Twelfth-Century Spain Research Articles

Municipal Ransoming Law on the Medieval Spanish Frontier

A serious yet unstudied consequence of the Christian-Muslim conflict in medieval Spain was the capture and enslavement of soldiers and civilians. Men, women, and children who were seized on raids, taken in battle, or pirated off ships were regarded by their captors as booty, to be used as slaves or to be sold for profit. Since warfare in twelfth-century Spain pitted Christians against Muslims, the usual prohibitions against enslavement of coreligionists clearly did not apply.' For Muslims and Christians alike, capture meant a life of slavery. Christian chronicles of this era are replete with stories of captives taken off to be sold in the slave markets of al-Andalus in southern Spain or, even worse, in those of North Africa.2 Some of these slaves, however, were able to regain their freedom through redemption that is, to purchase their liberty by paying a ransom. Since the ransom price frequently exceeded what could be gained in the slave auctions, redemption became an attractive option to both captor and captive. Ransoming is probably as old as slavery, and in Spain prior to the twelfth century there are numerous instances of kings ransoming their soldiers and parents their sons.3 It was not until the twelfth century, however, that the practice of redemption became institutionalized. This attempt at systematization coincided with the extension of Leon-Castile into the trans-Tagus and of Aragon into the middle Ebro valley at the end of the eleventh and the beginning of the twelfth centuries. Here, at the peninsula's center, new Christian communities were planted on what would be a shifting and volatile frontier with the fierce Murabits (or Almoravids) and Muwahhids (or Almohads), those Berbers of North Africa who had absorbed the fragments of the old Islamic caliphate in Spain. Thus, until Islam's decisive defeat at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 and the transfer of the conflict to Andalusia and Murcia, there existed in central Spain a Muslim-Christian frontier across which the military forces of both sides attacked and raided.4

Regalian Right in Twelfth-Century Spain: the Case of Archbishop Martín of Santiago de Compostela

In the spring of the year 1160 archbishop Martin of Santiago de Compostela was expelled from his see by his king, Fernando II of León. Except for a brief period of about six months in the winter of 1164–65 he remained excluded from his church and sometimes from the kingdom until shortly before his death in 1167. For some of this period of seven years he sought to exert pressure upon the king through the papal curia of Alexander III in order to bring about his reinstatement; usually in vain. This cause célèbre in the relations between Church and State in the most westerly of the Spanish kingdoms has attracted little attention from Spanish ecclesiastical historians, and none at all from others. What makes it of more than parochial interest is its timing. Fernando II was not the only western European ruler to be at loggerheads with his archbishop in the 1160s; neither is the spectacle of a pope unwilling decisively to intervene in a quarrel of this kind an unfamiliar one to students of the ecclesiastical affairs of that troubled decade. Only fragments of evidence have survived to shed light on the tortuous diplomacy of those years. To disinter and to attempt to fit together the dead bones of this forgotten dispute may, it is hoped, be to provide a further fragment, which, in its turn, may be of interest to those whose concern is with the larger affairs of empire and of papacy, of Angevins and of Capetians. To historians of Spain its interest will (we hope) be sufficiently obvious to need no commendation.

Latin histories and vernacular epic in twelfth-century Spain: similarities of spirit and style

The Latin histories of the first half of the twelfth century in Spain—-notably the Historia Roderici, the Silense and the Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris, and in a lesser way the Chronicon of Pelayo and the Historia Compostellana—have not, in my view, received the attention which they deserve from students of literature. To say this is not to make the typical claim when resurrecting some justly forgotten third-rate writer, but to suggest that a much graver error than mere neglect has been committed: that of adopting a concept of the literature of a past age which is completely invalid for its own time. Historians have of course used the works mentioned extensively; the Silense and the CAI have been edited recently (and very well too) by historians, and it was as a historian chiefly that Menendez Pidal edited the HR and used it for work on the Cid's life. It is not my purpose here to dwell on the literary merits of these works, but it would be wrong to relegate these to an aside; all these texts have some at...