C.-A.D. 117 (London, 1939); and F. J. Wiseman's manual, Roman Spain (London, 1956). M. Tarradell, cd., Estudios de economía antigua de la Península Ibérica (Barcelona, 1968), is tedious but rewarding.

There is no satisfactory history of Visigothic Hispania. The best general account has been written by Manuel Torres as volume 3 of Menéndez Pidal's Historia de España. See also E. A. Thompson, The Goths in Spain (Oxford, 1969); Ramón de Abadal, Del reino de Tolosa al reino de Toledo (Madrid, 1960); and volumes I and 3 of J. Orlandis, cd., Estudios visigóticos (Madrid, 1964). There is a narrative of Visigothic history in Harold Livermore's The Origins of Spain and Portugal (London, 1971). The church under the Visigoths is treated in Z. García Villada, Historia eclesiástica de España, vol. 2 (Madrid, 1929); A. K. Ziegler, Church and State in Visigothic Spain (Washington, D.C., 1930); and Abadal, La batalla del adopcionismo en la desintegración de la iglesia visigoda (Barcelona, 1949). Two key monographs on institutional changes by Claudio Sánchez Albornoz are Ruina y extinción del municipio romano en España (Buenos Aires, 1943), and El 'stipendium' hispano-godo y los orígenes del beneficio prefeudal (Buenos Aires, 1947). The Germanic kingdom of the Suevi in the northwest corner of the peninsula is treated in Wilhelm Reinhard, Historia general del reino hispánico de los suevos (Madrid, 1952).

A History of Spain and Portugal
Vol. 1
By Stanley G. Payne

Chapter Two
Al-Andalus

[14] It is difficult to determine in detail exactly what happened in Hispania during the crucial years after 700, for little direct source material has survived. Though the Visigothic aristocracy had achieved a degree of fusion with Hispanic society and had secured its dominance as a warrior caste, much of it was corrupted by wealth and power and it had at best a very feeble sense of political legitimacy. The Visigothic monarchy had failed to build stable institutions, successful means for transmitting power, or a stable and loyal elite behind the throne. Strife between rival pretenders and their supporters persisted throughout the history of Visigothic Hispania. Leovigild, the strongest of its rulers, had himself to face a five-year revolt by his son. Ratification of the elective, as opposed to the hereditary, right by the councils of Toledo in the seventh century sustained Visigothic law but guaranteed endemic civil war. It was not uncommon for factions to accept and encourage foreign intervention on their behalf. In part because of this, Byzantium had been able to control much of southern Hispania for approximately seventy years, from the mid-sixth century down to the third decade of the seventh century, and the Frankish monarchy intervened actively on several occasions in the seventh century. The quick and easy Muslim takeover is understandable only in terms of this persistent failure of political institutions, the accepted custom of foreign intervention, and the apathy or submissiveness of most of the [15] Hispanic lower classes, accustomed to nearly a millennium of rule by outsiders, first by the Romans, then by the Visigoths.

During the latter part of the seventh century the main antagonism was between the descendants of Chindaswinth (642-653) and those of a subsequent ruler, Witiza (702-710). Supporters of Witiza's clan rused to accept the election of a rival candidate, Roderic, in 710, and sought assistance from the newly established Muslim overlords of North Africa. The Visigothic dissidents obviously failed to appreciate the dynamism and integrative potential of the Islamic culture that had swept out of Arabia only a few generations earlier. Their miscalculation was probably due in part to the considerable difficulty encountered by the Muslims in subduing the Berber Kabyles of the Maghreb during the preceding half-century. The latter, like the Hispanic tribes confronting the Romans, had put up a more determined resistance than had most of the more civilized regions farther east. The conquest of the Maghreb had taken nearly forty years, and was nominally completed only in 705-710.

After a small exploratory raid, the Muslim commander of Tangier, Tariq, led a force of perhaps no more than 12,000 men, mostly Berbers from northern Morocco, across the straits in 711. Their goals were apparently ambiguous at first. The intervention was organized at the behest of the Witizan clan; the invaders probably hoped at the least to win booty and to exert some degree of Muslim influence in Hispania, possibly to make it a client state of the Arab caliphate.

However, discovery of the hollowness of Visigothic power, both crown and oligarchy, coupled with a swift and decisive victory, expanded Muslim ambition. At that moment Roderic was engaged in trying to subdue Basque and Visigothic rebels in the northeast. He hurriedly marched south, where the invaders awaited him in July 711 at the Guadalete, a small stream in the extreme southern tip of Spain. There the Witizans arranged the withdrawal of the bulk of Roderic's forces; the outnumbered remainder resisted stubbornly but were destroyed. Roderic was killed, and the remnants of his army were shattered near Ecija, where they made a desperate attempt to bar the road to the north. Córdoba, demoralized and almost undefended, was quickly taken. Roderic's supporters in the Visigothic capital, Toledo, were then overthrown by the Witizans, who opened the gates to Tariq.

Civil war was at first even more debilitating to the Visigothic kingdom than the foreign invasion. By 712 the kingdom lay divided and virtually leaderless, its central military elite destroyed. Consequently the Arab governor of northwest Africa, Musa ibn Nusair, personally led a force larger than the first, some 18,000--a high proportion of them the best Arab warriors--in the second wave of [16] invasion. Muslim armies had perfected a swift, flexible, hard-hitting style of battle that proved extremely difficult for Visigothic levies to cope with. Seville, the largest city in the peninsula and center of Hispano-Roman culture, fell easily after a short siege. The remaining elements of the Roderician faction withdrew to Mérida, which withstood a long siege but finally fell on June 30, 713. Much of the Visigothic aristocracy resisted little or not at all. Theodemir, duke of the Cartagena district in the southeast, made a treaty allowing him to retain control of his territory so long as the inhabitants paid regular taxes to the Muslim command. The spring and summer of 714 were then devoted to subduing the heavily populated northeast. Zaragoza was conquered and many of its aristocrats put to the sword. Nearly all the territory northeast of Zaragoza was rendered tributary, after which the main Muslim column apparently marched westward across north-central Hispania before returning southward.

The Muslim "conquest" took only three years, but the Muslims in fact made no effort to conquer and occupy the entire peninsula. That would have been impossible for an army of no more than 30,000 to 40,000 men. They occupied directly only the main strongholds of south-central and northeastern Hispania, the old centers of Roman civilization. The old Suevic district in Portucale to the west and Galicia to the northwest were rendered tributary but not occupied. The Witizan clan served as clients of the Muslims, who could in a sense present themselves as the protagonists of a legitimist cause. During the first generation of occupation, three thousand estates from the royal domain were bestowed on the Witizans.

The Muslims were concerned first with booty and secondly with the prosecution of the jihad--the holy war to extend Islamic dominion ever farther afield. By 720 an expedition had crossed the Pyrenees and seized Narbonne, and this was followed for the next twenty years by intermittent onslaughts into France. Conquest beyond the Pyrenees was the major new concern of the overlords of "Al-Andalus" (literally "land of the Vandals"), as the Muslims called their new peninsular domain. Between 721 and 732 three governors of Al-Andalus were killed leading expeditions into France, the last expedition culminating in a major defeat by the Frankish army at Poitiers in 732. This did not put an end to the Muslim offensives, however, for the Muslims were further encouraged by internal strife in southern France. The Gallo-Roman inhabitants of Provence stubbornly resisted domination by the Frankish monarchy to the north and summoned Muslim forces to their aid in 735. Two expeditions were dispatched into Provence during the next three years, but the expansion of Frankish military power threw the Muslims on the defensive, [17] and they were barely able to retain a foothold in Septimania immediately northeast of the Pyrenees.

The relative ease with which Muslim domination was established over most of the peninsula can be explained by the fact that only some of the Visigoths resisted, and almost none of the rest of the population. Religious antagonism caused surprisingly little difficulty. Early Islam, despite its emphasis on the jihad, was comparatively tolerant of Christians and Jews as "peoples of the book." Moreover, there was little sense of racial antipathy; the majority of the first wave of invaders were not even Arabs, but Berbers who differed little in appearance from the Hispanic people. Some of these Berbers were themselves not yet fully assimilated into Islam. (For that matter, the Berbers of northwest Africa were not effectively converted until after the adoption of the local Kharijite doctrines in the eighth century.)

The Muslim invaders were greedy for land and booty, but the main targets of their rapaciousness were the Visigothic aristocrats who resisted them. To most of the population the conquest was represented as a liberation. Christians were promised free practice of their religion and in some cases greater social and economic justice as well. The rights of the minority of Hispanic smallholders were apparently respected. Though Christians were required to pay a special tribute, it was at first modest. In all, exactions were perhaps no greater than under the Visigoths. For more than a century, the Christians in the towns were permitted to live a semi-autonomous local existence, and in some cases shared their churches with Islamic worshippers.

People began to accept conversion to Islam almost immediately, in large numbers. The process went forward most rapidly in the population centers of the south and east, and in the meantime practically all the collaborationists among the Visigothic aristocracy embraced the Muslim religion. It is sometimes alleged that the rapid and comparatively facile Islamization of most of the peninsula was the result of the corruption and inattentiveness of the Hispanic church and the lack of piety and orthodoxy among the Visigothic aristocracy. In fact, it is difficult to demonstrate that the Hispanic church was significantly weaker than others of Latin Christendom or that the Visigothic nobles were appreciably less religious than their Frankish counterparts. Rather, Islamization probably stemmed primarily from the complete military and political defeat of the Catholic Visigothic state and from the prestige of the dynamic Muslim empire and its all-conquering armies. At first Islamic overlords did not encourage mass conversion, because it reduced the number of non-Muslims who paid heavier taxes, but once the Muslim authorities were firmly established in power many Christians converted simply to be on the dominant side, [18] escape special taxes, and gain greater economic opportunity. It has also been suggested that a portion of the enserfed sector of the peasantry accepted Islam to be freed of their servitude. Moreover, it is doubtful that many ordinary people perceived the great religious gulf between Christianity and Islam that has subsequently been taken for granted. Rather than as the antithesis to Christianity, many probably saw it as a mere variant of simplification. Finally, according to a later claim of Muslim chroniclers, some Visigothic aristocrats were attracted by the opportunity under Islamic law for polygamy and legal concubinage.

The third religious group in the peninsula, the Jews, who may have numbered 2 or 3 percent of the population, eagerly collaborated with the Muslims. Hispanic Jews had achieved considerable wealth under the Visigoths but were subjected to intermittent persecution. Muslim rule promised greater freedom and security. Jews sometimes assisted the Muslims, and a detachment of Jewish soldiers (perhaps related to Hispano-Jews exiled to the Maghreb) accompanied the invaders. Several important cities were given to Jewish leaders to govern temporarily after the Muslims took over. During the next three centuries Jewish financial and cultural influence expanded in southern and south-central Hispania. Because of their unique position, and also because of their linguistic skills, Jews served for generations as mediators between sectors of the Muslim and Christian populations.

The Arabs, who formed a minority among the mostly Berber invaders, assumed the place of privilege from the beginning and began to set themselves up as a landed Muslim neo-aristocracy. Urban life in the peninsula, too, attracted many. Entering at a higher cultural level than had the Visigoths three centuries earlier, they formed an urban elite, and though at first only a small minority in the Hispano-Christian cities, sank deeper cultural and economic roots and helped expand the influence of Islam in the cities rapidly. The Berber warriors, the rank and file of the invaders, tended to be shunted toward the less productive highlands. Many were settled on territory seized from or abandoned by the Visigoths in the northwest-central region.

The destruction of the Visigothic system of state and society was one thing, and the building of a Muslim Hispania something else that was much more difficult and took more time--indeed, nearly two centuries. After the Visigothic collapse there was a tendency for the inhabitants of various parts of the peninsula to revert to the regionalism and localism characteristic of an earlier era. Muslim power advanced too far too fast to combine all these territories into a well-ordered system. The Arab clan leaders who formed the core of the new oligarchy quickly fell out with each other, and the heads of the caliphate in [19] faraway Damascus revealed concern about maintaining control of their most distant dominion. The first official governor of Muslim Hispania, Abdul Aziz (who incidentally married Roderic's widow), was murdered by rivals in 716. During the four decades 715-755 there were approximately twenty different governors, many of them assassinated and only three retaining office as long as five years.

In addition to feuds between Arab clans and factions, a broad ethnic split emerged between the Arab aristocrats and the Berber population. By 740 a major rebellion was underway across the straits in the Maghreb, where the Berbers were adopting Kharijism, a new, heretical form of Islam that accompanied protest against Arab domination of the Muslim empire. The revolt spread to the Berbers settled in the northwest-central part of the peninsula. They marched against the urban-associated Arab aristocracy in south-central and southern Hispania, outnumbering them, for the Arabs could not depend upon their new Christian subjects to fight for them. It may be that only the arrival of some 7,000 Syrian cavalry saved the aristocracy. During the 740s, the new polity in the peninsula virtually dissolved. The spectacle of general Muslim civil war did not encourage Hispanic loyalty, and small elements of the Christian population took advantage of this opportunity to migrate to the unoccupied northern mountains, whence border warfare had been waged since 718. After 750, crop failures and raiding brought widespread famine to the Berber-inhabited Duero valley of the northwest, forcing the remainder of the invaders to withdraw farther south. When political order was finally [20] restored and the Berbers brought under control, the Duero valley south of the Asturian and Cantabrian hills had been evacuated, leaving a no-man's-land fought over by northern Christians and Muslims for the next two centuries.

Unified government in Muslim Hispania was finally achieved after 755 by its first independent ruler, Abd-al-Rahman I (756-788), last surviving heir of the traditional Muslim Umayyad dynasty in Damascus after it had been deposed by the rival Abbasid dynasty. In flight from the Near East, Abd-al-Rahman, whose mother was a Berber, sought to regain an independent kingdom at the far western end of the Muslim world. Arriving in the peninsula in 755, he won the support not only of the Berbers but also of the strongest Arab faction, enabling him to overthrow the forces of the erstwhile governor outside Córdoba, the Hispano-Muslim capital since 719. There Abd-al Rahman announced the establishment of an independent Umayyad emirate based on "true justice" and toleration for all religions and ethnic groups. This stand greatly strengthened his position among the heterogeneous population of the peninsula. He was eventually recognized as heir of the legitimate dynasty by nearly all regions save the independent Christian hill country of the far north, but years of intermittent campaigning were required to subdue dissident Muslim regional overlords.

Little effort was made to conquer and occupy the northern mountain areas, because of difficult geographic obstacles, the poverty of those regions, and the resistance of their inhabitants. Instead, three frontier districts or marches were established to hold the border, and the emirate adopted or accepted a variant of west European feudalism in dealing with the frontier areas. The key spots were mountains, castles, or fortified towns difficult to incorporate into a central system. Loose personal relations akin to vassalage were worked out with Muslim and at times with Christian overlords in the frontier area. This meant an uneven border and an incomplete political system on the Christian fringe, but the offensive military strength and the economic resources of the northern Christian hill people did not seem great enough to warrant the expenditure of means that would have been required to subdue those harsh, backward regions.

It is impossible to calculate the number of immigrants who entered the peninsula during the three centuries of the emirate. All told they may have accounted for the ancestry of 20 percent of the peninsula's population by the end of the tenth century, yet the influx in most years was quite small. Moreover, the bulk of the immigrants were not oriental Arabs but Maghrebian Berbers. The prosperous, increasingly cultured Al-Andalus must have looked very attractive to the rude tribesmen across the straits. But the more cultured Arabs tended to monopolize the most important lands, posts, and perquisites, and [21] relations with the Berbers and other elements were never very good. Muslim Hispania never achieved a fully homogeneous society. Descendants of Arabs jealously preserved their family and tribal identities, together with a distinct sense of superiority to the rest of the Muslim population. Many of the Berber immigrants did not at first speak Arabic and for some time retained their separate community identity. The majority of the Muslims were of course descendants of Hispanic converts and never managed to absorb fully the aristocratic Arab elements; rather, upper-class Hispano-Muslim muwalladun (or muladíes, as converts to Islam were later known in Castilian) later came to affect Arab ancestry or names for themselves. Interethnic tensions persisted throughout the history of Al-Andalus. They probably lay at the root of continuing internal political conflicts that were only temporarily assuaged, never eliminated.

The emirate was nevertheless free of such strong anti-Arab outbursts as occurred among the native Muslim populace of Iraq and Iran during those centuries. Abd-al-Rahman I encouraged the settling of Arab aristocrats directly on the land, overseeing the cultivation of estates, and by the tenth century the gap between the Muslim aristocrats and the muladí peasants was apparently not as great as that which had existed in much of the former Hispano-Visigothic society.

An Islamic culture in the peninsula developed with surprising rapidity. Though the first generation of Muslims had been relatively uncultured and had a rather weak grasp of Islamic theology, religious teachers arrived from the Near East soon after the conquest, and their numbers increased during the course of the eighth century. The roots of a genuine Muslim orthodoxy were established, in response to the problem of cultural heterogeneity and the challenge to the identity of the convert. Within three or four generations, Hispanic Islam was strongly identified with the Malikite rite. The religious teacher Malik (who died in Medina ca. 795) had propounded a rather simple and traditionalistic understanding of Islam, based on the formula of "the Koran, the words of the Prophet, and admitting that otherwise I do not know." The antirationalist conservatism of the Malikite rite was adopted as the semi-official observance of Muslims in the emirate during the reign of al-Hakam I (796-822). Malikite traditionalism, as propounded by local faqihs (jurists) throughout Al-Andalus, provided a degree of cultural unity for most of the Muslim population. Ultraorthodoxy was characteristic of Islam in the peninsula throughout almost the entire Muslim period, and contrasted notably with the greater tendency toward heterodoxy in other parts of the Muslim world. This may perhaps be explained by the peripheral location of Al-Andalus at the outer limit of Islamic lands, adjacent to Latin Christendom, containing a Christian minority (at first a Christian [22] majority), and usually in a state of tension with its religious and cultural rival. It is interesting, too, that during the Middle Ages western Christianity also emphasized pragmatic legalism, ethics, and orthodoxy in contrast with the more speculative metaphysics of the Christian east.

A wave of major "orientalization" began during the reign of Abd al-Rahman II (822-852), who imported numerous oriental Muslim artists and educators. The high culture of the Middle East elicited a strongly eastward-looking orientation; though a few individual Hispano-Muslim art forms were developed by the tenth century (the muwashaha and zéjel songs and poems), the art and literature of Al-Andalus was established almost completely on oriental Arabic forms.

Christian society in the south and east was completely unable to hold its own. The independent Christians of the north came to call their counterparts in the south Mozarabs, derived from the Arabic musta'rib, meaning Arabized or Arabic-speaking. Mozarab culture became fossilized, its postconquest literature for example rhetorical and usually mediocre, deficient in dialectic and analysis. Of course it must be recognized that Mozarab culture was placed under increasing pressure and not able to develop in full freedom. Limited tolerance never meant equality, and Christians were never permitted to dispute publicly the teachings of Islam. Religious practice and cultural opportunity were increasingly circumscribed. It is true that some towns had Christian majorities for a century or more, that most Mozarab dioceses were able to continue an uninterrupted line of episcopal succession for nearly three hundred years, that all-Mozarab church councils were occasionally called, and that some religious and cultural contacts were maintained with other parts of western Christendom. Nonetheless, the strength and influence of Islam was increasingly felt. From about the beginning of the ninth century pressure mounted; taxes were raised and new restrictions were introduced, while the Muslim proportion of society steadily increased. One response to latent and then mounting persecution was the Christian "martyrs of Córdoba" movement of 850-859 in the course of which several score Christian spokesmen, confronting Islam directly, were put to death. A more common response was Mozarab emigration to the Christian principalities in the northern mountains. The Muslim state did not embark on a policy of extreme persecution until late in the tenth century, however, and the Mozarab minority persisted, in ever-dwindling numbers, until almost the end of Al-Andalus.

The growing strength and sophistication of Hispano-Muslim society was not reflected by political unity, for the ninth century was a time of political troubles for the emirate. Resentment among both Christians [23] and Hispano-Muslims increased: against the overlordship of Córdoba by Muslims in other regions, against exclusivist Arab clans on the part of non-Arab Muslims, and against supposedly heterodox emirs by fanatical Mahikite faqihs. A major revolt occurred among the lower classes of Córdoba in 814, when popular discontent took the form of an uprising against the emir himself. This reflected the uncertainty about political legitimacy that had existed in Muslim Hispania since the emirate broke away from the central caliphate in the Near East. After the revolt was quelled, one-fourth of the population of the Andalusi capital was expelled.

Muslim revolts grew serious during the second half of the ninth century. At times the emir controlled only the greater Córdoba region. Major rebellions occurred in the districts of Toledo in the center, Seville and Bobastro in the south, Mérida in the southwest, and Zaragoza and Lérida in the northeast. The partly Christian city of Toledo was more or less autonomous from 873 to 930, required only to pay a nominal tribute to the emirate. A more fully autonomous principality was carved out in the upper Ebro valley of the northeast by the Banu Qasi dynasty, descendants of the Visigothic overlord Casio (Cassius) of Tudela, who had accepted Islam in 714 at the start of the conquest. The Banu Qasi ruled the upper Ebro region for two hundred years, waxing at times rich and powerful. At their height in the late ninth century they were sometimes called "third kings of Hispania" (following the emirs of Al-Andalus and the kings of Christian Asturias-León). The most serious of the new revolts, however, was that begun by Omar ibn Hafsun at Bobastro in the hills above Málaga in 883. The descendant of muladíes, ben-Hafsun rallied Muslims and Christians alike and soon made most of the eastern Andalusian hill country independent of the emirate. In 894 he returned to Christianity, the religion of his ancestors. That cost the support of most of his Muslim following, but even so he held out in the Bobastro district until his death in 917. This domain was defended by his sons for another twelve years until it was finally reincorporated by the emirate in 929.

An effectively unified state was finally achieved during the long reign of Abd-al-Rahman III (912-961). The son of a Navarrese princess, this greatest of Cordoban rulers was a short, blue-eyed Muslim who dyed his red hair black to match that of most of his subjects. In 929 he took the step of raising his dominion from an emirate, or kingdom, to a caliphate, or empire. Originally the Islamic world had been unified under a single caliphate as the political successor to the prophet's authority. The Umayyad emirate of Al-Andalus had been nominally subordinate to the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, but establishment of a new caliphate under the aggressive Fatimids in [24] Egypt threatened military and political pressures through North Africa. Abd-al-Rahman III countered the claims and ambitions of the Fatimids by taking advantage of new Muslim theories to assert the imperial independence of Al-Andalus. This nominal authority also strengthened the claims of the Cordoban state over the local regions of the peninsula.

The caliph restored central control over all the Muslim population and carried on major border campaigns against the small Christian principalities of the north, receiving token submission from most of them. During the latter part of his reign he extended military dominion over part of the northwest Maghreb, briefly expanding Al-Andalus into an imperial domain.

The strength of the tenth-century caliphate was due as much to the efficiency of the state system as to the size and prosperity of its population, for the caliphate developed the best organized administration found anywhere in western Europe during that era. This had begun nearly a century earlier under Abd-al-Rahman II, who had commenced to refashion what had begun as a fairly simple despotism into a well-articulated structure patterned after the Abbasid caliphate in Damascus. Executive authority was nominally autocratic, administered by an hajib or chief minister through batteries of visirs or departmental ministers for varied aspects of administration, with complements of subsecretaries, scribes, and clerks. A fairly efficient treasury with some degree of central accounting was eventually developed. Theoretically, each district of the emirate was administered by a regional wali, or governor, responsible to the central government for the affairs of his province. The legal system was headed by a cadi aljamaa (chief justice), though his authority was restricted to the Córdoba district. The court structure was divided by region and municipality, with separate jurisdictions for different kinds of grievances according to civil need and Muslim custom.

Muslim military organization in the peninsula had long been rather rudimentary, resting upon the militia of the local Arab clans and other regional elites. Though originally made up mostly of infantry, Muslim armies came to rely especially on light cavalry, patterned in part on the Arabic model and armed with lances, darts, and small shields. Early in the emirate a permanent standing army had been begun with the formation of an elite corps of several thousand slaves from eastern Europe and Africa. Abd-al-Rahman III did not solve the problem of central military organization, but his forces were the most numerous yet employed by Muslim power in the peninsula and in their time were without peer in western Europe. The ports of the eastern, southern, and western coasts of the peninsula had long had large commercial fleets, but an armed navy of significance took form [25] for the first time under Abd-al-Rahman II. For a brief time it was perhaps comparable to that of the Byzantines.

The political strength and military glory of this reign coincided with the first full flowering of the high culture of Hispano-Muslim society as well as its broad economic expansion. During the tenth century the state, society, and culture of Al-Andalus were more advanced than anything to be found in Christian western Europe. The studies in philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, botany, and medicine carried on by the intellectual elite of Muslim Hispania between the mid-tenth and twelfth centuries have earned standard references in medieval history textbooks. Economic achievements were equally impressive. During the ninth and tenth centuries new Persian and Nabatean agricultural techniques were introduced, old irrigation systems restored, and new ones developed. East Mediterranean fruits, as well as grain, olives, and rice, were important crops. Conditions of land tenure varied greatly. Most farms were family farms, many of them rented or worked on shares from aristocratic overlords but a not insignificant number held independently by Muslim smallholders. Exact measurement is impossible, but productivity, at least in the irrigated valleys and huertas of parts of the south and east, was apparently well above ordinary west European standards of the time. Grain production in the dry areas was less successful; from the ninth century on grain had intermittently to be imported from northern Africa.
The real strength of Al-Andalus lay in its cities, with their productive economies, skilled labor, technological development, and learning. Nearly all had been effectively Muslimized and culturally Arabicized by the tenth century. They excelled in the production of silk and other textiles, ceramics, leather work, armaments, and some types of fine steelworking. Al-Andalus had proportionately more artisans in its cities than had any other part of western Europe at that time. Commerce flourished well beyond the range of the peninsula.

Above all other cities, the capital, Córdoba, was the urban showplace of the caliphate. Textbook estimates of a population of one million people may be dismissed, but there were apparently well over one hundred thousand. In size, services, culture, and economy, the city was without a peer in western Europe and rivaled in the east only by Constantinople. Some of the enduring works of Hispano-Muslim architecture in Córdoba and other cities were at least begun in the tenth century. The architecture of Al-Andalus is often referred to as Moorish, yet its surviving specimens considerably surpass what was built in Morocco during that (or most subsequent) periods.

Although aside from the great mosque at Córdoba, the outstanding examples of Hispano-Muslim architecture are of a later time (for example, the Giralda of Seville, twelfth century, and the Alhambra of Granada, fifteenth century).

[26] The population and cultural centers of Al-Andalus were for the most part the same towns and regions that had flourished under the Romans (and to a lesser degree under the Visigoths). Some of the people and atmosphere of the cultural vanguard of Romano-Christian Hispania were absorbed into Hispano-Muslim society, and it was not merely an accident that the high culture of Al-Andalus was superior to that of the Maghreb during the same period. It started from a higher base.

That Hispano-Christian culture affected Hispano-Muslim society cannot be doubted, yet its effect was negligible compared to the great impact of orientalization brought by the establishment of Islam in the peninsula. There are many regional variations in Islam, but the Hispanic peninsula was the only major part of western Europe that was for some time torn out of the matrix of western Christendom. All the culture as well as the religion of Al-Andalus was patterned on oriental norms and precedents. Non-Islamic Hispanic precursors for these ideas and trends are simply not to be found. The high culture of Al-Andalus was derivative, and oriental in inspiration. The only major exceptions lay in some of the arts: architecture, metalworking, and popular literature, where a synthesis of sorts was worked out between autochthonous Hispanic skills and motifs and oriental forms.

The sweeping effect of orientalization may be seen not merely in the high culture but in the common social patterns. Family standards and practices were patterned on those of the upper-class Muslim immigrants from the Middle East, and social customs were profoundly orientalized. A major example was the seclusion and restriction of women, something for which there was no parallel or precedent in Hispano-Christian society. The medieval Hispano-Christian family was distinctly more individualistic and egalitarian. Even the minor aberrations of Hispano-Muslim society were probably not as unusual as they have sometimes been made out. Fondness for wine has been presented as a triumph of the Hispanic over the Islamic, but there was also drinking in the Middle East. Sexual mores were typically Muslim as well, particularly in the apparently high incidence of homosexuality.

The Amirid Dictatorship 976/981-1008

The Cordoban state reached the height of its power in the middle of the tenth century under Abd-al-Rahman III, yet survived for only seventy-five years more. No state in Europe or the Mediterranean basin during the Middle Ages possessed the instruments to guarantee central government unless strong leadership and a continuous principle of legitimacy were preserved; by the eleventh century these were [27] lacking in Al-Andalus. Abd-al-Rahman III's successor, al-Hakam II, ruled for fifteen years, but when he died in 976 he left as heir a twelve-year-old son who was recognized as Hisham II. The government was soon dominated by its vigorous and efficient hajib, an Hispano-Arab known to history as al-Mansur ("The Victorious"). In 981 young Hisham was forced to officially ratify the complete authority of the hajib over all aspects of government.

Al-Mansur relied on two factors to cement his dictatorship: religion and a strong centralized army. He allied himself with the influential Malikite faqihs in suppressing the few scattered expressions of Islamic heterodoxy that had appeared at Córdoba and won a reputation among the superstitious lower classes as a defender of the faith. He also expanded the standing army. Large numbers of Berber mercenaries were brought in from the Maghreb, and Christian mercenaries were accepted as well. The ordinary militia levies of Al-Andalus were reorganized by special regiment rather than by local district in an effort to counteract the centrifugal effect of regional loyalties. Al-Mansur built the most powerful military machine yet seen in the peninsula, but it broke the traditional service patterns of Al-Andalus and severed bonds between local leaders and the Cordoban government. It became to some extent an instrument of control over the rest of Al-Andalus and a resented agent of centralization.

The historic title al-Mansur was won in a long series of summer campaigns against the Christian principalities of the north. The motives were more political and economic than religious, but al-Mansur found it useful to strengthen his position by preaching the jihad against the northern Christians, little troubled by the fact that Christian mercenaries sometimes served in his forces. At one time or another he ravaged every major part of Christian territory save Navarre, with whose ruling dynasty he was allied by marriage. No ruler since the original conquest had inflicted such heavy damage on Christian Hispania. Moreover, at the very end of the century his son, Abdul-Malik, restored Cordoban authority over the northwest corner of the Maghreb, of which the city of Fez was the center. Al-Mansur died in 1002 at the height of power, exhausted by his triumphant exertions. He was succeeded by Abdul-Malik, who quickly obtained from the impotent Hisham the same plenary authority held by his invincible father. Abdul-Malik survived his father by only six years, however, dying in 1008, possibly assassinated.

The Amirid dictatorship wielded by al-Mansur and Abdul-Mahk from 976/981 to 1008 had raised the caliphate to the pinnacle of its military power, yet sowed within it the seeds of its political destruction. [28] For one thing, the dictatorship fatally weakened the principle of political legitimacy. Al-Andalus had always been difficult to rule, relying on both forceful leadership and administration and the legitimate authority of the Ummayad dynasty. In the long run, the dictatorship supplied force alone; it replaced the dynasty, yet could not develop a new principle of legitimate descent from Mohammed. By the tenth century Shiite doctrines in the Muslim orient had tried to establish a new principle of legitimacy on the basis of divinely appointed leaders, imams, who were nominal descendants of the Prophet and were held to enjoy divinely delegated charismatic authority. But the Amirids could claim no such descent from Mohammed. Appeals to the jihad proved insufficient to bolster what was eventually revealed as a purely opportunistic military regime. Traditional relations between the regions were disrupted, and replaced with purely military bonds.

Breakup of the Caliphate 1008-1031

Soon after the death of the second Amirid, the political unity and authority of the caliphate collapsed altogether. Once the legitimate succession had been interrupted it was never successfully restored. Many regions of Al-Andalus were resentful of their treatment under the dictatorship and refused to heed new leaders in Córdoba. The feckless Hisham was deposed in 1009, briefly restored the following year, then deposed again. Altogether, over a period of twenty-three years, six relatives of the Ummayads and three members of a rival, half-Berber family disrupted the throne. The slave pretorians functioned as a powerful independent faction and the bands of Berber mercenaries who had become more numerous during the preceding half-century usurped power in local districts. Regional Arab oligarchs and clans withdrew into local exclusivism, and the state system soon dissolved. Córdoba was wracked by demagogy, riots, and pillaging, while the educated and wealthy fled. In 1010 the city was sacked by a Catalan expedition brought in by Muslim dissidents at Toledo.

Had a leader as resolute and resourceful as Abd-al-Rahman III or al-Mansur emerged, he might have been able to restore caliphal authority. As it was, the caliphate had been unable to institutionalize political unity in the face of geographic obstacles, ethnic diversity, class divisions, and a persistent spirit of localism. The idea of Muslim unity had little currency, for Cordoban power in the tenth century had been based largely on political, not religious, standards and values. Nor did the small Christian states of the north seem very [29] threatening in the early eleventh century; united defense of the faith was not an issue. Rather than undergo the Amirid experience again, the regions almost unanimously preferred to pull apart. The localism and factionalism that had proved an almost insuperable obstacle for the Visigothic monarchy also undermined the caliphate, and its official end was finally declared by a group of local leaders meeting in Córdoba in 1031. In the former capital it was replaced by a local government of notables ruling only the greater Córdoba district.

