Download PDF | (The Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World) Simon Barton, Robert Portass - Beyond the Reconquista_ New Directions in the History of Medieval Iberia (711-1085)-Brill (2020).
302 Pages
Simon Barton (1962–2017)
Yo dije siempre, y lo diré, y lo digo, que es la amistad el bien mayor humano; mas ¿qué español, qué griego, qué romano nos ha de dar este perfeto amigo?* ∵ Simon Barton died on 15 December 2017, some eighteen months before this book was eventually finished. His loss to the field of Spanish medieval history can hardly be overstated. Simon was one of the leading historians of the political structures of the Christian kingdoms of Spain in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, his interest in the Iberian Peninsula having been kindled by his mentor at York, the late Prof. Richard Fletcher. Simon’s achievements, awards and professional accolades were many, although one would not have known it; unfailing modesty and good grace characterised his professional persona, and these traits made themselves known – along with a dash of dry wit – mere moments after making his acquaintance. He wore his learning lightly and was widely admired for his quiet erudition, tremendous kindness and reassuring presence.
My first meeting with Simon took place at a seminar in Balliol College, Oxford, which I co-convened with Dr Graham Barrett (a contributor to this volume). Simon captivated the room with his original and percipient take on that most famous of Castilian noblemen, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, better known to posterity as El Cid. Rather than encourage those present to decide between standard depictions of El Cid (which paint him as either a national hero or a soldier-of-fortune), Simon suggested that we consider Rodrigo Díaz’s activities in the context of a peninsula still remaking itself from the wreckage of the Umayyad Caliphate, favourable terrain for opportunist chancers willing to manipulate the fractious court politics of the Christian kingdoms and Party Kings.
From that moment on a professional relationship from which I learnt a great deal began to take shape: Simon examined my doctoral thesis in 2011 and uncomplainingly wrote references for me thereafter, offering unsolicited (though welcome) encouragement and support on a regular basis. Enjoyable meetings at conferences in Salamanca, Exeter and Lincoln followed, but it was only while planning, proposing and editing this volume, that I really got to know Simon.
Chapters were read, and then re-read, and then read once again, before being sent hither and thither, from Oxford to Exeter, Galicia to Madrid, and Lincoln to Florida; our lengthy Skype conversations were always productive and always (somehow, for we were often discussing footnoting conventions) enjoyable. It is deeply sad that Simon is no longer here to cajole gently, to encourage sincerely, and to talk so persuasively about all manner of things Spanish and medieval, or to help me make light of the fortunes of Wycombe Wanderers FC, which he did on many a fondly remembered occasion. Almost all of this book’s content had been written and about half of the editing had been done before Simon died.
My role since January 2018 has been to make sure that an already seaworthy vessel should not founder on the rocks, and in this enterprise I could not have been better advised or assisted than I have been by Marcella Mulder at Brill, who showed great kindness at a difficult time. Lest there be any doubt, this is Simon’s book as much as it is mine. And it would not exist at all without the sterling efforts of the contributors, to whom I offer heartfelt thanks for their commitment and patience. I am confident that I do not speak out of turn when I remark that each and every one of the contributors would happily join me in dedicating this book to the memory of a much missed friend and colleague. Robert Portass Lincoln, October 2019
Beyond the Reconquista: An Introductory Essay Robert Portass 1 Origins
This volume is the fruit of a one-day workshop devised and hosted by Simon Barton at the University of Exeter in June 2013.1 On that occasion a handful of historians interested in medieval Iberia met to offer short papers on their thencurrent research, before rounding things off in style with further discussion at a local hostelry, all orchestrated with the quiet, unfussy élan that was Simon’s calling-card. Simon and I discussed the workshop the following week, both of us remarking that it had been enjoyable to hear papers on such an exciting range of topics.
