Aragonese exarici in the twelfth century: their status and conditions of landholding

Abstract

In the late eleventh and twelf th centuries, as the Aragonese fitfully expanded f rom their hardy Pyrenean kingdom into the Upper Ebro River Basin, they subdued and subsequently ruled Muslim lands wi th well-developed urban and agrarian life (1). As the Aragonese conquest of these Muslim lands shaped the geographical boundaries of Aragon, so the Aragonese conquest of the lands' Muslim inhabitants affected the shaping of Christian society. The Aragonese did not cast aside the material Islamic infrastructure they had conquered; instead, they incorporated it into Christian Aragon, partly in order to exploit the resources of the newly conquered lands. Aragonese retention and adoption of Islamic irrigation practices and techniques attest to the influence of the Muslims on Christian society. Another part of the Islamic agrarian structure retained by Christians was the Muslim tenant-farmer, the ash-shank (sharer), in Latin exaricus. In Al-Andalus, the sharik is usually defined as a tenant-farmer, leasing land f rom a landlord who receives a percentage of the crop (2). In its Romance or Latin fo rm, the word shank frequently surfaces