The Taifa Kingdoms

After the collapse of the caliphate, political power coalesced around local leaders, oligarchies, or ethnic groups and coalitions in the principal urban economic centers of Al-Andalus. Nearly all the first overlords were local commanders and notables who had achieved power through the political and military network created by al-Mansur. The result was a series of about thirty regional taifa (local faction) kingdoms that divided up approximately the southern 75 percent of the peninsula. Some of the taifas, chiefly Seville, Granada, Badajoz, Valencia, Toledo, and Zaragoza, quickly developed into fairly strong regional emirates or principalities, dominating large areas of the surrounding countryside and devouring their weaker neighbors. The taifas were typically governed by local dynasties of Arab aristocrats or local Berber military factions, but power was sometimes disputed by a variety of heterogeneous claimants: Arab oligarchs, Berber mercenaries or immigrants, the "Andalusian" or ordinary Hispano-Muslim majority, and other mercenaries or forces of slave pretorians. Political transition went most smoothly in border districts dominated by military leaders. In the Andalusian interior quarreling was more protracted.

The taifas managed to preserve most of the economic achievements of Al-Andalus and often to develop them further. Some of their capitals reached a greater level of prosperity and sophistication in the eleventh century than any towns under the caliphate save Córdoba. Hence the collapse of the Hispano-Muslim state did not bring the collapse of Hispano-Muslim culture.

Indeed, the famous "high culture" of Muslim Hispania, while building on the achievements of the tenth-century caliphate, was mainly a product of the new scholarship and writing of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The same was true of the most enduring creations of Hispano-Muslim art and architecture. It was during the taifa and the subsequent Almoravid period that the popular Hispanic song [30] and verse forms--the muwashahas and zéjels--were formally incorporated into written literature and subsequently gained a vogue in Islamic art.

A striking and dominant characteristic of Hispano-Muslim literature was its essential materialism and hedonism. Love lyrics and erotic poetry in Al-Andalus often surpassed those of the middle East, religious literature and mystical verse were rather poorly developed. The society's religion remained hyperorthodox, but it did not lead to a high religious culture in literature or theology. There were few new religious ideas in Al-Andalus.
The taifa kingdoms and their successors were the late blooming of Muslim Hispania's Indian Summer. Wracked by incessant factionalism, they divided and dissipated their civic and military energies. When the military balance in the peninsula began to change in the middle of the eleventh century, the taifas could not defend themselves in regional isolation and were destroyed one by one. The dissolution of the caliphate had been the political prelude to the political and military decline of all of Al-Andalus.

Parallel between the Caliphate and the Later Spanish Empire

There are certain intriguing parallels between the circumstances and historical patterns of tenth-century Al-Andalus and sixteenth-century Spain. Both empires were launched, as is customarily the case with expansionist systems, before their respective societies had reached their fullest cultural development. Both emphasized imperial expansion and foreign issues to the detriment of internal problems. Neither achieved a fully integrated civic entity: the Umayyad caliphate was not effectively integrated, and the Habsburg monarchy was pluralistic, revealing centrifugal tendencies. Both strongly emphasized religious issues in mobilizing for expansion; religious orthodoxy was later stressed by both in their periods of political decline. The renewed assertion of reorganized military power marked the last generation of strong government and the prelude to civic decline (compare al-Mansur and Olivares). The full flowering of Andalusi culture came after the collapse of the caliphate; that of Habsburg Spain, at least in esthetics, after the apogee of politico-military power under Felipe II. A major difference between the two was that the economic prosperity of Al-Andalus survived the passing of the caliphate. Seventeenth-century Spain exhausted its economy in war; the Muslim taifas never organized the military strength that their economies could have supported.

Bibliography for Chapter II

[335] The first critical comprehensive study of Al-Andalus was Reinhardt Dozy, Histoire des musulmans d'Espagne, 711-1110 (Leiden, 1861; Eng. tr., London, 1913). Dozy's work has been extended and corrected by E. Lévi-Provençal, Histoire de l'Espagne musulmane, 2d ed., 3 vols. (Paris, 1950-53), which covers only the years through 1031. Lévi-Provençal has treated the apex of Al-Andalus in L'Espagne musulmane au Xme siécle (Paris, 1932). A useful brief survey in English has been provided by W. Montgomery Watt, A History of Islamic Spain (Edinburgh, 1965). On the events of the eighth century, see the last part of Harold Livermore's The Origins of Spain and Portugal (London, 1971).

James T. Monroe has written a stimulating analysis, Islam and the Arabs in Spanish Scholarship (Leiden, 1970). C. Sánchez Albornoz, ed., La España musulmana, 2 vols. (Buenos Aires, 1946), provides accounts of major aspects of the entire period. Cultural onentalization and its sources are examined in Mahmud Ali Makki, Ensayo sobre las aportaciones orientales en la España musulmana (Madrid, 1968). The most up-to-date general study of the Mozarabs is Isidro de las Cagigas, Los mozárabes, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1947-48). E. P. Colbert, The Martyrs of Córdoba (850-859) (Washington, D.C., 1962), presents a revised interpretation of the major incident of Mozarab history.

There are cogent insights on Andalusi culture in the work of the leading twentieth-century Spanish Arabist, Miguel Asín Palacios, Obras escogidas, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1946-48). Henri Terrasse, Islam d'Espagne (Paris, 1958), deals mainly with art and architecture. A general account of the remarkable development of science in Al-Andalus will be found in J. A. Sánchez Pérez, La ciencia árabe en la Edad Media (Madrid, 1954). Rodolfo Gil Benumeya, Marruecos andaluz (Madrid, 1942), discusses interaction between Al-Andalus and Morocco.

A History of Spain and Portugal
Vol. 1
By Stanley G. Payne

Chapter Three
The Early Christian Principalities and the Expansion of Asturias-León

[31] The real dividing line between the Roman and medieval worlds came not with the Barbarian invasions of the fifth century but with the Muslim conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries. This interpretation, known to historians as the Pirenne Thesis, is more applicable to the history of the Hispanic peninsula than to that of any other part of western Europe. The historically enduring Hispanic kingdoms were those created in the aftermath of the Muslim conquest of most of the peninsula. The eight-century reconquest that followed was an historic enterprise without parallel in human history. Elsewhere invading forces and cultures have either been quickly repelled and eliminated or else as in Russia accepted as overlords by the native population. Exotic forces, once firmly implanted, have been absorbed by or have transformed the autochthonous culture. In Hispania, invading Muslim society could not be simply defeated and rejected, and much less could it be absorbed. Yet it was not completely accepted, either, and resistance by small independent groups of the indigenous population was maintained for centuries, becoming the major conditioning factor in the Hispanic cultures, until finally the Muslims had been completely defeated, subjugated, and ultimately expelled from the peninsula.

It should be remembered that the resistance of that minority of the population which remained Christian and independent was not inspired [32] by any racial antagonism between Hispano-Christians and Berber-Arab Muslims. For that matter, after a generation or so the great majority of Muslims were Hispanic converts. Hence the antagonism was essentially cultural and religious.

Origins of the Kingdom of Asturias

The only parts of the peninsula relatively untouched by the Muslim invasion were the mountainous regions of the far north in the Pyrenean and Cantabrian ranges. These areas had never been fully integrated into either of the preceding Hispanic political communities, Roman or Visigothic. The native Cantabrian and Basque populations stoutly resisted outside domination, though the Cantabrians had been partially Romanized and had reached a modus vivendi with the Visigoths. Small groups of native Cantabrians and Hispano-Visigoths resisted Muslim dominion in the more inaccessible parts of Asturias and the eastern Cantabrians (the latter, somewhat shakily organized as the duchy of Cantabria under the Visigoths, roughly corresponded to the modern province of Santander). About the year 718 they recognized as leader a warrior named Pelayo, apparently a Visigothic aristocrat. Pelayo's stronghold lay in the Picos de Europa district of eastern Asturias, near the center of the greater Cantabrian range. In 722 his followers ambushed and destroyed a Muslim attack force below the mountain of Covadonga, giving the Christians their first clear-cut victory. After the death of Pelayo (737) and of his son Fáfila (739), the military leaders of Asturias and Cantabria elected as successor Pelayo's son-in-law Alfonso, the son of the late Visigothic duke of Cantabria. He subsequently became known to history as Alfonso I (739-757), first regular ruler of the nascent kingdom of Asturias.

[33] The Muslim governors of the peninsula did not make an all-out effort to occupy the northern ranges. The number of Muslim fighting men was at first small, and operations against irregulars in mountainous terrain were extremely difficult, largely nullifying the Arabs' technological advantage in the open field. Furthermore, the few people living in the Pyrenean and Cantabrian ranges were economically and culturally backward. They had little to offer a conqueror and were scarcely worth the price, particularly when the most prosperous, cultured, and urbanized areas of the south and east had been occupied so easily. Moreover, after the first decade, the Muslim invaders were sorely distracted by their own internal quarrels, which gave the Christian resistance in the north further relief.

Under the leadership of Pelayo, the Asturians had been exclusively on the defensive. The first counteroffensive was begun by Alfonso I, taking advantage of the Muslim civil war between Arabs and Berbers that raged after 740, and of the great famine of 748-753, which temporarily weakened Muslim power and caused many of the Berber immigrants who had occupied parts of the northwest to leave. Alfonso's small forces, stiffened with modest cavalry detachments, descended from the mountains and raided parts of the Duero valley, killing or enslaving the small garrisons of Berber soldiers, liberating the Mozarabs, and in many cases moving them from the indefensible lowlands back into the hill country. With this and other immigration, the Asturo-Cantabrian hills acquired a slightly larger population. In the meantime, much of the Duero valley below Asturias, already hard hit by the famine of mid-century, was devastated and depopulated, turned into a thinly peopled no-man's-land between Christians and Muslims for the next century and more, forming something of a shield behind which the small kingdom of Asturias was able to forge its own institutions.

Apparently there was substantial immigration into Asturias and Galicia during the eighth and ninth centuries. This augmented the human and cultural resources of the small kingdom and enabled a distinctly institutionalized monarchy to form a nucleus of strength around its capital, first in the mountain village of Cangas de Onis, then in the town of Oviedo.

The new kingdom was ethnically heterogeneous. Its original inhabitants were a complex of Hispano-Visigoths (and Hispano-Suevi in Galicia), Hispano-Roman Galicians with strong Celtic residues, native Cantabrians and Basques, Mozarab immigrants from Al-Andalus, and a few small groups of Berber captives. Pre-Roman ethnic identities had still not been fully erased, and local or regional differences were strongly felt. In some cases they were reaffirmed or accentuated in the anti-Muslim resistance and the process of reconquest [34] and resettlement that followed. The only unifying factors in the early years of the kingdom were the crown, the church, and above all the frontier, for it was common determination to resist Muslim domination that brought together the diverse population of Asturias.

Though the rudeness of life in the early centuries of Asturias-León may sometimes have been exaggerated, the society was simple and backward compared with areas of Al-Andalus, France, and Italy. Thrown back on the least-developed regions of the peninsula, medieval Hispano-Christian society began under the burden of a formidable lag in social and economic achievement. Rural communities were largely self-sufficient and lived mostly by herding sheep and cattle. The moist, hilly, nonfertile land did not encourage cultivation, and crops were limited. There were scarcely any skilled workers, and only simple clothing and rudimentary weapons and tools were produced. Society was completely rural; no city worthy of the name developed in greater Asturias for nearly two hundred years. During that period trade and commerce were extremely slight, and though some money was available, nearly all of it came from outside; no coins were minted by the kings of Asturias.

Formation of the Pyrenean Counties

Farther east, autonomous nuclei of Hispanic people survived in the interior valleys of the Pyrenees throughout the eighth century. Their numbers were slightly increased by Christian immigration from the south, and they were to some extent sheltered by the mountainous terrain. Yet their population was small, even compared with the kingdom of Asturias, and at first they were obliged to come to terms with Muslim authorities, accepting a kind of tributary status. The Pyrenees lay astride the route of Muslim expansion into western Europe, and because the northeastern part of the peninsula was more urbanized and productive than the northwest and also more Mediterranean and warm, it drew greater attention from the Muslims. All the main cities in the northeast--Zaragoza, Pamplona, Tarragona, Barcelona, Lérida, Gerona--were occupied directly, and the more southerly of them were soon in process of Islamization. Facing heavy military pressure and lacking any buffer zone, the small Hispanic population of the Pyrenees was at first completely hemmed into the mountain area.

As the Muslims had moved up into the peninsula, a number of Visigoths and lower-class Hispani had crossed the Pyrenees into Septimania. Though the Muslims established a tenuous subordination of Septimania in their destructive raids between 718 and 732, they [35] were unable to extend their control permanently beyond the Pyrenees for reasons discussed in the foregoing chapter.

Frankish counterattacks from the north, followed by the outbreak of civil war among the Muslims, quickly altered the balance of power. After 742, part of Septimania renounced its tributary status, though the remaining Gothic overlords in Septimania sometimes preferred distant association with Córdoba to Frankish domination. In 756 Narbonne, the largest town in the region, acknowledged the sovereignty of the Frankish monarchy, which soon incorporated all the territory down to the Pyrenees. Charlemagne attempted to roll back the Muslim frontier by extending a Frankish protectorate over northeast Hispania at the behest of anti-Umayyad Muslim dissidents. In 778 a Frankish expedition against Zaragoza failed, but in 785 the Christian inhabitants of Gerona, in the northeastern corner of the peninsula, accepted Frankish suzerainty. In a series of limited campaigns fought between 785 and 811, Franks occupied and fortified the strongpoints of the southern Pyrenean foothills. The eastern and central Pyrenean regions were then organized on the Frankish principle into six counties -- Urgel, Pallars, Barcelona (seized in 801), Ribagorza, Sobrarbe, and Aragón -- under the Frankish monarchy.

The counties of the Pyrenees were more intimately associated with the culture and institutions of the rest of western Europe than was the semi-isolated kingdom of Asturias on the other side of the peninsula. Development of a semi-feudal political structure based on Frankish models, military reliance on Frankish assistance, the religious influence of Carolingian Catholicism, and cultural crosscurrents from France and Italy all drew the population of the Hispanic March into closer contact with the main forces shaping medieval western Europe.

The Basque Principality of Navarre

The Basque territory of the western Pyrenees had never been completely occupied and incorporated by an invading power. During the eighth century, its inhabitants maintained their customary hostility to outside domination and maneuvered between the Muslim emirate and Frankish expansion. Basques were probably responsible for ambushing the rearguard of Charlemagne's expedition of 778 when it retreated toward the north. In the course of a major expedition to restore the emirate's power in the northeast three years later, Abd-al-Rahman I occupied Pamplona, the only true city in the Basque country, and established Muslim control over lower Navarre (roughly in the area just south of the southwestern foothills of the Pyrenees). The Basques had all the less difficulty in establishing peaceful relations [36] with the Muslims because few Basques had been Christianized and religious antagonism was not acute. The nearest Muslim power was not the emirate of Córdoba, but the semi-autonomous principality of the Hispano-Muslim Banu Qasi dynasty along the upper Ebro, from whence had come help against the Franks. An independent Navarrese state first began to take form in the final years of the eighth century (ca. 796-798) under a strong leader, Iñigo Arista. The history of Navarre for the next hundred years and more was turbulent, with fluctuating borders and a number of invasions from Al-Andalus, Nonetheless, an organized Navarrese state was created, and a close alliance was maintained with the neighboring Banu Qasi through interdynastic marriage.

Expansíon of Asturias-León

During the height of Muslim power in the ninth and tenth centuries, the Pyrenean counties remained comparatively static and self-contained. The only dynamic, expanding power was the mountain kingdom of Asturias. With Galicia and most of the Cantabrian range organized within their territory, the Asturian rulers had the dual advantage of possessing greater resources than any single Pyrenean county and of facing less determined resistance to their immediate south for the sparsely inhabited buffer zone of the Duero valley contrasted sharply with the strong, prosperous Muslim urban centers of the northeast that hemmed in the Pyrenean counties.

The struggle for independence in the northwest had at first been a desperate fight for survival, but it soon generated a broader ideal and a more comprehensive objective, at least for the immediate circle of the Asturian monarchs. Rather than considering themselves overlords of a parochial principality, the Asturian rulers tried to legitimize broader ambitions and a claim to increased sovereignty by identifying their throne with the lost legacy of the Visigoths. As early as 760, after increased Visigothic emigration to Asturias and the first generation of successful counterattacks, the "Neo-Gothic" idea of restoring the independent Hispano-Christian monarchy of the Visigoths was foreshadowed. During the course of the next century, a political identity and goal were developed by the Asturian court. The discovery of an impressive tomb in central Galicia early in the ninth century provided the kingdom with a spiritual patron. The tomb was soon labeled as the sepulchre of "Santiago"--St. James, the brother of Christ--and the saint subsequently adopted as the patron saint of Asturias-León. Whereas the leaders of the Pyrenean counties thought of themselves as autonomous within a broader political framework, the rulers of [37] Asturias began to identify themselves as heirs of the Visigoths charged with an imperial mission of reconquest.

The Neo-Gothic idea was developed during the reign of Alfonso III "el Magno" (886-911), apparently the first Hispano-Christian king to claim the title of emperor. If the title was indeed used by Alfonso el Magno--and the sources are by no means unequivocal about such a claim--it referred only to the lands of the Hispanic peninsula, which were held to be the legitimate patrimony of the successors of the Visigothic monarchy. From the time of Alfonso el Magno there was a conscious revival of certain Visigothic court forms, such as the traditional rite of royal consecration, employed to symbolize the continuity and legitimacy of the kingdom. It might be noted that in the ninth and tenth centuries the notion of regaining domination over the peninsula did not imply the expulsion or extermination of Muslim rivals. What was involved was political sovereignty and religious authority, something not incompatible with the limited system of "discriminatory toleration" practiced in Al-Andalus vis-a-vis Christians and Jews, save that the roles of superior and subordinate would be reversed.

The Asturian church played a major role in the development and diffusion of the Neo-Gothic idea. Its hierarchy, after freeing itself from any dependence on the Mozarab church, was ambitious to assert the sovereignty of Asturian institutions and expand their influence. Learned clerics and monks formed the only intelligentsia of that time; they prepared the arguments and discovered the precedents for Neo-Gothic legitimist ambitions on the part of the crown and served as its chief propagandists.

The expansion of Asturias was a slow, halting process. Advances were made during the long, constructive reign of Alfonso II "the Chaste" (791-842), but it was not until the time of Ordoño I (850-866) that the line of Tuy-Astorga-León-Amaya was effectively occupied, and then to some extent repopulated and fortified. During the long reign of Alfonso el Magno, severe internal conflicts within the emirate led the Asturians to believe at one point that destruction of the Cordoban state was imminent, and in 881 a royal expedition struck deep into the heart of Al-Andalus. Before the death of Alfonso el Magno a line of occupation was reached that stretched through the Duero and Mondego valleys from Simancas to Zamora to Coimbra. The formidable strength of the unified caliphate made further advance in the tenth century difficult, but Ramiro II (931-951) inflicted a crushing defeat on Abd-al-Rahman III at Simancas in 939 and was able to occupy, in a tenuous fashion, the regions of Salamanca, Avila, and Sepúlveda. Altogether, the one hundred years from the start of the reign of Ordoflo I (850) to the death of Ramiro II (951) more than [38] doubled the kingdom. Alfonso el Magno moved the capital from the hilltown of Oviedo to the more attractive city of León to the south, and the kingdom was henceforth known by the geographically more descriptive title Asturias and León, or simply León. It had grown larger than all the Hispano-Christian principalities to the east put together.

Thus the people of the northwest became the creators and protagonists of what was to be the historic Spanish tradition. The mountainous regions of Asturias and Cantabria had been peripheral and among the least sophisticated of the peninsula, though the districts of Galicia and Braga to the southwest were more developed. In the eighth century, of course, the notion of Spanish as distinct from Muslim or Moorish scarcely existed for the independent northern mountaineers. The adjective Hispanic had been from the beginning of Roman times a merely geographic term. During the early Middle Ages Hispania or Espaffa referred to the territory of the peninsula, most of which was dominated by Muslims. Consequently adjectives derived therefrom might refer more frequently to Muslims than to Christians. As late as 996 the term espanesco meant "Moorish" rather than "Spanish" in the modern sense. The word espanyol (in Castilian, español) was apparently first coined by Provençal merchants in southwestern France to denote all the people who lived south of the Pyrenees, Christian or Muslim. Thus the independent identity of the people of the northwest was not originally conceived of as Spanish but was defined in two different ways. One was by region (Asturian, Galician, Leonese), and the other was as Christian (or at least non-Muslim). Therein lay a second paradox, in that the Asturians and Cantabrians who became the first champions of independent Hispanic Christendom against the Muslims had been the least Christianized of the Hispanic population (save for the Basques, who later tended to react in the same fashion). They came to stress Christianity in part to distinguish themselves from the religion of their antagonists.

The Emergence of Castile

Because of the depopulation and devastation that prevailed for a century in the Duero valley, one of the few ways in which Muslim armies could strike directly at the heartland of Asturias-León was by travelling up the Ebro valley along the old Roman road northwest from Zaragoza. To guard against invasion from this direction, the Asturian monarchy built a series of castles and fortified villages in the mountains above the upper Ebro, where the route could be sealed off. [39] This territory (in the modern provinces of Santander, Burgos, and Alava) was known in ancient times as Bardulia after the Celtiberian tribe that had inhabited the region. By the beginning of the ninth century it was beginning to be called in the local vernacular Castiella or Castilla --"the land of castles"--from the Latin castella.

The people of the eastern Cantabrian range had been even less Romanized than had the inhabitants of Asturias. The effective Romaniztion and Christianization of Cantabria was not really accomplished until after the influx of a certain number of Visigothic and Hispano-Christian refugees in the eighth century. Apparently there was also an ancient linguistic boundary between Asturias and Cantabria-Bardulia which persisted into the Middle Ages. Thus the Asturian-Leonese romance dialect, like the Galician (and also the Catalan), retained the normal Latin f, whereas the Cantabrian romance dialect apparently excluded it and included an aspirate sound. If this interpretation is correct, the influence of the Cantabrian dialect can still be heard in two of the linguistic pecularities of the Castilian language. Of the three major romance languages that were formed in the peninsula, Castilian developed into the most original, probably because of its beginnings in one of the remote and least cosmopolitan regions, a region whose linguistic individuality was already marked.

Communication with Cantabria-Bardulia and administration of that region always presented a problem for the Asturian monarchy, because of distance and rough terrain. As early as 804 a separate bishopric, that of Valpuesta, was organized to administer religious affairs in Castile. In the mid-830s Alfonso II the Chaste appointed several regional judges to administer the local affairs of Cantabria-Bardulia. After another generation passed, they were replaced by several regional "counts" to administer local districts, the most important of which was called the county of Castile, a name later given to the entire area. By that time the Castilians had come to constitute a separate territorial and social group within greater Asturias-León, a frontier society that was ruder, more militant, more egalitarian, and more self-reliant than the settled and developed areas of Asturias and Galicia.

Crown and Aristocracy

The Asturian state developed early a strong concept of royal sovereignty. Specific challenges of life in the peninsula, coupled with Neo-Gothic theory, resulted in a vigorous monarchy that did not succumb to the decentralizing effect of internal power struggles of the sort that were weakening other west European monarchies. The Hispano-Visigothic [40] law, the Fuero Juzgo, emphasized the overriding legal authority of the rex as ruler of the regnum (kingdom or public power), so that in theory the Leonese crown held public authority over all its domains. The royal state was viewed as sovereign in itself and not merely the patrimony of a dynasty regulated by local custom, as in the more feudalized areas of western Europe. Practice, however, was something else, and de facto resistance by local districts, dissident aristocrats, or even serfs against higher authority was not uncommon. At first, succession to the throne remained semi-elective, though within the original dynasty, and the principle of strict hereditary succession was not fully established for nearly three hundred years. The eighth and ninth centuries were marked by intermittent revolt and at least one successful deposition of a sovereign. This notwithstanding, the Asturian-Leonese monarchy proved more stable than had that of the Visigoths, at least until the middle of the tenth century.

Supremacy of the crown was reinforced by the need of its subjects to maintain military unity in the face of a much stronger Muslim state to the south. The Asturian monarchy raised military forces directly and was not dependent merely on feudal levies. Most of the ablebodied men, at least in the frontier areas, were under some obligation to bear arms. Warfare was not the prerogative of a single class, and the crown was able to maintain considerable control over military power because it upheld the Romano-Visigothic principle that newly conquered land that was unoccupied belonged to the royal fisc and thus added regularly to its income. Retention of a moneyed economy, augmented by military raids and border expansion, enabled the crown to pay for some services and thus be less dependent on personal relationships. Organized administrative and judicial affairs rested on the authority of the crown, which normally appointed officials to their posts rather than recognizing such posts as the personal patrimony of local feudal overlords.

In most of western Europe, the power of the medieval aristocracy lay in its feudal politico-juridical dominion over local territories and in its reciprocal military obligations toward the crown and the local region. Only in Catalonia did the Hispanic nobility form along this west European pattern, but actual social circumstances in the Hispanic principalities did not always differ as greatly from the norms of feudal western Europe as the differing legal systems might imply. The Leonese monarchy, for example, lacked resources to administer local affairs throughout the kingdom, and in many areas local overlords appropriated nominal functions of the crown, even if on an ad hoc basis.

At any rate, a distinct hereditary aristocracy existed from the time of Alfonso I, made up of vigorous Hispano-Visigothic elements and [41] the warrior elite of the local population. Though some aristocrats possessed hereditary estates, the establishment of such endowments was gradual and did not become general for almost two centuries. The aristocracy was largely a military class whose members enjoyed special privileges, such as exemption from taxes and ordinary labor. Military leaders and local overlords or administrators of the crown were frequently given grants of land or the income from herds of cattle or cultivated strips to maintain themselves, and in certain cases received special titles, but for the first century or so such grants were only lifetime awards and were not hereditary. The only original hereditary right of the aristocrats was that of transmitting special opportunities and legal exemptions to their heirs. By the tenth century, if not before, there had developed a system of vassalage whereby local aristocratic military leaders swore special fealty and vassalage to the crown, which in turn recognized certain privileges of its vassals, but this was not at first accompanied in Asturias-León by the granting or recognition of special feudalities--inherited fiefs under the permanent dominion of a local vassal who was free to govern them as a private domain. Only gradually did local barons and other aristocrats manage to establish inherited landed dominions and property rights, either by establishing their authority over local peasants in a reciprocal military and economic relationship or by gaining hereditary, rather than temporary, possession of the lands and rights granted as a reward for military or administrative service. It was not until the tenth century--the first "decadence" of León--that new benefices and grants of special income and exemptions were granted to aristocrats without the requirement of service in return.

There were at least two distinct classes in the nobility from the very beginning: the ordinary warrior aristocrats, those with horses and other accoutrements, who enjoyed special exemptions but received only minor soldadas (fees), and the high aristocrats, called magnates or ricoshombres, who enjoyed greater salaries or the income from larger grants of land. The difference between the upper and lower classes of nobility lay not in their legal status and exemptions, which were roughly the same for both, but in their wealth and the importance of titles and honors which they held. The size of soldadas or landed benefices and the category of positions held in royal service, or all these combined, were what raised the ricohombre (literally "powerful man") over the rest of the warrior aristocracy.

The Peasantry

The condition of the peasantry, particularly in the kingdom of León but to a lesser extent elsewhere, was varied and extremely complicated. [42] Perhaps most of the population of the north were originally free peasants, free in the sense that they were recognized individually under the law and were not bound to the land or placed under special obligations other than taxes and normal community responsibilities. In Galicia, which was more settled and traditionalist, however, a large proportion held the status of colonos or homines, juridically free and not fully enserfed but still bound not to have the land which they worked. Moreover, in Galicia there was also a class of outright serfs, augmented in the eighth century by a few captive Muslims.

A distinct social difference crystallized almost immediately between the inner and outer zones of the kingdom. The military elite endeavored almost from the beginning to preserve the traditional social hierarchy and subjection in the most settled, best developed, and most secure parts of the kingdom, primarily in Galicia and in some parts of Asturias. In the wilder or more exposed regions, such as Cantabria-Castile, the outer parts of Asturias, or the new frontier area of León, a rough sense of social equality or at least of tight functional unity prevailed. In these regions the right of peasant proprietors to their own lands or flocks was usually recognized, and in turn nearly everyone had a common interest in the defense of the land against the Muslims. New opportunities were created by the rolling back of the frontier. The more disgruntled or enterprising from the settled zones could often move to the most exposed areas, where they might normally expect land or cattle, better grazing opportunities, and fewer special exactions upon them.

The first major instance of social unrest was a serf revolt in Asturias between 768 and 774. It was put down with the aid of the crown, but many serfs are said to have run off to frontier districts where they were allowed to live as free peasants. This in turn created something of a labor shortage in the interior of Galicia, so that some of those remaining in serfdom had to be granted the more lenient adscripted status of homines.

At the time of the emergence of a separate county of Castile in the tenth century, most of the Castilian population were free peasants. Even the intermediate grade of adscription to the land as homines or colonos was almost nonexistent among them. Early Castile was a semi-egalitarian warrior community, whose members to a large degree shared the same responsibilities and the same opportunities. An aristocratic class developed, but at first it was mainly a group of military leaders chosen for achievement, not birth.

The situation remained more complicated in Galicia, Asturias, and the new territories of León. In the southern region of León--the Duero valley--repopulated slowly after the mid-ninth century, most [43] peasant immigrants established themselves as independent proprietors in presura (occupation) freeholds. Free peasant landholders were much less numerous in Asturias and the more settled parts of León, and soon were only a small minority of the population of Galicia, but changes in status occurred constantly. The situation of the Galician colonos or homines improved at the time of the major repopulation of the Duero valley in the first half of the tenth century. Some moved to new freeholds farther south, and many of those remaining had to be granted better terms to keep them on the land. Save for the small class of serfs, legal adscription to the soil became less and less common. One class of colonos, called iuniores, were recognized as being only renters and free to move whenever they liked. Eventually a decree of Alfonso V of León in 1017 officially declared all colonos free of legal adscription to the soil, leaving only the few serfs, concentrated in Galicia, still bound to the land.

Though the number of peasants legally bound to the land declined, it became increasingly difficult for independent peasant proprietors to maintain their position. From the first generations of the kingdom of Asturias, they had been under pressure in Asturias and Galicia to seek protection from warrior aristocrats by placing their land under incomuniatio (in later Castilian, encomendación), granting the overlord full use of part of it and keeping only a portion for themselves. This process of encomendación was soon widespread in Galicia, and later extended to the frontier districts of Portugal as well as to Asturias and León. It became increasingly common, until individual freeholders had disappeared as a class in Galicia.

The process of encomendación took a milder form in the newer districts of León, and later in Castile. The system there was called benefactoria (in Castilian, behetría) and at first required merely that collective peasant groups pay a sort of rent on their lands and pastures to support the military aristocracy. Under the terms of benefactoria, peasants normally retained their full personal freedom and the use of all their lands. Moreover, they were at first normally free to break the relation or choose a new overlord-protector. There was a tendency to tighten up these terms in León however, as early as the tenth century, and they became increasingly rigorous in later generations. Furthermore, there was always the possibility that because of debt, crime, or misfortune a peasant might sink from encomendación or benefactoria into homone status. On the other hand, there were occasional examples of serfs or homines being freed of prior obligations and given land by their overlords to hold in encomendación.

Some peasants were involved in dual status relationships. For example, in portions of León where peasant proprietors retained their [44] land, they also might undertake obligations to work as laborers or homines two or three days a week on seigneurial plots.

In some districts, peasants could place their land under the protection of the church through a process known as oblación, but this came to involve varying degrees of financial obligation. Homines on church lands were normally better treated than those on the lands of the aristocrats, and in troubled times peasants sometimes voluntarily accepted homine status under a local church or monastery. By the twelfth century, however, new land management techniques had made clerical administrators more demanding, and there were occasional revolts of homines on church land.

From the beginning there was also a small class of free landless peasants who worked exclusively as salaried laborers. And in Castile, Navarre, and Aragón there was a class of yunqueros, peasants who owned oxen or other cattle but little or no land of their own. These became more numerous in the twelfth century.

By the twelfth century serfdom--peasants held in semislave status, tied to the land, without juridical personality under the law--was disappearing. By that time practically the only fully enserfed were Muslim captives, some of whom worked on the land but who were more commonly in domestic service. During the thirteenth century nearly all remaining landed serfs (found mainly in Galicia) were raised to colono status, giving them individual recognition under the law and in most cases freedom of movement, though under heavy obligations for the use of land.

Though slaves were numerous in affluent Al-Andalus, there were comparatively few outright slaves in Asturias-León. Again, nearly all held in this condition were captive Muslims, and the actual difference between Muslim serfs and Muslim slaves in León was apparently often complicated and unclear. The slave class became somewhat more numerous in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as the Christian principalities grew in wealth and power.