Thus it was that learned analyses of the derring-do of queens and countesses sat alongside presentations on Arabic terminology in Latin charters, the usefulness or otherwise of the Feudal Revolution as a point of discussion in a Spanish historiographical context, and the nature of frontier politics in the Catalan March. The richness and the diversity of the approaches, themes and (largely provisional) conclusions debated on that glorious early summer’s day in Devon provided sufficient inspiration for the production of this volume, which Simon shortly thereafter suggested to me we undertake as a joint venture. What held the workshop together, we agreed, was the nearunanimity of opinion among contributors concerning not what we thought the future of Iberian medieval studies would bring, but what it would first need to overcome for genuinely new ground to be broken: viz. the extraordinarily durable model of the Reconquest (Reconquista), and its equally resilient and (in some quarters) equally cherished friend and ally, the putative depopulation (Despoblación) and repopulation (Repoblación) of the Duero basin.2
Even at this juncture the scale of the challenge we were setting ourselves appeared formidable, an impression only deepened during our first proper conversation on editorial matters, when Simon asked me (with no little mischief) just what I understood the word Reconquista to mean. He listened intently to my scrabbled-together response before proceeding to offer his own almost entirely different take on the continuing (ir)relevance of the term in scholarly discourse. That we were not able to agree upon a single definition, nor to pin down the idea straightforwardly, we took to be a promising sign. For whether considered contemporary to the events its proponents say it describes, or a later embellishment (or distortion?) of the facts; whether an organising principle of frontier society, as Lomax would have us believe, or a national Crusade of religious character, as José María Aznar famously suggested at Georgetown University in 2004; or whether so much hot air, unknowingly in thrall to the neogoticismo of Asturian court scholars, the Reconquista continues to offer grist for the scholarly mill.3 Confident in the appeal of the volume, our aim was for it to ask more penetrating questions than ‘fact’ or ‘fiction’; our aim, indeed, was for our contributors to afford Reconquista precisely the significance that they thought it deserved while showcasing their own researches.
This way, we supposed, we could see whether the near-ubiquity of the term in the secondary literature represented anything more than a metaphorical doffing of the cap to a venerable relative, and whether it was now superfluous to some of the most interesting and innovative avenues of research in Iberian medieval studies. Ever the realist, Simon was convinced that such an approach would elicit a bewildering range of responses, and he was right, as a glance at the essays collected in this volume demonstrates: some contributors relished the chance to confront the historiographical axioms which cast a shadow over their research; others chose to jettison almost entirely the theoretical baggage of Reconquest.
Too prescriptive an editorial guideline on this front – that is, to urge our contributors to identify and upbraid the elephant in the room – seemed to us counterproductive. Better to ask each and every one of our writers to offer more plausible and exciting interpretations of the evidence hitherto used to sustain a paradigm with which, to some degree, all of them take issue. Al buen entendedor, pocas palabras. Such noble sentiments were all very well, but what next? After all, we were hardly the first to recognise that the concept of the Reconquista left much to be desired. Some might say that it has been under assault ever since Barbero and Vigil set out their radical reimagining of the antique and early medieval past of northern Iberia in the 1970s.4 Attempts to rescue the idea, or at least decouple it from the unsavoury associations it acquired during and after the Spanish Civil War, are generally considered by experts to have been unsuccessful, and so, like Banquo’s Ghost, its presence is said to make dispassionate discussion impossible.5
How, then, to shape our volume such that it might offer something new in response to a paradigm recognised as problematic for more than four decades? We began by returning to first principles and attempting to diagnose the nature of the problem, which seemed to us, more or less, to be the following: almost all Hispanists accept that the Reconquista is an inadequate conceptual tool and are happy to declare as much; yet no compelling answer has been suggested with regard to what we might put in its place. This stems not from any lack of trying, but, in our view, from the fact that the premise that the Reconquista ought to be replaced by another paradigm, equally unwieldy and constraining, although doubtless more á la mode, is itself misguided. Historiographical frameworks of such scale and magnitude should be called into question, and indeed many would consider them to have been discredited since the 1970s.6 Consider the fate of Convivencia, ‘the putative “living together” of Jews, Muslims and Christians’ in medieval Iberia, a notion which remains an indispensable heuristic tool for some scholars, particularly in the United States, but has failed to persuade others of its utility.7
Can the deft deployment of anthropological theories of acculturation and cultural borrowing salvage Convivencia, as some would have us believe?8 Or did lines of separation, real and imagined, colour the lived experience of the inhabitants of medieval Iberia? In a judicious article of 2009, Maya Soifer Irish surveyed the literature and looked to rehabilitate the term, albeit cautiously; but though she opined that Convivencia can seem like a ‘Good Thing’ [sic], she also reminded us that it has ‘consistently failed on empirical grounds’, and these unsteady foundations have been undermined effectively in Eduardo Manzano Moreno’s elegant investigation of 2013.9 This is not mere point-scoring; what happened on the ground, insofar as we reconstruct it, ought to matter to us first and foremost, or we end up replacing one set of presentist concerns with another. But sometimes the real and the imagined refuse to be reconciled.
