Military Orders and Peasant Servitude in Catalonia: Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries

Abstract

The County of Barcelona was founded in the wake of the Carolingian empire's collapse in the late ninth century.' The population of this beleaguered region managed to expand southward from the overpopulated Pyrenean valleys, settling the foothills and much of the coastal plain despite the devastation inflicted by frequent Islamic expeditions and raids. In the eleventh century the balance of power between the county and its Islamic neighbors shifted, as it did throughout Spain, and the counts were able to extort gold from the enfeebled, divisive Islamic states.2 Unlike Leon-Castile, however, there was no dramatic territorial expansion in the eleventh century, nothing to parallel the conquest of Toledo except the humiliating failure of the attempt to capture Tarragona at the end of the century. The twelfth century marks the beginning of the energetic expansion of Catalonia. By mid-century Tarragona had at last been seized and resettled, and Tortosa in the south and Lerida in the west had been absorbed by what was becoming the unified Kingdom of Aragon and County of Barcelona. The role of the principal military orders in the union of Aragon and Catalonia is well known. Alfonso I el Batallador of Aragon died without direct heirs in 1134, leaving his kingdom to the Knights Templar, Hospitaller, and the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre. The orders had recently been created by groups of knights in the Holy Land and throughout Europe who took vows like monks but remained fighters to aid the crusades.