Social Associationism

Very characteristic of medieval Hispano-Christian society was the predominance of various forms of associationism or communalism. It is true that, as indicated earlier, the occupation of new land by reconquest permitted the establishment of numerous new allodial freeholds as private property, but in the majority of cases the old Roman principle of complete, unfettered private property no longer prevailed. The main source of wealth was land, but most land was not [45] owned, pure and simple, by a single party. The need for cooperation and division of responsibility for defense and the civil order was generally accepted, and a sometimes bewildering variety of claims, rights, shares, or interests were established relating to the use or production of a piece of property. Most land was held in a kind of condominium, part of the usufruct going to the overlord--whether aristocrat, church, or crown--and part to those who worked on it or otherwise "owned" it. Numerous kinds of sharecropping arrangements were worked out on lands that formed part of seigneurial or church domain, or were held under encomendación or benefactoria. This was the more common because part of the northern section of the peninsula had never been fully incorporated into the Roman property system and pre-Roman forms of communalism had not died out by the time of the Muslim conquest.

Associative arrangements functioned not only between members of hierarchic relationships but on the cooperative level of peasant village communes and pastoral associations as well. Particularly in Castile, but also to some extent in the frontier regions of León, much of the land was held by peasant villages that administered and reapportioned use of land and herds in common. In turn, local regional associations of villages and later of towns were formed for the regulation of common problems.

The medieval Hispano-Christian family was also organized along communal and associative lines, based on the joint rights of the parents. In place of Roman marital rights investing all power in the husband, medieval Hispano-Christian law in all regions held that marriage constituted a society of equal rights, based on half-and-half sharing and equal division of property among families and heirs. The same rule was normally applied to all income from or additions to community property. This reflected the greater emphasis on women's role in the post-Celtic society of part of the northern hill country, as well as the influence of Christian principles. Its sharp contrast to the norms of the orthodox Muslim society of Al-Andalus is obvious.

Early Extension of Seigneurial Domain

Even though the explicit feudal principle was not recognized in the legal structure of Asturias, and the military aristocracy at first was held to be more distinctly a service aristocracy than in other parts of western Europe, separate domains were built up by members of the aristocracy and by the church, probably starting as early as the second half of the eighth century. The origin of the seigneurial domains [46] lay more in practice than in theory. As explained earlier, dominion over land was considered legally to be a temporary award in return for service or the maintenance of military strength. Legal jurisdiction by aristocrats was originally meant to represent the jurisdiction of the public power, which could only be administered through intermediaries.

In practice, however, there was an early tendency in the more settled parts of Galicia and Asturias for dominions of aristocrats to become permanent and inheritable and for aristocrats to exercise economic and legal jurisdiction by mere right of dominion, not as temporary lieutenants of the crown. This did not nullify the tendency toward sharing and associationism, for seigneurial domain was frequently limited by tradition and the local custom of peasants' rights. By the tenth century, at any rate, de facto relationships in much of the northwest were passing into law; seigneurial and church domain were recognized over most of Galicia, and parts of Asturias and old León as well.

Castilian Frontier Society and Resettlement

Of all regions of the peninsula, the one with the greatest social mobility, autonomy, and communal associationism was Castile. The inhabitants of Cantabria-Bardulia had never been subjected to as developed a social hierarchy as had obtained in the centers of Roman and Visigothic Hispania. The conditions of Castilian frontier society in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries precluded the growth of the degree of social subjection and hierarchy that were already established in Galicia. Local Castilian peasant villages and communities enjoyed district autonomy, and frequently made decisions by means of open village meetings. There were numerous examples of peasants proven in battle who outfitted themselves with horses and became knights (in Castilian, caballero, "cavalryman"). It might also be noted that until the broad southward expansion of the eleventh century, cavalry were rather less important in Castilian hill warfare than in some other regions, and peasant infantry more important. Indeed, the booty obtained in semiconstant warfare offered new property to whoever was able to take it, reducing the degree of social stratification.

Border districts were always the most democratic, not merely in Castile but in León as well, for peasant groups had to be granted better terms, often including peasant community autonomy, to induce them to settle the hazardous frontier. Enterprising peasant [47] groups might resettle a district entirely by themselves on grants of presura, or with specific cartas de franquicias (charters of rights or immunities) from the crown, sometimes obtained ex post facto. The expansion of Castile was frequently a matter of osmosis. Most important of all was the establishment of new peasant communities as concejos, self-governing corporate councils, with cartas pueblas (charters) recognizing local rights and autonomy. Such practices were at the root of the system of local and municipal fueros (rights) that formed the basis of much of the historic Castilian legal structure.

It would be inaccurate to try to establish an absolute social and legal dichotomy between Castile and León. In the frontier districts of León there were semi-autonomous concejos just as in Castile. Not all local districts or peasant communities in Castile were autonomous, and by the eleventh century a trend had set in among elements of the new Castilian aristocracy to carve out their own seigneurial domains. Yet in general a difference in tendency and degree did exist, mainly because of the challenge and opportunity of Castile as a frontier region. It followed also that if Castilian society was freer, more autonomous, socially mobile, and egalitarian than that of greater León, it was ruder and more insular.

Immigration into the Hispanic Principalities

There were several currents of immigration into the northern principalities during the early Middle Ages, but the only one of significant proportions was the movement of Christian Mozarabs from Al-Andalus into the north, primarily into the major state, the kingdom of León. The flow of immigrants varied but continued fairly steadily for three centuries and more, the biggest influx probably occurring during the second half of the ninth century, when León was expanding and the pressure on Mozarabs in the south had begun to mount. It has been conjectured that Mozarab immigrants played a major role in diffusing sophisticated (sometimes Islamically-derived) cultural forms throughout the northwest, in the development of the Neo-Gothic and reconquest mystiques, and in the reestablishment or development of hierarchical institutions.

Up until the eleventh century, the Muslim population of the Christian states was small, consisting exclusively of prisoners carried back to the north. They were normally reduced to semislave status but were also more apt than not to be converted to Christianity. Conversion did not guarantee freedom, but it was the first step in the amelioration of their condition. In the more settled areas, particularly [48] Galicia, captured Muslims were frequently absorbed by the local society within a generation or two. No major centers of Muslim population were captured during the first three centuries of the reconquest; most Muslims in the path of the Christian advance withdrew, and only a comparative few were seized. Thus in the early Middle Ages they formed no ethno-religious bloc in the north.

The large Jewish society in the south played a significant role in the economic and cultural life of Al-Andalus, but few Jews lived in the Christian principalities before the eleventh century. The backward northern economy was unattractive, and the advantages of Muslim rule were appreciated, at least until the eleventh century, when conditions began to change. Even before then, however, very small groups of Jews were established in a few of the leading centers, engaged in commerce.

Aside from the Mozarabs, the most important group of immigrants in the tenth and eleventh centuries were the French, known as francos (Franks), who entered the peninsula in small but fairly continuous numbers from the ninth century on. The first notable Frankish immigration flowed into the Catalan counties in the ninth and tenth centuries, and during the eleventh expanded into the western principalities. The Franks were predominantly of three types--religious reformers and monks, who exercised a major influence on Spanish Catholicism (as well as government and economic development) and will be discussed in a subsequent chapter; military crusaders and adventurers, who sometimes lent decisive impetus to the reconquest, expecially in Aragón; and middle-class merchants and artisans, who played a major role in building up trade and urban economic life, to a greater extent during this period (the tenth and eleventh centuries) than did the Jews. Unlike the latter, middle-class French immigrants tended to merge with the general population after a generation or two.

Towns

Urban society only slowly began to develop in the north during the tenth and the first part of the eleventh centuries. During the period of caliphal splendor in Córdoba, León, the capital city of the northwest, had a population of scarcely 7,000. The only other towns of importance were Astorga, Oviedo, and the religious shrine of Santiago de Compostela. Farther east were Pamplona, Barcelona, and Gerona. Nearly all the towns that did exist had been laid out under Roman rule. What passed for towns in most localities were simply large [49] churches or villages fortified for military defense. Significant change came only with the great expansion of the eleventh century and the economic stimulus of tribute payments and other newly incorporated sources of wealth.

León During the Tenth Century

For two centuries, a series of comparatively strong rulers, external pressures for unity, territory of manageable dimensions, simplicity of social forms, modest population, and strong natural frontiers combined to create relative unity and continuity behind the monarchy of Asturias-León. These conditions changed during the course of the tenth century. After the death of Ordoño II (924), domestic disputes multiplied. During the second half of the century the throne was occupied by a series of weak rulers whose ineptness encouraged particularism and dissension. At the same time, the kingdom faced the awesome challenge of the military might of the tenth-century caliphate, the sharpest threat from the Muslims since the original conquest.

Dynastic dissension in León was due in part to the active intervention of Navarrese diplomacy. Three successive Leonese kings were married to Navarrese princesses, all daughters of the redoubtable Queen Toda of Pamplona, who was the key to north Hispanic politics for twenty years and the principal organizer of the coalition of Christian princes that defeated Abd-al-Rahman III at Simancas in 939. Leonese dissension was compounded by the influence of aristocratic cliques and the failure of the crown to develop an administrative system beneficial to the domain as a whole.

Navarrese diplomacy encouraged the separation of Castile, and after the death of Ramiro II in 951, rival heirs from successive marriages of the late king plunged León into its first full-fledged civil war. Sancho I (known as Sancho the Fat or the Crass), the younger son of Ramiro's second (Navarrese) marriage, required help from Navarre and from the caliphate to retain his throne. He was forced to recognize the suzerainty of Abd-al-Rahman III and ruled feebly for ten years. Sancho was then succeeded by an underage son, Ramiro III (966-985), whose unhappy reign coincided with the rise of al-Mansur, a drastic contraction of Leonese frontiers, and years of devastation and misery. A Galician-Leonese reaction eventually established Vermudo II (985-999), a son of Ordoño III, on the throne, but the kingdom could not escape further suffering from the summer campaigns of al-Mansur. At times it seemed that all the achievements [50] of two hundred years were being destroyed. Only toward the end of the reign of Alfonso V (999-1028) was domestic unity regained and the resettlement of border districts resumed. During the six harsh decades of 950-1010 León had lost its expansive momentum and had nearly broken apart.

The Autonomy of Castile

A major factor in the dissension of tenth-century León was the particularism of the region of Castile, where neither the regional counts nor the people felt close to the Leonese state system. Regulated by their own common law, largely free of social coercion, and often left to their own devices in the face of Muslim onslaught, the Castilians forged an identity of their own. Castile lay at the crossroads of diverse ethnic groups and principalities, but out of conflict and expansion had formed its own ethos and was developing its own language. The leader who first took effective advantage of this was a royally appointed count of Castile, Fernán González, in an attempt to assert Castilian autonomy during the reign of Ramiro II. Though several times defeated, he rallied most of the Castilian population behind him, and during the convulsed generation that followed the death of Ramiro II, established the full autonomy of Castile on terms of virtual independence. For twenty years, from 950 to 970, he governed as count of Castile, in conflict at varying times with the Cordoban caliphate, the kingdom of Navarre, and León itself.

Castile's chief reason for being was military, and it did a better job of defending itself against Muslim onslaught than any other Christian principality. The most redoubtable quality of Fernán González was his fierce military leadership. The vernacular Castilian romances later remembered that

Decianle por sus lides el buitre carnicero.
(They called him for his battles the butcher vulture.)

The elite cavalry of lesser nobles was increased to 600 by González, and though it may have bent, the military structure of Castile did not crack under the Muslim onslaught. Most of the wealth of the land was in livestock, which was herded out of the way or into the hills, limiting economic loss. By the beginning of the eleventh century, Castile had weathered the storm of the "iron century" in rather better condition than the more sophisticated but less vigorous and more politically and socially divided regions of Old León.

[51] The Expansion of Navarre

The small Basque region of Navarre (or Pamplona, as it is often called, after its capital and only real city) was originally one of the smallest but also the most ethnically homogeneous of Hispanic principalities. Its population was at first largely non-Christian, and only in its capital city and among the ruling class was Romance dialect spoken; elsewhere people spoke the isolated, autochthonous Basque tongue almost exclusively. The early history of Navarre is shrouded in mystery, for almost no records have survived. Though the region was not fully Christianized until the twelfth century, it may be inferred that Christian proselytization was carried on fairly continuously, particularly from the north, where Navarre lay more open to French influence than any other Hispanic region save the Catalan counties of the eastern Pyrenees.

Navarrese history took a new direction in 905, when a new dynasty was established in Pamplona under Sancho Garcés I (905-925). The one-hundred-year-old alliance with the Hispano-Muslim Banu Qasi rulers of the neighboring upper Ebro region was broken, and the Navarrese crown adopted an Hispano-Christian policy of expansion and reconquest. With military assistance from León, the Nájera district (in modern Logroño province) to the southwest was conquered between 918 and 923, though beyond that point the small Navarrese forces were unable to make headway. Indeed, the resurgence of Muslim power under the tenth-century caliphate soon forced the Pamplona rulers to return to their more customary policy of compromise and the renewal of marriage alliances, wedding a Navarrese princess to the heir of al-Mansur.

Somewhat paradoxically, the backward, non-Romance-speaking, still partly unchristianized Navarre nevertheless became by the end of the tenth century extremely receptive to new influences, in part because of its position astride the western Pyrenees. Navarre and the Catalan counties were the first Hispanic regions to be influenced by the tenth- and eleventh-century Catholic reform movements from France, which were transmitted through them to Castile and León. The eastern principalities served as channels of European modernization in a variety of ways: new forms of administrative organization, mercantile practice, training and functioning of clerks and scribes, artisanship, and military technology (particularly in the development of stronger horses, weapons, and chain mail for the new style of heavy cavalry) began to filter through the Pyrenean states. Though the Catalan counties in some respects may have been farther advanced culturally and economically, Navarre by the early eleventh [52] century had become the peninsula's best-organized state politically, thanks in large part to a series of vigorous and capable rulers. Navarre was the only non-Muslim region unravaged by al-Mansur, and it was clearly the most unified.

The "modernization" of Navarre occurred just as the Muslim caliphate was crippled by the death of Adbul Malik. This provided a major opportunity, and Sancho III "el Mayor" (1004-1035) seized it to make Navarre briefly the leading Hispano-Christian state for the first and only time in its history. Sancho was unequivocal about the royal nature of his sovereignty; he was strongly influenced by French monarchist theory and feudal norms, and followed the French practice of claiming to rule "by the grace of God," a formula subsequently adopted by other Hispanic kings. His ambitions were greatly assisted by the weakness and division of León, which had not yet recovered from the civil turmoil and devastation of the century before. Sancho first annexed the three small counties to the east (Aragón, Sobrarbe, Ribagorza) and then extended Navarrese control over much of the Basque territory on the northwest side of the Pyrenees. When his father-in-law, Sancho Garcia, third count of Castile, died in 1017 leaving only a small son as heir, Sancho of Navarre established himself as protector of Castile. This enabled him to incorporate the Basque-speaking districts of northeastern Castile (roughly modern Alava and Vizcaya) into Navarre. After the nephew came of age, he was murdered in 1028 by dissident Castilian nobles (perhaps with Sancho's encouragement), and Sancho incorporated all of Castile into his realm. From that point he pressed against the borders of León, fomenting rebellion by aristocratic dissidents and defeating the Leonese monarchy in battle. At the beginning of 1034 Sancho entered the city of León in triumph. Basing his claim on vague dynastic relations, support of fractious nobles, and the right of conquest, he asserted control over the Leonese throne and declared himself emperor of all the Hispano-Christian principalities. He died one year later, at the height of his power.

The Navarrese "empire" was no more than a personal creation of Sancho el Mayor, depending in large part on the weakness and disunity of its neighbors. Navarre itself lacked the resources to dominate the rest of Christian Hispania, and the empire immediately dissolved after Sancho's death. The dissolution, in fact, was arranged by Sancho himself, who gave vogue to French feudal theory and practice in the Hispanic states, introducing the term vassal into Castilan usage. He divided his three principal domains among his sons, with the understanding that the two younger sons in their separate patrimonies of Castile and Aragón would recognize the suzerainty of [53] the eldest, Garcia of Navarre (1035-1054), who inherited the dynasty's home principality. In the long run, however, the neighboring territories of Castile and Aragón benefitted more than did Navarre from new changes and techniques that were introduced during the eleventh century. In the decades that followed, the other states grew stronger, while Navarre remained comparatively static and no longer enjoyed leadership as effective as that of Sancho. When García tried to encroach directly on Castile, he was defeated and killed in battle in 1054. The Navarrese monarchy not only lost hegemony but subsequently encountered difficulty in maintaining the integrity of its domains.

Underlying Unity of the Hispano-Christian Principalities

The small Hispanic states of the early Middle Ages were divided by formidable geographic barriers, by linguistic differences, and at times by violent political conflict, yet these disparities were mitigated by undercurrents of religious and cultural unity. The Hispano-Visigothic liturgy was used not only by Mozarabs in Al-Andalus but also by Christians throughout the peninsula, and even for a time across the Pyrenees in formerly Visigothic Septimania, under French rule since the eighth century. The Hispano-Visigothic legal code, the Fuero Juzgo, was widely employed by the first generations of the Catalan Pyrenean counties, as well as in Asturias-León. Common artistic and architectural forms were followed, based on Hispano-Visigothic culture and the use of the peculiar Visigothic Latin script. All of this helped to keep alive the sense of a common Christian Hispania during the difficult centuries of Muslim hegemony.

By the eleventh century, the Hispano-Christian princes had also developed similar ambitions: the reconquest of territory and expansion to the south. Though this sometimes led to conflict, cooperation was more common, based on a common sense of historic mission. Yet the separate territorial political entities formed during these first centuries had laid deep roots, and expanded their frontiers southward rather than coalescing. Thus despite an underlying Hispano-Christian peninsular identity, monarchico-territorial pluralism became accepted as a legal and natural fact in the state systems of greater Christian Hispania.

Bibliography for Chapter III

[335] The best general one-volume history of Spain in the Middle Ages is Luis Suárez Fernández's Historia de España: Edad Media (Madrid, 1970). The leading historian of the kingdom of Asturias-León is Claudio Sánchez Albornoz. His principal works dealing with early medieval Spain are En torno a los orígenes del feudalismo, 3 vols. (Mendoza, 1942); Despoblación y repoblación del valle del Duero (Buenos Aires, 1966); and a collection of brief studies, Estudios sobre las instituciones medievales españoles (Mexico City, 1965). Joaquín Arbeloa, Los orígenes del reino de Navarra, 3 vols. (San Sebastián, 1969), is an interesting new work. The most extensive history of tenth-century Castile, though somewhat misleading on Castilian origins, is Justo Pérez de Urbel's Historia del Condado de Castilla, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1945). Pérez de Urbel has also written a biography of the leading Hispanic ruler of the early eleventh century, Sancho el Mayor de Navarra (Madrid, 1950). A. Cotarelo Valledor, Historia crítica y documentada de Alfonso III (Madrid, 1933), is a political biography of one of the most important Asturian kings.

[336] The fundamental study of the question of an Hispano-Christian identity is José Antonio Maravall, El concepto de España en ía Edad Media (Madrid, 1954). See also Maravall's Estudios de historia del pensamiento español (Madrid, 1967). The idea of Hispanic empire is treated by Ramón Menéndez Pidal, El imperio hispánico y los cinco reinos (Madrid, 1950), and Alfonso Sánchez Candeira, El "Regnum-Imperium" leonés hasta 1037 (Madrid, 1951). Useful studies of reconquest and repopulation are contained in J. M. Lacarra, ed., La Reconquista española y la repoblación del país (Zaragoza, 1951).

There is a detailed survey of early medieval Hispanic society by Alfonso García Gallo,"Las instituciones sociales de España en la Alta Edad Media (Siglos VIII-XII)," Revista de Estudios Politicos, Suplemento de Política Social (1945), vols. 1 and 2. See also Sánchez Albornoz's Estampas de la vida en León durante el Siglo X (Madrid, 1926, 1965). The principal work on medieval Hispanic slavery is Charles Verlinden, L'Esclavage dans l'Europe médiévale. I. Peninsule Ibérique-France (Bruges, 1955). For early medieval Hispanic culture, see Enrique Bagué, Historia de ía cultura española: La Alta Edad Media (Barcelona, 1953); and Gonzalo Menéndez Pidal, "Mozárabes y asturianos en la cultura de la Alta Edad Media," Boletín de la Real Academia de Historia 134 (1954): 137-291.

A History of Spain and Portugal
Vol. 1
By Stanley G. Payne

Chapter Four
Castile-León in the Era of the Great Reconquest

The Hispano-Christian reconquest and reoccupation was a continuing process of more than seven centuries, punctuated, however, by long pauses which Muslim strength, Christian exhaustion, or internal quarreling made inevitable. The reconquest may be divided into seven phases:

1. Ca. 740-790: conquest of the southern Cantabrian foothills and lower Galicia
2. Ca. 850-950: expansion into the Duero valley (in Catalonia, conquest of central Catalonia)
3. Eleventh century: conquest of the central plateau and central Portugal
4. Early twelfth century: conquest of lower Aragón and southwestern Catalonia and expansion of the southern and southwestern borders of Castile-León into Extremadura
5. Thirteenth century: climactic period of the reconquest, with the conquest of the Balearics, Valencia, all the south-central peninsula, and most of the south, save for the emirate of Granada and a few coastal points
6. Early fourteenth century: minor extension of Castilian territory along the southern coast
[56] 7. Fifteenth century: completion of the reconquest, ended by the occupation of Granada (1482-1492).

It should be kept in mind, of course, that there was often a lag of one hundred years or more between conquest and effective settlement or occupation.

The New Power Balance and Renewal of Leonese-Castilian Imperialism

The collapse of the Cordoban caliphate opened the way to a drastic change in the power balance of the peninsula. While Muslim leadership and strength splintered, the Christian principalities were expanding with a vigor only partially related to demographic changes. for the Christian states were still more lightly inhabited than the taifa lands. Key to the expansion were the recuperation of Leonese strength and unity and the reunification of Castile and León under the Castilian monarchy, accompanied by reinvigoration of the old Leonese program of imperial reconquest and Hispanic unity, first sketched out in the eighth century. A secondary factor of some importance was the development of mailed heavy cavalry, which had a distinct advantage over Muslim light cavalry and infantry, though it is not clear to how great an extent the Leonese-Castilian forces actually relied on heavy cavalry. Aragón and Catalonia also increased their military power, assisted by French adventurers and crusaders, but their forces remained much smaller than those of the large kingdom of León-Castile.

The reunification of León and Castile was accomplished by Fernando I (1037-1065), second son of Sancho el Mayor, who had inherited the county of Castile and raised it to the rank of kingdom after the Navarrese "anti-emperor"'s death in 1035. Meanwhile the young Leonese king, Vermudo III (1028-1037), had regained his capital after Sancho's death and begun to reassert the imperial sovereignty of the Leonese crown. In the process, he tried to reoccupy the territory in eastern León that had been seized earlier by Sancho for Castile, but was killed in battle by the Castilian forces of Fernando in 1037. Since Vermudo left no heir, he was succeeded by his rival, Fernando of Castile, who also happened to be Vermudo's brother-in-law, since Fernando was wed to a Leonese princess. Henceforth Fernando was ruler of "Castile-León," the younger and less-developed kingdom taking precedence in the royal title of the Sánchez dynasty because it was Fernando's inherited patrimony, whereas the larger and more important León was an acquired territory. In fact, [57] the main role in the later reconquest by Fernando was played by the militant aristocrats and expansionist prelates of wealthier, more developed, and more imperial-minded León.

The united Castile-León of Fernando I fell heir to the historic Leonese imperial program, interrupted by a century of internal weakness and Muslim pressure. Nearly two decades were passed in recuperation, restoration of unity, and settlement of the border quarrel with Navarre, finally resolved in 1054 with the death of the Navarrese king, García. In the following year Fernando I launched the first of a series of assaults against the Muslim border taifas that filled the last decade of his reign. The major territorial conquests were made in the southwest, where Viseu was seized in 1057 and Guarda and Coimbra in 1064. More important geopolitically and economically was the reduction to tributary status of the three leading taifa emirates along the frontier--Badajoz, Toledo, and Zaragoza. Large annual parias (tribute payments) swelled the resources of the Castilian-Leonese crown and encouraged the military mercenary, overlord, ethos that was developing more markedly in Castilian-Leonese society than in the Pyrenean counties.

Though Fernando I had adopted the imperial reconquest program of the traditional Leonese monarchy, he proved unable to resist the feudalizing inheritance policy that had been introduced by his father. He divided his domains among his three sons and awarded territorial grants to his two daughters, giving them the title of queen. This created intense conflict and rivalry after Fernando's death. At the end of seven years of internecine strife, the second son reunited the dual kingdom as Alfonso VI of Castile-León (1065-1109) and, in Leonese terminology, "Emperor of Hispania."

Leonese imperial policy could now be resumed. Within another decade most of Al-Andalus had been subjected to tributary status under the Leonese crown, and in 1082 Alfonso VI led an expedition to the southern tip of the peninsula, where he rode his horse out into the water in a symbolic gesture to show that all of Hispania was under Leonese suzerainty. The city of Toledo was a major prize, and key to the peninsula's fairly populous and productive central plateau. That entire region had been seized directly by 1085, moving the boundaries of Castile-León far southward from the Duero to the Tajo river valley and establishing Leonese dominion in the very center of Hispania. Reoccupation of the Visigothic capital gave further impetus to the imperial pretensions of the Leonese crown.

Territorial expansion and the large income from parias also opened a new era in the economic affairs of León and Castile. Urban life developed, as new towns were founded and the few already established grew. Commerce increased and began to acquire a significance [59] it had never known before. This was stimulated by Alfonso VI's encouragement of the immigration of monks, merchants, and artisans, who helped form the nucleus of a middle class in the towns of northern Castile and León. It was also assisted by the growth in traffic along the road to Santiago de Compostela, whose shrine had become the destination of thousands of west European pilgrims. The new prosperity stimulated building, the endowment of churches, the development of the arts, and the general growth of Leonese culture. Population expanded, and by 1100 the greater kingdom of Castile-León numbered approximately two and a half million inhabitants.

Resettlement of the Region between the Duero and Tajo: The Concejos of Castile and Leon

Much of the newly acquired land between the Duero and Tajo was taken over by common soldiers and peasant immigrants, who formed communities that were given royal charters (fueros) as semi-autonomous concejos (council districts). The concejos covered most of the territory in the region. They were not so much municipal governments as governing councils of rural districts with a fortified village or small town in the center of each to serve as cattle market and military rallying point. The larger concejos thus included sizable tracts of land surrounding the main town around which they were organized. Concejos were organized on a semi-egalitarian basis; in some districts all the local vecinos, or permanent residents, had a voice in choosing the local council, though in others the most vigorous or wealthy soon formed a local oligarchy. Most of the land within the concejos was held under varying terms of condominium or communal ownership, though agricultural as distinct from pastoral land was sometimes set aside as strictly personal property. A considerable share of each district was held as tierra concejil-"council land" of the community. Other portions were classified as bienes de propios, semiprivate lands still subject to community regulation. Since animal-grazing was the basis of the economy, the principle of absolute private property was less useful. Under the terms of their fueros, most concejos were free to administer their local affairs and dispense justice, and were nominally responsible to the crown only for payment of taxes and military levies. The most important of the concejos were Salamanca, Avila, and Segovia. Though concejo settlement had begun by the mid-eleventh century, it was not complete for more than one hundred years, until after the frontier had moved south of the Tajo.

The founding of the eleventh-century concejos was accompanied by the establishment of an intermediate military elite in New Castile [60] and lower León--the caballeros villanos or commoner-knights. This had already begun in Castile during the tenth century and had been hastened by two developments. First, there was the tendency, already marked by the tenth century, for the aristocracy in León and to a lesser degree in Old Castile to settle into an hereditary caste. What had earlier been a military and administrative service aristocracy had established itself as a privileged group, exempt from taxation and in some cases even military service, but enjoying hereditary dominion over lands and other perquisites, and among the high aristocracy over family titles as well. All this elevated its members into a feudal caste of regional socio-economic domination in Galicia, Old León, and Old Castile and deprived the crown of many of the services for which aristocratic status had originally been the reward. Second, the heightened warfare of the tenth century, followed by the renewed expansion of the eleventh, called for more mobile and offensive forces than had been needed for scattered raiding and defensive warfare in the northern hills. The Christian principalities had to expand heavy cavalry to secure military domination, but it was an expensive process.
The cheapest, most direct way was through broad expansion of the class of caballeros villanos, ordinary peasants who proved themselves in battle and were granted sufficient land or condominium shares in the concejos to maintain their expensive military equipment and retinue. Such expansion was made possible by the fact that horses were more available to commoners on the Hispanic frontier than anywhere else in western Europe. Formation of this nonaristocratic military elite strengthened royal power, discouraged aristocratic factionalism, and built military strength in the frontier areas where it was needed most. It recognized and reaffirmed the open society of frontier Castile-León, where common shepherds and peasants could rise to elite status.

Prominence of the Medieval Hispanic Venturero

During the eleventh century there emerged the Hispanic venturero (adventurer, professional soldier or mercenary), who for five hundred years was to be a common figure throughout western Europe and the Mediterranean and even parts of central Europe and northwest Africa. Ventureros came from all the Hispanic principalities, but the exorbitantly military style of Castile, coupled with its poverty, made professional warriors more often than not Castilian in origin, though probably the most famous of all were the special companies of Catalonia. Whether campeadores on land or mareantes on the sea, they were found in almost every theater of operations; Hispano-Christian [61] mercenaries were the last elite corps defending the fanatically Muslim Almoravid empire. Generations of this kind of experience found their fruition in the epic conquistadores of the sixteenth century.

The Reconquest Checked: Rise of the Almoravid Empire

By the time of the incorporation of Toledo, Alfonso VI was collecting tribute not merely from Muslim frontier districts but from the taifas of Seville, Granada, and other important southern regions. He demanded that a lieutenant from among his officials be allowed to supervise the government of the emirate of Seville. Other military lieutenants occupied strategic fortresses in the south central, southern, and southeastern parts of the peninsula to ensure Castilian military dominance and continued tribute payments.

In 1085, there seemed nothing to hinder Castilian conquest of all the taifas of southern Hispania, though the economy and culture of the south continued to flourish. Silks, leather goods, cotton textiles, pottery. and farm products made the taifas the economic wonder of the peninsula, and their commerce remained extensive, but tribute payments were raised higher and higher, threatening to bleed away this prosperity. The only hope of respite from Castilian pressure was Muslim assistance from outside the peninsula.

Relief was available from the forces of a dynamic new Muslim power that had swept across Morocco from the western Sahara during the past generation. In 1039, a Maghrebi jurist and evangelist had been invited into the western Sahara to inculcate formal Islamic practice among the wild Touareg tribes of that region. This faqih, Ibn Yasin, preached a simple, ascetic, as well as militant interpretation of Islam and quickly collected a following calling themselves al-murabi-tun ("united for holy war"), westernized as Almoravids. In their fanatical fervor, the Almoravids preached the jihad and spread across the western Sahara like the early followers of Mohammed in the Arabian Hedjaz. The Almoravids' militant, puritanical doctrine--advocating strict, literal obedience to the Koran, daily ablutions, the shunning of money-making, the giving of alms and rejection of vice, and the fear of hell counterbalanced by hope of salvation through militant implementation of the will of Allah--caught fire among the fierce, half-pagan tribesmen. Within twenty years the Almoravids carved out a loose, theocratic state that covered much of the western Sahara. Though in theory submissive to the sovereignty of the Fatimid caliphate at Cairo, the Almoravid state actually constituted an independent empire. It conquered the tribes of the upper Senegal, spilled over into western Algeria, and invaded sedentary and more [62] cultured Morocco. The Almoravids brought a promise of lowered taxes and relief for the poor, and by 1080 nearly all Morocco had been conquered.

As early as 1077, the Almoravids had been approached for military assistance by taifa representatives. The conquest of northern Morocco was completed in 1084, one year before Toledo was incorporated into Castile. The need of the taifas was desperate, and in 1086 an explicit invitation to cross the straits was tendered by al-Mutamid of Seville, who at the same time sought to make sure that the taifas would not fall under Almoravid domination. The invitation to do battle in support of the emir of Seville against Castile was accepted by the Almoravid leaders as a logical extension of their jihad.

As usual, Alfonso VI seized the initiative, meeting the Almoravids on Muslim territory at Sagrajas (near Badajoz). The Almoravid forces relied chiefly upon compactly organized, trained infantry, armed with lances and javelins and protected by hippopotamus-hide shields. In addition, they included an elite corps of black African guards, light cavalry interspersed with small camel corps to frighten the enemy's horses, and units of archers and crossbowmen. At Sagrajas the forces from Seville bore the brunt of the formidable Castilian charge while a mobile portion of the Almoravids flanked the Castilian host and struck their camp from the rear. Defeated, the Castilians retreated in fairly good order, and the Almoravids retired to Africa without exploiting their victory.