After all, the uncomfortable disjuncture between the reality of the Christian recovery of the peninsula and the inadequacy of the theory of Reconquista in the telling of that tale remains a bone of contention. But what to do? Is root-and-branch epistemological upheaval needed to tackle this quandary, or can a few wellchosen caveats suffice? Put differently, how might one tell the tale of the reconquest (the territorial recovery of the peninsula by Christian polities) without making recourse to the Reconquest? In the face of such complications, we defer to the range of compelling, suggestive and novel interpretations found herein. Insofar as a common theme emerges, it is that the physical and psychological possession of the peninsula (and even of the names associated with it), were contested wherever we look; and while functional, pragmatic coexistence necessarily obtained, so too did discord, between peoples of shared and different faiths. Figures heretofore marginalised in the Reconquista narrative – women, Muslims, villagers – emerge on to centre-stage and the plot thickens accordingly; yet the classic agents of Christian redemption – kings, counts and peasants – continue to play a crucial role.
Debates of broader reach – feudalisation, the legacy of public power – find a place for themselves where once we had been told that the Spanish Middle Ages were a law unto themselves. In short, remove Reconquest from the equation, or at least reconsider its role, and medieval Iberia becomes more complicated, not less; what emerges is brilliant in its complexity but also forbidding. These disparate strands cannot be neatly tied together, but nor should they be, for artificial homogeneity would compromise the animating spirit of the volume. Simon’s loss, moreover, demands that this book (while not a festschrift) represent something of his voluminous learning and range of interest. Thus it is that those seeking new paradigms with which to explain the history of medieval Spain will not find them here; this volume aims, rather more modestly, to consider whether the notion of Reconquest in any way continues to shape our understanding of the specific contexts in which the peoples of medieval Iberia went about their lives.10
There is doubtless much to do and this book represents no more than one step towards refining our comprehension of Spain in the Middle Ages, but if it can offer something in the way of a solid and durable foundation rather than yet another castle in the sky, it will have served its purpose. In any case, by affording our contributors a certain license to do with Reconquista as they would, a no-less exciting vista opens up before the reader of this volume – a vista composed of clues being revised and revisited, of ideas being nuanced, reframed and reworked, of gestures towards suggested new directions of travel which promise to take us, in good time, beyond the Reconquista. In order to expand the appeal of a specialist volume on this subject, we decided to cast our net widely, inviting certain select scholars from the United States, Spain and the UK who had not been present at our workshop to proffer a chapter. The response was overwhelmingly positive.