The only real prospect for independence of what remained of Al-Andalus--still nearly two-thirds of the peninsula--seemed to lie in a permanent Almoravid military presence. This left the taifa rulers in a dilemma, for they were no more eager to be taken over by the fanatical, somewhat primitive Almoravids than by the equally rigorous Castilians. By 1090, however, an Almoravid party had formed among the people of some of the larger taifa cities. It was led by fanatical faqihs and supported by Muslim traditionalists increasingly conscious of their Muslim identity and fearful of Christian domination; also by the poor, hoping for relief. The Almoravid leader, Yusuf ibn Tashfin, had gauged the feebleness of the taifa emirs, weak in religiosity, many of them steeped in self-indulgence. He returned to the peninsula in 1090 and within two years had seized the main taifa capitals in the south. Soon nearly the entire southern half of the peninsula had been incorporated in the Almoravid empire. The frontier then for several decades was stabilized south of the Tajo, since the Almoravids were not strong enough to assault the new line of Castilian settlements in the very center of the peninsula.

There seems little doubt that Almoravid rule was at first fairly popular among Hispano-Muslims. Yet the Almoravid military elite [63] was culturally inferior to its appanage, and the Almoravid period is sometimes painted as one of intolerant suppression of the "high culture" of the taifas by the puritanical and fanatic Africans. It is true that secular poetry and the use of musical instruments were discouraged, but the decorative arts, song, and popular poetry continued to flourish. The achievements of Hispano-Muslim culture in the second half of the twelfth century attest its survival under the Almoravids.

With the eleventh-century shift in power and the subsequent establishment of the Almoravid empire in southern Hispania, the sense of ethno-religious identity among Hispanic Muslims and of intense hostility toward Christians was sharpened. The traditionalist Malikite rite, which had become less universal, was rigorously reimposed, and the ulemas (religious teachers) were employed as an instrument of policy. What remained of the traditional Hispano-Muslim "discriminatory toleration" ended with the Almoravids, who inaugurated a policy of direct persecution of the few remaining Christians in the south. Jews also suffered and for the first time were beginning to look to the Christian princes as saviors from Muslim persecution. This was a consequence of the Almoravid interpretation of the jihad, and something of the same degree of militance and intolerance was begining to be shared by Hispanic Muslims as well. By the twelfth century the gap between Christian and Muslim Hispania was greater than ever before.

The Epic of the Cid

As Almoravid power grew, it veered away from the strongly-held Castilian center of the peninsula toward the prosperous urban centers and irrigated fields of the east coast. There at Valencia the greatest military figure of medieval Hispania, the legendary national hero Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, known from the terminology of his Muslim subjects as the Cid, had carved out an independent protectorate.

As far as is known, the Cid was a renowned Castilian knight, vassal of Alfonso VI, banished from his native kingdom because of a misunderstanding. He entered the military service of the emir of Zaragoza and gained more laurels in the eastern part of the peninsula. As the Almoravid danger grew, he was accepted again into the service of the Leonese crown, and though Alfonso VI remained jealous and suspicious, he was granted hereditary autonomous dominion, under the crown of León, of all Muslim land that he could conquer in the peninsula's east. Between 1088 and 1092 the Cid carved out a domain reaching from the region of Lérida and Tortosa down to Valencia, and proved a shrewd ruler as well as a clever and ruthless warrior. [64] Large tribute payments were exacted from the Muslims, in keeping with the Hispano-Christian practice. In 1092 the pro-Almoravid party in wealthy, populous Valencia rebelled against their emir, who was a vassal of the king of León. Mobilizing his maximum force, the Cid took advantage of civil strife in Valencia to add that city to his domain after a long siege that decimated the Muslim population. Major Almoravid counteroffensives to regain Valencia were twice defeated, and even the Muslims admitted the extraordinary astuteness and military prowess of the new Valencian overlord. The Cid combined some of the prime characteristics of the new Hispanic society of his time. He represented the growing initiative of Castile, personified the ideal of the warrior overlord, and prosecuted the reconquest while demonstrating an understanding of Muslim psychology and ability to treat with and govern Islamic people. During the last decade of his career he cooperated with Leonese, Aragonese, and Catalans in the crucial struggle against the Almoravids. After he died in 1099, however, the Levantine regions could not be defended. Alfonso VI drove off a Muslim force that besieged the Cid's widow in 1102, but lacked the strength to do other than evacuate and burn Valencia. The surrounding district was immediately seized by the Almoravids.

The Succession Crisis and the Social Revolt of 1109-1117

The second half of Alfonso VI's long reign (1065-1109) was a painful anticlimax. At one point this Leonese-Castilian king who called himself emperor had seemed to be wresting nearly the entire peninsula from the Muslims, only to lose most of the remaining Muslim territory back to the Almoravids after his harsh tributary policies encouraged African intervention. He had been the most European of Leonese kings; he had tried to bring Castile-León fully into the orbit of European diplomacy for the first time and had encouraged the official Romanization of Castilian Catholicism (see chapter 7). During his long reign he had displaced both his brothers and outlived four wives, but after 1086/1089 his armies remained largely on the defensive. New Castile was devastated by Almoravid raids in 1097-1099 and 1108, suffering lesser incursions in between.

Despite his four marriages, Alfonso VI left only two daughters upon his death in 1109, one, Urraca, legitimate, and the other, Teresa, a bastard. Alfonso, who had established strong political and religious ties with Burgundy and had married three French princesses, had wed both his daughters to prominent Burgundian nobles seeking their fortunes battling the infidels in Hispania. Teresa and her husband, [65] Count Henrique, had been awarded the county of Portugal (roughly the northern third of modern Portugal), which formed the southwestern corner of the kingdom of León. Intent upon expanding their patrimony, they began to intrigue against the crown while governing their own territory independently. The resulting emergence of the independent kingdom of Portugal is the topic of chapter 6.

Alfonso's heiress, Urraca, was already widowed at her father's death. According to Leonese custom, the crown could not be inherited by a woman alone, so immediately after the death of Alfonso VI she was wed to the only reigning king in Hispania, Alfonso I "the Battler," sovereign of Aragón and Navarre (which was for several generations under the Aragonese dynasty). The marriage reunited the eastern and western branches of the Sánchez dynasty that had split in 1035, but it was a political and a conjugal failure from the beginning. Dona Urraca was stubborn, independent, and given to frequent changes of mind; the Battler was a pious crusader, apparently with a streak of misogyny in his nature, who devoted himself to a rarely interrupted series of campaigns against the Muslims. The powerful Leonese magnates resented a strong new king and were rebellious and eager to increase their own power. Conflict between king and queen and the machinations of grasping nobles had by 1110 led to civil war in León.

The struggle was deepened and complicated by the first major social revolt in Leonese history, led by the middle classes in some of the newly expanded towns of northern León and Castile and to some extent spearheaded by French immigrants. Their uprising against the exactions of regional overlords was much like the revolt of communes in France during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In a few regions there were also rebellions by peasants bound in servitude, supported by poor village priests who sympathized with their lowly parishioners against the wealthy prelates and big monasteries. Some of the townspeople looked to Alfonso the Battler as their champion, for he had been generous toward the towns and the small commercial class in his own kingdom, where there was not yet a large, powerful aristocracy or strong establishment of monasteries to dominate society.

Most of the Leonese aristocracy and church hierarchy struggled to isolate Alfonso from his new kingdom. The marriage between distant cousins was annulled by the papacy as incestuous, and after several years of political frustration and civil war Alfonso the Battler withdrew completely and returned to his raids against the Muslims, leaving Urraca's very young son by her first marriage to eventually succeed him as Alfonso VII of Castile-León.

The social revolt was not put down finally until 1117, but it ended with complete victory for the upper classes, and some of the townspeople [66] active in the rebellion were forced to leave the kingdom. The outcome was frustrating to social and economic change. Towns in Castile-León remained comparatively few, small, and poor; internal affairs of the kingdom were dominated by the aristocracy to an extent greater than in the more rapidly developing areas of western Europe. The status of the concejos in the southern half of León-Castile was hardly affected, but the rural, agrarian character of the Leonese-Castilian economy was accentuated. The later twelfth century, marked by internal disorder and wars, was a time of relative economic decline. The society was still composed almost exclusively of aristocrats and peasants, warriors, priests, and shepherds, and was not developing the urban middle class and economy that were changing France, the Low Countries, west Germany, and northern Italy. The kingdom's primary export was wool to the textile towns of France, England. and the Low Countries, supplemented by other products of the countryside such as wax, hides, and honey. The extension of this rurally produced, partly aristocrat-dominated export trade in the second half of the eleventh century did, however, encourage commercial and maritime development along Castile's Cantabrian coast, where by 1200 a series of small but fairly active ports had been established.

The Crusade and the Crusading Orders

The first three and one-half centuries of warfare between Christians and Muslims in the peninsula were essentially a political power struggle having little or no ideological meaning and consisting of cattle raids or other depredations for booty by both sides. The Muslims normally did not practice the jihad and the main ideological justification for aggressive warfare by the Christian states, particularly by León, was the essentially political one of recovering the lost sovereignty of the Gothic monarchy. This was a major basis for the imperial claims of the Castilian-Leonese crown.

Among the Muslims, circumstances changed during the hegemony of al-Mansur, and the jihad was preached with great intensity during the Almoravid invasion. As for the Christians, the explicit ideal of the crusade as a holy war against Muslim usurpers was introduced from France and Italy during the Catholic religious renewal of the eleventh century. It was a consequence of the expanding population, military strength, and assertive spirit of western Europe, and of the increased power of the Hispanic kingdoms. The primary target of the western crusades was the Holy Land, but the struggle against the Muslims in the peninsula also received attention. As early as 1064, nearly three decades before the First Crusade to Palestine, the papacy promised [67] indulgences to French knights who volunteered to assist an Aragonese campaign against the Muslims. From the twelfth century on, crusading expeditions against Hispano-Muslim states were common in the military life of the Hispano-Christian kingdoms, including the new state of Portugal. The advantages of papal authorization for an official crusade were threefold: it boosted morale, encouraged Hispano-Christian political unity, and provided financial and military support through special subsidies and indulgences. The institutionalization of the crusade and its accompanying religio-military psychology. which subsequently became an important motivating factor in Castilian and Portuguese expansion, can be seen as the consequence of two factors: extra-Hispanic religious influences, and the radicalization of the long Christian-Muslim struggle in the peninsula.

Branches of the two major military crusading orders, the Knights Templars and Hospitalers, were soon established in the peninsula. This was followed by organization of a number of strictly Hispanic crusading orders, of which the three most important were the Knights of Calatrava, organized on the southern extremity of New Castile in 1157, the Order of Alcántara, founded in Extremadura about 1165, and the Order of Santiago, formed near Cáceres in 1170. The military usefulness of the crusading orders was clear from the outset, for they played a major role in defending and expanding the frontier. Within a century of their foundation, the three largest orders had become wealthy institutions with large domains, and important economically and politically in the affairs of Castile and León and to a lesser degree in Portugal and Aragón.

Yet the institutionalization of the crusade still did not create an absolute and unbridgeable gulf between Christian and Muslim. Crusading was used for purposes that were in large measure political, and political circumstances were still sufficient to overrule crusading. At the end of the twelfth century, following the temporary division of Castile and León and a major defeat of Castilians by the Muslim Almohad state, the crown of León still found it expedient to form a temporary alliance with the Almohads against its own Christian rival, Castile.

Antipathy to Islam was never so strong as to preclude admiration for and adoption of certain practices of Hispano-Muslim society. Muslim baths were retained in some of the cities seized by the reconquest, the practice of veiling women was adopted and maintained by Christian Society in some of the southern regions for several centuries, and hundreds of Arabic words were incorporated into the Hispanic languages. Polite ceremonious speech and even ways of referring to God were affected. To what extent certain facets of Hispano-Muslim [68] psychology were also reflected in that of Hispano-Christians has been a matter of extensive debate.

Institutional and Social Change in Twelfth-Century Castile and León

Alfonso VII, the son of Queen Urraca's first marriage, came of age in 1126 and restored unified rule during a long reign that lasted thirtyone years, until his death in 1157. When the Almoravid empire broke up during the 1140s he extended the reconquest deep into the south, though he was unable to hold most of his gains. Like his grandfather, Alfonso VII claimed the title of emperor and with it the right to divide up his lands among his heirs; the experience of the past century had no effect upon the short-sighted practice of Castilian-Leonese sovereigns of this period. All of Castile proper was willed to his elder son, who in 1157 became Sancho III of Castile, while the lands of León were granted to a younger son, crowned Fernando II of León. Castile and León remained separate for nearly three-quarters of a century, until reunited by San Fernando III in 1230.

This division of the kingdoms marked the effective end of the Leonese claim to empire over Christian Hispania. León had long been the largest, most important, and most ambitious of Hispano-Christian states, but the eleventh-century reconquest had greatly expanded Castile, to almost equal it in size. Moreover, the southern territories of New Castile included the former ruling city of Toledo, encouraging Castilian claims to leadership in Hispanic affairs. After 1157 there existed a large and independent Castile, separate kingdoms of Navarre and Portugal, and a united crown of Catalonia-Aragón. León could no longer pretend to hegemony; when Castile and León were later reunited, Castile took precedence not merely in name but in political and military reality as well, until eventually the lands of Castile-León were called simply the kingdom of Castile.

Sancho III of Castile survived his father by a single year, leaving as heir a three-year-old son, Alfonso VIII (1158-1214). Throughout the Middle Ages effective monarchy depended on a strong king; with a three-year-old as ruler, power was violently disputed by factions of the Castilian nobility, who tended to coalesce around the two feuding houses of the Castros and Laras. The people of Castile suffered considerably during the next ten years, as authority was usurped by a lawless aristocracy. Seigneurial domain was extended, and the already powerful nobility of León grew more powerful. It had become increasingly common for the crown to make explicit grants of señoríos and abadengos (seigneuries and church domains) carrying with [69] them social and economic jurisdiction over the land. Thus by the twelfth century much of León and some of Castile had become feudal in fact. The vogue of French ideas and French feudal terminology in Castile and León during the eleventh and twelfth centuries encouraged the trend.

It should be understood, however, that this de facto feudalization was not the same as the de jure feudalization of France and some other areas of western Europe. Seigneurial jurisdiction in León and Castile was with some exceptions limited to economic control, and governmental and juridical power over the seigneuries, at least in theory, still remained in the hands of crown. The authority of a strong monarchy was still predominant, and the process of economic feudalization worked from the top downward, through dispensations of the crown, as much as from the bottom upward, through the initiative or usurpation of local aristocrats. Moreover, in León, aristocratic holdings did not form the large compact semi-unified domains that they did in parts of France, but were usually made up of a patchwork of small territories, sometimes widely dispersed, over which economic seigneury had been recognized. Their crazy-quilt nature reduced the political or military power that could be exercised by aristocratic houses.

The system of benefactoria, by which local peasant groups recognized the overlordship of noble families and paid them shares of produce or rent, was extended considerably during the twelfth century. Both its name and nature were changing in the process. In Castile and eastern León the system, which had become known as behetría, was growing more restrictive. Under many original behetría arrangements the recognition of lordship might extend de mar a mar (from sea to sea), meaning that peasant villages dissatisfied with the protection and services of their overlord might switch their alliegance to another defender. By the twelfth century, the practice had become limited to one of de linaje de linaje (from lineage to lineage), meaning that any change of allegiance must be to a member of the same aristocratic family. Though behetría peasants were not homines or colonos, in many cases their freedom of movement was being limited to movement within their districts or to other domains held by their ruling families. Whereas the benefactoria system had originally been an arrangement for mutual defense, by the twelfth century it had become largely a means of institutionalizing aristocratic domination of the land. Exactions increased, as various forms of sub- and superinfeudation were practiced at different levels of the aristocracy, the more powerful overlords obtaining special diviseros or extra payments, from peasants who were already paying shares to their immediate [70] overlords. This extension of aristocratic control was a consequence of the insecurity and disorder of the twelfth century, and particularly of the turbulent decade of the Castros and Laras. By that time, autonomous local communities had disappeared in the greater part of the kingdom of León. The greatest concentration of new seigneuries and behetría arrangements occurred in the Duero plain of Castile and León, the region which had been resettled between 850 and 1050. Behetrías also became much more common in Old Castile, though their terms tended to be more liberal. Until the beginning of the twelfth century, most of the peasants of Castile had escaped living under direct seigneurial or behetria exactions, but by the end of that century many were subject to them.

The region that preserved local liberties most fully was the new concejo territory along the Tajo. The communities there, led by their local elite of caballeros villanos, held the Castilian and Leonese frontier firm against the onslaughts of the new Muslim invaders from Morocco. Whereas, during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the peasant population of the Duero region had been depleted by emigration to the frontier and had fallen under seigneurial control, concejo districts were being organized and populated on the southern frontier. The concejos of the greater Tajo region and beyond became a major stabilizing force in the kingdom.

Rise of the Muslim Almohad Empire

The strength of Almoravids lay in their military skill and religious zeal. Their civil organization and culture were never sufficiently advanced to weld a unified empire. Their domains were heterogeneous in the extreme, and in their most culturally sophisticated territory, Al-Andalus, they never sank deep roots. To most Hispano-Muslims, the Almoravids were foreigners who ruled by military power alone. The social reforms promised rarely materialized, and after several decades Almoravid rule came more and more to seem a mere military occupation. Furthermore it was opposed by local variants of Hispano-Muslim religious heterodoxy which had begun to show strength in the eleventh century, religious trends that tended toward the mystical, with populist and meliorist overtones. Reflecting the feelings of most of the Hispano-Muslim population, they were also anti-Arabicist, but one major result of this religious upsurge was to encourage opposition to Almoravid political and religious orthodoxy. Revolts began in the 1120s in Hispania and later became widespread in Morocco, where the last defenders of the Almoravid emperors were an elite guard of [71] Christian mercenaries. By 1147, the empire had been completely torn apart.

During the next twenty-five years, power in the south and east once more fell into the hands of local taifa rulers, much as during the preceding century. Their dominion lasted only one generation, for another militant Muslim empire was rising in Morocco. Known in the European languages as the Almohads, this new power was based on a Muslim reform movement that had begun, not among Saharan nomads, but among the agrarian Berbers of the Atlas Mountains. The Almohads (al-muwahhidun, "asserters of religious unity") preached a more sophisticated and mystical version of Islam in place of the simple, anthropomorphic religion of the Almoravids. By 1147, they had replaced the Almoravids as masters of Morocco and had begun to intervene militarily in the peninsula. Alfonso VII of Castile had made great gains in the wake of the Almoravid collapse, occupying Córdoba for three years (1146-1149) and holding the major port of Almeria for a decade (1147-1157), but nearly all his advances were wiped out by the Almohad counterattack. During the years that followed, the Almohads added most of Algeria and Tunisia to their realm, and by 1172 firmly established their control over all the neotaifa territories in the peninsula. Their position in Hispania at first was stronger than the Almoravids' had been in 1100, and their territories in North Africa even more extensive, but they never rewon Christian territory save that of Alfonso VII's most recent conquests.

The Apex of Hispano-Muslim Culture

The Almohads came from a more advanced, more urban society and were considerably more sophisticated than their predecessors. Almohad emperors were quickly acclimatized to Al-Andalus and before the end of the twelfth century had established their capital in Seville. They were much more interested in the arts than were the Almoravids, and the last and in some ways the fullest blossoming of Hispano-Muslim culture came in the late twelfth century under their rule. This was the era of the great Muslim Aristotelian Averroes (Ibn Rushd), perhaps the greatest philosopher in the history of Islam. During this period secular and religious literature flourished, as did new rationalist and mystic religious expression. Art and architecture were vigorously pursued, and Hispano-Muslim architecture was introduced and copied with considerable success in the larger towns of Morocco. During the twelfth century the popular verse forms of muwashaha and zéjel, deriving partly from Hispano-Romance culture, [72] were perfected and widely practiced. It was tragic and ironic that this most culturally syncretistic form of Hispanic literary culture flourished at the very time that the traditional political hostility between Muslim and Christian society was replaced by increasingly implacable religious and ideological antipathy.

Most of the Hispano-Muslim population under the Almohads remained traditionalist and orthodox Malikite in religious observance. In 1195, the cultured Almohad emperor, Abu-Yaqub Yusuf, had to order the burning of the heterodox writings of Averroes in order to assure the support of the populace in the struggle with Castile, and the learned philosopher fled to a more tolerant haven in the Maghreb at Marrakesh.

As with the taifas, the failure of the Almohad empire in the peninsula was not economic and cultural but military. Even though the Almohad rulers maintained political unity and won several important military victories over the Castilians, their wealth and following, though considerable, did not generate sufficient military power to face the large warrior kingdom to the north, which in the decisive struggle would draw assistance from other Hispanic kingdoms and other parts of western Europe.

The Reign of Alfonso VIII (1158-1214)

After Alfonso VIII came of age, he reasserted the authority of the crown in Castile, restored a degree of domestic order, and resumed the military contest with the Almohads. The treaty of Cazorla which he signed with the Aragonese crown in 1179 settled a long-standing border dispute between these neighboring Christian kingdoms and set a line dividing all remaining Muslim territory in the peninsula between Aragonese and Castilian spheres of conquest.

Developments in Hispanic military technology of the late twelfth and early thirteenth century brought a shift away from reliance on the massed charge of heavy cavalry and toward greater tactical dexterity, with the use of light cavalry for mobility and flanking maneuvers. From the thirteenth century on, light cavalry was in general use among Christians as well as Muslims.

Alfonso VIII suffered a major defeat at Alarcos in New Castile (1195), but gained complete revenge just before the end of his reign by virtually shattering Almohad military power at the great Christian victory of the Navas de Tolosa (1212). For more than half a century Castile and its Christian neighbors had been shedding each other's blood in border warfare, but in the crucial battle with the Almohads, large armies from each of the other four Hispano-Christian kingdoms [73] supported the Castilians. In terms of numbers of men engaged-- possibly 50,000 on each side--the Navas de Tolosa was the biggest battle yet to have been fought in Hispanic history. Loss of life was usually not great in medieval battles, but the decisive victory of 1212 was apparently accompanied by a slaughter of the defeated Muslims as they fled in disarray. The booty was enormous, replenishing the treasuries of the Hispanic crowns; for a short time Sancho the Strong of Navarre was the leading moneylender of western Europe from the investment of his share. However, the disease that followed the battle, engendered perhaps by the mass of rotting corpses, and the scarcity and famine of the succeeding year, discouraged the Christian forces from following up their triumphs and partitioning Almohad territory.

The Great Reconquest of San Fernando III (1217/1230-1252)

The crowns of Castile and León were finally reunited in 1230 under Fernando III, son of Alfonso IX of León and of the daughter of Alfonso VIII of Castile. When his uncle Enrique I of Castile died in 1217 without heirs, Fernando inherited the Castilian throne, then reunited it with León thirteen years later upon the death of his father. Meanwhile after about 1224 the Almohad empire, at a hopeless military disadvantage, began to break up, as had the Almoravid empire before it. After two decades of diplomatic maneuver and occupation of border zones, Fernando resumed major campaigns of conquest with the occupation of Córdoba and the surrounding countryside. Murcia in the southeast was taken in 1243, Jaén, the gateway to Granada, in 1246, and the imposing city of Seville in 1248. By that time the Catalan-Aragonese reconquest in the east had been completed, while the entire Cáceres-Badajoz region in the southwest had been occupied by Alfonso IX of León during the last years of his reign (1227-1230). By mid-century the only Muslim territory of any size that remained was the emirate of Granada in the far southeast. It was reduced to vassalage upon agreeing to pay a large annual tribute in precious metals. The pious, crusading Fernando III ("el Santo") was making plans to leapfrog Granada and launch a grand Hispanic crusade across the straits to overpower Morocco, when he died at Seville in 1252.

The Mudéjares of Castile

Large numbers of Muslims were first incorporated into the territories of the Castilian crown during the occupation of the Tajo valley and [74] adjoining regions under Alfonso VI in the eleventh century. Muslims who lived under Christian rule were known as mudéjares. Most urban Muslims were deported to make room for Christian immigrants in the key economic and military centers; they were normally treated leniently and allowed to take all movable possessions with them. Only a minority remained behind, so that the great Muslim cities of the peninsula were converted one by one from mostly Muslim to mostly Christian communities, though the Jewish minorities usually remained fixed. This uprooting of most of the urban Muslim population and their culture guaranteed the Christianization of reconquered territories in the south.

The mudéjar peasantry were treated quite differently, for they were normally allowed to till the soil or practice crafts as before, subject only to a special crown tax and the payment of rent or shares to the new overlord. In most cases they received formal garantías from the crown, specifying such terms and freedom to practice their own religion, together with the option to emigrate if they preferred.

During the first two decades of Castilian rule in western Andalusia, the Christians remained a small minority concentrated in occupied towns which they lacked the numbers to fill completely. Encouraged by the invasion of the southern tip of the peninsula by the Merinid empire of Morocco, a great mudéjar rebellion broke out in the countryside during 1263 and at first threatened to overturn Castilian rule. After this major revolt was throttled, royal policy changed, and the majority of the Muslim peasantry, particularly in western Andalusia where they were most heavily concentrated, were driven out of the kingdom, some to Granada, others toward Africa. Portions of the mudéjar peasantry remained in some areas, but in general the medieval Hispanic advance did not absorb the Muslims or even incorporate them as a minority; it drove them before it. The reconquest was not merely a matter of military occupation, but of expanding the Hispano-Christian population and institutions southward.

Castilian Repopulation and Resettlement in the Thirteenth Century

The thirteenth-century reconquest greatly increased the size of Castile. In 1212, Castile and León together covered approximately 235,000 square kilometers, but by 1265 they had grown to approximately 355,000 square kilometers. The thirteenth-century reconquest was one of the most decisive developments in Castilian history not merely because of its military and territorial significance. however, but equally because of its social and economic consequences, for the resettlement policy of the thirteenth century differed considerably from that of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

[75] Most of the lands south of the Tajo-central plateau area were divided among the nobility, the crusading orders, and the church. Some of the Christian peasants who moved into the south during the late-thirteenth and fourteenth centuries worked as braceros or jornaleros (day laborers) on large estates or cattle lands, but the majority rented small plots from overlords or church institutions, or worked land as sharecroppers on tributary financial terms rather than on a traditional or associative basis, as in the north. In most of the north, "useful dominion," the right to work the land, was recognized as pertaining to peasants even on seigneurial domain; in much of the south, "useful dominion" was held by the overlords, and peasants worked plots on whatever tenns they could get. Juridically, there was no question of homone or benefactoria status in the south; social and economic status there was more individualistic, and that was an incentive for immigration during the first few generations. Compared with the more densely populated north, terms of cultivation were often fairly favorable during the first century or so of resettlement but became more onerous as population increased.

There was, however, considerable variation between regions. A small minority of peasant immigrants managed to establish alodial property rights in a few areas, but more important were the formation of concejo districts in parts of the south-central region and the granting of autonomous fueros to a number of the repopulated Andalusian towns. The new concejos and some of the smaller towns were inhabited in part by stockmen who grazed livestock on a small scale on concejo land under royal, not seigneurial, domain. Such elements were only a minority in the south, but they were free of seigneurial domination, and their direct loyalty to the crown had a stabilizing effect on the southern regions of Castile and León.

The Triumph of Seigneurial Domain

Division of most of the reconquered south under separate jurisdiction of aristocracy, church, and crusading orders marked the triumph of seigneurial domain over the greater share of the peasantry and landed economy of Castile, accentuating the weight of the aristocracy and the church as institutions. The first codification of the rights of the aristrocracy appeared early in the thirteenth century (under Alfonso VIII) as the Fuero Viejo de Castilla (or Fuero de los Fijosdalgo de Castilla). This may have been the fruit of opposition to Alfonso VIII's effort to limit the granting of señoríos and the terms of their jurisdictions during his reign.

There was never a truly concerted effort on the part of the Castilian crown to reduce the privileges of señoríos, even during the reign of [76] Alfonso VIII, and amid the renewed internal difficulties that beset Castile during the late thirteenth century, seigneurial domain was extended. Most seigneuries during the thirteenth century, however, still rested primarily on economic rights--to profit from the land and its uses--and in the great majority of cases did not explicitly include the juridical and fiscal (or tax-collecting) control of the overlord over his peasants.

An indication of the wealth and influence of the aristocracy is given in the tendency developing toward the end of the thirteenth century for the nobility to limit entry and turn itself into a fixed caste. Heretofore, the military aristocracy in Castile had been fairly open to recruits, but from the late thirteenth century an increasing number of suits were brought by nobles in opposition to those who claimed aristocratic status.

The Economy of Thirteenth-Century Castile

Castile's twelfth-century economic stagnation was overcome in large measure by the stimulus of the great thirteenth-century reconquest and the subsequent expansion of the wool export trade. The invasion of the Merinid dynasty in Morocco between 1263 and 1268 occasioned considerable economic loss in the south, checking commercial expansion, but a period of growth commenced about 1280 and lasted for approximately half a century, until the ravages of the Black Death.

The Christian overlords of the conquered territory of Al-Andalus did not attempt to maintain its traditional rural economy. Peasant immigrants from the dry-farming regions of the north often lacked the skills to maintain irrigation and other complex farming systems, and the irrigated alfoz around Córdoba, for example, fell into considerable decay. Medieval Castile had always been the most pastoral society in western Europe, and its expansion merely accentuated the emphasis on cattle and sheep. Grazing and shepherding required less manpower than agriculture, and this fact encouraged abandonment of cultivation in some regions.

Extension of the wool trade made it the major single source of wealth for the kingdom, and for the crown it had the advantage of being easily taxed because of its increasing organization and concentration. One of the most important economic institutions in Castilian history was created in 1273, when Alfonso X established the Honorable Council of the Mesta, a broadly based syndicate of sheep owners that subsequently gained extraordinary influence.

During this period Castile failed to develop anything approaching [77] the urbanization or town manufacture found in the Low Countries or north Italy--or even Catalonia. Its agriculture, largely because of soil and climate, was backward even by thirteenth-century standards. Its only invention was the precursor of the modern cattle ranch, developed in the south-central region between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries.

The Castilian Sense of Wealth

By the thirteenth century much of Castilian society had formed a distinctive set of values regarding wealth and economic activity. The land of Old Castile was poor and unproductive. Insecurity and intermittent warfare had discouraged attention to long-term economic projects--agriculture, crafts, commerce--and cattle and sheep were its main wealth, mobile and self-generative. Income was the reward not so much of work as of conquest. Precious metals and manufactures flowed in considerable measure from alien territory in the south whose treasures might be appropriated by armed force. Thus in Castilian society riches were commonly considered not as something that one created or built, that is, worked for, but as something one conquered or enjoyed because of one's status as a warrior conqueror, a nobleman. The function of land was not as property with which to create wealth, but rather as dominion from which wealth might be extracted by superior right. Hence the notion of wealth and land as a result of military action and domination, rather than power and domination as a result of having land and developing its wealth. Hence also the particular importance of the aristocratic class as the military elite that enjoyed the full status and fruits of domination, and the identification of much of lower-class aspiration with the military style. The nobility was dominant in almost all of medieval Europe, but in most other regions there was a greater challenge to aristocratic values, at least among townspeople. Almost nowhere was there as wide an acceptance of the aristocracy and its particular sense of wealth, status, and dominance as in Castile.

The habit of living from imperial tribute began in the eleventh century with the influx of paria payments and continued in varying forms and degrees for almost eight hundred years. The first major inflation caused by a sudden influx of money and treasure came during the first generation after the major phase of the reconquest, during the reign of Alfonso X (1252-1284). The new income was concentrated in the military elite and groups of the aristocracy and resulted in an orgy of luxury goods buying and importing that unbalanced the late thirteenth-century Castilian trade equilibrium. To an [78] extent, this foreshadowed the post-imperial inflation of Habsburg Spain in the sixteenth century.

The Incorporation of Hispanic Jewry

A major socio-cultural result of the thirteenth-century reconquest was the incorporation of the main body of peninsular Jewry into the Christian kingdoms. The Jewish population was concentrated in the towns of the south and east and prospered greatly during the early centuries of Cordoban toleration. From early times, however, there were also small communities enjoying toleration and legal protection in the leading northern Christian towns. Growth of Muslim intolerance, combined with the expansion of the Christian principalities, encouraged Jewish migration northward from the eleventh century on. Castilian Jews served in the forces of Alfonso VI at several of his major battles.

The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were the heyday of Hispanic Jewry, and in some districts they achieved the rights of aristocratic fuero. The upper stratum of Jewish society grew wealthy, while Jewish intellectuals were the most vital and productive of the peninsula. The base of Hispanic Jewry, however, was composed of the artisans and craftsmen in the medium and large-sized towns, where they constituted a major source of skilled labor. In a few districts small groups of Jewish peasants tilled the soil or cared for vineyards.

Cultural Achievements of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries

The most important cultural achievement of medieval Hispania was the transmission of classical knowledge and Muslim learning to the world of Latin Christendom. Much of ancient Greco-Roman knowledge had been lost to the western world during the Middle Ages, and for several centuries the scientific work done in Islamic countries considerably surpassed that of western Europe. The Hispano-Christian states, as the bridge between Christendom and the Muslim world, were able to translate and transmit a great deal of this from the Arabic. The work had begun in a few Catalan monasteries during the tenth century. It reached its peak during the twelfth century, when a number of monastic centers and clerical schools, led by that of Toledo, collected and translated large numbers of ancient Jewish and Muslim works of philosophy, philology, mathematics, medicine, law, botany, astronomy, and geography. Visiting scholars from other parts of western Europe, carrying these materials back with them, [79] helped to change the course of medieval European culture and shape the form and content of its emerging philosophy and science.

Though the work in the main was done in the twelfth century, its most famous center was the royal school of translators that flourished in the thirteenth century in Toledo during the reign of Alfonso X, a sovereign known to history as Alfonso el Sabio, "the Wise," for he was the only philosopher-king to grace the throne of Castile. With the expanded income that Castile enjoyed after the great reconquest, he encouraged manifold undertakings in scholarship and the arts. Serious historical study, for example, was encouraged in the Castile of Alfonso el Sabio for perhaps the first time in medieval western Europe.

Castilian literature in the vernacular also emerged in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Castile had been one of the first regions in western Europe to use the vernacular in official documents, dating from the eleventh century. This was perhaps due to its simpler society or even to the linguistic complexity of an area in which Romance vernacular, Arabic, and Hebrew all came into play, encouraging the avoidance of Latin in public materials and manuscripts. By the thirteenth century the three main linguistic domains of the peninsula had been carved out: Castilian as the most broadly spoken language in the center (flanked by a parallel Leonese dialect in the west and Aragonese in the east), Galician-Portuguese in the far west, and Catalan in the northeast. The other two principal languages were also developing a vernacular literature, and in refined poetics Galician was more advanced than Castilian. With a long cultural tradition of the most fully settled society in the kingdom, Galician served as the court literary language of Castile itself in the thirteenth century.

The peninsula did not lag far behind the most advanced parts of western Europe in the creation of institutions of higher learning. The first peninsular university was founded in Palencia in 1212 and later moved to Valladolid. It was followed by the University of Salamanca, which subsequently became the outstanding school in the peninsula, in 1220, the Studium Generale of Lisbon in 1290 (which later became the University of Coimbra), two Catalan universities (Lérida, 1300; Perpinyá, 1350), and an Aragonese university at Huesca in 1354. There was no university in Navarre, but Navarrese students were not uncommon at the University of Paris.

Codification of Fueros and Expansion of Royal Law

The expansion of learning and revival of Roman law brought considerably greater attention to matters of law, administration, and legal [80] jurisdiction. One consequence was a general movement toward the systematization and written codification of laws and rights, beginning with the Fuero General de Navarra, early in the century, followed by the Furs de Valencia (1240), the Fueros de Aragón (1247), the Libro de Los Fueros de Castilla (1248), the revised Costumes de Catalunya, and the Costums de La Mar for Catalan shipping.

Because of sustained efforts by the territorial aristocracy to encroach on the rights of town and peasant communities, there was a general trend toward the explicit regranting of fueros and local charters in all the peninsular principalities during the thirteenth century, to protect the local communities. Another equally important aim was the clarification and extension of the crown's authority. Thus some towns found that they were escaping aristocratic domination only to come under closer royal control.

Of all the intellectual undertakings of Alfonso X's reign, the project of greatest immediate importance was his effort to develop a unified system of royal law. In 1255, only three years after he came to the throne, Alfonso's jurists brought out a written Fuero Real, an only partly harmonized compilation of Castilian common law and new royal statutes not based on any clear precedent in the traditional Fuero Juzgo. Though the application of the Fuero Real was carefully limited, Alfonso's goal was a perfectly harmonized system of universal law, both theoretical and practical, that would satisfy social demands and enhance the authority of the crown, while resolving the limitations, insufficiencies, and contradictions of medieval legal practice.

The result of ten years of work by royal jurists was the famous Siete Partidas (Seven Divisions of Law) of 1265, a rationalized system of universal justice under central monarchy and the first great didactic literary classic in the Castilian vernacular. It was also revolutionary in that it would have done away with much of the common law and foral (local statute) practices. Thus it aroused such vociferous protests from aristocrats and towns that it was not promulgated until almost one hundred years later, and was never put into effective use.

The Political Failure of Alfonso el Sabio

The fate of the Siete Partidas was symbolic of Alfonso's reign. His primary achievements were cultural; in practical affairs his reign ended in disaster. He had pretensions to being the first extra-Hispanic Castilian imperator, for his mother was Beatrice of Swabia and he was encouraged by minor dissidents in central Europe to seek the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. A good deal of money was wasted on bribery in this venture which ended in complete failure. A few [81] years earlier he had given away in a daughter's marriage dowry the claim to Gascony, inherited by the Castilian crown through his great-grandfather's marriage. In 1257 his forces played a major role in helping the Portuguese complete the reconquest of the southwest corner of the peninsula by occupying the Algarve, but Alfonso made no effort to claim part of that territory for Castile's crown or its aggressive aristocracy, some of whom rose in rebellion at what they considered Alfonso's sacrifice of their opportunity for aggrandizement. In 1263 came the beginning of the Merinid invasions and the great mudéjar revolt, followed by five years of border war, and then by another Merinid invasion in 1275.

During his last years Alfonso continued his effort to impose central Roman law, and he claimed the imperial right to divide his kingdom between his son and grandson. In 1282 the aristocracy and towns rose in revolt and deposed him in favor of his direct heir, Sancho, who was more respectful of foral right and seigneurial privilege. Two years later, the embittered philosopher king died in impotence and failure.

Origins of the Castilian Cortes

Spanish historians have derived considerable satisfaction from the fact that the first medieval parliament representing the three principal estates of society met in León in 1188, antedating the first parliamentary assemblies in all other European kingdoms. Medieval parliaments evolved in much the same manner in most parts of western and central Europe. The Leonese monarchy, like its Visigothic predecessor, was accustomed to convene periodic meetings of a royal council (curia regia) to advise on major policy matters and establish a sort of consensus. The curia regia was composed of leading aristocrats, royal administrators, and church hierarchs. By the eleventh and twelfth centuries it was occasionally supplemented by meetings of a curia plena, a broader royal assembly of lesser officials, nobles, and churchmen. As medieval society grew increasingly complex, the legitimization of changes in royal succession and in taxation and coinage became more difficult. By the twelfth century, the urban population in León and Castile had achieved some modest significance, as witnessed by the revolt of Urraca's reign and by the initiative of towns and concejos in some regions in forming juntas or hermandades to keep the peace and protect local economic interests. Since the aristocracy and church were exempt from ordinary taxation, the increasing costs of royal government could only be met by new levies raised from the towns and peasants, and such funds could be collected efficiently only if agreed to by taxpayers or their representatives. [82] Moreover, church leaders urged that town leaders be summoned to agree on means of limiting disorder on the roads and in the countryside.

In 1188 Alfonso IX of León faced major problems in consolidating his rule over an internally divided and disorderly kingdom, and he also faced mounting financial demands. To deal with these issues he summoned representatives of leading towns to meet with aristocrats and church officials at a royal assembly. He proclaimed a brief royal charter promising justice and recognizing local laws as well as the need to establish greater order. At a subsequent meeting he gained approval of a debasement of coinage to increase royal purchasing power. This Cortes (literally, "courts") was the first assembly representative of all three estates to meet in any European kingdom. Since the problems that induced Alfonso IX to summon this meeting were not unique to León, the introduction of a three-estate Cortes probably occurred there first because of the tradition of foral autonomies and rights for local groups in the Leonese (and Castilian) politicojuridical system. León accorded greater legal recognition to the interests of its various regions, towns, and classes than was to be found in the local-liberty systems of most of medieval Europe.

The meeting of the first three-estate Cortes in Castile cannot be dated as precisely as in the case of León. Such an assembly met in Castile in 1212, but there may have been an even earlier one. The respective dates for other peninsular kingdoms are: Catalonia, 1214 or 1218; Aragón, 1247; Portugal, 1254; Valencia, 1283; and Navarre, 1300. By comparison, the first regional parliament in Germany was summoned in 1232, the first English parliament in 1265, and the first estates-general in France in 1302. After 1250, Cortes meetings for León and Castile were usually joint meetings, but until the latter part of the fourteenth century there were also occasional separate meetings and several limited convocations of representatives from specific regions of Castile. After that only unified meetings of representatives of the three estates of León and Castile were held.

The original medieval Cortes had no institutional charters or rights and privileges as autonomous assemblies. They had no inherent legislative function, but were summoned solely at the convenience of the crown. Though in some periods frequent, meetings were often extremely irregular, and there was no legal specification as to which towns were to be represented. The composition of Cortes, particularly in Castile, often varied considerably from meeting to meeting.

Nevertheless, by the last years of the thirteenth century a philosophy of popular sovereignty was developing among some of the town representatives. There was at least one attempt, though unsuccessful, to codify the rights of representatives of the third estate, and some of [83] the latter soon went beyond a mere response to royal requests and asserted their right to ratify new laws. The Cortes assembly of 1282 was used to legitimize the deposition of Alfonso X and the accession of his son Sancho. By the end of the century, the Cortes of Castile had established the unwritten right to vote on all new taxes, present grievances to the crown, and ratify succession to the throne. During the next century, the Cortes was important in regulating succession crises and royal regencies during the minorities of sovereigns. But unlike the parliaments of Aragón and Catalonia, the Castilian Cortes never institutionalized by charter its specific legal prerogatives and never developed juridico-administrative machinery to guarantee its precise jurisdiction over certain kinds of decisions.

Constitutional Status of the Basque Region

The Basque-speaking territories southwest of the Pyrenees remained culturally and politically apart from neighboring states. Navarre, which in its Hispanic domain comprised roughly the eastern half of the Basque region, preserved its independence of the other Hispanic principalities, but from the thirteenth century on was drawn more and more into the French orbit through dynastic marriage. Its institutions were similar to those of neighboring Aragón (see the following chapter), but it became a cultural backwater and by the close of the thirteenth century was one of the least developed areas of the peninsula.

The western half of the Basque country was made up of three distinct districts: Guipuzcoa to the northeast, Vizcaya to the northwest, and Alava to the south. These three provinces were never united, but for several centuries belonged alternately to the crowns of Castile and Navarre. By the twelfth century, the whole population had been officially Christianized. Its social structure was somewhat anomalous; the peasantry lived for the most part on family farms, though with strong extended-family or clan bonds. Local districts, villages, and peasant groups were quite jealous of their autonomy, but had not been able to escape a process of seigneurial subordination rather like that which had taken place in northern Castile. There had never been much (if any) outright serfdom in the western Basque provinces, but behetría relationships predominated.

Association with Castile became more attractive than subjection to the sovereignty of Navarre in part because of the greater degree of feudal subjection in Navarre. The Basque aristocracy was numerous and turbulent, but its powers were restricted by local custom. The most egalitarian region was Guipuzcoa, in which by the close of the [84] Middle Ages virtually the entire population had claimed aristocratic status, meaning equality before the law and exemption from many kinds of taxation. Guipuzcoans also claimed the right to choose their own overlord. In 1200 they renounced the sovereignty of the Navarrese crown under pressure and recognized Alfonso VIII of Castile as their king. The southern Basque "county" of Alava was conquered at the same time, but its provincial autonomy was fully recognized in 1332. Vizcaya, the northwestern district, was constituted as a señorío of the local aristocratic family of Lopez de Haro in the eleventh century under the suzerainty of Castile, and finally became a direct seigneury of the crown in 1379. The fueros of all three districts were officially recognized and guaranteed by the crown, which was represented in each by an adelantado, or royal governor, as in all other major regions of Castile. Local affairs were resolved mostly by regional or local assemblies of notables. There was no attempt to impose a Castilian royal law upon local customs, and save for a few limited taxes, the local assemblies of notables and town representatives (a sort of district Cortes without a sovereign) negotiated taxes with the crown.

From the beginning of Castilian history, Basque immigration from the north had been significant in the development of Castilian society. Though most of the population continued to speak their native Basque, a form of romance dialect akin to Castilian had been the official, legal, and cultural speech of the leaders and towns of the region from the tenth or eleventh century on. The Basques thus increasingly became a part of the Castilian world, and their emigrants played a major role in the expansion of Castilian society.

Bibliography for Chapter IV

[336] The classic study of the Cid, though nationalistically biased, is Ramón Menéndez Pidal's La España del Cid (Madrid, 1947). Perhaps the principal historian of twelfth-century León and Castile is Julio González. His major works are Regesta de Fernando II (Madrid, 1940); Alfonso IX, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1942); Repartimiento de Sevilla, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1951); and El reino de Castilla en Ja época de Alfonso VIII, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1960). For the period of Alfonso el Sabio, see Antonio Ballesteros y Beretta, Alfonso el Sabio and Sevilla en el siglo XIII (Madrid, 1913).

The key work on the crusade in Spain is José Goñi Gaztambide, Historia de la bula de Cruzada en España (Vitoria, 1958). Two of the principal military orders are treated in Derek W. Lomax, La Orden de Santiago (1170-1275) (Madrid, 1965), and Francis Gutton's somewhat less useful L'Ordre de Calatrava (Paris, 1955). On military affairs, see Ambrosio Huici Miranda, Las grandes batallas de la reconquista durante ías invasiones africanas (Madrid, 1956). The background of military organization is well explained in Elena Lourie, "A Society Organized for War: Medieval Spain," Past and Present, no. 35 (Dec. 1966), pp. 54-76. French influence is treated in Marcel Defourneaux, Les Français en Espagne aux XIe et XIIe siécles (Paris, 1949). The best Spanish account of the Almoravids is Jacinto Bosch Vilá, Los Almorávides (Tetuan, 1956). The fundamental work on the medieval Castilian Cortes, though weak on the origins of the institution, is still the study by the fin de siècle Russian Hispanist, W. Piskorski, Las Cortes de Castilla en el período de trénsito de la Edad Media a ía Moderna (1188-1520) (Barcelona, 1930). Demetrio Ramos, Historia de las Cortes tradicionales de España (Madrid, 1944). gives a brief description. Joseph F. O'Callaghan, "The Beginnings [337] of the Cortes of León-Castile," American Historical Review 74, no. 5 (June 1969): 1503-37, is vital for understanding the origins of the Leonese-Castilian Cortes. The main work on Castilian towns and local self-government in this period is María del Carmen Carlé, Del concejo medieval castellano-leonés (Buenos Aires, 1968). Pedro Corominas, El sentimiento de la riqueza en Castilla (Madrid, 1917, 1951), presents an important hypothesis on Castilian social and economic values.

A History of Spain and Portugal
Vol. 1
By Stanley G. Payne

Chapter Five
The Rise of Aragón-Catalonia

[85] Evolution of the Catalan Counties

The crystallization of a common identity among the people of the border counties of the southeastern Pyrenean region was a comparatively slow process that took at least three centuries. The broadly regional term Catalan does not appear to have been used until the eleventh century. Geography and Muslim military pressure, as well as aspects of their cultural heritage, made the population of the nascent Catalonia a part of Christian Hispania. Other influences, however, reached across the Pyrenees to associate them with southwestern French society in particular and the Carolingian empire in general. It was the expansion of Carolingian France that had freed most of the Pyrenean region from Muslim domination and created the Catalan counties in the first place. The Catalan language that began to take shape faced no linguistic barrier at the Pyrenees, closely related as it was to the Romance vernacular of southwestern France. By the early ninth century the Carolingian script and Franco-Roman religious rite had replaced the Visigothic script and Hispano-Visigothic rite in the Catalan region.

During the course of the ninth century Carolingian political power contracted, and local overlords increasingly exercised de facto autonomy. In the Catalan region and southwestern France the old Roman system of direct ownership of land had been in large measure retamed, [86] so that in many cases local aristocrats and church establishments acquired full juridical title to their properties. A superstructure of personal political relationships in the feudal style of northern France was introduced during the ninth century, but such feudalism was slow to achieve full development in the south. Thus by the late ninth century this region had lapsed into extreme particularism under local counts and overlords and lacked any sort of general political system. Here for nearly two centuries there was neither the nominally strong monarchy found in León nor the overarching structure of rule by personal allegiance that characterized the classic feudalism of northern France.

During the first few generations after the Muslim conquest there had been a current of Visigothic and other Hispanic immigration into the eastern Pyrenees and beyond, reinforced by some slight Frankish emigration to the southwest. By the ninth century the eastern Pyrenean region held a fairly dense population, at least for its slight economic resources. The traditional property system and landlord domination remained comparatively unchanged; if the older form of serfdom tended to die out, stringent economic obligations of most peasants to their overlords remained. With the advance of the Catalan reconquest there was opportunity for peasants emigrating southward to till their own lands. Even newly occupied land, however, sometimes involved recognition of seigneurial obligations or payments, and when the expansion was resumed on a broader scale, some form of dominion by aristocrats or church institutions was established over most newly acquired land.

Formation of a single independent Catalan political entity was a slow and often confused process. The position of count in each of the original Catalan frontier districts was merely an administrative one, to which appointments were made by the Carolingian crown. Nevertheless, noble families were able to establish strong local positions, and they sometimes held offices for several generations. As the tendency toward local sovereignty spread during the latter part of the ninth century, their influence grew. By far the most powerful local dynasty was the house of Barcelona, descendents of Sant Guillem, count of Toulouse, one of Charlemagne's lieutenants. During the early and middle decades of the ninth century, members of this family at one time or another were counts of most of the small Catalan counties.

The roots of de facto Catalan independence have been traced to the time of Guifred el Pilós (Wilfred the Hairy), count of Barcelona from 878 to 897. After the overthrow of the main line of the Carolingian dynasty in 888, royal power was greatly weakened, and the [87] Catalan counties were farther from central control than any other part of the kingdom. Their relative stability in the tenth century encouraged the trend toward independence from the unstable French crown, as did the direct relations developed with the papacy by the counts of Barcelona. Yet the prestige of the crown was so great that there was no pretense of de jure independence by any of the Catalan counts until the end of the tenth century. Even as the county overlordships settled into semi-independent hereditary dynasties, limitations of sovereignty prevented any of the counts from claiming the title of king, though it became common for the count of Barcelona to refer to himself as count "by the grace of God," in the formula of the French monarchy.

There were entire decades of peace along the Muslim frontier, but such periods of calm were interludes in a long and extremely costly struggle. During the reigns of Abd-al-Rahmann III and al-Hakam II, the count of Barcelona became a client of the caliphate, but this did not prevent a devastating attack by al-Mansur that resulted in the sack of Barcelona in 985. The first major counterattack of the eleventh century was the great Catalan expedition of 1010, which, with the assistance of the Toledo Muslims, briefly occupied Córdoba. After the collapse of the caliphate, the Catalan counties were able to assume the offensive, their impetus strengthened by the population density that had been built up in "Old Catalonia" by the eleventh century.

The hegemony of the county of Barcelona was strengthened during the reign of Ramón Berenguer I "the Old" (1035-1076). Sometimes in conjuction with the count of Urgell and the king of Aragon, he mounted a series of successful expeditions to the west and southwest, expanding and repopulating the borders of the Catalan principalities. Parias from the prosperous Muslim cities to the southwest -- Zaragoza, Lérida, Tortosa - -filled his coffers and helped to create what may have been the first wave of prosperity in Catalan history. At about the same time, Catalan maritime power began to be felt in the west Mediterranean. Ramón Berenguer I established Barcelona's dominion over most of the area southeast of the Pyrenees and began the trans-Pyrenean expansion of the house of Barcelona by acquiring the counties of Carcassonne and Rasés as well, coordinating most of the Catalan territory through the exercise of greater personal sovereignty and through politico-juridical agreements with local overlords, won by negotiation, bribery, or force. This period saw a major achievement in the beginning of the collection and codification of Catalan law and practice in the written Usatges (Usages), the first full compilation of feudal law in any west European state. The church also [88] contributed to keeping order in Catalonia by developing the institution of the "peace of God," which established a general truce among warring feudal factions over a specific region for a specific time. This was introduced at an earlier date in Catalonia (1027) than anywhere else in western Europe.

Subsequent efforts by Count Ramón Berenguer II to expand westward toward Lérida and Zaragoza, made between 1082 and 1090, were blocked. At the end of the eleventh century the Catalan frontier was temporarily pushed back by the Almoravids, but the advance recommenced under Count Ramón Berenguer III, who took Tarragona on the coast in 1118. This city, once great under the Romans but ruined by the time of its reconquest, was rebuilt and soon made the metropolitan seat of the church in Catalonia, relieving Catalans of ecclesiastical dependency on the archbishopric of Narbonne beyond the Pyrenees. Ramón Berenguer III, with the aid of a Pisan fleet, also reduced most of the Balearic Islands to tributaries, though they were subsequently lost again to Muslim domination for a century more. The marriage of Ramón Berenguer III to the heiress of Provence added significant trans-Pyrenean holdings to the house of Barcelona, which during the next century served as a barrier to the southward expansion of the county of Toulouse, and more fatefully, the crown of France.

Origins of the Kingdom of Aragón

At the time of the Muslim conquest, the central Pyrenean region that later formed the nucleus of upper Aragón made nominal submission to the invaders. Because of its remoteness and general poverty and because of the small numbers of Muslim troops, it was left autonomous and was never occupied by a Muslim garrison. The two Pyrenean districts immediately to the east were called Sobrarbe and Ribagorza. Lower Sorbrarbe was nominally occupied directly by the Muslims, but Ribagorza was more remote and merely paid tribute. Even in the Ebro valley to the south, Arab and Berber immigration was lighter than in the main regions of Al-Andalus, and the subsequent Muslim population of the Ebro valley were mostly Hispanic converts.

During the Frankish advance at the close of the eighth century, the south-central districts of the Pyrenees were organized as the counties of Aragón, Sobrarbe, and Ribagorza. The county of Aragón was unique in that it soon became independent; it was only briefly an appanage of the French crown. Moreover, unlike some of the Catalan counties, Aragón was not by- or trans-Pyrenean; it was cut off by a [89] higher range from the French side of the Pyrenees than the others, more or less isolated from French influence, and consequently directed southward toward the more sophisticated and flourishing regions of Huesca and Zaragoza with their Hispano-Muslim populations. This reinforced a sense of Hispanic identity while reducing Mediterranean and French contacts.

The early society of Aragón was somewhat looser, simpler, and freer than that of the Catalan counties. The region was small, rugged, poor, and sparsely settled, inhabited mainly by shepherds and peasant farmers. By the middle of the ninth century a series of fortified villages had been erected as main points of defense, and many of the peasants took the protection of a señor--that is, a military leader--to defend themselves, but elaborate hierarchic forms and a rigid aristocratic caste were slow to take shape.

As the smallest, poorest, and weakest of Hispanic principalities, the little hill-county of Aragón at first had no hope of expanding southward against the prosperous Muslim cities of the Ebro valley, and for two centuries scarcely tried. The goal of reconquest or expansion was apparently first communicated to the Aragonese from the neighboring state of Navarre to the west, and the county momentarily lost its independence when it was incorporated into the "empire" of the Navarrese Sancho el Mayor early in the eleventh century. Yet Aragón emerged as the first of the Pyrenean counties to establish itself formally as a kingdom, when it was inherited by a bastard of Sancho named Ramiro, who invoked the authority of his late father the "emperor" to claim for himself the title of King Ramiro I (1035-1063). The real substance to back this claim was probably the increased income provided by tribute payments which Ramiro was able to exact from the wealthy taifa of Zaragoza. The Aragonese were rude and poor, but they developed the warlike qualities of their Castilian cousins to the west and by the mid-eleventh century had generated a military force disproportionate to their size or wealth.

The second king, Sancho Ramírez (1063-1094), strengthened his position, as had the counts of Barcelona in the preceding century, by aligning himself with the papacy. Support from Rome fortified Aragonese independence in the face of the imperial claims of the Leonese crown, and in 1063 introduced the first step in the development of the crusade, bringing military assistance from France that enabled the Aragonese crown to seize the key Muslim town of Barbastro in 1064. Sancho Ramírez formally recognized papal suzerainty over the kingdom of Aragón, and subsequently received papal ratification of the Aragonese dynasty's claim to an independent royal title. Sancho also established political and marital alliances with several important families of the feudal aristocracy of southwest France, reinforcing [90] Aragón's diplomatic position. Meanwhile, Muslim tribute helped build the Pyrenean village of Jaca, Aragón's original capital, into the first true city of the kingdom.

In the latter part of the eleventh century, the Aragonese crown and military leaders became more thoroughly imbued with the crusading ethos than their counterparts in any other Hispanic principality. They won a series of key points in the foothill country during the 1080s, but found it very difficult to break past the barrier of well-fortified cities into the Ebro plain below them. And whenever they seemed about to make a real breakthrough in the direction of wealthy Zaragoza, their more powerful rival, the Castilian crown, helped to prop up the emir of Zaragoza as a political client and tributary of its own. Consequently the ambition of the Aragonese crown shifted briefly to the southeast, in expeditions toward the Mediterranean coast. Conquest was easier there; in conjunction with forces of the count of Barcelona, the distinct around Tarragona was seized in 1095, then lost again. More important and lasting victories were finally gained, however, with the definitive seizure of the foothill towns of Huesca (1096), and for the second and final time, Barbastro (1101).

The great Aragonese reconquest occurred in the first part of the twelfth century during the reign of Alfonso the Battler (1104-1134), a pious crusader who devoted himself primarily to war against the Muslims. With decisive reinforcement from French crusading knights, Alfonso was able to occupy the key Ebro city of Zaragoza and practically all the surrounding Ebro plain. He nearly doubled the size of the kingdom, increasing its natural resources and economic potential several times over.

Before the twelfth century, most of the Aragonese aristocracy were relatively poor and lesser nobles (hidalgos), who sometimes had to work their own land and caused little trouble for the crown. As in León and Castile, but not Catalonia, military and administrative officials in Aragón had at first constituted a service aristocracy. There were few hereditary fiefs, though as early as the tenth century tenencias over land, with the right of jurisdiction as lieutenant of the crown, were held by some nobles in the tierra vieja, the hill country of old Aragón. Originally these were not hereditary, but merely rewards for military service. Already by the eleventh century, however, most nobles were claiming hereditary status for their honors and tenencias. During the expansion of the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, the crown had to recruit more heavy cavalry for lowland fighting, as the reconquest descended from the hills. The situation was broadly similar to that of Castile, and a similar solution was adopted. The class of caballeros villanos was expanded by the royal practice of granting [91] honores of income from land as remuneration for military service. Alfonso the Battler relied primarily on a caballería de honor of petty hidalgos and military commoners, each of whom was normally assigned a certain amount of rent or income for each mounted warrior that he brought to the royal service.

The first kings of Aragón, and particularly Alfonso, were energetic in limiting the privileges of the hereditary aristocracy, while granting liberal terms of resettlement in the new lands and encouraging founding of new towns. Semi-autonomous concejos were established in parts of new Aragón just as in southern Castile and León during the same period. Moreover, better terms had to be granted to peasants in tierra vieja to keep them on the land. In general, there was a somewhat more equitable social balance in much of Aragón than in Catalonia during the twelfth century, though this changed. As early as 1164, representatives of Aragonese towns were invited to a Curia regia (the first clear instance of this in any peninsular kingdom), forming the precursor of the Aragonese Cortes that developed half a century later.

But Aragón was a small kingdom with scanty population, and even after the occupation of the tierra nueva its resources were not great. Most of its "towns" were simply rural village communities akin to those of Castile. The only true cities were the new capital, Zaragoza, Jaca, and Huesca. There were not enough people from the north to inhabit the new territory, and so many more newly conquered Muslims were allowed to remain in the Aragonese tierra nueva than in other reconquered territory of the twelfth century. The most productive rural districts of southern Aragón were inhabited and worked almost exclusively by Muslim peasants.

Thus the most notable development in twelfth-century Aragonese society was not productive new development for most of the population but rather a continued increase in the power of the aristocracy. This foreshadowed a similar pattern that would emerge in Castile at the completion of the major part of Castihan reconquest. Following the death of Alfonso the Battler in 1134, his hard-pressed successor was forced to recognize the right of hereditary seigneurial domain for the landed aristocracy in both the north and south. In old Aragón this amounted to full legal title and sovereignty for the nobility. In new Aragón the granting of large seigneuries worked by Muslim peasants only increased the power of new landlords who did not have to worry about the rights of Christian underlings. The aristocratic fiefs in the south were established on the principle of personal feudal loyalty to the crown, reflecting the growing French influence in the peninsula at that time. Whether or not they held direct title in the [92] north or did feudal homage in the south, the Aragonese aristocracy was more powerful by the beginning of the thirteenth century than that of any other Hispanic kingdom.

The Aragonese Succession Crisis and the Union of Aragón and Catalonia

The first Aragonese succession crisis occurred after the death of the celibate Alfonso the Battler, who willed his crown and patrimony to the monastic orders of the Temple, the Hospital, and the Holy Sepulchre. This was blocked by the Aragonese elite. They elected as successor Alfonso's brother, Ramiro the Monk, who had to renounce holy orders and marry in an effort to provide an heir to the throne. The Aragonese succession immediately fell afoul of the strong expansionist ambitions of Alfonso VII "the Emperor" of Castile-León, who aspired to incorporate the entire Ebro district down to Valencia and the Mediterranean. Since Zaragoza had been tributary to Castile, he claimed sovereignty over many of the latest conquests of the Aragonese crown, seizing Zaragoza at the end of 1134 and forcing Ramiro to seek refuge in the Pyrenees. An international conclave of jurists, clerics, and neighboring princes forced Alfonso VII to retire, but not before Ramiro had been required to recognize the suzerainty of the Leonese-Castilian crown as well as Castilian occupation of the key fortresses of southwestern Aragón.

It was to save Aragón from domination by the powerful Leonese-Castilian monarchy that Ramiro turned to the highly capable young count of Barcelona, Ramón Berenguer IV (1131-1162), a strong military leader and the best Hispanic politician of his generation. Ramiro's infant daughter, Petronila, who was to have been betrothed to Alfonso VII, was instead pledged in 1137 to Ramón Berenguer, with the provision that their offspring would reign jointly over the two states of Aragón and Catalonia. In the meantime, the Catalan count was to exercise the powers of the Aragonese crown, and even in the event that the tiny Petronila died before the marriage could be consummated, the house of Barcelona was still to inherit the Aragonese crown.

This arrangement was the political masterstroke of the Hispanic Middle Ages. It guaranteed the independent succession to the crown of Aragón and strengthened the military and diplomatic position of both states, while providing that each would preserve its own laws, institutions, and autonomy undiminished. The two realms remained legally distinct, but federated under the rule of a common dynasty. [94] Such an arrangement would have been impossible with Castile, whose strong monarchy and centripetal tendencies were inimical to equal federation. Both Aragón and Catalonia gained greater strength and security than either would have enjoyed alone, and Aragón was provided with a badly needed outlet to the Mediterranean.

The measure of the skill of Ramón Berenguer IV was that hc managed the union successfully and extracted Aragón from its pledged submission to Castile. In this he may have been aided by the fact that he was brother to Alfonso's queen, a princess renowned for her beauty and charm. Formation of a strong political entity in the northeast at the same time that the kingdom of Portugal broke away from Castile in the southwest gave greater balance to the principalities of the peninsula. The one left behind was of course Navarre, which found itself hemmed in territorially, had already lost its western and southwestern districts to Castile, and at one point was the object of a partitioning scheme of Alfonso VII and Ramon Berenguer IV.

The new ruler of the united dynasty still called himself count of Barcelona and merely "prince" of Aragón. During the middle years of his reign, he completed the occupation of new Catalonia with the seizure of Lérida (1148) and Tortosa (1149). His son by Petronila, Alfons II (1162-1196), was the first to call himself king of Aragón-Catalonia. Under the aegis of Alfons II, Catalan expansion across the Pyrenees into southwestern France reached its fullest extent, as the crown incorporated most of the territories of Provence and Languedoc, adding them to the small northeast Pyrenean districts of Cerdanya and Rosselló (Cerdagne and Rousillon). Emigration across the Pyrenees into Catalonia continued throughout the twelfth century, and was particularly useful in repopulating towns seized in the new districts of south and west Catalonia, and in expanding Catalan commerce.

Yet the trans-Pyrenean empire of Catalonia was brought to an abrupt end by the downfall of Pere II "the Catholic" (1196-1213). This resulted from the ambition of the French crown to overcome feudal division and reincorporate all territory down to the Pyrenees, but even more from the zeal for orthodoxy of Pope Innocent III. Provence and Languedoc had become the center of the Cathari religion in western Europe. Albigensianism, as the Cathari beliefs were frequently called, was an heretical Manichean type of religion stressing asceticism, moralizing, and the duality of body and spirit. The papacy was determined to extirpate the Cathari doctrine, and the French crown assisted this enterprise in order to seize the southwestern territories once more. Pere II of Aragón-Catalonia was a fully [95] orthodox prince who pledged his kingdom a feudality of the Holy See (hence his nickname the Catholic) but could not allow French forces to conquer and expropriate the trans-Pyrenean domains. Whereas in 1212 this warrior king had played an heroic role at the great pan-Christian victory of the Navas de Tolosa, in 1213 he led his forces across the Pyrenees to eject the occupying forces summoned by the papacy from northern France. The odds at the battle of Muret were in Pere's favor, but his Languedocian vassals proved feeble allies, and fortune failed him. Pere was slain on the field, his forces fled, and ultimately all Provence and Languedoc were incorporated by the crown of France.