Now, six years later, after many trials and tribulations, the finished volume owes much to the forbearance and professionalism of the contributors, and of course to Simon. Scant consolation though it may provide, I nonetheless take heart from recalling that during our last telephone conversation Simon expressed his excitement at the quality of the chapters we were then editing. It is my fervent wish that the reader finds something of enjoyment here too. 2 Moving beyond the Reconquista Esforçad castellanos, non ayades pavor: vençremos los poderes d’esse rey Almançor, sacaremos Castiella de premia e error, el sera el vençido, yo seré vençedor.11 The thirteenth-century ‘Poem of Fernán González’ survives in a single, incomplete, fifteenth-century manuscript: Escorial b.iv.21. It tells the tale of the emergence of Castile and the role played by its leading tenth-century count, Fernán González, in the Christian recovery of the peninsula, an act of redemption made necessary not solely by the presence of Muslims in the thencontemporary peninsula, but also by the sins of Hispania’s previous Christian custodians, the Visigoths.12 Some centuries earlier, the anonymous writer of the late ninth-century Chronicle of Albelda, caught between bouts of regretful whimsy and matter-of-fact cussedness, stumbled upon the glimmer of hope offered by Old Testament notions of exile and return, and set about predicting the imminent Christian recovery of the peninsula.13 These ideas were clearly doing the rounds in learned circles as early as the last quarter of the ninth century: the Chronicle of Alfonso iii, more or less contemporary with the Albeldensis, haughtily informs us that the peninsula had been lost by the Visigoths ‘because they forsook the Lord and did not serve him in justice and truth’.14 Sure enough, such failings saw to it that the Visigoths ‘were forsaken by the Lord so that they could no longer inhabit the land that they desired’.15 Hope remained, but it would involve violent struggle, as our sources indicate: and there is simply no reason to doubt that Ordoño i (850–866) ‘did battle with the Chaldeans frequently’, as the chronicler claims, even if it less likely that he ‘always emerged the victor’.16 The concepts of recovery and redemption, the two lodestars of the Reconquista firmament, can therefore be traced back to ideas first expressed in a Spanish context during the early part of the Middle Ages, in Spanish academe conventionally taken to mean the long period book-ended by the Islamic invasion of 711 and the fall of Granada in 1492. The practical, everyday coexistence which must have characterised life in the major urban centres (above all Córdoba) after 711 should not blind us to the often violent reality of political relations between caliphs, kings, and their respective subordinates – a reality which, it has traditionally been held, helped bring about the Reconquest. With typical acuity, Richard Fletcher stylishly enjoined us to face these facts, look them square in the eye, and subject them to a more instructive interrogation than they tend to receive. The Reconquest – that is, the physical recovery of the Iberian landmass and the Christian political overlordship of it that ensued – most certainly took place; but as Fletcher reminded us, to get to the heart of the matter we need to consider whether we can ‘infer motive from action’.17 In other words, while we must think about how and in what circumstances the recovery of the peninsula by Christian polities occurred, we must also ask questions concerning the ideological underpinnings of that process of recovery. These underpinnings may have been only dimly visible in the doleful reflections of Christian chroniclers writing at the Asturian court but it is clear that ‘in time an ideological framework for Christian opposition to Islam developed’.18 This framework was not conjured from thin air: on the contrary, it was nourished and reinforced by events on the ground, and as cities fell to the Christians after Toledo’s capitulation in 1085, it became increasingly expedient to associate kings with such endeavours precisely because of the practical benefits, as well as the ideological potency, that such endeavours bestowed. Intellectuals certainly took note too, and by the mid-twelfth century some of their number were rehearsing variations of the ‘widely-articulated belief that the Christians were waging a campaign to reverse the wrongs that they had suffered at the hands of the Muslims in times past, and above all to restore to Christian hands the territories that had been lost’.19 In short, distant prophecies of Christian victory were at last coming true; wishful thinking had assumed something of the appearance of reality. However nefarious the tales spun in the aftermath of such events, to dismiss the idea of Reconquista as no more than an invention of the retrograde Right is to mischaracterise it.20 So there we have the key to its complexity: the Reconquest was both an ideal and, at least in part, an historical process. Or to be more accurate, it was first an ideal, then a reality, and thereafter an ideal now all the more potent for having something of substance underlying it. In moments of earnest self-reflection of the kind to which they were doubtless accustomed, the clerics who waxed lyrical from their mountainous northern redoubts in the late ninth century, claiming that ‘inimicorum terminus quoddidie defecit et ecclesia domini in maius et melius crescit’, cannot have hoped, faced with the reality of their own times, that within a few short centuries a Christian king would make their fantasies come true, as Ferdinand i (1037–65) did, yet from a position of political advantage.21 Something had happened in the intervening centuries, and at