The fateful defeat at Muret had the positive effect of quickly terminating what might have been a long, difficult, and costly rivalry with the crown of France. It set a stable border between France and Aragón-Catalonia, and turned the Hispanic kingdom southward to complete the reconquest of the peninsula's east, and ultimately outward into the Mediterranean in the great Aragonese expansion of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

The Great Catalan Reconquest of Jaume the Conqueror

Pere the Catholic left a minor son as heir, Jaume I (1213-1276). During the minority of the new ruler, the power of the crown declined and the aristocracy usurped authority in both Catalonia and Aragón. But after he came of age, Jaume proved himself the first great ruler of the united dynasty. He seized the opportunity provided by the final decay of Muslim power to complete the conquest of all the territory assigned to the Aragonese sphere by the treaty of Cazorla with Castile in 1179. This coincided with Castile's reconquest of most of the south under Fernando III and won for the Aragonese ruler the historic sobriquet of Jaume the Conqueror.

Jaume's first step was to seize the Balearic Islands in a series of expeditions between 1229 and 1235. His second was to move into the entire central portion of the eastern coast, beginning with Morella and the Maestrazgo district in 1232, going on to Valencia in 1238, and by 1244 taking the coastal district south of Valencia as far as Játiva. The boundaries between Aragón and Castile were then reaffirmed in a treaty of 1244, and in 1265 Aragonese forces repressed a major Muslim revolt in the new Castilian region of Murcia in the southeast. Finally, the treaty of Corbeil in 1258 between the crown of France and that of Aragón-Catalonia wiped from the slate the old quarrels over the French regions of Provence and Languedoc.

[96] Jaume's reign was important not merely because it expanded a dual kingdom of approximately 85,000 square kilometers to one of approximately 112,000, but also because of the growth of the Catalan economy during this period and the beginning of the formation of the classic political constitutions of the Aragonese realms. When the veteran Conqueror died at the age of seventy-eight in 1276, the political, economic, and territorial basis had been laid for the expansion of the Aragonese empire in the Mediterranean.

Constitution and Society of Aragón in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries

The thirteenth century was the age of consolidation of the political power of the Aragonese aristocracy. During the minority of Jaume I, the royal finances were exhausted (in part because of the extravagances of Pere the Catholic) and the resulting weakness of royal authority was used by some Aragonese nobles to divide among themselves the landed rents and other financial perquisites remaining to the crown. The expansionist policy of the Conqueror in his mature years was designed in part to remedy this weakness and restore a strong base for royal authority.

So long as the continental reconquest continued, ambitious and aggressive new aristocratic strata could be satisfied with new lands or rewards. After the reconquest ended, the nobility began to vie directly with the crown for control of the public power. The Aragonese nobility had already developed the myth of a pact which had supposedly originated the monarchy five centuries earlier through a compromise or contract between the chief noble, the king, and the leading ricoshombres (high aristocrats) to fight the Moors.

Much of the aggressiveness of the Aragonese nobility came from the fact that their position and power were in many cases of recent origin. Aragón had not been as thoroughly feudalized as Catalonia, where by definition most land was under the domain of the aristocracy or the church. Heading the nobility was a small group of ten or twelve families of ricoshombres, descended from or intermarried with royal bastards and the closest relatives of the crown. Most of their domains were of twelfth- and thirteenth-century creation and were the most productive areas in the Ebro and Jalón valleys and some of the most productive in the Valencia district. Below these few families was a fairly large group of middling-to-petty nobles, catagorized as infanzones and hidalgos. Though most of the landed aristocracy in Aragón exercised de facto civil and criminal jurisdiction over the [97] people and territory of their domains, this jurisdiction was not fully recognized by law. Furthermore, the bulk of the Aragonese aristocracy remained poorer than that of Castile or even of Catalonia, where some of the petty nobility were involving themselves in commerce. it was clear toward the end of the thirteenth century that Catalonia was the more populous, wealthy, and important of the two principalities. Aragón, one-third of whose population were Muslim underlings (mostly semiserfs), was a social and economic backwater by comparison.

Most of the Aragonese aristocracy joined in a special "Union" of 1283 to press on Jaume's son and successor, Pere el Gran (1276-1285) their status grievances and protests against new taxation and the growing predominance of Catalan interests in royal policy. The opportunity was provided by a quarrel with the French throne over the inheritance of Sicily, leading to a French invasion of Catalonia. The crown's desperate need for help forced it to recognize part of the "General Privilege" demanded by the Union, promising not to arrest, execute, or confiscate the property of any noble without the approval of the Aragonese Cortes and to make no new laws without Cortes approval.

The subsequent Privileges of the Union, imposed on the crown in 1287, forced ratification of the prerogatives of the Justicia (chief judge) of Zaragoza, whom the crown had already recognized as supreme judge of the kingdom, primarily in protection of nobles' rights. The Privileges also established the principle of annual Cortes meetings and the power of the nobles to name several members to the royal council with a veto over royal policy. Though not all these concessions were fully implemented, they had the effect of converting the kingdom of Aragón into a virtual aristocratic republic for the next half century. In the process, the full fiscal, civil, and criminal jurisdiction of the landholding aristocrats over their domains and the peasants thereon was implicitly recognized.
One of the distinctive features of the power of the aristocracy was its place in the Aragonese Cortes, which contained two aristocratic brazos ("arms" or chambers): one for the ricoshombres and one for the infanzones or hidalgos. Decisions in the brazo de ricoshombres required a unanimous vote. The two aristocratic brazos and the brazo popular (which represented twenty-two towns and three rural confederations) were complemented in 1301 by a brazo for the church hierarchy, creating the classic four-chamber Aragonese Cortes.

So long as their domestic social and juridical privileges were respected, the Aragonese aristocracy normally did not contest the crown's policy of overseas expansion. During the fourteenth-century [98] conquest of Sardinia, the contingent from lightly populated Aragón was as large as that from Catalonia and Mallorca combined.

The constitutional issue in Aragón was finally settled by the strongest king of the fourteenth century, Pere el Ceremoniós, who was determined to assert the authority of the crown in matters of general policy. He defeated forces of the aristocracy in a major battle in 1348 but reconfirmed many of the constitutional privileges granted by predecessors. Moreover, he ratified the authority of the Justicia, henceforth known as Justicia Mayor, to interpret the juridical rights of the aristocracy and safeguard the legitimate prerogatives of the Cortes. The Justicia Mayor was not, however, entirely above royal law; one who abused his authority was subsequently deposed, and another executed, by royal justice.

After 1348, the Aragonese nobility made little further effort to contest the sovereignty of the crown in the general affairs of the kingdom, in part because the crown accepted the social, juridical, and economic authority of the nobility on their local domains. The advance of Roman law gave them more exact legal tools to dominate the peasantry, particularly the lowest stratum of Muslim (and some Christian) peasants who lived in serfdom and were thenceforth treated under the judicial category of slave. New laws of the fourteenth century established the right of the señor to maltratar (punish) and even kill his serfs, if such authority was administered "justly." Thus by the fourteenth century the condition of most of the Aragonese peasantry, whether fully enserfed or simply encomendado, had declined from a hundred years earlier.

The towns and concejos of Aragón clung desperately to their charters under royal domain, to avoid falling under seigneurial control, and were frequently willing to pay large sums to the crown to have their status reconfirmed. Though the few Aragonese towns were small and poor, they were the only alternative under the crown to aristocratic authority. During the troubled twelfth century they had formed several regional juntas to help maintain law and order, but an effort was made from the thirteenth century on to incorporate jurisdiction over roads and royal domain in the royal administration, which appointed special judges and paceros (peacemakers) for policing.

The kingdom remained economically backward throughout the later Middle Ages. Some new irrigation was constructed in the river valleys, but the most productive farmland was for the most part the mudéjar (subject Muslim) regions of the tierra nueva. Sheep-grazing was almost as important as in Castile, and the Casa de Ganaderos of Zaragoza was the Aragonese equivalent of the Castilian Mesta. Compared [99] with the extraordinary development of Catalan commerce, that of Aragón was insignificant. From about the eleventh century, the most important trade routes were those that led northward through Jaca and Huesca over the Pyrenees into France.

The Kingdom of Valencia

The most important of the new domains was the region of Valencia. The city itself had been one of the most populous and prosperous of the taifas, and the surrounding agricultural region, partly irrigated, was one of the most productive in the peninsula. The Muslim inhabitants of the city and of other towns in the district were expelled, but most of the Muslim peasants were allowed to remain, their lands divided to form new domains for Aragonese (and some Catalan) aristocrats. After a Muslim peasant revolt in 1263, however, some 100,000 Muslim peasants were expelled from the new kingdom as well.

Jaume the Conqueror had the creative foresight to establish the new region on an independent basis similar to that of Aragón and Catalonia, making constructive use of the federative and constitutional principles behind the Aragonese crown. The Aragonese aristocracy had provided most of the military strength for the conquest of the region, but the crown was eager to avoid adding the whole new territory to the possessions of that domineering caste and so kept it separate and encouraged Catalan immigration. Valencia and most of the other towns were repopulated almost exclusively by Catalan immigrants. The majority of peasant immigrants into some of the better irrigated districts that had been cleared of Muslims were also Catalans. They were mainly from the freer districts of New Catalonia and brought their own furs, or systems of local rights, with them, as well as the technical ability to keep a rather complicated agrarian system operating. The domains of Aragonese aristocrats were restricted to the north and northwest of the new kingdom, adjacent to Aragón itself, and the common language of most of the Valencian Christian population was Catalan, not the Aragonese dialect more akin to Castilian. A three-chamber parliament or Corts on the Catalan pattern was then created to represent the dominant elements in the new Christian population.

Immigration was slow, for the surplus population of Catalonia was not great, that of Aragón even less, and some immigrants were attracted to the Balearics. In 1270 the Christian population of the entire region, including the city of Valencia, was only 30,000, while there [100] were four times as many subject Muslims in the countryside. By 1500, slow but steady immigration from the north and Muslim emigration to the south had increased the Christian proportion of an expanded population to nearly 50 percent: of a total of approximately 300,000 inhabitants, 140,000 were Christians, including nearly 70,000 in Valencia itself.

The rise of the city of Valencia as an important economic center dates from the height of the Aragonese Mediterranean empire in the fourteenth century. Its Catalan population brought with them the skills and values of Barcelona and other port towns, and ultimately, with the decline of Barcelona in the fifteenth century, Valencia became the leading commercial and financial city of eastern Spain. Its many skilled workers produced an important volume of manufactures, particularly in textiles. The principality's autonomy enabled the Valencians to maintain their own currency and protect it from the devaluations of the fifteenth century.

The two ruling classes in the principality were the urban oligarchy (ciutadans honrats) of the city and the landed aristocracy of the countryside. Early efforts to give artisans equal representation in the administration of Valencia were squelched, and strict sumptuary laws promulgated to keep them in their place; the dominance of the upper classes was maintained throughout. A degree of fusion between the urban oligarchs and the aristocracy occurred, particularly after an agreement of 1329 that allowed the lower aristocracy to hold office in the towns.
Valencia became in some ways the most cosmopolitan city in the peninsula and by the late fifteenth century was its primary center of sensual Renaissance esthetic and humanist culture, strongly influenced by Italian patterns. Yet Valencia remained a culturally bifurcate, religiously divided region, with half its population Muslim, for four hundred years, down to the final expulsion of the Muslims in 1613. Despite its prosperity and urban sophistication, it never developed a completely distinct, independent, and unified cultural personality.

The Balearic Islands

Occupation of the Balearic Islands was a major step in the expansion of Aragón-Catalonia in the Mediterranean. The largest of the islands, Mallorca, had supported a Muslim population of between 80,000 and 100,000, most of them peasant smallholders, but its Muslims were expelled en masse and the island redivided among the royal domain and members of the occupying force. Poor peasants from Catalonia [101] were brought over in significant numbers to work the empty fields for the new overlords, at first on fairly favorable terms.

The key to Mallorca was its large and prosperous capital city of Palma. Endowed with a fine harbor and strategic position in the west Mediterranean, it became within two generations a new Barcelona and for the next century a rival of that capital. Through the first half of the fourteenth century the bourgeoisie of Palma built one of the strongest commercial and financial centers of the west Mediterranean, operating a large merchant fleet. After the middle of the fourteenth century, however, warfare, increased competition, the plague, and natural disaster combined to reduce sharply the commercial importance of Palma.

During the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the society of Mallorca had been more or less open: the first positions after the conquest had been taken by petty cavaller and middle class conquerors and emigrants from Catalonia. The only feudal aristocrats were a very small group of nobles from Rosselló and Cerdanya. By the fourteenth century, Mallorca had developed an island parliament, the Consell General of three estates, with a special council for peasants and local councils for each district. Over half the land was originally under royal domain, and most of the original peasant immigrants enjoyed hereditary emphyteutic rights. By the fifteenth century, however, the urban oligarchy of Palma had come to dominate the entire island, buying up most of the land rights and establishing a kind of seigneurial domination over the peasantry, which was placed under growing exactions. Social tensions eventually erupted in several bloody civil wars between town and countryside.

The lesser islands were settled by Christian immigrants more slowly. Ibiza, the third largest, was occupied in 1235 and most of it divided among magnates (high aristocrats) from northeast Catalonia who led the expedition. The fairly dense Muslim population was reduced to serfdom, and in subsequent generations much of it was by degrees either expelled or sold into slavery. At the time of the original conquest the second largest island, Menorca, was merely reduced to vassalage. It was not occupied directly until 1287, after which most of the Muslim population of 40,000 were reduced to slavery and a large number sold throughout the west Mediterranean. Menorca may not have been fully repopulated with Catalan peasant immigrants for a century or more.

In his will, Jaume the Conqueror exercised the customary feudal right of division, and after his death in 1276, the Balearics were split off from the rest of the territories of the Aragonese crown to form a separate kingdom together with the north Pyrenean counties of Rosselló [102] and Cerdanya. The logic behind this hybrid arrangement was that many of the original conquerors and emigrants to Mallorca had come from Rosselló. Though the separate kingdom of Mallorca, as it was called, was soon forced to recognize once more the suzerainty of Aragón, its territories were not fully reincorporated into the patrimony of the Aragonese crown until 1349.

The Economy of Medieval Catalonia

Aside from the commerce of Mallorca and the rise of Valencia in the late Middle Ages, the economic history of the Aragonese empire is mainly the economic history of Catalonia. Without the sea power of the Catalan ports, overseas expansion would have been impossible. Catalan maritime activity began to develop significantly in the eleventh century, and displayed major military importance in the successful expedition to Mallorca in 1229. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the shipyards of Barcelona vied with those of Venice and Genoa to build the finest vessels in western Europe.

The growth of the Catalan economy was probably stimulated by the flourishing urban economy of southwestern France in the twelfth century, then by the money, enterprise and technical ability of middle class Albigensian refugees who fled to Catalonia after 1213. Simultaneously, the ravages of the papal Albigensian crusade shattered the economic centers of Provence and Languedoc and eliminated much of their competition to the broadly expanding thirteenth-century Catalan economy.

The first great phase of commercial expansion came during the second half of the thirteenth century. It was built especially on the oriental spice trade through Sicily and the traffic in gold, wool, and slaves with northwest Africa. In the early Middle Ages, traffic in slaves--mostly white--may have been the core of Barcelona's commerce. After the middle of the fourteenth century, the slave trade became increasingly important in general Catalan commerce.

By the early fourteenth century, Catalan merchants had established themselves in all the major emporia of the Mediterranean. Barcelona's Consulate of the Sea regulated overseas commerce and supervised the trade of many lesser ports along the Catalan and Valencian littoral. Altogether, Barcelona merchants comprised one of the three largest groups of traders in the centers of Mediterranean and west European commerce. They were the principal European middlemen in the ports of northwest Africa, were second only to the Venetians at Alexandria and in the Flanders trade, and even ranged beyond Byzantium to the Black Sea ports. Traffic in the spices and drugs of [103] Alexandria was facilitated by a favorable gold balance in trade with northwest Africa and augmented by special tribute paid to the crown of Aragón by several states along the northwest African coast during the fourteenth century.

The Catalan towns became important manufacturing centers and were practically the only exporters of finished goods in any volume in the Hispanic peninsula. At the heart was the domestic textile industry, relying on woolens in Catalonia and silks in Valencia. It began a major phase of development at the start of the fourteenth century with the formation of several large concerns of textile producers, the first of which was established at Barcelona in 1304. Expansion was encouraged by the elimination of French competition during the war that raged intermittently from 1283 to 1313, and by the demands of a growing domestic population and export markets in Castile, the west Mediterranean islands, and northwest Africa. There was also a significant domestic metallurgical industry, whose main achievement, the "Catalan forge," was later copied for iron-working in other parts of western Europe. During the fourteenth century the Catalans held what amounted to control over the technique of extracting Mediterranean coral, and their production of leather goods was also important. At one point, early in the fourteenth century, Catalonia may have had the strongest local manufacturing complex of any one region in western Europe.

Equally significant, Catalonia led in the development of banking and finance. Unlike Castile, which for a long time kept some Muslim monetary standards, Catalonia functioned within the monetary system of the European west Mediterranean. Earlier than 1400, Barcelona's financiers and merchants had developed letters of exchange (the forerunners of checks), insurance, and other banking techniques that were major steps in the evolution of modern finance.
Science was used most impressively in the realms of astronomy, mathematics, and navigation, and it enabled Catalan mariners to make fundamental contributions to the fourteenth-century expansion of Europe into the Atlantic and around the northwest African coast. All told, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Catalonia was probably the only society within the peninsula in all of Hispanic history to be ahead of most of its European contemporaries in technology and economy.

Society and Institutions of Medieval Catalonia

The economic and territorial expansion of thirteenth-century Catalonia was made possible by, and in turn encouraged, the heaviest [104] concentration of people in the peninsula. Subsequent investigation has revealed, for example, that Catalan farming plots of the thirteenth century were only 20 to 50 percent as large as those of the sixteenth century because of the denser population in the earlier period. The population of the peninsula as a whole may have nearly doubled in the two centuries preceding the Black Death, between 1140 and 1340, as a result of improved agriculture and expanded commerce, but already by the mid-thirteenth century the population of Catalonia was nearly 500,000, or at least 10 percent of the peninsula's approximately 5,000,000. It is calculated that by the early fourteenth century Catalonia's population may have dropped to about 450,000, mainly because of heavy emigration. Altogether, two-thirds of the people of the home territories of the crown of Aragón were Catalan. The population of Valencia and Aragón combined, around 1300, scarcely exceeded 200,000, and that of the Balearics scarcely reached 50,000. Well over half the people of Valencia and Aragón were Muslims not integrated into the society. The Moorish population of the Valencia region amounted to 70-80 percent of the total of that area, that of Aragón to more than one-third, but it has been estimated at only 3 percent of all of Catalonia. The almost entirely rural population of bleak, landlocked Aragón was of secondary importance in producing food and raw materials (grain, wool, and hides).

Catalonia, however, suffered more heavily from the Black Death than did Aragón (or Castile), because it was more urbanized and the plague tended to follow the trade routes. The crest of the disease was followed by locusts, famine, and then its recrudescence, and according to some estimates nearly half of Catalonia died. By the latter part of the fourteenth century the population had declined to about 350,000.

There were two elements of the Catalan upper class: the feudal military aristocracy, established on the land, and the moneyed bourgeois oligarchies. By the late fourteenth century these two were beginning to merge, as more aristocrats chose to live in the towns and more wealthy merchants and financiers bought country estates. The urban patriciate or upper class were for the most part rentiers and the urban equivalent of the feudal seigneurs. These ciutadans honrats (honored citizens) wielded a disproportionate influence in town government.

Below them were the active middle classes, the ma mitjana, composed of several strata of mercaders (merchants and financiers), ranging from the mercaders honrats (enfranchised merchants), who might rival the oligarchic ciutadans in wealth, down to the ordinary marxants (peddlers). In wealth such categories might overlap with the artistas (professional men and skilled workers), below whom were the ordinary menestrals (artisans). The distribution of public power is [105] revealed by the social background of the 200 elective members of the ruling Barcelona Concell de Cent in 1257: 89 were ciutadans, 89 were mercaders, and 22 were menestrals.

Despite strong status differences, this was a fairly open society with great mobility and considerable opportunity. There were definite social tensions, as demonstrated in an uprising by the poble menut of Barcelona in 1285, led by one Berenguer Oller and supressed with 200 executions. But in general the urban society of expanding Catalonia, with all its complexity, revealed a degree of social cohesion rivaled by few other regions of western Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The extent of opportunity is demonstrated by fourteenth-century menestrals who ultimately made so much money that they were able to buy landed estates in the countryside. It was only in the fifteenth century, after opportunity and mobility had decreased, that rebellion by the lower and middle classes against the oligarchy became endemic.

The condition of the peasantry improved steadily during the Catalan expansion from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries. Genuine serfdom did not exist, though much of the peasantry was still liable to various kinds of feudal dues and services. However, after the Black Death reduced their numbers and placed a premium on labor, the upper classes began to tighten exactions and increase requirements, leading eventually to the great Catalan peasant revolts of the late fifteenth century.

The major political distinction of medieval Catalonia was that it developed the most effective parliament of any realm in western Europe. The constitutional structures of Catalonia and Aragón became more fully defined than that of Castile in part because of their more exact feudal separation of jurisdiction and rights. As in other kingdoms, the Catalan Corts that evolved in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were composed of representatives of three distinct braces. The Catalan parliament, like that of Aragón, was able to take advantage of the heavy fiscal and military needs of the crown to establish basic rights. Lacking the large royal domains of its Castilian counterpart, the crown of Catalonia-Aragón was constantly in need of funds, primarily to support military undertakings. Much of what was held in royal domain was sold to meet these needs, yet they were never fully satisfied and the crown was perpetually dependent on further grants, particularly from Catalonia. By the early fourteenth century, the Corts had used this hold over the crown to establish the principle of regular meetings of the Corts and its power of the purse, and it was on the way to achieving an explicit position of judicial and legislative sovereignty as well.

[106] The Catalan system, unlike that of Aragón, was more than an instrument of aristocratic domination, but developed a broad constitutional structure that represented and protected the middle class as well. The principal reason for this difference was the much greater strength of the Catalan towns and middle classes, requiring that the landed nobility, which was involved in commerce, ally itself with the urban elite rather than merely usurping priority. Thus in Catalonia, as later in England, there developed a functional combination of interests between the aristocracy and the upper level of commoners.

A unique feature of the Catalan system was the establishment of a special institution, the Diputació del General de Catalunya, a committee of representatives of the three estates of the Corts. Its function was to apportion and collect taxes, interpret the laws, and guarantee observance of due constitutional process. The Corts made a rule of never permitting the crown to know the sources of its grants, which were presented in a lump sum after being collected among the population on the basis of periodic censuses. A special Diputació was usually appointed to supervise collection of taxes, and in 1359 the Diputació was summoned to permanent session. In addition to supervising taxes, it began to serve as a superior court, and in 1421 was recognized by the crown as bearing authority to interpret the laws and guarantee their proper observance by other authorities. The Catalan Corts not only established legislative cosovereignty with the crown but institutionalized the means of safeguarding constitutional process, something completely wanting in the Castilian Cortes. The institution of a permanent executive agency--though mainly restricted to fiscal supervision--was afterward adopted by the parliaments of Aragón, Valencia, Navarre, Mallorca, and Aragonese Sicily. Yet the Corts and its Diputació were used by the dominant elements in late medieval Catalan society primarily as a protective device against the crown. The notion of legislative initiative or a positive economic or fiscal program by the Corts was almost entirely absent. The only programs that ever appeared in the medieval Corts were the annual greuges, usually long lists of juridical and financial complaints against exactions and abuses, designed mainly to hold down the tax bill.

Medieval Catalan Culture

The culture of medieval Catalonia was the most thoroughly "European" to be found in the peninsula. Its first significant intellectual center was developed at the monastery of Ripoll in the eleventh century. There and at several other schools in the northeast, the first [107] work was done in transmitting aspects of Muslim science and culture to western Europe, antedating the more extensive efforts in Castile. In both Castile and Catalonia the major role in this was played by Jewish intellectuals, living especially in Barcelona, Huesca in Aragón, and Tudela in Navarre. Foreign students at the principal Catalan schools as well as the religious centers at Pamplona and at Tarazona in Aragón helped transmit Muslim learning across the Pyrenees.

The first major foreign esthetic influences in Catalonia came from Provence and Lombardy, to be followed by the common Romanesque art of western Europe, stronger in Catalan art and architecture of the eleventh and twelfth centuries than anywhere else in the peninsula. Largely from Provençal influence, formal vernacular poetry developed earlier in Catalonia than in Castile, beginning with such poets as Moncada in the eleventh and Arnau de Vilanova in the twelfth century. By the early thirteenth century, the Provençal mode of courtly lyricism (and topical satire), as spread by the trovadors and jongleurs, was widely practiced, and the poetic contest became an institution.

Throughout the Middle Ages, Catalan remained the language of the Aragonese dynasty and court, which itself produced the first great Catalan narrative in the Crónica of Jaume I. At the end of the thirteenth century, the Catalan theologian and philosopher Ramón Ltull was the first writer in western Europe to compose philosophical and scientific works in the vernacular. The height of the medieval Catalan prose narrative was reached during the fourteenth century in Ramón de Muntaner's chronicles of the Mediterranean expansion.

Philosophical and theological study in Catalonia was the most advanced in the peninsula, and during the fourteenth century there were several teachers of Scotism in the region. The only new Catholic philosophical variant to appear anywhere in the peninsula during the Middle Ages was that of Ramón Lluli. Llull is best known for a grand project to convert the Muslims that eventually led him to a martyr's death. He also developed a body of theology that differed from Thomism in its insistence that there was no function for philosophy aside from theology and that all theological propositions could be understood by reason. Llull was besides a poet, a mystic, and a writer of didactic romance, and was probably the first thinker in western Europe to propound the idea of an international association of states (Christian and non-Christian) to keep the peace.

Though open heresy was extremely rare, Catalonia was more noticeably touched by heterodoxy than other Hispanic realms. The Albigensians who fled into the region in the thirteenth century left few direct traces, but the more open and individualistic structure of [109] Catalan culture and society created a somewhat more critical-minded and questioning religious ambience than in Castile or Portugal.

Expansion of the Aragonese Mediterranean Empire

During the late-thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Aragonese crown developed the most clearly defined, conscious, and carefully planned imperial strategy of any power in western Europe. It first began to take shape during the reign of the heir of Jaume I, Pere III el Gran (1276-1285), who proposed active expansion on all fronts, to include restricting aristocratic power at home (particularly in Aragón) and establishing the indivisibility of the royal inheritance. Pere's queen was the daughter of Manfred von Hobenstaufen and heiress to Sicily. He proposed to claim this inheritance even though the pope had given the island to a branch of the French Angevin dynasty. An opportunity was provided by the famous "Sicilian vespers" of 1282, in which many of the French supporters of the Angevin claimant were massacred and the rest driven from the island, opening the way to Aragonese occupation. The claim to Sicily brought the Aragonese crown into direct conflict with the two major powers of western Europe in that era: the papacy and the crown of France. It led immediately to a major French invasion of Catalonia, under duress of which the Aragonese and Catalan parliaments exacted fundamental concessions from the crown. The invasion was blessed by the pope as a crusade but it ended in complete defeat (1285), leaving rich spoils to be garnered by the victorious Catalans.

Pere el Gran's successor, the weak Alfons III (1285-1291), was handicapped by the resistance of the Aragonese aristocracy. Sicily was given to Pere's second son, Jaume, who was hard-pressed to beat off the assaults of the French and papal forces but was assisted by the excellent Catalan navy of Roger de Lluria that smashed several French fleets. In 1291, Alfons was reconciled with the papacy and agreed to cease aiding the Sicilian branch of his family, but died six months later without a direct heir. The Catalans then offered the throne to Jaume of Sicily, who became Jaume II of Aragón (1291-1327), ignored some of his late brother's concessions to the aristocracy, and continued the struggle with the papacy over Sicily. After five years, however, a compromise was arranged: the Aragonese crown renounced Sicily, was lifted from interdict by the papacy, and was given sovereignty over Sardinia and Corsica (though it would be up to the Aragonese to conquer those islands to make such sovereignty effective). The compromise was not, however, accepted by [110] Jaume's younger brother, Fadric, the governor of Sicily. who was elected king by a Sicilian parliament in 1296. A settlement was finally reached in 1302, when the French crown agreed to accept Fadric as independent ruler of Sicily after he married a Neapolitan Angevin princess.

Jaume II, like his father, pursued a policy of calculated expansion, both in the west Mediterranean and in the peninsula as well. Royal policy was strongly supported by the Catalans, for it proved a stimulus to manufactures and commerce and offered advantageous new positions. Unlike his grandfather Jaume I, Jaume II did not regard the existing frontiers between Castile and Aragón as final. He took advantage of a Castilian minority crisis in 1296 to occupy the entire Alicante-Murcia region south of Valencia. Though unable to keep Murcia, Jaume did obtain recognition of the Aragonese crown's possession of all the Alicante district, which then became part of the kingdom of Valencia.
The most extraordinary single achievement of the expansion, however, was accomplished in the east Mediterranean by Catalan forces entirely independent of the crown. After peace was restored to the Mediterranean for an entire generation following the compromise of 1302, most of the almogávers, the mercenary light infantry from Catalonia who had done much of the recent fighting, were left without employment. The greater share -- a "Grand Company" of possibly as many as 6,500 under Roger de Flor -- were hired by Byzantium to protect the eastern empire. Though they quickly established an extraordinary record in wresting Asia Minor from the Turks, the Byzantine court found the almogavers potentially dangerous defenders; within two years Roger de Flor and many of them were tricked and massacred near Constantinople. The survivors of the Grand Company seized the Gallipoli peninsula, where they attracted allies, including several thousand Turkish mercenaries, and laid waste all of Thrace. In 1309, they moved to Thessaly in the employ of the French Burgundian overlord of central Greece but were soon dismissed. They turned on the Burgundian-Athenian forces and cut the latter's cavalry to pieces in battle near Thebes, then took over completely the "Latin" duchy of Athens. This independent Catalan dominion over central Greece lasted for three generations, and by 1370, one-third of the population of Athens was said to be Catalan. Catalan rule was finally overthrown in 1388.

The military and commercial power of the lands of the Aragonese crown waxed so strong throughout the west Mediterranean during the reign of Jaume II that at one point, in 1309, the Aragonese ruler was even offered the overlordship of the Italian republic of Pisa by its leading citizens. Given the intense rivalries in Italy, this was impractical, [111] but during the course of his reign Jaume II prepared the diplomatic and commercial outlines of further territorial expansion, finally launched with the beginning of the Aragonese conquest of Sardinia in 1323. This brought the Aragonese crown into direct conflict with the powerful republic of Genoa, and the subsequent reign of Alfons IV (1327-1336) was full of conflict.

The outstanding Aragonese ruler of the fourteenth century was Pere IV "el Ceremoniós" (the Punctilious), whose long reign extended for half a century, from 1336-1387. He was a conscientious and devoted ruler and an excellent politician. Moreover, like most of the Aragonese kings of this period, he was cultured and well-read. Pere IV was extremely popular in Barcelona and enjoyed general Catalan support throughout his reign. His main accomplishments were to consolidate the constitutional system of Aragón and Catalonia and secure the domination of the Aragonese crown in the west Mediterranean islands. A showdown with the Aragonese aristocracy occurred in 1347-1348 when the leaders of Aragón and Valencia refused to recognize Pere's only child at that time, his daughter, as heiress to the crown. Momentarily in a weak position, Pere was forced to restore the privileges of the Union to the Aragonese aristocracy and to ratify the institution of a justicia mayor for the Valencian Corts. But the balance soon changed. After another outbreak of plague, Pere collected a largely Catalan army and broke the forces of the Aragonese aristocracy in pitched battle, bringing death to the leaders of the opposition. The Union was abolished, but, as explained earlier, Pere kept a respect for the traditional laws and did not try to alter the original prerogatives of the Aragonese Cortes. Moreover, it was during his reign that the executive branch of Catalan parliamentarianism, the Diputació, was permanently established (1359).

After settling the Aragonese constitutional issue, Pere forceably reincorporated the "kingdom" of Mallorca and its appendage of Rosselló under the Aragonese crown. The struggle with Genoa over Sardinia was then pursued more vigorously, but effective control of Sardinia was not achieved until the very end of his reign. Even after that, serious revolts had to be faced. The Catalan position in Sicily had remained strong, with eighteen commercial consulates ringing the island in an economic web, and in the last years of his reign, Pere was successful in regaining control of Sicily for the Aragonese crown. The Aragonese pattern of establishing autonomous local parliaments was also repeated in Sardinia and Sicily.

During the l350s and 60s, many of the resources of the Aragonese crown were tied down in a protracted struggle with Pedro the Cruel of Castile. Aragonese interests emerged unscathed from this long contest with a powerful rival, thanks in large part to the diplomatic [112] skill of Pere IV in finding allies and playing off Castilian factions against each other.

During the long reign of Pere IV, the Aragonese-Catalan empire reached its zenith, but the symptoms of decline were already apparent by the time of the old king's death in 1387. Earlier, the expansion of the empire and war with France had stimulated commerce and provided new opportunities for Catalan manufactures. By the middle of Pere's reign the effects of the plague, of population decline, and of constant warfare were beginning to tell on Catalan resources. The Barcelona financial collapse of 1381 was a warning of worse to come.

The achievement was nevertheless extraordinary. In the Middle Ages, only in Venice was there another example of economic development and commercial-military hegemony resting on so slim an original base. Given the complexity and difficulty of the problems faced and the elaborate political and technological developments that were realized in the process, the rise and temporary splendor of medieval Aragón-Catalonia surpassed the territorial expansion of militant Castile in scope and intricacy of accomplishment.

Bibliography for Chapter V

[337] The best one-volume history of Catalonia is Ferran Soldevila's História de Catalunya, rev. ed. (Barcelona, 1962). Soldevila is also the editor of a new multivolume Historia dels catalans (Barcelona, 1966), which is superbly illustrated. The series Biografies Catalanes, published in Barcelona, provides detailed accounts of political and institutional history: see Ramon d'Abadal, Els primers comtes catalans (1958); Santiago Sobrequés, Els grans comtes de Barcelona (1961); P. E. Schramm, J.F. Cabestany, and E. Bagué, Els primers comtes-reis (1960); Ferran Soldevila, Els grans reis del segle XIII (1955); J.E. Martínez Ferrando, S. Sobrequés, and E. Bagué, Els descendents de Pere el Gran (1954); and Rafael Tasis, Pere el Ceremoniós i els seus fills (1957). The most thorough study of Catalonia-Aragón in the period of the expansion is J. L. Shneidman's The Rise of the Aragonese-Catalan Empire 1200-1350, 2 vols. (New York, 1970), which is topical in organization.

The most extensive study of early medieval Catalonia, still uncompleted, is Ramón d'Abadal's Catalunya carolingia, 4 vols. (Barcelona, 1925-55). A. R. Lewis, The Development of Southern French and Catalan Society, 718-1050 (Austin, 1965), provides new understanding of early Catalan society and institutions. See also Emile Cauvet, Etude historique sur l'établissement des espagnols dans la Septimanie au VIlime et IXme siécles (Narbonne, 1877), and Josep M, Guilera, Unitat histórica del Pirineu (Barcelona, 1964). Jordi Ventura has written two useful biographies that deal also with transpyrenean expansion and the question of heterodoxy: Alfons el Cast (Barcelona, 1962), and Pere el Católic i Simó de Montfort (Barcelona, 1960). R. Dalmau's booklet, L'heretgia albigesa i la batalla de Muret (Barcelona, 1960), is also helpful. The principal biographies of the two leading thirteenth-century rulers are by Soldevila: Vida de Jaume I el Conqueridor (Barcelona, 1958), and Pere el Gran, 3 vols. (Barcelona, 1950-1956). Ramon d'Abadal has recently published a new biography, Pere el Cereinoniós (Barcelona, 1972). On the fourteenth-century kings of Mallorca, see J.-E. Martínez Ferrando, La trágica história dels reis de Mallorca (Barcelona, 1960).

Aspects of foreign affairs and expansion are studied in Juan Regla Campistol, Francia, la Corona de Aragón y la frontera pirenaica, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1951); Vicente Salavert y Roca, Cerdeña y la expansión mediterránea de la Corona de Aragón 1297-1314, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1956); Antonio Arribas Palau, La conquista de Cerdeña por Jaime II de Aragón (Madrid, 1952); Francesco Giunta, Aragonesi e catalani nel Mediterraneo, 2 vols. (Palermo, 1953); Ch.-E. Dufourcq, L'Espagne catalane et le Maghrib aux XIIIe et XIVe siécles (Paris, 1966); and Lluis Nicolau d'Olwer, L'expansió de Catalunya en [338] la Mediterránia oriental (Barcelona, 1926). Two useful brief summaries are I. F. Cabestany, Expansió catalana per la Methterránea (Barcelona, 1967), and Rafael Tasis, L'expedició dels almogavers (Barcelona, 1960).

Political and scientific ideas are treated in Francisco Elias de Tejada, Historia del pensamiento político catalán, 3 vols. (Seville, 1963-65), and J. Millás Vallicrosa, Assaig d'historia de les idees fisiques i matemátiques a la Catalunya medieval (Barcelona, 1931). Armand Llinares, Ramon Llull (Barcelona, 1968), presents an excellent analysis of the leading figure of medieval Catalan religion and culture. Commercial organization is studied in Jaime Carrera Pujal, La Lonja de Mar y los cuerpos de comercio de Barcelona (Barcelona, 1953).

The best brief history of medieval Aragón is José Ma. Lacarra, Aragón en el pasado (Zaragoza, 1960). On Valencia, see the multivolume História deIs valen cians (Barcelona, 1965), and the first chapters of Joan Fuster, Nosotros íos valencianos (Madrid, 1967). Thomas F. Glick, Irrigation and Society in Medieval Valencia (Cambridge, 1970), is an important new work. The basic new reference on Mallorca is J. Mascaró Pasarius, História de Mallorca, 4 vols. (Palma de Mallorca, 1970).

A History of Spain and Portugal
Vol. 1
By Stanley G. Payne

Chapter Six
The Emergence of Portugal

[113] The question of the roots of Portuguese individuality and the formation of a separate monarchy in the southwest has provoked considerable discussion. The two great Portuguese historians of the nineteenth century, Alexandre Herculano and Oliveira Martins, considered Portuguese independence somewhat accidental, the consequence of fortuitous political developments in the twelfth century. Spanish historians have stated such views even more emphatically. On the other hand, some twentieth-century Portuguese historians have stressed the distinctiveness of their region and what they interpret to be an underlying cultural identity and continuity that reaches well back into the Middle Ages.

The Roman province of Lusitania was not coterminous with modern Portugal, for it did not include part of the north but did embrace a portion of what was later southwestern Spain. The peninsula's southwest developed an economy with a special geographic basis oriented toward the Atlantic coast, but drew comparatively little attention because of the lack of mineral or other natural wealth.

The first separate polity organized in the western part of the peninsula in historic times was the independent kingdom established by the Suevi, a small Germanic tribe that invaded the region in 411. The Suevi settled primarily in the northwest, in Galicia and to the south of it. Their economic orientation was more agricultural than that of the [114]Visigoths, and they have been given credit for introducing the central European quadrangular plow into the peninsula. The moist northwest had a more fundamentally agrarian economy than the predominantly pastoral dry central region of the peninsula, and after the collapse of Roman power, cultivation of the land returned to smaller family units, replacing much of the latifundia system. In later centuries, more agrarian terms would be found in Galician than in any other Hispanic language. By the sixth century, the best-developed agriculture in the northwest seems not to have been in Galicia proper but in the Minho district just to the south. The role of the Suevi, however, probably lay more in adapting to these conditions than fostering them. There is little evidence of direct Suevic cultural and social influence on the population of the northwest, and Portuguese has fewer German words in it than any other peninsular language.

During the sixth century, the northwestern kingdom of the Suevi was incorporated by the Visigothic monarchy, with subsequent fusion of Visigothic and northwestern aristocracies, and there is no clear indication of any separate political or ethnic identification by the eighth century. During the first generation of the Muslim occupation, there was little effort to establish Muslim colonists in the northwest. Above the Mondego valley no more than a few small garrisons were to be found. Almost all of Galicia was rewon in the Asturian advance of the 740s, and between 751 and 754 all the Minho district down to the mouth of the lower Douro (in Castilian, Duero) was temporarily occupied. The Christian society of Asturias-Galicia lacked the strength and resources to repopulate the northern part of the Minho district until well into the ninth century, while the lower stretches of the Douro valley constituted part of the no-man's-land whose inhospitable wastes sheltered the north from Muslim attack. Though raids might carry as far south as the Muslim centers of Coimbra and Lisbon, effective Christian occupation during the ninth century scarcely extended beyond the Minho River, the southern limit of Galicia proper.

There was a large Mozarab population in the Muslim towns of the southwest, as in other parts of the peninsula, and a significant emigration from the Muslim districts toward the north occurred in the second half of the ninth century. Apparently Mozarab emigrants from the south were primarily responsible for settling the city of Porto in 868.

The difficulty of peopling the Minho-Douro region with Galicians from the north, and the influx of Mozarabs from the Coimbra-Mon-dego region to the south, were evidently two factors of some importance in creating a separate regional identity for the area below the Minho. At least as early as 841, the region was referred to as the Provincia Portucalense, taking its name from the port of Cale (site of [115] the subsequent city of Porto), the main transit point between the settled region of Galicia to the north and historic Lusitania to the south. Hence Portugal or portucalense originally referred merely to an intermediate geographic district, not to a distinct cultural, political, or social entity. Toward the end of the ninth century this frontier district below the Minho River was established as a separate administrative territory by the Asturian monarchy, with a governor (later called dux) appointed for life by the crown, in much the same way as with the county of Castile. Territorium portugalense (changing c to g in ordinary usage) was the term used to refer to the entire area from the Minho to the Douro, and the succinct word Portugal can first be traced from a document of 883.

During the tenth century, the post of dux of the Portugalense was held by a powerful local aristocratic family which governed on an hereditary basis for a hundred years. The Viking raids and Muslim assaults of the tenth and early eleventh centuries, together with the contemporary decline of the Leonese monarchy, encouraged local identity and self-reliance. The center of the Portugalense tended toward its southern region, in the Douro valley, for the northern district below the Minho had apparently not been fully resettled even by the end of the tenth century.

Particularism in the Portugalense was reinforced by the mountain barriers and watershed--the region of Tras-os-Montes--that separated it from Leon to the northeast. Save for the Douro, none of the rivers that flowed through the Portugalense originated east of the mountains. There was distinct geographic separation and orientation toward the southwest and the Atlantic. Greater geographic and cultural continuity existed toward the north, for it appears that in addition to the climatic and agrarian similarities, a separate western dialect of vernacular Latin had been spoken in that part of the peninsula since late Roman times. This formed the basis for the modern language of Galician-Portuguese. Differences between Galicia and the Portugalense were not the result of dialect or important geographic barriers, but stemmed from political division, the sparseness of population below the Minho, and the frontier quality of the Portugalense. Galicia was a settled and sheltered society, oriented toward greater Leon and western Europe. Its spiritual center, Santiago, drew pilgrims from all over the western part of the continent. The Portugalense developed as a more exposed and peripheral area. Though it did not suffer from tenth-century Muslim attacks as much as did León proper, it was placed under heavier pressure than Galicia.

The Navarrese-Castilian hegemony of the early eleventh century shifted the power base in the kingdom farther toward the east, resulting in discontent among the local aristocracy of both Galicia and the [116] Portugalense. The ricos homens of Galicia and old León lost influence at the new Castilo-Leonese court, and in Galicia and the Portugalense their roles were increasingly taken by lesser nobles or royal appointees. By the middle of the eleventh century the office of dux of Portugal was no longer being filled; the Castilian-Leonese crown simply appointed local meirinhos (royal administrators) to supplant the influence of the local aristocracy. The Coimbra-Mondego region to the south was retaken in 1064 and established as a new territory of Coimbra, administratively separate from the Portugalense. It was inhabited by a large and relatively cultured and prosperous population of Mozarabs and mudéjares, whose incorporation added a sophisticated element to the population of the southwest.

After the death of Fernando I and his division of Castile-León, the barons of the Portugalense rebelled against the domination of the new "king of Galicia," Fernando's younger son Garcia (1071). This hostility was exacerbated by the powerful archdiocese of Santiago, which opposed independent authority for Braga, ecclesiastical center of the Portugalense, whose bishopric had been restored in 1070. The ephemeral kingdom of Galicia came to an end in 1073 when it was incorporated by Castile-León, and Galicia remained close to the interests of the kingdom, to which it had geographic access through Asturias. Coimbra and the Portugalense, however, continued to be relatively isolated by the rugged barrier of the Tras-os-Montes district and increasingly at odds with their cultural cousins to the north, who were under antagonistic political and ecclesiastical leadership.

New leadership was given the southwest in 1096, when Alfonso VI of Castile bestowed the hereditary government of Portugal and Coimbra on the Burgundian aristocrat and crusader Henri (Port. Henri-que), husband of Alfonso's bastard daughter and personal favorite, Teresa. Though the administrative appointment was not necessarily hereditary, Henri and Teresa were given the hereditary seigneury of all royal domain in the region. As leader of the entire Hispano-Christian southwest, Henri established a capital at the town of Guimarais in northern Portugal. He and his wife participated actively in the quarrels over division of Alfonso VI's patrimony that followed the old king's death. When Henri died in 1112, Teresa was left as governess of all Portuguese territory. Her rule and that of her lover, a Galician noble named Fernando Peres, provoked resentment among the local aristocracy and town leaders, and they turned for hope to Afonso Henriques, the heir of Henri and Teresa, who had been about seven years old at his father's death. Overthrowing her in 1128, Afonso Henriques took authority as head of Portugal.

In young Afonso's view he had inherited full hereditary authority over all Portugal and Coimbra, and the Portuguese barons encouraged [117] him to resist further political domination from Castile, León, or Galicia. In 1135, he refused to join other north Spanish princes in homage to Alfonso VII of Castile-León. He moved his seat of government southward to Coimbra and for eleven years used the title Prince of Portugal, Afonso was an aggressive military leader and won a notable victory in 1139 that reduced the Muslims of the Santarem district to tributary status. He took the title of King of Portugal on the basis of his autonomous authority, his conquests, and his descent from the Hispanic "emperor" Alfonso VI. The independence of his territory was further enhanced by establishment of the ecclesiastical independence of the archdiocese of Braga, giving the kingdom its own church hierarchy. For protection, Afonso subsequently swore fealty to the papacy and paid tribute to it, but the papacy did not officially recognize King of Portugal as a title and institution until 1179.

The establishment of the independent kingdom of Portugal coincided with a period of severe internal stress for Castile-León, as well as of renewed military challenges to it from the Almoravids and Almohads. This combination of pressures left Castile-León with little strength or energy for the reincorporation of Portugal. Afonso I's long reign of fifty-seven years ended with his death in 1185. During [119] the middle years of his rule, the Portuguese border was extended well into the south. Though the strength of the kingdom, with its modest population of half a million, was comparatively slight, a passing force of English, French, and Flemish crusaders was enlisted to conquer the key Muslim city of Lisbon at the mouth of the Tejo (in Spanish, Tajo). Other foreign forces were recruited to aid in the occupation of much of the Alemtejo region to the southeast. The Knights Templars and four other orders of crusading knights, several of which were established expressly for the Portuguese reconquest, played a major role. Given their limited resources, Afonso I and his successors must be accounted among the most dynamic dynasts of their time.

The expansion of Portugal depended upon royal leadership, and the new state was fortunate in that all but one of its early rulers were adequate, and several were unusual. Basing the authority of the crown on strong royalist institutions patterned after those of Leon, and aided by the territorial compactness of its state, the Portuguese monarchy soon achieved greater internal political consistency than did most medieval kingdoms. Like Leon and Aragon, Portugal developed a largely seigneurial society, with most of its districts under the domain of church or aristocracy, but like León and Castile, its political organization was not strictly feudal. From the very beginning, the overriding sovereignty of the crown was clearly understood, and the monarchy also played a role in social and economic affairs, sometimes fostering the interests and representation of the third estate.

Afonso's son and heir, Sancho I (1185-1211), continued the military struggle, but devoted himself especially to institutional development, repopulation and the founding of towns, and the patronage of letters. The third king, Afonso II (1211-1223), was less concerned with military affairs. His principal achievement was the first systematic compilation of Portuguese law, clarifying property and personal rights and guaranteeing the overarching sovereignty of the crown. Afonso II's heir, Sancho II (1223-1246), was less successful. Dominated by a powerful aristocratic faction, his reign led to considerable internal conflict, and he was eventually deposed by his younger brother Afonso III (1246-1279), who was supported by the church, the crusading orders, the petty nobility, and the towns. Nevertheless, a major phase of Portuguese expansion was accomplished under Sancho II, and the reconquest was finally completed under Afonso III, who occupied the Algarve district along the southern coast, giving Portugal the approximate boundaries that it has had since. Altogether, between 1225 and 1250, the occupation of the Alemtejo and the Algarve increased the size of Portugal from 55,000 to 90,000 square kilometers. Afonso III was a notably successful administrator, [120] promoting resettlement and summoning the first meeting of a three-estate Portuguese Cortes at Leiria in 1254.

The last ruler of the thirteenth century, Dinis o Lavrador, "the Farmer" (1279-1325), was in many ways the most impressive. He gained his nickname from efforts to promote agriculture, and it is especially because of his work that the period of the Burgundian dynasty in Portuguese history is often, and somewhat misleadingly, referred to as that of the "agrarian monarchy." Dinis devoted particular attention to the repopulation of the Alemtejo. He broke up a number of large domains in various regions to distribute among the peasants and discouraged the tendency of nobles to leave a part of their lands uncultivated. He reformed the terms of peasant land tenure in the north, stimulated food production and commerce, undertook the draining of swamps and the planting of the Leiria forest, and helped to develop fairs. His personal interest, however, lay in women and poetry. Dinis fostered Portuguese culture, and it was during his reign that the vernacular, rather than Latin, became the official language. His last years were troubled by a bloody civil revolt led by his legitimate heir and provoked by the honors Dinis had bestowed on the eldest of his nine bastards.

Medieval Portuguese Society

There was a notable increase in wealth during the main phase of the Portuguese reconquest, and for the next hundred years food production and commerce continued to expand, making it possible for the population of the kingdom to double between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. Estimates of population in the Middle Ages are usually vague approximations, but it is generally believed that the number of Portuguese increased approximately as follows:

twelfth century 500,000-600,000
thirteenth century 800,000-900,000
fourteenth century 1,000,000-1,200,000

Unlike Castile, Aragon, and Valencia, Portugal contained no sizable Muslim minorities. Only in the Alemtejo and Algarve did small groups of Muslim peasants remain on the land after completion of the Portuguese reconquest.

Linguistically unified, the Portuguese people were socially and culturally more homogeneous than the population of Castile and Aragon. The small kingdom contained no ethnic subgroup of any importance save for a very slight Jewish population, and by the [121] middle of the thirteenth century had become the first nation-state in Europe.

The structure of Portuguese society was originally quite similar to that of Galicia and Leon, though as it expanded southward it was more nearly like the frontier pattern of new Leon than the feudal pattern typical of Galicia. The dominant class in Portugal, as elsewhere, was the military aristocracy, rewarded by the crown with recognition of seigneurial domain and special grants of land or income as honras. Aristocratic seigneuries dominated the Minho and Douro regions of the northwest but were less common in central and southern Portugal. Moreover, Portuguese seigneuries were normally quite small in comparison with those of Castile. There were perhaps a half dozen truly powerful and influential aristocratic families, most of them related by blood to the ruling dynasty.

Most aristocrats did not have large incomes from their own domains, but depended for their wealth on subassignments of royal income known as quantias. The quantias assigned to nobles amounted, at certain times, to between 25 and 50 percent of the crown's revenue. One economic historian has calculated that the quantias were several times the total income from the nobility's seigneurial domain. The policy of assigning part of the royal income to the nobility was common in most late-medieval monarchies, and was a normal way of maintaining the social and economic preeminence of the aristocracy.

Below the nobility there existed, as in Castile, a class of cavaleiros vilaos, commoner knights, drawn from the middle or lower classes to supplement the military elite during the twelfth- and thirteenth-century reconquest. They held assignments of land or income sufficient to defray military expenses and occupied an intermediate social status, though their exemption from most taxes was a privilege that gave them near-aristocratic rank.

In the original terra portucalense north of the Douro, most of the peasantry, by the twelfth century, lived under terms of cartas de incomuniaçao or pactos de benfeitoria roughly similar to the encomendación or benefactoria of León. Though direct allodial possession was quite uncommon, so too was complete serfdom. Much of the peasantry was tied to the land under varying restrictions, but between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries such conditions of adscription largely died out.

The agrarian reforms of Dinis o Lavrador encouraged a tendency in the most heavily populated area of the kingdom, the Minho, toward family farms or casais. Dinis guaranteed the right of emphyteusis (hereditary transmission of cultivation rights) to peasant renters [122] on most aristocratic and church domains in the northwest. The majority of Portuguese peasants operated petty farms either as hereditary emphyteutical renters or as sharecroppers, the terms exacted from the latter usually being considerably more rigorous than from the former. Below the sharecroppers or parceiros (roughly equivalent to the Castilian aparceros), there were the peasants who carried out various duties on aristocratic or ecclesiastical domains and sometimes had partial land-use rights of their own. In central and southern Portugal by the fourteenth century, with the growth in population and emigration from the north, there had also developed a class of completely landless rural laborers similar to the jornaleros of the southern districts of Castile.

In general, more of Portuguese society than of Castilian was devoted to agriculture. Grazing was not as important as in the neighboring kingdom, but sheep and cattle were of major significance in two of the newer, somewhat flatter regions of southcentral Portugal, Beira Baixa and the Alto Alemtejo. A greater communal access to land stimulated livestock production there.

The granting of special rights (foros) and charters (cartas) to small rural communities and municipalities soon became as widespread in Portugal as in Castile-León. In the mountainous northeast (Tras-os-Montes) that separated Portugal from Leon, the soil was poor and population sparse, encouraging communal social and economic organization. In that region, foros were sometimes granted by the crown to communal subgroups of no more than twenty households, recognizing local privileges, regularizing taxes and obligations, and specifying rights of self-government. The collectivist terms of much of the cultivation in the Tras-os-Montes region were ratified by the agrarian reforms of Dinis.

The most important semi-autonomous units were not small rural groups but the larger towns, like Porto and Coimbra, along the main rivers and coast, and the larger concelhos established mainly in the north-central region (Beira) and in west-central Estremadura (not to be confused with Leonese Extremadura). Concelho rights varied considerably in their terms, but the most common were similar to those of Leonese concejos such as Salamanca, though their privileges and organization were not as broad and strong as those of Castile. Towns formed by royal charter in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries received significant rights of autonomy, and some of the older towns broadened their prerogatives, as for example after a successful revolt for wider municipal rights at Coimbra in 1111.

In the broad plains of the southern Alemtejo, incorporated after 1238, much of the land was taken over by the church and the Portuguese [123] crusading orders, just as in the southern districts of Castile after the great reconquest of San Fernando. There, as in southern Castile, autonomous communities were proportionately less common.

Portuguese Catholicism

Religion played a role in defining and sustaining Portuguese life rather similar to its role in Castile-León, though Portuguese religiosity did not become as intense as that of Castile. The crusade was officially introduced in 1100 with a papal bull calling all Hispanic monarchies to concerted action against the Muslims. Proclamation of the crusade was frequent in the Portuguese reconquest of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. The complex of holy war was encouraged by the nominal vassalage of Portugal to the Holy See during much of that period, and the aura of holy war came to be bestowed on a variety of military enterprises, including the struggle against Castile during the late fourteenth century, when the Portuguese and Castilian crowns supported opposing sides in the Great Schism of the papacy. Thus the idea of crusade became as firmly entrenched in Portugal as in Castile, and was intrinsic in the motivations of the subsequent overseas expansion, contributing to the ultimate doom of the monarchy in Morocco in 1578.

The earliest inhabitants of Portuguese territory, whether Mozarabs under Muslim rule or Galician immigrants, practiced the ancient Hispanic or Mozarabic rite, but by the time Portugal emerged as an independent kingdom, the entire Hispanic church had become Romanized in liturgy and organization. The establishment of the Portuguese monarchy coincided with the rise of papal political influence in the peninsula, and there was never any doubt of Portuguese religious orthodoxy, just as there was never any doubt of Castilian. As much as the Castilians, the medieval Portuguese defined their identity facing southward, against Islam, and found it almost impossible to conceive of heresy.

On the other hand, Portugal was more remote than Castile from the centers of European culture. Though stimulated militarily by European crusaders, the kingdom was less affected by medieval religious and cultural movements than was Castile, and there was less interest in transmitting or absorbing the achievements of Muslim intellectual life than in Castile or Catalonia. Portugal remained something of a cultural and spiritual backwater throughout the Middle Ages. The first major center of poetry in galego-Português was not in Portugal, but was the thirteenth-century Castilian court of San Fernando and Alfonso el Sabio. The Visigothic script persisted in Galicia and Portugal [124] until the middle of the twelfth century, even longer than in Castile. A Portuguese vernacular prose literature emerged somewhat late, in the fourteenth century.

Even among the clergy, educational standards were low, and compared with other areas in the peninsula and beyond, remained low during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The only Portuguese university was founded at Lisbon in 1290 and later moved to Coimbra. It never became a major center of learning, and during the Middle Ages never employed more than some twenty-five professors. The three principal Portuguese religious thinkers and philosophers-- Santo Antonio de Lisboa, Pope John XXI, and Pedro Juliao--all developed their careers outside of Portugal. The only dissenting philosopher of any note, the rationalist and Averroist Tomaz Escoto of the early fourteenth century (apparently not of Portuguese parentage) was eventually put to death.

Despite the orthodoxy and lack of dissent in Portuguese religion, thirteenth-century Portugal was wracked by conflict between the church and crown (the latter usually supported by the municipalities and concelhos) over church properties and jurisdictions. The church had gained greater political influence in Portugal than in Castile, because of the ecclesiastical support needed to assure Portuguese independence and because of the crown's tributary vassalage to the papacy in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. The crown was frequently unable to control the election of bishops. During the reconquest, the Portuguese church amassed a great deal of land, especially in the center and south, and it has been estimated that during the thirteenth century its income was greater than that of the crown. The monarchy, which encountered great difficulty in taxing church property, viewed the influence and wealth of the ecclesiastical hierarchy as a danger. Church wealth and domains were resented by the autonomous municipalities and the concelhos and were coveted by the nobility.

The first measures to restrict or reexamine church acquisitions were taken by Afonso II, who in 1218 began a series of inquiriçoes (inquiries) into the legal titles of church properties. Relations with the hierarchy and papacy remained highly strained throughout the reigns of Afonso II, Sancho II, and Afonso III. The latter revived inquiriçoes into economic and juridical abuses by both the church and aristocracy, restoring a certain amount of church land to the royal domain. Four generations of conflict were finally brought to a close by Dinis, who instituted new inquiriçoes, recovered more property, and finally settled the longstanding dispute with the papacy and church hierarchy through a compromise concordat that was signed in 1290.

[125] These political and economic clashes never involved issues of religion or the spirit, and the place of religion in daily life was little affected by them. There was always, however, a certain amount of anticlericalism in Portuguese society, encouraged by wealth, corruption, and ignorance among the clergy. During the fourteenth century, the relaxation of morals in Portugal was as marked as in the rest of Europe. Concubinage among the clergy was common, paralleling the licentious behavior of the aristocracy.

Portuguese culture progressed during the fourteenth century, with the growth of vernacular literature and the foundation of new religious schools. Though Portuguese achievements in architecture remained modest compared with the main regions of western Europe or with Castile, a number of impressive castles and Gothic churches and monasteries were constructed. Influences from France and England were probably more important in these developments than were those from Castile.

Maritime and Commercial Affairs

There may have been more usable small harbors along the Portuguese coast in the Middle Ages than in the twentieth century, and Portuguese maritime activity antedated independence. Before 1100, Portuguese merchants were already established in small numbers in the main ports of France and Flanders. The coastal and river towns joined the concelhos of south-central Protugal in the movement toward greater representation for the third estate in the thirteenth century and in the protest against overweening church wealth.

Urban handicraft never passed very modest proportions, and aside from some linens in the fourteenth century, Portuguese exports consisted of foodstuffs and raw materials: wine, oil, dried fish, hides, salt from Setubal, cork, and figs, raisins, and almonds from the south.

Growth of the Portuguese navy, taking advantage of the kingdom's unique geographic position, was slow but fairly steady, and by the fourteenth century it had become a minor force that could not be ignored in the Atlantic. In 1336 a Portuguese fleet ventured out into the Atlantic as far as the Canary Islands, establishing a claim that remained in contention for more than one hundred and fifty years until finally relinquished in favor of Castile. Maritime affairs, nevertheless, involved a smaller proportion of the Portuguese population than of the principal coastal regions of western Europe, and Portuguese strength could not be compared with that of the five or six principal naval powers. What compensated to some extent for the small size of the Portuguese fleet and the weakness of the domestic [126] economy was the kingdom's strategic position at the outlet from the west Mediterranean to the Atlantic, central axis of the sea lanes from Italy to Flanders. The second half of the fourteenth century was a time of modestly growing prosperity for Portugal, and larger shipping companies were formed to pool capital and share risks. The crown played a crucial role in this development by providing protection and incentives. A royal decree of 1377 established shipbuilding subsidies, and another in 1380 set up a kind of compulsory maritime insurance. Neither in Lisbon nor in any other Portuguese port were there merchants or shipowners with the great resources of those in Venice, Genoa, Barcelona, or Bruges, but a basis for future expansion was being established.

The Sesmarias

Medieval Portugal was poor, even for its day. No more than a third of its soil was suited for agriculture, either because it was hilly, rocky, or infertile, and the rainfall, although heavier than Castile's, was unreliable. Despite such handicaps, Portuguese agriculture made some progress between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries and in the process adopted slightly improved techniques and was largely able to meet the needs of an expanding population. There were recurrent problems in provisioning Lisbon, but these arose because of the size of the capital, the inevitably bad medieval transportation, and the unavoidable bad harvests. Portugal suffered less from the Black Death of the early fourteenth century than other regions of Europe, but it did suffer a temporary decline in population, accompanied by a shortage of laborers and a drop in cultivation in certain areas. In the southern half of the kingdom, there was a growing tendency to take land out of cultivation and put it into the raising of livestock, which required less labor and drew higher market prices. By the second half of the fourteenth century, many of the coastal towns were importing grain, and there were exaggerated complaints over the "decay" of Portuguese agriculture.

Government intervention to regulate the cost of agricultural labor and production was common in mid-fourteenth-century Europe. The main Portuguese variant of this trend was the "Sesmarias" decree by the crown in 1375, taken from the term used to denote the dividing up of strips of land in the earlier resettlement of Portugal. It followed the tradition of royal encouragement of peasant agriculture, providing that two judges be named for each local district of Portugal to make sure that all arable land was being put to use. Lands of nobles or church foundations that were not being cultivated were to be confiscated, [127] and all landless or unemployed peasants were to receive land on reasonable terms. At the same time, all peasants already working the land were required to remain there. Livestock raising, theoretically, was to be restricted to large properties only. The Sesmarias were not fully enforced and were largely under the control of the homens bons, or local oligarchies, of the concelhos and municipalities. The decrees were aimed particularly at latifundium districts of central and south-central Portugal, and did result in a certain amount of redistribution of land for peasant agriculture. They had some effect in raising food production and building Portuguese economic strength for the period of expansion in the fifteenth century.

The Monarchy in the Fourteenth Century

The long reign of Afonso IV (1325-1357) involved disputes and war with Castile, but this did not prevent the appearance of a large Portuguese contingent beside the Castilians at the battle of Salado (1340), in which the last invasion from Morocco was decisively defeated. Afonso IV's most famous act was his execution of Ines de Castro, Castilian mistress of his heir Pedro, for involving the Portuguese throne in the internal conflicts of Castile. Her execution brought Pedro into rebellion against his father, but the brief struggle was resolved by devolving upon Pedro certain functions of government, including that of dispensing justice throughout the kingdom. During Pedro's ten years as ruler in his own right (1357-1367), as Pedro I, he earned the nickname O Justiceiro (the Justicer) for his rigorous if capricious punishment of wrongdoing among all classes. The Justicer was in fact a merry and sometimes irresponsible monarch who loved to dance and sing with his subjects and devoted much energy to the hunt. However, he kept Portugal out of war and became perhaps the most popular of all medieval Portuguese kings.

The last king of the Burgundian dynasty, D. Fernando (1367-1383), was the least successful and the most unpopular, a ruler whose personality, policies, and reign were all contradictory. He instituted a number of constructive measures: the Sesmarias decree of 1375, regulations promoting shipping and commerce, and efforts to limit artistocratic jurisdiction on seigneurial domain. On the other hand, his foreign policy was disastrous. His government became involved on the Anglo-Aragonese side against Castile in the contemporary phase of the Hundred Years' War, and his forces were three times defeated, forcing him to sign three successive unfavorable treaties of peace. A great deal of Portuguese shipping was lost and a heavy economic strain was placed on the kingdom, leaving much of the [ 128] population in growing misery by the 1380s. His queen, Leonor Teles, who had been legally wed to a nobleman, was extremely unpopular, identifying the throne with aristocratic and foreign intrigues. Moreover, Fernando increased the granting of honras to favored nobles at a time when the kingdom could least afford it. When he died in 1383, the towns and some of the aristocracy were seething with discontent.

The Succession Crisis of 1383-1385

Fernando left no male heir, and his only daughter, Beatriz, was married to Juan I of Castile with the provision that their offspring would inherit the Portuguese crown, introducing the danger of Castilian domination. Until such issue, however, the Portuguese crown remained under the regency of Fernando's widow, the hated Leonor Teles. The government of the queen regent and her new Galician lover was particularly detested by the townspeople and some of the lesser nobility. The queen regent's main rival was a bastard of Pedro I, D. Joâo, grand master of the Order of Aviz (the Portuguese section of the Knights of Calatrava). An Aviz revolt drove Teles from Lisbon, but was immediately faced with an invading force from Castile.