least some Christian contemporaries recognised as much. So too did their erstwhile enemies, even while they recoiled at the sheer effrontery of their newly galvanized foes.22 Perhaps we can simplify matters by terminological sleight of hand. If by Reconquest we refer to the hugely complex process of movement and settlement, appropriation and accommodation, and conquest and reclamation which took place over several centuries in medieval Spain, then perhaps it might yet be saved from the capacious dustbin of history? Not all the contributors to this volume are thus persuaded. As to whether we might rehabilitate Reconquest along with its brothers-in-arms, Depopulation and Repopulation, in Chapter 1 Julio Escalona and Iñaki Martín Viso offer a robust response: all these concepts are to be jettisoned, and good riddance to them too. And if their somewhat iconoclastic chapter is not for the faint-hearted, then the same can be said of Graham Barrett’s learned ruminations on place, space and memory in Chapter 2, in which he asks us to consider to whom, if anyone, Hispania belonged. Escalona and Martín Viso encourage us to propose new theories and implore us to think a bit harder about the damaging effect of the terminology we deploy as a matter of routine when discussing the Iberian Peninsula of the Middle Ages. Theirs is a cri de cœur of admirable conviction; not all readers will agree with the course of action they propose but none will be left indifferent. A return to the realities of demography, settlement and government lies at the heart of Barrett’s chapter too, though less obviously so, for therein they are tied in new and suggestive ways to the recollections and fabrications which inform collective memory and identity. We learn that the manipulation of the true and the plainly fictive had real consequences in the short, medium and long term; life on the ground, in turn, made its demands of the compositors of historical narrative. We see this most clearly after 1100 or so, when the Christian powers found themselves in control of much of Hispania for the first time in four hundred years and soon seem to have realised that they had some explaining to do. Did they simply revisit an idea which first emerged in embryonic form in the Prophetic Chronicle, dust it down, and make it fit for purpose in the changed times in which they found themselves? Surely not. But neither did they resort to spinning yarns entirely divorced from reality. The Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris spoke glowingly of Alfonso vii’s clarity of purpose, noting of the king that ‘his mind was wholly fixed upon the following: that he would invade the land of the Saracens in order to conquer them’.23 The recovery of the peninsula from Islam continued to matter to chroniclers because it now spoke, however imperfectly, to reality and ideal. It also brought the need to govern into view, and if we read between the lines of Barrett’s chapter we begin to discern that Reconquest ideology was in some sense the consequence of a renewed commitment to statecraft on the part of Christian kings now confronting an inheritance to which they had long laid claim but never before had to consider a going concern. Yet alongside the need to re-theorise medieval Iberia (the focus of Part 1), Part 2 of this volume shows that our efforts ultimately depend upon sophisticated reimaginings and reworkings of the complex body of primary sources at our disposal. With no little skill and a fine grasp of the details, Jon Jarrett shows that making neat distinctions between the content and the formulaic aspect of a document serves only to enhance the probability of missing its central purpose: to dress the particular (the remembered, the mis-remembered and the made up) in garb that would stand up in court precisely because of the creative and intelligent ways that contemporaries made sense of and deployed written testimony. Also preoccupied by charter evidence is Wendy Davies, whose characteristically thorough contribution goes some way to clarifying just what those individuals associated with the term ‘count’ actually did and who they were. Although not a watchword in Hispanic studies of the sort that are, say, ‘frontier’ or ‘presura’, dig a little deeper in the secondary literature and one soon finds that counts were accredited with a role of considerable importance in medieval Spain. They were, or at least have been treated as, veritable pillars of the initial stages of the Reconquest, quasi-officers of the state for some, pioneering frontiersmen for others. Davies argues that counts could be both of these things or (more frequently) neither, but they were rarely if ever the recipients of a delegated responsibility to advance the Reconquest in the period on which she concentrates. If we are to believe the ‘Poem of Fernán González’s’ description of that count’s activities in the tenth century, perhaps that is just as well.24 But if we have little trouble believing that loyalty could be bought and sold, what about land? We see it change hands often enough in the charters, and across the entirety of northern Spain too, but our estimations of the economic complexity of this world have always been tempered by the apparent lack of coins in circulation in the early centuries of Reconquest, it being a mainstay of the secondary literature that coins were not minted in the Christian realms 24 Poema de Fernán González, strophe 176: ‘El conde don Fernando, con muy poca conpaña of Asturias-León-Castile until well into the eleventh century.25 In a bold and imaginative paper, Eduardo Manzano Moreno and Alberto Canto challenge this notion persuasively, guiding us towards a new understanding of the role of money in early medieval Christian Spain. And if they are right that Christian and Muslim Spain were even more deeply connected than we had once imagined, and that these connections were oftentimes the result of transactions, might we talk productively of an economic Reconquest, the result of people’s need to do business with each other in a variety of contexts? In Part 3 we turn our attention to figures hitherto afforded a bit-part in the story of Reconquista: powerful women and non-Christians, the subjects of Jeff Bowman’s and Nicola Clarke’s respective chapters; and concerned clerics of a theological bent, upon whose endeavours Lucy Pick shines a light. Save for providing the odd flourish of narrative colour (adultery, avarice, exoticism), women and non-Christians have played a secondary role in much Reconquista historiography, presumably because they were largely written out of the picture by the very chroniclers on whose accounts we ultimately depend. Or were they? Jeff Bowman kicks thing off, providing us with a four-pronged typology of the factors that conditioned the power of elite women. To some extent, some of these factors, not least the omnipresent shadow of the Visigothic law and the power of ecclesiastical institutions, are identified by other contributors to this volume, but Bowman goes further, suggesting that the socio-cultural and political landscape of tenth-century Christian Spain provided conditions in which elite women were particularly well-placed to flourish. Not for Bowman merely a land of kings, counts and their warriors; medieval Spain, on the contrary, was as much influenced by a succession of powerful elite women who only emerge from the historical record when the familiar figures of the Reconquest narrative find themselves shunted to one side. An enterprise such as Bowman’s of course implies tackling much of the secondary literature in a respectful but partially corrective spirit; by the same token, Bowman’s approach offers a salutary reminder that the prejudices and narrative strategies of the writers of our primary sources are marked by lacunae with regard to their dramatis personae precisely because they often intended to let silences speak. Where women appear in our narrative accounts, we can be sure that they indeed shaped events on the ground; yet where they do not appear in such accounts, we cannot presume that they played no role. After all, genre, as well as gender, were both influential in the shaping of the historical record. By way of example, Bowman considers how ‘conventional’ narrative accounts of noble women differed in their presentation of those women from that which we encounter in charters. This difference was not simply the consequence of the multifarious strategies of the writers of chronicles and administrative records; it also reflects the fact that certain kinds of writing seem to have been considered the suitable vehicle for the recording of certain kinds of personal attributes. Clarke’s chapter shares a similar concern to investigate the attributes expected of and associated with individuals who for a variety of reasons remained marginal to classic accounts of the Reconquista. Her quarrying of the evidence, however, focuses upon the policing and subversion of boundaries of social conduct, between men and women, and individuals of the same sex but differing social status, in al-Andalus. It does so by examining some of the surviving monuments of historical writing in Arabic, texts which have not been central to the creation of the Reconquista paradigm but which instead evidence a different set of literary traditions and narrative concerns. And yet when we reflect upon the inner workings of Andalusi society via the prism of these Arabic texts, we encounter another frontier, this time traversed daily by individuals sometimes adhering to and sometimes challenging gendered expectations and social norms. Boundaries between the sexes in al-Andalus, we learn, ‘were seen as indispensable to the proper ordering of society’; here, a frontier, a boundary, an attempt to delineate and control, remains an organising principle of a section of peninsular society, but we are far removed from conventional settings of the Reconquista. These settings, as Barrett outlined in Part 1, were always subject to contestation in any case. And sometimes it paid to ignore reality in order to make that reality tolerable. Such was the case with regard to the two texts (the Chronicle of 754 and Beatus’s Commentary on the Apocalypse) examined here by Pick, who shows us that to fashion a didactic Christian narrative in times of existential despair meant to exclude artfully and to embellish selectively. Exclusions, gaps in the narrative, lacunae – indeed the apparent lack of significance afforded to Islam and the peninsula’s Muslims – ought to be interpreted, for Pick, as an exercise in the promotion of ethical reflection of the sort encouraged by learned Christians: Readers of the Bible found within the Old Testament story the allegory of the New Testament event and the moral message for their own day; readers of historical texts worked in the same way, discerning the presence of God in the working out of historical time and perceiving the moral lessons of historical events by filling in the gaps left by the historian.26 Whether the historians engaged herein have managed to promote ethical reflection on the Reconquista is not for me to say; but it is surely the case that their combined efforts have helped to fill in some of the gaps left by illustrious predecessors and thus better understand medieval Iberia in the early centuries of Reconquista. Few scholars did more to assist in this endeavour than Simon Barton, and it is to his memory and example that this volume is dedicated.
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