The result was both a civil war and an international war between the Portuguese rebels and the crown of Castile. In general, the south and west rallied behind the Aviz banner. The coastal and urban areas, particularly, opposed the Castilian king, for they feared the imposition of a Castilian-style government which would favor the countryside and the aristocracy. On the other hand, the more traditional and aristocratic north and east rallied to Juan I. During 1383-1384 the Aviz forces were on the defensive but managed to hold fast in the central area around Lisbon, and early in 1385 the Portuguese Cortes at Coimbra officially recognized D. Joâo as king. The struggle reached its climax in the summer of 1385, after the Castilian forces had been weakened by long campaigning. The battle of Aljubarrota, north of Lisbon, resulted in decisive defeat for the Castilian crown when the cavalry of Juan I failed to break the outnumbered ranks of dismounted knights, crossbowmen, and English archers led by D. Joâo's brilliant military chief, Nun'Alvares Pereira.

Portugal's first alliance with England had been signed by Fernando, and it was renewed in a formal agreement of 1386, bringing nearly 5,000 English troops into the country. John of Gaunt, uncle to the English Richard II, had married a daughter of the former Castilian king, Pedro the Cruel, and pressed his own claim to the Castilian throne in opposition to the new Trastamara dynasty. Anglo-Portuguese forces temporarily occupied much of Spanish Galicia before the [129] Castilian crown paid off the English to get them out of the peninsula. Desultory hostilities between Castile and Portugal continued for years, especially at sea, until a definitive peace was finally signed in 1411.

João I (1384-1433)

The first ruler of the new Aviz dynasty enjoyed a long reign of half a century, during which the basis was laid for the expansion of the fifteenth century. He introduced nothing radical, but consolidated the institutions of the kingdom and continued most of the positive policies of his predecessors. The advent of Joâo I did not mark the triumph of the middle classes over the aristocracy, as is sometimes stated, but a reorganization of the nobility and an elevation of new elements from the petty aristocracy (infançoes) and middle classes. Indeed, it was during his reign that the Portuguese aristocracy began to be officially ranked by the categories and titles typical of the French and English nobility. Like most ambitious rulers, however, Joâo I distrusted the high aristocrats and favored the lesser nobility.

The new reign brought with it an increase in the power and authority of the crown. Joâo I's officials, like those of his predecessors, actively expanded the royal authority over seigneurial privilege and local custom. A Royal Council, with specific membership and functions, was established. Following the progressive c I's English queen, Philippa of Lancaster, daughter of John the Gaunt, was a most exemplary princess, both as a wife and a queen. Their five sons were the most talented and imaginative generation of heirs in Portuguese history.

Since the middle of the fourteenth century, the monarchy had intervened increasingly in the government of Portuguese towns through the appointment of royal administrators and inspectors (corregedores, regedores, and vedores) to oversee affairs. Joâo I continued this trend but at the same time broadened certain aspects of autonomy and representation. He rewarded town leaders who had backed [130] his cause by granting them broader local property jurisdiction. This increased the influence of the homens bons, the middle-class oligarchs, who for more than a century had been gaining control in the larger towns and concelhos austom of the later Middle Ages, middle-class jurists rather than aristocratic lieutenants were employed in royal administration.

Joâo I was fortunate in possessing the qualities of a successful prince and in having ministers and a family of the highest quality. He was himself a cultured and learned man, prudent almost to a fault, and astute in his political dealings. Joâo das Regras, the jurist who served as chancellor for many years, was perhaps the most effective administrator to assist the medieval Portuguese throne. His military lieutenant, Nun'Alvares Pereira, was a great leader and a model of knightly virtue. Joâo I the expense of the lower classes. Artisans never had much influence in Portuguese municipal government, but Joâo I did open the government of Lisbon to representatives of the guilds (mesteres) in 1384, and during the fifteenth century the practice was extended to most other large towns.

Joâo I was quite respectful of the Portuguese Cortes and summoned it almost biennially. The need to marshal national resources for large enterprises and enlist the support of the towns made the fifteenth century the golden age of the traditional Portuguese Cortes. Yet Joâo I strove to avoid becoming altogether dependent on the Cortes for financial assistance, and for a period of ten years (1418-1427) he did not convene the Cortes at all. His government sought to expand both the royal domain and the royal revenues, incorporating a few sources of ecclesiastical income and restricting several perquisites of the nobility. Taxation became less unequal after the Cortes in 1387 voted general excises to be paid on certain goods by all social classes. These excises provided a significant share of the royal revenue during Joâo I's reign.

The new dynasty assisted peasant agriculture less than its predecessor. Though peasant renters in the north benefitted from the inflation and devaluation that marked Joâo's reign, landless peasants in the south were hurt. Social tension increased in the Alemtejo, whence a flight from the land was already evident by the fifteenth century. Moreover, the new nobility created under Joâo I was often rapacious, and the homens bons of the towns too sometimes seized concelho land from the peasants.
The Aviz policy of strong royal government merely reaffirmed the tradition of the Portuguese monarchy, which had been to a large extent responsible for creating a Portuguese nation. Royal patronage of commerce and incentives for maritime development had already become traditional long before Joâo I. What was new in Portugal by the beginning of the fifteenth century was not these trends of royal policy, but that the small kingdom had, after three hundred years, finally come of age. Though its population was no more than one and a half million, it had achieved strongly institutionalized government, a sense of national unity, a basis for modest economic development, commercial and maritime forces eager for a more expansive role in the world, a reorganized military aristocracy seeking new fields of adventure, and firm, calculating leadership able to guide the energies of its followers into major enterprises abroad.

Bibliography for Chapter VI

[338] The best succinct account of Portuguese history is A. H. de Oliveira Marques, History of Portugal, 2 vols. (New York, 1972-73). The principal multivolume histories are Damiao Peres, ed., História monumental de Portugal, 8 vols. (Barcelos, 1928-35); Fortunato de Almeida, História de Portugal, 6 vols. (Coimbra, 1922-29); and Alexandre Herculano de Carvalho, História de Portugal desde o começo da monarchia até o fim do reinado de Afonso III, 8 vols. (Lisbon, n.d.); rev. ed., by L. Gonzaga de Azevedo and D. M. Gomes dos Santos, 6 vols. (Lisbon, 1940-44). There are several one-volume narratives in English: Harold Livermore, A History of Portugal (Cambridge, 1947) and A New History of Portugal (Cambridge, 1966), and Charles E. Nowell, A History of Portugal (Princeton, 1958). The principal history of the Catholic Church in Portugal is Almeida's História da Igreja em Portugal, 4 vols. (Coimbra, 1910-22). The classic work on medieval administrative system is H. de Gama Barros, História da administraçâo pública em Portugal nos séculos XII a XIV, 3 vols. (Lisbon, 1895-1914).

On the origins of Portugal, see Dan Stanislawski, The Individuality of Portugal (Austin, 1959); T. de Sousa Soares, Reflexoes sobre a origem e fundacâo de Portugal (Coimbra, 1962) and Contribuiçâo para o estudo das origens do poyo portugués (Sa da Bandiera, 1970); A. A. Mundes Correa, Raizes de Portugal (Lisbon, 1944); and, for a political interpretation, Damiño Peres, Como nasceu Portugal (Porto, 1942). M. Blócker-Walter, Alfons I von Portugal (Zurich, 1966), is a recent study of the first Portuguese king. A useful recent economic history is Armando Castro, A evoluçâo económica de Portugal dos séculos XII a XV, 4 vols. (Porto, 1964). A.H. de Oliveira Marques, A sociedade medieval portuguesa (Lisbon, 1964; Eng. tr., Madison, Wis., 1970) is a topical analysis. On the grain question and agriculture, see Oliveira Marques's A questâo cerealífera durante a Idade Media (Lisbon, [339] 1962), and Virgínia Rau, Sesmarias medievais portuguesas (Lisbon, 1946). The Minho region is the principal focus of Alberto Sampaio's Estudos históricos e económicos, 2 vols. (Porto, 1923). See also Pierre David, Etudes historiques sur la Galice et Portugal (Coimbra, 1947).

The basic cultural histories of Portugal are J. P. de Oliveira Martins, A History of Iberian Civilization (New York, 1930), and Antonio José Saraiva, História da cultura em Portugal, 3 vols. (Lisbon, 1950). Hernâni Cidade and Carlos Selvagem are preparing a projected eight-volume history of Cultura portuguesa (Lisbon, 1969). On the idea of the crusade in Portugal, see Carl Erdmann, "Der Kreuzzugsgedanke in Portugal," Historische Zeitschrift 141, no. 1 (1929), pp. 23-53, translated as A idea de cruzada em Portugal (Coimbra, 1940).

Important aspects of political and social development are treated in "Os factores democráticos na formaçâo do Portugal," in the first volume of Jaime Cortesao's Obras completas, 6 vols. (Lisbon, 1964); Edgar Prestage, Royal Power and the Cortes in Portugal (Watford, 1927); and two somewhat differing accounts of the 1383 revolt, Joel Serrao, O carácter social da revoluçio de 1383 (Lisbon, 1946), and António Borges Coelho, A revoluçâo de 1383 (Lisbon, 1965).

Bailey Diffie's Prelude to Empire: Portugal Overseas Before Henry the Navegator (Lincoln, 1960), presents a brief synthesis of the medieval foundations of Portuguese maritime expansion. Other useful studies include Antonio Sergio, En torno da designaçâo de "monarquia agrária" dada á primeira época da nossa história (Lisbon, 1941); Marcelo Caetano, A administraçio municipal de Lisboa durante a primeira dinastia, 1179-1383 (Lisbon, 1951), and Subsédios para a história das Cortes medievais (Lisbon, 1963); Salvador Dias Arnaut, A crise nacional, I: A sucessâo de D. Fernando (Coimbra, 1960); Virginia Rau, A exploraçâo do sal de Setúbal (Lisbon, 1951); and Oliveira Marques, Hansa e Portugal na Idade Média (Lisbon, 1959).

A very useful tool for Portuguese history is Joel Serrâo, ed., Dicionário de História de Portugal, 4 vols. (Lisbon, 1963-1970). Joaquim V. Serrao's História breve da historiografia portuguesa (Lisbon, 1962), provides an account of pre-twentieth-century Portuguese historiography. For those especially interested in medieval Portugal, Oliveira Marques, Guia do estudante de história medieval portuguesa (Lisbon, 1964), is an important aid.

A History of Spain and Portugal
Vol. 1
By Stanley G. Payne

Chapter Seven
Medieval Hispanic Catholicism

[131] Before the Muslim conquest, the centers of Hispanic Christendom lay in the towns of the south and east and so from the very beginning of the conquest fell under Muslim control. At first it was perhaps not difficult to adjust to Muslim political domination. The system of "discriminatory tolerance" practiced during the first two centuries and more of Muslim rule made it possible to maintain the diocesan structure of the Mozarab church. Indeed, the hierarchy gained a degree of freedom, for unlike the Visigothic kings, the emirs of Cordoba let the ecclesiastical hierarchy call their own councils (with one exception in 851) and elect their own bishops. Yet within little more than a century, the Mozarab church had become fossilized, largely cut off from the Christian community of western Europe, more and more heavily taxed, and subject to restrictions and the pressure of a dominant oriental culture. It sank into decadence and its following dwindled, as the most vital elements emigrated to the Christian principalities of the north.

The northern hill districts that escaped Muslim domination had been uncertain in their Christian identity before the eighth century, but during that century much of their uncertainty was lost, apparently in part as a reaction against the Muslim faith of their adversaries. The Asturian church was by no means entirely cut off from Mozarab Christianity. When the border was not disrupted by fighting [132], there was often a good deal of travel back and forth across the frontier, and Mozarab religious probably played an important role in the further Christianization and acculturation of the northern population.

The Asturian church, however, did not recognize the ecclesiastical overlordship of the metropolitan of Toledo, living under Muslim rule, and outright antagonism between Asturian and Mozarab Catholicism emerged by the end of the eighth century in the Adoptionist controversy. The customary Hispano-Visigothic religious definition of the two natures of Christ spoke of his "natural filiation" to the divine and of his "adoptive filiation" to the human, differing from the unified trinitarian interpretation that had become orthodox in most of Latin Christendom. After continued official usage of these terms at the Mozarab church council of 784 in Seville, the Asturian clergy protested. The issue was ultimately carried to Rome, perhaps the first such invocation of papal authority by Hispanic Christians, and in 794 the metropolitan of Toledo was excommunicated. Under Alfonso II (791-842), the Asturian monarchy created a separate ecclesiastical system independent of Toledo, thereby affirming the special identity of Asturias and the legitimate authority of its institutions as heirs to the Visigothic legacy.

During the ninth and tenth centuries, the Asturo-Leonese church grew in authority and wealth. It remained almost completely subordinate to royal power, for the Asturian kings dominated the selection of bishops and actually expanded the prerogatives of Visigothic rulers. But the clergy improved their own education somewhat, expanded parish and administrative operations, and increased their cultural and spiritual influence.

An important aspect of the expansion of the Asturo-Leonese church was the cult of Santiago (St. James) at Compostela in Galicia. The shrine there provided the main religious nexus with the rest of western Europe. By the tenth century, the pilgrim's route to it had become one of the most traveled in the west, and the thousands of voyagers along it provided stimulus for the development of the small northern towns. By the eleventh century the road to Santiago through the Pyrenees and across the north of the peninsula was a major force for Europeanization and modernization. The prestige of Santiago throughout Christendom was an important source of pride and identification for a monarchy that ruled over a poor, uncultured people subsisting on a largely pastoral economy. In turn, the bishop of Santiago de Compostela tried to assert leadership over the church in the kingdom of León. The diocese came to consider itself the equal of Rome, for the Leonese church at that time, though fully orthodox in [133] Catholic theology, clearly did not deem itself institutionally or organizationally subservient to the papacy.

From the earliest phase of Asturian territorial expansion, the church grew in wealth. Grants of land were made by the crown and by local overlords as well, and church property became especially extensive in Galicia. Monastic institutions also played an important role in taking over and resettling new territories. A definite contrast existed, however, in the social and economic pattern of Castile, where church endowments were proportionately much smaller and ecclesiastical leaders had a less imposing place in public councils than in Galicia and León.

The rise of the Leonese church in the ninth and tenth centuries contrasted with the steady decline of the Mozarab, a decline which first reached crisis proportions in the Cordoban martyrdoms of the 850s, at the very time when the cult of Santiago was beginning to take firm hold in the north. Sizable Mozarab emigrations to the northwest in the second half of the ninth century apparently made significant contributions to Leonese culture, but it is not clear that the influx of southern Christians had any very original effects on the religious structure and ethos, for these were fairly well defined in León by that time. Moreover, though there were instances of other heresies besides Adoptionism among the Mozarabs between the ninth and eleventh centuries, Leonese Catholicism remained rigidly orthodox throughout, as a militant frontier religion holding to a firm, rather narrow identity in tense opposition to a powerful spiritual foe.

By contrast to the theologically orthodox but regionally autonomous and somewhat archaic church in León, the church in the Catalan counties, from the end of the eighth century, was organized under the administrative system of west European Roman Catholicism. The native Hispano-Visigothic liturgy and forms persisted for a long time in León, but in Catalonia, which did not obtain a cis-Pyrenean metropolitanate of its own until the eleventh century, they gave way almost immediately to the more typical Roman rite. The economic endowments and the political influence of the church in Catalonia were more typically feudal. The church there, too, soon amassed considerable wealth, and enjoyed a greater autonomy because of the decentralization of political authority. Propertied monasteries in Catalonia remained strong supporters of the Frankish crown even after its decline, in opposition to the local power of the counts and overlords. Church-state tensions were more extreme in Catalonia than in León. Perhaps the most atrocious example was the fate of Arnulf, archbishop of Narbonne, who in 912 excommunicated Count Sunyer II of Ampurias (a district in northeast Catalonia). The count's henchmen [134] waylaid the hapless archbishop, blinded and mutilated him, and tore out his tongue before he died.

Between Catalonia and Castile-León, on the other hand, a partly pagan territory existed for some time, since the Christianization of the bulk of the Basque population did not get underway until the tenth century. By the end of that century, most of the Navarrese had been converted, but the inhabitants of Vizcaya and Guipuzcoa were not fully brought within the sphere of Christianity until after establishment of the bishopric of Alava in the eleventh century.

The full institutional authority of the Roman papacy was introduced into the peninsula by way of southern France and Catalonia. The papacy's increasing diplomatic influence proved useful at the time of the Cordoban offensives in the tenth century, and the counts of Barcelona entered into regular relations with the papacy from the third quarter of that century on. They were followed a generation later by Sancho the Great of Navarre, whose political hegemony in northern Spain was to some extent assisted by papal diplomacy.

The effect of papal diplomacy on the Hispanic kingdoms from the late tenth century on was both centripetal and centrifugal, with the latter predominating. The papacy did exert some influence toward Hispanic political unity by trying to discourage internecine warfare and encourage cooperation in the struggle against the Muslims, but it also encouraged the independent or separatist ambitions of the several kingdoms in order to increase its own influence in each and gain larger contributions. Pope Alexander II (1061-1073) used his diplomatic influence to ratify the independence of the "kingdom" of Aragón, whose rulers were willing to recognize papal suzerainty. In the twelfth century, as has been seen, a similar relationship developed with the crown of Portugal.

Having established leadership over Latin Christendom, the papacy insisted on uniform liturgical practices. Another major influence for standardization was acceptance of the Benedictine monastic rule, which tended to reform behavior, improve administration, and straighten out frequently confused jurisdictions between monastic and secular domain. The Roman rite, together with monastic and ecclesiastical reforms, had first been accepted in Catalonia and Navarre, and then in Aragón under Sancho Ramírez. They were officially adopted for Castile-León at a church council in 1080, marking the full incorporation of the Castilian-Leonese church into the network of medieval Roman Catholicism. The state, however, continued to control indirectly the elections of most bishops.

French Cluniac monks, who entered León in significant numbers during the second half of the eleventh century, were important agents of religious Europeanization. Encouraged by the crown, they quickened [135] the cultural life of the church, improved its administrative standards, and were especially concerned to purify morals. By the close of the eleventh century, many of the bishoprics in León, Galicia, and Portugal were occupied by Cluniac monks. They had much less influence in Castile, where there was some tendency to identify them with Leonese centralism.

The monasteries had played a key role in the early history of León and Catalonia, and in some respects their influence increased after the eleventh century as their organization and administration advanced. The conduct and preparation of the clergy were also improved. Immorality, violence, and participation in all manner of secular conflicts had been fairly common among high as well as low clergy, and were never overcome at any point in the Middle Ages. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, the influence of papal, Cluniac, and local church reforming movements seems to have helped effect a distinct improvement in the education and behavior of the clergy.

The development of the thirteenth-century universities was also related to Europeanization, for the main cultural, intellectual, and spiritual impulses in Christian Hispania throughout the Middle Ages came from western Europe, in particular from France and Italy. The influences from the Muslim south were either aesthetic--in architecture, clothing, language--or technical--in building, irrigation, crafts, medicine, and science. The modes of learning and the content of education were thoroughly Latin Catholic. All the universities were in the north, away from centers of Muslim culture.

The institutionalization of the idea of the crusade was another result of the Romanization and Europeanization of Hispanic Catholicism. The nature of and difference between the goals of reconquest and crusade in Hispanic history have become topics of considerable controversy. Some commentators have called the Leonese-Castilian reconquest of the early Middle Ages the first major example of the crusading impulse in Europe. Others, such as Menéndez Pidal, have denied that there was originally any conscious crusading sense. They have held that in the first centuries the Leonese and Castilians fought for concrete objectives of land, cattle, and booty. Ortega y Gasset went farther and uttered the well-known dictum that "something which lasted for eight centuries can hardly be called a reconquest." Américo Castro has pointed to the relative tolerance frequently found in medieval Hispania and has defined historically Hispanic society and culture as a unique blend of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim influences into which the crusading spirit was first injected from the outer world of Latin Europe after the eleventh century. These questions constitute one of the main problems in Hispanic history. It has [136] now been fairly well proven by Menéndez Pidal, Sánchez Albornoz, and others that the early Asturo-Leonese monarchy did define itself as the heir of the Visigothic state and embrace a goal of reconquest, but there is no indication that this included the subsequent Latin Christian ideal of religious crusade. The evidence seems generally to support the contention that the idea of the crusade was fully implanted only after the end of the eleventh century and was generated by broader European influences.

Almost from the beginning, Leonese-Castilian society was marked by a degree of religious identification unknown in France or Italy, but the impulse to reconquest by Christian society was not synonymous with a crusading desire either to convert or to exterminate the infidel. At first, the reconquest was largely a political and military enterprise to recover what had been Hispano-Christian territory. The fact of the Muslim and Jewish religions was accepted by the northerners, just as was the example of partial tolerance shown by Al-Andalus. The acceptance of a degree of toleration did not imply relativism or equality, for Leonese-Castilian Christians were firmly convinced of the inferiority of the Muslim and Jewish religions, as they were of the legal inferiority of Muslims and Jews. This sense of religious superiority was in no way diminished by having to recognize the higher cultural and technological achievements of the Muslim and Jewish society of the south.

Américo Castro contends that centuries of contact or confrontation with Muslims and Jews resulted in a semitization of Spanish culture and religion. This analysis is used in part to explain the thoroughness and intensity with which religion became identified with nearly all aspects of Spanish life, including the ultimate quasi-totality of the church-state bond and the final rejection of pluralism of any kind. While Castro is unable to verify this contention fully, it is evident that historical confrontation with large, sophisticated, and in some ways culturally superior non-western, non-Christian societies could not but leave some impress. It is one thing, however, to claim that Spanish or Castilian society developed a unique set of values in confrontation with Muslims and Jews, and something else to contend that it absorbed an exotic psychology directly. This it did not do; specifically Muslim and Jewish values were overtly and categorically rejected. The resulting tensions, however, interacted to produce a unique culture and psychology.

Between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries there occurred fundamental changes in the attitudes towards Muslims and Jews. For Alfonso VI of Castile, dealing with the Muslims was mainly a political, not a religious, enterprise, and in the thirteenth century, the tomb of Fernando III was inscribed with the title "king of the three religions." [137] In some of the campaigns of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, French crusaders either quarreled with or deserted their Castilian and Aragonese allies because of the latter's refusal to slaughter conquered Muslims. Ramón Llull and the Dominicans of Valencia proposed to educate and convert, not expel or even subdue, Muslims of neighboring regions. While Jewish communities were totally expelled from every other part of western Europe, they continued to flourish and multiply in the Hispanic kingdoms.

Attitudes and policies began to change during the course of the fourteenth century. Tolerance was above all a matter of official policy; the common people, both Christian and Muslim, were usually intolerant. The official position of the church, as distinct from that of the crown, was to accept the guarantees of tolerance but at the same time to put pressure on the crown to keep the Jews in their place and prevent them from becoming too influential in Christian society. The spread of the crusading ideal, with its violence and intolerance, may not have changed civic attitudes in the peninsula at first, but it left its effect over the course of six or eight generations. The anti-Muslim feeling of the crusades was accompanied by a great deal of anti-Jewish sentiment as well. The impact of the fanaticism and intolerance of the Almoravids and Almohads has been noted in a previous chapter. And finally, the total military superiority achieved by Christian society by the middle of the fourteenth century obviously lessened the need of Hispano-Christians for systems of discriminatory toleration.

Following the close of the thirteenth-century reconquest, the church's wealth and power increased. It held domain over at least 15 percent of the land in the Hispanic kingdoms, and of that 15 percent the crusading orders alone held more than one third. Over half of Galicia was under Church dominion. The church also collected a special tax from the Muslims and Jews of the Christian kingdoms. As the largest holder of capital, the church had even begun to invest in the royal debt in Castile, and the Cortes of Castile repeatedly petitioned the crown to prohibit acquisition of territories under royal domain by the church. Evidence of the wealth and splendor of the church by the thirteenth century was the construction of the great Gothic cathedrals of Castile (León, Burgos, Toledo, Cuenca), which was begun at that time.

Yet the church did not follow up the reconquest by extending parish organization and church facilities equally through the southern part of the peninsula, where the establishment of new churches lagged. In the eleventh century, approximately twenty episcopal sees had existed north of the Duero. During the next hundred years or so, approximately twenty new sees were created in the central portions of [138] the peninsula, and often were given responsibility for leadership and defense in newly settled areas. During and after the thirteenth-century reconquest, only seven new sees were established in the south, where the crusading orders often filled the place of episcopal organization. By that time, the monasteries had become very active in the wool export trade, and many small churches were established in the sheep-raising regions of the central Meseta: in some of its districts there was a church for every one hundred people by the late Middle Ages. Churches were proportionately fewer in the south, where at first there was only limited immigration and less need. Even after the Christian population increased, church organization was thinner in regions of Extramadura, Andalusia, and Murcia. The slack was partly taken up by the mendicant orders, before their decline in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In modern times, certain areas of the south would stand out as the major "unchurched" districts of the peninsula.

In the Hispanic kingdoms, as elsewhere, the wealth and influence of the medieval church aroused varying degrees of opposition. This stemmed primarily from the crown, the towns, and a few antagonistic critics and thinkers. Conflict with the papacy was common on the part of the Portuguese and Aragonese monarchies during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, though infrequent in Castile. At first, Jaume The Conqueror refused to pay the customary Aragonese tax to the papacy, and in Portugal a certain amount of church land was taken back under royal domain. In Castile, as well, a series of measures against church economic power were taken during the early fourteenth century, though the partial vacuum created in some districts by the Black Death resulted in further extension of ecclesiastical properties. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the church's economic strength in the Aragonese territories apparently did decline somewhat.

The fourteenth century spiritual decline of European Christendom was reflected in the peninsula, where it was perhaps worse in the lands of the crown of Aragón and in Portugal than in Castile. The problem of the morals and conduct of the clergy was never solved during the Middle Ages; in thirteenth-century Catalonia Jaume the Conqueror had the tongue of the Bishop of Gerona cut out for revealing secrets from the confessional. One of the most common objects of protest by church councils-- barraganla, or concubinage, among the clergy--was not necessarily looked upon as immoral by the common people, who accepted the common-law marriages of village priests as comparatively natural relationships.

All told, there were three major medieval religious reform movements in the peninsula, and they reflected those in Latin Christendom [139] as a whole. The first was the Cluniac and papal reform of the eleventh century that has been discussed earlier. The second was the monastic reform movement of the thirteenth century: the Cistercians, Dominicans, Franciscans, Carmelites, and Augustinians. Most of the new thirteenth-century orders were composed of mendicant friars who came into close contact with the people and emphasized preaching and social service. They also encouraged learning and played a major role in development of the universities. Yet even the mendicant orders amassed property, and some came to be classed with the privileged and unconcerned among the clergy.

The last movement of reform took place in the late Middle Ages and was diverse and disunified. It began sporadically in the late fourteenth century, gathering momentum only one hundred years later. One of its first manifestations was the attempt of leaders of the Castilian hierarchy in the 1370s and 80s to purify morals, expand education, and encourage royal power in the hope that it would use its authority over other sectors of the church. A monastic movement of spiritual and moral revival known as the Observancia stimulated new interest in evangelicalism among the mendicant orders. The rise of the Jeronymite order in the second half of the fourteenth century, encouraging a more contemplative, internalized religion, was another significant new expression of reform. Late medieval spiritual ferment, though certainly not involving most of the clergy and the faithful, was expressed in new ideals of interiorism and antisacramental mysticism and in a growing vein of apocalypticism. In addition to the Jeronymites, the Carmelites and reformist Franciscans were active in trying to encourage spiritual change and growth. These elements played a major role in the subsequent "Catholic reform" of late-fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century Castile.

Recruitment by the church remained comparatively democratic throughout the Middle Ages. Even after the aristocracy had become quite stratified, the clergy were still drawn from nearly all social classes and were the only institutional group in direct contact with and attempting to minister to all the population.

The Catholicism of Castile and Portugal retained its simple, direct frontier ethos and somewhat archaic quality throughout the Middle Ages. Hispanic religion was popular and vital but not intellectually creative. Nearly all its high theological cultural and structural-functional ideas came from western Europe. The nearest thing to an Hispanic school of philosophy and theology was that of the Catalan Ramon Llull. The Hispanic kingdoms were perhaps the most theologically and religiously orthodox in Latin Christendom.

Variant tendencies were definitely more marked in the Aragonese lands. Though during the Middle Ages scholarly studies developed in [140] a more secular framework in Castile also, classical secular themes drew most attention in the northeast, thanks to French and Italian influences. Only in Catalonia and Valencia did religious thought and seeking lapse into serious heresy. Both Albigensian and Waldensian heretics penetrated Catalonia, but few reached Castile. In Aragon the humillados of Durando de Huesca developed ideas of religious communalism and were apparently influenced by both of the former groups, yet stayed within the Catholic system and were recognized by Pope Innocent III. The more radical forms of Franciscanism appeared in Catalonia, northern Aragón, and Vizcaya at Durango. In later times, the Spanish Inquisition would find little that was suspicious enough to examine or proscribe in Castilian religious literature, but a fairly large number of heterodox writings to delete from the religious literature of the Catalan-speaking regions.

It is possible to discern during the Middle Ages the establishment of a certain anti-objectifying bent in the Castilian mind that to some extent discouraged analysis. Religion provided total caste identification in much of the peninsula, and ultimately a sense of prenational group identity, the only unity in a divided and uncertain world. Yet if Hispanic Catholicism was on the whole fixed, incurious, and anti-individualistic by the end of the Middle Ages, this was true to an only slightly lesser degree in most of western Christendom. During the fifteenth century there was considerable religious ferment and questioning among small groups, and an extensive spirit of anticlericalism (directed solely against individual elements of the clergy and not against the church or Catholic theology). The closed, fanatical, caste Catholicism later thought of as typical of Hispanic religiosity did not come to fruition until the second half of the sixteenth century, and was more than simply a product of the Middle Ages. New pressures for religious redefinition and individual understanding of spiritual realities were perhaps no weaker in the peninsula at the close of the Middle Ages than in most parts of western Europe, and nowhere was religious fervor stronger.

Bibliography for Chapter VII

[339] There exists a vast corpus of Hispanic hagiography and ecclesiastical chronicles, but the real history of religion in the peninsula has received little attention. There are two general church histories: Z. García Villada, S.J., Historia eclesiástica de España, 5 vols. in 3 (Madnd, 1936), which stops at the eleventh century, and the dated work of Vincente de la Fuente, Historia eclesiástica de España, 4 vols. (Barcelona, 1855-59). Peter Linehan, The Spanish Church and the Papacy in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, 1971), is broader in scope than the title suggests. Aspects of the medieval church-state struggle are treated in Johannes Vincke, Staat und Kirche in Katalonien und Aragon wáhrend des Mittelalters, 2 vols. (Münster, 1931), [340] and D. Mansilla Reoyo, Iglesia castellano-leonesa y Curia romana en íos tiempos del Rey San Femando (Madrid, 1945). The standard work on the pilgrimages to Santiago is L.Vázquez de Parga, J. M. Lacarra, and J. Una Riu, Las peregnnaciones a Santiago de Compostela, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1948). J. Pérez de Urbel, Los monjes españoles en la Edad Media, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1945), is of limited use; see also P. Maur Cocheril, Etudes sur le monachisme en Espagne et au Portugal (Paris, 1966). The establishment of church institutions in the Levant has been studied by R. I. Burns, S. J., The Crusader Kingdom of Valencia, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1967). On the idea of the crusade, in addition to the work by José Goili Gaztambide cited in bibliography 4, see Carl Erdmann, Die Entstehung des Kreuzzuggedankens (Stuttgart, 1935). An alternative strategy is the topic of Burns's "Christian-Islamic Confrontation in the West: The Thirteenth-Century Dream of Conversion," American Historical Review 76, no.5 (Dec. 1971): 1386-1434.

The two leading rival interpretations of medieval Hispanic culture and society are Américo Castro's The Spaniards (Berkeley, 1971), rev. ed. of The Structure of Spanish History; and Sánchez Albornoz's España: Un enigma histórico, 2 vols. (Buenos Aires, 1956). Castro's Aspectos del vivir hispánico (Santiago de Chile, 1949, Madrid, 1970), is useful on late medieval Castilian religious currents.

The nineteenth-century polymath Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo produced a massive study of spiritual heterodoxy, Historia de los heterodoxos españoles, 8 vols. (Santander, 1946-48), but it is biased and out of date. Heresy in Catalonia has been studied by Jordi Ventura in "El Catarismo en Cataluña," Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras 28 (1959-60): 75-168, and "La Valdesía de Cataluña," 29 (1961-62): 275-317.
A classic history of Hispanic Jewry is José Amador de los Ríos's Historia social, política y religiosa de los judíos de España y Portugal, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1875-76). Two more recent accounts are A. A. Neuman, The Jews in Spain, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1942), and Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1961). Both concentrate on the Jewish communities in Catalonia-Aragon; Baer emphasizes political and interethnic relations, while Neuman gives more attention to internal Jewish history.

I find rather good this resume on hispanic history by Stanley G. Payne. Regarding the portuguese history chapter, the sixth, it's quite isent and complete. A nice piece of light but reliable history reading. :muybueno: