Beyond the Reconquista: New Directions in the History of Medieval Iberia (711-1085) 2019057613, 2019057614, 9789004315136, 9789004423879

Table of contents :
Beyond the Reconquista: New Directions in the History of Medieval Iberia (711–1085)
Copyright
Contents
List of Illustrations
Abbreviations
Contributors
Simon Barton? (1962-2017)
Beyond the Reconquista: An Introductory Essay
Part 1: Hispania Old and New
1 The Life and Death of an Historiographical Folly: The Early Medieval Depopulation and Repopulation of the Duero Basin
2 Hispania at Home and Abroad
Part 2: Hispania Real and Imagined
3 A Likely Story: Purpose in Narratives from Charters of the Early Medieval Pyrenees
4 Counts in Ninth- and Tenth-Century Iberia
5 The Value of Wealth: Coins and Coinage in Iberian Early Medieval Documents
Part 3: Writing, Remembering, Representing
6 Record, Chronicle and Oblivion: Remembering and Forgetting Elite Women in Medieval Iberia
7 'He lashed his mawla with a whip, and shaved his head': Masculinity and Hierarchy in Early Andalusi Chronicles
8 Islam Concealed and Revealed: The Chronicle of 754 and Beatus of Liébana's Commentary on the Apocalypse
Index

Citation preview

Beyond the Reconquista: New Directions in the History of Medieval Iberia (711–1085)

The Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World Edited by Larry J. Simon (Western Michigan University) Gerard Wiegers (University of Amsterdam) Arie Schippers (University of Amsterdam) Isidro J. Rivera (University of Kansas) Mercedes Garcia-Arenal (cchs/csic) Montserrat Piera (Temple University)

volume 76

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/memi

Beyond the Reconquista New Directions in the History of Medieval Iberia (711–1085) In Honour of Simon Barton

Edited by

Simon Barton† Robert Portass

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: Miniature of Alfonso V, probably 12th-century, from the codex Tumbo A. With kind permission of the Archivo-Biblioteca de la Catedral de Santiago de Compostela. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Barton, Simon, 1962-2017, honoree, editor. | Portass, Robert, 1983-editor. Title: Beyond the Reconquista : New Directions in the History of Medieval Iberia (711-1085) : In Honour of Simon Barton / edited by Simon Barton, Robert Portass. Other titles: New directions in the history of medieval Iberia (711-1085) Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2020] | Series: The medieval and early modern Iberian world, 1569-1934 ; volume 76 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019057613 (print) | LCCN 2019057614 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004315136 ; (hardback) | ISBN 9789004423879 ; (mobi) Subjects: LCSH: Spain--History--711-1516--Historiography. Classification: LCC DP97.6 .B49 2020 (print) | LCC DP97.6 (ebook) | DDC 946/.02--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057613 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057614

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1569-1934 ISBN 978-90-04-31513-6 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-42387-9 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents List of Illustrations  VII Abbreviations  VIII Contributors  IX Simon Barton† (1962–2017)  X

Beyond the Reconquista: An Introductory Essay  1 Robert Portass

Part 1 Hispania Old and New 1

The Life and Death of an Historiographical Folly: The Early Medieval Depopulation and Repopulation of the Duero Basin  21 Julio Escalona and Iñaki Martín Viso

2

Hispania at Home and Abroad  52 Graham Barrett

Part 2 Hispania Real and Imagined 3

A Likely Story: Purpose in Narratives from Charters of the Early Medieval Pyrenees  123 Jonathan Jarrett

4

Counts in Ninth- and Tenth-Century Iberia  143 Wendy Davies

5

The Value of Wealth: Coins and Coinage in Iberian Early Medieval Documents  169 Eduardo Manzano Moreno and Alberto Canto

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Contents

Part 3 Writing, Remembering, Representing 6

Record, Chronicle and Oblivion: Remembering and Forgetting Elite Women in Medieval Iberia  201 Jeffrey Bowman

7

‘He lashed his mawlā with a whip, and shaved his head’: Masculinity and Hierarchy in Early Andalusi Chronicles  232 Nicola Clarke

8

Islam Concealed and Revealed: The Chronicle of 754 and Beatus of Liébana’s Commentary on the Apocalypse  257 Lucy K. Pick



Index  283

Illustrations Maps 0.1 The Iberian Peninsula, c. 950 (after J.F. O’Callaghan, A History of Medieval Spain, Ithaca and London, 1975, p. 108)  16 0.2 The Iberian Peninsula at the Death of Alfonso VIII in 1214 (after J.F. O’Callaghan, A History of Medieval Spain, Ithaca and London, 1975, p. 252)  17

Figures 8.1 Beatus, Commentary on the Apocalypse. The Morgan Library & Museum. MS M.644 fol. 152v–153r. Photographic Credit: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York  271 8.2 Beatus, Commentary on the Apocalypse. The Morgan Library & Museum MS M.644 fol. 222v. Photographic Credit: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York  278 8.3 San Miguel de la Escalada, interior. Photographic Credit: Cecily J. Hilsdale  279

Abbreviations CCCM Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis Corpus Christianorum Series Latina CCSL CSM Corpus Scriptorum Muzarabicorum, ed. J. Gil, 2 vols (Madrid, 1973) MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica NCHI The New Cambridge History of Islam NCMH II  The New Cambridge Medieval History, Volume II, c. 700-c. 900, ed. R. McKitterick (Cambridge, 1995) NCMH III  The New Cambridge Medieval History, Volume III, c. 900-c. 1024, ed. T. Reuter (Cambridge, 1999)

Contributors Graham Barrett University of Lincoln Jeffrey Bowman Kenyon College Alberto Canto Universidad Autónoma de Madrid Nicola Clarke Newcastle University Wendy Davies Independent Scholar Julio Escalona Instituto de Historia – CSIC, Madrid Jonathan Jarrett University of Leeds Eduardo Manzano Moreno Instituto de Historia-CSIC, Madrid Iñaki Martín Viso Universidad de Salamanca Lucy K. Pick University of Chicago

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 * Lope de Vega, Lírica: selección, introducción y notas por José Manuel Blecua (2nd edn, Madrid, 1999), 122 (1–4), 259–60. Originally published in La Circe con otras Rimas y Prosas. Al Excelentísimo Señor D. Gaspar de Guzmán, Conde de Olivares. De Lope de Vega Carpio. En casa de Alonso Martín, a costa de Alonso Pérez, Madrid, 1624.

Simon Barton† (1962–2017)

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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 1 I should like to thank Roger Collins and Peter Linehan for their comments on this introductory essay. 2 On the matter of the threads which tie the Reconquest to demographic change, note that ‘Reconquest and Repopulation’ are so grouped, in a single entry, by J.F. O’Callaghan, in E. Michael Gerli (ed.), Medieval Iberia, An Encyclopedia (London, 2003), 697–700.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004423879_002

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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

3 Classic accounts in English include D.W. Lomax, The Reconquest of Spain (London, 1978); R.A. Fletcher, ‘Reconquest and Crusade in Spain, c. 1050–1150’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 37 (1987), 31–47; J.F. O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain (Philadelphia, 2003); see also A. Mackay, Spain in the Middle Ages: From Frontier to Empire, 1000–1500 (London, 1977), the title of which alone hints at how the reality of existence on the frontier readied the Spanish for forays further afield after 1450. In Spanish, some milestones in the secondary literature include C. Sánchez-Albornoz, Despoblación y Repoblación en el Valle del Duero (Buenos Aires, 1966) and S. de Moxó, Repoblación y sociedad en la España cristiana medieval (Madrid, 1979). For more recent treatments, which relegate depopulation and repopulation to a lesser role but nonetheless focus on the Reconquest see M.F. Ríos Saloma, La Reconquista. Una construcción historiográfica (siglos xvi–xix) (Madrid, 2011) and F. García Fitz, La reconquista (Granada, 2010). The most brilliant examination of both the Reconquest and its ‘invention’ is to be found in P. Linehan, History and the Historians of Medieval Spain (Oxford, 1993), esp. Chapter 4.

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e­ vidence ­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 4 A. Barbero de Aguilera and M. Vigil Pascual, Sobre los orígenes sociales de la reconquista (Barcelona, 1974) and La formación del feudalismo en la península ibérica (Barcelona, 1978). 5 Manuel González Jiménez rues the simplistic treatment the idea has received from both Left and Right in his ‘¿Re-conquista? Un estado de la cuestión’, in E. Benito Ruano, Tópicos y Realidades de la Edad Media, 3 vols (Madrid, 2002), vol. 1, 155–78, but hints that its medieval origins still offer food for thought; Alejandro García Sanjuan, on the other hand, delivers a coruscating verdict on the pervasive influence of the idea of Reconquista in academic circles and beyond, in ‘Rejecting al-Andalus, exalting the Reconquista: historical memory in contemporary Spain’, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 10 (2018), 127–45. 6 Now classic works which looked beyond grand narratives and the history of politics and institutions in order to suggest a new approach to socio-cultural historical study include C. Ginzburg, Il formaggio e i vermi: il cosmo di un mugnaio del ‘500 (Torino, 1976) and R. Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (London, 1984). For critical ruminations on the ‘grand narrative’, see R. Samuel, ‘Grand Narratives’, History Workshop Journal 29 (1990), 120–33, and R.F. Berkhofer, Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, MA, 1995). A healthy scepticism for nationalist narratives, grand or otherwise, remains important, yet lest we forget that social history and microhistory can lose site of the bigger picture, or indeed actively cultivate academic obscurantism, see the gloriously spirited response to the direction social history was taking in the mid- to late 1970s

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t­ ogether” 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 offered by the late T. Judt, ‘A Clown in Regal Purple: Social History and the Historians’, History Workshop Journal 7 (1979), 66–94. 7 An idea given its most eloquent expression in M.R. Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Boston, 2002). Two intelligent and insightful responses: M. Soifer Irish, ‘Beyond Convivencia: Critical Reflections on the Historiography of Interfaith Relations in Christian Spain’, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 1 (2009), 19–35; E. Manzano Moreno, ‘Qurtuba: Some Critical Considerations of the Caliphate of Cordoba and the Myth of Convivencia’, in J. Rosón (ed.), Reflections on Qurtuba in the 21st Century, (Madrid, 2013), 111–32. For a recent attempt to steer a more profitable course between myth and reality, see B.A. Catlos, Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain (London, 2018). The quoted text is from Soifer Irish, ‘Beyond Convivencia’, p. 31. 8 T. Glick and O. Pi-Sunyer, ‘Acculturation as an Explanatory Concept in Spanish History’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 11 (1969), 136–54. 9 Soifer Irish, ‘Beyond Convivencia’, 19–20. Manzano Moreno, ‘Qurtuba: Some Critical Considerations’.

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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

10

Although note the vehemence with which the authors of Chapter 1 insist that the paradigms of depopulation/repopulation and Reconquest be rejected once and for all.

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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 then-­ contemporary 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

11

12 13

Poema de Fernán González, ed. J. Victorio (5th edn, Madrid, 2015), strophe 222. For guidance, I have consulted P. Such and R. Rabone, The Poem of Fernán González: edited and translated with introduction and commentary (Liverpool, 2015), which is excellent on the complexities of the poem’s genesis, its borrowings from many traditions and materials, and its verse form; M.E. Lacarra, ‘El significado histórico del Poema de Fernán González’, Studi Ispanici 10 (1979), 9–41; B. West, Epic, Folk and Christian Traditions in the ‘Poema de Fernán González’ (Potomac, MD, 1983). To whom Hispania ‘belonged’ is treated in great detail in Barrett’s chapter in this volume. Crónica Albeldense, in J. Gil Fernández, J. L Moralejo and J. I Ruiz de la Peña (eds), Crónicas asturianas. Crónica de Alfonso iii (Rotense y ‘a Sebastián’). Crónica Albeldense (y ‘Profética’) (Oviedo, 1985), 187. Roger Collins is persuasive on the identity of the author of the prophecy of ‘Ishmaelite doom’ in the so-called Prophetic Chronicle, in his Caliphs and Kings: Spain, 796–1031 (Chichester, 2012), 52–5.

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‘­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, 14

Crónica de Alfonso iii, in Gil Fernández, Moralejo and Ruiz de la Peña, Crónicas asturianas, 120, 122; for the translation I follow K.B. Wolf, Conquerors and Chroniclers of Early Medieval Spain (2nd edn, Liverpool, 1999), 161–77, at 165. 15 Wolf, Conquerors and Chroniclers, 165. 16 Ibid., 165. How early-ish Arabic narratives dealt with the conquest is examined in N. Clarke, The Muslim Conquest of Iberia: Medieval Arabic Narratives (London, 2012). 17 Fletcher, ‘Reconquest and Crusade in Spain’, 35. 18 O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade, 18. For equally stimulating accounts, see F. Fernández-Armesto, ‘The Survival of a Notion of Reconquista in Late Tenth- and Eleventh-­ Century León’, in T. Reuter (ed.), Warriors and Churchmen in the High Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Karl Leyser (London, 1992), 123–43; W.J. Purkis, ‘The Past as a Precedent:

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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

19

20 21

­rusade, Reconquest and Twelfth-Century Memories of a Christian Iberia’, in L. C Doležalová (ed.), The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages (Leiden, 2009), 441–61. See the mid-twelfth-century Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris [henceforth caf], here consulted in S. Barton and R. Fletcher (trans.), The World of El Cid: Chronicles of the Spanish Reconquest (Manchester, 2000), 162–263, for plentiful examples. The quoted text above is to be found in the introductory essay to the Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris in the same volume, 148–61, at 153. A. García-Sanjuan does not agree: ‘Rejecting al-Andalus’, 127–45. Crónica Albeldense, 188. For an analysis of Ibn Idhārī’s report of Ferdinand’s confident address to an embassy from Toledo, purportedly given in 1040, see D. Wasserstein, The Rise and Fall of the Party Kings: Politics and Society in Islamic Spain, 1002–1086 (Princeton, 1985), 250. Cf. C. de Ayala Martínez, ‘Fernando i y la sacralización de la Reconquista’, Anales de la Universidad de Alicante. Historia Medieval 17 (2011), 67–115. Although note Fletcher’s misgivings in ‘Reconquest and Crusade’, 37.

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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, 22 23

The Tibyān: Memoirs of ʻAbd Allāh b. Buluggīn, Last Zīrid Emīr of Granada, ed. and trans. Amin T. Tibi (Leiden, 1986). caf, 178.

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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 / -en contar lo que fizo semejarie fazaña- / mantovo sienpre guerra con los reys d’España / non dava mas por ellos que por una castaña’.

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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 25

Wendy Davies has totally changed our understanding of the Spanish charter material in recent years. See her Acts of Giving: Individual, Community, and Church in Tenth-Century Christian Spain (Oxford, 2007) and Windows on Justice in northern Iberia, 800–1000 (Abingdon, 2016).

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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

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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. Bibliography Ayala Martínez, C. de, ‘Fernando I y la sacralización de la Reconquista’, Anales de la Universidad de Alicante. Historia Medieval 17 (2011), 67–115. Barbero de Aguilera, A., and M. Vigil Pascual, Sobre los orígenes sociales de la reconquista (Barcelona, 1974). Barbero de Aguilera, A., and M. Vigil Pascual, La formación del feudalismo en la península ibérica (Barcelona, 1978). Berkhofer, Jr., R.F., Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, MA, 1995). Catlos, B.A., Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain (London, 2018). Clarke, N., The Muslim Conquest of Iberia: Medieval Arabic Narratives (London, 2012). Collins, R., Caliphs and Kings: Spain, 796–1031 (Chichester, 2012). Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris [here CAF], in S. Barton and R. Fletcher (trans.), The World of El Cid: Chronicles of the Spanish Reconquest (Manchester, 2000), 162–263. Crónica Albeldense, in J. Gil Fernández, J.L Moralejo and J.I Ruiz de la Peña (eds), Crónicas asturianas. Crónica de Alfonso iii (Rotense y ‘a Sebastián’). Crónica Albeldense (y ‘Profética’) (Oviedo, 1985). Crónica de Alfonso iii, in Gil Fernández, Moralejo and Ruiz de la Peña, Crónicas asturianas. Darnton, R., The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (London, 1984). Davies, W., Acts of Giving: Individual, Community, and Church in Tenth-Century Christian Spain (Oxford, 2007). Davies, W., Windows on Justice in northern Iberia, 800–1000 (Abingdon, 2016).

26

L.K. Pick, ‘Islam Concealed and Revealed: the Chronicle of 754 and Beatus of Liébana’s Commentary on the Apocalypse’, chapter 8, 265.

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Fernández-Armesto, F., ‘The Survival of a Notion of Reconquista in Late Tenth- and Eleventh-Century León’, in T. Reuter (ed.), Warriors and Churchmen in the High Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Karl Leyser (London, 1992), 123–43. Fletcher, R.A., ‘Reconquest and Crusade in Spain, c. 1050–1150’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 37 (1987), 31–47. García Fitz, F., La reconquista (Granada, 2010). García Sanjuan, A., ‘Rejecting al-Andalus, exalting the Reconquista: historical memory in contemporary Spain’, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 10 (2018), 127–45. Ginzburg, C., Il formaggio e i vermi: il cosmo di un mugnaio del ’500 (Torino, 1976). González Jiménez, M., ‘¿Re-conquista? Un estado de la cuestión’, in E. Benito Ruano, Tópicos y Realidades de la Edad Media, 3 vols (Madrid, 2002), vol. 1, 155–78. Judt, T., ‘A Clown in Regal Purple: Social History and the Historians’, History Workshop Journal 7 (1979), 66–94. Lacarra, M.E., ‘El significado histórico del Poema de Fernán González’, Studi Ispanici 10 (1979), 9–41. Linehan, P., History and the Historians of Medieval Spain (Oxford, 1993). Lomax, D.W., The Reconquest of Spain (London, 1978). Mackay, A., Spain in the Middle Ages: From Frontier to Empire, 1000–1500 (London, 1977). Manzano Moreno, E., ‘Qurtuba: Some Critical Considerations of the Caliphate of Cordoba and the Myth of Convivencia’, in J. Rosón (ed.), Reflections on Qurtuba in the 21st Century, (Madrid, 2013), 111–32. Menocal, M.R., The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Boston, 2002). Moxó, S. de, Repoblación y sociedad en la Espana cristiana medieval (Madrid, 1979). O’Callaghan, J.F., ‘Reconquest and Repopulation’, in E. M. Gerli (ed.), Medieval Iberia, An Encyclopedia (London, 2003), 697–700. O’Callaghan, J.F., Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain (Philadelphia, 2003). Poema de Fernán González, ed. J. Victorio (5th edn, Madrid, 2015). Purkis, W.J., ‘The Past as a Precedent: Crusade, Reconquest and Twelfth-Century Memories of a Christian Iberia’, in L. Doležalová (ed.), The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages (Leiden, 2009), 441–61. Ríos Saloma, M.F., La Reconquista. Una construcción historiográfica (siglos xvi–xix) (Madrid, 2011). Samuel, R., ‘Grand Narratives’, History Workshop Journal 29 (1990), 120–33. Sánchez-Albornoz, C., Despoblación y Repoblación en el Valle del Duero (Buenos Aires, 1966). Soifer Irish, M., ‘Beyond Convivencia: Critical Reflections on the Historiography of Interfaith Relations in Christian Spain’, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 1 (2009), 19–35.

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Such, P., and R. Rabone, The Poem of Fernán González: edited and translated with introduction and commentary (Liverpool, 2015). The Tibyān: Memoirs of ʻAbd Allāh b. Buluggīn, Last Zīrid Emīr of Granada, ed. and trans. Amin T. Tibi (Leiden, 1986). Wasserstein, D., The Rise and Fall of the Party Kings: Politics and Society in Islamic Spain, 1002–1086 (Princeton, 1985). West, B., Epic, Folk and Christian Traditions in the ‘Poema de Fernán González’ (Potomac, MD, 1983). Wolf, K.B., Conquerors and Chroniclers of Early Medieval Spain (2nd edn, Liverpool, 1999).

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Part 1 Hispania Old and New

∵

Chapter 1

The Life and Death of an Historiographical Folly: The Early Medieval Depopulation and Repopulation of the Duero Basin Julio Escalona and Iñaki Martín Viso One must always remember that, even if interpretations have moved on, traditionalist archaeological views were very often based upon knowledge of the material evidence that was and is second to none.1 1

National Histories and Historical Labels

All European historiographies are marked by one kind of cliché or another. Some of these clichés are so powerful that they dominate not only the national ‘grand narratives’ familiar to the general public, but also the perceptions of specialists, who are often just as ready to repeat inherited paradigms rather than subject them to criticism. Medieval Spain is no exception. Depending on their specific interests, many historians find themselves marooned in ‘Convivencia Country’ or ‘Frontier Country’, or, quintessentially, ‘Reconquista Country’. Such clichés often go far back in time (although often not as far as their proponents suggest), and the reason for their entrenchment and endurance is that between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries they became key components of the collective identity promoted by the nation-state, especially after History earned recognition as a formal academic discipline in the later nineteenth century. This ‘canonization’ fosters a tendency towards the formation of ‘tags’ or ‘watchwords’, used so as to trigger associations between discrete historical phenomena and an overarching narrative to which such phenomena are said to belong. For that reason, when it comes to criticizing or rejecting a ‘grand narrative’, it is unhelpful to do so by critically redefining its labels. In any given study, no matter how many pages are devoted to clarifying the term Reconquista, the mere appearance of the word will have a considerable impact upon the audience, evoking the network of meanings with which it is unconsciously associated, hindering any further attempt to alter it. For the same reason, we shall argue here that no matter how alive we are to the need for nuance, 1 G. Halsall, Worlds of Arthur (Oxford, 2013), 108.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004423879_003

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to describe the settlement patterns of central Iberia in the Middle Ages by deploying the terms ‘depopulation’ and ‘repopulation’ does nothing but buttress and strengthen Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz’s general theories about the history of Spain, further consolidating their ideological potency. This chapter will briefly review the origins of the depopulation theory and try to explain how it was formed, why it became so successful and how it produced its devastating effects upon the development of Spanish medievalism. But above all, this chapter is an appeal to medievalists: it implores them not only to bury once and for all a theory that is long since deceased, but also to dispense forever with the distorting vocabulary that supports and facilitates its persistence, even if this vocabulary is already becoming marginal in academia (if not in publications for the general public, where scholarly advances and developments are adopted piecemeal and often with considerable delay). Before proceeding any further, however, it must be noted – in light of the quotation from Guy Halsall with which this chapter opens – that it is important, as well as fair, to remember that in the eyes of the modern historian, the figure of Sánchez-Albornoz has two radically different faces. On the one hand, the vast majority of his work reveals a historian of great stature, possessed of excellent knowledge of Spanish and European history, expertise in modern and ancient languages, a mastery of the textual sources, especially legal and narrative texts, and an unrivalled command of analytical techniques. His many pages devoted to the critical study of documents and chronicles continue to impress by the clarity of their vision and the complexity of their arguments. His knowledge of medieval law and institutions could successfully challenge that of any current scholar in the field. The way he incorporated the Arabic sources into his heuristic armoury also marked a turning point in Spanish medievalism. But then there is the other Sánchez-Albornoz, the one that emerges from his most ambitious works on the Spanish Middle Ages or the history of Spain as a whole, culminating with his hefty España, un Enigma Histórico.2 Beyond its aggressive, polemical tone (Sánchez-Albornoz wrote this work as a c­ ounterblast to the rather literary and somewhat idyllic vision of medieval Spain

2 C. Sánchez-Albornoz, España, un enigma histórico, 2 vols (Buenos Aires, 1957) repr. Barcelona, 1985. On Sánchez-Albornoz’s personality and thought, see R. Pastor, ‘Claudio SánchezAlbornoz, historiador, maestro y militante’, in eadem (ed.), Sánchez-Albornoz a debate. Homenaje de la Universidad de Valladolid con motivo de su centenario (Valladolid, 1993), 9–19; eadem, ‘El problema del feudalismo hispánico en la obra de Sánchez-Albornoz’, in En torno al feudalismo hispánico. I Congreso de Estudios Medievales (León, 1989), 9–19; eadem, ‘El feudalismo en la obra de Sánchez-Albornoz y las intepretaciones actuales’, in Giornata Lincea per il centenario della nascita di Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz (Rome, 1995), 19–30.

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­conjured by Américo Castro), the most striking aspect of his magnum opus is actually its very idiosyncratic view of history.3 Sánchez-Albornoz personalized Spain, treating it as a quasi-living historical subject, endowed with a ‘personality’ forged through the centuries which had acquired its main features through two interrelated processes: reconquest and repopulation. Concerns about the meaning and essence of Spain were common among intellectuals of SánchezAlbornoz’s generation, such as José María Hinojosa, Rafael Altamira, Ramón Menéndez Pidal, or Castro himself, who shared the ‘regenerationist’ agenda of Spanish noventayochismo.4 The lack of a strong, unified Spanish identity of the French or American sort, in conjunction with the tangled web of atavisms that continued to find expression in Spanish politics during the formation of the nation state at the end of Spain’s troubled nineteenth century, provoked an extraordinary series of meta-historical essays about the essence of Spain. It was during the nineteenth century that the concept of Reconquista emerged in Spanish historiography, first to challenge and then to replace the traditional term of ‘restoration’, a term more faithful to the idea propounded by the Asturian monarchy itself.5 The contribution of Sánchez-Albornoz in this respect was crucial. It helped to consolidate a vision of the Spanish nation based upon the identification of Spain with Castile. This region had been the principal agent in the formation of the Spanish nation, and following this logic, its decline led to the crisis of national identity that marked the intellectual ambience of Sánchez-Albornoz’s youth. Equally significant was the idea that there exists a ‘collective spirit’ in Spain – which Sánchez-Albornoz often calls ‘race’ – which developed over the centuries and determined the essence of ‘Spanishness’.6 If for the modern historian Sánchez-Albornoz’s scholarly studies continue to appear insightful, one should never forget that the more technical facet of his work is functionally subordinated to his ideological objectives. The second of these twin pillars of his work dominates and to some extent influences the first, to the point of imposing a very noticeable bias even on the empirical details of his work. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the relationship between his concepts of depopulation and repopulation and the historical 3 A. Castro, España en su historia: moros, judíos y cristianos (Buenos Aires, 1948). 4 J. Portolés, Medio siglo de filología española (1896–1952). Positivismo e idealismo (Madrid, 1986). 5 M.F. Ríos Saloma, La Reconquista. Una construcción historiográfica (siglos xvi–xix) (Madrid, 2011). 6 See an early example of this line of thought in Sánchez-Albornoz’s first lecture to the general public, in 1919, much later published as C. Sánchez-Albornoz, ‘Vindicación histórica de Castilla’, in his Mis tres Primeros Estudios Históricos (Iniciación de una vocación) (Valladolid, 1974), 101–42.

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process that Sánchez-Albornoz considered ‘key to the history of Spain’: the Reconquista.7 As he put it himself, in typically strident prose: ‘The depopulation of the Duero valley is the basis of my entire thesis on the institutional and human history of Castile and Spain.’8 2

Birth: From Herculano to Sánchez-Albornoz

To track when and how Sánchez-Albornoz’s depopulation theory was formed is no easy task. His most programmatic work on this question, Despoblación y Repoblación en el Valle del Duero, published in 1966, was not a starting point, but rather a resolute statement of first principles, delivered – no doubt – with an accompanying fist on the table, in typical Sánchez-Albornoz style. The book’s aim was to establish the theory’s validity and forever silence the voices of those who were reluctant to accept it, particularly Menéndez Pidal.9 The theory was already well known to specialists because Sánchez-Albornoz had been using it as an argument for decades, and was happy to admit as much, stating that ‘I have defended many times since 1924 the reality of that emptying’.10 With these words Sánchez-Albornoz was probably alluding to his first major work, Orígenes de la nación española, for which he won the Covadonga Award. This extensive monograph – a turning point in the academic career of its author – remained unpublished for nearly fifty years, and when it finally appeared it was with so many changes that, in the absence of first-hand research by scholars on the manuscript that was originally submitted, it is ­difficult to know which parts are original and which the result of subsequent revisions.11 In fact, Orígenes has much in common with the later España, un 7 Sánchez-Albornoz, España, un enigma histórico, passim. 8 ‘La despoblación del valle del Duero es base de todas mis tesis sobre la historia institucional y vital de Castilla y de España’ [translation our own], which appears in C. SánchezAlbornoz, Despoblación y Repoblación en el Valle del Duero (Buenos Aires, 1966). See also, J.Á. García de Cortázar y Ruiz de Aguirre, ‘Sánchez-Albornoz y la repoblación del Valle del Duero’, in Pastor, Sánchez-Albornoz a debate, 33–44. 9 R. Menéndez Pidal, ‘Repoblación y tradición en la Cuenca del Duero’, in Enciclopedia Lingüística Hispánica (Madrid, 1960) vol. 1, xxix–lvii. 10 Sánchez-Albornoz, España, un enigma histórico, vol. 2, 17. 11 In the introduction to his Orígenes de la nación española. Estudios críticos sobre la Historia del reino de Asturias, 3 vols (Oviedo, 1972–1975), Sánchez-Albornoz made very interesting remarks on the importance of this award and how he was hastily ‘encouraged’ to compete. The same introduction reveals that the original text was provisional and that immediately after the award the author began making changes to a publication that would not see the light of day for half a century.

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enigma histórico and Despoblación y Repoblación, so it is probably a misleading guide to Sánchez-Albornoz’s early thinking.12 This being the case, it would only be possible to reconstruct the evolution of the ‘depopulation’ theory by means of a detailed dissection of his publications prior to España, un enigma histórico, and perhaps even his 1913 PhD thesis, a task beyond the scope of this essay.13 It should be noted, however, that several of his works on other, oftentimes seemingly unrelated issues, play an instrumental role in supporting the general theory of depopulation; examples include his study of the end of the Roman city, his analysis of the Asturian chronicles and Arabic sources, and his hypothesis regarding the existence of a lost eighth-century Asturian chronicle, apparently the basis for the late ninthcentury historiographical cycle of chronicles.14 The first systematic and comprehensive formulation of the theory appears in España, un enigma histórico, which already contained a section on the ‘Depopulation of the Duero valley’ (vol. 2, 16–33) and another on ‘Repopulation and repopulators’ (vol. 2, 33–44). It was those pages that Menéndez Pidal criticized in 1960, which in turn persuaded Sánchez-Albornoz to prepare a meticulous argument with which to counter his former mentor. In his extensive 1966 study, Despoblación y Repoblación, Sánchez-Albornoz also discussed the theory’s pedigree, claiming that his own role had merely been to refine and perfect an idea whose paternity he credited to Alexandre Herculano and Louis ­Barrau-Dihigo, two authors whose works he had critically scrutinized down to every detail.15 The reason why, in the writings of those two authors, the depopulation theory barely had any impact, while in Sánchez-Albornoz’s work it grew into an almost untouchable orthodoxy, depends, in our opinion, not so much upon the theory’s validity as upon its significance in the whole Albornocian canon, as we shall argue later. Both Herculano and Barrau-Dihigo deemed the depopulation of the Duero region to have been the result of a conscious 12 13 14

15

Ibid., vol. 1, 223–37. Similar problems are highlighted by García de Cortázar y Ruiz de Aguirre, ‘SánchezAlbornoz y la repoblación’. C. Sánchez-Albornoz, Ruina y extinción del municipio romano en España e instituciones que lo reemplazan (Buenos Aires, 1943); idem, En torno a los orígenes del feudalismo, ii: Los árabes y el régimen prefeudal carolingio. Fuentes de la historia hispanomusulmana del siglo viii (Mendoza, 1942); idem, El Ajbar Maymu’a. Problemas historiográficos que suscita (Buenos Aires, 1944); idem, ‘¿Una crónica asturiana perdida?’, Revista de Filología Hispánica 7 (1945), 105–46. idem, Despoblación y Repoblación, 9; A. Herculano de Carvalho e Araujo, Historia de Portugal (desde o começo da monarchia até o fim do reinado de Affonso iii) (Lisbon, 1875); L. Barrau-Dihigo, ‘Recherches sur l’histoire politique du royaume asturien (718–910)’, Revue Hispanique 52 (1921), 1–360.

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strategic decision by Alfonso i, the aim being to create a defensive buffer zone between the kingdom of Asturias and Al-Andalus. Looming large in the work of both authors is the idea that from the very beginning of the Islamic invasion the fight against the Muslims had been the main occupation of the Christian rulers of the north. The improbability of the notion that an eighth-century king could oversee the depopulation of a vast area of some 90,000 km2, primarily to protect his much smaller highland realm, posed no challenge to that vision. For Sánchez-Albornoz it was not as important to present Alfonso i’s raids as a purposeful strategy as it was to state a sharp discontinuity between the Roman and Visigothic past and the kingdom of Asturias, thereby highlighting repopulation as a national enterprise, which, along with the fight against Islam, shaped the institutions and the character of the Spanish Middle Ages. The link to the Visigothic period was institutional, cultural and religious, but there was no straightforward continuity in terms of settlement, population, or economic and social structures. By sweeping to one side the plateau’s pre-medieval past, the Asturian period could be presented as the territorial projection of a strong monarchy – a monarchy capable of creating ex nihilo a group of landowning peasants free from feudal bonds. Created during the same process was a military aristocracy of Gothic origins, controlled by a king whose own authority lay in the enduring Visigothic legal tradition. To this end Sánchez-Albornoz developed the complex argument that Alfonso i’s raids would not have caused the demographic emptying of the plateau, but would have merely delivered the final blow to a region already badly damaged by a long-term process of population loss, starting in Late Antiquity. In support of this idea he collected all possible indications of military and demographic disasters, such as the third- to fifth-century invasions, or the fifthand sixth-century plagues, and blamed them for both the destruction of the territorial pattern based upon Roman municipia, and the dismantling of the rural settlement network, in spite of the impossibility of measuring their actual impact.16 He stretched to the limit the scarce archaeological evidence available at the time to paint a picture of the total disruption of the Roman settlement network, emphasizing the abandonment of cities and uici, the failure to maintain the road network, and the disappearance of many placenames, even for major centres. Archaeology can considerably refine that image today, but there is no doubt that territorial structures in the Duero region underwent a dramatic fragmentation, both in urban and rural areas. However, the same process seems to have affected other areas of the central plateau in the 16 Sánchez-Albornoz, Despoblación y Repoblación, 138–48.

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fifth century for which it is not possible to identify a radical demographic weakening. Sánchez-Albornoz attributed similar effects to the Visigothic invasion, which, in accordance with interpretations in vogue when he was writing, he associated with the so-called ‘Visigothic cemeteries’ and the idea of a ‘popular settlement’ of free Visigothic peasant groups on the Duero plateau. Such realities, for Sánchez-Albornoz, did not cause an increase in population, but ­actually provoked even greater depopulation, by putting to flight many of the people who remained in the region: ‘an inflow of young blood would have indeed increased the population density in the country, had that settlement in turn not diminished the population in the plateau, undoubtedly forcing many of its former inhabitants to migrate in view of their full occupation of the country and the destruction that their progress would produce’.17 Sánchez-­Albornoz mined the textual evidence assiduously, especially that which described the plagues, droughts and famines that hit the Duero region through­out the sixth and seventh centuries. However, the passages he quotes from the Chronica Caesaraugustana or Gregory of Tours relate either to the entire peninsula or to areas outside the Duero region, but Sánchez-Albornoz extrapolated creatively from these texts, proposing that such disasters had a devastating impact in the Duero region, even if these same disasters would not have had the same effect in other areas of Hispania.18 The story indeed dovetails with the Islamic invasion of 711 (which would have prompted massive migration of natives to the northern mountains), Berber settlement in the Duero basin, and the subsequent withdrawal of these settlers after the famines and revolts of the 740s. Thus Sánchez-Albornoz managed to set out an argument for profound demographic decline even before Alfonso i initiated the sweeping raids that did away with what little was left of the urban network, leading to demographic desertification and, incidentally, a significant increase in population in the Cantabrian north, as a result of the massive influx of refugees from the plateau. Sánchez-Albornoz also introduced nuances, claiming, for instance, that not all of the plateau would have been totally depopulated, what with native groups surviving in remote areas, especially south of the Duero; the essential notion underpinning the above, however, was to propose a complete disorganization of the region, which saw itself 17

18

Ibid., 146: ‘Un juvenil torrente sanguíneo habría en verdad aumentado la densidad demográfica del país si ese asentamiento no hubiese a su vez mermado la población de la meseta forzando, sin duda, a emigrar a muchos de sus antiguos habitantes: ante su ocupación integral del país y por los destrozos que en su avanzar producirían’. Ibid., 146–48.

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turned into a ‘no man’s land’ interposed between Al-Andalus and the Asturian realm. This rupture would have affected not only the territories of the Duero, but also southern Galicia and northern Portugal, between the rivers Miño and Limia. The survival of the population in northern Galicia, however, would have facilitated the continuity of Visigothic ‘proto-feudal’ political and social structures, in stark contrast to the Castilian world of small freeholders that would ultimately define the characteristic social landscape of the Central Middle Ages. As far as sources are concerned, Sánchez-Albornoz put to use a truly overwhelming amount of data, including narrative texts (both Latin and Arabic), charters, inscriptions, archaeology and place-names – this latter a subject to which he devoted considerable time, since Menéndez Pidal’s objections of 1960 leant especially on toponymical data. However, a critical reading immediately reveals that the strength of his argument rests primarily on two pillars: first, the discourse of the late ninth-century Asturian chronicles, which describe very explicitly how Alfonso i fell upon the region, killing Muslim settlers and taking Christians to the north; second, the relatively numerous diplomas from the reign of Alfonso iii (866–910), which describe the Asturian monarchy’s expansion over the plateau in terms of the occupation and repopulation of a deserted space. All other evidence has the function of reinforcing or confirming what those two pillars of the Albornocian thesis are said to prove, or of providing parallel arguments with which to demonstrate their validity. ­Sánchez-Albornoz also offered relentless criticism of those who, like Barrau-­ Dihigo, questioned the diplomatic authenticity of the documents on which he based his thesis. 3

The Making of an Orthodoxy

Sánchez-Albornoz’s training in the German historicist school is evident in his careful analysis of texts, in the predominant role he assigns to law and institutions, and in his choice of the nation as the paramount object of study, although he conceded that great political actors were figureheads in moments of collective action. However, his political ideology and experience are equally important in explaining the trajectory of his historical writing. Throughout the 1930s he enjoyed a hugely successful academic career which led him to assume the directorship of the History Department of the Instituto de Estudios Medievales at the Centro de Estudios Históricos, and, in 1932, the position of Rector of the Universidad Central de Madrid. In addition, he was elected to the Parliament of the Second Spanish Republic, serving in Manuel Azaña’s

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­Acción Republicana party between 1931 and 1936, and he even served briefly as Minister of State in 1933. Coming from a family of Ávila livestock breeders, his political ideals were those of classic conservative liberalism. A strong defender of private property, for Sánchez-Albornoz the principal agents of Spanish history were not the industrial bourgeoisie, but rather the small- and mid-scale landowning farmers from the Castile and León region. In his view, large numbers of peasant proprietors and ranchers, created in the process of the medieval repopulation, were the true originators of the Spanish nation, the unity of which he defended with characteristic zeal from the burgeoning peripheral ­nationalisms – notably in the Catalan and Basque regions – of his time. His parliamentary speeches, typified by one famous effort of 1932 which addressed the pressing issue of agrarian reform, contain an interesting hybridization of contemporary politics and medieval scholarship.19 Involvement in the politics of the Second Republic obliged Sánchez-­ Albornoz to enter into exile at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War (1936– 1939) and finally to settle in Argentina at the end of 1940. From there, his writings continued to reach – with many restrictions at first – Spanish historians, among whom he enjoyed great prestige despite the political demonization he suffered.20 It was then that the idea of the depopulation of the Duero basin, a fragmentary component of many of those articles, became familiar and took root in the vocabulary of specialists. What is more, while in this embryonic form, it rarely encountered opposition. Only after the first systematic formulation, in España, un enigma histórico, did Menéndez Pidal publish the objections that triggered Sánchez-Albornoz’s bitter reply in 1966. But by then the theory had been widely accepted and many authors – whether favouring or opposing Franco’s regime – already interpreted the Iberian early Middle Ages in terms of ‘reconquest and repopulation’, if not ‘depopulation and repopulation’, and not only in the Duero basin, but all over the peninsula.21 From the 1950s the depopulation theory became commonplace in Spanish historiography, although few delved critically into Sánchez-Albornoz’s arguments. Most scholars thought – rather uncritically – that Sánchez-Albornoz’s arguments rested upon empirically demonstrated fact, and so they shaped their own research in response to what was in fact already an historiographical cliché. As a result, the theory snowballed into an unshakable orthodoxy that lasted well 19 20 21

J.L. Martín Rodríguez, ‘Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz ante la reforma agraria’, Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español 63–64 (1993–1994), 1123–34. Pastor, ‘Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, historiador, maestro y militante’. See more generally J.L. Barona Vilar (ed.), El exilio científico republicano (Valencia, 2011). See, for instance, the proceedings of the colloquium La reconquista española y la repoblación del país (Zaragoza, 1951).

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into the 1970s.22 Moreover, Sánchez-Albornoz’s nuanced arguments, and the detailed knowledge of the sources he deployed, were bypassed by most authors, who not only failed to elaborate or build upon them, but even simplified and exaggerated his views, producing more or less cartoonish versions that would have appalled Sánchez-Albornoz himself. For example, Herculano’s ­belief – rejected by Sánchez-Albornoz – that depopulation was a strategic move designed to create a defensive buffer against Al-Andalus became constantly repeated. Why so? Perhaps because for most people a simplistic explanation of an historical and political nature was more palatable than complex Malthusian arguments. One of the most interesting aspects of the dispersion of the depopulation theory was the way it spread beyond the northern plateau. Sánchez-­Albornoz had formulated a general theory for the whole Duero basin – more than 90,000 km2 – while recognizing that human groups could have survived in specific areas. But the general idea was undoubtedly convenient for a legion of local historians who addressed the analysis of much smaller areas, even localities, starting from the first principle that, as their respective localities had been uninhabited, it was therefore pointless to deal with awkward issues of continuity and change: the distant Roman and Visigothic past had nothing to do with early medieval settlement. The never-ending repetition of the argument at the local level served to establish a widespread unanimity with regards to the new orthodoxy. In the long run, this in turn had an impact upon the theory itself: consider, for example, that Julio González’s work on repopulation reinforced the axiom of the eighth-century depopulation, but also defined a whole new way of working in historical geography regardless of any connection to the premedieval past. This work, moreover, had the ‘value’ of expanding the same approach to the southern plains of present-day Extremadura and Castilla-La Mancha.23 Moreover, Sánchez-Albornoz’s model also spread to other areas, such as the Spanish March, that is, the Catalan counties under Carolingian rule. Thus, the devastation of the plains of Vic after Aizón’s revolt in 827 was used by Ramon d’Abadal to enhance the figure of Count Wifred the Hairy (­Guifré lo Pilòs). According to this view, Wifred unified some of the counties, exercising a political hegemony over the area, and, above all, took decisive steps towards building a separate sovereign power against the backdrop of 22 23

S. de Moxó, Repoblación y sociedad en la España cristiana medieval (Madrid, 1979). See, for instance, J. González González, ‘Repoblación de la Extremadura leonesa’, Hispania 12 (1943), 195–273; idem, ‘Reconquista y repoblación de Castilla, León, Extremadura y Andalucía (siglos xi al xiii)’, in La reconquista española y la repoblación del país, 163–206; idem, ‘La Extremadura castellana al mediar el siglo xiii’, Hispania 34 (1974), 265–424; idem, Repoblación de Castilla la Nueva (Madrid, 1975–76).

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Carolingian crisis. The repopulation carried out in the late ninth century would mark the strength of this new power, by turning the lands south of the Llobregat River into a defensive buffer zone against Al-Andalus. Alfonso i now had a matching Catalan alter ego.24 However, the success of the depopulation theory cannot be explained away by the intellectual apathy of those seeking an aprioristic interpretive shortcut that would spare them from having to deal with more complex issues. The real reason that ​​Sánchez-Albornoz’s theory gained such great acceptance was fundamentally ideological. The depopulation/repopulation thesis was nothing if not an apparently empirical cornerstone of a teleological conception of Spain’s entire past: it was therefore, with not a little irony, perfectly primed to succeed in Franco’s Spain. One of Sánchez-Albornoz’s most interesting contradictions is precisely that despite his personal commitment to the Second Republic and his very explicit opposition in exile to Franco’s dictatorship, his thinking as a medievalist, and more generally as an historian, was adopted by the academic and intellectual establishment of Franco’s regime, especially after the publication of España, un enigma histórico. The obvious explanation for this is that after the initial phase of rampant fascism and the dissemination of the regime’s official propaganda, what prevailed among the ruling classes of Franco’s Spain was a traditional, Catholic, anti-Marxist ideology, fully compatible with Sánchez-Albornoz’s own views. What indeed happened is that many of his ideas were replicated and exaggerated by the mediocre academic establishment of Francoism. A good example of the tension that this provoked can be seen in the way that the Benedictine abbot Fray Justo Pérez de Urbel, the Falange’s ‘official medievalist’, who had a long history of personal animosity with Sánchez-Albornoz, nevertheless adopted most of his doctrines, blending them with his own epic delusions into a peculiar mix of methodological positivism and a decidedly providentialist philosophy of history.25 It is equally interesting to note that the most authoritative voice to disagree with the depopulation theory was none other than that of Sánchez-Albornoz’s mentor, Menéndez Pidal. This he did by focusing on arguments of an historical and, above all, 24 25

R. d’Abadal i de Vinyals, Els primers comtes catalans (Barcelona, 1958); and idem, Dels visigots als catalans. Volum Primer. La Hispania visigótica i la Catalunya carolíngia (Barcelona, 1969). On Pérez de Urbel, see I. Peiró Martín and G. Pasamar Alzuria, Diccionario Akal de Historiadores Españoles Contemporáneos (Madrid, 2002), 485–86. See also C. Estepa Díez, ‘La Historia de Castilla y León en la Edad Media: perspectivas y realidades’, in Introducción a la Historia de Burgos en la Edad Media. I Jornadas Burgalesas de Historia (Burgos, 1990), 31–66; idem, ‘Las revistas de historia en España: el ejemplo de Hispania’, Revista de Historia Jerónimo Zurita (La Historia en el Horizonte del Año 2000) 71 (1997), 297–308.

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linguistic nature, and expressing disagreement with the empirical foundations of Sánchez-Albornoz’s ideas while accepting his overall vision of the national past, which was in turn fully compatible with his own. That Sánchez-Albornoz’s vision of Spain should triumph in the atmosphere of nationalist fervour of Francoism is not surprising. More shocking is that the depopulation thesis achieved comparable success among many foreign researchers, who in principle should have been less susceptible to the grand narrative of the Spanish nation-state (although it must be admitted that even in the 1960s Spain was hardly the easiest place for a foreigner to carry out firsthand archival research).26 With regard to the international dissemination of the depopulation theory, the obvious first place to look is Portugal, an ‘interested party’ in the process. Although the idea of ​​depopulation originated in Portuguese historiography, it never became a historiographical paradigm there, and it was in fact a relatively marginal idea. The paradox is even greater if we consider that much of the original Portuguese territorial heartland, the County of Portugal, lay within the Duero basin, and is the setting of some of the earliest evidence of the presuras.27 The key to this difference between these two countries (which are, lest we forget, neighbours, albeit neighbours who seem to turn their backs on each other), is again ideological. Sánchez-Albornoz openly credited the idea of de​​ population to the Portuguese historian Alexandre Herculano, even though he partially disagreed with his vision. A journalist and liberal politician who represented the Partido Cartista in parliament, Herculano published his first volume of the História de Portugal in 1846, with the idea of ​​creating a national history. His ideological inclinations were therefore quite close to Sánchez-­ Albornoz’s own and, like him, he was a prominent public figure. As the founder of the Portugaliae Monumenta Historica project, an attempt to follow in the footsteps of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Herculano combined two major influences: first, that of German historicism, and second, that of the French romantic historians like Guizot and Thierry, who understood national history as the history of ordinary people.28 Unlike his twentieth-century successors, Herculano envisaged a distinct discontinuity between the Lusitanian pre-Roman world and the Roman period: 26 27 28

We thank Rob Portass for his comments in this respect. A.M. de. C. Lima, ‘Povoamento e organização do territorio do Baixo Douro na época da monarquia asturiana’, in F.J. Fernández Conde and C. García de Castro Valdés (eds), Poder y Simbología en Europa. Siglos viii–x (Oviedo, 2009), 227–60. J. Barradas de Carvalho, As ideias políticas e sociais de Alexandre Herculano (Lisbon, 1971); C. Beirante and J. Custódio, Alexandre Herculano. Um homem e uma ideología na construção de Portugal. Antologia (Lisbon, 1978).

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to wit, Portugal was a fully Romanized country whose character was forged amidst the struggles against the Muslims and crystallized in the formation of the Portuguese monarchy under Afonso Henriques (1139–85). Later criticism of Herculano’s work by scholars like J.P. Oliveira Martins,29 Alberto Sampaio,30 Damião Peres,31 Torquato de Sousa Soares, or Avelino de Jesus da Costa,32 often offered a rejection of depopulation, proposing instead that the eighth century had seen an absence of government, but not the creation of a strategic desert. All of the aforementioned, and others like Pierre David33 or Orlando Ribeiro,34 based their criticism on a careful reassessment of the textual data, of precisely the sort that Sánchez-Albornoz was undertaking at the same time in order to defend the idea of ​​depopulation. If this did not triumph in Portugal, it was because the national imagination took a different course. The origins of Portugal were ever more commonly credited to the late Iron Age Lusitanian peoples who, under the leadership of Viriato, faced the Romans in the second century bc. A rupture in the eighth century would not only mean a crucial break in the connection between the contemporary Portuguese and their ancestors; it would also implicitly recognize that the depopulated north of Portugal had been repopulated by people from other, now Spanish, areas, and moreover, by the initiative of the kings of Asturias-León. Given the prominent role of anti-Castilian sentiment in the development of Portuguese identity since the seventeenth century, this was not an option. In Portugal the process of analysing the Middle Ages was tied up with the assertion of an identity of pre-Roman origins. While not all scholars necessarily shared this vision in its entirety, some certainly did,35 and it was well-established by the time it received the backing of Salazar’s Estado Novo, which emphasized the distinctiveness of both Lusitanian roots and the work of Afonso Henriques. Not until the democratization of Portugal in 1974 did new historiographical trends play down the pre-Roman identity and stress the 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

J.P. Oliveira Martins, Alexandre Herculano (Lisbon, 1967) on texts and letters exchanged by the author with Herculano in the second half of the nineteenth century. A. Sampaio, Estudos históricos e económicos. Vol. 1: As vilas do norte de Portugal, 2 vols (Lisbon, 1899–1903; 2nd edn 1923). D. Peres, História de Portugal, 9 vols (Barcelos, 1928–54). Criticism of depopulation appears in vol. 1, 437. T. de. S. Soares, ‘O repovoamento do Norte de Portugal no século ix’, Biblos 18 (1942), 5–26; idem, O bispo D. Pedro e a organização da diocese de Braga (Coimbra, 1959). P. David, Études historiques sur la Galice et le Portugal du viie au xiie siècle (Lisbon-Paris, 1947), 118–84. O. Ribeiro, Geografía de España y Portugal (Barcelona, 1955). T. de. S. Soares, Contribuição para o estudo das origens do povo português (Luanda, 1970).

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emergence of Portugal as another feudal monarchy.36 In general terms, the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Portuguese intellectual and political context was not markedly different from that of its Spanish neighbour, but the ideological need to stress differentiation from the dominant Spanish narrative prevented the success of the idea of depopulation ​​ in Portuguese historiography. By contrast, in other countries the key points of the ‘depopulation’ theory were generally accepted without much controversy, albeit with a significant delay. The argument fitted a widespread vision of medieval Spain as an exotic space, dominated by notions of frontier, colonization and conquest. Interestingly, the heated debate between Sánchez-Albornoz and Américo Castro had no winners or losers at the international level, and Spain became known simultaneously as the country of Reconquista and Convivencia.37 The depopulation theory became part and parcel of this vision. Such a general acceptance among authors who were in principle ‘immune’ to the grand narrative of the Spanish nation state may be due to the fact that the depopulation theory ultimately rested on a diffusionist concept of cultural change, dominant among historians and archaeologists in the first half of the twentieth century.38 Cultures at that time were seen as closed ensembles, that is to say, as h ­ ermetically-sealed ‘bundles’ of cultural traits: these were biological (related to races or ethnic groups), technical and artistic (pertaining to material culture) and s­ ocio-political (concerning social structures and institutions). Cultural change was understood as the replacement of given human groups by others, hence the extraordinary importance that pre-historians, linguists, anthropologists and historians conferred upon migrations and invasions as the explanation of change.39 As it happens, the putative existence of large-scale unpopulated areas was not an idea applied exclusively to Spain but had been raised in relation to other areas, such as Septimania, Anglo-Saxon England in the invasion period, or the

36

J. Mattoso, Identificação de um país. Ensaio sobre as origens de Portugal (1096–1325) (Lisbon, 1995). 37 Sánchez-Albornoz, España, un enigma histórico, represents an explicit reaction (not without reason in many respects) against the work of Castro, whose España en su historia quickly became popular among American hispanists, especially in the field of literary studies if not so much among historians. See J.L. Abellán, ‘La polémica de Sánchez Albornoz con Américo Castro’, in Pastor, Sánchez-Albornoz a debate, 45–52. 38 B.G. Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought (Cambridge, 1989), 150–54. 39 See, quintessentially, L. Musset, Les invasions. Les vagues germaniques (Paris, 1965) and the same author’s Les invasions. Le second assaut contre l’Europe chrétienne (viie–ixe siècles) (Paris, 1965).

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Slavic areas at the time of German expansion. The notional depopulation of the Duero basin therefore seemed to tally with a process of more general importance; yet it also had the enormous appeal of creating a kind of medieval ‘far West’ facing the Islamic world: an idealised exotic periphery in a medieval Europe whose core was then indisputably embodied by France and championed by French historians.40 The power of Sánchez-Albornoz’s arguments also served to win over international medievalists who were more familiar with the specific Iberian sources and context, even if most did not assume their associated ideological implications.41 It is no exaggeration to say that the theory of depopulation became an orthodoxy. It not only achieved an unusual hegemony among specialists but also spread among the general public, so much so that even today it is a frequently repeated cliché on internet forums. In academia it became untouchable, with significant consequences. At the ideological level, the most obvious ­consequence – albeit one that cannot be addressed in detail here – was the consolidation of Reconquista as the ‘engine’ of Iberian medieval history, an idea that only recently has begun to lose traction in the field, as the title of this volume shows.42 Nonetheless, on purportedly more empirical and methodological grounds depopulation made no less of an impact. Hailed by most as proven fact rather than mere hypothesis, the depopulation theory became a major tool with which to evaluate the sources of the early medieval period: this led to a beautifully circular exercise. Charters containing elements that were at odds with the idea were considered false or manipulated, while others were deemed sound because of their relevance to, and apparent support of, the core precepts of depopulation and repopulation. The few medieval archaeological sites studied before the 1980s were interpreted aprioristically in the light of the depopulation theory, and certain cultural traits were dated according not to archaeological criteria but to the need to locate them on either side of the population vacuum. Perhaps the clearest example of this kind of interpretation of archaeological 40 41

42

The influence on Sánchez-Albornoz of Turner’s notion of the frontier as expressed in F.J. Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York, 1920) is very clear. See García de Cortázar y Ruiz de Aguirre, ‘Sánchez-Albornoz y la repoblación’, at 33. See, for instance, J. Gautier-Dalché, ‘Châteaux et peuplements dans la Péninsule Ibérique (x–xiii siècles)’, Flaran 1 (1979), 93–107; A. Mackay, Spain in the Middle Ages: From Frontier to Empire, 1000–1500 (London, 1977); P. Vilar, Histoire de l’Espagne (Paris, 1958). There were also dissenting voices, like that of D.W. Lomax, The Reconquest of Spain (London, 1978), who limited depopulation only to specific towns, and defended the idea that there existed a no man’s land, rather than a desert. F. García Fitz, La reconquista (Granada, 2010).

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sites concerns rock-cut graves, which were until recently considered to be emblematic features of the reality of the Sánchez-Albornoz thesis.43 In parallel, the belief in an eighth-century demographic break also led to disciplinary watersheds. For example, the study of the Visigothic and post-711 periods was divided by the apparent watershed of the Muslim invasion, with the exception of religious, cultural or institutional issues thought to have endured into the Asturian period through ‘neo-Gothicism’; but Visigothic archaeology rested firmly on the side of Antiquity, usually under the ‘Christian archaeology’ tag that was a favourite of the time. In Art History, the study of Visigothic architecture likewise belonged to the realm of Classical Studies, in contrast to the architecture of later times, labelled ‘Mozarabic’, or, more explicitly, ‘repopulation architecture’, although this formula is a latecomer.44 Place-name studies were split between the analysis of ‘pre-Roman survivals’ undertaken by specialists in Indo-European languages – ​​who, incidentally, constantly found pre-Roman linguistic elements up and down the length and breadth of the Duero basin – and the study of ‘Reconquista place-names’, interpreted as the vestigial footprints of the occupation of an empty space.45 But it was certainly the more grounded studies of economy, society, population and territory that were most influenced by a vision that defined Astur-Leonese expansion as the top-down imposition of a solid institutional system of Visigothic pedigree. This expansion was nothing less than a national effort to recover the territories lost in 711.46 4

The End Begins

Until the 1960s, rejection of the depopulation theory was little more than anecdotal. Critical voices appeared here and there, privately expressing suspicion 43

44 45 46

A. de. Castillo Yurrita, ‘Cronología de las tumbas llamadas olerdolanas’, in xi Congreso Nacional de Arqueología (Zaragoza, 1970), 835–45. An early denunciation of the negative effects of the depopulation theory on archaeology is F. Reyes Téllez, ‘El problema del despoblamiento del valle del Duero a la luz de los hallazgos arqueológicos’ (MA Thesis, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1979). We thank the author for granting access to his unpublished manuscript. His arguments are summarized in idem and M.L. Menéndez Robles, ‘Aspectos ideológicos en la despoblación del Valle del Duero’, in J. Arce and R. Olmos (eds), Historiografía de la Arqueología y de la Historia Antigua en España (siglos xviii–xx) (Madrid, 1991), 199–207. I. Bango, ‘Arquitectura de la décima centuria: ¿Repoblación o mozárabe?’, Goya: Revista de arte 122 (1974), 68–75. F. Marsá, ‘Toponimia de reconquista’, in Enciclopedia Lingüística Hispánica, 615–46. See further J. Escalona, ‘The early Castilian peasantry: An archaeological turn?’, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 1 (2009), 119–45.

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or doubt, but very few dared to contradict the dominant orthodoxy in written form.47 Perhaps most influential were the excavators of the site of El Castellar, who argued in support of continuous occupation during the period in which most rural settlements were supposed to have been uninhabited; however, casedriven criticism such as this could not make a significant dent in the t­ heory as a whole.48 Menéndez Pidal’s critiques, mentioned above, are an entirely different matter, as they cast doubt on the overall validity of the model, though they did so by examining place-names and other linguistic evidence, thereby attacking only relatively peripheral components of Sánchez-­Albornoz’s arguments. Nor was it uncommon to hear in those years the pie-in-the-sky idea that only archaeology, were it ever to take off, would be able to clarify whether depopulation occurred or did not; unhappily, such was the dominance of the depopulation theory at that time that it effectively served to block the development of early medieval archaeology in academia.49 The whole idea was flawed, of course, because the goal of modern archaeology cannot be to corroborate or refute a historiographical theory through a ‘systematic and comprehensive barrage of archaeological tests’ throughout the Duero basin.50 Spanish medieval archeology in the 1980s, rising from unsure beginnings, was indeed faced with a more pressing task: to settle upon its own objectives of study. The real turning point did not come from archaeology or local studies but from a critique of the fundamental basis of the theory. In a book whose influence on late twentieth-century Spanish medievalism cannot be overstated, Abilio Barbero and Marcelo Vigil offered the first well-theorized alternative argument to depopulation, which, furthermore, challenged Sánchez-Albornoz’s entire interpretation of the history of Spain.51 Barbero and Vigil comprehensively 47 48

49 50

51

This was the case of de Moxó in his Repoblación y sociedad, who echoed the criticism of depopulation but ultimately accepted its validity. M.Á. García Guinea, J. González Echegaray, and B. Madariaga de la Campa, El Castellar (Villajimena, Palencia) (Madrid, 1963). Cf., for a critical review, R. Bohigas Roldán and A. Ruiz Gutiérez, ‘Las cerámicas visigodas de poblado en Cantabria y Palencia’, Boletín de Arqueología Medieval 3 (1989), 31–51. J. Escalona, ‘L’archéologie médiévale chrétienne en Espagne: entre recherche et gestion du patrimoine’, in E. Magnani (ed.), Le Moyen Âge vu d’ailleurs: voix croisées d’Amérique latine et d’Europe (Dijon, 2009), 253–74. ‘…un sistemático y exhaustivo “rodillo” de catas arqueológicas’: the phrase is from J.Á. García de Cortázar y Ruiz de Aguirre, ‘Del Cantábrico al Duero’, in his edited collection, Organización social del espacio en la España medieval. La Corona de Castilla en los siglos viii a xv (Barcelona, 1985), 43–83, at 61. A. Barbero de Aguilera and M. Vigil Pascual, La formación del feudalismo en la península ibérica (Barcelona, 1978). A thorough analysis of the work of Barbero and Vigil, perhaps the most influential in medieval Iberian studies in the late twentieth century, is entirely beyond the scope of the present chapter. Suffice it to note that subsequent criticism has

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exposed the shortcomings of the depopulation theory, showing it to be based on a face-value reading of the ninth-century Asturian chronicles. Sánchez­Albornoz had assumed that the passages in the chronicles concerning Alfonso i’s raid over the plateau came from a hypothetical eighth-century lost chronicle which was ‘closer’ to the facts. Barbero and Vigil rejected that idea and demonstrated that the chronicles’ account of depopulation, and the charters that allegedly illustrated the repopulation, were part and parcel of one single discourse aimed at legitimizing the Asturian takeover of the Duero and, more generally, promoting the Asturian monarchy’s neo-Gothic image. This ideology, far from having inspired the Asturian monarchs from Pelayo, had only been developed since the time of Alfonso iii, under whom both the chronicles and the charters that illustrate presuras and repopulation were written.52 Barbero and Vigil’s argument was elegantly devastating because it tore down the very foundations of Sánchez-Albornoz’s theory instead of simply arguing in favour of population continuity here or there. Alternatively, they proposed a broad continuity of population based on the models that they had developed for the Cantabrian peoples of the northern fringe, which societies they considered to be ‘primitive’ and characterized by patterns of social organization that they labelled ‘tribal’. Deriving as it did from an approach to anthropological studies that was already outdated, the model of ‘pervivencias gentilicias’ (‘tribal, or kin-based, traces’) was probably the weakest part of their argument. The chapter of La formación del feudalismo devoted to destroying the depopulation theory is possibly the most inspiring in a book the real goal of which was to dismantle the entire meta-historical vision of ‘Reconquest Spain’, a vision then still dominant in academic circles.53 Adding insult to injury, Barbero and Vigil set about this task from an explicitly Marxist standpoint, the first fully realized one in Spanish medievalism; this fact alone soon provoked a split between those who saw such trenchantly politicized writing as a breath of fresh air and those for whom it was an outrageous and unwelcome novelty. The arguments made by Barbero and Vigil were soon taken up by other scholars. These newly emboldened scholars began to work free of the shackles of depopulation, although the lack of a well-defined alternative model to which all could rally soon became a problem, what with ‘pervivencias gentilicias’ themselves becoming something of a cliché in the 1990s.54 Moreover, the

52 53 54

r­evealed numerous empirical and interpretive shortcomings in its arguments, but this does not diminish in the least its impact at the time. More specifically, the section devoted to the depopulation of the Duero basin retains, in our view, its full force. Ibid., 232–78. Ibid., 213–28. For example, C. Estepa Díez, ‘La vida urbana en el norte de la Península Ibérica en los siglos viii y ix. El significado de los términos civitates y castra’, Hispania 38 (1978), 257–74;

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academic orthodoxy of depopulation was so firmly rooted that in the 1980s it proved surprisingly obdurate. To complicate matters further, in addition to the unmistakable political overtones of La formación del feudalismo, the book first appeared at a watershed moment in Spanish history – the transition to democracy. The book’s dissemination among the academic establishment suffered as a result; many historians, some of whom shared the authors’ criticisms, refrained from explicitly aligning themselves with the book’s implications. 5

Zombification

And yet Barbero and Vigil’s major works appeared at a crucial moment in another respect, for they coincided with a ‘generational replacement’ in Spanish medievalism, after which outside influences were welcomed and new interpretations developed. Many scholars in the 1970s and 1980s felt the need to insert Iberian history in its wider European framework and to dump the traditional meta-historical discourse that waved the banner of Spain’s peculiarity (encapsulated by the unprecedented international success of the ‘Spain is different’ slogan with which Franco’s regime attracted tourism from the 1960s). In this context, d​​ epopulation and repopulation became part of the historiographical inheritance in need of revision. Amidst this background, Sánchez-Albornoz ended his four-decade-long exile and returned to a newly democratic Spain, receiving numerous honours for his political and academic career, including the prestigious Príncipe de Asturias Communication and Humanities Award in 1984, barely a month before his death in Ávila. Far from suffering a rapid collapse, in the 1980s the depopulation theory entered a prolonged death spiral, partially supported by a new model which replaced the old concepts of depopulation and repopulation with colonization.55 Sánchez-Albornoz himself had distinguished the ‘official’ repopulation, led by kings and their delegates, from a more spontaneous one led by peasant

55

J.M. Mínguez Fernández, El dominio del monasterio de Sahagún en el siglo x. Paisajes agrarios, producción y expansión económica (Salamanca, 1980), 63; and, later on, A. Isla Frez, La sociedad gallega en la Alta Edad Media (Madrid, 1992), 49–70. In archaeology Francisco Reyes’s pioneering PhD thesis, supervised by Barbero until his death in 1990, was the first to advance in this direction: F. Reyes Téllez, Poblacion y sociedad en el Valle del Duero, Duratón y Riaza en la Alta Edad Media, siglos vi al xi: aspectos arqueológicos (­Madrid, 2000) CD-ROM edition. For an early example of a critical voice, see J. Escalona, ‘Algunos problemas relativos a la génesis de las estructuras territoriales de la Castilla altomedieval’, in Burgos en la Alta Edad Media. ii Jornadas Burgalesas de Historia Medieval (Burgos, 1991), 489–506, esp. at 493–94.

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settlers. The colonization model emphasized the role of pioneering farmers who gradually filled the Duero basin with a swarm of village communities, their inhabitants pushing ever southwards the borders of the ‘Duero desert’. The model of peasant colonization did not hypothetically preclude the prior abandonment of the region, but it replaced the largely top-down institutionalist approach of previous decades with a social and economic one that owed much to the introduction into Spanish medievalism of the influence of the Annales School. The colonization model is best represented by the abundant output of José Ángel García de Cortázar, who rejected ­Sánchez-Albornoz’s meta-historical postulations and proposed instead the notion of the ‘social organization of space’, a concept that he and his numerous students refined over many years, beginning with a seminal volume in 1985.56 Along with García de Cortázar, Pascual Martínez Sopena made a major contribution with his thesis on Tierra de Campos,57 which followed a pioneering study of the well-documented village of Villobera,58 where instead of repopulation, notions such as peasant settlement, the expansion of arable, and the concentration of property take centre stage. Although hardly representing a radical departure from depopulation, which García de Cortázar marginalized but never fully denied, this new model paved the way for social and economic studies focused upon the dynamics between peasant communities and feudal lords, and was heavily influenced by French models like Georges Duby’s ‘saltus vs. ager’ and ‘warriors vs. peasants’ vision of early medieval society.59 García de Cortázar’s model provided mainstream historians with an ideologically more palatable choice than Barbero and Vigil’s openly Marxist notion of feudalism. Moreover, it also furnished them with an internationally recognizable framework for the understanding of early medieval settlement that was far more concrete than Barbero and Vigil’s vague model, in which tribal village communities underwent a process of disarticulation under feudal pressure. Consider, for example, the impact upon a new generation of medieval 56 57 58 59

García de Cortázar y Ruiz de Aguirre, ‘Del Cantábrico al Duero’. P. Martínez Sopena, La Tierra de Campos Occidental: poblamiento, poder y comunidad del siglo x al xiii (Valladolid, 1985). Idem and M.J. Carbajo Serrano, ‘Notas sobre la colonización de Tierra de Campos en el siglo x: Villobera’, in El pasado histórico de Castilla y León. Actas del I Congreso de Historia de Castilla y León, 3 vols (Burgos, 1983), vol. 1, 113–25. The agenda included issues such as ‘feudalization’ or ‘forms of spatial organization’. J.Á. García de Cortázar y Ruiz de Aguirre, ‘Las formas de organización social del espacio del Valle del Duero en la Alta Edad Media: de la espontaneidad al control feudal’, in Despoblación y Colonización del Valle del Duero (siglos viii al xx) (Ávila, 1995), 13–44, and ‘La formación de la sociedad feudal en el cuadrante noroccidental de la península ibérica en los siglos viii a xii’, Initium 4 (1999), 57–121.

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­historians, equipped with Annales School training, of García de Cortázar’s classification of the work of Barbero and Vigil as ‘a society without space’.60 At the same time, supporters of colonization rarely dared to refute depopulation and largely ignored, or at least never assumed, the implications of Barbero and Vigil’s criticism of its heuristic basis. By the mid-1990s colonization had gained wide acceptance, as evidenced in major meetings, like the Oviedo Congress on Alfonso iii, or the Fourth Congress of Medieval Studies of the Sánchez-­Albornoz Foundation, entitled Despoblación y colonización del valle del Duero.61 In a favourable political and ideological context, a modern and more flexible model was emerging which significantly changed the historiographical landscape while also granting life support to the retreating depopulation theory. The model even proved useful to explicitly Marxist scholars who reformulated the depopulation/colonization toolkit in terms of modes of production.62 If colonization never became as robust an orthodoxy as depopulation had been, it was because, on the one hand, it never produced an aggressively dogmatic formulation in the Sánchez-Albornoz style, and, on the other hand, scholars blended the principles of colonization with an explicit rejection of depopulation. Thus, Ángel Barrios’ reassessment of place-names south of the Duero led him to defend the notion that a large proportion of the population continued to live in stable settlements in the eighth century; at the same time, he afforded some importance to waves of spontaneous colonization by peasants from the north.63 Likewise José María Mínguez, using textual evidence, suggested that the Duero plateau remained basically occupied, even if it was not fertile terrain for the development of complex socio-political structures. Peasant colonization acted upon a scarcely organized landscape where the monarchy’s role in directing the process of repopulation would arrive later, bringing political and administrative organization to a territory where population growth, expansion of productive spaces and changes in social organization were already underway.64 The rejection of the depopulation thesis was 60 61 62 63 64

García de Cortázar y Ruiz de Aguirre, ‘Del Cantábrico al Duero’, 35. See F.J. Fernandez Conde (ed.), La época de Alfonso iii y San Salvador de Valdediós. Congreso de Historia medieval (Oviedo, 1994), and in particular the contributions by José Ángel García de Cortázar and Carlos Reglero. See Despoblación y Colonización, passim. J.J. García González and I. Fernández de Mata, Estudios sobre la transición al feudalismo en Cantabria y la cuenca del Duero (Burgos, 1999). A. Barrios Garcia, ‘Repoblación de la zona meridional del Duero. Fases de ocupación, procedencias y distribución espacial de los grupos repobladores’, Studia Historica. Historia Medieval 3 (1985), 33–82. Mínguez’s approaches have since evolved (like those of all authors cited in this section). See J.M. Mínguez Fernández, Las sociedades feudales, 1. Antecedentes, formación y expansión (siglos vi al xiii) (Madrid, 1994); idem, ‘La despoblación del Duero: un tema a debate’,

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particularly noticeable in Galicia, in both the scholarship of historians and archaeologists.65 The rise of the colonization model clearly represents a transitional phase between the general acceptance of depopulation and its total abandonment. As the 1990s unfolded, Sánchez-Albornoz’s unconditional supporters became increasingly confined to the history of law and institutions,66 whilst most medievalists opted for colonization.67 However, the turning point was the emergence of a new wave of studies that not only radically rejected depopulation but also colonization, this latter on the grounds that it was a by-product of the first. From the late 1970s a small group of scholars associated with the circle of Barbero and Vigil – most notable amongst them Carlos Estepa – set out to undertake studies on settlement and territory.68 These studies were aimed at developing more complex models of continuity between Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, in which neither depopulation nor colonization played any significant role. The incorporation of the meagre archaeological data a­ vailable

65

66

67

68

in S. Aguadé and J. Pérez (eds) Les origines de la féodalité. Hommage à Claudio SánchezAlbornoz (Madrid, 2000), 169–82; idem, ‘Poderes locales en el espacio central leonés durante el periodo astur’, in Fernández Conde and García de Castro Valdés, Poder y Simbología, 199–214. Isla Frez, La sociedad gallega; E. Portela Silva, ‘Galicia en la época de Alfonso iii’, in Fernández Conde, La época de Alfonso iii, 79–95; J. López Quiroga and M. Rodríguez Lovelle, ‘Un modelo de análisis del poblamiento rural en el valle del Duero (siglos viii–x) a partir de un espacio macro-regional: las tierras galaico-portuguesas’, Anuario Español de Medievalismo 27 (1997), 687–748; J. López Quiroga, El final de la Antigüedad en la Gallaecia. La transformación de las estructuras de poblamiento entre Miño y Duero (siglos v al x) (La Coruña, 2004). See the work on legal and institutional issues and on historical geography of G. Martínez Díez, including Génesis histórica de la provincia de Burgos y sus divisiones administrativas (Burgos, 1983); idem, Las comunidades de villa y tierra de la Extremadura castellana (­Madrid, 1983); idem, Pueblos y alfoces burgaleses de la Repoblación (Valladolid, 1987). García de Cortázar’s ‘social organization of space’ actually set the tone for a new research agenda in which depopulation became an increasingly marginal component in relation to other processes. Compare the foundational 1985 volume Organización social del espacio with the later Del Cantábrico al Duero. Trece estudios sobre organización social del espacio en los siglos viii a xiii (Santander, 1999), where the role afforded to depopulation has been seriously reduced, and a more recent volume which celebrates the validity of the concept of ‘social organization of space’, namely, J.Á. Sesma Muñoz and C. Laliena Corbera, La pervivencia del concepto. Nuevas reflexiones sobre la ordenación social del espacio en la Edad Media (Zaragoza, 2008). In this latter volume depopulation does not feature. C. Estepa Díez, Estructura social de la ciudad de León (siglos xi–xiii) (León, 1977); idem, ‘La vida urbana en el norte de la Península Ibérica’; idem, ‘El alfoz castellano en los siglos ix al xii’, En la España Medieval (Estudios dedicados al profesor d. Angel Ferrari Núñez, 1) 4 (1984), 305–42.

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at the time was another characteristic of these studies, as was the attempt to find contact points with international debates, such as the one on ‘feudal revolution’.69 These developments were equally connected to an explicit rejection of depopulation by stressing the fundamentally political meaning of the word populare in the written sources, thus demanding a more complex approach to debates hitherto focused on measuring ‘indigenous’ influence against ‘Roman’ influence.70 One of the most interesting consequences of this shift was that if SánchezAlbornoz’s theory was consigned to oblivion, it must also be recognized that in similar fashion many of Barbero and Vigil’s proposals were also rejected, even by their direct disciples. Their exceedingly primitivistic model of supposed ‘tribal characteristics’ was gradually dismissed by researchers, who came to focus instead upon the analysis of the different ways the Roman world ended in the West and the variety of situations that emerged in its wake.71 To break free from the depopulation thesis was paramount, but equally so was to establish connections beyond Spanish academe and to make comparisons with processes seen in other early medieval contexts. Tellingly, the first article outlining a pattern of varied regional transition from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages for the Duero basin appeared in English in the journal Early Medieval Europe.72 Meanwhile, medieval archaeology slowly found a place for itself in Spanish academia and set out to build a proper archaeological agenda, with the aim of investigating the material dimensions of the complex social, economic, and cultural processes that defined the Iberian north-west in the fifth

69

70 71

72

E. Pastor Díaz de Garayo, Castilla en el tránsito de la Antigüedad al feudalismo. Poblamiento, poder político y estructura social del Arlanza al Duero (siglos vii–xi) (Valladolid, 1996), defends a certain continuity of population, but with new patterns of settlement, and a continuity of public political relationships. A different view, emphasizing the endurance of some settlement patterns within a changing socio-political background is found in I. Martín Viso, Poblamiento y estructuras sociales en el norte de la Península Ibérica, siglos vi–xiii (Salamanca, 2000); cf. J. Escalona, Sociedad y territorio en la Alta Edad Media castellana: la formación del alfoz de Lara (Oxford, 2002), and, for Galicia, López Quiroga, El final de la Antigüedad en la Gallaecia. A. Isla Frez, ‘Los astures: el populus y la populatio’, in La época de la monarquía asturiana (Oviedo, 2002), 17–42. It is fair to note the great influence of the publication of the Spanish translation of Chris Wickham’s ‘The other transition’, Past and Present 103 (1984), 3–36, first published in Spanish as C. Wickham, ‘La otra transición: del mundo antiguo al feudalismo’, Studia Historica. Historia Medieval 7 (1989), 7–35. S. Castellanos García and I. Martín Viso, ‘The local articulation of central power in the north of the Iberian Peninsula (500–1000)’, Early Medieval Europe 13 (2005), 1–42.

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to tenth centuries, rather than running tests across the plateau in an effort to refute or confirm depopulation.73 6

The Final Curtain

Since Gonzalo Martínez Díez passed away in 2014, the defenders of depopulation have become almost invisible in academia, and the whole theory has virtually disappeared from the agenda of scholarly projects, conferences and the like. Most scholars have simply decided to ignore it and to engage in the study of processes which can be empirically verified and yield insights into the dynamics of early medieval Iberia in an increasingly internationalized research environment. The model of depopulation survives elsewhere, however, thanks to its former dominance, and the slowness with which academic advances are disseminated among the general public. Witness the Wikipedia entry ‘Desierto del Duero’, which (at the time of writing) rather appallingly states: ‘depopulation was a notorious fact, despite some authors, mainly Barbero and Vigil, who deny it with no documentary or archaeological support, nor try to refute the theses of Albornoz’.74 A similar ignorance of recent – and not so recent – ­historiographical developments is apparent in publications on medieval Iberia from outside Spain which keep uncritically rolling out the notion of depopu​​ lation in total disregard of advances in Spanish medievalism. Not everything remains static, though. If in 1989 Roger Collins, a fine connoisseur of Spanish historiography, felt the need to examine different views on depopulation in his book on the Arab conquest of Spain, defining the Duero region as a ‘cordon sanitaire’,75 in his 2012 contribution to the same series, depopulation does not even merit a mention.76 Some younger scholars have reflected upon the matters discussed in this chapter and chosen to ignore depopulation, while approaching the period from perspectives which account for developments made elsewhere in Europe.77 Eppur si muove. 73

See, for example, J.A. Quirós Castillo (ed.), El poblamiento rural de época visigoda en Hispania. Arqueología del campesinado en el interior peninsular (Bilbao, 2013). For Galicia, see J.C. Sánchez Pardo, ‘Power and rural landscapes in early medieval Galicia (400–900 A.D): towards a re-incorporation of the archaeology into the historical narrative’, Early Medieval Europe 21 (2013), 140–68. 74 See https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desierto_del_Duero (accessed 16/10/2017). 75 R. Collins, The Arab Conquest of Spain, 710–797 (Oxford, 1989). 76 idem, Caliphs and Kings: Spain, 796–1031 (Chichester, 2012). 77 R. Portass, ‘All Quiet on the Western Front? Royal Politics in Galicia from c.800 to c.950’, Early Medieval Europe 21 (2013), 283–306.

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The depopulation theory must be studied as an historical artefact in its own right, within the framework of the history of nationalist historiography. The theory’s success can only be explained by its specific political and ideological context, and, crucially, through Sánchez-Albornoz’s considerable intellectual achievement; furthermore, to reject depopulation should imply no slight toward his many inspiring studies on a huge number of issues of interest to medievalists. However, to keep objecting to depopulation is to suppose it still alive, when it is in fact a ghost, now bereft of its supporters. It is time for the students of the early medieval history of the Iberian north-west to break free from and to reject the millstone of the depopulation theory – a millstone that has slowed the progress of historical enquiry for decades. It now behoves us to keep exploring new and more relevant avenues, as the present volume eloquently shows. It is also time for non-Iberian scholars to rid themselves of clichés that they would deem unacceptable if applied to their own national histories. In fact, all historians would benefit from developing interpretive frameworks which look to overcome the tyranny of the narrow nineteenthcentury national histories which reinvented the Middle Ages in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.78 In the Hieronymites’ monastery at Lisbon, one of Portugal’s most emblematic historical sites, rest the remains of Alexandre Herculano, along with those of other illustrious countrymen, like Henry the Navigator, Vasco da Gama, Camões, and Pessoa. In the cloister of Ávila Cathedral rest the remains of Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, along with those of Adolfo Suárez, the first prime minister of post-Franco Spain: a fitting parallel for two like-minded men, Herculano and Sánchez-Albornoz, despite their separation in time and space. Both are honoured and remembered, as they deserve to be. But it is now the moment to lay to rest, with full funerary honours, the long deceased notions of depopulation, repopulation and, ultimately, Reconquista, which have long distorted our understanding of Iberia’s medieval past. Acknowledgements This article has been prepared within the framework of, and with support from the research projects HAR2013-47789-C3-1-P and HAR2013-47789-C3-2-P, directed respectively by Iñaki Martín Viso and Julio Escalona. The authors would like to thank Simon Barton and Robert Portass for their kind invitation to 78

P. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, NJ, 2003); I. Wood, The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages (Oxford, 2013).

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­ articipate in this volume and for their editorial help. Preliminary versions of p the text were read and commented upon by Cristina Jular, Isabel Alfonso and Carlos Estepa. The authors are grateful for their comments, but claim full responsibility for any shortcomings this chapter may contain. Bibliography Abadal i de Vinyals, R. d’, Els primers comtes catalans (Barcelona, 1958). Abadal i de Vinyals, R. d’, Dels visigots als catalans. Volum Primer. La Hispània visigòtica i la Catalunya carolíngia (Barcelona, 1969). Abellán, J.L., ‘La polémica de Sánchez Albornoz con Américo Castro’, in R. Pastor, Sánchez-Albornoz a debate. Homenaje de la Universidad de Valladolid con motivo de su centenario (Valladolid, 1993), 45–52. Bango, I., ‘Arquitectura de la décima centuria: ¿Repoblación o mozárabe?’, Goya: Revista de arte 122 (1974), 68–75. Barbero de Aguilera, A. and M. Vigil Pascual, La formación del feudalismo en la península ibérica (Barcelona, 1978). Barona Vilar, J.L. (ed.), El exilio científico republicano (Valencia, 2011). Barradas de Carvalho, J., As ideias políticas e sociais de Alexandre Herculano (Lisbon, 1971). Barrios Garcia, A., ‘Repoblación de la zona meridional del Duero. Fases de ocupación, procedencias y distribución espacial de los grupos repobladores’, Studia Historica. Historia Medieval 3 (1985), 33–82. Barrau-Dihigo, L., ‘Recherches sur l’histoire politique du royaume asturien (718–910)’, Revue Hispanique 52 (1921), 1–360. Beirante, C. and J. Custódio, Alexandre Herculano. Um homem e uma ideología na construção de Portugal. Antologia (Lisbon, 1978). Bohigas Roldán, R. and A. Ruiz Gutiérez, ‘Las cerámicas visigodas de poblado en Cantabria y Palencia’, Boletín de Arqueología Medieval 3 (1989), 31–51. Carvalho Lima, A.M. de, ‘Povoamento e organização do territorio do Baixo Douro na época da monarquia asturiana’, in F.J. Fernández Conde and C. García de Castro Valdés (eds), Poder y Simbología en Europa. Siglos viii–x (Oviedo, 2009), 227–60. Castellanos García, S. and I. Martín Viso, ‘The local articulation of central power in the north of the Iberian Peninsula (500–1000)’, Early Medieval Europe 13 (2005), 1–42. Castillo Yurrita, A. de, ‘Cronología de las tumbas llamadas olerdolanas’, in xi Congreso Nacional de Arqueología (Zaragoza, 1970), 835–45. Castro, A., España en su historia: moros, judíos y cristianos (Buenos Aires, 1948). Collins, R., The Arab Conquest of Spain, 710–797 (Oxford, 1989).

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García González, J.J. and I. Fernández de Mata, Estudios sobre la transición al feudalismo en Cantabria y la cuenca del Duero (Burgos, 1999). García Guinea, M.Á., J. González Echegaray and B. Madariaga de la Campa, El Castellar (Villajimena, Palencia) (Madrid, 1963). Gautier-Dalché, J., ‘Châteaux et peuplements dans la Péninsule Ibérique (x–xiii siècles)’, Flaran 1 (1979), 93–107. Geary, P., The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, NJ, 2003). González González, J., ‘Repoblación de la Extremadura leonesa’, Hispania 12 (1943), 195–273. González González, J., ‘Reconquista y repoblación de Castilla, León, Extremadura y Andalucía (siglos xi al xiii)’, in La reconquista española y la repoblación del país, 163–206. González González, J., ‘La Extremadura castellana al mediar el siglo xiii’, Hispania 34 (1974), 265–424. González González, J., Repoblación de Castilla la Nueva (Madrid, 1975–76). Halsall, G., Worlds of Arthur (Oxford, 2013). Herculano de Carvalho e Araujo, A., Historia de Portugal (desde o começo da monarchia até o fim do reinado de Affonso iii) (Lisbon, 1875). Isla Frez, A., La sociedad gallega en la Alta Edad Media (Madrid, 1992). Isla Frez, A., ‘Los astures: el populus y la populatio’, in La época de la monarquía asturiana (Oviedo, 2002), 17–42. La reconquista española y la repoblación del país (Zaragoza, 1951). Lomax, D.W., The Reconquest of Spain (London, 1978). López Quiroga, J., El final de la Antigüedad en la Gallaecia. La transformación de las estructuras de poblamiento entre Miño y Duero (siglos v al x) (La Coruña, 2004). López Quiroga, J. and M. Rodríguez Lovelle, ‘Un modelo de análisis del poblamiento rural en el valle del Duero (siglos viii–x) a partir de un espacio macro-regional: las tierras galaico-portuguesas’, Anuario Español de Medievalismo 27 (1997), 687–748. Mackay, A., Spain in the Middle Ages: From Frontier to Empire, 1000–1500 (London, 1977). Marsá, F., ‘Toponimia de reconquista’, in Enciclopedia Lingüística Hispánica (Madrid, 1960), 615–46. Martín Rodríguez, J.L., ‘Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz ante la reforma agraria’, Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español 63–64 (1993–1994), 1123–34. Martín Viso, I., Poblamiento y estructuras sociales en el norte de la Península Ibérica, siglos vi–xiii (Salamanca, 2000). Martínez Díez, G., Génesis histórica de la provincia de Burgos y sus divisiones administrativas (Burgos, 1983). Martínez Díez, G., Las comunidades de villa y tierra de la Extremadura castellana (­Madrid, 1983). Martínez Díez, G., Pueblos y alfoces burgaleses de la Repoblación (Valladolid, 1987).

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Martínez Sopena, P., La Tierra de Campos Occidental: poblamiento, poder y comunidad del siglo x al xiii (Valladolid, 1985). Martínez Sopena, P. and M.J. Carbajo Serrano, ‘Notas sobre la colonización de Tierra de Campos en el siglo x: Villobera’, in El pasado histórico de Castilla y León. Actas del I Congreso de Historia de Castilla y León, 3 vols (Burgos, 1983), vol. 1, 113–25. Mattoso, J., Identificação de um país. Ensaio sobre as origens de Portugal (1096–1325) (Lisbon, 1995). Menéndez Pidal, R., ‘Repoblación y tradición en la Cuenca del Duero’, in Enciclopedia Lingüística Hispánica, vol. 1, xxix–lvii. Mínguez Fernández, J.M., El dominio del monasterio de Sahagún en el siglo x. Paisajes agrarios, producción y expansión económica (Salamanca, 1980). Mínguez Fernández, J.M., Las sociedades feudales, 1. Antecedentes, formación y expansión (siglos vi al xiii) (Madrid, 1994). Mínguez Fernández, J.M., ‘La despoblación del Duero: un tema a debate’, in S. Aguadé and J. Pérez (eds) Les origines de la féodalité. Hommage à Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz (Madrid, 2000), 169–82. Mínguez Fernández, J.M., ‘Poderes locales en el espacio central leonés durante el periodo astur’, in Fernández Conde and García de Castro Valdés, Poder y Simbología, 199–214. Moxó, S. de, Repoblación y sociedad en la España cristiana medieval (Madrid, 1979). Musset, L., Les invasions. Les vagues germaniques (Paris, 1965). Musset, L., Les invasions. Le second assaut contre l’Europe chrétienne (viie–ixe siècles) (Paris, 1965). Oliveira Martins, J.P., Alexandre Herculano (Lisbon, 1967). Pastor, R., ‘El problema del feudalismo hispánico en la obra de Sánchez-Albornoz’, in En torno al feudalismo hispánico. I Congreso de Estudios Medievales (León, 1989), 9–19. Pastor, R., ‘Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, historiador, maestro y militante’, in eadem, Sánchez-Albornoz a debate, 9–19. Pastor, R., ‘El feudalismo en la obra de Sánchez-Albornoz y las intepretaciones actuales’, in Giornata Lincea per il centenario della nascita di Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz (Rome, 1995), 19–30. Pastor Díaz de Garayo, E., Castilla en el tránsito de la Antigüedad al feudalismo. Poblamiento, poder político y estructura social del Arlanza al Duero (siglos vii–xi) (Valladolid, 1996). Peiró Martín, I. and G. Pasamar Alzuria, Diccionario Akal de Historiadores Españoles Contemporáneos (Madrid, 2002). Peres, D., História de Portugal, 9 vols (Barcelos, 1928–54). Portass, R., ‘All Quiet on the Western Front? Royal Politics in Galicia from c.800 to c.950’, Early Medieval Europe 21 (2013), 283–306.

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Portela Silva, E., ‘Galicia en la época de Alfonso iii’, in Fernández Conde, La época de Alfonso iii, 79–95. Portolés, J., Medio siglo de filología española (1896–1952). Positivismo e idealismo (­Madrid, 1986). Quirós Castillo, J.A. (ed.), El poblamiento rural de época visigoda en Hispania. Arqueología del campesinado en el interior peninsular (Bilbao, 2013). Reyes Téllez, F., ‘El problema del despoblamiento del valle del Duero a la luz de los hallazgos arqueológicos’ (MA Thesis, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1979). Reyes Téllez, F., Poblacion y sociedad en el Valle del Duero, Duratón y Riaza en la Alta Edad Media, siglos vi al xi: aspectos arqueológicos (Madrid, 2000) CD-ROM edition. Reyes Téllez, F. and M.L. Menéndez Robles, ‘Aspectos ideológicos en la despoblación del Valle del Duero’, in J. Arce and R. Olmos (eds), Historiografía de la Arqueología y de la Historia Antigua en España (siglos xviii–xx) (Madrid, 1991), 199–207. Ribeiro, O., Geografía de España y Portugal (Barcelona, 1955). Ríos Saloma, M.F., La Reconquista. Una construcción historiográfica (siglos xvi–xix) (Madrid, 2011). Sampaio, A., Estudos históricos e económicos. Vol. 1: As vilas do norte de Portugal, 2 vols (Lisbon, 1899–1903; 2nd edn 1923). Sánchez-Albornoz, C., En torno a los orígenes del feudalismo, ii: Los árabes y el régimen prefeudal carolingio. Fuentes de la historia hispanomusulmana del siglo viii (Mendoza, 1942). Sánchez-Albornoz, C., Ruina y extinción del municipio romano en España e instituciones que lo reemplazan (Buenos Aires, 1943). Sánchez-Albornoz, C., El Ajbar Maymu’a. Problemas historiográficos que suscita (Buenos Aires, 1944). Sánchez-Albornoz, C., ‘¿Una crónica asturiana perdida?’, Revista de Filología Hispánica 7 (1945), 105–46. Sánchez-Albornoz, C., España, un enigma histórico, 2 vols (Buenos Aires, 1957) repr. Barcelona, 1985. Sánchez-Albornoz, C., Despoblación y Repoblación en el Valle del Duero (Buenos Aires, 1966). Sánchez-Albornoz, C., Orígenes de la nación española. Estudios críticos sobre la Historia del reino de Asturias, 3 vols (Oviedo, 1972–1975). Sánchez-Albornoz, C., ‘Vindicación histórica de Castilla’, in idem, Mis tres Primeros Estudios Históricos (Iniciación de una vocación) (Valladolid, 1974), 101–42. Sánchez Pardo, J.C., ‘Power and rural landscapes in early medieval Galicia (400–900 A.D): towards a re-incorporation of the archaeology into the historical narrative’, Early Medieval Europe 21 (2013), 140–68.

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Chapter 2

Hispania at Home and Abroad Graham Barrett In memory of Simon Barton, a gentilhombre and a scholar.1 For perhaps the memory of those men and women will surprise him simply as with an unfamiliar, but arresting sound – the sound of springheads, long dried up and silent in a fierce drought, suddenly burst out and rushing freely to the sea. It may remind him of a continuity that outlives all lives, fears, perplexities, contrivings, hopes, defeats; so that he is moved to reach down and touch again for strength, as if he were its first discoverer, the changeless thing – the undeluding, undenying earth. whittaker chambers2

Sometimes the most obvious question is the last to be asked, and the hardest to answer. Where was Hispania in the early Middle Ages? If we go looking, we can find it, but not where we might expect.3 More than a few contemporaries gave this some thought, and all who did so pointed to the same spot – at least at first. How do we get to early medieval Hispania, then, and why was it there? When Muslim forces defeated the Visigoths in 711, they marked a caesura in Iberian historiography: an ideological fissure amidst the communities formed in the aftermath, a dividing line (disciplinary, departmental) between ancient and medieval eras.4 Yet remembering Hispania, or the world of the Peninsula before the coming of Islam, remained central to self-definition on both sides of 1 I should like to express my gratitude here to Julia Bray, Ann Christys, Julio Escalona Monge, Antonia Fitzpatrick, Michael Kelly, Peter Linehan, Eduardo Manzano Moreno, David Peterson, Robert Portass, Emily Troscianko, Chris Wickham, George Woudhuysen, and Simeon Zahl; and, for setting me straight, to Marie Legendre. 2 W. Chambers, ‘A Westminster Letter: Springhead to Springhead’, repr. in Ghosts on the Roof: Selected Essays, ed. T. Teachout (New Brunswick, NJ, 1996), 324–5. 3 When citing primary sources, I provide section or document numbers in preference to pages wherever possible; for Classical texts, unless otherwise indicated, I use the Loeb Classical Library. All translations are my own (I have simplified spellings to Hispania or Hispaniae, and Gallaecia, as appropriate), while the headers, of course, are from Browning. 4 Or modern (!): see P. Linehan, ‘By Way of Introduction: the Spanish Middle Ages and the Nineteenth Century’, in Historical Memory and Clerical Activity in Medieval Spain and Portugal (Farnham, 2012), x. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004423879_004

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the new religious frontier for centuries to come.5 In the Christian realm of ­Asturias-León, the Visigothic kingdom lived on – from the perspective of its chroniclers – and this continuity was a wellspring of legitimacy for the reigning dynasty. Even so, in the language of charters, its kings laid no claim, initially, to ruling Hispania itself, for that endured in al-Andalus, the Islamic south, a heartland quondam et futurus; those in the north dwelt somewhere else, outside their own assumed past. For the court historians of Córdoba, in contrast, the kingdom had partly been conquered, partly been induced to submit, whence there arose a tradition in both Arabic and Latin literature: the Visigoths, through villainy, had forfeited any right to rule, leaving the Umayyads lawful rulers of what had formerly been Hispania. But while some of those whom we (however tendentiously) label ‘Mozarabs’ – the subject Christian population of al-Andalus – accepted this line, and assimilated into Arabic culture and Islam, others appointed themselves keepers of the Visigothic inheritance, and embarked on penitential resistance.6 What points all these varied responses in a common direction is the reconstructive nature of memory: we revise, forget, as our needs, beliefs, and perceptions of ourselves change in time; we remember then for now, the past for the present.7 Take the Passion of Emeterius and Celedonius of Calahorra. Written perhaps in the early eighth century, their martyrdom is set, apparently, in the 5 See e.g. P. Álvarez Rubiano, ‘El concepto de España según los cronicones de la Alta Edad Media’, Príncipe de Viana 3.7 (1942), 149–54; R. Menéndez Pidal, El imperio hispánico y los cinco reinos. Dos épocas en la estructura política de España (Madrid, 1950), esp. 21–44; J.A. Maravall Casesnoves, El concepto de España en la Edad Media (3rd ed., Madrid, 1981), esp. 105–243, 299–337; A.P. Bronisch, ‘El concepto de España en la historiografía visigoda y asturiana’, Norba 19 (2006), 9–42; I. Pérez Marinas, ‘Regnum Gothorum y regnum Hispaniae en las crónicas hispano-cristianas de los siglos viii y ix: continuación, fin o traslado en el relato de la conquista árabe’, Estudios Medievales Hispánicos 2 (2013), 175–200; I. Fernández-Ordóñez, ‘La denotación de “España” en la Edad Media. Perspectiva historiográfica (siglos vii–xiv)’, in J.M. García Martín et al. (eds), Actas del ix Congreso internacional de historia de la lengua española, 2 vols (Madrid, 2015), vol. 1, 49–106; K. Bonch Reeves, Visions of Unity after the Visigoths: Early Iberian Latin Chronicles and the Mediterranean World (Turnhout, 2016), 24–37; C. de Ayala Martínez, ‘Realidad y percepción de Hispania en la Edad Media’, eHumanista 37 (2017), 206–31. 6 See M. de Epalza, ‘Mozarabs: an Emblematic Christian Minority in Islamic al-Andalus’, repr. in M. Marín, M. Fierro, and J. Samsó (eds), The Formation of al-Andalus, 2 vols (Aldershot, 1998), vol. 1, 183–204; R. Hitchcock, Mozarabs in Medieval and Early Modern Spain: Identities and Influences (Aldershot, 2008), ix-xx; C. Aillet, Les mozarabes. Christianisme, islamisation et arabisation en Péninsule Ibérique (ixe–xiie siècle) (Madrid, 2010), 1–39; M. Maser, ‘Die Mozaraber. Ein undefinierbares Phänomen?’, in M. Maser (ed.), Die Mozaraber. Definitionen und Perspektiven der Forschung (Münster, 2011), 11–35. 7 M.A. Conway, ‘Memory and the Self’, Journal of Memory and Language 53.4 (2005), esp. 595–7; M.A. Conway and C. Loveday, ‘Remembering, Imagining, False Memories, and Personal Meanings’, Consciousness and Cognition 33 (2015), 574–81.

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first years of the fourth: ‘when Gallaecia was still to be found joined together with the province of Tarraconensis as Hispania Citerior, the deathly blast of the heathen horn sounded…’, but as our author laments, ‘here tradition has forsaken us’.8 No further details, no consular or regnal dating – the years are measured solely in geography, through the evolving configuration of Hispania, a gathering of provinces providing a home for these men and their story. Then, as ever. When the Apostle Paul wrote to the Christians of Rome, undertaking to visit them en route to Hispania, it could stand for preaching the Gospel to the very limit of the world, the realisation of a Church without end, the balm, the assurance of a Second Coming.9 In the passage of a millennium, the Iberian Peninsula fractured into polities and peoples whose relations were conflictive as often as constructive; they nonetheless agreed on a new location for Hispania, a new delineation of Hispania, precisely because they disagreed about what it should signify.10 Our canvas for reconstructing this geography is spread from the eighth century to the eleventh, what we used to think of as stage one of the Reconquista.11 Through the prism of Hispania, both Christians and Muslims, in all their ways of looking back at what used to be and ahead at what God had foreordained to be, perceived and processed continuity and change, triumph and disaster, and by what can seem divergent paths arrived in the end at the same destination, each to stake out a special claim.12 1

‘Tread once more familiar paths’

Where to begin? As Livy tells us, the consuls for 218 bc drew lots for operations against the Carthaginians, and P. Cornelius Scipio obtained Hispania; the 8

Passio Emeterii et Celedonii, in P. Riesco Chueca, Pasionario hispánico. Introducción, edición crítica y traducción (Seville, 1995), 8, 3. 9 Romans 15:23–9; R.N. Longenecker, The Epistle to the Romans: a Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids, MI, 2016), 1023–52; cf. O.F.A. Meinardus, ‘Paul’s Missionary Journey to Spain: Tradition and Folklore’, Biblical Archaeologist 41.2 (1978), 61–3. 10 See M. Soifer Irish, ‘Beyond convivencia: Critical Reflections on the Historiography of Interfaith Relations in Christian Spain’, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 1.1 (2009), 19–35; B.A. Catlos, Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c. 1050–1614 (Cambridge, 2014), 515–35; H. Fancy, ‘The New convivencia’, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 11.3 (2019), 295–305; and (perhaps) also D. Fernández-Morera, The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain (Wilmington, DE, 2016), 83–118. 11 C. Laliena Corbera, ‘Holy War, Crusade, and Reconquista in Recent Anglo-American Historiography about the Iberian Peninsula’, Imago Temporis. Medium Aevum 9 (2015), 109– 22; J. Jarrett, ‘Before the Reconquista: Frontier Relations in Medieval Iberia, 718–1031’, in J. Muñoz-Basols, L. Lonsdale, and M. Delgado (eds), The Routledge Companion to Iberian Studies (Abingdon, 2017), 27–40. 12 P. Linehan, History and the Historians of Medieval Spain (Oxford, 1993), 1–21.

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­Second Punic War over, the new Roman province was divided into Citerior and Ulterior, adjectives for ‘hither’ and ‘thither Spain’.13 In a convoluted history of administrative tinkering, Baetica and Lusitania were created out of Ulterior, and Citerior re-designated Hispania Tarraconensis, by the emperor Augustus in 27 bc, while Gallaecia in turn emerged from this last as a separate entity early in the third century ad. The final additions were Hispania Carthaginiensis, carved out of Tarraconensis in the late third century as Diocletian reorganised the entirety – including Mauretania Tingitana in North Africa – into the diocese of Hispaniae (‘the Spains’), and the Baleares, partitioned off late in the fourth.14 The earliest attestation of the name ‘Hispania’ itself, however, proves elusive quarry. Perhaps it is the fragmentary annalist L. Cassius Hemina (fl. c. 146 bc), remarking of some setback, ‘there were two battles in Hispania; both times our troops were dislodged from their position’.15 Or is it still earlier? Textbooks typically grant the trademark to the epic poet Ennius (c. 239–169 bc), also fragmentary, as quoted by Charisius, a late antique grammarian. The relevant passage dramatises a parley between the Volciani and a Roman embassy seeking alliance against Hannibal, but the usage is adverbial: ‘mind you, I speak as a Spaniard (Hispane), not as a Roman’, which suggests a noun already coined at some unknown prior date.16 Symptomatic of these obscure origins is a doubtful etymology. In 1646, ­antiquary-zoologist Samuel Bochart hazarded a derivation of Hispania from the Phoenician i-shephan-im (seemingly ‘the Rabbit Coast’), taking on board supporting smut by Catullus referring to cuniculosae Celtiberiae (‘rabbity Celtiberia’), though philologists since have proposed other comparatively drab Punic possibilities, including ‘the land of the north’ and ‘the land of metals’.17 13 Livy, Ab urbe condita, 21.17; L.A. Curchin, Roman Spain: Conquest and Assimilation (London, 1991), 24–9; J.S. Richardson, The Romans in Spain (Oxford, 1996), 24–51. 14 E. Albertini, Les divisions administratives de l’Espagne romaine (Paris, 1923), 9–41, 117–26; T.D. Barnes, The New Empire of Diocletian and Constantine (Cambridge, MA, 1982), 209– 24; M. Kulikowski, Late Roman Spain and its Cities (Baltimore, MD, 2004), 71–6; J. Cabrero Piquero, ‘La visión de Hispania en las fuentes clásicas’, in J. Andreu Pintado, J. Cabrero Piquero, and I. Rodà de Llanza (eds), Hispaniae. Las provincias hispanas en el mundo romano (Tarragona, 2009), 17–28. 15 Cassius Hemina, Annales, in T.J. Cornell (ed.), The Fragments of the Roman Historians, 3 vols (Oxford, 2013), vol. 2, 4.37 (34, 36); cf. Cato the Elder, De agri cultura, 10.4; Plautus, Menaechmi, l. 235. 16 Ennius, Annales, in O. Skutsch, The Annals of Q. Ennius (Oxford, 1985), 471 (503); see e.g. P. Barceló, ‘Hispania, Iberia’, in H. Cancik et al. (eds), Brill’s New Pauly (Leiden, 2002-), at http:// referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/brill-s-new-pauly/hispania-iberia-e515490. 17 S. Bochart, Geographia sacra, 2 vols (Caen, 1646), vol. 2, 700; Catullus, Carmina, 37, l. 18; J.C. Fernández Corte, ‘Cuniculosae Celtiberiae de Catulo 37 y la etimología fenicia de Hispania’, Voces 10–11 (1999–2000), 59–73; J.M. Blázquez Martínez, ‘El nombre de Hispania aparece en la historia. Los hispanos en el Imperio Romano’, in V. Palacio Atard (ed.), De

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­ ountry and creature were linked in Antiquity, notoriously so when certain C Balearic islanders, critically beset by a menace of hares, appealed in their final desperation to Augustus for legionary rescue; indeed, the association pre-dates the Romans, whose word for that ‘modest little animal’ is of Celtiberian origin – but definitive proof for this admittedly satisfying explanation is lacking.18 Evidently ancient writers were also unsure: Strabo observed that the Romans employed Hispania in preference to ‘Iberia’, the Greek term for the Peninsula, but ventured no comment as to its source, while Pliny the Elder maintained a similarly learned silence despite registering the Cuniculariae (‘Rabbit Warrens’), sundry piccole isole between Corsica and Sardinia.19 Pseudo-Plutarch advanced an etymology from Pan (senior officer on the scene after Dionysus had moved on), and Pompeius Trogus, feebly, ‘from someone named Hispanus’, but no such footling nonsense would do for the Encyclopaedist of the Dark Ages.20 Canonising the Classical world centuries later, and faced with such prevailing uncertainty, Isidore of Seville concluded that Hispania must perforce come from Hispalis, his own episcopal see, and this from Hesperia, the ‘western land’ of Greek literature and Latin epic.21 Enigmatic though its beginnings remain, Hispania was ubiquitous in the language of Roman administration, even as that began to break down. While the imperial exeunt from Iberia commenced in the early fifth century, the plodding polemicist Orosius retained this terminology in the tour d’horizon Hispania a España. El nombre y el concepto a través de los siglos (Madrid, 2005), 18–20; cf. F. Aguilar Piñal, El académico Cándido María Trigueros (1736–1798) (Madrid, 2001), 25–47; J.-L. Cunchillos, ‘Nueva etimología de la palabra “Hispania”’, in M. Barthélemy and M.E. Aubet Semmler (eds), Actas del iv Congreso internacional de estudios fenicios y púnicos, 4 vols (Cádiz, 2000), vol. 1, 217–25. 18 Strabo, Geography, 3.2.6, 3.5.2; Pliny the Elder, Historia naturalis, 8.81 (cf. 3.5, 8.43); x. Ballester and R. Quinn, ‘Cuniculus “Rabbit” – a Celtic Etymology’, World Rabbit Science 10.3 (2002), 123–7. 19 Strabo, Geography, 3.4.19; Pliny the Elder, Historia naturalis, 3.6.83 (cf. 3.2); A.J. Domínguez Monedero, ‘Los términos “Iberia” e “Iberos” en las fuentes grecolatinas: estudio acerca de su origen y ámbito de aplicación’, Lucentum 2 (1983), 203–24. 20 Pseudo-Plutarch, De fluviis, in R. Hercher, Plutarchi Libellus de fluviis (Leipzig, 1851), 16.3; Justinus, Epitoma, in F. Rühl and O. Seel, M. Iuniani Iustini Epitoma historiarum Philippicarum Pompei Trogi (Stuttgart, 1972), 44.1; P. Matesanz Gascón, ‘Hispano, héroe epónimo de Hispania’, Gallaecia 21 (2002), 345–70; cf. Pseudo-Isidore, Chronica, in F. González Muñoz, La chronica gothorum pseudo-isidoriana (ms. Paris BN 6113). Edición crítica, traducción y estudio (Noia, 2000), 1. 21 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, 9, in M. Reydellet, Isidore de Séville. Étymologies, Livre ix. Les langues et les groups sociaux (Paris, 1984), 2.126; 14, in O. Spevak, Isidore de Séville. Étymologies, Livre xiv. La terre (Paris, 2011), 4.19, 4.28; cf. Versus de Asia et de universi mundi rota, in Itineraria et alia geographica, 2 vols (Turnhout, 1965), vol. 1, 30, ll. 88–90.

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which ­prefaces his searing historical indictment of heathendom. Famously – if inexactly – ­describing Hispania as a triangular quasi-island bounded by Ocean and the Tyrrhenian Sea, he subdivided it only into Citerior and Ulterior, disdaining all reorganisations.22 With empirically questionable praise of its political reliability, Orosius expresses a not-so-quiet pride in his natal soil, being at pains to mention that Trajan was genere Hispanus (‘Spanish by birth’), a descriptor applied by others to Theodosius i.23 When he remarks that ‘we too in Hispania’ can recall the barbarian sack of Tarragona in the 260s as a comforting parallel amidst present tribulation, the focus of his narrative has already narrowed discernibly from the empire as a whole to his own corner of it; he ends on the cheering reflection that the occupying barbarians now slaughter one another in their desire to make peace with Rome.24 Such local horizons are still more pronounced with Hydatius, dismal chronicler of late imperial woe, who concentrates on his native Gallaecia almost to the exclusion of anywhere else. For the Peninsula generally he prefers ‘Hispaniae’, the diocesan plural, but in his entry for 411 he cites ‘the provinces of Hispania’ lost to the cataclysm: ‘the Spaniards (Spani) of the towns and forts surviving the assaults’, he laments, ‘deliver themselves in servitude to the barbarians who rule throughout the provinces’.25 By the fifth century, Hispania had outgrown its original connection to the Roman state: no longer purely, or principally, an administrative label, it had come to encompass people and place, a sense of regional, even ethnic identity. The end of Roman Spain was not the end of Hispania, but context for a redefinition. The conquering Visigoths took up ‘Hispania’ and ‘Hispaniae’ for their territories in Iberia, with ‘Gallia’ and ‘Galliae’ for the land which they ruled beyond the Pyrenees, and they too had to negotiate its developing range of meanings.26 For the early Visigothic kingdom we must, faute de mieux, subsist on the meagre fare of John of Biclarum (a monastic foundation traditionally, 22 Orosius, Historiarum adversum paganos libri vii, in M.-P. Arnaud-Lindet, Orose. Histoire contre les païens, 3 vols (Paris, 1990–91), 1.2.69–74; S. Teillet, Des Goths à la nation gothique: les origines de l’idée de nation en Occident du ve au viie siècle (Paris, 1984), 113–60; A.H. Merrills, History and Geography in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2005), 64–97; A.T. Fear (trans.), Orosius. Seven Books of History against the Pagans (Liverpool, 2010), 44, n. 92. 23 Orosius, Historiarum adversum paganos libri vii, 5.23.16, 7.12.1; N. McLynn, ‘“Genere Hispanus”: Theodosius, Spain, and Nicene Orthodoxy’, in K. Bowes and M. Kulikowski (eds), Hispania in Late Antiquity: Current Perspectives (Leiden, 2005), 77–9. 24 Orosius, Historiarum adversum paganos libri vii, 7.22.7–8, 7.43.15. 25 Hydatius, Chronica, in R.W. Burgess, The Chronicle of Hydatius and the Consularia Constantinopolitana: Two Contemporary Accounts of the Final Years of the Roman Empire (Oxford, 1993), 41 (49); Teillet, Des Goths, 207–50. 26 See M. Kulikowski, ‘Ethnicity, Rulership, and Early Medieval Frontiers’, in F. Curta (ed.), Borders, Barriers, and Ethnogenesis: Frontiers in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages

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if by no means definitively, placed in the Catalan village of Vallclara), writing at the end of the sixth century.27 He readily identified the new realm with the Roman political unit which it had displaced: Athanagild, ‘king of the Goths in Hispania’, was succeeded by Liuva i in 567, who in turn appointed Leovigild as co-regent ‘to the rule of Hispania Citerior’ (an anachronism surely borrowed from Orosius).28 Leovigild reigning alone, ‘all Hispania and Gallia Narbonensis’ were united ‘once all tyrants everywhere had been destroyed and invaders of Hispania overcome’; after his death in 586, his son Reccared quickly abandoned the Arianism of his father and called ‘a holy synod of bishops from all Hispania, Gallia, and Gallaecia’ to solemnise conversion.29 The Visigothic kingdom was to be Roman Hispania under new and improved management, and this vocabulary is a fundamental feature of the ‘national’ series of Church councils collected in the Hispana – all but absent from the provincial synods.30 At that fateful Third Council of Toledo (589), ‘the Arian heresy is condemned in Hispania’: the king unburdens himself as to the vexation of ‘the Catholic Church of God in Hispaniae’ by the Arians, and asks ‘all the churches of Hispaniae and Gallia’, after professing the new faith, to utter the Nicene Creed before taking communion.31 The canons proceed, inter alia, to mandate the recitation of said statement ‘in all the churches of Hispania,

27

28 29

30 31

(­Turnhout, 2005), 247–54; J. Wood, ‘Borders, Centres, and Peripheries in Late Roman and Visigothic Iberia’, International Journal of Regional and Local History 10.1 (2015), 1–17. J. Pujades, Coronica universal del Principat de Cathalunya (Barcelona, 1609), 6.62, fols 305v-306r; J. Campos, Juan de Biclaro, obispo de Gerona: su vida y su obra. Introducción, texto crítico y comentarios (Madrid, 1960), 21–5; D.J. Wasserstein, ‘Ibn Biklarish – Isra’ili’, in C. Burnett (ed.), Ibn Baklarish’s Book of Simples. Medical Remedies between Three Faiths in Twelfth-Century Spain (Oxford, 2008), 105–6; cf. R. Collins, Early Medieval Spain: Unity in Diversity, 400–1000 (2nd ed., New York, NY, 1995), 42. John of Vallclara, Chronicon, in C. Cardelle de Hartmann, Victoris Tunnunensis Chronicon cum reliquiis ex Consularibus Caesaraugustanis et Iohannis Biclarensis Chronicon (Turnhout, 2001), 6, 10, 24 (cf. 6a). John of Vallclara, Chronicon, 24, 50, 91 (cf. 54); Teillet, Des Goths, 421–55; F. Álvarez García, ‘Tiempo, religión y política en el “Chronicon” de Ioannis Biclarensis’, En la España Medieval 20 (1997), 9–30; K.B. Wolf (trans.), Conquerors and Chroniclers of Early Medieval Spain (2nd ed., Liverpool, 1999), 1–9. See I Braga, in J. Vives, T. Marín Martínez, and G. Martínez Díez, Concilios visigóticos e hispano-romanos (Barcelona-Madrid, 1963), prooemium. iii Toledo, in G. Martínez Díez and F. Rodríguez, La colección canónica Hispana [cch], 6 vols (Madrid, 1966–2002), vol. 5, prooemium, regis professio fidei, canones; R.L. Stocking, Bishops, Councils, and Consensus in the Visigothic Kingdom, 589–633 (Ann Arbor, MI, 2000), 59–88; I. Velázquez, ‘Pro patriae gentisque Gothorum statu (4th Council of Toledo, Canon 75, a. 633)’, in H.-W. Goetz, J. Jarnut, and W. Pohl (eds), Regna and Gentes: the Relationship between Late Antique and Early Medieval Peoples and Kingdoms in the Transformation of the Roman World (Leiden, 2003), 168–75; cf. A. Ferreiro, ‘Sanctissimus idem

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Gallia, and Gallaecia’, to quash idolatry ‘in all Hispania and Gallia’, and to prohibit the practice of infanticide ‘in certain parts of Hispania’, culminating in fitting banishment ‘from all Hispania’ of those congregants who, contrary to fe y moral, divert themselves with dance during the divine offices.32 This criminality suppressed, Reccared issued a concluding edict endorsing the worthy deliberations of ‘all the bishops of Hispania’ whom he had gathered in council.33 At a stroke the ‘baptism of Spain’ under Visigothic rule was complete. Clearly enough, Hispania, ‘all Hispania’, and Hispaniae could stand interchangeably for the entire Iberian Peninsula, with or without southern Gaul included. At the same time, this overarching unit could itself encompass both Hispania and Gallaecia in the northwest, per the twofold diocesan and provincial nomenclature of the late empire. In essence, the singular might also stand for the plural, the part for the whole, as in an inscription of 589/90 from the east Roman enclave at Cartagena: erected on a gate in the city walls, it celebrates the building activity of Comenciolus, patrician and magister militum Spaniae sent by the emperor Maurice to confront ‘the barbarous host’, and exhorts Hispania to exult in him.34 If change occurred, it did so at the level of orthography, which hereafter tends to ‘Spania’ and ‘Spaniae’, but one can scarcely extract a reliable pattern from the motley readings of our sources in original or edited form; besides, these spellings were already creeping into the lexicon from the second or third century, if not before.35 The anomalous prominence of Gallaecia as a constituent of the kingdom alongside Hispania

32 33 34

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princeps sic venerandum concilium ad loquitur dicens. King Reccared’s Discourses at the Third Council of Toledo (589)’, Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum 46 (2014), 27–53. iii Toledo, 2, 16–7, 23 (cf. 1, 11, 18). iii Toledo, edictum regis. A. Prego de Lis, ‘Nueva lectura de la inscripción “Comenciolo” del Museo Municipal de Arqueología de Cartagena’, in J.M. Gurt Esparraguera and N. Tena (eds), V Reunió d’arqueologia cristiana hispànica (Barcelona, 2000), 34; J. Wood, ‘Defending Byzantine Spain: Frontiers and Diplomacy’, Early Medieval Europe 18.3 (2010), 292–319; D. Morossi, ‘The Governors of Byzantine Spain’, Bizantinistica 15 (2013), 143–53. See Hyginus, De condicionibus agrorum, in B. Campbell, The Writings of the Roman Land Surveyors: Introduction, Text, Translation, and Commentary (London, 2000), 88, l. 28; Pomponius Porphyrion, Commentum in Horatium: Carmina, 2.2, ll. 9–10; cf. Martial, Epigrammata, 2.41, l. 8; C. Martin, La géographie du pouvoir dans l’Espagne visigothique (Villeneuve d’Ascq, 2003), 84–6; and also J. Vizcaíno Sánchez, La presencia bizantina en “Hispania” (siglos vi–vii): la documentación arqueológica. Antigüedad y Cristianismo 24 (2007), passim; O. Olesti Vila and R. Andreu Expósito, ‘Una nueva fuente documental sobre HispaniaSpania. El Ars Gromatica Gisemundi y la Discriptio Hispaniae: actividades agrimensorias en época romana y bizantina’, Gerión 34 (2016), 351–81; with the suggestive hypothesis of M.J. Kelly, ‘Where am I? The Meta-historical and Theo-political Implications of Spania and Hispania’ (forthcoming).

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and Gallia may reflect its late conquest by Leovigild: the Visigoths aside, John of Vallclara accorded the title of king, in lieu of (say) rebel thug, to the Suevic rulers of Gallaecia alone, and in the sources it persisted as a discrete region into the Middle Ages.36 The overall configuration is made apparent by an edict of Erwig from the Thirteenth Council of Toledo (683), granting amnesty for taxes long overdue to ‘all peoples of our kingdom, both privately owned and fiscal slaves, men as well as women subject to taxation, who reside in the provinces of Gallia and Gallaecia and in all the provinces of Hispania’.37 The bond between the Visigothic kings and Hispania was sealed by Isidore of Seville, presiding at the Fourth Council of Toledo in 633. Seven years before, he had written in the director’s cut of his History of the Goths that Suinthila, expelling the east Romans at last, ‘first gained absolute rule of the kingdom of all Hispania within Ocean’.38 Isidore also augmented his survey with a lavish prologue, In Praise of Hispania, saluting ‘the most prosperous nation of the Goths’ which had come to rule this land with love, ‘secure in the fortune of empire’.39 But his aim, as a ‘cultural broker’, was to detach Hispania from its history (bathed here in unexpected eroticism, viz., ‘Rightly, yea, did golden Rome – head of nations – lust after you in a former age’), to refashion it into an independent, neutral space, once Roman, now Visigothic in dominion, where both could find common cause: the accompanying epilogue closes with the prospect of an imperial soldier, re-enlisted, looking on as ‘so many nations and Hispania itself serve’ the Visigoths.40 Accordingly, the bishops assembled at 36 37 38

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John of Vallclara, Chronicon, 14, 21, 40, 66, 68, 72, 76; Velázquez, ‘Pro patriae gentisque Gothorum statu’, 173–4, 196–8; M. Carriedo Tejedo, ‘Pervivencia altomedieval (714–1080) de la “Gallaecia” suevo-visigoda’, Memoria Ecclesiae 27 (2005), 553–89. xiii Toledo, in cch, vol. 6, decretum de relaxandis tributis; Teillet, Des Goths, 559–62; C. Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800 (Oxford, 2005), 97. Isidore of Seville, Historia Gothorum, in C. Rodríguez Alonso, Las Historias de los Godos, Vándalos y Suevos de Isidoro de Sevilla. Estudio, edición crítica y traducción (León, 1975), 62 (cf. 34, 39, 41, 48–9, 53–4); C. Codoñer, J.C. Martín, and M.A. Andrés, ‘Isidorus Hispalensis ep.’, in P. Chiesa and L. Castaldi (eds), La trasmissione dei testi latini del Medioevo. Te. Tra. 2 (Florence, 2005), 362–3, 370–71; cf. Isidore of Seville, Chronica, in J.C. Martín, Isidori Hispalensis Chronica (Turnhout, 2003), 416b. Isidore of Seville, De laude Spaniae, in Rodríguez Alonso, Historias, ll. 28, 30; Isidore of Seville, Historia Gothorum, 70 (cf. 66). Isidore of Seville, De laude Spaniae, ll. 26–7; H. Messmer, Hispania-Idee und Gotenmythos. Zu den Voraussetzungen des traditionellen vaterländischen Geschichtsbildes im spanischen Mittelalter (Zürich, 1960), 85–137; Teillet, Des Goths, 463–501; Velázquez, ‘Pro patriae gentisque Gothorum statu’, 186–95; Merrills, History, 170–228; L.A. García Moreno, ‘Patria española y etnia goda (siglos vi–viii)’, in Palacio Atard (ed.), De Hispania, 41–53; J. Wood, The Politics of Identity in Visigothic Spain: Religion and Power in the Histories of Isidore of Seville

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Toledo wrapped up proceedings by thrice vowing robustly that ‘any of us or of the peoples of all Hispania’ who would violate this oath of loyalty by treason should be anathematised ‘for the good order of the land and people of the Goths and the preservation of the royal welfare’.41 Hispania thereby became a synonym for Church and kingdom: questions of faith or religious life were to be heard in ‘a general synod of all Hispania and Gallia’, liturgical uniformity was imposed on them both, and the bishops introduced a standard clerical tonsure and habit to squelch deviant practice ‘in parts of Gallaecia’ shared disturbingly with heretics ‘across Hispaniae’.42 As Braulio of Zaragoza later said of Isidore when cataloguing his writings, ‘God raised him, I believe, after so many failures in ­Hispania down to our own day, to restore the monuments of the ancients’.43 This, in some measure, he did, setting them on new Christian foundations; his own Hispania was an illustrious bibliography of authors carefully vetted for their orthodoxy.44 Successive councils echoed these usages in canons addressing fidelity and the security of the realm, or liturgy and the integrity of the Church, while xiv Toledo (684) first conjured peoples and prelates sub regno Hispaniae (‘within the kingdom of Hispania’) in formulating a reply to the recent condemnation of monothelitism in the East.45

41 42 43 44

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(Leiden, 2012), 133–232; H. Reimitz, ‘The Historian as Cultural Broker in the Late and PostRoman West’, in A. Fischer and I. Wood (eds), Western Perspectives on the Mediterranean: Cultural Transfer in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, 400–800 ad (London, 2014), 48–54. iv Toledo, in cch, vol. 5, 75 (cf. prooemium). IV Toledo, 3, 41 (cf. 2, 5–6, 9–14); Teillet, Des Goths, 503–36, 562–6; Velázquez, ‘Pro patriae gentisque Gothorum statu’, 196–205. Braulio of Zaragoza, Renotatio librorum Isidori, in J.C. Martín, Scripta de vita Isidori Hispalensis episcopi (Turnhout, 2006), ll. 51–2. Isidore of Seville, De viris illustribus, in C. Codoñer Merino, El “De viris illustribus” de Isidoro de Sevilla. Estudio y edición crítica (Salamanca, 1964), 2, 17, 20, 22, 28, 31, 33; T. Deswarte, Une Chrétienté romaine sans pape. L’Espagne et Rome (586–1085) (Paris, 2010), 240–41; J. Wood, ‘Playing the Fame Game: Bibliography, Celebrity, and Primacy in Late Antique Spain’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 20.4 (2012), 619–28; G. Barrett, ‘God’s Librarian: Isidore of Seville and his Literary Agenda’, in A.T. Fear and J. Wood (eds), A Companion to Isidore of Seville (Leiden, 2020), 68–76. xiv Toledo, in cch, vol. 6, 2; T. Deswarte, ‘Une nation inachevée: le royaume de Tolède (vie–viie siècle)’, in Nation et nations au Moyen Âge (Paris, 2014), 68–72. See V Toledo, prooemium, 7, vi Toledo, prooemium, vii Toledo, 1, x Toledo, 1, all in cch, vol. 5; xii Toledo, tomus, 6, xiv Toledo, 1–2, 4–5, xv Toledo, prooemium, all in cch, vol. 6; and XVI Toledo, tomus, 6, 10, xvii Toledo, prooemium, tomus, 2–3, 6, 8, both in Vives, Marín Martínez, and Martínez Díez, Concilios.

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In consequence of the new bond, the discursive identity of Hispania itself changed. And at some stage in the seventh century, a passion was composed for the martyr Leocadia, whose basilica had been rebuilt by Sisebut and played host to iv–vi and xvii Toledo (possibly the others too): Slowly the learning of the Gospel and gradually the teaching of the Apostles shone over all the earth, and at last, finally, they became known within the boundaries of Hispania; the faith was rare, and therefore great because rare. … Diocletian and Maximian, the ungodly emperors, appointed that faithless governor Datian to destroy rather than to govern Hispania. Verily, he first entered Gallia like a bloodthirsty wolf, and thence, glutted on the blood of the martyrs and drunk on their corpses, he approached Hispania – belching.46 With Church and crown now aligned, Hispania evangelised and bearing witness is a theme developed by much contemporary hagiography.47 The ratchet of politics, meanwhile, intensified the rhetoric of territorial solidarity: at xiii Toledo in 683, ‘all the assembled bishops of Hispania’ favoured restoring the right to testify in court to henchmen of Paul, who had rebelled against Wamba ten years prior.48 One can work out that his insurgency had begun in Tarraconensis before reaching critical mass in Narbonne, but in pointed geographical sleight of hand Julian of Toledo, in his history of the episode, presents this as forcing Hispania to confront ‘the land of Galliae, nursemaid of disloyalty’, and assails the foreign province as ‘a miserable club of the disloyal, the basement of disloyalty, a ghastly convention of the damned’, from which Paul ‘made war on Hispaniae’ for the throne.49 Giving it both barrels, Julian demolishes the arrogance of ‘the tyrannical regime’ for claiming ‘not so much part of Hispania as all Hispania’; he then transcribes the sentence of judgement passed on the conspirators, in which that very oath sworn by the bishops at Toledo in 633 was implemented.50 46 47

48 49 50

Passio Leocadiae, in Riesco Chueca, Pasionario hispánico, 3, 2–3. Passio Torquati et comitum, 3, 6, Passio Vincenti, Sabinae et Cristetae, 3, Passio innumerabilium Caesaraugustanorum, 4–5, 13, Passio Mantii, 2, all Riesco Chueca, Pasionario hispánico, 9, 16–7, 25; cf. M. Férotin, Le Liber mozarabicus sacramentorum et les manuscrits mozarabes (Paris, 1912), 81, 731, 734, 738. xiii Toledo, in cch, vol. 6, 1. Julian of Toledo, Historia Wambae regis, in J.N. Hillgarth, Sancti Iuliani Toletanae sedis episcopi opera 1 (Turnhout, 1976), 5, 7–8 (cf. tituli, 19, 28–9). Julian of Toledo, Insultatio in tyrannidem Galliae, 4, Iudicium in tyrannorum perfidiam promulgatum, 7, both in Hillgarth, Sancti Iuliani Toletanae sedis episcopi opera; Teillet, Des

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The Visigoths reigned over a set of formerly Roman provinces, and expressed their authority in those terms: they became, in the passage of time, the kings of Hispania. We can see the ‘official line’ in the Law of the Visigoths, the code promulgated by Reccesuinth in 654 and reissued in revised form by Erwig in 681, with subsequent additions.51 Wamba responded to the insurrection of Paul with a law of 673, clarifying the military service required should ‘anyone within the borders of Hispania, Gallia, Gallaecia, or all the provinces which pertain to the authority of our rule promote or seek to promote unrest in any region whatsoever against the people, the land, and our reign’.52 In simpler terms, Egica issued a novel at Córdoba in 702 against aiding and abetting an alleged outbreak of fugitives: ‘whosoever, permanently or temporarily inside the borders of Hispania, should seek to receive slaves from any persons unknown to them’ must first publicly verify that they belong to the vendor.53 We have few legal documents from the time, but these two laws, as close as we come to the original form of legislation (they are amongst the handful transmitted by the Law of the Visigoths to retain their dating clauses and other formal features normally cut in the process of codification), imply that un-redacted royal acts made routine reference to Hispania, though seemingly not until the end of the sixth century at the earliest.54 Telling is a contract incorporated into the code as a model: addressing Reccesuinth, ‘we, the Hebrews of the city of Toledo’, further qualified in some manuscripts ‘and of your glory Hispania’, obliged themselves in 654 to make good their false (compulsory) conversion to Christianity under Chintila.55 Hispania, from its genesis in Roman conquest and administration,

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Goths, 573–636; M. de Jong, ‘Adding Insult to Injury: Julian of Toledo and his Historia Wambae’, in P. Heather (ed.), The Visigoths from the Migration Period to the Seventh ­Century: an Ethnographic Perspective (Woodbridge, 1999), 373–402; Velázquez, ‘Pro patriae gentisque Gothorum statu’, 212–3; J. Martínez Pizarro (trans.), The Story of Wamba: Julian of Toledo’s Historia Wambae regis (Washington, DC, 2005), 109–67. See P.D. King, Law and Society in the Visigothic Kingdom (Cambridge, 1972), 1–22. Lex Visigothorum, in K. Zeumer (ed.), Leges Visigothorum. mgh Leges nationum Germanicarum 1 (Hanover, 1902), 33–456, at 9.2.8; xii Toledo, tomus; Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, 98–9; S. Koon and J. Wood, ‘Unity from Disunity: Law, Rhetoric, and Power in the Visigothic Kingdom’, European Review of History 16.6 (2009), 797–9. Lex Visigothorum, 9.1.21; cf. Y. García López, Estudios críticos y literarios de la “Lex Wisigothorum” (Alcalá de Henares, 1996), 579–90; Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, 526. See G. Tomás-Faci and J.C. Martín-Iglesias, ‘Cuatro documentos inéditos del monasterio visigodo de San Martín de Asán’, Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 52.2 (2017), 2, 4. Note that it is also absent from coinage: J. Vico Monteoliva, M.C. Cores Gomendio, and G. Cores Uría, Corpus nummorum Visigothorum: ca. 575–714, Leovigildus-Achila (Madrid, 2006), 119–32; R. Pliego Vázquez, La moneda visigoda, 2 vols (Seville, 2009), vol. 1, 175–86. Lex Visigothorum, 12.2.17; J. Juster, ‘The Legal Condition of the Jews under the Visigothic Kings (Part I)’, Israel Law Review 11 (1976), 265–72.

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had evolved into the very exaltation of the Catholic Visigothic kings. As if to formalise this association of rulers and realm in terms of Latin semantics, Julian of Toledo (or his intimate acquaintance Pseudo-Julian of the same see) discourses for our benefit on the quality of the reflexive pronoun, ‘Why is it termed “less than finite”? Think on it: because I speak of a person who is known, yet absent, if I say, “Do you know the lord Erwig? He (ipse) is the prince of Hispania”’.56 2

‘Perished in an arrogant self-reliance’

The Muslim conquest of Iberia in 711 could draw legal justification, if any were needed, from the notion of the ‘House of War’ elaborated in early Islamic jurisprudence, but in the caliphate of Córdoba a supporting historiography also developed to undermine the sovereign legitimacy of the Visigoths.57 The tenthcentury historian Ibn al-Qūṭīya can provide us with the core elements of the narrative, though it is subject to much variation.58 Roderic, the last Visigothic king, had no right to succeed his predecessor Witiza, whose sons correctly betrayed him to the conqueror Ṭāriq ibn Zīyād, dealing the fatal blow in the final battle. In the aftermath, these sons of Witiza attained a place of honour in Islamic society, recognised by a certificate of the caliph al-Walīd i, and lent the new regime the legality of succession: Ibn al-Qūṭīya himself, as witnessed by his ma‘rifa or shuhra (ancestral adjective) ‘of the Gothic woman’, was descended from Sāra, daughter of one of them.59 But Roderic had further blame to shoulder. Forgetting his Henry iv, Part 2, he rashly put on a crown inscribed 56 57

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Julian of Toledo, Ars grammatica, in M.A.H. Maestre Yenes, Ars Iuliani Toletani episcopi. Una gramática latina de la España visigoda (Toledo, 1973), 1.2.34. N. Clarke, The Muslim Conquest of Iberia: Medieval Arabic Narratives (London, 2012), 23– 68, 102–17; A. Christys, ‘From ǧihād to diwān in Two Providential Histories of Hispania/ al-Andalus’, in M. di Branco and K. Wolf (eds), “Guerra santa” e conquiste islamiche nel Mediterraneo (Rome, 2014), 79–94; M. Fierro and L. Molina, ‘Some Notes on the dār alḥarb in Early al-Andalus’, in G. Calasso and G. Lancioni (eds), Dār al-islām / dār al-ḥarb: Territories, People, Identities (Leiden, 2017), 205–34. See e.g. Akhbār majmū’a, in D. James (trans.), A History of Early al-Andalus: the Akhbār majmū’a (London, 2012), 5, 7, 11; Fatḥ al-Andalus, in M. Penelas (trans.), La conquista de al-Andalus (Madrid, 2002), 1.1–49; cf. R. Collins, The Arab Conquest of Spain, 710–797 (Oxford, 1989), 23–51; D.K. Filios, ‘A Good Story Well Told: Memory, Identity, and the Conquest of Iberia’, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 6.2 (2014), 127–47. Ibn al-Qūṭīya, Ta’rīkh iftitāḥ al-Andalus, in D. James (trans.), Early Islamic Spain: the History of Ibn al-Qūṭīya (London, 2009), 49–51 (cf. 145–6); A. Christys, ‘How the Royal House of Witiza Survived the Islamic Conquest of Spain’, in W. Pohl and M. Diesenberger (eds), Integration und Herrschaft. Ethnische Identitäten und soziale Organisation im Frühmittelalter

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with the names of former kings, unsealed ‘the temple’ in Toledo, and opened the ark within containing the Gospels for use in swearing oaths, all three acts forbidden (we are told) by Christian religion. Inside the ark he found images of turbaned Arabs armed with bows, ominously captioned with the prediction that, if ark were opened and images seen, they would overrun the Peninsula in divine retribution. The hapless Roderic even managed to set the conquest itself in motion: dispatching Julian, a Christian merchant, to North Africa on pretext of business, the king raped his daughter; in tremenda vendetta her outraged father arranged to meet with Ṭāriq ibn Zīyād, inciting him to invade with sensational intelligence on the wealth and enfeeblement of the Visigothic kingdom, maybe even ferrying him across the Straits.60 Quid plura? Collectively these overlapping, mutually reinforcing tales served to underwrite defeat and dominion, and the geographical vocabulary which Muslim writers employed for Iberia shared the same function. The Arabic name for both the Peninsula in its entirety and the portion under Islamic control was ‘al-Andalus’, but the etymology of the word, as with ‘Hispania’, has bedevilled scholars for a millennium and more.61 The great Algerian littérateur alMaqqarī (d. 1632), in his hefty sourcebook of history and literature, weighed in on a controversy dating back to Aḥmad al-Rāzī in the tenth century: Ibn Ḥayyān in the eleventh and Ibn Khaldūn in the fourteenth had derived the name from the ‘Andalush’, a barbarian nation who supposedly settled there prior to Carthaginian and Roman rule, and this he found preferable to Ibn Ghālib and Ibn Sa‘īd in the twelfth and thirteenth, who had maintained that ‘Andalus’, a convenient pseudo-Biblical personage, conferred his name on it.62 Many modern commentators defer instead to the eminent Spanish orientalist Pascual de Gayangos (d. 1897), and trace al-Andalus from the ‘Vandalocii’, the Vandals, or ‘Vandalicia, -ocia, -ucia’, a conjectural toponym for Tarifa, whence (Vienna, 2002), 233–46; D.K. Filios, ‘Playing the Goth Card in Tenth-Century Córdoba: Ibn al-Qūṭīya’s Family Traditions’, La Corónica 43.2 (2015), 57–84. 60 Ibn al-Qūṭīya, Ta’rīkh iftitāḥ al-Andalus, 51–2; D.K. Filios, ‘Legends of the Fall: Conde Julián in Medieval Arabic and Hispano-Latin Historiography’, Medieval Encounters 15 (2009), 375–90. 61 See A. García Sanjuán, ‘El significado geográfico del topónimo al-Andalus en las fuentes árabes’, Anuario de Estudios Medievales 33.1 (2003), 3–36; A. García Sanjuán, ‘Al-Andalus, Etymology and Name’, in K. Fleet et al. (eds), The Encyclopedia of Islam – Three (Leiden,2007-),athttp://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-3/*COM_24223. 62 Al-Maqqarī, Nafḥ al-ṭīb, in P. de Gayangos (ed. and trans.), The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain, 2 vols (London, 1840–43), vol. 1, 1.1; cf. D. Catalán and M. Soledad de Andrés, Crónica del moro Rasis (Madrid, 1975), 50–51; N. Roth, Jews, Visigoths, and Muslims in Medieval Spain: Cooperation and Conflict (Leiden, 1994), 43.

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they pushed off for North Africa in 429.63 Still others have canvassed Berber, for some species of zamurz or tamurt Wandalus, ‘the land of the Vandals’, or Gothic, for landahlauts, ‘lot lands’ divided amongst the barbarian invaders of Roman Hispania.64 Joining these are Atlantis, truly, and a pre-Indo-European compound of anda and luz, and (see Isidore?) the Coptic amenti as heard by Arab ears, for Hades, the West – ‘a place very much like hell’.65 The most recent explanation fixes, one could say counterintuitively, on the Greek word ἀνατολή, which has given Anatolia its name, as the eastern land of the sunrise.66 None of these propositions rests on any real historical evidence, and the debate, while diverting, can distract us from noticing that al-Andalus was used in place of ‘Ishbāniya’, the Arabic equivalent of Hispania. The obvious contrast is with North Africa, where Ifrīqiya is a direct rendering of Africa (Proconsularis), though the Mauretanian provinces of Rome are encompassed by the Maghrib. Initially it was not so. Immediately on arrival the conquerors began minting coins, with Latin inscriptions: remarkably, we have a gold piece from 712/3 bearing the Muslim profession of faith and in the margin ‘this solidus was struck in Hispania in the year…’; bilingual legends were introduced in 716, and al-Andalus substituted for Hispania in the Arabic text, until Latin was dropped for good in 720/21.67 Thereafter, for the balance of the early Middle Ages, one 63

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De Gayangos, History of the Mohammedan Dynasties, vol. 1, 312, n. 5 (cf. 322, n. 44); R. Dozy, Recherches sur l’histoire et la littérature de l’Espagne pendant le Moyen Âge, 2 vols (3rd ed., Paris-Leiden, 1881), vol. 1, 301–3; E. Lévi-Provençal, Histoire de l’Espagne musulmane, 3 vols (Cairo, 1944), vol. 1, 51–2; L.A. García Moreno, ‘Los árabes y la geografía clásica. El origen del nombre de al-Andalus’, in A. Pérez Jiménez and I. Calero Secall (eds), Δῶρον Μνημοσύνης. Miscelánea de estudios ofrecidos a Ma Ángeles Durán López (Zaragoza, 2011), 547; cf. C. Courtois, Les Vandales et l’Afrique (Paris, 1955), 56–7. W. Wycichl, ‘“Al-Andalus” (sobre la historia de un nombre)’, Al-Andalus 17.2 (1952), 449–50; H. Halm, ‘Al-Andalus and Gothica Sors’, repr. in Marín, Fierro, and Samsó (eds), Formation, vol. 1, 47–50. J. Vallvé Bermejo, ‘El nombre de al-Andalus’, Al-Qanṭara 4.1 (1983), 353–5; G. Bossong, ‘Der Name al-Andalus: neue Überlegungen zu einem alten Problem’, in D. Restle and D. Zaefferer (eds), Sounds and Systems: Studies in Structure and Change. A Festschrift for Theo Vennemann (Berlin, 2002), 159–62; F. Corriente, ‘Coptic Loanwords of Egyptian Arabic in Comparison with the Parallel Case of Romance Loanwords in Andalusi Arabic, with the True Egyptian Etymon of al-Andalus’, Collectanea Christiana Orientalia 5 (2008), 115–8 (though anticipated somewhat by M. Casiri, Bibliotheca Arabico-Hispana Escurialensis, 2 vols (Madrid, 1760–70), vol. 2, 327–8). J. Ramírez del Río, ‘Acerca del origen del topónimo al-Andalus’, eHumanista ivitra 12 (2017), 152–3. I. de las Cagigas, ‘Al-Andalus (unos datos y una pregunta)’, Al-Andalus 4 (1936), 205–14; G.C. Miles, The Coinage of the Umayyads of Spain, 2 vols (New York, NY, 1950), vol. 1, 113–16; A. Canto García and T. ibn Ḥāfiẓ Ibrāhīm, Moneda andalusí. La colección del Museo Casa de la Moneda (Madrid, 2004), 129–31, 143–51; E. Manzano Moreno, Conquistadores, emires y califas. Los Omeyas y la formación de al-Andalus (Barcelona, 2006), 56–9; A. Ariza Ar-

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finds the old Roman name living on only in translations and annotations of Visigothic canons and laws, as well as in geographical treatments of Iberia before Islam, beginning in the mid-tenth century.68 At that time Orosius was translated (summarised, abridged, revised) into Arabic, and in this form provided an introduction to Hispania for al-Rāzī, al-Bakrī, and others.69 Amongst them, al-Rāzī stands out for his unusual interest in the pre-Islamic history of the Peninsula, which hints that the Umayyads of his day saw themselves as the heirs to and culmination of this tradition.70 In the main, just as Arabic writers normally ignored the jāhilīyah or ‘time of ignorance’, they preferred al-­Andalus, their own term, for the days since the landing at Gibraltar, the ‘Mountain of Ṭāriq’: consistently, deliberately, they reached back to pre-Visigothic, even preRoman days, depending on how they understood the word’s etymology.71 What

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mada, ‘Los dinares bilingües de al-Andalus y el Magreb’, Hécate 3 (2016), 143–54; cf. J. Vallvé Bermejo, ‘Al-Andalus como España’, repr. in Al-Andalus: sociedad e instituciones (Madrid, 1999), 13–36; J. Vallvé Bermejo, ‘La imagen de España desde las fuentes musulmanas’, in Palacio Atard (ed.), De Hispania, 63–78. See P. Sj. van Koningsveld, ‘Christian Arabic Literature from Medieval Spain: an Attempt at Periodization’, in S.K. Samir and J.S. Nelson (eds), Christian Arabic Apologetics during the Abbasid Period (750–1258) (Leiden, 1994), 220–22; C. Aillet, ‘Recherches sur le christianisme arabisé (ixe–xiie siècles). Les manuscrits hispaniques annotés en arabe’, in C. Aillet, M. Penelas, and P. Roisse (eds), ¿Existe una identidad mozárabe? Historia, lengua y cultura de los cristianos de al-Andalus (siglos ix–xii) (Madrid, 2008), 107–8, 118–9; C. Aillet, ‘Quelques repères pour l’étude des gloses arabes dans les manuscrits ibériques latins (ixe–xiiie siècles)’, in M. Maser et al. (eds), Von Mozarabern zu Mozarabismen. Zur Vielfalt kultureller Ordnungen auf der mittelalterlichen Iberischen Halbinsel (Münster, 2014), 192–3, 199, 202. M. Penelas, Kitāb Hurūšiyūš (traducción árabe de las Historiae adversus paganos de Orosio). Edición y estudio (Madrid, 2001), 27–81; C.C. Sahner, ‘From Augustine to Islam: Translation and History in the Arabic Orosius’, Speculum 88.4 (2013), 905–9, 929–31; A. Christys, ‘The Qur’ān as History for Muslims and Christians in al-Andalus’, Journal of Transcultural Medieval Studies 5.1 (2018), 55–73; cf. Catalán and Soledad de Andrés, Crónica del moro Rasis, xxix-lxix; al-Bakrī, Kitāb al-masālik wa-l-mamālik, in E. Vidal Beltrán (trans.), Abū ‘Ubayd al-Bakrī. Geografía de España (Kitāb al-masālik wa-l-mamālik) (Zaragoza, 1982), 9–10, 15, 18–19. See D.G. König, Arabic-Islamic Views of the Latin West: Tracing the Emergence of Medieval Europe (Oxford, 2015), 72–188; J. Elices Ocón and E. Manzano Moreno, ‘Uses of the Past in Early Medieval Iberia (Eighth-Tenth Centuries)’, Medieval Worlds 10 (2019), 87–106. J. Elices Ocón, El pasado preislámico en al-Andalus. Fuentes árabes, recepción de la antigüedad y legitimación en época omeya (ss. viii–x) (Ph.D. thesis, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2017). This is on occasion hidden by translators who render ‘al-Andalus’ selectively as ‘España’: e.g. Ibn Ḥayyān, al-Muqtabis 2–1, in J. Vallvé and F. Ruiz Girela (trans.), La primera década del reinado de Al-Ḥakam I, según el Muqtabis ii, 1 de Ben Ḥayyān de Córdoba (m. 469 h./1076 J.C.) (Madrid, 2003), 3, 6, 15, 23; al-Khushanī, Ta’rīkh Quḍāt al-Andalus, in J. Ribera (ed. and trans.), Historia de los jueces de Córdoba por Aljoxaní (Madrid, 1914), 23–4, 30, 36, 39–41, 47, 49, 79.

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came in between was cut, a history untethered from its moorings. Al-Andalus, according to a geographical excursus of ‘Abd al-Wāḥid al-Marrākushī, writing in the thirteenth century, had once been known as Ishbāniya by the Romans and their precursors; picking up his narrative thread of the invasion in 711, he designates it by its new Arabic name, signalling a firm break with the past.72 This is, in other words, a fundamentally contested geography. The terms of the past had to be redefined for the present, as we can see in the Akhbār majmū’a or Collected Accounts, a compilation of hotly disputed date focussing on the conquest and emiral periods. When we read of Mūsā ibn Nuṣayr capturing Seville in 712, we learn that it was the foremost of cities, with the finest buildings and monuments, seat of the Romans in Iberia; here their aristocracy, clergy, and lay élite remained while the Visigoths took up residence in Toledo. The new capital, so often to rebel against rule from Córdoba, is thereby presented as a pale imitation of its predecessor, an impostor for upstart barbarians, subtly diminished in recognition and standing even as the Hispania over which it presided is erased from the linguistic history of the Peninsula.73 But why such sensitivity? The historian Ibn Ḥayyān, sorting through earlier sources in the mid-eleventh century, tells a story (also recounted by Ibn al-Qūṭīya) which may explain his own consistent preference for al-Andalus. By 805/6, the restive nobility of Toledo – seeking to dethrone al-Ḥakam i, departing from right faith, rejecting (so he says) the imamate – had vexed the emir for the last time. The pestiferous Toledans, beyond comparison with any other insubordinate citizens, were relying on the fortifications and difficult approach of the city to resist siege: stymied, al-Ḥakam i drafted in ‘Amrūs ibn Yūsuf, whom Ibn Ḥayyān calls a muwallad or non-Arab neo-Muslim, native to Iberia (as opposed to a Berber). Devising a ruse, he counted on the local élite feeling an inclination towards him as one of their own, implying that the rebels were muwalladūn themselves. Once ‘Amrūs ibn Yūsuf had been installed as governor of Toledo, he lured their leaders to a great banquet, efficiently massacring them on the ‘Day of the Ditch’ – named for their mass grave.74 There is a charged context of 72 73 74

‘Abd al-Wāḥid al-Marrākushī, al-Mu‘jib fī talkhīṣ akhbār al-Maghrib, in E. Fagnan (trans.), Histoire des Almohades d’Abd el-Wâh’id Merrâkechi (Algiers, 1893), 312. Akhbār majmū’a, 13; cf. James (trans.), History of Early al-Andalus, 15–42; R. Collins, Caliphs and Kings: Spain, 796–1031 (Chichester, 2012), 31–8. Ibn Ḥayyān, al-Muqtabis 2-1, in M. ‘A. Makkī and F. Corriente (trans.), Crónica de los emires Alḥakam I y ‘Abdarraḥmān ii entre los años 796 y 847 (Zaragoza, 2001), 28–35 (cf. 38–9); Ibn al-Qūṭīya, Ta’rīkh iftitāḥ al-Andalus, 86–8; M. Fierro, ‘Mawālī and muwalladūn in al-Andalus (Second/Eighth-Fourth/Tenth Centuries)’, in M. Bernards and J. Nawas (eds), Patronate and Patronage in Early and Classical Islam (Leiden, 2005), 218–38; A. Venegas Ramos, ‘Procesos de alteridad e identidad política en la Crónica de los emires Alhakam I

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resistance here: the old centres, like the Visigothic capital, persisted as foci of dissent. It was the former Roman diocesan capital of Mérida, after all, to which Louis the Pious made appeal a generation later, exhorting the citizenry to resist the tax bill imposed by the regime of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān ii.75 And given this context, there is an anxiety about history, a need to assert control over it. When the ninth-century scholar ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Ḥabīb and his continuator peered into the future, to the inevitable end of al-Andalus, the fall of Córdoba and Seville, they reckoned the final number of governors and emirs at 25, the same as the kings of the Visigoths: this put the telos in the reign of the emir ‘Abdallāh, beginning in 888.76 Who would not be anxious? The past seemed to reach out and take control of the present, as the Muslim rulers of the Iberian Peninsula were fated to go the way of their Christian predecessors. Not before time, though: al-Andalus was still standing in the mid-tenth century when the peripatetic Ibn Ḥawqal paid a visit and prepared a description of it for the global gazetteer which he seems to have been adapting from the work of al-Iṣṭakhrī.77 To him al-Andalus was part of the Maghrib, a unit constituted – like the diocese of Hispaniae – by Iberia and western North Africa. Yet Hispania had come to an end in 711, so what to call those pesky holdouts high up in the mountains? Like other Arabic authors, Ibn Ḥawqal uses the term Gallaecia (‘Jillīqiya’), the Roman province maintained by the Visigoths, to designate the y Abderramán I entre los años 796 y 847 [Almuqtabis ii-1]. Leales e infieles’, Revista de Estudios Extremeños 72.2 (2016), 907–36; cf. D.J. Wasserstein, ‘Ghirbīb ibn ‘Abd Allāh al-Thaqafī and the Beginnings of Linguistic and Ethnic Accommodation to Arab Islam in al-Andalus’, in R.G. Hoyland and P.F. Kennedy (eds), Islamic Reflections, Arabic Musings: Studies in Honour of Professor Alan Jones (Cambridge, 2004), 217–29. 75 Einhard, Epistulae, in E. Dümmler (ed.), Epistolae Karolini Aevi 3. mgh Epistolae 5 (Berlin, 1899), 12; J.P. Conant, ‘Louis the Pious and the Contours of Empire’, Early Medieval Europe 22.3 (2014), 339–45. 76 Ibn Ḥabib, Kitāb al-ta’rīkh, in J. Aguadé, ‘Abd al-Malik b. Ḥabīb (m. 238/853). Kitāb al-taʼrīj (La historia). Edición y estudio (Madrid, 1991), 403–4, 442–67; Manzano Moreno, Conquistadores, 347–8; A. Christys, ‘The History of Ibn Ḥabīb and Ethnogenesis in al-Andalus’, in R. Corradini, M. Diesenberger, and H. Reimitz (eds), The Construction of Communities in the Early Middle Ages: Texts, Resources, and Artefacts (Leiden, 2003), 335–6; A. Christys, ‘The History of Ibn Ḥabīb: al-Andalus in the Last Days’, in V. Wieser (ed.), Making Ends Meet: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the End of Times in Medieval Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism (Vienna, forthcoming). 77 G.R. Tibbetts, ‘The Balkhī School of Geographers’, in J.B. Harley and D. Woodward (eds), The History of Cartography, vol. 2.1 (Chicago, IL, 1992), 108–14; K.C. Pinto, Medieval Islamic Maps: an Exploration (Chicago, IL, 2016), 56, 154; A. Christys, ‘Did All Roads Lead to Córdoba under the Umayyads?’, in M. Kelly (ed.), Urban Interactions: Communication and Competition in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Networks and Neighbours (2018), 47–62.

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larger Christian kingdom of Asturias-León; the Basque country and Francia (Catalonia) fill out the northern boundaries of al-Andalus. But it is in Gallaecia, less ideologically resonant than Visigothic Hispania, that he locates the political and religious dynamic of the Peninsula. It is there that Ibn Ḥawqal finds the frontier cities of Zamora and León, capital and seat of the kings of the Galicians, whom he pillories for their intractable ways; al-Andalus, as he observes pithily, has two frontiers, one with the region of unbelief, the other with the sea.78 In this geography of religious polarisation, Gallaecia stood for the enemy. According to the Collected Accounts, an early governor, ‘Uqba ibn alḤajjāj, marched as far north as Narbonne: ‘in Jillīqiya not a village remained unconquered except the mountain where a ruler called Pelayo had sought refuge with three hundred men’, but in 749–51, amidst famine and civil war, these partisans struck southwards, seizing the Asturias and attacking the Muslims of Gallaecia, in the face of which ‘those who wavered in their faith converted to Christianity and did not pay their taxes’.79 A faithless land – the flight of the conquered to its fastness is a motif of the conquest narrative, and suspicion attaches to the very use of its name, reflecting the inability of Córdoba to assert any secure hold on it.80 There is even judgement in the sobriquet of ‘Abd alRaḥmān ibn Marwān ibn Yūnus al-Jilliqī (‘the Galician’), a muwallad who caused no end of trouble for the emir Muḥammad in the mid-ninth century; he and a crony ‘allied themselves with the polytheists’, namely those same wretched Christians of Gallaecia.81 78

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Ibn Ḥawqal, Kitāb ṣūrat al-arḍ, in M.J. Romani Suay (trans.), Ibn Hawkal. Configuración del mundo ( fragmentos alusivos al Magreb y España) (Valencia, 1971), 9, 11, 15, 61–3 (cf. 69–70); A.M. Carballeira Debasa, Galicia y los gallegos en las fuentes árabes medievales (Madrid, 2007), 59–77; G. Turienzo, El reino de León en las fuentes islámicas medievales (siglos ii H./viii d.C.-vi H./xii d.C.) (León, 2010), 20, n. 6, 24, n. 21; cf. W. Ouseley (trans.), The Oriental Geography of Ebn Haukal, an Arabian Traveller of the Tenth Century (London, 1800), a neglected monument of scholarship. Akhbār majmū’a, 20, 39 (cf. 27, 44); D. Peterson, ‘The Men of Wavering Faith: on the Origins of Arabic Personal and Place Names in the Duero Basin’, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 3.2 (2011), 228–36; E. Manzano Moreno, ‘La rebelión de los astures en las fuentes árabes’, in Homenaje a Manuel Acién Almansa. Mainake 36 (2016), 279–88. See e.g. Akhbār majmū’a, 9, 14. Ibn al-Qūṭīya, Ta’rīkh iftitāḥ al-Andalus, 118–9; cf. Ibn Ḥayyān, al-Muqtabis 3, in J.E. Guráieb (trans.), ‘al-Muqtabis de Ibn Ḥayyān’, Cuadernos de Historia de España 13–32 (1950–60), 13.171–2; ‘Arīb ibn Sa‘īd, Mukhtaṣar ta’rīkh al-Ṭabarī, in J. Casilla Brazales (trans.), La crónica de ‘Arīb sobre al-Andalus (Granada, 1992), 21.5; P. Quintana, ‘La violencia de la palabra: la construcción discursiva de los rebeldes musulmanes en al-Andalus (ss. viii–x)’, Estudios de Historia de España 16 (2014), 45–71; J.A. Coope, The Most Noble of People: Religious, Ethnic, and Gender Identity in Muslim Spain (Ann Arbor, MI, 2017), 146–8.

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Given this dichotomy, our principal narrative of the period, provided by Ibn Ḥayyān, juxtaposes north and south in a predictable range of movement between them. Muhājir ibn al-Qatīl, for one, leader of a failed uprising in the suburbs of the capital, obtained asylum ‘against the head of the Muslim community’, until being recalled to al-Andalus by his supporters.82 The dissident Maḥmūd ibn ‘Abd al-Jabbār al-Māridī (‘of Mérida’, that city again) likewise found himself forced to take refuge in Gallaecia under polytheist protection: granted a frontier outpost by Alfonso ii, he even held it in peace for a while before changing sides several times more.83 We hear too of Sa‘dūn ibn Fatḥ al-Surunbāqī, client of al-Jilliqī, one-time captive of the Magi (Vikings), and menace to Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike throughout Coimbra and Santarém, taken down by Alfonso (iii) ‘the Terrible’, lord of Gallaecia.84 Geography stands for allegiance or treachery, righteousness or blasphemy, raids depart from al-Andalus and assault ‘the lord of Jillīqiya’ and his infidels, the enemies of God, and this ideology of opposites only intensifies under ‘Abd al-Raḥmān iii. Regular news bulletins on events up north start to feature ritual curses – may God annihilate Ordoño, king of the Galicians; may God curse Ordoño, he who reigns over the Christians; savages, infidels, tyrants all – as people and place become the generic enemy other, and God intervenes decisively on the side of His Muslims. At word of the deaths of the brothers Ordoño ii and Fruela ii in 924 and 925, the Anonymous Chronicle of the first caliph has nothing good to say, coldly deploring the late lords of Gallaecia as unlamented despots.85 In this context, holy war gets its second wind, revitalised after sundry campaigns by the earlier Umayyads. With the adoption by ‘Abd al-Raḥmān iii of the caliphal title in 929, he is soon to be found performing pious leadership, on manoeuvres in Castilla destroying monasteries and churches as well as towns and fortresses: reaching Gallaecia during Ramaḍān, he joined his fasting with

82 83 84 85

Ibn Ḥayyān, al-Muqtabis 2-1, 59–60 (cf. e.g. 48, 54, 119, 187–9, 292, 295, 309, 317, 322). Ibn Ḥayyān, al-Muqtabis 2-1, 298, 304–5; A. Christys, ‘Crossing the Frontier of Ninth-Century Hispania’, in D. Abulafia and N. Berend (eds), Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices (Aldershot, 2002), 35–53. Ibn Ḥayyān, al-Muqtabis 3, 14, 178–9 (cf. 25–6, 336, 344–50). Ibn Ḥayyān, al-Muqtabis 5, in M.J. Viguera and F. Corriente (trans.), Crónica del califa ‘Abdarraḥmān iii an-Nāṣir entre los años 912 y 942 (Zaragoza, 1981), 9, 11, 13–4, 16, 20, 30; Crónica anónima, in E. Lévi-Provençal and E. García Gómez (ed. and trans.), Una crónica anónima de ‘Abd al-Raḥmān iii al-Nāṣir (Madrid-Granada, 1950), 49, 51 (cf. 9, 34, 36); G. Martínez-Gros, L’idéologie omeyyade. La construction de la légitimité du califat de Cordoue (xe–xie siècles) (Madrid, 1992), 113–28.

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prosecution of jihād, aiming to destroy the land ‘closest to the Muslims’, home to ‘the enemies of God’.86 Subsequent victory led to the public decapitation – commemorated in stirring verse – of a hundred leading ‘barbarian’ captives at Córdoba: a notable deviation from the ‘culture of tolerance’ then ascendant in the ‘ornament of the world’.87 Warfare was not only escalating, but also changing in its essence. When ‘Abd al-Raḥmān iii signed a peace treaty with Ramiro ii, one object was to secure the return of a Qur’ān which he had taken to carrying with him on campaign and mislaid in Gallaecia.88 The court chronicle of ‘Īsā ibn Aḥmad al-Rāzī, which covers the reign of his son and successor alḤakam ii, may offer more in the way of regular exchange of embassies, yet at the same time it too denounces the rogues of Gallaecia with routine imprecations, graduating to appeals for the extermination of León and the obliteration of San Esteban de Gormaz.89 Myriad more precise terms were of course current for portions of the Christian realms, but taken as a whole it was Gallaecia, a land increasingly understood as home to the enemy in an existential combat. The venerable textbook tradition of labelling the early medieval north ‘España’ misses this crucial corollary: one outcome of the conquest of 711 from the perspective of Arabic histories was not so much the end as the ending of Hispania, its deliberate absorption into and replacement by the new Islamic polity of the south.90 86

87

88 89

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Ibn Ḥayyān, al-Muqtabis 5, 30; cf. ‘Arīb ibn Sa‘īd, Mukhtaṣar ta’rīkh al-Ṭabarī, 16.1, 22.1; H. Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal: a Political History of al-Andalus (Harlow, 1996), 44–5, 65–7, 71, 77–8, 82–95; J.M. Safran, The Second Umayyad Caliphate: the Articulation of Caliphal Legitimacy in al-Andalus (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 19–25; M. Fierro, ‘Abd al-­Rahman iii: the First Cordoban Caliph (Oxford, 2005), 53–60; A. García Sanjuán, ‘La noción de fatḥ en las fuentes árabes andalusíes y magrebíes (siglos viii al xiii)’, in C. de Ayala Martínez, P. Henriet, and J.S. Palacios Ontalva (eds), Orígenes y desarrollo de la Guerra santa en la Península Ibérica. Palabras e imágenes para una legitimación (siglos x–xiv) (Madrid, 2016), 31–50. Ibn Ḥayyān, al-Muqtabis 5, 35; cf. M.R. Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Boston, MA, 2002), 79–90; M. Fierro, ‘Decapitation of Christians and Muslims in the Medieval Iberian Peninsula: Narratives, Images, Contemporary Perceptions’, Comparative Literature Studies 45.2 (2008), 148–9. Ibn Ḥayyān, al-Muqtabis 5, 37–8. Ibn Ḥayyān, al-Muqtabis 7, in E. García Gómez (ed. and trans.), Anales palatinos del califa de Córdoba al-Hakam ii, por ‘Īsā ibn Aḥmad al-Rāzī (Madrid, 1967), 11, 32, 58, 157, 216, 218, 220, 239–42; Martínez-Gros, Idéologie omeyyade, 129–55; E. Manzano Moreno, La corte del califa. Cuatro años en la Córdoba de los omeyas (Barcelona, 2019), 201–34. See now E. Manzano Moreno, Historia de España, 2. Épocas medievales (Madrid, 2010), 93–134; F. Arias Guillén, ‘The Many Histories of Medieval Spain’, Mediaeval Journal 2.2 (2012), 77–98.

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‘Better light let in by death’

Since it lay in the past, finding Hispania in the early Middle Ages requires a journey into contemporary recollection, and our first calling point in the Latin sources is with the Mozarabic population of al-Andalus. As late as the midtenth century, Ibn Ḥawqal could still catch sight of rural Christian communities numbering thousands of peasants disposed to an intrepid conservatism of resistance to change.91 But many adjusted to the new reality over time, and one much-discussed calculation locates the midpoint of ‘end conversion’ to Islam within a decade or so of the geographer’s observation.92 The incentives to adapt were greatest in cities, most of all Córdoba, and Ibn al-Qūṭīya relates the experience of the qūmis (count) Ibn Antunīyān al-Naṣrānī, who had mastered Arabic and attained some notoriety as a poet: when the emir Muḥammad mused aloud that he would appoint him chief secretary were he a Muslim, he promptly converted, though ironically this was later used against him in court intrigue, and led to his replacement by a rival.93 Yet, in spite of such opportunities, others more inclined to stand athwart history saw themselves as custodians of the Latin Christian culture of the Visigothic kingdom. The most disruptive of these are referred to collectively as the martyrs of Córdoba, and in the mid-ninth century, with a particular shared memory of Hispania animating them, they willingly and actively sought death by denouncing Islam and any accommodation of or acculturation to it.94

91 92 93 94

Ibn Ḥawqal, Kitāb ṣūrat al-arḍ, 63. R.W. Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: an Essay in Quantitative History (Cambridge, MA, 1979), 114–27; cf. A. Harrison, ‘Behind the Curve: Bulliet and Conversion to Islam in al-Andalus Revisited’, Al-Masāq 24.1 (2012), 35–51. Ibn al-Qūṭīya, Ta’rīkh iftitāḥ al-Andalus, 115–6 (cf. 110–11); Coope, Most Noble of People, 77–80. See e.g. K.B. Wolf, Christian Martyrs in Muslim Spain (Cambridge, 1988), 5–20, 107–19; J.A. Coope, The Martyrs of Córdoba: Community and Family Conflict in an Age of Mass Conversion (Lincoln, NE, 1995), 55–69, 80–90; C.L. Tieszen, Christian Identity amid Islam in Medieval Spain (Leiden, 2013), esp. 45–97; J.M. Safran, Defining Boundaries in al-Andalus: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Islamic Iberia (Ithaca, NY, 2013), 81–124; A. Patey, ‘Asserting Difference in Plurality: the Case of the Martyrs of Córdoba’, Studies in Church History 51 (2015), 53–66; A.T. Hollander, ‘Blazing Light and Perfect Death: the Martyrs of Córdoba and the Growth of Polemical Holiness’, in U. Winkler, L. Rodríguez Fernández, and O. Leirvik (eds), Contested Spaces, Common Ground: Space and Power Structures in Contemporary Multireligious Societies (Leiden, 2016), 203–24; C.C. Sahner, Christian Martyrs under Islam: Religious Violence and the Making of the Muslim World (Princeton, NJ, 2018), esp. 140–54, 216–21; and E.P. Colbert, The Martyrs of Córdoba (850–859): a Study of the Sources (Washington, DC, 1962), still fundamental.

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Latin writers from al-Andalus agree with the Arabic sources that the Visigoths forfeited Hispania to the invaders by their own patent shortcomings. One of the earliest and best known of these, the author of the Chronicle of 754, inhabited an intellectual world bridging Latin Christian and Arab Muslim, and this deeply informs the framing of events in the text.95 After a lengthy review of events from 611 onwards, touching on royal politics, east Roman machinations, and Church councils, the chronicler records that Mūsā ibn Nuṣayr conquered the Visigothic kingdom, ‘spanning Hispaniae’ since the reign of Leovigild, and forced it to pay tribute: Roderic had seized the throne, and when he joined battle with the Muslims, his entire army, present only out of ambition for the kingship, left him to his death.96 The godless conqueror beheld the Pillars of Hercules ‘like keys in his hand presaging and revealing the passage to Hispania’, before decapitating the nobility at Toledo, devastating ‘not only Hispania Ulterior but also Citerior’, and founding his brutal rule ‘over unhappy Hispania’ at Córdoba, once the wealthiest subject city of the Visigoths.97 Cue an apocalyptic dirge for the ruin of Hispania, beyond the chronicler’s ability to express even were every limb magicked into a tongue, language borrowed from Virgil by way of Jerome and Isidore; its suffering surpassed the downfall of Troy, Jerusalem, Babylon, and Rome, of that there can be no doubt.98 Next comes the bleak roll call of the governors of al-Andalus, interspersed with notices of illustrious Christians. ‘Abd al-‘Azīz ibn Mūsā ibn Nuṣayr brought all Hispania under his yoke in 715, seizing Seville and marrying ‘the queen of Hispania’, widow of Roderic, while his successor but one ‘to the rule of Hesperia’ imposed ‘the power of the judges’ across Hispania and organised Ulterior for taxation; another took a census of both Ulterior and Citerior, while ‘Anbasa ibn Suḥaym al-Kalbī, the eighth to rule, doubled Christian taxes and ‘triumphed

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F. González Muñoz, ‘Un perfil para el autor de la Crónica Mozárabe de 754’, Collectanea Christiana Orientalia 15 (2018), 31–48; and see A. D’Ottone Rambach and D. Internullo, ‘One Script for Two Languages: Latin and Arabic in an Early Allographic Papyrus’, in A. D’Ottone Rambach (ed.), Palaeography between East and West. Proceedings of the Seminars on Arabic Palaeography at Sapienza University of Rome (Pisa-Rome, 2018), 53–72, for an intriguing and potentially contemporary parallel. Crónica mozárabe, in J.E. López Pereira, Continuatio Isidoriana Hispana. Crónica mozárabe de 754. Estudio, edición crítica y traducción (León, 2009), 13, 16–7, 23, 27, 36–7, 41, 47, 50–52. Crónica mozárabe, 54. Crónica mozárabe, 55; cf. Virgil, Aeneid, 6, ll. 625–7; A. Cain (ed. and trans.), Jerome’s Epitaph on Paula: a Commentary on the Epitaphium Sanctae Paulae (Oxford, 2013), 1.1, with 99–104; Isidore of Seville, De viris illustribus, 27; J. Gil, Chronica Hispana saeculi viii et ix (Turnhout, 2018), 494.

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in Hispania’.99 But God was still hard at work behind the scenes, and in 750 avenging angels inflicted great famine on all those who by His surpassing grace were living in the land of Hispania.100 Christian rule had come to an end, and such accounts, in reporting this so firmly and finally, seem to counsel some measure of acceptance. The Chronicle of 741 (which runs, confusingly, to 743) draws from the same materials as the Chronicle of 754, though with rather different interests, and mentions Hispaniae solely to record the subjugation of the Visigothic kingdom and the imposition of tribute, scarcely expressing regret.101 The Chronicle of Pseudo-Isidore – possibly a work of the mid-tenth century, quite plausibly a Latin-Arabic-Latin translation – bins lament altogether, intriguingly, and closes instead with an arresting scene of Ṭāriq ibn Zīyād, advised by the wronged Julian, presiding over ‘captive Hispania (capta Ispania)’ from his capital at Toledo.102 In all these narratives, Hispania is instrumentalised, a device for coming to terms with a world profoundly changed, but in others it is a means of extolling firm resistance. The Passion of Pelagius, written in Córdoba circa 925–67 by a priest named Raguel, describes the worst storm ever to befall the Christians: ‘the enemy hosts of all Hispania moved against Gallaecia’, that is, Galicia proper rather than the north in toto, ‘such that, if they could have wholly overthrown it, then foreign domination would have taken control of all the faithful’.103 The sentiment behind this is made explicit in the anonymous Passion of Argentea, its protagonist perhaps identifiable as the daughter of ‘Umar ibn Ḥafṣūn (d. 918), alleged descendant of Visigothic nobility, convert to Christianity, and definite thorn in the side of the Umayyad emirs.104 Vulfura, a Frank, travels ‘to the

99

Crónica mozárabe, 59, 62, 64, 69, 74 (cf. 56–7, 65, 75, 77–8, 81–2, 84–8, 91, 93–5); G.V. Sumner, ‘The Chronology of the Governors of al-Andalus to the Accession of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān I’, Mediaeval Studies 48 (1986), 422–69; A. Christys, ‘The Transformation of Hispania after 711’, in Goetz, Jarnut, and Pohl (eds), Regna, 219–35. 100 Crónica mozárabe, 92. 101 Chronica byzantia-arabica, in csm, vol. 1, 36; R.G. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: a Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam (Princeton, NJ, 1997), 423–7, 611–2. 102 Pseudo-Isidore, Chronica, 21 (cf. 18–20); A. Christys, ‘“How can I trust you, since you are a Christian and I am a Moor?” The Multiple Identities of the Chronicle of Pseudo-Isidore’, in R. Corradini et al. (eds), Texts and Identities in the Early Middle Ages (Vienna, 2006), 359–72; A. Christys, ‘Expanding/Expounding the Chronicle of Pseudo-Isidore: Paris, BN lat. 6113’, in R. Corradini, M. Diesenberger, and M. Niederkorn-Bruck (eds), Zwischen Niederschrift und Wiederschrift. Hagiographie und Historiographie im Spannungsfeld von Kompendienüberlieferung und Editionstechnik (Vienna, 2010), 79–91. 103 Raguel, Passio Pelagii, in Riesco Chueca, Pasionario hispánico, 24, 2. 104 See D.J. Wasserstein, ‘Inventing Tradition and Constructing Identity: the Genealogy of ‘Umar ibn Ḥafṣūn between Christianity and Islam’, Al-Qanṭara 23.2 (2002), 269–97.

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region of Hispania’ to meet Argentea, and falls with her at Córdoba in 931; for these Latin hagiographers, Hispania had in fact survived its conquest, but transformed into Islamic al-Andalus, adversary and persecutor of Christians both north and south.105 Such a succession in situ has a logic to it, since the Visigothic ecclesiastical hierarchy remained partly in place: eight bishops convened in council at Córdoba in 839, while three were still available for a legation of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān iii sent to negotiate peace with Ramiro ii a century later.106 Indeed, identification of Hispania with al-Andalus, the situation of the one within the other, is attested in Latin literary sources nearly as early as in chronicles. Bishop Felix of Córdoba, in a fragmentary letter of 764, states that ‘litanies are customarily celebrated on the fourth, fifth, and sixth days of the week, with God as our patron, across all Hispania’, just as Leovigild (not the king), in a pamphlet On the Habit of Clerics from around 864, tackles the pressing question of why, contrary to the Apostle, ‘bishops across Hispania daily cover their heads with hoods’.107 In the intervening century, the Adoptionist dispute over the humanity of Christ only accentuated the distinction of this new southern realm from its northern counterpart. Elipandus of Toledo wrote to the bishops of Francia on behalf of his fellow prelates of Hispania, putting on blast ‘the antiphrasis Beatus, abominable Asturian priest, pseudo-Christ and pseudo-prophet’ for ‘the viperous words and sulphurous fumes of his pestilential doctrine’, while in a follow-up sent to Albinus, ‘disciple of the putrid antiphrasis Beatus’, he took the gravest possible exception to being cast inaccurately as ‘one of few in this belief, which all Hispania actually upholds’.108 But not everyone, whatever the precise rate and extent of assimilation amongst the Mozarabs, accepted that Hispania as al-Andalus should be a permanent arrangement. Amongst the objectors, we are exceptionally (doubtless unrepresentatively) well informed about those based in and around the 105 Passio Argenteae et comitum, in Riesco Chueca, Pasionario hispánico, 19, 9; A. Christys, ‘Cordoba in the Vita vel Passio Argenteae’, in M. de Jong and F. Theuws (eds), Topographies of Power in the Early Middle Ages (Leiden, 2001), 119–36; Coope, Most Noble of People, 137–9. 106 Concilium cordubense, in csm, vol. 1, fol. 5v; Ibn Ḥayyān, al-Muqtabis 5, 37; Collins, Caliphs, 97–102. 107 Felix of Córdoba, Epistula, in csm, vol. 1, ll. 12–3; Leovigild, De habitu clericorum, in csm, vol. 2, 9. 108 Elipandus of Toledo, Epistulae, in csm, vol. 1, 4.1, 6.4; D. Millet-Gérard, Chrétiens mozarabes et culture islamique dans l’Espagne des viiie–ixe siècles (Paris, 1984), 189–203; J.C. Cavadini, The Last Christology of the West: Adoptionism in Spain and Gaul, 785–820 (Philadelphia, PA, 1993), 24–44; A. Isla Frez, ‘El adopcionismo y las evoluciones religiosas y políticas en el reino astur’, Hispania 58.200 (1998), 971–93.

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Umayyad capital, who sacrificed their lives in confronting Islam.109 Eulogius of Córdoba said of these martyrs in his Remembrance of the Saints that ‘they sally forth against the angel of Satan and the forerunner of Antichrist, openly declaring what is holy, which even now the whole Church of Hispania cries out with its voice – albeit silently, as it is oppressed’.110 For him and his intense circle of ascetics, pious men and women, and troubled children of mixed families, the outrage was that, in the face of what they viewed as the oppression of Muslim rule, Christians kept their peace: horribile dictu, some even collaborated. Eulogius found precedent for their response, a willing search for death, in the ‘heroic age’ of Christianity in the late third and early fourth centuries. He relates approvingly how Felix had come from Caesaria Mauretania to Girona, ‘a city in Hispania’, seeking martyrdom in the Great Persecution, since there was no such opportunity at home.111 Somewhat earlier, the anonymous author of the Passion of Zoilus, martyred at Córdoba in 304, had straddled Roman and Visigothic history to similar effect: the saint remains unknown to men until the Arian idolatry passes away and ‘with true faith, in the time of the Christian and orthodox king Sisebut, the peace of the Catholic Church has been reinstated to the entirety of Hispania, and all people have been instructed by Church councils’.112 For the ninth-century disciples of Felix and Zoilus, their land was a stage set once more with official oppression – memory was reborn to life.113 Some might moot getting along with the new Muslim rulers, but Eulogius firmly reminded them of the big picture, that ‘the sceptre of Hispania has been transferred into their dominion, after the ruin and absolute eradication of the kingdom of the Goths, because our sin compelled it’, and while the once flourishing Church yet lives, it is thanks not to the tolerance of the regime but to the grace of our Redeemer.114 As he reiterated (at some length) in his Testament of Martyrdom, a prison letter penned to buck up fellow inmates Flora and Maria:

109 See A. Christys, Christians in al-Andalus, 711–1000 (Abingdon, 2002), 52–79. 110 Eulogius of Córdoba, Memoriale sanctorum, in csm, vol. 2, 1.6; Millet-Gérard, Chrétiens mozarabes, 21–48; and see now K.B. Wolf (trans.), The Eulogius Corpus (Liverpool, 2019), esp. 66–100. 111 Eulogius of Córdoba, Memoriale sanctorum, 1.24; cf. Passio Felicis Gerundensis, in Riesco Chueca, Pasionario hispánico, 12, 3–4. 112 Inventio Zoili, in Riesco Chueca, Pasionario hispánico, 18, 4. 113 See J. Wood, ‘Persecution, Past and Present: Memorialising Martyrdom in Late Antique and Early Medieval Córdoba’, Al-Masāq 27.1 (2015), 41–60. 114 Eulogius of Córdoba, Memoriale sanctorum, 1.30.

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The republic, shackled by its sin and now passed from the dominion of the Goths – which in Hispaniae, exalted by the good fortune of churches and preeminent in the potent authority of priests, used to be governed by their rulers – has been reassigned to the right of believers in that evil prophet by the hidden and just judgement of God.115 What was to be done? The answer came with the martyrdom of Perfectus in 850, when ‘the Arab nation in Hispaniae, enhanced in property and authority, was occupying with dire privilege nearly all of Iberia’.116 The differentiation here of political and geographical terminology is worth noting: the sovereign symbol of Hispaniae projected on the neutral screen of Iberia. Incarcerated for accusing Islam itself of falsehood, Perfectus foretold death within a year for the eunuch Nazar, ‘jailer-proconsul (claviculario proconsule), who at that time was running the administration of the whole republic in Hispaniae’, and had been elevated ‘over all the nobles of Iberia’.117 He died on schedule in the manner of Arius, his innards ‘seared internally by red-hot fever and, as more than a few report, rotted away by liquid poison’.118 According to Ibn al-Qūṭīya, this Nazar, a.k.a. Abū’l-Fatḥ Naṣr, ḥājib or chamberlain to ‘Abd al-Raḥmān ii, had bribed the court physician a thousand dinars to violate the Hippocratic Oath and prepare a fatal draught for the emir, but regrettably he got word and made the would-be regicide drink it himself.119 With a careful choice of archaising vocabulary, Eulogius has historicised the whole episode, transposing it to late Roman Hispania, when martyrs defied unyielding emperors.120 For those longing to suffer this was a positive attraction: following in the footsteps of Felix, a deacon named George travelled from his monastery near Jerusalem by way of North Africa to Hispania, where he chose martyrdom over escape to Francia.121 Temporary reprieve from state oppression, Eulogius grants, came under the emir Muḥammad, who was distracted by provincial rebellion against his tyranny ‘over every city of Hispania’, but by 859 the martyrs, ideologue-in-chief 115 Eulogius of Córdoba, Documentum martyriale, in csm, vol. 2, 18. 116 Eulogius of Córdoba, Memoriale sanctorum, 2.1.1. 117 Eulogius of Córdoba Memoriale sanctorum, 2.1.3; E. Pérez Rodríguez, ‘Léxico político latino del reino de León (s. viii-1230): consul y proconsul’, Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi 71 (2013), 151–64. 118 Eulogius of Córdoba, Memoriale sanctorum, 2.1.5. 119 Ibn al-Qūṭīya, Ta’rīkh iftitāḥ al-Andalus, 112. 120 Wolf, Christian Martyrs, 96–104. 121 Eulogius of Córdoba, Memoriale sanctorum, 2.10.23, 25; Passio Georgii, Aurelii et Nathaliae, in R. Jiménez Pedrajas, ‘San Eulogio de Córdoba, autor de la Pasión francesa de los mártires mozárabes cordobeses Jorge, Aurelio y Natalia’, Anthologica Annua 17 (1970), 465– 583, 36, 42 (cf. 2).

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included, had all won their palms of victory.122 Alvarus of Córdoba, in his Life of Eulogius, evokes a decade of great trials: When the cruel domination of the Arabs wretchedly laid waste all the limits of Hispania with the cunning of guile, when King Muhammad with unbelievable madness and inexorable purpose was intending utterly to annihilate the house of Christians, many, fearing the terror of that most bloodthirsty king and trying to restrain his insanity, attempted in fierce service of an evil will to attack the flock of Christ with various and exquisite temptations.123 Of these temptations, the one which most troubled Eulogius and Alvarus was linguistic – what they viewed as a progressive abandonment of the Latin literary heritage of the Visigothic kingdom in favour of Arabic language and culture. The familiarity of a shared tongue is bound up with a sense of home, and a feeling of dislocation fills its absence: in response, their circle cultivated an introverted prose of obscure archaisms, erudite neologisms, and the ‘synonymous style’ of repetitive rephrasing championed by Isidore of Seville and Ildefonsus of Toledo, both fêted in the Mozarabic liturgical calendar (as transmitted, revealingly, in Arabic).124 Alvarus in particular pursued a ‘demonstratively learned’ correspondence with John of Seville on the relationship of Christianity to education and other theological matters; he also became involved in violent epistolary trash talk with Bodo-Eleazar, renegade Carolingian convert to Judaism, in which he championed the Christian Visigoths as celebrated by Isidore and took seething umbrage at being dismissed as nothing but a lousy ‘compiler of the ancients’.125 About poetry especially this group felt strongly, 122 Eulogius of Córdoba, Memoriale sanctorum, 3.4; cf. I. Pochoshajew, Die Märtyrer von Cordoba. Christen im muslimischen Spanien des 9. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main, 2007), 171–88. 123 Alvarus of Córdoba, Vita Eulogii, in csm, vol. 1, 12. 124 Calendar of Córdoba, in R. Dozy, Le Calendrier de Cordoue, ed. and trans. C. Pellat (Leiden, 1961), Jan. 23, Apr. 4; P.P. Herrera Roldán, Cultura y lengua latinas entre los mozárabes cordobeses del siglo ix (Córdoba, 1995), 31–80; F. González Muñoz, Latinidad mozárabe. Estudios sobre el latín de Álbaro de Córdoba (A Coruña, 1996), 11–31; R. Wright, ‘The End of Written Ladino in al-Andalus’, repr. in Marín, Fierro, and Samsó (eds), Formation, vol. 2, 19–36. 125 Alvarus of Córdoba, Epistulae, in csm, vol. 1, 1–6, 14–20, at 20, l. 17; R. Collins, ‘Literacy and the Laity in Early Mediaeval Spain’, repr. in Law, Culture, and Regionalism in Early Medieval Spain (Aldershot, 1992), 15, 120–22, at 121; F. Riess, ‘From Aachen to al-Andalus: the Journey of Deacon Bodo (823–76)’, Early Medieval Europe 13.2 (2005), 140–50; M. Cousin, ‘“Nous avons vu ta lettre fétide et boueuse”. La querelle épistolaire entre Alvare de Cordoue et Bodo-Éléazar’, in T. Deswarte, K. Herbers, and H. Sirantoine (eds), Epistola 1.

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and Alvarus became literally senseless with rage and contempt in his Shining Catalogue, apparently a polemic against Islam, on the subject of Christians who studied the rules of Arabic versification.126 Offsetting such an alarming trend called for a poetic revival, and Eulogius describes in a letter to Wiliesindus of Pamplona how he had returned from the monasteries of Navarre (running into Wistremirus of Toledo, ‘torch of all Hispania’, on the way) with codices for use in promoting that artificial, convoluted, and tortured Latin verse which had been the joy of the Visigothic lettré.127 According to Alvarus, while Eulogius was imprisoned with Flora and Maria ‘he magisterially taught those metrical feet of which the intelligentsia of Hispania had been ignorant until then, and once paroled he introduced them to me’.128 These authors tarried in a Visigothic twilight. Writing soon afterwards, Samson of Córdoba referred in his must-read treatise On the Degrees of Consanguinity to ‘the blessed Isidore, our outstanding doctor, who illuminated all Hispania by the brilliance of his teaching and is a lamp of light to all the faithful dwelling in the house of God’.129 Elipandus of Toledo had similarly spoken wistfully of Isidore as ‘the doctor of Hispania’, while the Life of Ildefonsus – variously credited to his (dead) predecessor Helladius, his successor Cixila in the eighth century, or Cixila of León in the tenth (or alternatively to some Cluniac monk in the eleventh) – says of its subject that ‘like a little torch burning he shone all over the entirety of his own Hispania’.130 Collectively they echo Écriture et genre épistolaires, ive–xie siècle (Madrid, 2018), 99–112; and C.M. Sage, Paul Albar of Cordoba: Studies on his Life and Writings (Washington, DC, 1943), 43–81, even now a point of departure. 126 Alvarus of Córdoba, Indiculus luminosus, in csm, vol. 1, 35; Millet-Gérard, Chrétiens mozarabes, 49–76; D.J. Wasserstein, ‘A Latin Lament on the Prevalence of Arabic in NinthCentury Islamic Córdoba’, in A. Jones (ed.), Arabicus Felix: Luminosus Britannicus. Essays in Honour of A.F.L. Beeston on his Eightieth Birthday (Reading, 1991), 1–7; F. Delgado León, Álvaro de Córdoba y la polémica contra el Islam. El Indiculus luminosus (Córdoba, 1996), 11–57. 127 Eulogius of Córdoba, Epistulae, in csm, vol. 2, 3.7; R. Collins, ‘Poetry in Ninth-Century Spain’, repr. in Law, Culture, 7, 181–95; F. González Muñoz, ‘En torno a la poesía latina de la Córdoba del siglo ix’, in J. Casas Rigall (ed.), Iberia cantat. Estudios sobre poesía hispánica medieval (Santiago de Compostela, 2002), 31–60; cf. G. del Cerro Calderón and J. Palacios Royán, Lírica mozárabe. Introducción, comentarios, texto latino y traducción (Málaga, 1998), 9–37. 128 Alvarus of Córdoba, Vita Eulogii, 4; cf. C.O. Tommasi Moreschini, ‘Richiami al passato classico nella poesia mozarabica. Alcune note su Paolo Alvaro di Cordova’, in L.A. García Moreno, E. Sánchez Medina, and L. Fernández Fonfría (eds), Historiografía y representaciones. iii Estudios sobre las fuentes de la conquista islámica (Madrid, 2015), 289–304. 129 Samson, De gradibus consanguinitatis, in csm, vol. 2, ll. 18–20. 130 Elipandus of Toledo, Epistulae, 6.7; Vita Ildefonsi, in V. Yarza Urquiola, ‘La Vita vel gesta sancti Ildefonsi de Ps. Eladio. Estudio, edición crítica y traducción’, Veleia 23 (2006), 279– 325, ll. 20–21 (cf. ll. 1–2).

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the judgement of the chronicler of 754, who pointed to Isidore as ‘the brilliant doctor’ whom ‘Hispania celebrates’.131 But how did this torchlight illuminate the encompassing darkness? In an uncompromising Apologia against Hostegesis of Málaga, collaborator and heretic, Samson belabours his bête-noire for touring churches to compile a census of Christians, even visiting Córdoba, ‘patrician city of Hispania’, in 863 to enslave its citizens to state taxation, as well as for his shoddy grammar.132 Samson knew his way around language, and at times had himself worked for the regime as a translator: ‘when a letter of the king of Hispania had to be dispatched to the king of the Franks in 901, summoned by royal decree I presented myself to translate it, as I used to do, from the Chaldaean tongue into Latin eloquence’.133 The future of Latinity itself was at stake in a struggle against both Arabic and Islam, yet there was always hope. ‘Believe me’, he vowed, ‘these shadows of ignorance will be dispelled some day, and yes, awareness of the art of grammar will be restored to Hispania’.134 The message was clear: hold onto that language and literature for long enough, and the old days would return. 4

‘Life was blotted out – not so completely’

Meanwhile, to the north, the kingdom of Asturias-León formed a government-in-exile from its own history, and for that reason was endowed with the manifest destiny of recovering it.135 This is apparent from the very beginning, or as close as we can get to it. Beatus of Liébana, in his mammoth Commentary on the Apocalypse of 786, knew that Hispania had been entrusted to James the Greater – Santiago – for evangelising (whether or not the tradition dates back to Isidore of Seville): in the liturgy too he was hymned as ‘maestro 131 Crónica mozárabe, 14 (cf. 17). 132 Samson, Apologeticus, in csm, vol. 2, 2, praefatio, 2 (cf. 2.15.2). 133 Samson, 2, praefatio, 9. 134 Samson, 2.7.5; F. González Muñoz, ‘Sobre la latinidad de Hostegesis de Málaga y el estado lingüístico de la Bética del siglo ix’, in A. Alberte González and C. Macías Villalobos (eds), Actas del Congreso internacional “Cristianismo y tradición latina” (Madrid, 2001), 387–98; N. Pleuger, ‘Die lateinische Sprache im Apologeticus des Samson von Córdoba’, in Maser et al. (eds), Von Mozarabern, 179–88; and see G. Barrett, ‘Parallel Latinities in the Early Medieval West’, in G. Barrett and O. Margolis (eds), Latinity: Rhetoric and Anxiety in the Post-Classical World (Cambridge, forthcoming). 135 See e.g. A. Isla Frez, ‘Monarchy and Neogothicism in the Astur Kingdom, 711–910’, Francia 26.1 (1999), 41–56; T. Deswarte, De la destruction à la restauration. L’idéologie du royaume d’Oviedo-León (viiie–xie siècles) (Turnhout, 2003), esp. 45–95; H. Sirantoine, Imperator Hispaniae. Les idéologies impériales dans le royaume de León (ixe–xiie siècles) (Madrid, 2012), esp. 81–122; Bonch Reeves, Visions, 206–22.

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of Hispania … glittering as its golden head’.136 But change beckoned. When Beatus and Eterius of Osma staged their own intervention in the Adoptionist debate, they recognised a serious situation: ‘across not only the Asturias but all Hispania and as far as Francia, the news spreads that two questions have arisen in the Asturian Church – and as two questions, so two peoples and two churches’.137 Opening a second front in the rhetorical war with Elipandus of Toledo ‘primate of Hispania’, they heatedly accused him of ‘prefiguring himself as Antichrist’.138 One perceives here a dualism aborning, of our Asturias versus their Hispania, of orthodox non-Hispania versus heterodox Hispania, a sense of dwelling all as one in Santiago’s promised land no more. By the end of the ninth century and the beginning of the tenth, two hundred years on from the invasion, the first Asturian chronicles were being cobbled together, and that yonder Hispania had assumed a central role in the legitimation, self-definition, and eschatological destiny of the kingdom.139 The nearest we have to an official press release is the Chronicle attributed to Alfonso iii (866–910), surviving in two distinct but interrelated versions made soon after his death. Reviewing events since the decease of Reccesuinth in 672, the ‘Roda text’, so called for its transmission in the early eleventh-century Roda Codex, relates the Muslim conquest to mortal sin in familiar terms: ‘Hispania attained still greater iniquity’, such that the sons of Witiza betrayed it to the Saracens, who stationed their prefects in every province to pay tribute to ‘the Babylonian king’.140 And when the rebellion of Pelayo, ‘that Asturian hybrid of Moses and 136 Beatus of Liébana, Commentarius in Apocalipsin, in R. Gryson and M.-C. de Bièvre, Beati Liebanensis Tractatus de Apocalipsin, 2 vols (Turnhout, 2012), vol. 2, prologus, 3.17; Liber hymnorum, in J. Castro Sánchez, Hymnodia Hispanica (Turnhout, 2010), 130, ll. 25, 46 (cf. 97, l. 9); cf. Isidore of Seville, De ortu et obitu patrum, in C. Chaparro Gómez, Isidoro de Sevilla. Vida y muerte de los santos. Introducción, edición crítica y traducción (Paris, 2012), 70, with n. 162. 137 Beatus of Liébana and Eterius of Osma, Adversus Elipandum, in B. Löfstedt, Beati Liebanensis et Eterii Oxomensis adversus Elipandum libri duo (Turnhout, 1984), 1.13. 138 Beatus of Liébana and Eterius of Osma, Adversus Elipandum, 2.99; Cavadini, Last Christology, 45–70. 139 See H. Sirantoine, ‘Le discours monarchique des Chroniques asturiennes (fin ixe siècle). Trois modes de légitimation pour les rois des Asturies’, in Monarquía y sociedad en el reino de León. De Alfonso iii a Alfonso vii, 2 vols (León, 2007), vol. 2, 793–819; A.M. Ordóñez Cuevas, ‘La legitimidad de los reyes asturianos en las Crónicas de Alfonso iii’, Estudios Medievales Hispánicos 5 (2016), 7–43. 140 Crónica de Alfonso iii, in J. Gil Fernández, Crónicas asturianas. Crónica de Alfonso iii (Rotense y “a Sebastián”). Crónica Albeldense (y “Profética”) (Oviedo, 1985), R7–8 (cf. S7–8); cf. Annales Portugalenses Veteres, repr. in P. David, Études historiques sur la Galice et le Portugal du vie au xiie siècle (Lisbon, 1947), 257–340, 1, 711–2, 2; Annales Castellani Antiquiores, in J.C. Martín, ‘Los Annales Castellani Antiquiores y Annales Castellani Recentiores. Edición crítica y traducción’, Territorio, Sociedad y Poder 4 (2009), 203–26, 714.

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Asterix’, reached the ears of the new governor, he dispatched an ‘uncountable host from all Hispania’ with Bishop Oppa of Toledo (‘Abbās, brother of Sāra), one of those fell sons.141 At the fabled battle of Covadonga, both versions of the narrative report, Oppa taunted Pelayo that ‘all Hispania had once been ruled in a single order under the regime of the Goths, and its doctrine and science glowed brighter than in all other lands’, but the Don, unmoved, hit back, ‘Christ is our hope that from this small mountain which you see the salvation of Hispania and the army of the Gothic people may be restored’, whereupon 124,000 (or so) of the enemy troops lost their lives, and the small mountain itself contrived to flatten a further 63,000.142 For a time Hispania disappears from sight, but it returns with the first expansion of the realm in the ninth century. There can be no question that it lay to the south: Alfonso ii granted asylum to our old friend Maḥmūd ibn ‘Abd alJabbār, refugee from Mérida, but when he proved disloyal the king decapitated him and put down all 50,000 warriors who came to his aid from ‘the provinces of Hispania’.143 In the reign of his successor Ramiro i, the Chronicle in its ‘to Sebastian’ text – absent, alas, the elegiac charm of Brideshead, and named for a prefatory letter to the bishop of Salamanca – tells us that the Vikings dropped by but were driven off, setting sail for Seville, ‘a city in Hispania’.144 The new kingdom was hitting its stride, and according to the Roda narrative his son in turn, Ordoño i, built walls around León, Astorga, Tuy, and Amaya, all deserted, populating them in part with his own people, in part ‘with those arriving out of Hispania’.145 This is the core of the legitimising armature of the Reconquista, for not only are the towns said to have been abandoned, but their new settlers include expatriates from al-Andalus. The king transplants a portion of the past into a present, imperfect instantiation, laying a foundation for one day reclaiming those ancestral lands.146 The sour note on which the Chronicle of Alfonso iii seems to close may in that respect be deliberate strategy: piratical Northmen return to ‘our shores’, before pressing onwards ‘into Hispania’, crossing to 141 Crónica de Alfonso iii, R8 (cf. S8); P. Linehan, ‘At the Spanish Frontier’, in P. Linehan, J.L. Nelson, and M. Costambeys (eds), The Medieval World (2nd ed., Abingdon, 2018), 33. 142 Crónica de Alfonso iii, RS9–10; L.A. García Moreno, ‘Covadonga, realidad y leyenda’, Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 194.2 (1997), 353–80; F.J. Zabalo Zabalegui, ‘El número de musulmanes que atacaron Covagonda: los precedentes bíblicos de unas cifras simbólicas’, Historia, Instituciones, Documentos 31 (2004), 715–27. 143 Crónica de Alfonso iii, R22 (cf. S22). 144 Crónica de Alfonso III, S23 (cf. R23). 145 Crónica de Alfonso III, R25 (cf. S25). 146 See e.g. J. Escalona, ‘Family Memories: Inventing Alfonso i of Asturias’, in I. Alfonso, H. Kennedy, and J. Escalona (eds), Building Legitimacy: Political Discourses and Forms of Legitimation in Medieval Societies (Leiden, 2004), esp. 238–51.

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North Africa, and thence running amok right across the Mediterranean.147 What outlives Ordoño i is a lingering sense of unfinished business. The historical miscellany known misleadingly as the Chronicle of Albelda takes these ideas to their logical conclusion, and makes the implicit explicit. The text incorporates descriptions of the world and of Hispania, a range of factoids from national characteristics (‘the libido of the Scots’) to a bucket list of regional specialities (‘the chicken of Narbonne’), surveys of the six ages and of geography, a catalogue of bishops, an overview of Roman and Visigothic history in certain manuscripts complemented by the succession of rulers in León and Pamplona, and a chronicle of Oviedo and its ‘Gothic kings’: for although ‘Hispania was occupied by the Saracens’, ‘freedom was restored to the Christian people’ by the triumph of Pelayo.148 Subsequent sections comment on the origins of Islam, ‘the arrival of the Saracens in Hispania’, and the governors and emirs, flagging the moment when ‘the Umayyads came into Hispania’.149 The sense of whereabouts is the same. We learn that the Asturian king Silo (774–83) made peace with Hispania, and again that Maḥmūd was received from Hispania into Gallaecia, only to betray his king.150 When the chronicler records an attack by Muslim troops, they come out of Hispania to Gallaecia; raids by the Asturian kings strike into Hispania.151 But there is something new besides. Alfonso ii built churches – San Salvador, Santa María, San Tirso – and ‘comprehensively instituted the ceremonial (ordo) of the Goths, just as it had been in Toledo, in both Church and palace’, recreating an element of that former age in his kingdom.152 Where the narrative goes one step farther is in departing from the opposition of north and south shared by all other contemporary sources, Latin and Arabic: tacked onto it is an appendix or continuation, reflecting back the prediction by Ibn Ḥabīb of the downfall of al-Andalus, which foresees the imminent restoration of Visigothic Hispania by divine design. How would it come to pass? This Prophetic Chronicle, channelling Geoffrey of Monmouth and his ‘very ancient book written in the British language’, claims to be based on a Liber Panticinus, learned wordplay for ‘Book of All Fate’ (from παν-, ‘all’, and τύχe, ‘fortune’, with an adjectival ending).153 What follows 147 148 149 150 151 152

Crónica de Alfonso iii, RS27–8. Crónica Albeldense, in Gil Fernández, Crónicas asturianas, 6.7, 7.1, 15, titulus, 15.1 (cf. 14.34). Crónica Albeldense, 17, titulus, 17.19 (cf. 17.1). Crónica Albeldense, 15.6, 15.9. Crónica Albeldense, 15.12–3, 18.5–6 (cf. 19.5). Crónica Albeldense, 15.9; A. Besga Marroquín, Orígenes hispanogodos del reino de Asturias (Oviedo, 2000), 433–44. 153 Crónica Albeldense, 18.8; Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. L. Thorpe (London, 1966), 1.1; and Gil, Chronica Hispana, 511, cf. L.A. García Moreno,

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is the vision of Ezekiel of the Lord’s vengeance against Gog, only the bad guy is now the hero and Ishmael takes his former role.154 The anonymous author has been studying sixth-century exegete Apringius of Beja, who explicates the significance of Gog – and indeed Magog – in Revelation by identifying Meshek and Tubal as Cappadocia and Hispania, the far ends of the Mediterranean.155 ‘The land of Gog refers to Hispania under the rule of the Goths’, our prophet clarifies, ‘into which the Ishmaelites entered on account of the sins of the Gothic people’ in 714 (deliberately nudged ahead from 711). Yet as Ishmael abandoned God, so will he be given up to Gog after 170 years of power – to be precise, in 884.156 ‘Christ is our hope’, echoing the bold riposte of Pelayo, ‘that, as the years since they entered into Hispania are all but passed, the enemy may be nullified and peace restored to the Holy Church of Christ’.157 One might in any case notice a certain nostalgia for Visigothic halcyon days in the Chronicle of Albelda itself: in the geographical overview, ‘Gallia is not of the provinces of Hispania – but it used to be under the rule of the Goths’, or in the last of the fabulous features, ‘the teaching and learning of Toledo – this was especially so in the time of the Goths’.158 The Roda Codex adds to the prophecy that the Saracens themselves have foreseen their coming destruction in wondrous prodigies and astral signs, realising that the kingdom of the Goths will be reestablished by Alfonso iii. Many Christians too have seen that he stands on the verge of reigning over all Hispania, for the frontiers of the enemy daily contract inversely to the growth of the Church, and as the writer sets down his pen the year 170 has just begun.159 The auspicious decade of the 880s, again: was our author a reader of Ibn Ḥabīb himself? Sooner or later the present would give

154

155 156 157 158 159

‘­Historiografía andalusí e ­historiografía latina’, in C. Codoñer and P. Farmhouse Alberto (eds), Wisigothica. After M.C. Díaz y Díaz (Florence, 2014), 212; R. Furtado, ‘The Chronica prophetica in ms. Madrid, RAH Aem. 78’, in Forme di acceso al sapere in età tardoantica e altomedievale. Polymnia: Studi di Filologia Classica 19 (2016), 89. Ezekiel 38–9; P. Henriet, ‘L’idéologie de guerre sainte dans le haut Moyen Âge hispanique’, Francia 29.1 (2002), esp. 178–82; Deswarte, De la destruction, 147–57; A.P. Bronisch, Reconquista y guerra santa: la concepción de la guerra en la España cristiana desde los visigodos hasta comienzos del siglo xii, trans. M. Diago Hernando (Granada, 2006), 201–16. Apringius of Beja, Tractatus in Apocalypsin, in R. Gryson, Commentaria minora in Apocalypsin Johannis (Turnhout, 2003), 7.20.8–11. Crónica Albeldense, 19.1–2. Crónica Albeldense, 19.2. Crónica Albeldense, 3, 7.12. Crónica Albeldense, 19.3–4; cf. E. Manzano Moreno, ‘Christian-Muslim Frontier in alAndalus: Idea and Reality’, in D.A. Agius and R. Hitchcock (eds), The Arab Influence in Medieval Europe: Folia Scholastica Mediterranea (Reading, 1994), 86–7.

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way to a restoration of the past; like their Mozarabic brethren in the south, all the Christians of the north needed was patience. 5

‘Scattered wrecks enough of it remain’

Until then, their kings were not the kings of Hispania. But when did that actually change? The surest guide to this evolution is the corpus of 4,000 charters which survive from the Christian kingdoms in the early Middle Ages.160 Some dating clauses – regrettably not all – situate the transaction being recorded in the rule of a given king or count over a given area: written in the reign of Alfonso iii in the Asturias, for example, Ramiro ii in León, Fernán González in Castilla, or Sancho Garcés ii in Navarre; even, at moments of disunity, in the reign of, say, Vermudo ii in Galicia, where he plotted for the throne.161 As opposed to Arabic usage, ‘Gallaecia’ is seldom if ever employed for Asturias-León in its entirety, but the charters do agree, or at least initially so, that Hispania was al-Andalus.162 Consider the opera buffa of Sancho i ‘the Fat’: briefly dethroned in 958 by Ordoño iv ‘the Bad’, he availed himself of the free time to visit the court of the caliph at Córdoba, and shed the pounds on a herbal diet plan devised by ‘the Hagarenes’, assuming ‘the former cunning of his slim figure’.163 The king regained power in 959, and one donation and two diplomas from the Leonese monastery of Sahagún are dated to the first or second year ‘after his return (reversione or adventu) from Hispania’.164 This identification may also help to explain the unique sanction clause of a grant made to the Castilian abbey of Salcedo in 991, preserved in the unpublished late medieval cartulary of Froncea, which assigns the penalty of sixty solidi ‘to the count who 160 See W. Davies, Acts of Giving: Individual, Community, and Church in Tenth-Century Christian Spain (Oxford, 2007), 22–6; W. Davies, Windows on Justice in Northern Iberia, 800–1000 (Abingdon, 2016), 10–17; and G. Barrett, The Written and the World in Early Medieval Iberia (711–1031) (Oxford, forthcoming). In what follows I shall exclude Catalonia, for lack of space (and expertise): cf. A.J. Kosto, ‘Laymen, Clerics, and Documentary Practices in the Early Middle Ages: the Example of Catalonia’, Speculum 80.1 (2005), 52–3. 161 J. Escalona, ‘In the Name of a Distant King: Representing Royal Authority in the County of Castilla, c. 900–1038’, Early Medieval Europe 24.1 (2016), 74–102. 162 See e.g. Passio Facundi et Primitivi, in Riesco Chueca, Pasionario hispánico, 2, 2. 163 Crónica de Sampiro, in J. Pérez de Urbel, Sampiro. Su crónica y la monarquía leonesa en el siglo x (Madrid, 1952), 26; cf. J. Rodríguez Fernández, Sancho i y Ordoño iv, reyes de León (León, 1987), 13–36; M. Carriedo Tejedo, ‘Claves cronológicas de la Crónica de Sampiro’, Archivos Leoneses 47.93–94 (1993), 262–8; and see now J.A. Estévez Sola, Chronica Hispana saeculi xii. Pars iii. Historia Silensis (Turnhout, 2018), 25. 164 J.M. Mínguez Fernández, Colección diplomática del monasterio de Sahagún (siglos ix y x) (León, 1976), 164, 175–6; Rodríguez Fernández, Sancho i y Ordoño iv, 36–44, 56–8.

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has been in Hispania’.165 The document is dated to the reigns of Vermudo ii in León and García Fernández in Castilla, and the latter did spend time in al-Andalus (only later, when taken captive by raiders in 995; he expired of his wounds while in transit to Córdoba).166 I wonder: could that provision refer to some other unattested visit? At first glance, narrative passages from the charters seem to confirm a southern situation for early medieval Hispania, but in a number of cases they have set off scholarly alarm bells. One evocative example is a diploma of Vermudo ii from 986, by which he donated property to Santiago de Compostela: the former owners had been captured when Muslim forces, in the reign of terror of the ḥājib al-Manṣūr (d. 1002), had ‘come up from Hispania against the Christians’, laid siege to Simancas, and escorted the future martyrs back to Córdoba.167 The authenticity of the text has been questioned on philological grounds, and it does provide a rather pat back story for a local church of Santa Leocadia belonging to one of the victims.168 Along similar lines, the record of a dispute involving the Galician see of Lugo in 1025 recalls Braga as a great metropolitan of Hispania because of its foundation by the semi-mythical Odoario, who had come from Hispania – elsewhere usually North Africa – to populate it in the eighth century.169 Again the account conveniently contributes to the origin legend of that bishopric, but also mobilises it in the case at issue; the parchment may furthermore be a pseudo-original, an imitation designed precisely to disguise a forged document.170 Whatever they promise to reveal, charters always raise this question of authenticity. Many of ostensibly early medieval date appear to contradict what I have just said, attributing the title of rex or even imperator of Hispania to 165 Biblioteca Universitaria de Oviedo, MS 456, fol. 13v: ‘a parte de comite qui fuerit in Spania’; cf. D. Peterson, ‘Estratos vascos y árabes en la onomástica castellana altomedieval. La toponimia del cartulario de Froncea’, in E. Ramos and A. Ros (eds), Onomástica, lengua e historia. Estudios en honor de Ricardo Cierbide (Bilbao, 2017), 217–8. 166 Collins, Caliphs, 254. 167 M. Lucas Álvarez, La documentación del Tumbo A de la catedral de Santiago de Compostela. Estudio y edición (León, 1997), 52. 168 T. de Sousa Soares, ‘Sur un faux diplôme de Bermude ii’, Revista Portuguesa de História 6 (1955), 41–3. 169 J.M. Fernández del Pozo, ‘Alfonso v, rey de León’, in León y su historia. Miscelánea histórica, vol. 5 (León, 1984), 9–262, x. 170 T. de Sousa Soares, ‘Um testemunho sobre a presúria do bispo Odoário de Lugo no território Bracarense’, Revista Portuguesa de História 1 (1941), 151–60; L. Vázquez de Parga, ‘Los documentos sobre las presuras del obispo Odoario, de Lugo’, Hispania 10.41 (1950), 649– 53; J. D’Emilio, ‘The Legend of Bishop Odoario and the Early Medieval Church in Galicia’, in T. Martin and J.A. Harris (eds), Church, State, Vellum, and Stone: Essays on Medieval Spain in Honor of John Williams (Leiden, 2005), 50.

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the rulers of Asturias-León or labelling their realm the kingdom of Hispania, but turn out on closer inspection – whether for content, or style, or palaeographic dating – to be forgeries of the high Middle Ages.171 Few equal the chutzpah of the Voto of Santiago. After Ramiro i (842–50) had been assisted by the Apostolic saint in battle ‘for the first time in Hispania’, he supposedly provided for annual donatives to Compostela from ‘all Hispania, indeed every part of Hispaniae’, including what ‘Christians throughout Hispania’ should acquire in expeditions against the Muslims, one portion per soldier for ‘the guardian of Hispaniae’.172 The object was universal jurisdiction for the MoorSlayer: ‘the head of all Hispania’ as he is called in the Voto of San Millán, ‘patron and lord of all Hispania’ in dubious diplomas of Alfonso ii and Ordoño i.173 Only slightly less egregious counterfeits emanate from the cathedral archive of Oviedo: two diplomas naming princes of Hispania from Alfonso ii onwards, a papal letter identifying him as ‘king of Gallaeciae’ (sic) but the Arabs as rulers in Hispania, or a further pitiable attempt at a Vatican communiqué branding Alfonso iii ‘king of Hispania Citerior’ (somebody must have been reading Orosius again).174 Credit is largely due to renowned bishop-falsifier Pelayo (d. 1153), and versions of the papal material may also be consulted in his edition of the Chronicle of Sampiro, alongside the apocryphal Second Council of Oviedo convened ‘for the welfare of the whole kingdom of Hispania’ in 872.175 What Pelayo sought was the promotion of his see: the First (Fake) Council of Oviedo in 821 opens on the familiar theme of His wrath, reviewing how the Gentiles have brought low various towns in Hispania as condign punishment for their sins, and this sets the stage for why 171 See A.C. Floriano, Diplomática española del período astur. Estudio de las fuentes documentales del reino de Asturias (718–910), 2 vols (Oviedo, 1949–51), vol. 2, 716–8; M. Lucas Álvarez, La documentación real astur-leonesa (718–1072) (León, 1995), 92–202; cf. J. Montenegro and A. del Castillo, ‘Los títulos de los reyes de León en los documentos medievales como reflejo de la continuidad del reino visigodo de Toledo’, Estudios de Historia de España 13 (2011), 13–36. 172 Privilegio del Voto, in S. Barton, Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines: Interfaith Relations and Social Power in Medieval Iberia (Philadelphia, PA, 2015), 153–63, 159, with 82–92; cf. M. T. González Balasch, Tumbo B de la catedral de Santiago. Estudio y edición (Santiago de Compostela, 2004), 236. 173 F. García Andreva, El Becerro Galicano de San Millán de la Cogolla. Edición y estudio (Logroño, 2010), privilegio, fol. 1v; Lucas Álvarez, Documentación del Tumbo A, 1–2; Barton, Conquerors, 92–7. 174 J.A. Valdés Gallego, El Liber Testamentorum Ovetensis. Estudio filológico y edición (Oviedo, 1999), 476–81, 483–90, 472; E.E. Rodríguez Díaz, El libro de la Regla Colorada de la catedral de Oviedo. Estudio y edición (Oviedo, 1995), 1. 175 Crónica de Sampiro, 6–13; cf. G. Martínez Díez, Legislación conciliar del reino astur (718– 910) y del reino de León (910–1230) (León, 2009), 31–9.

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‘the entire council of Hispania’ simply must elevate Oviedo to metropolitan status.176 With the seal of a fraudulent antiquity, churches from Braga in the west to Albelda in the east endeavoured to endorse their foundation, restoration, relocation, or endowment: so often do such forgeries feature Hispania that it approaches a disclaimer in itself.177 This can of course lead to circular reasoning, not unknown to the ‘science’ of diplomatic, and each instance needs to be read as the product of a particular historical moment. False charters from the Aragonese house of San Juan de la Peña, for example, date the delimitation of one of its properties with reference to the visit by a Frankish king to Hispania in the late ninth century, and ground the importation of ‘the law and custom of Cluny’ (the Rule of Benedict) in the admirable plan of Sancho iii to hot up the tepid ardour for divine enterprise in Hispania.178 Both uses reflect, in general terms, the Frankish orientation of the region, and more specifically an intensification of Cluniac influence during the eleventh century.179 But there are also real differences amongst the fakes. Several series maintain the identification of Hispania with al-Andalus, reporting this or that bishop or monk hitting the road from there to the Christian north and founding a church or monastery: the stories are suspiciously similar, and call to mind the Chronicle of Alfonso iii and the royal resettlement of ‘those arriving out of Hispania’. In documentation notionally dating to the ninth and early tenth centuries, the Galician 176 Valdés Gallego, Liber Testamentorum Ovetensis, 465–71; cf. Martínez Díez, Legislación, 21–9. 177 A. de Jesus da Costa, Liber Fidei Sanctae Bracarensis Ecclesiae, 3 vols (Braga, 1965–90), vol. 1, 16; A. Ubieto Arteta, Cartulario de Albelda (2nd ed., Zaragoza, 1981), 2; see e.g. C. Sáez and M. del Val González de la Peña, La Coruña. Fondo Antiguo (788–1065), 2 vols (Alcalá de Henares, 2003–4), vol. 1, 11–2, 14–5; Lucas Álvarez, Documentación del Tumbo A, 40; J.L. López Sangil and M. Vidán Torreira, ‘El Tumbo Viejo de Lugo (transcripción completa)’, Estudios Mindonienses 27 (2011), 11–373, 8, 57; E. Cal Pardo, Colección diplomática medieval do arquivo da catedral de Mondoñedo. Transcrición íntegra dos documentos (Santiago de Compostela, 1999), 3; G. Cavero Domínguez and E. Martín López, Colección documental de la catedral de Astorga, i (646–1126) (León, 1999), 64; E. Sáez and C. Sáez, Colección documental del archivo de la catedral de León (775–1230), ii (953–985) (León, 1990), 511; P. Floriano Llorente, Colección diplomática del monasterio de San Vicente de Oviedo (Oviedo, 1968), 28; P. Floriano Llorente, ‘El fondo antiguo de pergaminos del Instituto “Valencia de Don Juan”. Documentos reales, primera serie (año 875–1224)’, Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 168 (1971), 441–513, 2. 178 A. Ubieto Arteta, Cartulario de San Juan de la Peña, i (Valencia, 1962), 7, 16; R. Jimeno and A. Pescador, Colección documental de Sancho Garcés iii, el Mayor, rey de Pamplona (1004– 1035) (Pamplona, 2003), 38. 179 A. Linage Conde, Los orígenes del monacato benedictino en la Península Ibérica, 3 vols (León, 1973), vol. 2, 498–551, 866–87.

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monastery of Samos is re-founded several times in succession by immigrant abbots from Hispania, often toting serious libraries with them, while three charters retrospectively recount an Abbot Alfonso and his compatriots from Hispania establishing Sahagún under the auspices of Alfonso iii.180 The ‘golden age’ of forgery in Iberia lasted from the late eleventh century to the early twelfth, but why did Hispania have such prominence in its products? Partly, archaism for credibility and respectability. The older, the better: the false restoration of the see of Ourense in 900 colourfully retails the arrival of its first occupant, ‘expelled by the barbarians from the province of Celtiberia’, top trumps for spurious antiquity.181 When Hispania stands for al-Andalus in such forgeries, it indicates that by this date institutions had come to see an advantage in re-remembering an origin in the occupied south. But by the same logic, when Hispania stands for the north, it indicates that by this date kings had come to see an advantage in re-remembering the Visigothic crown, and wearing it once more. Of course, it had never been pawned, only shelved. In 812, Alfonso ii had said in his testament that ‘the brilliant triumph of the Goths sparkled in the boundaries of Hispania’ until they were chastened for ‘overweening ostentation’ by ‘the Arabic sword’, from which disaster Pelayo arose.182 The interpolated cartulary version of the early twelfth century builds on this, tracing his dynasty to elements of the Visigothic ruling class who had fled northwards in 711.183 But an ideology of continuity is patent throughout the history of AsturiasLeón. This is most notable in the ongoing use of Visigothic monastic rules and the Visigothic liturgy, and kings promoted it by intentionally issuing no new law of their own, a statement of reverence for the monuments of a remembered past. The continued application of the Visigothic code in court cases and 180 M. Lucas Álvarez, El Tumbo de San Julián de Samos (siglos viii–xii). Estudio introductorio, edición diplomática, apéndices e índices (Santiago de Compostela, 1986), 33, 41, S2 (cf. 1, 3, 5); Mínguez Fernández, Colección diplomática, 97–9; cf. Sáez and del Val González de la Peña, Coruña, vol. 1, 27; C. Zwanzig, ‘Heidenheim and Samos: Monastic Remembrance of the “Anglo-Saxon Mission” in Southern Germany and the “Mozarabic Resettlement” of Northern Spain Compared’, in J.C. Sánchez-Pardo and M.G. Shapland (eds), Churches and Social Power in Early Medieval Europe: Integrating Archaeological and Historical Approaches (Turnhout, 2015), 269–95. 181 M.B. Vaquero Díaz and F.J. Pérez Rodríguez, Colección documental del archivo de la catedral de Ourense, i (888–1230) (León, 2010), 2. 182 A.M. Miranda Duque and X.L. García Arias, Documentos orixinales de los sieglos ix–x de los archivos del monasteriu de San Pelayo y de la catedral d’Uviéu (Oviedo, 2011), 2. 183 Valdés Gallego, Liber Testamentorum Ovetensis, 473–5; Besga Marroquín, Orígenes, 511–34; J. Montenegro and A. del Castillo, ‘The Alfonso ii Document of 812, the Annales Portugalenses Veteres, and the Continuity of the Visigothic Kingdom of Toledo as the Kingdom of Asturias’, Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 87.2 (2009), 197–214.

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legal records told a certain story, and lest the point be missed contemporary manuscript copies prefix to it a Brief List of the Visigothic Kings. This inventory of names, reigns, and little else runs from the year 400 to the Muslim conquest, noting exceptionally those rulers who had legislated, and carries straight on through the Asturian and Leonese kings (and beyond, in some versions).184 Though lacking a stable form, the catalogue normally has no breaks from the fifth century down to the eleventh, conjuring a seamless dynastic succession; at most, it registers the decidedly unjoyous entry of the Saracens into Hispania, before moving swiftly on. There was more than one route to legitimacy, however, and in revealing contrast the terse notices of the Navarrese regnal lists copied in the Roda Codex begin post-conquest and make no attempt to fashion any link to the Visigothic past, reporting without comment members of the ruling family fleeing to or dying in Córdoba.185 For the kingdom of Pamplona, genealogical links with living, reigning neighbours had greater currency than so many Reccesuinths and Erwigs and their laws. Yet the kings of Asturias-León remained uncomfortably conscious of where they were and where they were not. The Chronicle of Alfonso iii records, with a hint or two of defensiveness, that Ramiro i erected a church on Mount Naranco decorated such that ‘if one wished to locate a building comparable to it in Hispania one would not’.186 Significantly, it was only Mūsā ibn Mūsā (d. 862) in the Upper March of Aragón, regular rebel against the emirs, who ‘demanded of his men that they address him as the third king in Hispania’.187 The territory of the Banū Qāsī, putatively descendants of a Visigothic count and convert to Islam named Cassius, was no-man’s-land, nominally under Umayyad dominion

184 Laterculus Regum Visigothorum, in T. Mommsen, Chronica Minora 3. mgh Auctores Antiquissimi 13 (Berlin, 1898), 461–9; Chronica regum Visigothorum, in Zeumer, Leges Visigothorum, 457–61; cf. L.A. García Moreno, ‘Sobre un nuevo ejemplar del Laterculus regum Visigothorum’, Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 47 (1974), 5–14; F. Bautista, ‘Breve historiografía: listas regias y anales en la Península Ibérica (siglos vii–xii)’, Talia Dixit 4 (2009), 118–41; A. Isla Frez, ‘La pervivencia de la tradición legal visigótica en el reino asturleonés’, Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 41.2 (2011), 75–86; A. Isla Frez, ‘La construcción de la monarquía regia en León y Castilla: historias y leyes’, in P. Martínez Sopena and A. Rodríguez (eds), La construcción medieval de la memoria regia (Valencia, 2011), 33–44; Bonch Reeves, Visions, 153–94. 185 Item alia parte regum, in J.M. Lacarra, ‘Textos navarros del Códice de Roda’, repr. in J.Á. Sesma Muñoz (ed.), En el centenario de José María Lacarra (1907–2007). Obra dispersa, 5 vols (Pamplona, 2007–11), vol. 2, 11–3. 186 Crónica de Alfonso iii, S24; cf. V. Nieto Alcaide, ‘La imagen de la arquitectura asturiana de los siglos viii y ix en las crónicas de Alfonso iii’, Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Serie vii. Historia del Arte 2 (1989), 11–34. 187 Crónica de Alfonso iii, RS25.

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but effectively beyond their reach well into the tenth century.188 The audience for this title was Córdoba, not Oviedo: certainly the author of the Passion of Nunilo and Alodia, martyred in 851 at Huesca, knew that the area was subject to ‘the king of Hispania’, the emir, whose appointed governor received ‘the feral command’ to execute any muwallad who apostatised.189 Correspondingly, immigrants from the south were quite clear on where they had arrived. Notwithstanding the ‘Mozarabic migration’ of historiographical invention, the Leonese monasteries of San Miguel de Escalada (913) and San Martín de Castañeda (916/21) are the only two with inscriptions securely attesting foundation by refugees: both cite Córdoba as their port of embarkation while saying nothing of Hispania, as if leaving it behind mentally as well as physically.190 Of course, the frontier was crossed both ways by constant movement, in trade as well as warfare and diplomacy, and an unusual text of 1064/5 from Lorvão in Portugal describes a master engineer turning up from Córdoba during the abbacy of Primus (c. 966–85) to construct bridges and mills in the area.191 But again, nothing of Hispania. The Mozarabs, so often the deus ex machina for explaining cultural change, did not simply bring it with them in their luggage; the transference was a more gradual and internal process of accommodation. 6

‘The goal in sight again’

It is only natural to focus on Alfonso vi and his conquest of the old Visigothic capital of Toledo in 1085. From the unification in his person of León-Castilla in 188 See e.g. J. Pavón Benito, ‘Muladíes. Lectura política de una conversión: los Banū Qāsī (714– 924)’, Anaquel de Estudios Árabes 17 (2006), 189–201; Coope, Most Noble of People, 144–54. 189 Passio Nunilonis et Alodiae, in Riesco Chueca, Pasionario hispánico, 23, 3, 9; cf. Translatio Nunilonis et Alodiae, in J. Gil, ‘En torno a las santas Nunilón y Alodia’, in Homenaje a Menéndez Pidal, iv. Revista de la Universidad de Madrid 19 (1970), 103–40, 1–2. 190 M. Pérez González, ‘El latín de las inscripciones mozárabes’, in Codoñer and Farmhouse Alberto (eds), Wisigothica, 48, 55; cf. A. Christys, ‘Christian-Muslim Frontiers in Early Medieval Spain’, Bulletin of International Medieval Research 5 (1999), 7–9; J.-P. Molénat, ‘Los mozárabes, entre al-Andalus y el norte peninsular’, in Á. Vaca Lorenzo (ed.), Minorías y migraciones en la historia. xv Jornadas de estudios históricos organizadas por el Departamento de historia medieval, moderna y contemporánea (Salamanca, 2004), 11–24; G. Martínez Díez, ‘La emigración mozárabe al reino de León, siglos ix y x’, Antigüedad y Cristianismo 28 (2011), 99–117; C. Zwanzig, ‘Monastische Migration aus dem Andalus im 8.-10. Jahrhundert. Selbst- und Fremdwahrnehmungen’, in Maser et al. (eds), Von Mozarabern, 217–33. 191 A.A. Nascimento et al., ‘Transcripción del texto del Liber Testamentorum – Transcrição do texto do Liber Testamentorum’, in Liber Testamentorum Coenobii Laurbanensis, 2 vols (León, 2008), vol. 2, 581–717, 71.

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1072 he styled himself anew: ‘prince at the present time and king of Hispania’, faithful to the Apostle Santiago, ‘in whose dominion the land and rule of all Hispania reside’.192 Before long (the first original diploma dates from 1079) he had transferred this sense of global sovereignty to himself, ‘Alfonso, by divine grace emperor of all Hispania’.193 With restoration of Toledo as supreme archiepiscopal see in 1086, the regnum of Hispania, once found wanting by God for ‘swinish wallowing’, fully reclaimed its ancient Visigothic glory, or so argues the History of León (as we must now style the Historia Silense).194 The real innovator just may have been Fernando i, who titles himself ‘king of this Spanish (Spaniense) city’ when granting a fuero to Santa Cristina in 1062, but the document, a ‘semi-Romance’ copy of the twelfth century, is suspect to its most recent editor for that selfsame feature.195 Or perhaps his father Sancho iii, though all diplomas calling him rex Hispaniae are distinctly dubious; surely it is telling that when Oliba, bishop of Vic and abbot of Ripoll, aimed to flatter by courier, he addressed him in a letter of 1024 or 1025 as rex Ibericus (‘Iberian king’) ­instead.196 With the collapse of the caliphate imminent or recently accomplished, one might reason that ownership of Hispania as al-Andalus was freshly up for grabs at any point in the eleventh century, only this whole debate is largely beside the point. By the reign of Alfonso vi the hard distinction between Christian north and Hispania in the south had been slowly but undeniably dissolving for almost two hundred years. Even the biggest fan of Pseudo-Ezekiel will have noticed that Alfonso iii, contrary to the prophecy, did not reconquer Hispania in 884. In lieu of victory there ensues a steady drift in its location and meaning. When he penned a letter to the clergy of Saint Martin of Tours at the end of his reign, Alfonso iii 192 A. Gambra, Alfonso vi. Cancillería, curia e imperio, ii. Colección diplomática (León, 1998), 11; S. Barton and R. Fletcher (trans.), The World of El Cid: Chronicles of the Spanish Reconquest (Manchester, 2000), 17–21; Deswarte, De la destruction, 209–34; Sirantoine, Imperator Hispaniae, esp. 197–259. 193 Gambra, Alfonso vi, 63 (but cf. 34). 194 Gambra, Alfonso VI, 86; Historia Silense, in J. Pérez de Urbel and A. González Ruiz-Zorrilla, Historia Silense. Edición crítica e introducción (Madrid, 1959); Estévez Sola, Historia Silensis; G. Le Morvan, ‘Reinos e imperio: la Historia legionensis (llamada silensis) y la reivindicación leonesa de la herencia visigótica’, e-Spania 14 (2012), at http://journals.openedition.org/e-spania/21681. 195 P. Blanco Lozano, Colección diplomática de Fernando i (1037–1065) (León, 1987), 61 (cf. 58; 6, 25, 54, 67, 76). 196 Jimeno and Pescador, Colección documental de Sancho Garcés iii, 19, 53, 71 (cf. 27); E. Junyent i Subirà, Diplomatari i escrits literaris de l’abat i bisbe Oliba, ed. A.M. Mundó (Barcelona, 1992), lit., 19; Á.J. Martín Duque, ‘Sancho iii de Navarra, rex Ibericus’, in Palacio Atard (ed.), De Hispania, 103–19; G. Martínez Díez, Sancho iii el Mayor. Rey de Pamplona, Rex Ibericus (Madrid, 2007), 231–7.

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­introduced himself simply as ‘king of Hispania’: the text has raised many a diplomatist’s eyebrow, but then, why should anyone have invented its rambling chat of miracles and a tomb at Compostela?197 The more pertinent question is what the king was claiming by this title: the legacy of what had been lost in 711, or that his own realm was Hispania restored? Similar ambiguity characterises another contemporary source, the Life of Froilán, bishop of León, written a decade or so after his death in 905. ‘When his fame had travelled across the whole of Hispania’, we read, ‘at length it came to the ears of Alfonso the prince, who was ruling the kingdom of the Goths in Oviedo, in the province of Asturias’.198 The signification of Hispania here must be the north, where the holy man passed his entire life, but the author shies away from explicitly identifying it with the Asturian kingdom proper. As yet there is a distinction between the two, but perceptibly less clearly drawn; the one is being overlaid on the other. Indeed, a generation later, the scribe Gómez of Albelda stated likewise that Godescalc of Le Puy had taken his gift copy of Ildefonsus of Toledo back with him ‘from Hispania to Aquitania’ after making the first trans-Pyrenean pilgrimage to Santiago, yet in the same colophon called Ramiro ii ‘king of Gallaecia’.199 If we peek ahead a bit, when the notary Sampiro sat down to bring the Chronicle of Alfonso iii up to his own day in the early eleventh century, he kept to common usage in the opening years. ‘So many cities of Hispania also yielded to the arms’ of that king, who had captured Abū Khālid Hāshim ibn ‘Abd al-‘Azīz, ‘duke and proconsul of Hispania’, and vanquished the armies of Toledo and ‘other cities of Hispania’ at Polvorosa in 878.200 Every man must face his Polvorosa, and Sampiro with time equivocates: on campaign, the redoubtable alManṣūr ‘reached the maritime parts of western H ­ ispania and destroyed the

197 Alfonso iii, Epistula, in P. Henriet, ‘La lettre d’Alphonse iii, rex Hispaniae, aux chanoines de Saint-Martin de Tours (906)’, in S. Gouguenheim et al. (eds), Retour aux sources. Textes, études et documents d’histoire médiévale offerts à Michel Parisse (Paris, 2004), 163; R.A. Fletcher, Saint James’s Catapult: the Life and Times of Diego Gelmírez of Santiago de Compostela (Oxford, 1984), 317–23. 198 Vita Froilani, in J.C. Martín, ‘La Vita Froilanis episcopi Legionensis (bhl 3180) (s. x). Introducción, edición crítica y particularidades lingüísticas’, in M. Goullet (ed.), Parva pro magnis munera. Études de littérature latine tardo-antique et médiévale offertes à François Dolbeau par ses élèves (Turnhout, 2009), 561–84, at 581. 199 Gómez of Albelda, Prologus, in M.C. Díaz y Díaz, Libros y librerías en La Rioja altomedieval (2nd ed., Logroño, 1991), 279–80, ll. 28–33. 200 Crónica de Sampiro, 3–5; J.A. Estévez Sola, Continuatio de la Crónica de Alfonso iii: Manuscrito 57-1-16 de la Biblioteca Capitular, Institución Colombina, Sevilla. Edición, traducción y presentación (Paris, 2012), 1.4–5.

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city of Gallaecia where the body of the blessed Apostle Santiago is entombed’ in 997.201 By that date, Hispania had moved from the south to the north. With this change comes a shift in attitude towards the Visigothic past. The History of Octavian and Seven-Stars, not the household name it should be in academe, is arguably (though far from certainly) a Galician text of the later tenth century, and its fantastical quasi-urban history of ancient Iberia unfolds in a kind of Classicising alternative reality: ‘the city of Toledo was the first to be founded in Hispania, and all Spanish (Spanienses) cities are subject to that place’.202 The struggle for supremacy between the title characters has been taken to dramatise the Muslim conquest, but in the Roda Codex, which transmits the text, it is headed by an image of the old capital and comes right before a revised In Praise of Hispania.203 ‘Mother Hispania’, a second Isidore of Seville says, knows naught but peace amidst the passage of peoples through it: ‘the Spanish (Spani)’, the Medes (yes, the Medes), the Vandals, the Romans, the Goths, the Saracens, then the Romans again, for ‘they will reign over her forever and ever’.204 These oddball texts refocus the relationship between today and history, with Visigothic Toledo ascendant once more and Romans back in charge. Such an imperial image of dominion over many nations in one Hispania hints at a radical rethinking, that the Muslims did not necessarily have to be expelled for restoration to be real, as Alfonso vi (or one of his predecessors) subsequently took for granted in calling himself its king. Potential advantage, after all, was at stake in ownership of Hispania. Caesarius of Montserrat, for one, had his eye on the see of Tarragona, ‘which is established in Hispania’ and languished under Muslim rule but for a few years in the mid-tenth century: Sancho i and a council at Compostela consecrated him archbishop in 956/7, and he wrote to John xiii for papal recognition in 970/71. Santiago is the Apostle of Hispania, he argues, and the king and his bishops, in succession to the Visigoths, have the seniority (citing iv and xii Toledo) to elevate him so, even 201 Crónica de Sampiro, 30; cf. A. Isla Frez, ‘La monarquía leonesa según Sampiro’, in M.I. Loring García (ed.), Historia social, pensamiento historiográfico y Edad Media. Homenaje al Prof. Abilio Barbero de Aguilera (Madrid, 1997), 33–57; A. Isla Frez, ‘Building Kingship on Words. Magni reges and sanctus rex in the Asturleonese Kingdom’, Journal of Medieval History 28.3 (2002), 249–61. 202 Historia de Octaviano et Septemsidero, in J. Gil, ‘Textos olvidados del Códice de Roda’, Habis 2 (1971), 165–78, at 165; cf. M.C. Díaz y Díaz, ‘Tres ciudades en el Códice de Roda: Babilonia, Nínive y Toledo’, Archivo Español de Arqueología 45–7.125–30 (1972–74), 258–63; H. de Carlos Villamarín, ‘À l’ombre de Rome: les villes de Tolède et Pampelune dans le Codex de Roda’, Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 51.202 (2008), 131–9. 203 Madrid, Biblioteca de la Real Academia de la Historia, MS 78, fols 197v-198r. 204 Laus Spaniae, in H. de Carlos Villamarín, Las antigüedades de Hispania (Spoleto, 1996), 301–23, at 305–6.

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if the bishops of the Catalan counties rejected this tradition, and with it a Church united under Leonese rule.205 In the tenth century (circa 976?), at least one copyist of the Prophetic Chronicle borrowed a trick from the doomsday forecaster and ‘corrected’ the date of reconquest from 884 to 984, confident once more in its imminence, even as the diplomatic material begins securely to identify Hispania with the kingdom of Asturias-León.206 The earliest example is quite an ordinary charter, an original of 976 from the archive of Otero de las Dueñas, by which Adrianus and Leokadia donate a villa in Valdoré to a Leonese monastery of Santa Marina: the preamble terms her ‘guardian and defender of Hispania’, evidently a Christian realm and recalling the epithets for Santiago in more controverted documents.207 Twenty years later there is no more hedging: according to an original diploma of Vermudo ii to San Pelayo de Oviedo from 996, the king ‘was master of (possideret) the kingdom of Hispania’, and to make this gift he had come to the province of Asturias, the latter expressly located within the former.208 As earlier reges insisted that they were not in Hispania, so do subsequent rulers insist that they are – at stake in both contrasting strategies were authority and legitimacy. An original of 1012 now preserved only in photograph records how ‘a certain count in Hispania’ by the name of Ablabel had fomented unrest within the kingdom, aligning himself with troublemaker García Fernández.209 Circumstances called for the smack of firm government, hence Hispania was wheeled out in the proceedings: citing Visigothic treason law, Vermudo ii confiscated the rebel’s property and handed it to his son and successor.210 Hereafter references are regular. When Alfonso v granted the diocese of Tuy to Compostela in 1024, the diploma rehashed the story of Hispania and its sinful downfall, only now to explain the ongoing destruction being wreaked by 205 Caesarius of Montserrat, Epistula, in T. Deswarte, ‘Saint Jacques refusé en Catalogne: la lettre de l’abbé Césaire de Montserrat au pape Jean xiii ([970])’, in T. Deswarte and P. Sénac (eds), Guerre, pouvoirs et idéologies dans l’Espagne chrétienne aux alentours de l’an mil (Turnhout, 2005), 143–61, at 156–61. 206 Crónica Albeldense, 19.2 (A/AS1); with Gil Fernández, Crónicas asturianas, 101. 207 J.A. Fernández Flórez and M. Herrero de la Fuente, Colección documental del monasterio de Santa María de Otero de las Dueñas, i (854–1108) (León, 1999), 21; A. García Leal, El archivo de los condes Fruela Muñoz y Pedro Flaínez. La formación de un patrimonio nobiliario en la montaña asturleonesa (854–1048) (León, 2010), 21. 208 F.J. Fernández Conde, I. Torrente Fernández, and G. de la Noval Menéndez, El monasterio de San Pelayo de Oviedo. Historia y fuentes, I. Colección diplomática (996–1325) (Oviedo, 1978), 1. 209 Fernández Flórez and Herrero de la Fuente, Colección documental, 90; cf. García Leal, Archivo de los condes, 89. 210 Lex Visigothorum, 2.1.8; cf. M. Pérez, ‘Rebelles, infideles, traditores. Insumisión política y poder aristocrático en el reino de León’, Historia, Instituciones, Documentos 38 (2011), 271–5.

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Viking raids on the north.211 The unique verse preface to a testament of 1030 preserved in the thirteenth-century ‘old cartulary’ of Lugo meanwhile picks up another familiar theme, of Santiago as the Apostle who drew the mission of Hispania and made his seat in Gallaecia.212 There is renewed belief here in the divine plan for the Christian kingdom, with its Compostelan intercessor, but what has changed to explain such new life? Not the size or security of the realm; far from a turning point in any Reconquista, the late tenth and early eleventh centuries in Asturias-León were defined by sorties from al-Andalus, ­incursions by Normans, and a turbulence of pretenders.213 Yet this nadir prompted a fundamental development in the theory and practice of rule: royal promulgation of the Fuero de León in 1017, confirming, revising, and – crucially – supplementing the laws of the Visigothic kings with new legislation. Alfonso v issued his quasi-code in council with ‘all the bishops, abbots, and optimates of the kingdom of Hispania’ (in the Oviedo version of the text), and when he did so the relationship of that kingdom to its own history changed from passive to active, from reception to renewal, from inheriting the legitimacy of a former crown to asserting the authority of its reincarnation.214 And in the very decade that he did so the caliphate began teetering towards collapse, opening the road to Toledo: half a century before his namesake Alfonso vi, the time had come to take up the past in the present. 7

‘At times I almost dream’

Around 780, a group of refugees sought asylum under Carolingian rule, and in exchange for bringing waste land in the Pyrenees under cultivation they were granted a series of privileges by Charlemagne; the diploma is lost, but it can be

211 Lucas Álvarez, Documentación del Tumbo A, 64. 212 López Sangil and Vidán Torreira, ‘Tumbo Viejo de Lugo’, 111. 213 See e.g. A. Isla Frez, ‘Warfare and Other Plagues in the Iberian Peninsula around the Year 1000’, in P. Urbańczyk (ed.), Europe around the Year 1000 (Warsaw, 2001), 233–46; P. Martínez Sopena, ‘Reyes, condes e infanzones. Aristocracia y alfetena en el reino de Leόn’, in Ante el milenario del reinado de Sancho el Mayor. Un rey navarro para España y Europa. xxx Semana de Estudios Medievales (Navarra, 2004), 109–54. 214 Fuero de León, in G. Martínez Díez, ‘La tradición manuscrita del Fuero de León y del Concilio de Coyanza’, in El Reino de León en la Alta Edad Media, ii. Ordenamiento jurídico del reino (León, 1992), 115–84, prooemium; A. Isla Frez, ‘El proyecto político regio de las leyes de León de 1017’, in R. López Valladares (ed.), El Reino de León hace mil años. El Fuero de 1017 (Madrid, 2018), 172–5; cf. A. García-Gallo de Diego, ‘El Fuero de León. Su historia, textos y redacciones’, Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español 39 (1969), 13–7.

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reconstructed from later confirmations.215 These new landholders were called ‘Hispani’, but whence they had fled is not precisely certain. From just over the frontier of the Marca Hispanica (‘Spanish March’), perhaps: in 988/9, Sancho Garcés ii awarded pasturage ‘both on mountain slopes and in Hispania’ to the Aragonese monastery of San Pedro de Taberna, conceivably meaning the borderlands nearby.216 From al-Andalus broadly speaking, certainly; a generation thereafter, the deacon Guillem d’Oló took the precaution of updating his will because ‘I wish to travel in the region of Hispania’, and similar ‘death in Hispania’ clauses appear in Catalan charters of the early eleventh century, something of a travel advisory being then in effect.217 The refugees commemorated that ‘other place’ as their homeland, and travelled to Aachen in 812 to obtain imperial ratification of the original grant in the face of local counts who had disrupted their privileges. Still Hispani, a cohesive group 32 years later, they emerged victorious, and provided a model for other such arrangements agreed over the course of the century, beginning with Louis the Pious in 815 and 816.218 One may even imagine that the emperor drafted his letter to the citizens of Mérida in response to representations from such Hispani. Think on the concerns of his addressees: immunity from census payment, but also preservation of traditional legal practices. By guaranteeing them Louis assumed and performed a new role as advocate and defender of the Christians of Hispania. 215 R. d’Abadal i de Vinyals, Catalunya Carolíngia, ii. Els diplomes carolingis a Catalunya, 2 vols (Barcelona, 1926–52), vol. 2, app., 1; see e.g. C.J. Chandler, ‘Between Court and Counts: Carolingian Catalonia and the aprisio Grant, 778–897’, Early Medieval Europe 11.1 (2002), 19–44; L.A. García Moreno, ‘Los Hispani: emigrantes y exiliados ibéricos en la Francia carolingia. Realidad y mito historiográfico’, in Movimientos migratorios, asentamientos y expansión (siglos viii–xi). En el centenario del Profesor José María Lacarra (1907–2007). xxxiv Semana de Estudios Medievales (Pamplona, 2008), 53–76; E. Pastor and J.J. Larrea, ‘El curioso devenir historiográfico de los Hispani’, in B. Arízaga Bolumburu et al. (eds), Mundos medievales: espacios, sociedades y poder. Homenaje al Profesor José Ángel García de Cortázar y Ruiz de Aguirre, 2 vols (Santander, 2010), vol. 1, 785–94. 216 A. Ubieto Arteta, Documentos reales navarro-aragoneses hasta el año 1004 (Zaragoza, 1986), 64 (but see 65); cf. M. Zimmermann, ‘Le concept de “Marca Hispanica” et l’importance de la frontière dans la formation de la Catalogne’, in P. Sénac (ed.), La Marche supérieure d’al-Andalus et l’Occident chrétien (Madrid, 1991), 29–48; C.J. Chandler, ‘Carolingian Catalonia: the Spanish March and the Franks, c. 750-c. 1050’, History Compass 11.9 (2013), 739–50. 217 Junyent i Subirà, Diplomatari, 108 (cf. 146); see e.g. J. Rius Serra, Cartulario de “Sant Cugat” del Vallés, 3 vols (Barcelona, 1945–47), vol. 2, 427, 441; A.M. Udina i Abelló, La successió testada a la Catalunya altomedieval (Barcelona, 1984), 95, 97. 218 A. Boretius, Capitularia Regum Francorum 1. mgh Leges 1 (Hanover, 1883), 76, 132–3; d’Abadal i de Vinyals, Catalunya Carolíngia, vol. 2, app., 3–4; cf. also J.M. Font Rius, Cartas de población y franquicia de Cataluña, 2 vols (Madrid-Barcelona, 1969–83), vol. 1, 2; M. Pardo i Sabartés, Mensa episcopal de Barcelona (878–1299) (Barcelona, 1994), 1.

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Does a sense of identity emerge from territory? Or does a sense of territory emerge from identity? As the court looked back on the settlers looking back, a self-awareness gathered, rights and obligations bound together, and substance built on air, from the Hispani remembering Hispania – now Roman, now Catholic, now Visigothic, now Muslim; from the memory of a memory. Those who had fled to the sanctuary of a strange land defined themselves by that flight, their abandoned home serving yet to provide and protect a special status. The experience of the Hispani can stand for remembering Hispania across the Iberian Peninsula in the early Middle Ages, a means by which its communities in conflict could fashion and refashion their respective identities and come to understand where they stood in relation to each other. Governors, emirs, and caliphs of al-Andalus knew that they were the new Hispania, but more than observing a simple silence they chose to overwrite it, forgetting, as their stance towards the Christians in the north intensified into jihād. The Mozarabs too made a point of who they were still, in exhortations to recollect and resist, while their co-religionists in Asturias-León remembered who they once had been, and could be again. Chronicling and documenting dynastic continuity with a Hispania just beyond the frontier moulded a memory to frame reconquest under royal leadership; if Christianity, unlike Islam, lacked a theology of holy war for the moment at least, here it found cover. And as that frontier pushed southwards, first in fits and starts, then dramatically under Alfonso vi, not only did Hispania move northwards, liberated from al-Andalus, but it also crept back through forgeries into a past rewritten, bringing a Mozarabic migration along with it – an origin myth for a world reborn. Light the lamp of memory: prophecy had faltered, but in adversity and opportunity the Christians of the old Asturias-León and the new León-Castilla reached out to summon home their own private Hispania from its long fruitful years of service abroad. Bibliography Abadal i de Vinyals, R. d’, Catalunya Carolíngia, ii. Els diplomes carolingis a Catalunya, 2 vols (Barcelona, 1926–52). ‘Abd al-Wāḥid al-Marrākushī, al-Mu‘jib fī talkhīṣ akhbār al-Maghrib, in E. Fagnan (trans.), Histoire des Almohades d’Abd el-Wâh’id Merrâkechi (Algiers, 1893). Aguilar Piñal, F., El académico Cándido María Trigueros (1736–1798) (Madrid, 2001). Aillet, C., ‘Recherches sur le christianisme arabisé (ixe–xiie siècles). Les manuscrits hispaniques annotés en arabe’, in C. Aillet, M. Penelas, and P. Roisse (eds), ¿Existe una identidad mozárabe? Historia, lengua y cultura de los cristianos de al-Andalus (siglos ix–xii) (Madrid, 2008), 91–134.

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Part 2 Hispania Real and Imagined

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Chapter 3

A Likely Story: Purpose in Narratives from Charters of the Early Medieval Pyrenees Jonathan Jarrett Despite having no early specifically narrative source materials, the area now known as Catalonia is famously rich in documentary material from the ninth and tenth centuries, providing us with contemporary original sources which detail transactions, judicial hearings and so on. A surprising number of these documents contain narratives. Sometimes these relate to grand events, but more often they are stories particular to the transaction or hearing recorded. Using material from before and shortly after the year 1000, this chapter asks why such stories occur only occasionally, how much weight can be placed on their details given their formulaic medium, and what purpose they served. It concludes that, rather than representing an access of realism breaching formulae, the stories acted mainly as a stratagem to make safe the unusual or even fraudulent, working to elicit audience sympathy or cooperation when regular, legal norms were insufficient. 1

Introduction: Telling Stories in Charters

In the year 1003 an archdeacon of the cathedral of Urgell, on the southern side of the Pyrenees in what is now Catalonia, decided he needed to tell a story. The story that he told, or at least that was written down for him, went something like this: By our Lord Jesus. Let it be known to all men present and future how it happened to me Sendred, Archdeacon, however unworthy, of the Holy Mother of the See of Urgell and bailiff of the Andorra valley, sadly for my sins or some reason, that my lord Count Borrell built against the men of the Andorra valley a castle that is called Bragafols, which he commended to me. Those selfsame men however raised siege-works against the castle and took possession of it, and the aforesaid count flung me in chains and shackles and held me for a long time over that castle. And he interrogated

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me in his name through his magnates and nobles so that I would agree to give to him that alod of mine that I had in Somont, which I held from the franchise of the men of Andorra and from my parents. I however answered him: I am not giving away my parents’ heredity, I had sooner die first! And I sent a message to my lord, to Bishop Sal·la, and he himself sought the count and said to him: For what reason, my lord, are you holding a cleric and Archdeacon of Holy Mary in chains? The count answered: If he will not give me that alod of his that he has in Somont I shall not release him. The Bishop responded: That alod which you seek is already the above-named Mother’s. Moreover, when the count heard the words of the bishop and the bishop proved all these things to be true, the count was exceedingly angry and released me from the shackles and from the chains. And on account of this service which Holy Mary the Mother of God and my lord Bishop Sal·la have done me, we, I Sendred son of Centoll and my woman Ermeriga give to My Lady the aforesaid Virgin Mary Mother of God the aforesaid alod which we have in Somont, with its entrances and exits and with all the things pertaining to it, in this way, namely, so that we or our kinsmen may hold the aforesaid alod as long as we may live, in the service of Holy Mary […] by donation of Bishop Sal·la and his successors… The story comes, as the ending reveals, from a donation charter to Urgell cathedral.1 Its use of direct speech is striking and unusual, but that speech refers to 1 Sendred’s story is to be found in C. Baraut (ed.), ‘Els documents, dels anys 981–1010, de l’Arxiu Capitular de la Seu d’Urgell’, Urgellia 3 (1980), 7–166 (117–9, no. 286): ‘Per Ihesum dominum nostrum. Notum sit hominibus presentibus et futuris qualiter ego Sendredus, quamvis indignus archidiaconus sancte matris Sedis Urgellensis et baiulus vallis Norrensis, evenit mihi triste pro peccatis meis sive de racione quia comes Borrellus senior meus fecit castrum contra homines valle Norrensis qui vocatur Bragafols quod comendavit eum mihi. Ipsi tamen homines posuerunt insidias contra castrum et tenuerunt eum, et tamen prelibatis comes missit me in vinculis sive in compedibus et tenuit me longo tempore per illum castrum. Et inquisivi me ut nomine suo per suos optimos vel nobiles et dedissem ei ipsum meum alodem quem habebam in Submonte, qui fuit ex franceda de homines de valle Andorra sive ex parentibus meis. Ego autem respondi ei: Non do hereditatem parentum meorum antea pocius mori. Et missi ad seniorem meum indicium ad Sallanum episcopum et petivit ipse ad comitem et dixit ei: Quare domine senior tenes clericum et archidiaconem sancte Marie in vinculis? Respondit comes: Si non dederit mihi suum alaudem quam habet in Submote non dimitam eum. Respondit episcopus: Ipsum alaudem quem inquiris iam est ex iam dicta Genetricis. Ut autem audivit comes verba episcopi et probavit omnia vera esse fuit iratus nimis et abstraxit me a compedibus sive a vinculis. Et propter hoc beneficium, quod fecit mihi Dei genetricis virginis Marie et Sanla pontifex senior meus, domanus ego Sendredus filius Centoli et mulier mea Ermeriga ad domine mee iam dicte Dei genetricis virginis Marie alodium

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the text of which it forms part when it identifies Santa Maria d’Urgell as ‘that aforesaid mother’, iam dicta Genetrix. It shows us clearly how a man in this castle-dominated world might literally wind up serving two masters, and how that might go wrong; it also tells us that in Catalonia at the turn of the first millennium an archdeacon might have a common-law wife, whose rights in his property had to be respected. It tells us, furthermore, that Bishop Sal·la was a sharp operator whom it was unwise to cross. Looking deeper, though, it is clear that the narrative twists around some awkward points. Why, for example, did Sendred hold land from the franchise of the same people that he was supposed to be guarding against? Was his holding of that land the reason why he was chosen as bailiff? Or was that why he found himself under siege? For Sendred, these facts did not help the story and so we do not know them. The most obvious difficulty, however, is that the story’s internal content is at odds with its external form. Count Borrell had died in 993; the events described must therefore have taken place at least a decade earlier than Sendred’s unwilling gift.2 At some level, therefore, Sal·la was lying if he told the count that the land was already the Virgin’s. At best, Sendred had taken some time to make good on the bishop’s promise and, even when he did, he and Ermeriga received the lands back in the cathedral’s service for their and their kinsmens’ lifetimes.3 If Sendred had earlier promised the lands to Sal·la, though, surely that earlier promise would have adequately explained the gift, but Sendred did not record it; instead he told the story of the time his old boss put him in chains. There is, in other words, no easy way for the gift to be above board as we are told it, but the story was still important to tell. At this point some context is needed. In 1003, Urgell was one of eleven counties and a number of lesser territories like Andorra that made up a zone that we could call Catalonia, although its inhabitants did not yet do so and it is identifiable as such largely by not being part of Toulouse, Provence, Navarre,

quam habemus in Submonte iam dictum cum exiis et regressiis suis sive cum omnibus suis pertineciis, ea videlicet racione ut prelibatum alodem teneamus nos [quan]diucumque vixerimus vel consanguinei nostri in servicio sancte Marie […] donacione Sallani episcopi vel successores suos…’ N.B. Alod here is understood to mean land owned outright. 2 C. Baraut, ‘La data i el lloc de la mort del comte Borrell ii de Barcelona-Urgell’, Urgellia 10 (1990), 469–72. 3 The document is phrased as a donation, but its terms clearly amount to what would have been formulated as a precaria elsewhere: see L. Morelle, ‘Les «  actes de précaire  », instruments de transferts patrimoniaux (France du nord et de l’est, viiie–xie siècle)’, Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome: Moyen âge 111, Les trans­ferts patrimoniaux en Europe occidentale, VIIIIe– Xe siècle : Actes de la table ronde de Rome, 6, 7 et 8 mai 1999 (1999) (607–47).

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Aragón or al-Andalus.4 Al-Andalus was resurgent at this point, having for twenty years been a military terror in the north under the Amirid family, chief ministers of the increasingly-isolated caliph. Amirid dominance was about to fall apart, but that would not yet have been apparent.5 The eleven counties had eight counts, of whom most were probably related, but this did not make them a unit. Urgell, where Sendred made his gift, was ruled by Count Ermengol i, son of Count Borrell of the charter, and Ermengol’s brother Ramon Borrell was the most powerful ruler of the area, in Barcelona, Girona and Osona. Even in cooperation, however, these two held no explicit supremacy over their cousins in Besalú-Cerdanya and Empúries-Rosselló. Until very recently, all these zones had been notionally obedient to the Carolingian kings, occasionally obtaining royal precepts from them right up until 986, although Borrell was at that point changing tack after more than twenty years as a client of the Caliph of Córdoba.6 Borrell, who had ruled all four of his sons’ counties, was one of the most powerful men in northern Spain, but this did not enable him to resist Córdoba’s armies when the Muslim chief minister al-Manṣūr sacked Barcelona in 985. Borrell struggled to control his lords (men like Bishop Sal·la), and the range of ways – ideological and bluntly matter-offact – in which he did so would make a book in themselves.7 Their variety did not always mean success, however. 2

Early Medieval Narratives in Catalonia

Although it is famous (or infamous) for the extent of its early medieval documentary preservation, the area these men ruled has left us almost nothing in 4 For general political background see J.M.H. Smith, ‘“Fines Imperii”: the marches’, in ncmh ii, 169–89, at 179–85, and M. Zimmermann, ‘Western Francia: the southern principalities’, in ncmh iii, 420–55, at 441–9, or, in Catalan, Josep María Salrach, ‘Introducció: canvi social, poder i identitat’, in J.M. Salrach (ed.), Història Política, Societat i Cultura dels Països Catalans volum 2: la formació de la societat feudal, segles vi–xii (Barcelona, 1998), 15–67. See also C.J. Chandler, Carolingian Catalonia: Politics, Culture, and Identity in an Imperial Province, 778–987, vol. 111 of Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 4th Series (Cambridge, 2019).The classic work on identity in the area remains R. d’Abadal i de Vinyals, Els primers comtes catalans (Barcelona, 1958). 5 H. Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal: a political history (London, 1996), 109–29. 6 J. Jarrett, ‘Caliph, King or Grandfather: strategies of legitimisation on the Spanish March in the reign of Lothar iii’, The Mediaeval Journal 1. 2 (2011), 1–21. 7 Borrell is not well studied. J. Jarrett, Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia 880–1010: Pathways of Power (Woodbridge, 2010), 141–66, goes some way toward changing this and gives such references as exist.

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the way of historical narrative.8 The earliest sets of annals perhaps have cores dating back to the late tenth century, but have almost no detail until much later; before 1000 they tend only to record the capture of Barcelona by Charlemagne’s son Louis the Pious as King of Aquitaine in 801 and its aforementioned sack by al-Manṣūr, an event which has been argued to have kickstarted Catalan national consciousness and a local historiography.9 The former claim might be contested, although only non-Catalans have done so; the latter seems perfectly justifiable, but the fruits of this historiographical impulse were nonetheless a long time emerging.10 Nonetheless, components of a narrative history can be found in the surviving documents. In the 1003 document already instanced, for example, we have an eye-witness account of a rebellion against outside rule in Andorra and the victim’s reaction. More significant narrative efforts were made for the sack of Barcelona in 985, and indeed its details have been extensively reconstructed from such accounts. Four years afterwards, one such document recalled: There died or were captured all the inhabitants of that city or of the same county who had entered there by order of the lord Count Borrell to guard

8

9

10

There are thought to be some six or seven thousand charters extant from the territories of Catalunya Vella from the period 782 (when preservation begins) to 1000. The situation will be clarified when the ongoing Catalunya Carolíngia project, which aims to publish all pre1000 material, is completed. On it see J. Alturó i Perucho, ‘A propòsit de la publicació dels diplomes de la Catalunya Carolíngia’, Estudis Romànics 27 (2005), 289–97. A.J. Kosto, ‘Laymen, Clerics and Documentary Practices in the Early Middle Ages: the example of Catalonia’, Speculum 80 (2005), 44–74, opens with an apology to his colleagues for the quantity of his source material. On the absence of early narratives from the general area see T.N. Bisson, ‘Unheroed Pasts: history and commemoration in South Frankland before the Albigensian Crusade’, Speculum 65 (1990), 281–308. On the annals and their contexts, see now S.M. Cingolani (ed.), Els Annals de la Família Rivipullense i les Genealogies de Pallars-Ribagorça (Valencia, 2010); for the 985 argument, M. Zimmermann, ‘La prise de Barcelone par al-Mansûr et la naissance de l’historiographie catalane’, in L’Historiographie en Occident du ve au xve siècle. Actes du Congrès de la Société des Historiens Médiévistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur. Tours, 10–12 juin 1977, vol. 87 of Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest (Rennes, 1980), 191–218; on the sack, see now G. Feliu i Montfort, La presa de Barcelona per Almansor: història i mitificació (Barcelona, 2007). P.H. Freedman, ‘The Symbolic Implications of the Events of 985–988’, in F. Udina i Martorell (ed.), Symposium internacional sobre els orígens de Catalunya (segles viii–xi), 2 vols (Barcelona, 1991–2), vol. 1, 117–29; cf. J.M. Font i Rius et al., Procés d’independència de Catalunya (ss. viii–xi). La fita del 988, vol. 5 of Textos i Documentos (Barcelona, 1999); Zimmermann, ‘Prise de Barcelone’, is also judicious here.

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and defend it, and there perished all their substance, whatever they had gathered together there, as much books as royal precepts and all their collected documents of all sorts through which they had retained all their alods or possessions among themselves and before them their parents for two hundred years or more.11 This is arguably historiography, and it can certainly inform ours. Such documents tell us, for example, of an attempt by Count Borrell to mass a defence from the locality.12 It is also perhaps surprising to be told that people still held royal precepts in this area, and it is notable that this was recorded even though the actor in the charter was not claiming to have lost one. Nonetheless, at the point when this document was originally written, its story was not news to anyone. The events of 985 were all too fresh in most people’s minds: the sack had already become, in documentary shorthand, ‘the day Barcelona died’ and its psychological impact was far out of proportion to the physical damage caused, which recent work has suggested was not very serious.13 The point in telling this story at such length was therefore not just to explain the loss of the transactor’s documents; it was presumably to engage the sympathy of the audience by reminding them of what they had all collectively suffered, and how it had been no-one’s fault except perhaps Borrell’s, and that therefore the plaintiff’s claim, which could not be substantiated, ought to be looked on kindly.

11

12

13

À. Fàbrega i Grau (ed.), Diplomatari de la Catedral de Barcelona: documents dels anys 844–1260. Volum i: documents dels anys 844–1000, vol. 1 of Fonts Documentals (Barcelona, 1995), 377–9 (no. 172): ‘…ibi mortui vel capti sunt omnes habitantibus de eadem civitate vel de eiusdem comitatu que ibidem introierant per iussionem de dompno Borrello comite ad custodiendum vel ad defendendum eam, et ibi periit omnem substancias eorum quicquid ibidem congragaverunt, tam libris quam preceptis regalis vel cunctis illorum scriptoris omnibusque modis confectis per quas retinebant cunctis eorum alodis vel possessionibus inter eos et precedentes eorum parentibus CC anni et amplius…’ Feliu i Montfort indexes these documents in his Presa de Barcelona, 7–11, and removes from consideration the false Cronica de Sant Pere de les Puelles which is excerpted in P. de Marca, Marca Hispanica sive Limes Hispanicus, hoc est geographica and historica descriptio cataloniæ, ruscinonis, and circumiacentium populorum, ed. É. Baluze (Paris, 1688), cols 933–4 (ap. cxxxiv). F. Udina Martorell, El Archivo Condal de Barcelona en los siglos ix–x: estudio crítico de sus fondos (Barcelona, 1951), 421–3, doc. no. 232: ‘in quando die Barchinona interiit’. Zimmermann, ‘Prise de Barcelone’, discusses the psychological impact, but G. Feliu i Montfort, ‘Al-Mansur, Barcelona i Sant Cugat’, Acta Historica et Archæologica Mediævalia 3 (1982), 49–54, suggests that only part of the city’s defences was over-run.

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Narratives and Formulae

A transaction charter, of course, can be viewed as a narrative in itself.14 In it we are told of a decision made by the author of the document and carried out before witnesses. Although in these ‘dispositive’ documents the decision is usually recounted in the present tense, it was still a record of something in the past, for all that its outcomes might remain active.15 More than this, in the clauses by which documents less egregious than those so far instanced explain their authors’ claim on the property of which they now disposed, it is arguable that even the most basic charters also resort to micro-narrative. After all, claims to hold land from a previous purchase, from inheritance or from the assart of the land (aprisio, in the language of these documents) were also stories, however compressed. These stories told of another such decision and handover, of a legitimate birth and upbringing sufficient to entitle the landholder to succession to their parents, or of a lengthy endeavour of clearance.16 Such clauses were of course formulaic; they can be found repeated through document after document with only minimal variation.17 Formulae as inclusive as ‘it came to us from our parents or from purchase or from aprisio or through whatever voice it may be’ may have been so vague because they were covering a range of different circumstances, but it is hard to distinguish that 14

15 16

17

H. Wolfram, ‘Political Theory and Narrative in Charters’, trans. P. Geary, Viator: Medieval and Renaissance studies 26 (1995), 39–51; S. Foot, ‘Reading Anglo-Saxon Charters: Memory, Record, or Story?’, in E.M. Tyler and R. Balzaretti (eds), Narrative and History in the Early Medieval West, vol. 16 in Studies in the Early Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2006), 39–66; more broadly, P. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: memory and oblivion at the end of the first millennium (Princeton, 1995). On the division, largely formal, between dispositive and probative charters, see R. Härtel, Notarielle und kirchliche Urkunden im frühen und hohen Mittelalter (Vienna and Munich, 2011), 25. Some ready examples pulled from just one edition, R. Ordeig i Mata (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia iv: els comtats d’Osona i Manresa, vol. 53 of Memòries de la Secció Històrico-­ Arqueològica, 3 vols (Barcelona, 1999), one example per volume given here of many more possible: land from parents, vol. 1, 277 (no. 311), vol. 2, 699–700 (no. 942), vol. 3, 1145–46 (no. 1603), etc.; from purchase, vol. 1, 315 (no. 372), vol. 2, 727–8 (no. 989), vol. 3, 1273–74 (no. 1796), etc.; from aprisio vol. 1, 126–7 (no. 80), vol. 2, 603–4 (no. 791), vol. 3, 1303 (no. 1839), etc. On the nature of aprisio, see J. Jarrett, ‘Settling the Kings’ Lands: aprisio in Catalonia in perspective’, Early Medieval Europe 18 (2010), 320–42. This is extensively analysed by M. Zimmermann, Écrire et lire en Catalogne (ixe–xiie siècle), vol. 23 of Bibliothèque de la Casa de Velázquez, 2 vols (Madrid, 2003), vol. 1, 203–84, though see now also J. Jarrett, ‘Comparing the Earliest Documentary Culture in Catalonia’, in J. Jarrett and A. Scott McKinley (eds), Problems and Possibilities of Early Medieval Charters (Turnhout, 2013), 89–128.

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possibility from the scribe just employing a handy catch-all.18 Certainly, the writers of these documents laboured to be inclusive. This is clearest of all in the descriptions of the properties concerned, which beyond a very basic level of elaboration tend to fall into descriptive pairs that aim for total coverage by the use of opposites like ‘on the mountain or in the valley’, ‘upslope or down’, and so on, or complementary pairs of attributes, ‘houses and buildings, lands and vines, meadows and pastures, woods and copses, cultivated and waste, fruiting trees and non-fruiting trees’, so that nothing could be left out. These also are so widely-repeated that their formulaic nature is evident. This, however, should not be taken to mean that any of these clauses was invariable. In fact, variation between the various options and their extensions is considerable.19 This means that choices were made about which ones to use and how much of them, and these choices may have been made as much by the owners of the properties in question as by the scribes who wrote for them. With any narrative constrained by a formula, be it of form or of content, there is an obvious likelihood that the expectations placed upon that narrative by the formula will overwhelm its relation to the actual facts of the matter with which it deals.20 Choices of formulae may indeed be made to bring this about, as we shall see. Nonetheless, the fact that choices of formulae could be made here indicates to us that factors outside these documents were influences on them, even if only in the choice of the formulae. An illustrative example is dovecotes, which are occasionally named as attributes of landed property being transferred in this corpus.21 It could indeed be thought that a fully-equipped and desirable country steading would naturally have one of these, and therefore that the description of a given estate should include one, but if so, this pressure was only rarely felt.22 To sustain the idea that this was solely a formula, it becomes necessary to distinguish certain properties or holdings as being somehow deserving of this rare distinction. It is hard to think of a factor more likely to have influenced the scribe or the property’s owner in this regard 18 19 20 21 22

Ordeig i Mata, Catalunya Carolíngia iv, vol. 1, 199–200 (no. 179): ‘nobis advenit de parentorum vel ex conparacione sive de aprisione vel pro qualicumque voce…’. M. Zimmermann, ‘Glose, tautologie ou inventaire ? L’énumération descriptive dans la documentation catalane du xe au xiie siècle’, Cahiers de linguistique hispanique médiévale 14 (1989), 309–38. A point most sharply made, for all narrative texts, in H. White, The content of the form: narrative discourse and historical representation (Baltimore, 1987); for charters see also Foot, ‘Reading Anglo-Saxon Charters’. E. g. Ordeig i Mata, Catalunya Carolíngia iv, vol. 1, 385–6 (no. 477), vol. 2, 629–30 (no. 832), vol. 3, 1171 (no. 1642), etc. Some very large estates were not attributed one, e. g. ibid., vol. 3, 1268 (no. 1786).

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than the actual existence of a dovecote, not least since the recipient of an estate fictively so described might have scope for redress against the previous owner. The issue is pressed even harder by documents covering several properties of which only one is said to have a dovecote, and so on.23 The same argument can be made for other attributes of these lands, most of all mills, which were of an economic significance that made their presence or absence a serious concern. In general, it seems likely that, while formulae were clearly part of the narrative apparatus of these documents, the scribes would mostly have chosen among their available formula stock on the basis of the actual matter of the case in question.24 A simple document containing an ordinary sale or donation, barring a deliberate attempt to mislead on the part of one or other party involved in its redaction, need not therefore stand too far from the facts merely because of being formulaically constructed. There was room in the formulae to cover most plausible cases of an ordinary kind; this was, after all, the purpose for which they had been written. The form would here accomodate a variety of contents. 4

The Force of Law

It could also be argued that, since there was a written law in this area that governed transaction procedures, the actions and transactions that our ­ ­documents describe were themselves constrained by formulae, and that the documents are in this sense realistically formulaic.25 In fact, the Visigothic Law as preserved in the Forum Iudicum, the ‘Book of Judges’ that constituted the area’s jurisprudence until the late twelfth century at least, although it is 23 24 25

For example, the endowment of the monastery of Sant Benet de Bages, ibid., vol. 2, 730–2 (no. 995A). Mills appear in e. g. ibid., vol. 1, 125–6 (no. 79), vol. 2, 833–4 (no. 1148), vol. 3, 1282 (no. 1805), etc. On their importance see P. Bonnassie, La Catalogne du milieu du xe à la fin du xie siècle: croissance et mutations d’une société, 2 vols (Toulouse, 1975–76), vol. 1, 459–64. M. Zimmermann, ‘L’usage du Droit wisigothique en Catalogne du ixe au xiie siècle: Approches d’une signification culturelle’, Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 9 (1973), 233–81; R. Collins, ‘“Sicut lex Gothorum continet”: law and charters in ninth- and tenth-century León and Catalonia’, English Historical Review 100 (1985), 489–512, repr. in idem, Law, Culture and Regionalism in Early Medieval Spain (Aldershot, 1992); J.A. Bowman, Shifting Landmarks: Property, Proof, and Dispute in Catalonia around the Year 1000 (Ithaca, NY, 2004), 33–55 and references there, and specifically on legal influence on formulae Zimmermann, Écrire et lire, vol. 2, 664–8; cf. Jarrett, ‘Comparing the Earliest Documentary Culture’, 105–7.

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insistent on the necessity of written documents of transactions, gives very little detail about how they should be constructed or used.26 A supposedly-Visigothic formulae collection survives, in a twelfth-century copy in Oviedo, but this finds only scant reflections in the documents of practice from what is now Catalonia.27 The clearest echoes are, significantly, in the area of testamentary practice, where a substantial ceremonial component was regular and structures the documents: the testator had to appoint executors, or ‘almsmen’ (as the word used, elemosinarii, is more literally translated), to dictate to them the terms of his or her will, and then after the demise of the testator these almsmen had publically to declare the will under oath in a church before judges. This naturally involved a certain degree of narrative, as the almsmen explained their appointment and the deceased’s adequate condition to make such decisions at that time.28 Sometimes they had more to explain: one case from the city of Elne tells us that the deceased, though a priest, had nonetheless made no written will but simply come to the door of his house and shouted his intentions to the street. This being adequately recalled, however, the document that records it is otherwise compliant to expectations.29 The physical choreography of this process would have been enacted within most if not all persons’ memories, reproducing these formulae long after most other models in the Visigothic formulary had become obsolete. In this area, therefore, while the formulae were still representative of reality, it was a reality that was substantially conditioned, and constrained, by their own enaction over a period of centuries. In areas where the law was less frequently applied, however, we can sometimes see how form could overwhelm content. We have a very few documents of judicial hearings that had been convened in order to allow plaintiffs who had lost documents by misadventure to have their contents recalled by witnesses­ and recorded anew in a judge’s charter, a process known to diplomatists as 26 27 28

29

See the Lex Visgothorum, in K. Zeumer (ed.), Leges Visigothorum. MGH Leges nationum Germanicarum 1 (Hanover, 1902), 33–456, the relevant section being 105–20 (ii. 5). Formulae Visigothicae, in K. Zeumer (ed.), Formulae Merowingici et Karolini Aevi, accedunt Ordines Iudiciorum Dei. MGH Legum sectio V, Formulae (Hanover, 1882-86), repr. 2011, 572– 95; see Jarrett, ‘Comparing the Earliest Documentary Culture’, 105–7. On these practices, see Collins, ‘“Sicut lex Gothorum continet”’; N. L. Taylor, ‘Testamentary Publication and Proof and the Afterlife of Ancient Probate Procedure in Carolingian Septimania’, in K. Pennington et al. (eds), Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Medieval Canon Law (Vatican City, 2001), 767–80; Zimmermann, Écrire et lire, vol. 1, 263–70. C. Devic and J. Vaissète, Histoire Générale de Languedoc avec les notes et les pièces justificatives. Édition accompagnée de dissertations et actes nouvelles, contenant le recueil des inscriptions de la province antiques et du moyen âge, des planches, des cartes géographiques et des vues des monuments, ed. É. Dulaurier (Toulouse, 1875, repr. Osnabrück, 1973), v, 395–6 (Preuves: chartes et documents, no. 194).

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r­ eparatio scripturae, for which the Visigothic Law made basic provision. Several such documents survive from just after the sack of Barcelona, and one from after a later attack on the city of Manresa in 997; rather more survive as the bedrock of the documentary preservation of the monastery of Saint-Michel de Cuxa (as it now is), which moved to that location after the destruction of its founders’ original house at Sant Andreu d’Eixalada by flood in 897, whereupon the erstwhile donors, almost all still available, were induced to participate in such ceremonies to assure the devastated community of their endowment. All these more or less conform, despite the near century and fair distances that separate their redaction, to a coherent pattern of ceremony and record, suggesting that models of a fairly regular kind were available, whether in writing or in community memory.30 Two others, however, from the county of Vic at a time soon after the restoration of comital government there, give us rather more detail in their witnesses’ testimony on the process of charter production, as follows: …we the above-written witnesses know … and saw with our eyes, and heard with our ears, and also were present at that hour while there were persons by the name of Domènic, who is dead, and his wife Guisilda, and Ermoari and his wife Farelda, in the county of Osona, in the term of Taradell, in Vil·lar de Gaudila. And thus the late Domènic made a charter of sale to a man by the name of Boso, of all his heredity which he had in the county of Osona within the limits of the castle of Taradell or in Vil·lar de Gaudila, and Ermoari with his wife Farelda sold all their lands or house, all their heredity, to that same Boso in Vil·lar de Gaudila. And we witnesses ourselves saw the documents, confirmed and impressed with the sign of the man named Domènic and his wife…. And it was there inserted that if we the seller or [any] of our heirs, or any man who should come against these same scriptures to disrupt them, he should compound the selfsame heredity which is described above twofold, including whatever might have been increased at that time. And it was reported in the selfsame scripture of Domènic about the day: the 7th Kalends of March, 7th year of the reign of King Odo. And there were there firmatores Elderic, Elnies, Gaudila, Argemir, making a mark, and therein appeared the notary Algerand. And there was reported in the selfsame other charter of 30

J. Rius Serra, ‘Reparatio Scriptura’, Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español 5 (1928), 246– 53; Zimmermann, Écrire et lire, vol. 1, 73–9; Bowman, Shifting Landmarks, 151–61; J.M. Salrach, Justícia i poder a Catalunya abans de l’any mil (Vic, 2013), 194–8. See now J. Jarrett, ‘Ceremony, Charters and Social Memory: Property Transfer Ritual in Early Medieval Catalonia’, Social History 44 (2019), 275–95.

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Ermoari about the day: the 8th Kalends of September, 6th year of the reign of King Odo. And we the witnesses were firmatores making marks in the selfsame little charter of Ermoari, and therein appeared the notary John the priest. We the witnesses saw the selfsame scriptures confirmed and corroborated and the mark of Domènic and his wife impressed, and of Ermoari and his wife the sellers, and of the auditores and of the chancellor just as is inserted above. And we saw the selfsame scriptures handed over into the power of this same Boso and I the already-said Domènic and his wife, and Ermoari and his wife, I handed them over of their spontaneous will into the power of this same Boso. And we the witnesses saw and heard the selfsame scriptures read and reread one and another and a third time in Vil·lar de Gaudila. And these selfsame lost scriptures did this same Boso have, and it was manifest. And that which we know we do testify rightly and truly and we swear the above-said oath in the Lord.31 31

Ordeig i Mata, Catalunya Carolíngia iv, vol. 1, 91–3 (nos 33 and 34), 92–3 (no. 34) quoted: ‘Quia nos supra scripti testes scimus, et bene in veritate sapemus, et oculis nostris vidimus, et aures audivimus, et vel presente eramus ad ea ora dum erant homines nomine Domenicho condam et sua uxore Quisildes, et Ermoario et sua uxore Farelde, in comitatum Ausona, in terminio Taradelense, in villare de Gaudila. Et sic fecit Domenico chondam cartula vindictionis ad homine nomine Boso, de omnem suam hereditatem quod habebat in comitatum Ausona infra fines de castro Taradelense vel in villare Gaudila, et Ermoario cum sua uxore Farelde venundaverunt omnem illorum terras vel domo, omnem illorum ereditatem ad isto Boso in villare Gaudila. Et vidimus testes nos ipsas scripturas firmatas et signum impresas de homine domine Domenico et sua uxore, de omnem illorum hereditatem de iam dicto villare quod superius ressonat, quantum ibidem abebant, vendebant hereditatem per illorum comparatione in casis, in curtis, in ortis, terris, silvis, aquis, aquarum vieductibus vel reductibus, vel omnia quod ibidem abebant de illorum hereditatem, quiquid dicit vel nominari potest im iam dicto villare. Et erat ibidem insertum quod si nos vinditores vel de heredibus nostris, aut ullus homo qui contra ipsas scripturas veniset ad inrumpendum, composuisset ipsa hereditatem in duplo quod superius ressonat, quantum ad eo tempore inmelioratas fuissent. Et resonabat in ipsa scriptura de Dominico in suo dodarum vii kalendas marcii, anno vi regnante Hodone rege. Et erant ibidem firmatores Eldericho, Elnias, Gaudila, Aregmiro, signa facientes, et resonabat ibidem in notarius Algerandus. Et resonabat in ipsa alia cartula de Ermoario in suo dodarum viii kalendas septembras, anno vi regnante Hodone rege. Et fuimus nos testes firmatores signa facientes in ipsa cartula de Ermoario, et resonabat ibidem notarius Ioannes presbiter. Vidimus nos testes ipsas scripturas firmatas et rovoratas signum inpresas de Dominicho et su uxore, et de Ermoario et sua uxore vinditores, et de auditores et de cancellario sicut superius insertum est. Et vidimus ipsas scripturas traditas in potestate de isto Bosone et tradidi eas iam dicto Dominico et sua uxore, et Ermoario et sua uxore, illorum spontanea voluntate in potestate de isto Bosone. Et nos testes vidimus et audivimus ipsas scripturas legentes et relegentes una et alia et tercia vice in villare Gaudila. Et ipsas scripturas perditas abet iste Boso, et inparuit. Et ea que scimus recte et veraciter testificamus adque iuramus supra nicxum iuramentum in Domino’.

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This is the kind of information on process and procedure that is almost never preserved for the early Middle Ages, and it is immensely tempting to take it at face value, not least because the procedures it describes seem sensible and functionally symbolic: the re-reading of the document on the land concerned might have been meant to make the land itself a witness, but it would also have stuck usefully in the memory of those present, as indeed the witnesses claimed it had. There is also the echo of ancestor documents in the vestigial first-person reportage of the charters’ sanction clauses. Nonetheless, there is more here than can be real, and the token of this is the presence of the two notaries and a chancellor (cancellarius). Such figures are simply unknown in documents contemporary to these ones: the assembled documents of Carolingian Osona and Manresa offer nine usages of notarius and one only of cancellarius in 1,883 documents dating from 880 to 1000, other than these.32 Of that first nine, seven are papal documents emanating from Rome,33 one is a passing reference in a sanctio from a synod of Frankish bishops apparently at Narbonne34 – that is, outside Catalonia – and the remaining one is in a document of 888 preserved in a seventeenth-century copy whose contents are at least arguably manipu­ lated,35 while cancellarius appears only in a forged papal Bull.36 Quite why the scribe of these documents thought such officials should have been present, given that he seems unlikely ever to have met any, is unclear, but the simplest explanation would seem to be that he had a written model in which they featured, in which case almost every other detail of process in the documents becomes suspect. We need not imagine that the transactions themselves were fictive, not least since a total of five witnesses to the documents signed autograph, four in both documents. We might, however, suspect that when the scribe came up with a model of how the law or something like it expected transactions to have been done, it was in no-one’s interest to claim that they had happened otherwise. There was a story they were expected to tell at this point if equilibrium was to be restored, and it was recorded so even though it was almost certainly untrue in some of its details.37 32 33 34 35 36 37

R. Ginebra and R. Ordeig i Mata, ‘Índex alfabètic de noms’, in Ordeig i Mata, Catalunya Carolíngia iv, vol. 3, 1355–563, at 1484. Ordeig i Mata, Catalunya Carolíngia iv, vol. 2, 524–6, 789–92 and 898–900 (nos 685, 1086, 1087, 1088 and 1247) and vol. 3, 1274–6 (no. 1797). Ibid., vol. 1, 170–1 (no. 136). Ibid., vol. 1, 74–6 (no. 10). Ibid., vol. 3, 1333–4 (no. ‘vii’), which Ordeig i Mata dates to 948, but which other editors have placed at 971 or 1016. In this formulation I follow J.F. Haldon, ‘Towards a Social History of Byzantium’, in his The Social History of Byzantium (Oxford, 2009), 1–30, at 10–12.

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Records of Untruth

In the 898 reparatio scripturae, while it seems unlikely that it can be correct in detail, it is hard to characterise the detectable additions as more than embellishments; the basic truth of the story told is hard to doubt. Sometimes, however, we are told stories that were demonstrably untrue. This chapter began with one, Sendred’s mysteriously delayed grant to Santa Maria de la Seu d’Urgell, but we can go one step further, to a report of a story that was most probably not true and that perhaps the recorder did not believe. The evidence in this case is a parchment from the monastery of Sant Pere de Casserres, which preserves an odd hearing whose judge recorded it for us as follows: In the name of omnipotent God. Let all believers in God know that there was held a hearing in the See of Vic between the monastery of Saint Peter of Casserres and Guitard of Taradell over the alod that the late Ramon Drog left to the aforementioned monastery, Guitard saying that he could not make such an undertaking since he had made a charter of it to his cousin Oliba of Capraria. In this audience, indeed, was Viscount Bermon, who along with Abbot Reinard gave his testimony before Guifré the judge that when this charter that Guitard was showing was made, the author, the aforementioned Ramon, had become demented and was out of his mind. And therefore I Guifré the judge, through sworn oaths, received these witnesses and I confirm the selfsame alod in the power of Saint Peter and the power of Ramon so that from this day into the future they may have it just as the aforementioned Ramon ordered. The oaths indeed that pertain to the business are reserved and archived in the monastery. And if anyone [should come] to disrupt this, let him pay a pound of gold and let this verdict remain firm. The alod itself is moreover in l’Angle in Antunyà, and there are houses and lands and vines and mills with their bounds and appurtenances and exits and entrances. Meanwhile the charter that was shown in the hearing in the name of Oliba of Capraria was disavowed, and shall remain so in future, which was evidenced by the witnesses who are now recorded in the oaths. Definition made the 3rd Ides of March, in the 34th year of the rule of King Robert. Guifré, deacon and also judge, who with Guitard received the witnesses and signed below.38 38

I. Llop (ed.), Col·lecció diplomàtica de Sant Pere de Casserres, vol. 44 of Diplomataris, 2 vols (Barcelona, 2009), vol. 1, 148–50 (no. 130): ‘…Sciant omnes Deum credentes quia motus est placit in sede Vico inter cenobium Sancti Petri Kastrum serres et Witardo Taravellense, de alaude quod condam Reimundus Drogus relinquid ad prefatum cenobium. Dicens

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This is such a complicated story that one hardly knows where to begin. For one thing, the plaintiff is recorded as maintaining that the land in question should be his because it was given to someone else, although he evidently had the charter by which that had been done and so had presumably inherited, in a step that Guifré, the judge and scribe, missed out. The defence was hardly more solid, however: if this noted madman had genuinely disposed of his property left, right and centre, then where was the monastery’s charter? None is mentioned for them, and neither does one covering this property survive. Sant Pere’s documents have suffered rather, but other gifts of Ramon Drog are in fact still among them.39 The impression left by Guifré’s unusually blunt record is that the monastery had brought in the local viscount, a nephew of the alleged foundress, to enforce what had only been a verbal agreement against the rather better title of Guitard of Taradell.40 This may be why Guifré did not bother to record the testimony, or even the names, of the witnesses the monastery and viscount brought; the whole thing was a strong-arm job anyway, so he did not consider its details worth recording. Instead, he dropped into first-­ person narrative, turning what should have been a record of a verdict into a memorandum for its enforcement, and dispatching the awkward job as quickly as possible.41 It is possible that neither side here was lying, though it seems unlikely, but it is certainly clear that what was allowed to pass into record was not a legal verdict, but a story, a story that as Guifré remarked, would be preserved by the witnesses.

­ rephatus Witardus quod facere non potuit quia karta exinde fecit ad socrum suum p Olibane de Chapraria. In hac vero audiencia fuit Bremundus, vicescomes, qui cum Reinardo, abbate suam, exibuit legalem testimonia ante Wifredo, iudice, quia quando ipsa karta fuit facta quod Witadus ostendebat Reimundus prephatus auctor demenserat et alienatus asensa. Et ideo ego Wifredus iudex per condicionibus editis recepit ipsos testes et confirmo ipso alaude in potestate Sancti Petri et potestati de Reimundus ut ab hodierno die in antea eum habebant quem ad modum constituit vel ordinavit prephatus Reimundus. Condiciones vero testium que pertinet ad huius negocii reservate vel condite sunt in ipso cenobio. Et si quis hoc disrumpere voluerit libram auri persolvat et hec consignacio firma permaneat. Est autem iamdictus alaudes in ipso Angulo in terminio Roda et sunt domos et terras et vineas et molinos cum terminis et pertinenciis, et exiis vel regresiis. Kartam vero qui ostensa placito fuit in nomine Olibane caprariense evacuata fuit, et ex in antea permansit quem ad modum premissum est cum testibus qui in condicionibus resonant. Facta definicione iii idus marcii, anno xxxiii regni Radeberto rege. Guifredus levita, qui et iudex, qui cum Guitardo recep[…] testes et sub sss…’. 39 Llop, Diplomataris, vol. 1, 89–92, 124–6 and 132–4 (nos 62, 108 and 114). 40 On the foundation of the house and its backing, see T. Soldevila i García, Sant Pere de Casserres: història i llegenda (Vic, 1998), 35–41. 41 On the usual templates for the documentation of judicial decisions under Visigothic Law in this area, see Collins, ‘“Sicut lex Gothorum continet”’.

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Needs for Narrative

It is usually obvious what narratives like this were intended to achieve, to wit, a peaceful and durable acceptance that the beneficiary held the rights to the property concerned, but it is not always clear why the story was necessary, and why a simple claim of tenure per parentorum or similar would not do the job. Much must always have depended on local context and the interaction of personalities, but trying to intuit personalities from such documents is fraught with problems, not least because the texts are designed to present their participants as being reasonable and justified people behaving correctly when often the truth may have been precisely otherwise. A norm is appealed to in each of these texts, indeed, whether the full story is given or not. A charter that claims land per parentorum was invoking the audience’s expectation that it was perfectly reasonable and normal for land to pass from parents to children; one mentioning aprisio was reminding the audience or readers that the practice of claiming land on the basis of having cleared it was normal enough to have its own name; and one that mentioned a purchase was appealing to a collective conviction that this was a normal and acceptable way to acquire property. All such documents were claiming their ­circumstances to be instances of a recognisable and common pattern, and sometimes invoked legal or canonical norms to that effect.42 Sometimes, however, the known patterns were inadequate. In the case of Ramon Drog, the patterns of expectation were in fact directly contradictory to the result the ­powers-that-were wished to achieve: the monastery did not have a charter, its opponent did, and although it availed him little, he was nonetheless the one behaving as per the usual norm. This, then, was when the stories came out. Unusual documents were made because something unusual was being done. Ordinary charters appealed to the idea that inheritance or purchase or aprisio were recognised, legitimate and unproblematic ways to obtain property, and their lack of elaboration suggests that this was indeed the case. The documents that present a more extended narrative were not unproblematic, however; in fact, they almost always described problems, and it was these problems which their narratives were designed to overcome. 42 Bowman, Shifting Landmarks, 31–55, is excellent on the extent to which citations of the Visigothic Law were bent to purpose by the legal experts of this area; I am less convinced than he is that the norms invoked by their opponents were any less legalistic, especially with respect to the 30-year rule. On that rule, see Jarrett, ‘Settling the Kings’ Lands’, 325–7; although the Carolingians recognised it, it too was based in Visigothic legislation even if that was not cited by the Church’s opponents.

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As with the likely tailoring of descriptive formulae to the attributes of the property concerned, when a charter was equipped with a narrative it was presumably tailored to requirements. Most documents did not require more than the standard formulae, though even that was a narrative assertion of a kind, namely that the transaction was normal enough for the standard formulae to suffice. When, however, the transaction was not normal, because of having been agreed while chained to a prison wall or glared down by the local viscount, or because of being completely fabricated, among many other possibilities that could have been discussed, a good strategy, apparently, was to tell a story. Some of the stories thus recorded were easily falsifiable, but the requirement was not to convince by argument, but to establish an acceptable version of the situation, on the basis of which events could now proceed as required.43 These narratives, then, despite being individualised to the point of uniqueness and often dealing with tiny amounts of property, are not micro-histories as we usually understand the term; they are very small macro-histories, connecting the circumstances of the transactors to frames of collectively-agreed reference that enabled new actions. This is a way of reading such documents that has application well beyond Catalonia, and indeed the Iberian Peninsula. As citation here will have made evident, that charters contain narrative material will surprise few diplomatists, even if it may be news to those who do not work on this kind of text.44 That charters sometimes assert things which were not strictly true is hardly unknown either.45 The strong coincidence between narrative mode and contested situations that we have seen here, however, should be a warning to those using such texts in any area or period, whether diplomatists or not, that stories told this way had a function, which as far as we can see was to invoke superstructural norms that might permit the transactors to get over obstacles against which normal process would have brought them. The true circumstances lying beneath such superstructures are mostly unrecoverable. In a few cases here, the sheer density of Catalan documentary preservation has enabled it, but the main effect of this should be to warn us that usually the documents whose stories we study have outlived the alternative viewpoint which had made them necessary. In this sense, the form of such records has indeed overwritten the truthful content of the situation, but that form was not blindly determinative but, rather, wittingly deployed by our medieval transactors. We may not be 43 44 45

Cf. Haldon, ‘Towards a Social History’, 12. See n. 14 above. For a useful introduction to the issues for the period, see G. Constable, ‘Forgery and Plagiarism in the Middle Ages’, Archiv für Diplomatik 29 (1983), 1–41, repr. in idem, Culture and Spirituality in Medieval Europe (Aldershot, 1996).

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able always to unravel their efforts at dissimulation, but we can start by recognising them for what they were: stories.46 Bibliography Abadal i de Vinyals, R. d’, Els primers comtes catalans (Barcelona, 1958). Alturó i Perucho, J., ‘A propòsit de la publicació dels diplomes de la Catalunya Carolíngia’, Estudis Romànics 27 (2005), 289–97. Baraut, C. (ed.), ‘Els documents, dels anys 981–1010, de l’Arxiu Capitular de la Seu d’Urgell’, Urgellia 3 (1980), 7–166. Baraut, C., ‘La data i el lloc de la mort del comte Borrell ii de Barcelona-Urgell’, Urgellia 10 (1990), 469–72. Bisson, T.N., ‘Unheroed Pasts: history and commemoration in South Frankland before the Albigensian Crusade’, Speculum 65 (1990), 281–308. Bonnassie, P., La Catalogne du milieu du xe à la fin du xie siècle: croissance et mutations d’une société, 2 vols (Toulouse, 1975–76). Bowman, J.A., Shifting Landmarks: Property, Proof, and Dispute in Catalonia around the Year 1000 (Ithaca, NY, 2004). Chandler, C.J., Carolingian Catalonia: Politics, Culture, and Identity in an Imperial Province, 778–987, vol. 111 of Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 4th Series (Cambridge, 2019). Cingolani, S.M. (ed.), Els Annals de la Família Rivipullense i les Genealogies de PallarsRibagorça, vol. 4 of Monuments d'Història de la Corona d'Aragó (Valencia, 2010). Collins, R., ‘“Sicut lex Gothorum continet”: law and charters in ninth- and tenth-century León and Catalonia’, English Historical Review 100 (1985), 489–512, repr. in idem, Law, Culture and Regionalism in Early Medieval Spain (Aldershot, 1992). Constable, G., ‘Forgery and Plagiarism in the Middle Ages’, Archiv für Diplomatik 29 (1983), 1–41, repr. in idem, Culture and Spirituality in Medieval Europe (Aldershot, 1996). Devic, C. and J. Vaissète, Histoire Générale de Languedoc avec les notes et les pièces justificatives. Édition accompagnée de dissertations et actes nouvelles, contenant le recueil des inscriptions de la province antiques et du moyen âge, des planches, des cartes géographiques et des vues des monuments, ed. É. Dulaurier (Toulouse, 1875, repr. Osnabrück, 1973).

46

An initial version of this chapter was given as a paper to the Medieval History Seminar in the University of Oxford on 23 November 2010. I must thank the late and lamented Dr Mark Whittow† and Professor Chris Wickham for the opportunity to air my work there and also for their useful thoughts on the paper as it then existed. Dr Rebecca Darley’s comments have materially improved the construction of the current version. Only I can be responsible for whatever failings remain, however.

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Fàbrega i Grau, À. (ed.), Diplomatari de la Catedral de Barcelona: documents dels anys 844–1260. Volum i: documents dels anys 844–1000, vol. 1 of Fonts Documentals (Barcelona, 1995). Feliu i Montfort, G., ‘Al-Mansur, Barcelona i Sant Cugat’, Acta Historica et Archæologica Mediævalia 3 (1982), 49–54. Feliu i Montfort, G., La presa de Barcelona per Almansor: història i mitificació (Barcelona, 2007). Font i Rius, J.M. et al., Procés d’independència de Catalunya (ss. viii–xi). La fita del 988, vol. 5 of Textos i Documentos (Barcelona, 1999). Foot, S., ‘Reading Anglo-Saxon Charters: Memory, Record, or Story?’, in E.M. Tyler and R. and R. Balzaretti (eds), Narrative and History in the Early Medieval West, vol. 16 in Studies in the Early Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2006), 39–66. Formulae Visigothicae, in K. Zeumer (ed.), Formulae Merowingici et Karolini Aevi, accedunt Ordines Iudiciorum Dei, MGH Legum sectio v, Formulae (Hanover, 1882–86), repr. 2011, 572–95. Freedman, P.H., ‘The Symbolic Implications of the Events of 985–988’, in F. Udina i Martorell (ed.), Symposium internacional sobre els orígens de Catalunya (segles viii– xi), 2 vols (Barcelona, 1991–92). Geary, P., Phantoms of Remembrance: memory and oblivion at the end of the first millennium (Princeton, 1995). Ginebra, R., and R. Ordeig i Mata, ‘Índex alfabètic de noms’, in R. Ordeig i Mata (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia iv: els comtats d’Osona i Manresa, vol. 53 of Memòries de la Secció Històrico-Arqueològica, 3 vols (Barcelona, 1999), vol. 3, 1355–563. Haldon, J.F., ‘Towards a Social History of Byzantium’, in The Social History of Byzantium (Oxford, 2009), 1–30. Härtel, R., Notarielle und kirchliche Urkunden im frühen und hohen Mittelalter (Vienna and Munich, 2011). Jarrett, J., Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia 880–1010: Pathways of Power (Woodbridge, 2010). Jarrett, J., ‘Settling the Kings’ Lands: aprisio in Catalonia in perspective’, Early Medieval Europe 18 (2010), 320–42. Jarrett, J., ‘Caliph, King or Grandfather: strategies of legitimisation on the Spanish March in the reign of Lothar iii’, The Medieval Journal 1 (2011), 1–21. Jarrett, J., ‘Comparing the Earliest Documentary Culture in Catalonia’, in J. Jarrett and A. Scott McKinley (eds), Problems and Possibilities of Early Medieval Charters (Turnhout, 2013), 89–128. Jarrett, J., ‘Ceremony, Charters and Social Memory: Property Transfer Ritual in Early Medieval Catalonia’, Social History 44 (2019), 275–95. Kennedy, H., Muslim Spain and Portugal: a political history (London, 1996). Kosto, A.J., ‘Laymen, Clerics and Documentary Practices in the Early Middle Ages: the example of Catalonia’, Speculum 80 (2005), 44–74.

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Lex Visigothorum, in K. Zeumer (ed.), Leges Visigothorum. MGH Leges nationum Germanicarum 1 (Hanover, 1902), 33–456. Llop, I. (ed.), Col·lecció diplomàtica de Sant Pere de Casserres, vol. 44 of Diplomataris (Barcelona, 2009). Morelle, L., ‘Les « actes de précaire », instruments de transferts patrimoniaux (France du nord et de l’est, viiie–xie siècle)’, Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome: Moyen âge 111, Les transferts patrimoniaux en Europe occidentale, VIIIe–Xe siècle : Actes de la table ronde de Rome, 6, 7 et 8 mai 1999. (1999), 487–983 (607–47). Ordeig i Mata, R. (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia iv: els comtats d’Osona i Manresa, vol. 53 of Memòries de la Secció Històrico-Arqueològica, 3 vols (Barcelona, 1999). Rius Serra, J., ‘Reparatio Scriptura’, Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español 5 (1928), 246–53. Salrach, J.M., ‘Introducció: canvi social, poder i identitat’, in idem, Història Política, Societat i Cultura dels Països Catalans volum 2: la formació de la societat feudal, segles vi–xii (Barcelona, 1998), 15–67. Salrach, J.M. Justícia i poder a Catalunya abans de l’any mil (Vic, 2013). Smith, J.M.H., ‘“Fines Imperii”: the marches’, in NCMH ii, 169–89. Soldevila i García, T., Sant Pere de Casserres: història i llegenda (Vic, 1998). Taylor, N.L., ‘Testamentary Publication and Proof and the Afterlife of Ancient Probate Procedure in Carolingian Septimania’, in K. Pennington et al. (eds), Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Medieval Canon Law (Vatican City, 2001), 767–80. Udina Martorell, F., El Archivo Condal de Barcelona en los siglos ix–x: estudio crítico de sus fondos (Barcelona, 1951). White, H., The content of the form: narrative discourse and historical representation (Baltimore, 1987). Wolfram, H., ‘Political Theory and Narrative in Charters’, Viator: Medieval and Renaissance studies 26 (1995), 39–51. Zimmerman, M., ‘L’usage du Droit wisigothique en Catalogne du ixe au xiie siècle: Approches d’une signification culturelle’, Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 9 (1973), 233–81. Zimmerman, M., ‘La prise de Barcelone par al-Mansûr et la naissance de l’historio­ graphie catalane’, in L’Historiographie en Occident du ve au xve siècle. Actes du Congrès de la Société des Historiens Médiévistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur. Tours, 10–12 juin 1977, vol. 87 of Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest (Rennes, 1980), 191–218. Zimmerman, M., ‘Glose, tautologie ou inventaire ? L’énumération descriptive dans la documentation catalane du xe au xiie siècle’, Cahiers de linguistique hispanique médiévale 14 (1989), 309–38. Zimmerman, M., ‘Western Francia: the southern principalities’, in NCMH iii, 420–55. Zimmerman, M., Écrire et lire en Catalogne (ixe–xiie siècle), 2 vols (Madrid, 2003).

Chapter 4

Counts in Ninth- and Tenth-Century Iberia Wendy Davies The title of count and the territorial unit of the county – comes and comitatus, conte and contea, comte and comté, conde and condado, even Graf and ­Grafschaft1 – are extremely familiar concepts to anyone who works on the history of western Europe in the Middle Ages, as indeed they are in much of modern history. So much so that their meaning might appear straightforward. But they present some problems, of several kinds, when we encounter them in Iberian texts of the ninth and tenth centuries. If we were to suppose that the whole of northern Iberia formed some neat patchwork of counties, rather like those of a modern North American state, we would have considerable difficulty in identifying many such units, even though the word comitatus (county) can occasionally be found in tenth-century texts and there has been much emphasis in the historiography on its occurrence in a few charters.2 What, if anything, did comitatus signify? Clearly not the territorial districts envisaged by the fabricated Lugo charter supposedly of 910, in which many counts promised to rebuild houses in Lugo – ‘nos omnes comites seu inperatores quanticumque sumus qui comitatos obtinemus de Euue per ripa maris usque in Lesuce’ (‘all of us, counts and rulers, inasmuch as we obtained counties from the Eo along the coast as far as the Lesuce’).3 As for the comites (counts), although some can be found, they are difficult to differentiate from 1 See L. Holzfurtner, Die Grafschaft der Andechser. Comitatus und Grafschaft in Bayern 1000–1180 (Munich, 1994), 17–76 especially. 2 For example, Sob107 (968), Sob109 (990s): from P. Loscertales de García de Valdeavellano (ed.), Tumbos del monasterio de Sobrado de los Monjes, 2 vols (Madrid, 1976), cited as Sob1, Sob2, etc. 3 TV80, from J.L. López Sangil and M. Vidán Torreira (eds), Tumbo Viejo de Lugo (transcripción completa), Estudios Mindonienses 27 (2011), 11–373, cited as TV1, TV2, etc. This charter was examined by Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz in his ‘Homines mandationis y iuniores’, in idem, Viejos y nuevos estudios sobre las instituciones medievales españolas, 3 vols (Madrid, 1976–80), vol. 1, 365–577, at 445, in his discussion of administrative units of the early Middle Ages. The doubtful nature of the charter is discussed by Emilio Sáez, ‘Los ascendientes de San Rosendo (Notas para el estudio de la monarquía astur-leonesa durante los siglos ix y x)’, Hispania 8 (1948), 3–74, 179–233, at 50; A. Isla Frez, La sociedad gallega en la alta edad media (Madrid, 1992), 157–8; idem, ‘Nombres de reyes y sucesión al trono (siglos viii–x)’, Studia Historica. Historia Medieval 11 (1993), 9–33, at 19–20.

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other prominent landholders. What made a count a count? What contemporaries understood by the term is not at all obvious. Secondly, individuals who are characteristically referred to as counts in the secondary literature are often not called ‘count’ in the early medieval texts in which they feature, although some editors have added the title ‘count’ in their summaries of charters:4 for example, although conventionally called count by modern writers, Hermenegildo of Sobrado is never referred to as count in any of the many charters detailing his holding of judicial courts in the first half of the tenth century.5 Flaino Muñoz, on the southern flanks of the Cantabrian Mountains, is a subtly different but comparable case: while he is not referred to as count in many of the (original) charters in which he is named as court holder, he is so termed from 995;6 it is as if he acquired the designation during the course of his activity. It is also the case that in the twelfth century there was some tendency for revisions of earlier charters to add comital titles: so, for example, the witness list of San Rosendo’s 942 endowment of the monastery of Celanova recorded in the Celanova cartulary has twelve people labelled comes et dux and thirteen people labelled comes alone; this witness list is not credible as a record written in 942 for it is completely inconsistent with other records from that time and place.7 Accordingly, there is a tendency for falsos, like those attributed to ninth-century kings, to include the designation comes in witness 4 For example Lor33 (928), OvC33 (991) and Liii556 (993). The first two examples are drawn from, respectively: A.A. Nascimento et al., ‘Transcripción del texto del Liber Testamentorum – Transcrição do texto do Liber Testamentorum’, in Liber testamentorum coenobii Laurbanensis, 2 vols (León, 2008), cited as Lor1, Lor2, etc.; S. García Larragueta (ed.), Colección de documentos de la catedral de Oviedo, (Oviedo, 1962), cited as OvC1, OvC2, etc. The third example comes from the third volume of charters from the cathedral archive of León, all of which have now been edited as follows: E. Sáez (ed.), Colección documental del archivo de la catedral de León (775–1230), i (775–952) (León, 1987); idem and C. Sáez (eds), Colección documental del archivo de la catedral de León (775–1230), ii (953–985) (León, 1990); J.M. Ruiz Asencio (ed.), Colección documental del archivo de la catedral de León (775–1230), iii (986–1031) (León, 1987); charters cited as Li1, Li2, Lii259, Liii512, etc. in order to indicate volume number and charter number. 5 Sob21 (931), Sob23 (949), Sob24 (931), Sob29 (931), Sob31 (951), etc.; nor do the sanctions of these judicial texts mention a comes – rather, penalties are due to uobis. These are cartulary copies, which one might have thought would be edited to supply the comital title but they clearly were not (the cartulary compiler did call Hermenegildo ‘count’ in one title added to a charter, Sob85 (929), and retrospectively in the text of Sob108 (978)). 6 OD38, OD39, OD43 (all dated to 997); but not OD26 (986), OD27 (987), OD31 (991), OD32 (992), OD33 (992), OD34 (993); all of these charters are on single sheets and appear to be original. They can be found in J.A. Fernández Flórez and M. Herrero de la Fuente (eds), Colección documental del monasterio de Santa María de Otero de las Dueñas, i (854–1108) (León, 1999), cited here as OD1, OD2, etc. 7 Cel2; the text could certainly reflect Rosendo’s endowment and the list might just reflect those present. See J.M. Andrade Cernadas (ed.), O Tombo de Celanova: Estudio introductorio,

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lists;8 and numerous counts are listed in some suspect or reworked Sahagún charters.9 It looks as if rather fewer people may have been called count in ninth- and tenth-century texts than we tend to assume; and also as if cartulary compilers in the twelfth century added comital titles to original charters when they copied them. Credible twelfth-century charters are indeed much more likely to cite comital titles, such as, for example, the groups of counts in the witness lists of mid-twelfth-century royal grants to the bishopric of Santiago de Compostela.10 Thirdly, there is an acute hiatus in the availability of written texts from the period of the Muslim conquest of the early eighth century until the later ninth century. This means that we cannot pursue essential background. We cannot determine the origins of the families whose members were called counts in the ninth and tenth centuries nor the mechanisms by which they acquired these labels. We cannot uncover their relationship with Visigothic, nor indeed late Roman, antecedents of the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries. Reference to individuals as counts was clearly becoming more common, although by no means standard, round about the year 1000, as the case of Flaino Muñoz shows. In what follows, I want to attempt an assessment of what a count was in northern Iberia in the later ninth and tenth centuries, excluding Catalonia, in the period before the extension of use of the term in the eleventh

8

9

10

edición e índices (ss. ix–xii), 2 vols (Santiago de Compostela, 1995); charters hereafter cited by number as Cel1, Cel2, etc. For example V2 (804), which has six; Flo45 (841), which has four; Flo153 (896), which has four, all localized. For the documents see J.M. Ruiz Asencio, I. Ruiz Albi and M. Herrero Jiménez (eds), Los becerros gótico y galicano de Valpuesta, 2 vols (Burgos, 2010), cited as V1, V2, etc.; A.C. Floriano Cumbreño, Diplomática española del periodo astur. Estudio de las fuentes documentales del reino de Asturias (718–910), 2 vols (Oviedo, 1949–51), cited as Flo1, Flo2, etc. For example the supposedly mid-tenth-century S98, S99 and S168: edited in J.M. Mínguez Fernández (ed.), Colección diplomática del monasterio de Sahagún (siglos ix y x) (León, 1976); charters cited as S1, S2, etc. See José Antonio Fernández Flórez, ‘El fondo documental del monasterio de Sahagún y sus scriptores (siglos ix–x)’, in J.I. Ruiz de la Peña (ed.), El monacato en los reinos de León y Castilla (Siglos vii–xiii). x Congreso de Estudios Medievales, 2005 (Ávila, 2007), 125–46, at 111, 119, 120. SantA111(1159), SantA123 (1175), SantA128 (1180), for example, from Tumbo A; compare the doubtful SantA18 (899), also from Tumbo A, for all of which see M. Lucas Álvarez (ed.), La documentación del Tumbo A de la catedral de Santiago de Compostela: estudio y edición (León, 1997), cited as SantA1, SantA2, etc.; cf. also E170 (1192), on a single sheet, edited in J. M. Ruiz Asencio and I. Ruiz Albi (eds), Colección documental del monasterio de San Pedro de Eslonza, i (912–1300) (León, 2007), cited as E1, E2, etc.

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and twelfth centuries.11 Most of those so labelled were clearly landed aristocrats. What, if anything, did the label signify? What, if any, distinctive role did they perform as count? What differentiated them from other landed aristocrats who were not so termed? 1 Sources The texts available are overwhelmingly charters, that is, records of the transfer of property rights. There is little in the way of letters or tracts or narrative sources, although there are chronicles from the late ninth century as well as the chronicle written by Sampiro in the early eleventh and there are some annals compiled in the mid-tenth century;12 these are important works but they are relatively brief. Although few new literary compositions of the ninth and tenth centuries survive, the tenth century was nevertheless a period of significant manuscript production. The contents of these manuscripts were in large part devotional and in large part copies of much earlier works, especially of the late antique period: bibles, psalters, liturgical texts and monastic rules, as well as works like the large glossaries and the collections of Visigothic laws and canons.13 This is not material which can throw light on use of the term ‘count’ or ‘county’ in the later ninth and tenth centuries. Surviving charters of this period are written in Latin and number about 2,700 from the whole of northern Iberia, excluding Catalonia; they are overwhelmingly of the tenth century, but there is a handful from the Visigothic period, about twenty from the eighth century and a little over 200 from the ninth century. About two thirds of them survive in cartulary copies and one third on single sheets of parchment; many of the latter are classified by their ­modern 11 12

13

Catalonia does not form part of the subject matter of this paper since it was in many ways different from the rest of northern Iberia in the early Middle Ages and had a close association with Frankish culture. Sampiro’s chronicle, together with notes and critical study, is published in J. Pérez de Urbel, Sampiro. Su crónica y la monarquía leonesa en el siglo x (Madrid, 1952), at 273–346, hereafter Crónica de Sampiro. For the ninth-century chronicles, see J. Gil Fernández, J.L Moralejo and J.I. Ruiz de la Peña (eds), Crónicas asturianas. Crónica de Alfonso iii (Rotense y ‘a Sebastián’). Crónica Albeldense (y ‘Profética’) (Oviedo, 1985). For the Castilian annals, J.C. Martín, ‘Los Annales Castellani Antiquiores y Annales Castellani Recentiores: edición y traducción anotada’, Territorio, Sociedad y Poder 4 (2009), 203–26. For description and contents of the manuscripts: A. Millares Carlo, Corpus de códices visigóticos, ed. M.C. Díaz y Díaz, 2 vols (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1999). For more detailed discussion, see M.C. Díaz y Díaz et al., Códices visigóticos en la monarquía leonesa (León, 1983).

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editors as ‘originals’ but some are contemporary or later copies and some are falsifications. Whether it is appropriate to look for a single original is arguable but there remains a significant difference between records prepared close to the date of the transaction they record and those prepared much later – it is always possible that a later version has been updated or otherwise edited, as some clearly were; some cartulary copyists changed spelling and grammar to more classical forms, as well as adding new material. For the most part the charters record gifts and sales, but the charter collections also include other material such as records of disputes and inventories. They come from localities across northern Spain and Portugal, although there are relatively few from Navarre and Aragón. Of the material used in this paper, the biggest collections of pre-eleventh-century charters are from the monastery of Celanova in Galicia, in an important cartulary including 223 records, in twelfth-century hands;14 the episcopal collections from León, on the meseta, including 591 records, from several cartularies and on single sheets;15 the monastery of Sahagún on the meseta, including 372 records in an early twelfthcentury cartulary and on single sheets;16 the monastery of Cardeña in Castile, with a late eleventh-century cartulary including the majority of the 212 pre1000 records;17 and the early twelfth-century collection, within a late twelfthcentury cartulary, ultimately from several different sources, from San Millán de la Cogolla in the rich agricultural lands of La Rioja, to the east (118 records, some of which are composite).18 There are cartularies from the monasteries of Sobrado de los Monjes and of San Julián at Samos, in Galicia, containing just under 200 charters between them;19 several series of cartularies compiled by the church of Santiago de Compostela and smaller but significant collections (from single sheets and cartularies) from north-west Galicia (122 charters);20 and over 200 charters 14 15 16 17 18

19 20

Full details above in fn. 7. Full details above in fn. 4. Full details above in fn. 9. G. Martínez Díez (ed.), Colección documental del monasterio de San Pedro de Cardeña (Burgos, 1998); charters cited as C1, C2, etc. A. Ubieto Arteta (ed.), Cartulario de San Millán de la Cogolla (Valencia, 1976), cited as Cog1, Cog2, etc. Now available in an online edition, ‘Becerro Galicano de San Millán de la Cogolla’ (accessed March 2018), http://www.ehu.es/galicano/?l=es, cited as BG1, BG2 etc., which is based on F. García Andreva, El becerro galicano de San Millán de la Cogolla. Edición y estudio (Logroño, 2010). For Sobrado, see fn. 2. M. Lucas Álvarez (ed.), El Tumbo de San Julián de Samos (siglos viii– xii) (Santiago de Compostela, 1986), cited as Sam1, Sam2, etc. C. Sáez and M. del Val González de la Peña (eds), La Coruña. Fondo Antiguo (788–1065), 2 vols (Alcalá de Henares, 2003–2004), cited as LaC1, LaC2, etc.

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from Portugal, on single sheets and in cartularies, from different sources.21 There would also appear to be in the order of 70 charters of pre-1000 from the bishopric of Lugo, on single sheets and in cartularies.22 There are also some important smaller collections, especially those from the monastery of Santo Toribio on the edge of the Liébana valley in the far north (77 from before 1000);23 from the cathedral of Oviedo (34 records);24 49 records from Otero de las Dueñas on the northern edge of the meseta – for virtually all of its pre-eleventh-century charters are single sheets from lay archives;25 and 47 records from Valpuesta in Castile (in two cartularies, of which the earlier includes folios written in tenth-century hands).26 There are in addition some charters in cartularies from Castile and farther east, such as San Juan de la Peña in Aragón (32, though the latter include several falsos).27 And finally there are very small numbers of ninth- or tenth-century charters in collections which are mainly of eleventh-century or later material; these include eight charters from Oña in Castile and seven from Santa María del Puerto in Cantabria; from the meseta: 30 from Eslonza (including a number of tenth-century charters on single sheets) as well as the very substantial collection of 186 records from Astorga (largely inaccessible because the majority of charters in the published edition derives from earlier listings and are calendared rather than published in full).28

21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28

A. Herculano de Carvalho e Araujo and J. J. da Silva Mendes Leal (eds), Portugaliae Monumenta Historica a saeculo octavo post Christum usque ad quintumdecimum. Diplomata et chartae (Lisbon, 1867–73), cited as PMH1, PMH2, etc. Some of these are unpublished. Nearly all of the published editions are listed in A. Castro, Colección diplomática altomedieval de Galicia i: Documentación editada en escritura visigótica (662–1234) (A Coruña, 2011). See also V. Cañizares del Rey, Colección Diplomática (569–1463), ed. Manuel Rodríguez Sánchez and Óscar González Murado (Lugo, 2012), for twentieth-century transcripts, cited as Cañ1, Cañ2, etc. Some Lugo charters can be found in Floriano Cumbreño, Diplomática española del periodo astur. L. Sánchez Belda (ed.), Cartulario de Santo Toribio de Liébana (Madrid, 1948), cited as T1, T2, etc. Full details above in fn. 4. Full details above in fn. 6. Full details above in fn. 8 A. Ubieto Arteta (ed.), Cartulario de San Juan de la Peña, 2 vols (Valencia, 1962–3), charters cited as SJP1, SJP2, etc. J. del Álamo (ed.), Colección diplomática de San Salvador de Oña, 2 vols (Madrid, 1950), cited as Oña1, etc.; M. Serrano y Sanz (ed.), ‘Cartulario de la iglesia de Santa María del Puerto (Santoña)’, Boletín de la Real Academia Historia 73 (1928), 420–42, cited as SMdelP1, SMdelP2, etc.; G. Cavero Domínguez and E. Martín López (eds), Colección documental de la catedral de Astorga, i (646–1126) (León, 1999), cited as Ast1, Ast2, etc.

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Textual References to Counts

How then was the word ‘count’ used in credible texts of the ninth and tenth centuries? The late ninth-century Asturian chronicles name some counts, as does Sampiro in the early eleventh century when reflecting on the tenth-century past, although not many are named in either case. The Chronicle of Albelda has Fruela ‘Gallicie comite’ and then Vela Jiménez ‘comes in Alaba’ and Diego Rodríguez ‘comes in Castella’, in contexts of 866 and 882 respectively, Vela fortifying a castrum; that of Alfonso iii has counts of the palace (comes palatii) and refers to the status of Visigothic counts (‘honore comitis sublimates’).29 Sampiro has counts ruling (regere) the area of Burgos in the early tenth century and Fernán González count of the Burgenses (Burgensium comes/comite) in the 950s, in conflict with the king of León and temporarily captured. Meanwhile the Pelagian version of this chronicle holds Rodrigo count of Amaya and Diego count of Burgos responsible for ‘populating’ those areas, and there are later tenth-century references in both versions to Gonzalo Sánchez and to counts in ­Galicia.30 So these chronicles associate counts of Galicia, Álava and Castile, and counts of Burgos especially, with specific territories – they focus on the west in Galicia and on the east in Castile and beyond, rather than the central meseta. Some of the same material features in the so-called Castilian Annals, Rodrigo and Diego in late ninth-century contexts, Diego populating by order of King Alfonso iii, with Munio Núñez, Gonzalo Tellez and Gonzalo Fernández populating points in Castile in the early tenth.31 By 939 these Annals have the king of León, together with counts and their armies, assembled to do battle with Muslim opponents (mauros); and the more recent Annals (of late ­eleventh- or early twelfth-century date) frequently feature counts of Castile, such as García Fernández and Sancho Garcés, after the death of Fernán González.32 The contexts of these narrative references are overwhelmingly military: counts take over territory and counts fight for and against kings. Similar contexts are also reflected in Arabic sources, in which military leaders of the north and prominent Christians of the south are characteristically called qūmis, a word which is a direct borrowing from Latin comes.33 Ibn al-Qūṭīya, who died in 977, wrote 29 30 31 32 33

Gil Fernández, Moralejo and Ruiz de la Peña, Crónicas Asturianas, 176, 178, 180; 142, 144, 116. Crónica de Sampiro, 316, 333, 335; 327–8; 341, 342. ‘Populating’ suggests taking political control of an area. Martín, ‘Los Annales Castellani Antiquiores y Annales Castellani Recentiores’, 208. Ibid., 209; 216. See Federico Corriente, A Dictionary of Andalusi Arabic (Leiden, 1997), 442: qūmis, qummas, count, from Latin comes; qumt, qu/ūmt, count, from Latin comit[em].

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a history of the conquest of Spain and was himself of Visigothic origin; he tells the story of Artabās, the first person to be appointed al-qimāsah (of the rank of count) in al-Andalus, supposedly a son of the Visigothic king Witiza.34 The great eleventh-century writer Ibn Ḥayyān writes at length of the history of the north, also focussing on Count (qūmis) Fernán González, naming other counts (quwāmis) and their strong points, and associating Vermudo Núñez, count of Salamanca (qūmis Shalmanqa), with the leadership of 300 mounted fighters, c. 942.35 As for charter references, if we confine observations in the first instance to the charters preserved on single sheets which may reasonably be held to derive from or near the date of the transaction recorded, then we can note that there are considerably more references to counts in the later tenth century than earlier: for example, of credible Sahagún charters, less than a quarter of tenthcentury references to counts fall before 960. When they occur, for the most part references occur in three different contexts, although it is very rare for a count to be specified in all three contexts in a single charter: in the main text of the charter; in the dating clause; and in the list of witnesses and/or confirmers. Beyond this, there are also a few references to counts in sanctions: one charter of 962, a gift from husband to wife of property in Castile and the Liébana as well as Saldaña, specifies that a fine is due to the count if the transfer should be interrupted; the other sanctions, of the 980s and 990s, include counts in exclusion clauses, in the sense that if anyone – a royal, a count, a territorial power (potestas), a bishop, an abbot, a judge – should damage the gift recorded, then penalties would apply.36 Here the count is listed alongside other authority figures. However, these usages are rare and are either Castilian or from late in the century; notably a count features in an exclusion clause in a false Sahagún charter of 938.37 Counts, in the plural, occasionally feature in the main text of charters in the context of general references to the powerful gathered together, for example in

34

Ibn al-Qūṭīya, Ta’rīkh iftitāḥ al-Andalus, ed. Ibrāhīm al-Abyārī (Beirut, 1982), 58. I am extremely grateful to Ann Christys for checking the Arabic texts and for assistance with translation. See also David James, Early Islamic Spain. The History of Ibn al-Qūṭīya (London, 2009), 76. 35 Spanish translation: M.J. Viguera and F. Corriente (trans.), Crónica del califa `Abdarrahmān iii an-nāsir entre los años 912 y 942 (al-Muqtabis V) (Zaragoza, 1981), 117, 244, 351, 363, 364. For the Arabic text, see P. Chalmeta, F. Corriente and M. Subh (eds), Al-Muqtabis (V) de Ibn Ḥayyān (Madrid, 1979). 36 S207 (962); OD23 (978), S328 (985), Lii508 (985), S330 and S331 (both 986), and S355 (997). 37 S70.

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the king’s court – counts, magnates, bishops – a perspective which is very similar to that of the exclusion clauses of sanctions.38 But there are much more specific text references too: the property of a count can be noted in a delimitation of boundaries, as happened on the meseta in 920 near León (‘terras … iuxta que fuerunt de Ueremudo comite Caluo’), and 986 (‘termino de comite’), on one side of a vineyard in Grajal;39 while the donor of a substantial gift to Sahagún of land in and around León is described as Iusta cometissa in 997.40 But the most frequent kind of text reference is to a count as court holder: a person came before this or that count, as did the deacon Arias when he promised the abbot Arborio before Count Fernando Vermúdez that he would not disrupt the abbot’s rights to the church of San Martín of Noanca. Similarly, groups of local people sometimes appealed to a count to resolve a boundary dispute, as did the people of Saidres and Villamayor when they appeared before Count Gonzalo; on other occasions a confession was secured, like that of Flaino before Count Flacenti following an accusation.41 Such references occur explicitly and unambiguously from 922 and are particularly characteristic of Galicia, but also feature in charters from the meseta, the Cantabrian Mountains and Castile. The practice is also almost certainly evidenced in a Lugo charter of 861, although this only survives in an eleventh-century copy.42 The same point is made by reference to the judge of two counts before whom the monastery of Pardomino concluded an agreement with local people (‘Emilianus qui iudice est Garuissoni et Pepi comitibus in cuius presentia factus est hanc placitam’); and in that to the lady ‘Tota cometissa iudicante ciui Domnas’, effectively the president of the court at Dueñas.43 In some areas counts feature in the regnante type of dating clause; such clauses use the format ‘at the time when King X was ruling and Y was count in Z’, often combined with a precise date by Spanish era. These are very specific and occur unquestionably from 911; they come overwhelmingly from Castile and the Liébana, although there are examples from Álava and Dueñas, as cited 38

For example, Jaca (958), although it is very questionable that this is an unaltered record from that year; Lii410 (968); S284 (976) – an eleventh- or twelfth-century copy; cf. Lii508 (985). The Jaca charter is published in Roger Collins, ‘Visigothic law and regional custom in disputes in early medieval Spain’, in W. Davies and P. Fouracre (eds), The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 1986), 85–104 (see appendix, 252–7, at 255–6). 39 Li51 (920); S329 (986). 40 S355. 41 Lii330 (960); LaC65 (pre-962); OD38 and OD39 (995). 42 Flo74. I follow Ainoa Castro’s classification of this as a copy; see the longer discussion in my Windows on Justice in Northern Iberia, 800–1000 (Abingdon, 2016), 84–6, 129. 43 Lii290 (955); Lii478 (980).

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above; they are not a normal feature of charters from the meseta or Galicia. Hence, ‘comite nostro Adefonso in Leuanensem’ in a record of a Piasca sale of 952; ‘comite Gundesalbo Telluz in Lantarone’ and ‘comite Munnio Uigilazi in Alaba’ in records of oaths taken in Castile in 911 and 919; ‘comite Assuri Fredenandiz in Castella’ following an account of a 944 court case in Castile; ‘Fredenando Gontesalbes comite in Kastela’ in a meseta sale of 933; ‘comite Gomizi Didaz in Libana’ in a 977 sale to Piasca; ‘comite Gartia Gomiz in Liuana’ in a Liébana exchange between lay parties of 997.44 Since they occur in records of small-scale transactions, especially sales, and were made by many different scribes and redactors, this appears to have been a standard way of conceptualizing authority in those areas. It is also very characteristic of Castilian cartulary copies, such as those in the Cardeña cartulary, which provide many more, credible, examples.45 Not only was this a characteristically Castilian practice, but counts of Castile appear to have been prominent beyond Castile: the countship of Fernán González, for example, was independently noted from some considerable distance away, in different kinds of source, including Arabic sources, particularly when no other counts were noted, suggesting an unusual reputation.46 Reference to counts in witness lists of this period is extremely rare; strikingly, it does not normally feature in a charter with a text reference to a count – the record of Fernán González in Ordoño iii’s gift to the monastery of San Martín is an exception.47 By contrast, as indicated above, comites feature often in the witness lists of reworked and falsified charters, such as the ten noted in Sancho i’s confirmation of Melic’s gifts to Sahagún and the eight and ten in the supposed records of Melic’s original gifts.48 But there are some credible occurrences, like those of the special context of the comes palatii, member of the 44

45

46 47 48

S136 (952); V10 (911), V11 (919) (the sheets bound into the Valpuesta cartulary were written at different periods; these charters occur on sheets written by an early tenth-century scribe); Oña3 (944); S52 (933), on which cf. S153 (957), S207 (962), V14 (935, in Lantarone – a late tenth-century scribe); S288 (977); S353 (997); also Tota cometissa of Lii478, cited above. For a thorough treatment of the Castilian regnante clauses, and comparison with other areas, see Julio Escalona, ‘In the name of a distant king: representing royal authority in the county of Castile, ca. 900–1038’, Early Medieval Europe 24 (2016), 74–102. Beyond Castile, in Galicia, the witness list of Sam217 (973) has ‘tenente Lemos et Sarriam comite Domno Fernando’, which is suggestive; however, this appears to derive from a twelfth-century endorsement to the original charter. For example, in the Galician Cel426 (951); and Viguera and Corriente, Crónica del califa, 351. Lii295 (956). S183 (960), S167 (959), S168 (959).

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royal household, in the 950s.49 And there are witness list references to a single or a couple of counts intermittently and erratically across the tenth century: ‘Fredinandus Didazi comes’ in the list following Ordoño ii’s gift to Valdevimbre in 918; ‘Audesinda comitissa’ in the list following a lay gift to Sahagún in 964; ‘Menendo Gundissalviz comes… Osorius Didaz comes’ in the list following a substantial lay gift in 986.50 The contexts are overwhelmingly royal or associated with large aristocratic gifts, although occasionally they refer to something smaller; they occur overwhelmingly on the meseta, and the records were made by several different scribes and redactors. This must suggest that some individuals were indeed referred to as ‘count’ along the length of the tenth century: the label was attached to them, just as an expert judge could be labelled iudex in the witness lists of straightforward, non-controversial, sales between lay parties.51 But there are not so many of them. It was not normal practice to name eight or ten counts at royal occasions. These observations make it clear that some people were called ‘count’ from the time of our earliest surviving charters; this was a feature of standard scribal discourse. It is also clear that people referred to counts when speaking, since the form comite/comice is the commonest form of written reference, even where one might expect nominative or accusative cases; and this is the form from which the vernacular Spanish conde developed.52 Counts feature in charters in credible contexts across the tenth century and they occur from north-west Galicia to Álava (in the Basque Country). However, there are some potentially significant differences in the pattern of occurrences. While the texts of charters refer to counts from Galicia to Castile, with more examples from Galicia, and while the chronicles focus on those from Castile, the dating clauses which emphasize the rule of counts unquestionably focus on Castile 49 50 51 52

Lii280 (954) and OvC26 (953). Note that this latter list occurs in the royal confirmation of the outcome of the 953 judicial process recorded in this charter, a confirmation which may well have happened several years later. Li45 (918), S221 (964), S333 (986). For the iudex label, see Wendy Davies, ‘Judges and judging. Truth and justice in northern Iberia on the eve of the millennium’, Journal of Medieval History 36 (2010), 193–203. Hence, ‘noster comite Assuri Fredenandiz’, in Oña3 (944); ‘ante comite domno Gundessaluus’, LaC50 (947); ‘ad comite Gundesaluo’, LaC65 (pre-962); ‘ad Comitem Gudesteo Hordoniz … ille comite … ipse comite’, Cañ41 (959); cf. ‘Gundesindus Froiani et comyti’, witness list, Li93 (932). There are also many more examples in cartulary copies, such as ‘Ego comite Gisuadus’, in E7 (928); ‘ad lege ubi fuisset ille comite et suos iudices’, PMH183 (999). I am grateful to Roger Wright for advising that, in accordance with normal rules for forming romance words, it was the accusative form comitem which survived in speech and which (losing final m) gave rise to Modern Spanish conde: therefore the form comite must indeed reflect speech.

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and the Liébana, and witness lists come from the meseta. Clearly one might encounter someone called count almost anywhere, but the scribal perspective emphasized the authority and activity of Castilian and Galician counts. If we attempt to add references to counts in cartularies, then we immediately encounter the problems of expansion and editing already flagged. It is perfectly clear that some cartulary references to counts in ninth- and tenth-century charters reflect the perspective of cartulary compilers in the later eleventh century and beyond. That does not mean that all such references must derive from later perspectives and it would be quite unreasonable to dismiss them all. If we were to apply the simple test of consistency with single sheets, then we might make the following points. As noted above, the cartulary of Cardeña, as also that of San Millán (respectively late eleventh-century and late twelfth-century, though notable in those parts of the latter that derive from pre-twelfthcentury notes), are both striking in the number of references to counts of Castile in dating clauses, especially from the time of Fernán González. Consider the appearance of ‘regnante principe Ranimiro in Obeto et comite Fredinando Gundissalbiz in Castella’ in 932 and ‘regnante Regimiro in Legione et comite Fredinando Gondissalviz in Castella et in Alava’ in 937.53 While it is clear that all kinds of acts were falsely attributed to Fernán González and his family, the specification of different centres in Castile in the tenth century is intrinsically credible: hence ‘comite Gundissalbo Fernandiz in Uurgos’ (899), ‘comite Gundissalbo Telliz in Cerasio’ (913), ‘comite Fredinando in Cereso et in Granione’ (936), ‘comite Assur Fredinandiz in Montson’ (943).54 The text formulations ‘in presentia de illo comite and ante comite’ are also credible in these charters, as also ‘Comite Fredinando’ in the witness list of a 932 gift, all notable because of the use of the comite form.55 Fines due to counts are also specified in some credible Castilian sanctions.56 A comparable point is made by the much later Santo Toribio cartulary, which has occasional references to counts in dating clauses: ‘comite Allefonso’ (941), ‘comite Fredinando Gundesaluice’ 53

54

55 56

These two examples are C22 and Cog24 = BG525; cf. Cog52 (949) = BG544, Cog70 (956) = BG526, and C143 (969). See, in much more detail, Escalona, ‘Distant King’. From 932 until 969, after which he was followed by García Fernández (e.g. Cog100 (988) = BG411), Fernán González is by far the most frequently cited count of Castile; others are Assur Fernández and Sancho son of Ramiro ii. C1; C6; Cog23 = BG390; C42. Cf. C3 and C4, Cog19 = BG523 (Munnio Núñez, 909, 899–912), C7 (Gundisalbo Fernandiz, 914), C11 (Nunu Fernández, 921), C15 (Nunu, 922), C19 (Gutier Núñez, 931). For early counts of Castile, see Carlos Estepa Díez, ‘La Castilla primitiva (750– 931): condes, territorios y villas’, Territorio, Sociedad y Poder Annex 2 (2009), 261–78. C22 (932), C23. Cog8 (867) = BG424, Cog59 (943–51) = BG384, Cog64 (952) = BG358.

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(959), ‘comite N[un]o Monite in Sallania et in Leuanes’ (?966), ‘comite Garcias Gomet in Leuana’ (990).57 Indeed, although the Santo Toribio cartulary is a late compilation, its usage is instructive: comital dating does not feature in its many ninth-century charters nor in those of Bagaudano and Faquilona, important local landowners of the early tenth century, but it does start to feature from the 940s; a comparable pattern is suggested by some sanctions which from the 940s exclude the interference of counts, especially those sanctions redacted by scribes Adica and Ansedus; there is also the occasional count in a witness list – ‘Alfonsus comite’ (941), ‘Pepi…comite’ (959).58 It is as if counts came into the Liébana world view in the mid-tenth century. A similar perspective is reflected in the Sobrado cartulary, from Galicia: it includes a handful of references to named counts, of which all but one are from late tenth-century records, and a couple of late tenth-century sanctions specifying counts in the exclusion clause.59 By contrast, it looks as if the charters of the San Juan de la Peña cartulary, although many are in themselves doubtful, seem to include reflections of a recording horizon of the time of counts Galindo and Fortunio Jiménez of Aragón in the later ninth to mid-tenth century.60 If we look at the earliest surviving Sahagún cartulary, we occasionally find the same type of dating clause, like ‘comite Garsea Gomiz in Ceia castello’, as well as several text references using the form comite: a transaction performed ‘ante comite Fernando Vermuiz’ and a court case heard ‘ante comite Fernando Vermuiz’.61 The several cartularies of León include references to a place called the Count’s Gate (‘porta de comite’), and text references to fixing boundaries by Bishops Frunimio and Ouecco and ‘Comite Gisuado’, a count who also features as donor to Eslonza in an eleventh-century copy of a charter, ‘Ego comite Gisuadus’; there is also payment of a fine in 997 to ‘comite Monio Fredenandiz’.62 57 58

59

60 61 62

T46 (941), T57 (?959), T71 (?966), T76 (990). Regnante: T46 (941), T57 (959), T71 (?966), T76 (990); sanctions: T45 (941), T50 (946), T60 (961), T69 (963); witness lists: T45, T57. Cf. ‘comite nostro Adefonso in Leuanensem’ noted by a Piasca charter in 952 (S136) and also a text reference to ‘comiti nostro domno Adefonso’ in a record of exchange of orchards, T31 (924). Counts: Sob49 (966–99), ‘comite Ariane’ (but this must be late within this period, given the scribe); both Sob130 (992) and Sob137 (?995) for ‘comite Suario’; but contrast Sob43 (818) ‘Aloitus comes’ (818) and Sob108 (978) ‘Hermegildus comes’; sanctions: Sob38 (985), Sob137. SJP7 (893), SJP9 (?9th century); SJP15 (943), SJP17 (947), SJP18 (948); cf. SJP8 (c. 890–900), Asnar; and cf. Fortunio Jiménez in Jaca (958). S263 (971); S279 (975), S295 (978), cf. S262 (971) and S322 (984). Lii486 (982), cf. Li167 (943), Lii496 (984), Sob107 (968), and also T68 (963) for location with reference to comital property; Li184 (944) and E7 (928); Liii578 (997). Cf. the ‘mallatus de comite’, perhaps a count’s prosecutor or advocate, in a witness list of 937–54 (Lii276).

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Farther­west, in Portugal, there is an occasional text reference to a count as court holder, like the Lorvão cartulary’s 936 boundary dispute taken ‘in presentia domini Exemeni comiti’ and the Livro de Mumadonna’s (Guimarães) disputed property case taken ‘ad ille comite Menendo Gonsalui’ in 999.63 To the north, a copy of a complex dispute over saltpans in northern Galicia, c. 956, has the ancestors of ‘domno Gundisalbus dux comite’ and of ‘illa comitesa domna Tarasia’ and a settlement eventually agreed before ‘ille comite domno Pelagio’, son of Gonzalo, and his sister Queen Aragonta.64 These references are consistent both in form and in content with those of single sheets and it must be likely that many of them derive from the exemplars of the cartulary copies; even the San Juan de la Peña charters, although clearly subject to several stages of editing, must derive from earlier written material. This is clearly very imprecise, and the argument is in danger of becoming circular, but using the simple tool of consistency with the practice of single sheets, we could suggest a cautious view that cartulary references add substantially to references to counts in regnante clauses in Castile, and to a smaller extent in the Liébana. These references more than double the names of individual counts and countesses; they add the castle of Cea, as a count’s point of reference, as also Saldaña and Aragón; and they confirm the date range, adding a handful of ninth-century references. 3 Function Such textual references as we have emphasize the role of counts as warriors, and as the holders of judicial courts, throughout northern Iberia. Dating clauses emphasize rule, in their specified regions, and imply governance, whatever that might have meant. If counts exercised practical functions, and were viewed as figures of authority, then the question has to be asked: what functions? And from where, if anywhere, did this authority derive? There is an established and influential Spanish historiography suggesting that counts exercised authority which had been delegated to them by kings, with a strong emphasis in much twentieth-century writing on the delegation of judicial authority.65 Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, as ever influential, argued that territories called commissa 63 64 65

Lor36 and PMH183, which latter also has a sanction with fine due to the count. LaC59. Cf. also the much-cited ‘comite Gaton’ hearing a case in El Bierzo in 878, Ast5. See for example, L. García de Valdeavellano, Curso de historia de las instituciones españolas. De los orígenes al final de la edad media (Madrid, 1968), 501–03; M. Pérez, ‘Rebelles, infideles, traditores. Insumisión política y poder aristocrático en el reino de León’, Historia, instituciones, documentos 38 (2011), 361–82, at 378–9.

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were by the ninth century established by kings as a basis of administration and that individuals were appointed by kings to exercise the office of count.66 He noted the alternative terms comitatus and mandationes in tenth-century texts but viewed the words commissa, comitatus and mandationes as interchangeable, which allowed him to reconstruct the counties of ninth-century counts, a reconstruction which is nowadays very difficult to believe.67 A sequence of charters of the later tenth century in the monastery of Sobrado’s cartulary has played a major part in the argument for delegation because it suggests that at that time kings confirmed the authority of the monastery to act in the manner that counts had acted in the past (‘secundum regiam consuetudinem comitibus solebat mandare’), as in Ordoño iv’s 958 confirmation of the monastery’s comissum of Présaras.68 Ten years later Sobrado’s control of the comitatos of Présaras, a third of Mera, a quarter of Nendos, and by implication a quarter of Nallar and half of Parga, as exercised by the abbot’s predecessors, was supposedly confirmed by the six-year-old Ramiro iii.69 Ten years after that King Ramiro iii confirmed Sobrado’s mandationes and the comisso of Présaras, the charter claiming that Hermenegildo, comes, and his family had first obtained these powers.70 Yet, as demonstrated above, Hermenegildo is never called comes in the many charters that describe his activities and there is nothing in texts of the first half of the tenth century, when he was active, to link Hermenegildo’s court holding with countship. Further, the term comitatus is quite abnormal in the Sobrado cartulary, in which the term most frequently associated with Présaras is territorium and occasionally ualle.71 Comitatus is used in an eleventh- or twelfth-century statement of the boundaries of Présaras/Sobrado and in that part of the cartulary which was constructed to suggest royal confirmations of Sobrado’s rights.72 The marked inconsistency with ninth- and tenth-century usage must make it unlikely that comitatos in the 968 charter derives from a tenth-century record. Clearly someone in the Sobrado orbit made the equation comisso = 66

67 68 69 70 71 72

C. Sánchez-Albornoz, ‘El régimen de la tierra en el reino asturleonés hace mil años’, in his Viejos y nuevos estudios, vol. 3, 1313–1521, at 1352–63; idem, ‘Homines mandationis y iuniores’, 443–74. See also Isla Frez, La sociedad gallega, 145–51, on royal concession of counties to the Galician nobility. Sánchez-Albornoz, ‘Homines mandationis y iuniores’, 455–6; his tenth-century references to counties in Santo Toribio and Sahagún cartularies (ibid., 452, n. 39) are in fact deductions from texts which do not mention the word county (namely, T46 and S263). Sob106 (958). Sob107 (968). Sob108 (978). For example, Sob13 (968), Sob21 (931), Sob60 (916); Sob10 (943), Sob48 (994). Sob113 (11th–12th century); Sob106 to Sob113.

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comitatus = mandatio, and associated counts with the direction of such units, but we do not know at what point after 952 (the foundation date of Sobrado) that was.73 It is notable, however, that Tumbo A from Santiago de Compostela does include charters that use the word comitatus in the second half of the tenth century, although it is more frequent in the early eleventh.74 It is therefore conceivable that this was a word that was current, though clearly not standard, in the episcopal scriptorium of Santiago c. 1000, especially in the context of royal confirmations, and that the usage affected Sobrado practice, given the close connections between Santiago and Sobrado: Bishop Sisnando of Santiago was a son of Hermenegildo, founder of Sobrado, and the charter Sobrado 109 (within the confirmation sequence) appears to have been drafted by a scribe from the Santiago episcopal household. Is it therefore reasonable to look for the county, the territorial expression of a count’s sphere of authority, in the later ninth and tenth centuries? López Alsina prepared a map of commissa in the province of La Coruña in northern Galicia in the first half of the tenth century.75 This map is a hypothetical construct, largely based on arguments from later material, although López Alsina himself was careful to indicate that there were many changes in unit size and shape across the centuries. Of the twenty-seven units mapped by López Alsina, three are mentioned in a possible late ninth-century list of counts; this has influenced assessments by other scholars.76 However, this list of counts is part of the long story of an Oviedo council through which the pope confirmed a wide range of churches to the church of Santiago; it was inserted into the twelfthcentury Pelagian recension of Sampiro’s chronicle and is clearly a twelfth-­ century construct. It names counts and associated places – hence Ero count in Lugo (in Lugo comes) and Vermudo count in León (Legionensis comes); a total of eleven counts is listed, of which two are in Portugal, one is in Astorga, one, as above, is in León and the rest are Galician.77 The most that this would suggest is not so much the existence of the county as a defined territorial unit but 73

74 75 76 77

E. Pastor, ‘L’organisation territoriale dans le nord-ouest de la péninsule ibérique (viiie-xe siècle): vocabulaire et interprétations, exemples et suggestions’, Annales du Midi 121 (2009), 159–76, at 168–73, treats commissus and comitatus as interchangeable, but points out that most modern commentators regard mandationes as different. SantA42 (961), SantA44 (952), SantA46 (958), SantA47 (958), SantA55 (987); SantA59 (1007), SantA60 (1011), SantA61 (1019). Cf. also the retrospectively drafted Cel8 (962), Cel95 (950), Cel265 (982). F. López Alsina, La ciudad de Santiago de Compostela en la alta edad media (Santiago de Compostela, 1988), 164, 163–6. That is Deza, Bregantia and Prucios; see A. Isla Frez, La alta edad media, siglos viii–xi (Madrid, 2002), 34–5, 147–51. Crónica de Sampiro, 284–305, at 290–1.

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rather, the existence of counts associated either with specified focal points or with regions. This is comparable to the picture derived from the chronicles, with their focus on the strongpoints of Burgos and Amaya and regions of Castile and Álava, and as such is credible. The Arab source al-Muqtabis adds the strong points of Pamplona, Gormaz, Harisha and Salamanca.78 The charters add Dueñas, Lantarón, Cerezo, Grañón, Saldaña, Cea and the regions of the Liébana and Aragón. Apart from the possible Santiago practice, charter references to a county unit (comitatus) are very rare at this period: there are none in the large León or Sahagún collections; and other words – like prouincia, territorium, uilla and ualle – are much more common in all collections. There is really nothing in the believable or possible ninth- and tenth-century evidence which suggests a comprehensive system of territorial units such as the county; the named strong points are overwhelmingly Castilian; and there are areas with no associated counts. Indeed the largest number of counts ever found together, even in the most dubious of charters, is 26, and the total number of counts named on single sheets and in credible cartulary copies of the whole of the ninth and tenth centuries is of the order of 75;79 if there had been a count for every part of northern Iberia there would surely have been several hundred. There also seem to have been greater counts and lesser. By the mid-tenth century counts like the count of Castile had widespread property and political interests, approaching or exceeding the scale of a modern Spanish province, 15–20,000 km2.80 But there were counts whose property interests and scale of operation were much more limited, like those of Flaino Muñoz or Munio Fernández. These are areas of the order of 2,000 km2 or even smaller.81 There is therefore nothing to suggest a coherent or even a haphazard system of territorial counties at the time.

78 79 80 81

Viguera and Corriente, Crónica del califa, 117, 364; perhaps Salamanca, which is associated with Vermudo Núñez, is in error for Saldaña or Cea. Cel2 (one reference to comes et dux is recorded as similiter). Cf. the dubious S167 (959) – ten, S129 (950) – eight, S290 (977) – seven. Cf. Estepa’s count of fifteen for Castile 816–931, ‘La Castilla primitiva’, 264. Cf. also southern Galicia, for which see Robert Portass, ‘All quiet on the western front. Royal politics in Galicia from c. 800 to c. 950’, Early Medieval Europe 21 (2013), 283–306. See W. Davies, Acts of Giving. Individual, Community, and Church in Tenth-Century Christian Spain (Oxford, 2007), 144–8, for Flaino and Munio, with maps. Pastor, ‘L’organisation ter­ ritoriale’, 169, 171, cites 390 km2 for Galician commisos and 55–65 km2 for Valdoré (apparently Flaino’s core property), though the latter was only one element of his property interests. See also Á. Carvajal Castro, ‘Sociedad y territorio en el norte de León: Valdoré, los Flaínez y el entorno del Alto Esla (siglos ix–xi)’, Studia Historica. Historia Medieval 31 (2013), 105–31.

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As for delegation: despite the influence of Sánchez-Albornoz, in the later twentieth century and the past decade some historians have called into question the fact of delegation and there has been some tendency to modify his argument. For example, it is suggested that there was a pre-ninth-century background of territorial chiefdoms, not necessarily coterminous, whose chiefs exercised control of greater or lesser territories before the reach of kings was consolidated.82 In other words, there were people with independent powers of territorial control who were not kings. It has also been suggested that some families developed hereditary political interests over a long period, interests subsequently acquired by ecclesiastical bodies;83 and that by the late tenth century the term ‘count’ was no more than an honorific title.84 Approaches to delegation have been changing. The redactors of charters clearly associated counts with ruling; we have seen the regnante clauses, the judicial hearings before (ante) this or that count and the military leadership of counts. However, there is nothing in charters on single sheets and there is little in cartulary copies of pre-950 to indicate the source of any such powers; the Celanova cartulary does indicate royal delegation of the ‘commisso’ of Quiroga to Gutier Menéndez in 929 and that of Caldelas (and other areas) to Fruela Gutiérrez, under his mother’s guidance, in 942; but in neither case was the beneficiary described as count of those areas and Gutier in practice operated over a much wider area, as did Fruela’s mother, his wife;

82

83 84

See especially, C. Estepa Díez, ‘Configuración y primera expansión del reino astur. Siglos viii y ix’, in F.J. Lomas and F. Devís (eds), De Constantino a Carlomagno. Disidentes, heterodoxos, marginados (Cádiz, 1992), 179–95; cf. I. Álvarez Borge, ‘Estructuras de poder en Castilla en la alta edad media: señores, siervos, vasallos’, in Señores, siervos, vasallos en la alta edad media. xxviii Semana de estudios medievales, Estella, 16 a 20 de julio de 2001 (Pamplona, 2002), 269–308, at 289; I. Martín Viso, ‘Poder político y estructura social en la Castilla altomedieval: el condado de Lantarón (siglos viii–xi)’, in J.I. de la Iglesia Duarte (co-ordinator), Los espacios de poder en la España medieval. xii semana de estudios medievales Nájera 2001 (Logroño, 2002), 533–52, at 535–6. Cf., also, Isla Frez, La sociedad gallega, 133, on the autonomy of territorial chiefs in the Visigothic period. E. Portela Silva, ‘Galicia y la monarquía leonesa’, in El reino de León en la alta edad media, vii, Estudios (León, 1995), 9–70, at 29–30; Isla Frez, La sociedad gallega, 147–9; Pérez, ‘Rebelles, infideles, traditores’, 379. P. Martínez Sopena, ‘El conde Rodrigo de León y los suyos. Herencia y expectativa de poder entre los siglos x y xii’, in R. Pastor (ed.), Relaciones de poder, de producción y parentesco en la edad media y moderna (Madrid, 1990), 51–84, at 56 (citing the case of Flaino Muñoz); idem, ‘Reyes y nobles en León (ca. 860–1160)’, in J.M. Fernández Catón (co-­ ordinator), Monarquía y sociedad en el reino de León. De Alfonso iii a Alfonso vii, 2 vols (León, 2007), vol. 1, 149–200, at 183.

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we have no explicit record of either man holding a judicial court.85 From the mid-tenth century there are some credible charters indicating royal delegation of limited spheres of authority (which tend to be authority over people rather than over territories) to individuals, although these were rarely counts and more often clerics.86 Royal capacity to command and therefore to delegate was clearly developing in the later tenth century, and even more so in the eleventh century: Pedro Flaínez, son of Flaino Muñoz, explicitly held the mandatio of Valdoré in the early eleventh century and had control over the movement of the population but he is not called count in the charters that refer to this.87 By 1014, however, he was being called count and by 1019 the delegation of power to him was explicit.88 At this time use of the term ‘count’ was clearly beginning to increase, and one or two counts might be designated as witnesses to royal charters.89 However, these two trends do not map neatly on to each other and they appear to represent different processes – on the one hand there was development and delegation of royal authority to appropriate people and on the other increasing use of an honorific title for top people. Sometimes these different processes came together; at others they did not. Before this period of change and development, some people were referred to as count, often ‘our count’, ‘noster comite’ in the charters, but overall the designation is quite rare. Many of these people can be seen holding judicial courts; there is nothing which directly supports the notion that they acquired this power to hold a court by any act of royal delegation; and, very significantly, it is perfectly clear that other people held courts too.90 Court holders could be 85

86

87 88 89 90

Cel207, Cel499. Gutier is said to have appeared with the king in Lugo to hear the early stages of the Odoíno dispute over control of the church of Santa Comba, Cel265 (pre-982, probably in 932). Gutier is called count in Cel179 (927), Cel416 (959), Cel502 (940), the last of which was probably judicial. For example, Ordoño iii gave the bishop of León, ‘ad inperandum’, the castle of San Salvador ‘qum mandationibus suis uel homines ei deseruientes’, Lii300 (951–6), a single sheet; the monk Zuleiman, mayordomo of Queen Teresa, mother of Ramiro iii, held mandationes in several places, for which he answered to the queen, Liii560 (pre-994), also a single sheet. C. Estepa Díez, ‘Poder y propiedad feudales en el período astur: las mandaciones de los Flaínez en la montaña leonesa’, in Miscel·lània en homenatge al P. Agustí Altisent (Tarragona, 1991), 285–327, remains the best treatment of mandationes; he clearly demonstrates that by the 1020s holding a mandatio brought with it the power to hold a court, 318. See OD56 (1001) and OD70 (1006). OD99 (1014) is explicit that Pedro held the mandatio of Lorma and in this text he is called count, in the forms comes (once) and comite (four times). Royal delegation is explicit in OD116 (1019). All of these Otero charters are on single sheets. For example, Liii871 (1030), OD201 (1032). On this latter point, see my Windows on Justice, Chs. 6, 7, 8. For counts as court holders: Flo74 (Froilani, 861); Ast5 (Gaton, 878); Cañ39 (Froila Menéndez, 922); SMdelP2 (Nunu,

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referred to as dominus or potestas terrae, in effect landowners with some control of territory beyond their personal properties, a kind of seigneurial power, and fines could be specified as due to the dominus/potestas terrae; these could be relatively minor aristocrats, dealing with small-scale cases.91 Counts certainly held judicial courts but you did not have to be a count to do so. How then did a person come to be termed count? The most obvious answer to this question is scribal habit. ‘Ego comite Gisuadus’ may look like a personal statement but it was the scribe who formulated the words, though reflecting the spoken register. But which scribes and redactors chose to call an individual a count? Taking firstly the references on single sheets, there are at least 25 different named scribes responsible for these charters and there are at least a further 15 named in cartulary copies of such charters. Some of these scribes belonged to the royal household, some to monastic scriptoria – like that of Sahagún and probably Abellar. A few could well have been local scribes and some belonged to aristocratic households. For example, the priest Naczare who recorded a small sale between lay parties, using comite in the dating clause, looks like a local priest;92 and the Sendino who redacted the charter recording a fine paid to Count Munio Fernández in 997 appears to have been Munio’s household scribe, recording his transactions in scattered locations.93 The fact that some individuals were called counts by several different scribes suggests that they were recognized as prominent in different contexts – this was not just the practice of a single recording source. The best example is that of Fernán González but it is also true of others, such as Fernando Vermúdez.94 However, it is just as telling that some individuals were called counts by some scribes and were not so designated by others and that some individuals were sometimes called count and sometimes not by the same scribe – for most of 927); C22, C35, C59, C90, Cog50 (Fernán González. 932–57); Lor36 (Jimeno Díaz, 936); Oña3 (Assur Fernández, 944); Li184 (Gisuado, 944); LaC50, LaC65 (Gonzalo, 947); Cel95, Cel93 (Suario and Rodrigo Gutiérrez, 950); Li243 (Uelasco, 952); Lii290 (Garuissoni and Pepi, 955); LaC59 (Pelayo, 956); LaC61 (Pedro, 958); SJP18, ?Jaca (Fortunio Jiménez, 948– 58); Cañ41 (Gudesteo Ordoñez, 959); Lii330, S279, S295 (Fernando Vermúdez, 960–78); C151 (García Fernández, 972); Cañ47 (Vermudo Magnidizi, 973); Sob130 (Suario Gundemáriz, 992); OD39 (Flacenti, 995); OD43 (Flaino Muñoz, 997); Liii578 (Munio Fernández, 997); S356 (García Gómez, 998); PMH183 (Menendo González, 999). 91 Lii378 (964) for a very explicit case involving a potestas; OD21 (976) and OD26 (986) for fines. I mean ‘seigneurial’ in the sense of the seigneurie banale. 92 S263. 93 Liii578. 94 Fernán González: at least, in credible charters, by Arias, Ambrosius and Iustus (S52 (933), Lii295 (956), S152 (956)); Fernando Vermúdez: at least Iulianus, Teodericus and Flaino (S262 (971), S279 (975), S295 (978)).

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the tenth century the designation was clearly not essential. So, Sendino did not use the term in association with Munio Fernández in some records, whether surviving as single sheet or cartulary copy; nor did some other scribes.95 All of this suggests that in the ninth and tenth centuries the term had more to do with prominence, with visibility on the political stage. Essentially it seems to have been a descriptor of the powerful of the moment, who often explicitly had military capacity and/or operated from fortifiable strongpoints and who often had the power of the court holder – though not to the exclusion of others for potestates terrae could be differentiated from counts. The term presumably came from the late Roman background of post-Roman civil administration by counts, the comites civitatum,96 and the Visigothic background of frequent reference to dukes, counts and judges in the corpus of Visigothic law, especially in judicial contexts.97 That this Visigothic law, or some of it, was known and cited in the ninth and tenth centuries is demonstrable.98 This does not have to imply that the counts of the ninth and tenth century were descendants of Visigothic comites, but it does provide some explanation of why the word comes was appropriate to describe such figures. Indeed, it is not impossible that some could have had ancestors who were Visigothic counts; others, presumably, looked like comparably powerful people to those observing them. By the time we see counts in the later ninth and early tenth centuries, they look and behave like members of a hereditary landed aristocracy, although their ultimate ancestry is impossible to trace. They are difficult to differentiate from other powerful members of the landed aristocracy who are not so termed, although it might be reasonable to suggest that these were aristocrats with the greatest military capacity and the greatest propensity to lead military action.99 There is not much of ‘office’ about them and it is difficult to demonstrate any delegation of power from kings before the late tenth century. By then such a sphere of authority was usually referred to as a com(m)issum or mandatio, rather than comitatus, and could be held by people other than counts, such as

95 96 97 98 99

For example, Sendino: Liii556 (993), Liii561 (994), Liii562 (994); other scribes: Liii530 (989), Liii669 (1008), Munio and Sampiro. In a questionable assumption, Sánchez-Albornoz directly associated the comitatus of the ninth and tenth centuries with the territorium of the earlier comes civitatis; ‘Homines mandationis y iuniores’, 450. Lex Visigothorum, in K. Zeumer (ed.), Leges Visigothorum. mgh Leges nationum Germanicarum 1 (Hanover, 1902), 33–456: 78, 157, 288, 314, 378, for example. See G. Barrett, ‘The written and the world in early medieval Iberia’ (DPhil, University of Oxford, 2015, Ch. 5.). Cf. Estepa Díez, ‘Configuración y primera expansión del reino astur’, 192, on the strong military element in Castilian countship.

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bishops. Indeed, there is little to suggest that the county existed as a recognizable territorial unit. Further, there is nothing to suggest that every part of northern Iberia was within the sphere of authority of some count; rather, there was an irregular and incomplete patchwork of a count here, a count there, with some very marked regional differences, some counts extremely prominent on the wider political stage, some of local significance only. And there were relatively few of them – the total number of counts and countesses mentioned in credible texts of the ninth and tenth centuries is of the order of 75 across 150 years. All of this suggests that the exercise of political power was more fluid than one might have supposed and was not at all systematized. This is in itself both a comment on the limited power of kings and their limited capacity to govern and on the great variety of local arrangements prior to the tenth century – some areas were probably effectively ruled by a count, others effectively ruled by someone else, and others not ruled at all. ‘Rule’ seems to have involved leading some warriors and holding judicial courts; it does not appear to have involved taking taxes nor making laws. It is important, then, to avoid the assumption that to be a count was to hold an office. The setting aside of office and the acknowledgment of the limits of royal power offer yet more reasons to oppose the model of king-led reconquest of northern Iberia, in which kings delegated authority to officials to promote that reconquest. The nature of political change in ninth- and tenth-century Iberia was both more subtle and more complex than the Sánchez-Albornoz model of royal conquest would allow.100 Bibliography Alamo, J. del, (ed.), Colección diplomática de San Salvador de Oña, 2 vols (Madrid, 1950). Álvarez Borge, I., ‘Estructuras de poder en Castilla en la alta edad media: señores, siervos, vasallos’, in Señores, siervos, vasallos en la alta edad media. xxviii Semana de estudios medievales, Estella, 16 a 20 de julio de 2001 (Pamplona, 2002), 269–308. Andrade Cernadas, J.M. (ed.), O Tombo de Celanova: Estudio introductorio, edición e índices (ss. ix–xii), 2 vols (Santiago de Compostela, 1995). Barrett, G., ‘The written and the world in early medieval Iberia’ (DPhil, University of Oxford, 2015).

100 Grateful thanks are due to the volume editors for their helpful comments on a draft of this paper, and to the many others, Julio Escalona especially, who have assisted my thinking.

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Cañizares del Rey, V., Colección Diplomática (569–1463), ed. Manuel Rodríguez Sánchez and Óscar González Murado (Lugo, 2012). Carvajal Castro, Á., ‘Sociedad y territorio en el norte de León: Valdoré, los Flaínez y el entorno del Alto Esla (siglos ix–xi)’, Studia Historica. Historia Medieval 31 (2013), 105–31. Castro, A., Colección diplomática altomedieval de Galicia i: Documentación editada en escritura visigótica (662–1234) (A Coruña, 2011). Cavero Domínguez, G. and E. Martín López (eds), Colección documental de la catedral de Astorga, i (646–1126) (León, 1999). Chalmeta, P., F. Corriente and M. Subh (eds), Al-Muqtabis (v) de Ibn Ḥayyān (Madrid, 1979). Collins, R., ‘Visigothic law and regional custom in disputes in early medieval Spain’, in W. Davies and P. Fouracre (eds), The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 1986), 85–104. Corriente, F., A Dictionary of Andalusi Arabic (Leiden, 1997). Crónica de Sampiro, in J. Pérez de Urbel, Sampiro. Su crónica y la monarquía leonesa en el siglo x (Madrid, 1952), 273–346. Davies, W., Acts of Giving. Individual, Community, and Church in Tenth-Century Christian Spain (Oxford, 2007). Davies, W., ‘Judges and judging. Truth and justice in northern Iberia, 800–1000 on the eve of the millennium’, Journal of Medieval History 36 (2010), 193–203. Davies, W., Windows on Justice in Northern Iberia, 800–1000 (Abingdon, 2016). Díaz y Díaz, M.C., Códices visigóticos en la monarquía leonesa (León, 1983). Escalona, J., ‘In the name of a distant king: representing royal authority in the county of Castile, ca. 900–1038’, Early Medieval Europe 24 (2016), 74–102. Estepa Díez, C., ‘Poder y propiedad feudales en el período astur: las mandaciones de los Flaínez en la montaña leonesa’, in Miscel·lània en homenatge al P. Agustí Altisent (Tarragona, 1991), 285–327. Estepa Díez, C. ‘Configuración y primera expansión del reino astur. Siglos viii y ix’, in F.J. Lomas and F. Devís (eds), De Constantino a Carlomagno. Disidentes, heterodoxos, marginados (Cádiz, 1992), 179–95. Estepa Díez, C. ‘La Castilla primitiva (750–931): condes, territorios y villas’, Territorio, Sociedad y Poder Annex 2 (2009), 261–78. Fernández Flórez, J.A., ‘El fondo documental del monasterio de Sahagún y sus scriptores (siglos ix–x)’, in J.I. Ruiz de la Peña (ed.), El monacato en los reinos de León y Castilla (Siglos vii–xiii). x Congreso de Estudios Medievales, 2005 (Ávila, 2007), 125–46. Fernández Flórez, J.A. and M. Herrero de la Fuente (eds), Colección documental del monasterio de Santa María de Otero de las Dueñas, i (854–1108) (León, 1999). Floriano Cumbreño, A.C., Diplomática española del periodo astur. Estudio de las fuentes documentales del reino de Asturias (718–910), 2 vols (Oviedo, 1949–51).

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García Andreva, F., El becerro galicano de San Millán de la Cogolla. Edición y estudio (Logroño, 2010). García de Valdeavellano, L., Curso de historia de las instituciones españolas. De los orígenes al final de la edad media (Madrid, 1968). García Larragueta, S. (ed.), Colección de documentos de la catedral de Oviedo, (Oviedo, 1962). Gil Fernández, J., J.L Moralejo and J.I Ruiz de la Peña (eds), Crónicas asturianas. Crónica de Alfonso iii (Rotense y ‘a Sebastián’). Crónica Albeldense (y ‘Profética’) (Oviedo, 1985). Herculano de Carvalho e Araujo, A. and J.J. da Silva Mendes Leal (eds), Portugaliae Monumenta Historica a saeculo octavo post Christum usque ad quintumdecimum. Diplomata et chartae (Lisbon, 1867–73). Holzfurtner, L., Die Grafschaft der Andechser. Comitatus und Grafschaft in Bayern 1000– 1180 (Munich, 1994). Ibn al-Qūṭīya, Ta’rīkh iftitāḥ al-Andalus, ed. Ibrāhīm al-Abyārī (Beirut, 1982). Isla Frez, A., La sociedad gallega en la alta edad media (Madrid, 1992). Isla Frez, A., La alta edad media, siglos viii–xi (Madrid, 2002). Isla Frez, A., ‘Nombres de reyes y sucesión al trono (siglos viii–x)’, Studia Historica. Historia Medieval 11 (1993), 9–33. James, D., Early Islamic Spain. The History of Ibn al-Qūṭīya (London, 2009). Lex Visigothorum, in K. Zeumer (ed.), Leges Visigothorum. MGH Leges nationum Germanicarum 1 (Hanover, 1902), 33–456. López Alsina, F., La ciudad de Santiago de Compostela en la alta edad media (Santiago de Compostela, 1988). López Sangil, J.L. and M. Vidán Torreira (eds), Tumbo Viejo de Lugo (transcripción completa), Estudios Mindonienses 27 (2011), 11–373. Loscertales de García de Valdeavellano, P. (ed.), Tumbos del monasterio de Sobrado de los Monjes, 2 vols (Madrid, 1976). Lucas Álvarez, M. (ed.), El Tumbo de San Julián de Samos (siglos viii–xii) (Santiago de Compostela, 1986). Lucas Álvarez, M. (ed.), La documentación del Tumbo A de la catedral de Santiago de Compostela: estudio y edición (León, 1997). Martín, J.C., ‘Los Annales Castellani Antiquiores y Annales Castellani Recentiores: edición y traducción anotada’, Territorio, Sociedad y Poder 4 (2009), 203–26. Martín Viso, I., ‘Poder político y estructura social en la Castilla altomedieval: el condado de Lantarón (siglos viii–xi)’, in J.I. de la Iglesia Duarte (co-ordinator), Los espacios de poder en la España medieval. xii semana de estudios medievales Nájera 2001 (Logroño, 2002), 533–52.

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Martínez Díez, G. (ed.), Colección documental del monasterio de San Pedro de Cardeña (Burgos, 1998). Martínez Sopena, P., ‘El conde Rodrigo de León y los suyos. Herencia y expectativa de poder entre los siglos x y xii’, in R. Pastor (ed.), Relaciones de poder, de producción y parentesco en la edad media y moderna (Madrid, 1990), 51–84. Martínez Sopena, P., ‘Reyes y nobles en León (ca. 860–1160)’, in J.M. Fernández Catón (co-ordinator), Monarquía y sociedad en el reino de León. De Alfonso iii a Alfonso vii, 2 vols (León, 2007), vol. 1, 149–200. Millares Carlo, A., Corpus de códices visigóticos, ed. M.C. Díaz y Díaz et al., 2 vols (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1999). Mínguez Fernández, J.M. (ed.), Colección diplomática del monasterio de Sahagún (siglos ix y x) (León, 1976). Nascimento, A.A. et al., ‘Transcripción del texto del Liber Testamentorum – Transcrição do texto do Liber Testamentorum’, in Liber testamentorum coenobii Laurbanensis, 2 vols (León, 2008). Pastor, E., ‘L’organisation territoriale dans le nord-ouest de la péninsule ibérique (viiie–xe siècle): vocabulaire et interprétations, exemples et suggestions’, Annales du Midi 121 (2009), 159–76. Pérez, M., ‘Rebelles, infideles, traditores. Insumisión política y poder aristocrático en el reino de León’, Historia, instituciones, documentos 38 (2011), 361–82. Portass, R., ‘All quiet on the western front. Royal politics in Galicia from c. 800 to c. 950’, Early Medieval Europe 21 (2013), 283–306. Portela Silva, E., ‘Galicia y la monarquía leonesa’, in El reino de León en la alta edad media, vii, Estudios (León, 1995), 9–70. Ruiz Asencio, J.M. (ed.), Colección documental del archivo de la catedral de León (775– 1230), iii (986–1031) (León, 1987). Ruiz Asencio, J.M. and I. Ruiz Albi (eds), Colección documental del monasterio de San Pedro de Eslonza, i (912–1300) (León, 2007). Ruiz Asencio, J.M. and I. Ruiz Albi and M. Herrero Jiménez (eds), Los becerros gótico y galicano de Valpuesta, 2 vols (Burgos, 2010). Sáez, C. and M. del Val González de la Peña (eds), La Coruña. Fondo Antiguo (788–1065), 2 vols (Alcalá de Henares, 2003–2004). Sáez, E., ‘Los ascendientes de San Rosendo (Notas para el estudio de la monarquía astur-leonesa durante los siglos ix y x)’, Hispania 8 (1948), 3–74, 179–233. Sáez, E. (ed.), Colección documental del archivo de la catedral de León (775–1230), i (775– 952) (León, 1987). Sáez, E. and C. Sáez (eds), Colección documental del archivo de la catedral de León (775– 1230), ii (953–985) (León, 1990).

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Chapter 5

The Value of Wealth: Coins and Coinage in Iberian Early Medieval Documents Eduardo Manzano Moreno and Alberto Canto 1

The Problem of Coinage in Early Medieval Northern Iberia1

Early medieval Iberian charters are characterised by an interesting and intriguing feature: records of sales of land, houses, mills and cattle frequently express the value of these items in coins. This would hardly be remarkable were it not for the well-known fact that kings, counts and other landlords of the northern Christian kingdoms did not mint coinage before the eleventh century. The only exception to this rule is to be found in a few issues minted in the Catalan counties; the rest of the Christian kingdoms of the peninsula only began to produce coins in the last third of the eleventh century. In spite of the absence of minting in much of the peninsula, Iberian charters routinely record sales and other transactions in which the value of the items sold or exchanged is expressed in coins. In some cases, there seems to be explicit reference to actual payment in coins; in others, it is clear that no coinage was transacted, but the items sold or exchanged were nevertheless valued in coins.2 Questions abound. What was 1 The authors acknowledge the support of grants har 2009–10011 and har 2013–40745-P of the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad. The authors would like to thank Wendy Davies and Amancio Isla Frez for the comments and corrections that they offered on an early draft of this chapter. This paper was also presented to the workshop ‘Currency, payments and fines in the Astur-Leonese kingdom’, organised by J. Escalona at csic (Madrid): his comments and those of the rest of the participants were extremely valuable. 2 Here one charter, Liii533 (990), can stand for hundreds of examples: ‘Uendidimus ea [corte] uobis in pretio aderato et difinito (…), id est x argenteos et de ipso pretio apud uos nicil remansit in deuito’. Note that in what follows examples will be drawn from the first four volumes of charters from the cathedral archive of Léon, and citations will appear as follows: E. Sáez (ed.), Colección documental del archivo de la catedral de León (775–1230), i (775–952) (León, 1987); idem and C. Sáez (eds), Colección documental del archivo de la catedral de León (775–1230), ii (953–985) (León, 1990); J.M. Ruiz Asencio (ed.), Colección documental del archivo de la catedral de León (775–1230), iii (986–1031) (León, 1987); J.M. Ruiz Asencio (ed.), Colección documental del archivo de la catedral de León (775–1230), iv (1032–1109) (León, 1990); charters cited as Li1, Li2, Lii259, Liii512, Liv922 etc. in order to indicate volume number and charter number. Cf. ‘acebimus de uos in precio inter boues et pane et ariento, solitos cxx’: from a charter in G. del Ser Quijano (ed.), Colección Diplomática de Santa María de Otero de las

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004423879_007

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this coinage? Did real coins circulate in northern Iberia? Or should we consider references to coins mere units of account, used solely for the purpose of estimating value? If coins circulated, where did they come from? Were they remnants of the old Roman and Visigothic coinages? Or had they arrived from contemporary al-Andalus, or perhaps even the northern Carolingian territories, where minting was undertaken on a large scale? If coins were used as units of account, what was the system of reference? Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz addressed some of these problems by systematically recording all references to coinage in Leonese and Castilian charters. He managed to recognise chronological and regional variations, but his main conclusion was typically trenchant: these references demonstrated the wide circulation of coinage in León and Castile; some coins were ancient Visigothic and Roman specimens still in circulation, while others were silver coins from alAndalus or, more frequently, the Carolingian empire.3 In an excellent article, which unfortunately has not attracted the attention it deserves, Jean GautierDalché criticised this view, arguing that economic contacts beyond the Pyrenees were sparse before the eleventh century, and that remnants of the old Visigothic monetary system must have been very rare a century and a half after the fall of the kingdom. Although some of his evidence had shortcomings, Gautier-Dalché advanced a compelling argument in favour of how this coinage should be understood.4 More recently, Amancio Isla Frez has also refuted Sánchez-Albornoz’s ideas by convincingly claiming that most references to coinage in ninth- and early tenth-century documents from Galicia and Portugal indicate units of account with no real equivalence to actual coinage.5 Wendy Davies has compared references to coin values in tenth-century documents from monasteries such as Celanova, Sahagún or Cardeña and has argued that, although in some cases transactions did not involve the exchange of real money, references to pieces ­ ueñas (León) (854–1037) (Salamanca, 1993), charters cited hereafter as Old1, Old2, etc. The D example given here is Old130 (1024). 3 C. Sánchez-Albornoz, ‘El precio de la vida en el reino astur-leonés hace mil años’ and ‘Moneda de cambio y moneda de cuenta en el reino astur-leonés’, in his Estudios sobre las instituciones medievales españolas (Mexico City, 1965), 369–410 and 411–39. 4 J. Gautier-Dalché, ‘Du royaume asturo-léonais à la monarchie castillano-léonaise. Une histoire monétaire singulière (viiie–XIe siècle)’, in Actes des Congrès de la Société des historiens médiévistes de l´enseignement supérieur public (Clermont Ferrand, 1997), 77–92. 5 A. Isla Frez, ‘Moneda de cuenta y organización monetaria en la Galicia altomedieval’, in Miscel.lània en Homenatge al P. Agustí Altissent (Tarragona, 1991), 487–510; idem, ‘Monnaie et échanges dans le royaume asturo-léonais, ixe–xie siècles’, in L. Feller and A. Rodríguez (eds), Objets sous contrainte. Circulation des richesses et valeur des choses au Moyen Âge (Paris, 2013), 181–96.

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of silver called argenzos and argenteos indicate the development of a ‘metal weight economy’ nurtured by silver coins and fragments coming from al-­ Andalus or Francia.6 In this chapter we will examine the use of coinage to meet estimations of value in charters of sale from the ninth to the eleventh century in Christian Iberia.7 Given that any transaction was in some sense an expression of power relations, this value was not only economic but also social. However, the fact that value was frequently expressed in coinage suggests a need to fix a value considered acceptable and recognisable by all parties in the transaction. Therefore, although values may have depended on the social context that framed every particular charter, we propose that they were, or aimed to be, consistent with the coinage system to which they referred. With this in mind, it is possible to assess the socially constructed value of wealth in our documentary evidence, as value was expressed in terms designed to convey agreement. Realising as much is a key factor in the correct understanding of charters. The value of a given transaction may hint at the status of those undertaking it and, as a consequence, it may likewise shed light on the social implications of the legal deed recorded in the charter. Another fundamental aspect of our approach is the assumption that when dealing with the issue of coinage both the textual and material evidence should be coherent and thus point in the same direction. If, for instance, it be considered that ninth- to tenth-century documents reflect the wide circulation of coinage in northern Iberia, this conclusion should be reinforced by a consistent record of coin finds, similar to that which survives in al-Andalus, where hoards have been recorded throughout the last century and a half: the lack of such finds – discussed below – has thus been thought to render the idea that this was a monetised society indefensible. This matter is crucial. Contrary to historiographical notions that tend to consider the material record as ancillary, we think that it has a unique explanatory potential; contrary to ideas that disregard the textual evidence as partial and manipulated, we deem documentary references to be reflections, however problematic, of real social practice. The final aim of our contribution is to demonstrate that values expressed in early 6 W. Davies, ‘Sale, price and valuation in Galicia and Castile-León in the tenth century’, Early Medieval Europe 11 (2002), 149–74. 7 The chronological limit of this study is 1031, the date of the fall of the Umayyad caliphate in Córdoba, a year of little relevance in our charters but which nonetheless signals the beginning of the ṭāʾifa period in al-Andalus and of the use of a different coinage system. See E. López Martínez de Marigorta, ‘Acuñaciones monetarias de al-Andalus en la primera mitad del siglo v/xi: Fin de un modelo, consolidación de las emisiones regionales’, Al-Qantara 36 (2015), 69–106.

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medieval documents responded either to actual coins used in transactions or, more frequently, to units of account that differed in time and place. However, in all cases references to coinage corresponded to the prevailing system of reference; so it is by understanding the many contexts in which such references were made that we arrive at a better global understanding of value, and how it was met, in early medieval Iberia. 2

An Overview of Coinage in Iberia from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages

The late Roman monetary system was based on the gold solidus, which weighed 4.5g, and its lower denominations, the half and third (semissis and tremissis).8 This system characterised the emissions of the Visigothic kingdom, which were based on the exclusive coinage of tremisses (each weighing 1.5g). No other coin complemented this system. In Visigothic Hispania there was nothing similar to the silver coinage that emerged in other parts of Western Europe and this is why Roman bronze coins still circulated at the level of simple pettycommodity markets.9 The Visigothic monetary system went through a crisis of extreme devaluations. A review of the evolution of active workshops, as well as the number of annual minted variants, suggests that the production, quality and distribution of these gold tremisses clearly contracted from the beginning of the seventh century onwards.10 Two possible explanations for this contraction come to mind: a deficit of metal, and a reduced tax collection in gold. These factors, in 8 9

10

Standard Latin terminology for coins is here indicated by italics: thus modius/modii, solidus/solidi, etc. Where lifted from a concrete example (a charter, say), such words will not be italicised and will be given in single quotation marks. The use of Roman bronze coins is ratified by their survival in Islamic archaeological contexts. This casts doubt on the existence of a Visigothic copper system, as proposed by M. Crusafont i Sabater, El sistema monetario, cobre y oro (Barcelona, 1994); cf. R. Pliego, La moneda visigoda (Sevilla, 2009), 188–9; idem, ‘The circulation of copper coins in the Iberian Peninsula during the Visigothic period: new approaches’, The Journal of Archaeological Numismatics, 5/6, 2015–2016, 125–60. Cf., arguing contra this idea, J. Vico Monteoliva, Mª.C. Cores Gomendio y G. Cores Uría (eds), Corpus Nummorum Visigothorum. Ca. 575714. Leovigildus-Achila (Madrid, 2006), 111–16; F. Martín Escudero, ‘Monedas que van, monedas que vienen. Circulación monetaria en época de cambios’, De Mahoma a Carlomagno (Siglos vii–ix), xxxix Semana de Estudios Medievales (Estella, 2012), 311–50. Vico Monteoliva, Cores Gomendio and Cores Uría, Corpus Nummorum Visigothorum, 83–108; A. Canto ‘Las monedas de la conquista’, in 711 Arqueología e Historia entre dos mundos (Madrid 2011), 135–46.

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turn, were likely connected to the declining availability of metal, or the loss of gold due to its conversion into votive and liturgical objects.11 In addition, most hoards of Visigothic coins have been found in the former Roman provinces of Baetica, Lusitania or Tarraconensis, whereas there is a notorious absence of finds in northern Iberia. The Arab conquest of the Visigothic kingdom in 711 implied the abandonment of the minting of tremisses and the introduction of a new monetary system. This system was tri-metallic, based on gold, silver and copper coins (the dīnār, the dirham, and the fals).12 Interestingly, gold coins (taking the form of either the so-called ‘transitional-solidi’ or the reformed dinars) were relatively abundant in the aftermath of the conquest. This may be an indication of the initial conversion of spoils into coins by the Arab conquerors. The irregularity of these golden issues may also be explained by the gradual depletion of the availability of precious metal once the conquest was over. This is further confirmed by the interruption of the minting of dinars in 744–745; gold coins were not issued again in al-Andalus until well into the tenth century. Copper coins were also extremely abundant in this early period, although their minting also declined and stopped almost completely from the second half of the eighth century. The main coinage minted by the Arabs in al-Andalus from the year 721 until well into the middle of the eleventh century was the silver dirham. Its typology and metrology were based on models defined in the East by the monetary reform of 696 decreed by the Umayyad caliph ‘Abd al-Malik: a theoretical average weight of 2.97g, a module of 25–28mm, and an epigraphic design surrounded by lines and rings. It is possible to discern two phases in the minting of dirhams in al-Andalus. The first corresponds to the early period of the governors appointed by the caliphs of Damascus (711–756), when silver coins of a high quality of engraving and alloy (more than 95% fineness) were struck.13 Here a word of caution is needed, however, for the number of dirham hoards from this period is relatively low: no more than a dozen have been published completely or partially. These hoards have a high percentage of coins minted in oriental workshops, like Damascus, Wasit or Basra. Although minting dates assigned to these Andalusi hoards are very variable, in some cases it is clear 11 12 13

A. Canto, ‘El Pacto de Tudmir: aspectos económicos’, eHumanista 5 (2014), 370–91, at 372–4. Hereafter standard English forms will be used for Andalusi coins with Arabic names where these are widely known and used: hence dinar(s) (although this is a derivation of denarius, a Roman coin), dirham(s), etc. A. Canto and T. ibn Ḥāfiẓ Ibrāhīm, Moneda andalusí. La Colección del Museo Casa de la Moneda (Madrid, 2004), 40–2.

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that dirhams in circulation after 711 were minted prior to the conquest of alAndalus, which may be construed as proof of the use of these coins as payment to the troops who led the first phase of the conquest of the peninsula.14 The second phase corresponds to the dirhams struck by the Umayyad emirs of Córdoba (756–929), which became the main coinage of the Andalusi monetary system. Silver seems to have been supplied locally, as there is no evidence of its large-scale arrival from Europe, and recent work has confirmed the systematic exploitation of mines in al-Andalus.15 This guaranteed a slow but constant increase in the volume of minted dirhams until the last quarter of the ninth century. This coinage was morphologically similar to the previous issues. In metrological terms, the Umayyads tried to keep their coinage stable; pieces had a weight of 2.7g, and variations normally did not exceed 5% higher or lower than this figure. The minting quality of coins was not as good as it had been during the early period due to the growing mass of coins minted and the number of dies used.16 The wide circulation of Umayyad Andalusi dirhams is witnessed by dozens of hoards from the ninth century. In contrast to the previous period, these hoards contain almost no coins from Oriental or North African workshops. This fact, allied with the scarce presence of Andalusi coins outside the peninsula (even among the abundant Northern European finds of Arab coins), indicates a closed circulation pattern within Iberia. In terms of numbers, it is not rare to find emiral hoards containing several hundred coins. For instance, a very early one found in Córdoba (the latest coin in which dates to 803), contains 386 dirhams.17 These hoards not only include entire coins, but also numerous fragments, ranging from regular shapes and weights (three quarters, halves and quarters), to countless smaller pieces that seem to have provided a mass of divisional elements to facilitate daily exchanges once the minting of copper coins had stopped. Interestingly, Carolingian coins and fragments are also present in some of these hoards, but always in very small numbers.18 14 15 16 17 18

F. Martín Escudero, El Tesoro de Baena (Madrid, 2005), 45–63; idem, ‘Monedas que van’, 321; E. Manzano Moreno, Conquistadores, emires y califas. Los Omeyas y la formación de al-Andalus (Barcelona, 2006), 93–100. A. Canto, P. Cressier and P. Grañeda (eds), Minas y minería en al-Andalus y Magreb Occidental: explotación y poblamiento (Madrid, 2008). Canto and Ibrāhīm, Moneda andalusí, 41–4. M.D. Baena Alcántara and A. Canto, Masquqat. Tesoros del Museo de Córdoba (Córdoba 2007), 17–23. A. Canto and E. Marsal Moyano, ‘Hallazgo de moneda emiral de Iznajar (Granada)’, AlQanṭara 9 (1988), 427–80, esp. 445–8 for the problem of fragmentation; A. Canto and T. ibn Ḥāfiẓ Ibrāhīm, ‘Hallazgo emiral en Puebla de Cazalla (Sevilla)’, Numisma 229 (1991), 69–83, esp. 72–3; Martín Escudero, ‘Monedas que van’, 340–5.

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The Umayyad emirate went through a period of deep political and military crisis in the last quarter of the ninth century and the beginning of the tenth. This crisis had an immediate effect on minting, which virtually came to a halt during these years. Issues of dirhams only returned during the rule of ‘Abd alRaḥmān iii (912–961), who restored the dynasty’s authority and proclaimed himself caliph in 929. If minting during most of the emirate had been consistently abundant, issues of silver coinage during the caliphate became massive, reaching magnitudes exceeding hundreds of thousands of annual coins, and, remarkably, even a million in certain years. These estimates are consistently based on the examination of dies and the survival of numerous hoards, some of which include huge amounts of coins and fragments.19 The restauration of the Umayyad monetary system was also marked by the return of gold issues from 929 onwards, coinciding with the proclamation of the caliphate. Dinars were minted to enforce the legitimacy of the caliph. As a prestige coinage, gold dinars were never as abundant as dirhams and their use in everyday life was certainly limited. Their function was to serve as rewards to high-ranking officials of the administration and the army, as gifts aimed at strengthening diplomatic ties with allies, or as payments for expensive items brought to the West by long distance trade. The new emissions of dinars were also prompted by the occupation of some enclaves on the Maghribi coast by the Umayyad armies, which allowed control over supply routes coming from inland Africa.20 Estimates of minted dinars during the caliphate of al-Ḥakam ii (961–976) suggest possible peak magnitudes of around 100,000 dinars per year. This means that at times the Umayyad caliphate was handling a gold mass of c.400kg annually. This is a clear indication of the strength of caliphal rule in the tenth century.21 3

Coins without Coinage: The Evidence from Northern Charters

The foregoing has argued that the material record conforms to textual references to coinage in the Visigothic and Islamic periods. Kings, emirs and caliphs 19 20 21

A. Canto, Hallazgo de monedas califales de Haza del Carmen (Córdoba) (Córdoba, 2006), 91–2. idem, ‘El dinar en al-Andalus en el siglo x’, Cuadernos de Madīnat al-Zahrā 5 (2004), 327–38. A. Prieto y Vives, ‘Tesoro de monedas musulmanas encontrado en Badajoz’, Al-Andalus 2 (1934), 299–327; A. Canto, I. Casas, T. ibn Ḥāfiẓ Ibrāhīm and F. Martín Escudero, ‘El tesoro de época islámica de la calle Santa Elena (Valencia)’, in A. Ribera and P. Ripollés (eds), Tesoros monetarios de Valencia y su entorno (Valencia, 2005), 177–96.

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minted gold, silver or copper coins, a reality confirmed both by textual and archaeological evidence. The numismatic picture that emerges from northern Iberia in the aftermath of the Arab conquest is quite different. Christian charters certainly include references to coins, but the archaeological record does not confirm their circulation. In stark contrast to al-Andalus, there are hardly any published references to Carolingian or Umayyad hoards in northern Iberia, and stray finds from this period are virtually non-existent.22 Although serendipity certainly plays a role in the amount of material at our disposal, and it is not impossible that coins of an early medieval chronology might emerge in the future, the near absence of coins in northern Iberia indicates a clear trend: in contrast to what was happening in the south, coinage was not circulating in northern Iberia in significant quantities between the ninth and eleventh centuries. A careful reading of the documentary evidence confirms this contention. As a matter of fact, references to coins in documents are rare before the tenth century and in some areas there are not many references to coinage until well into the eleventh century. Charters are full of transactions in which property was exchanged in return for cattle, products, objects or plots of land. This kind of transaction was abundant in Galicia, as reflected by documents from the monasteries of Sobrado and Celanova, where as late as 1031 a vineyard could be sold for a certain amount of grain, wine, cattle and textiles.23 In Otero de las Dueñas, north of León, eighty-four charters contain sales from the period 946– 1031, but only twenty-four of them involved possible payments in coinage; of these twenty-four, all except one date from the period 1002–1031. In most sales, land was exchanged for cattle, grain, textiles, and even iron, salt or meat.24 In 22

23

24

F. Martín, J. Mínguez and A. Canto, ‘La circulación monetaria en el reinado de Alfonso iii a través de las fuentes documentales’, in A. García-Leal, R. Gutiérrez and C.E. Prieto (eds), Asturiensis Regni Territorium. Documentos y Estudios sobre el período Tardorromano y Medieval en el Noroeste Hispano, 2 vols (Oviedo, 2011), vol. 2, 157–205. ‘accepimus de vobis pretium in cibaria et vinno et res et pannos modios xiii’: charter number 108 (1031), in J.M. Andrade Cernadas (ed.), O Tombo de Celanova: Estudio introductorio, edición e índices (ss. ix–xii), 2 vols (Santiago de Compostela, 1995), charters cited hereafter as Cel1, Cel2, etc. See also Cel161 (965); Cel163 (932); Cel164 (967); Cel168 (931). For Sobrado, see P. Loscertales de García de Valdeavellano (ed.), Tumbos del Monasterio de Sobrado de los Monjes, 2 vols (Madrid, 1976), cited as Sob1, Sob2, etc. Relevant examples include Sob12 (945); Sob22 (931). Old6 (950), Old47 (1002), Old48 (1002), Old51 (1003), Old52 (1003), Old60 (1008), Old62 (1009), Old69 (1012), Old71 (1013), Old89 (1019), Old90 (1019), Old91 (1019), Old97 (1020), Old98 (1020), Old99 (1020), Old100 (1021), Old101 (1021), Old111 (1022), Old113 (1022), Old126 (1024), Old132 (1025), Old137 (1027), Old142 (1027), Old145 (1030). Compare with Old2 (946), Old4 (949), Old7 (951), Old13 (973), Old42 (1001), Old50 (1003).

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the monastery of Sahagún (León), the first sale expressed in coins dates from 919: before and after this year it was common to sell a parcel of land or a vineyard for a goat (869), four calves (916), six mares (919) or an ox (934).25 Cows, pigs, sheep, textiles or meat are other items that are regularly given in exchange for land in documents from other cartularies of this period.26 In very few cases, though, are coins mentioned in documents at an early date. A charter from the monastery of Santo Toribio de Liébana dated to 796 records the purchase of an ox for a ‘solido’ and a tremissis.27 The same coinage was used in Sobrado, where land was sold in 835 for an ox, a wool mantle and a number of cheeses, which were valued altogether at four ‘solidos’ and one tremissis.28 A document from León cathedral records the sale of a villa for a black ox and one tremissis in 876.29 These documents, however, are exceptional, and they hardly reflect a circulation pattern: at most they bear witness to the preservation of the late Roman tradition in some areas and testify, perhaps, to the survival of a few old and rare Visigothic tremisses. Conservative monetary practices are also witnessed by references to the socalled solidi gallicani, gallicanos or gallicenses in Galician and Portuguese documents. A charter from Celanova records a land sale, in which the vendors accepted five of these ‘solidos gallicenses’ in 885; twenty years later the vendor of two churches received ‘xxv solidos gallicenses in pannos vel argento et boves’. Later examples can also be found: in 961, grain, textiles and cattle were valued in gallicenses and modii.30 In Sobrado, cattle and grain were valued at seven ‘solidos gallicanos’ and in 962 another parcel of land was sold for eight ‘solidos usu Gallecie’.31 Portuguese charters also mention these solidos gallicanos 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

J.M. Mínguez Fernández (ed.), Colección diplomática del monasterio de Sahagún (siglos ix y x) (León, 1976), cited as S1, S2, etc. Examples given here are S4 (869), S14 (916), S17 (919), S18 (919), S56 (934). L. Serrano (ed.), Cartulario de San Vicente de Oviedo (781–1200) (Madrid, 1929), cited as Ov1, Ov2, etc. See Ov3 (887), Ov4 (887), Ov5 (889), Ov9 (931), Ov10, (946), Ov13 (949), Ov23 (980). A.C. Floriano Cumbreño (ed.), Diplomática española del período astur. Estudio de las fuentes documentales del reino de Asturias (718–910), 2 vols (Oviedo, 1949–51), charters cited as Flo1, Flo2, etc. Example given here is Flo15 (796). Sob18 (835): ‘et accepit de uobis in aderado et definido precio, id est, boue colore marceno, manteo laneo uilado et chomacio, kaseos xiii et est ipso precio in aderado solidos iiii et uno tremese’. Li8 (876): ‘et dedimus uouis in precio boue negra et tremis de relico precio’. Cel342 (885); Cel101 (905); Cel384 (961). N.B. The modius was a standard late Roman measure, normally for dry goods. Sob62 (941): ‘accepimus de uobis precium, id est, Ve uacas pregnadas et iiii lenzos lineos, ceuaria et sicera in simul vii solidos gallicanus’; see also Sob57 (962).

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occasionally, thus also reflecting this peculiar pattern of western Iberian documents of the tenth century.32 The most likely explanation for the continued references to solidi gallicanos in these documents is rooted in tradition: in short, the memory of the gold coinage minted in north-western Iberia in Late Antiquity endured for many centuries. The number of mints that existed in Gallaecia in the seventh century is striking, and it has been convincingly argued that their activity began during the Suevic kingdom, which was conquered by the Visigoths in 585.33 Galician solidi and tremisses from this period followed the same patterns of the late Roman gold system, although they were lighter in weight. There is some discussion regarding who was responsible for these coin issues – Suevic kings and local chieftains are considered likely candidates – but what seems indisputable is that their system of reference was preserved well after the Arab conquest, even though it is unlikely that real coins from the fifth or sixth centuries circulated so many years after their minting.34 Thus, when scribes in Galicia and Portugal mentioned the solidi gallicani (or some variant of this expression) they were referring to an accounting unit based on the old coinage, which had been minted extensively in the numerous workshops that had operated in these regions during the sixth and seventh centuries.35 During the tenth century, a new situation emerged in some areas of northern Iberia. This was pointed out by Sánchez-Albornoz, who brought to our attention the considerable difference in the value of horses in documents from Galicia and León or Castile. Whereas a charter from the monastery of Celanova valued a horse at four solidi in 951, in Sahagún a horse was worth fifty solidi in 969, a difference that surely cannot be explained by the quality, size or strength of the animals in question.36 A comparison of horse and cattle values showed 32

33 34

35

36

A. Herculano de Carvalho e Araujo and J.J. da Silva Mendes Leal (eds), Portugaliae Monumenta Historica a saeculo octavo post Christum usque ad quintumdecimum. Diplomata et chartae (Lisbon, 1867–73), cited as PMH1, PMH2, etc.: PMH29 (924); PMH35 (929) PMH142 (984). P.C. Díaz, ‘Acuñación monetaria y organización administrativa en la Gallaecia tardoantigua’, Zephyrus 57 (2004), 367–75. J.M. Peixoto Cabral and D.M. Metcalf, A moeda sueva (Porto, 1997); M. Gomes Marques, A moeda peninsular na idade das Trevas (Sintra, 1998). Cf. A. Roma, ‘Emisiones monetarias del siglo vi con la leyenda LATINA MUNITA. Estado del debate’, Brigecio 12 (2002), 79–84. Sánchez-Albornoz, ‘Moneda de cambio’, 418–9; Isla Frez, ‘Moneda de cuenta’, 495. More recently, M. Crusafont i Sabater, ‘Significado y valor del “sólido gallecano” (S. x–xi)’, in F. Cebreiro Ares (ed.), Introducción a la Historia Monetaria de Galicia. (s. ii a.C.–xvii d.C.) (Betanzos, 2012), 105–16. The document in question, Cel 176 (951), records the sale of a property in return for a ‘caballo de quattuor solidos, vacca soldare et kenabe de decem modiosi’. The Sahagún example is S252 (969).

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a consistent trend of lower figures in Galicia and Portugal, compared to higher values in documents of the same period from León and Castile. The consistency of these differences led Sánchez-Albornoz to suggest rightly that charters were reflecting two different systems of monetary account: coinage mentioned in Galician and Portuguese documents referred to gold solidi, but documents from tenth-century León and Castile made reference to silver solidi.37 The substitution of a gold-based accounting system for a standard based on silver is shown not only by values given in coin, but also by references to a new unit of coinage: the solido argenteo. A charter from León cathedral dated to 894 records the sale of an orchard and two houses for four ‘solidos de argenteos’.38 In Castile, a document from the cartulary of San Pedro de Cardeña records the sale of two plots of land for six ‘solidos de argento’, a horse valued in forty-five ‘solidos’, and a silk cloth (‘camiso sirico’) held to be worth fifteen ‘solidos’ in 899.39 Afterward, charters from this monastery recorded transactions in which property was estimated in quantities that oscillated between five and 102 ‘solidos de argento’, suggesting the prevalence of this system of valuation in different kinds of transactions. The adoption of this silver coinage can be confirmed in other places.40 In 930 the monastery of Sahagún bought a plot of land for six ‘solidos de argenteo’; thereafter, this coinage unit became recurrent in many documents.41 The first mention of such a transaction expressed in coins in the cartulary of San Millán de la Cogolla dates from 932, when seven and a half solidi plus a mare with her colt were paid to purchase some land; in 986 a captive held in alAndalus was ransomed for a price of 150 ‘solidos argenti’.42 In the cartulary of Albelda a document records that a bishop called Tudemiro bought lands for six 37 38 39 40

41 42

Sánchez-Albornoz, ‘El precio de la vida’, 404–7. Li9 (894): ‘in quantum michi bene complacuit, id est iiiior solidos de argenteos’. G. Martínez Díez (ed.), Colección documental del monasterio de San Pedro de Cardeña (Burgos, 1998), charters cited as C1, C2, etc. The example given here is C4 (899). A very striking case is the monastery of Alaón in Ribagorza, where as early as 845 there are references to argenteos in a set of charters which record an unusual number of purchases of land valued in coinage. These early examples are otherwise unknown and should be explained either by some special circumstance concerning this particular monastery or by the fact that the whole cartulary has been preserved in a twelfth-century copy open to all kinds of manipulation. The charters can be found in J.L. Corral Lafuente (ed.), Cartulario de Alaón (Zaragoza, 1984), charters cited as Al1, Al2, etc. The documents discussed here include Al11 (845); Al16 (845); Al17 (845). S36 (930). See Davies, ‘Sale, price and valuation’, 56. A. Ubieto Arteta (ed.), Cartulario de San Millán de la Cogolla (Valencia, 1976), charters cited as Cog1, Cog2, etc. Examples given here: Cog20 (932) and Cog99 (986). Other cases: Cog61 (951); Cog116 (999); Cog120 (1001); Cog124 (1003); Cog125 (1003).

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‘argento solidos’ in 944. Other cartularies show the same pattern.43 Even in Galicia and northern Portugal the new system based on silver was slowly introduced during this century. In Celanova the first mention of ‘solidos argenteos’ dates from 951 and the adoption of the new system is clearly reflected by the increase in the valuation of horses given in coinage.44 The emergence of the solidos argenteos in northern charters entailed a rupture with the late Roman tradition, which had always identified the solidus with a gold coin. But it was also a departure from the Carolingian system, which was based on the silver denier, the theoretical weight of which had been fixed by Pippin iii at 1.3g and was increased by Charlemagne to 1.7g in 793– 794.45 The well-known equivalence of twelve silver denarii for each solidus, and twenty solidi for the libra was not adopted in the valorisation of wealth in León or Castile. Regional contrast is illuminating here: whereas in northern Italy and Catalonia, charters usually referred to these denarii, this was never the case in León and Castile, where this coinage is never mentioned.46 As a consequence, it can be stated with total certainty that the solidos argenteos do not refer to the Carolingian system. Castilian and Leonese charters also mention another kind of coinage called argenteo, argenceo or even arenzo or arienzo, which is also widely used as a 43

44

45 46

Alb10 (944), in A. Ubieto Arteta (ed.), Cartulario de Albelda (Valencia, 1960), charters cited as Alb1, Alb2, etc.; another good example is Arl17 (964), in L. Serrano (ed.), Cartulario de San Pedro de Arlanza (Madrid, 1925), charters cited as Arl1, Arl2, etc.; cf. J.M. Garrido (ed.), Documentación de la Catedral de Burgos (Burgos, 1983), charters cited as Bur1, Bur2, etc., a relevant example being Bur12 (1027). For a Navarrese example, a villa sold in 1033 by King Sancho the Great to the monastery of Leire was purchased with a coat of mail and 100 ‘solidos argenti’. The document, Lei24 (1033), can be found in A.J. Martín Duque (ed.), Documentación Medieval de Leire (siglos ix al xii) (Pamplona, 1983), cited hereafter as Lei1, Lei2, etc. See also J. del Álamo (ed.), Colección Diplomática de San Salvador de Oña, 2 vols (Madrid, 1950), charters cited as Oña1, Oña2, etc.; for an example see Oña6 (993). See also M.D. Pérez Soler (ed.), Cartulario de Valpuesta (Valencia, 1970), charters cited as Val1, Val2 etc., relevant examples for our purposes being Val37 (963) and Val44 (975). Cel430 (951): ‘et accepimus (…) precio argenteos solidos iii’. See also Cel248 (991): ‘accepimus de te pretium, id est, caballos iiies, uno de boves xv, alio de boves v. Ille tertius de boves vii, boves iiies, ariento xviii solidos et vii arienzos, pelle de viiii’. Cf. Isla Frez, ‘Moneda de cuenta’, 508. P. Grierson, ‘Money and Coinage under Charlemagne’, in W. Braunfels, H. Beumann, H. Schnitzler and B. Bischoff (eds), Karl der Grosse (Dusseldorf, 1965), 501–36, repr. in P. Grierson, Dark Age Numismatics (London, 1979). W.R. Day, ‘The monetary reforms of Charlemagne and the circulation of money in early medieval Campania’, Early Medieval Europe 6 (1997), 25–45. On Catalan documents see below.

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unit of value in the tenth-century documents.47 That this coinage was different but connected to the solido argenteo is demonstrated by many examples. In 939, Fernando, together with his family, sold an aqueduct to the monastery of Sahagún: although the aqueduct was given a value of twelve solidi, the vendors only took twenty argenteos and left the rest in the hands of the monks for the salvation of their souls. A few years later, in 945, another charter from this monastery records the sale of a land for five ‘solidos’ and two ‘arenzos’.48 Documents from other cartularies set down similar valuations, expressed in ‘solidos’ and ‘arenzos’.49 Following the hypothesis proposed by Gautier-Dalché, we think that the system based on solidos argenteos and argenteos was neither late Roman nor Carolingian: its model was the Arab coinage system prevalent in al-Andalus.50 Our proposal is that the solido argenteo was an accounting unit that had originated in al-Andalus, whereas the argenzos or argenteos (or some variant of this word) referred to real Arab dirhams that had reached the north, but always in very small quantities. As a consequence, references to coinage in charters reveal the integration of most of northern Iberia within the sphere of influence of the Andalusi monetary system. In general terms, this integration makes sense if we bear in mind that none of these kingdoms or territories ever minted coinage and that frequent warfare and political relations with the south entailed the recognition of the dirham as the coinage of reference in a social and economic milieu that became increasingly connected with its powerful southern neighbour during the ninth and, particularly, the tenth century. The argument advanced here, however, requires a careful discussion of the reasons why we think that both the expression solidos argenteos, and the coins referred to as argenteos in transactions, derived from the Andalusian monetary system.

47

48 49 50

There are many variants of this word, from argento to arienzo. R. Menéndez Pidal, R. Lapesa and C. García (eds), Léxico hispano primitivo (siglos viii al xii) (Madrid, 2004), s.v. ‘argento’ and ‘arienzo’. Arienzo was also used as a unit of measure, a process which illustrates how the value of coinage was transferred to and became associated with the products involved in transactions. S73 (939): ‘Et donastis nobis in xii solidos et prendimus inde xx argenteos et quod restat dimisimus vobis pro remedio anime nostre vel parentibus nostris’; S94 (945): ‘et dedistis nobis in precio v solidos et duos arenzos’. See also S323 (984). Li52 (921); Li114 (937); M.P. Yáñez Cifuentes, El Monasterio de Santiago de León (Barcelona, 1972), charters cited as SdeL1, SdeL2, etc.: ‘et accepi de te in pretio iiii solidos in saile et in arenzos’, SdeL8 (946). Gautier-Dalché, ‘Une histoire monétaire singulière’, 86–7.

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4 The dīnār darāhīm and the solidos argenteos As we have seen above, Arab rulers in Iberia stopped minting gold dinars by 744 or 745. Throughout the rest of the eighth century production of silver dirhams was still irregular, but the early decades of the ninth saw an increase in minting levels which reached huge proportions at the time of the Umayyad caliphate in the tenth century. The whole fiscal and military system of the Umayyads of Córdoba became dependent on these coins: troops and officials were paid with dirhams, most taxes were collected in them, and goods and luxury items were purchased with them.51 Nonetheless, and despite the dominance of the silver coinage during the emirate, whenever Arab narrative and legal sources referred to coinage, they rarely alluded to dirhams and frequently mentioned dinars, as if this coinage were still circulating. Fiscal receipts were estimated in dinars, as were the salaries of administrative agents and the prices of luxury items and goods.52 In these cases the dinar was used as an accounting unit, which corresponded to a fixed amount of real and circulating dirhams. This practice guaranteed the stability of accounting procedures, notwithstanding the possible annual oscillations in the weight and content of minted coins. Arab sources use a specific name for this accounting unit: dīnār darāhīm or ‘dīnār of dirhams’, meaning an ‘ideal’ coin that was linked to existing ‘hard cash’ dirhams.53 It is our contention that the expression solidos argenteos that appears in many northern documents from the end of the ninth century onwards is a loan translation of the Arabic dīnār darāhīm or ‘dīnār of dirhams’. The solido argenteo was the same dīnār darāhīm used as the cornerstone of the monetary system in al-Andalus, a coinage best interpreted as a unit of account, widely used to establish a fixed value that was not affected by oscillations in the quality of mints. Scribes and all parties who intervened in a given transaction were agreeing on an accounting unit that, on the one hand, reflected the virtual nonmonetisation of northern societies, but on the other hand made clear reference to those dirhams that occasionally reached these territories. These real dirhams appeared in charters as argenteos or argenzos. The hypothesis that the solido de argenteos is a loan translation of the dīnār darāhīm finds support in metrology. In al-Andalus one dīnār darāhīm was 51 52 53

Manzano Moreno, Conquistadores, emires y califas, 311–16. P. Chalmeta, ‘Monnaie de compte, monnaie fiscale et monnaie réelle en Andalus’, in Documents de l’ Islam Mediéval. Nouvelles perspectives de recherche, (Cairo, 1991), 65–88, at 69. E. Manzano Moreno, ‘Moneda y articulación social en al-Andalus en época omeya’, Villa 5 (2015) 133–55.

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equivalent to eight real and circulating dirhams. This lower ratio than the traditional 1:12 equivalence between gold and silver was due to the fact that dirhams coined by the Umayyads underwent devaluation of approximately forty percent in relation to the legal weight and silver content of the pure dirham, known as dirham kayl. As a consequence, the value of the accounting dinar in al-Andalus was also devalued. This produced a ratio of 1:8, a correspondence that is fully confirmed by our texts.54 As we have seen above, northern documents also mention a silver coinage called argenzos or argenteos, which we believe to be references to the actual silver dirhams. A charter from the cathedral of León, dated to 1055, sets the value of one ‘solidum de argenteis bonis’ at eight argenzos, exactly the same equivalence between the Andalusian dīnār darāhīm and the real silver dirhams.55 The theoretical value of eight argenzos to one solidus is also confirmed by a penitential from the monastery of Silos that was composed around 1060 and lists the pecuniary compensations to be paid by those who did not observe fasting during Lent. Compensations were different according to the status of the sinner. An emperor (imperator), for instance, did not pay the same as a prince (princeps) if he did not observe fasting, and a count (comes) had to pay even less. Compensations also varied depending on how many days the sinner had eluded his religious obligation. If the imperator, for instance, had failed to fast a single day, he was obliged to pay one solidus, while the princeps had to pay five argenteos and the comes four argenteos. But if fasting had been ignored throughout the entire period of Lent, then the penitence had to be multiplied by forty and the imperator therefore had to pay forty solidi (or ransom a captive), the princeps had to pay twenty-five solidi, and the comes twenty solidi. The value revealed by these equivalences is exactly of eight argenteos for each solidus.56 This metrology is also consistent with a list of weights and measures that was added to a manuscript of the Visigothic law, the Liber Iudicum, copied in 54 55

56

Ibn al-‘Aṭṭār, K. al-watāʼiq wa l-siŷillāt, ed. P. Chalmeta, (Madrid, 1983), 9; M. Marugán and P. Chalmeta (ed. and trans.), Formulario Notarial y Judicial Andalusí, (Madrid, 2000), 45. Cf. Manzano Moreno, ‘Moneda y articulación social’, 153. Liv1096 (1055): ‘acepimus de uobis in precio xx solidos de argenteis bonis, quos magnus et placibiles fuerunt contra nos pensados per pondere per unumquoque solidum argenzos viii, et apud uos nichil remansit debitum’. See also J. Mínguez Martínez, ‘Moneda medieval en el reino de León: análisis de términos monetarios en la documentación del archivo de la catedral de León’, Ab Initio 1 (2011), 11–67 at 27. ‘Si imperator est, solidum unum exsolbat. Princeps, v argenteos. Comes iiiior. (…) Imperator autem quadragenos solidos exsolbat. Aut captibum redimat. Princeps xxv solidos. Comes xx solidos’: F. Bezlier (ed.), Paenitentialia Hispaniae, ccsl 156A (Turnhout, 1998), 42.

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1020. In this list, in which different measures are all related to gold values, a tremissis is valued at five argenteos; in other words, and in accordance with our argument, 1.5g of gold were valued at five Umayyad dirhams. Given that real dirhams weighed an average of 2.7g this means that 13g of silver coinage were valued at 1.5g of gold, a rate that brings us very close to the 1:8 equivalence.57 In light of the foregoing, the monetary system that emerges from tenth- to eleventh-century charters from northwestern Iberia was underpinned by the use of an accounting coinage, the solido de argenteos, which was related to argenteos or argenceos in much the same way, and, indeed, at precisely the same ratio, that linked the Andalusian dīnār darāhīm with the circulating dirham. This theoretical ratio probably varied in practice because the argenteos mentioned in our charters were real coins whose previous circulation had decreased their value. This explains why in some charters the ratio between the solidos and the argenceos is 1:9 or even 1:10, an adaptation of the theoretical equivalence of 1:8 to the situations created by the deterioration of coins.58 Therefore, in charters containing sales or donations expressed in argenteos, argenceos or arienzos we can be quite certain that actual dirhams of silver were being used in the transaction. The monastery of Sahagún, for instance, paid four argenteos or dirhams in 932 for a plot of land and some pastureland; ten years later, this monastery paid twenty-one and a half argenzeos/dirhams. In these and other cases the monastery spent a total of 278 and a half dirhams in different transactions during the period 930–99.59 In San Pedro de Cardeña,

57

58

59

The exact equivalence is 1:9. However, the original weight of dirhams was reduced considerably on their arrival in the north. If we estimate a weight of 2.4g for the dirham/argenteo, then the rate expressed by this equivalence – one tremissis equals five argenteos – conforms exactly to the 1:8 rate. See ‘De pondere et mensura’ (Additamentum) in K. Zeumer (ed.), Leges Visigothorum. mgh Leges nationum Germanicarum 1 (Hanover, 1902), 462–64, at 464. The text mentions ‘auri libra’ and its equivalence in golden ‘solidos, uncias, statera auri, dragma, tremisses, siliqua’. The fact that this was a golden siliqua is confirmed by its equivalence to one ‘argencium’ and a third. Compare this last example with the Penitential from Silos, where forty silver ‘siliquae’ are the equivalent of three and a quarter ‘argenceos’. A much quoted document from León follows this equivalence, detailing the purchase of a villa with a mule valued to be worth thirty solidos, three oxen valued at five solidos each, a linen textile valued at two solidos and a shield valued at ten argenceos, all in all approximating to forty-eight solidos (‘sub uno solidos xlviii’): the charter is Li129 (939). S46 (932): ‘accepimus de vos in precio iiii or argenzeos’; S82 (942): ‘accepimus de vos in precio argenzeos xxi et medio’. J.M. Mínguez Fernández, ‘Moneda y áreas de circulación en el dominio del monasterio de Sahagún en el siglo x’, Estudis d’ Història Agrària 2 (1979), 39–49, at 41.

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when abbot Belasio purchased a plot of land for twelve ‘arienzos de argento’ in 993, we can be sure that twelve dirhams were given on that occasion.60 The search for argenteos or argenzeos in our documents reveals the relative scarcity of this coinage, which accords with the familiar picture of the Christian north as a barely monetised society. The dirhams/argenteos had probably arrived in the north as booty taken in successful frontier raids, as payments for the ransom of Muslim captives, or as the result of commercial exchange. None of these activities, though, yielded huge amounts of coinage, as raiding, ransoming, or trading with northern Iberia were always hindered by the relative strength of the Umayyad caliphate in al-Andalus. Besides, some of this silver probably ended up in the coffers of ecclesiastical institutions, and was subsequently melted down in order to make liturgical objects. The fate that probably befell coinage at ecclesiastical institutions is consistent with the absence of finds today. A careful review of the evidence also reveals some unexpected clues. Documents from the archive of León cathedral record 192 sales for the period 899– 970. In only thirty-one of them argenzos or arienzos are given as payment: sometimes coins alone were used (‘arenzos x’); at other times, coins completed the total value of the purchase (‘boue rubio et xii arenzos in argenteo’).61 What is remarkable, though, is that twenty-two of the thirty-one documents that mention argenzos come from the same place: the monastery of San Cosme and San Damián in Abellar. The monastery was involved in at least fifteen of these transactions, the rest being sales among individuals.62 Abellar was located in modern day Canaleja, near León, and it had been founded in 905 by a certain Cixila. Most scholars consider Cixila and his community to have been Mozarabs who had arrived from al-Andalus, probably from Toledo. The reason for this is the high incidence of Arab names in the witness lists of the monastery’s charters and the excellent monastic library, which housed

60 61 62

C205 (993): ‘xii arienzos de argento’. See also SdeL8 (946): ‘Et accepi de te in pretio iiii solidos in saiale et in arenzos’. Li131 (939), Li133 (939). Li14 (899); Li26 (911); Li52 (921); Li77 (928); Li84 (929); Li96 (932); Li112 (936); Li114 (937); Li127 (938); Li133 (939); Li148 (941); Li157 (942); Li171 (943); Li179 (944); Li183 (944); Lii259 (953); Lii344 (961); Lii345 (961); Lii363 (963); Lii370 (963); Lii390 (965); Lii395 (966). Of these charters all involved the monastery of Abellar save for Li14; Li26; Li52; Li127; Li133; Lii259; Lii370. It is significant that from the 970s purchases in argenzos diminish and those involving cattle, textiles or grain increase, perhaps suggesting a depletion of the monastery’s reserves of silver coinage.

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many works unknown in other northern monasteries.63 The Mozarabic origins of the monastery may explain why its monks could pay a total of 184 argenzos or dirhams in purchases during the period 905–970, by far the highest rate of spending of this coinage among all the ecclesiastical institutions of the area. A question, however, remains. If argenzos were actual dirhams that circulated in small quantities and the solidos argenteos were accounting units based on the Umayyad dīnār darāhīm, how should we interpret those sales in which a particular property was sold for a given amount of solidos argenteos? Were the equivalent coins actually exchanged? Or are we looking at a simple valuation in items other than coins of the property involved in the transaction? No single comprehensive answer suggests itself. In some cases, the solidos argenteos, or even the argenzeos, were just expressions of the value of the items exchanged.64 In others, payment in solidos argenteos is mentioned, but the context might imply that a different item was given in exchange: in some cartularies, like Otero de las Dueñas, most references to solidos are given in round figures and this leads one to suspect that they were expressing an ideal value that might not have corresponded with reality. But there is also evidence that shows clear trade in coins. One of the documents from the monastery of Abellar records the sale to bishop Cixila and his monks of a plot of land ‘in pretio viii solidos in argenzos’, an expression that indicates that these clerics paid at least sixty-four dirhams.65 In 1027 a parcel of land was sold in the monastery of San Miguel de la Vega for ‘V solidos minus I argenzo’, which means that thirtynine dirhams were paid.66 Other documents state payments in ‘solidos pondere pensatos’. The earliest reference we have found of this practice comes from a charter in which the monks of the monastery of Ardón in León bought a plot of land in 958; but from this date onwards references become more abundant, clearly reflecting the arrival of larger amounts of coinage in the north during the second half of the tenth and particularly the eleventh centuries.67 63 64 65 66 67

M.J. Carbajo Serrano, El monasterio de los santos Cosme y Damián de Abellar. Monacato y sociedad en la época astur-leónesa (León, 1988), 52. Lii382 (964): ‘Et accepimus de uos in pretio pro ipsa hereditate xlvi solidos in pretio (…) in argento et in armentio et in panno’; Liii515 (987): ‘accepimus de te in pretio x argentos in uino et in cibaria’. Li91 (931); note that this example is not included in the previous calculation on the total purchases of Abellar, as the price is not expressed in argenzos. Liii840 (1027). Lii308 (958): ‘accepimus de uos in pretio, argento pondere pensato, arenzos x’; Liii688 (1010): ‘in pretio v argenteis solidos et fuerunt in pondere pensatos’. Further useful examples: Liii711 (1013); Liii729 (1014); Liii731 (1014); Liii780 (1021); Liii786 (1022); Liii787 (1022);

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In a few other cases, the type of Andalusi coinage used in the transaction was specifically mentioned, bolstering the notion that actual coins were exchanged. This is the case of the forty-five ‘solidos kazimis’ that were paid for a church in 943 in the area of the monastery of Lorvão, in central Portugal. These ‘solidos kazimis’ were linked to the so-called qāsimi dirhams, which drew their name from Qāsim b. Khālid, who was in charge of the Cordoban mint from 941 to 944 and coined pieces of an excellent quality. It is striking that this coinage reached this monastery so quickly: if the charter is genuine, the strong Mozarabic influence and character of Lorvão may also explain the rapid reception of this coinage.68 Another sale to this monastery in 977 was expressed in twentytwo ‘solidos argentos’, seventeen ‘solidos hazimis’ and five ‘solidos mohomati’, a mixture of references to coins with different qualities together used to purchase a water mill. Another document mentions twenty ‘solidis de argento kazimi’, used by Lorvão to buy a villa in 1016.69 In this case it is clear that a monastery with strong Andalusi connections had at its disposal a certain amount of coinage that was used for buying mills and plots of land: this should not be construed as a circulation pattern, but rather as an exceptional circumstance associated with a very singular monastery.70 5

The Return of Gold: Coinage in Catalan Documents

The Catalan counties were part of the Carolingian empire and there a different monetary system prevailed, based on the coinage issued by Charlemagne and his successors. There is evidence of Carolingian mints in Girona, Empúries, Roda and Barcelona, operating mostly during the first half of the ninth century. Scarce and discontinuous, issues of silver denarii and fractions (oboli) were probably linked to the military campaigns in the Spanish March ordered by Charlemagne and Louis the Pious. Stray finds of Carolingian coins have also been reported in Catalonia and other parts of the empire, although the number

Liii789 (1022); Liii791 (1022); Liii804 (1024); Liii845 (1028); Liii850 (1029); Liii888 (1031). See also S410 (1022). 68 PMH51 (943). A. Canto, ‘Los ashab al-sikka de ‘Abd al-Raḥmān iii, según Ibn Ḥayyān y el testimonio de las monedas’, Cuadernos de Prehistoria y Arqueología 13–14 (1986–1987), 271–6. C. Aillet, Les Mozarabes. Christianisme, islamisation et arabisation en Péninsule Ibérique (ixe–xiie siècles) (Madrid, 2010), 292. 69 PMH121 (977) and PMH230 (1016). Solidos hazumis – probably kazimis – were also used in the monastery of Sobrado, as seen in Sob64 (984). 70 Aillet, Les Mozarabes, 281–307.

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of coins discovered has never been considerable.71 This peculiarity is also reflected in the documentary record. There are references to coinage in some early ninth-century documents from Pallars i Ribagorça that conform to the Carolingian system, but the scarcity of these references shows that well into the tenth century coinage was not widely used as an expression of value. Documents from Osona reflect this trend very clearly, as they record a growing number of cases (particularly from the second half of the tenth century) where lands were valued in solidi and, to a lesser degree, denarii.72 This prevalence of the Carolingian system did not preclude references to argenzos in contemporary Catalan documents. For some reason this is particularly the case in documents from Urgell, where as early as 863, land was sold for six ‘argentos’ – that is, six dirhams. From this date forwards, this coinage is consistently mentioned in most documents until well into the eleventh century. In contrast, references to the Carolingian denarii in Urgell are very few.73 Catalan charters of sale have also an interesting feature, as many of them have values expressed in coins followed by the expression in rem valentem.74 This has been rightly construed as an indication that actual coinage was not exchanged; the document reflected a payment in kind which had been given a monetary value. However, in other documents the expression in rem valentem is absent and this has been explained as proof that in these cases payment was made in real coins. Accordingly, the appearance or absence of the expression in rem valentem in charters has been considered significant: for example, it has been argued that Barcelona was highly monetised in the tenth century precisely because most of its documents lack this formula.75 71 72

73

74 75

A.M. Balaguer, Història de la moneda dels Comtats Catalans (Barcelona, 1999), 23–39. R. d’Abadal i de Vinyals, Catalunya Carolingia iii. Els comtats de Pallars i Ribagorça (Barcelona, 1955), charters cited as PR1, PR2, etc.; PR7 (826), PR13 (834), PR15 (838). R. Ordeig i Mata, Catalunya Carolingia iv, Els comtats d´Osona i Manresa (Barcelona, 1999), charters cited as OM1, OM2, etc. Relevant examples here: OM18 (890), OM19 (891), OM81 (908), OM89 (909), OM107 (912), OM158 (917), etc. C. Baraut (ed.), ‘Els documents, dels segles ix i x, conservats a l´Arxiu Capitular de la Seu d´Urgell’, Urgellia 2 (1979), 7–145, charters cited as Urg1, Urg2, etc. Relevant examples: Urg22 (863), Urg24 (869); Urg78 (919); Urg81 (920). Many documents refer to ‘argenzatas’, which, like ‘solidatas’ or ‘mancusatas’, seem to refer to valued items and not to coinage. References to denarii: Urg31 (885); Urg190 (981); Urg191 (981); Urg194 (982). See also ‘solidos xi et argencios iiiior in res valentem’, J. Bolós (ed.), Diplomatari del monestir de Santa María del Serrateix (segles x–xv), charters cited as SMS1, SMS, etc. SMS57 (1013), SMS83 (1031). OM763 (956): ‘in propter precium solidos C in rem valentem’. P. Bonnassie, La Catalogne du milieu du xe à la fin du xie siècle: croissance et mutations d’une société, 2 vols (Toulouse, 1975–76), vol. 1, 369–71; also Balaguer, Historia de la moneda, 93–100.

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This argument, however, is far from conclusive. Most charter references to coinage are to the Carolingian units of account, the solidi, in contrast with the many fewer references to denarii, that is, actual coins. In Osona alone, for instance, documents record sales of land worth a total of 11, 196 solidi during the period 888–1000: the contrast with the mere 336 denarii that were used in transactions during the same period is impressive. Neither does the archaeological record support the view that coinage circulated widely. It is perfectly possible, then, that the presence or absence of the expression in rem valentem reflects nothing more than different scribal habits in the drafting of legal documents. It is clear that Catalan charters follow the imperial tradition by using the solidi as units of account, but if we follow the same reasoning that we used in the previous section, only those charters with values expressed in denarii reflect actual payments in coinage. This interpretation would fit much better with the material evidence, which points in one direction: namely, that coinage was not in wide circulation.76 The denarii mentioned in these transactions were, nonetheless, real silver coins. Their provenance was very mixed. Some of them were remnants of the Carolingian issues struck in Catalonia. There is evidence that coins were still minted in Barcelona at the time of Charles the Bald (840–877) and concessions of coinage rights to bishops of Barcelona, Vic and Girona in 862, 878, 911 and 934 also support the idea that Carolingian denarii were occasionally produced. Although the quantity of their production is debatable, the existence of these issues is confirmed by documents like the will of Count Sunifred, who bequeathed ten pesas of denarii ‘of Osona or Barcelona or Girona’.77 What modern numismatists call diners de transició – of which only around thirty pieces are known – have been regarded as material evidence of issues made by counts or bishops in the tenth century.78 It is also plausible that Andalusian dirhams arrived in Catalonia in small quantities and merged with circulating denarii: this might explain the difference between the Carolingian denarii curribiles and the denarii grossos mentioned in charters from Barcelona; the former

76 77 78

F. Retamero, ‘Els primers comptes catalans. Els números primerencs del feudalisme’, in M. Barceló, G. Feliu, A. Furió, M. Miquel and J. Sobrequés (eds), El feudalisme comptat i debatut. Formació i expansió del feudalisme catalá (Valencia, 2003), 103–18. J. Jarrett, ‘Currency change in pre-millennial Catalonia: coinage, counts and economics’, Numismatic Chronicle 169 (2009), 217–43, at 229. M. Crusafont i Sabater, ‘La moneda barcelonina del segle x. Altres novetats comtals’, Acta Numismática 28 (2008), 91–122.

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referred to Carolingian silver pieces and the latter to the heavier Andalusi dirhams.79 Although many issues remain obscure, it can be safely concluded that in relative terms the Catalan counties were more monetised than León and Castile; in absolute terms though, in all these societies access to coinage was far from being widespread. Ninth-century Catalan charters reflect a scarcity of coinage which largely persisted in the tenth century. References to denarii can be construed as references to real coins that were part of an incompletely monetised economy consisting of different components: local and foreign Carolingian pieces, and, plausibly, Andalusi dirhams too. In contrast, the solidus was an accounting unit which, when mentioned in charters, probably denoted actual payment in coins in some cases, although in general terms it is safer to consider references to solidi as expressions of value. The Catalan counties in this regard share similarities with the rest of northern Iberia, although in Barcelona coinage circulated more commonly than elsewhere. What makes Catalonia exceptional is the fact that from the second half of the tenth century charters regularly mention gold coinage as an expression of value in land sales. Nowhere else in Iberia do we find such a high number of references to gold. The core Leonese territories are a case in point: a document dated to 999, in which a certain Zidi and his sons sold land in León for twenty-one ‘aureas’, stands out in northwestern Iberia precisely because it is so unusual.80 In contrast, P. Bonnassie went so far as to speak of a ‘gold fever’ in Catalonia, beginning in the 970s, when charters start mentioning pesas dor.81 References of this sort become more frequent in the period 980–1000, when documents including payments in mancusos de auro, mancusos iafaris or mancusos amuris, increase exponentially.82 For the period 981–1020 Bonnassie estimates that the global volume of gold coinage mentioned in Catalan documents amounted to more than 5500 mancusos.83 There is no doubt that these mancusos were Andalusi dinars, the minting of which had started in Córdoba in 929. Mancusos iafaris refer to actual coins issued during the caliphate of al-Ḥakam ii (961–976), which have the name Dja‘far inscribed on them. This 79

G. Feliu, ‘La moneda prefeudal’, in B. Riquer (ed.), Història: Politica, societat i cultura dels Països Catalans, ii (Barcelona, 1998), 152–3; quoted by Jarrett, ‘Currency change’, 228, n. 49. 80 Yáñez Cifuentes, El Monasterio de Santiago de León, 189–90. 81 Bonnassie, La Catalogne, 372. 82 J. Balcells et al. (eds), Diplomatari de l´Arxiu Capitular de la Catedral de Barcelona: Segle xi (Barcelona, 2006), charters cited as ACCB1, ACCB2, etc. See ACCB138 (1010): ‘in propter precium manchosos viii aureos cogtos iaphari vel amuri a penso legittimo fideliter pensatos’. 83 Bonnassie, La Catalogne, 374.

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was Dja‘far b. ‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Ṣiqlabī, ḥādjib or chamberlain of this caliph until his death in 971. The mancusos amuris refer to existing dinars which have the name ‘Amir. This was probably Muḥammad b. Abī ‘Amir, later known as Almanzor, who was for a time in charge of the mint.84 The mixture of gold coinage coming from al-Andalus with the previous Carolingian system created a very complicated pattern of circulation, the complexity of which increased still further when a moneyer by the name of Bonhom started minting imitations of mancusos in Barcelona around the year 1018.85 In order to deal with this complexity Catalan charters revived an ancient unit of account, the ounce or uncia, which weighed about 27g. This could be conveniently related to good quality Andalusi silver dirhams, which each weighed 2.7g. A flavour of how this system worked is given by the convenientia between the count of Barcelona, Berenguer Ramón i, and Ermengol ii, count of Urgell. The document is dated to between 1018 and 1023, and, among many other things, it mentions a sword that was exchanged as part of the transaction: Et Berengarius comes donet ipsam espadam cognominatam Tizonem ad Ermengaudum comitem iam dictum, in tali conveniencia ut Berengarius supradictus comes donet propter ipsa espadam Ermenguado comiti milia solidos de argento kaçimi de Ispania aut centum uncias aut in rebus aliis valentibus supradictos quinque milia solidos aut centum uncias auri.86 The above is important because it furnishes the definitive clue in our quest to understand the mixed circulation pattern of coinage in Catalonia. The equivalence of ‘milia solidos de argento kaçimi de Ispania’ with ‘centum uncias auri’ presents us with a problem if we imagine that the solidos de argento refer to dirhams: this would mean that 2700g of silver (each dirham weighed 2.7g, so 84 85

86

Canto and Ibrāhīm, Moneda Andalusí (Catalogue: numbers 222, 224, 228 and 232). I.J. Baiges, G. Feliu and J.M. Salrach (eds), Els pergamins de l´Arxiu comtal de Barcelona de Ramon Berenguer ii a Ramon Berenguer iv (Barcelona, 2010); see document no. 18 (1027): ‘abeas super me ut ego reddam tibi mancusos viii de auro de Bonoomine, hebreo; et per unumquemque mensem, per istos octo mancusos, unum mancusum de supradicto auro’; Balaguer, Història de la moneda, 53–5. G. Feliu and J.M. Salrach (eds), Els pergamins de l´Arxiu Comtal de Barcelona de Ramon Borrell a Ramon Berenguer i (Barcelona, 1999), document no. 177. The document also states that were Ramon Berenguer not to hand over the sword, he should pay Ermengol ‘duo milia solidos de argento Kacimi de Ispania aut duo milia solidatas in re valente predictum argentum’.

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2.7g x 1000) had the same value as the same quantity of gold (since each of the ‘centum uncias auri’ would weigh 27g, and the document speaks of 100 ounces of gold, that is, 2700g of gold).87 Plainly, this cannot be right, since a given weight in gold cannot have had the same value as an identical given weight in silver. But the solidos de argento were not dirhams, as we have seen above: they in fact referred to the dīnār darāhīm, the Andalusi accounting unit said to represent approximately eight dirhams, which unit would have had a theoretical weight of 21.6g (8 x 2.7g): thus 1000 solidos de argento theoretically weighed 21,600g (1000 x 8 x 2.7), and those same 1000 solidos de argenteo had the same value (but did not weigh the same) as ‘centum uncias auri’. These latter weighed 2700g, and we therefore find that a single gold uncia (27g) had the same value as 216g of silver – namely, 10 solidos de argento (eighty hypothetical dirhams at 2.7g each). Here then was the equivalence between the uncia and the accounting unit of the dīnār darāhīm; as the document indeed tells us, ‘centum uncias auri’ were worth 1000 solidos de argento. To clarify this further, we might consider the total theoretical weights used in this example: 21,600g of silver and 2700g of gold, which gives us a silver: gold ratio of 8:1.88 The implication is clear: this system of reference was set in relation to the local Catalan system, because real Andalusi silver coinage was also circulating, making systematic comparison indispensable. The document mentions other solidi, but with a lesser value: we are told that 100 ounces of gold were equivalent to 5000 solidi. Given their equivalence to 100 ounces, these 5000 solidi had a theoretical weight of 0.54g of gold each. We propose that these lighter units were the Carolingian ‘solidos’ usually mentioned as accounting coins in documents. Clearly, a system was in place which tried to facilitate the task of coinage conversion. To complicate matters further, the ratio of exchange between gold and silver likely depended on the condition of the actual coinage traded (its weight, its alloy, its presentation etc.). By setting a reference system of equivalences based on units of account, users had a clear framework – a tool with which to facilitate exchange. The distinction that documents make between the denarii curribiles and the denarii grossos, which, as we have seen, indicates the coexistence of the lighter Carolingian denarii and the heavier Andalusian 87

This is the mistake made by O. Gil Farres, ‘Influencia de la moneda árabe en los numerarios de la España cristiana. Dos interesantes documentos’, Boletín de la Asociación Española de Orientalistas 14 (1978), 137–42. 88 These solidos de argento were used in some large-scale transactions. For example, ACCB301 (1018): ‘et propter CCC solidos argenti yspani quod Cathmia dicitur’; ACCB347 (1022): ‘ex optimo argento Ispanie cacimi’; also ACCB357 (1022); ACCB (1024). The editors wish to thank Dr Rory Naismith for his assistance at this juncture.

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dirhams, also explains the expression solidos de diners, which can be compared to the solidos de argento. These are exactly the two sorts of solidi mentioned in the convenientia between the counts of Barcelona and Urgell.89 Both denarii curribiles and grossos circulated, but they had to be contextualised in their respective monetary systems. In turn, these systems could also be used without any relation to real coins for the valorisation of wealth. In this monetary system the arrival of golden mancusos added a new element of complexity. The reasons why these mancusos arrived in Catalonia are not clear: it has been suggested that they were payments to Catalan mercenaries, but in the 970s there is no evidence of a massive enrolment of Christian mercenaries in the Umayyad army. Perhaps the answer lies elsewhere: in the booming trade of slaves to al-Andalus that may have had a thriving centre in Barcelona at this particular juncture. Be that as it may, these mancusos corresponded to the dinars that the caliphs had been issuing since 929. Therefore, these coins were real and not accounting units, and, as such, they were unlike the dīnār darāhīm, the solido de argento or the solido de diners. Indeed, the mancusos did not refer to any of these traditional units; they were in fact the new gold coinage of the Umayyad caliphate. This is why they were imitated in Catalonia, whereas there was no possibility of imitation for the solidos de argenteo. The unit of account for real gold became the uncia. This explanation makes it easier to understand that references to uncias de auro in charters of sale do not really refer to coinage but to pieces of gold with a very precise weight.90 All in all, the foregoing demonstrates the considerable impact that the Andalusi monetary system must have had on northern Iberia. The abundance of references to Islamic coins in Christian documents suggests a steady stream of coins from south to north. Furthermore, by shedding light on the role of the Andalusian monetary system in the Christian north, we have shown that it is indeed possible to reassess the value of wealth and the many expressions given to it in the Latin charters of the northern kingdoms. In this context it is clear that to call the years of Umayyad supremacy in Iberia the beginning of the age of Reconquista is misleading: coins in fact help us to appreciate something of the complexity of the socio-economic and cultural exchanges which marked Christian-Muslim relations in these centuries. 89 90

ACCB42 (1004); ACCB59 (1005); compare to ACCB143 (1010). Also compare ‘solidos…de denarios curribiles’ to ‘solidos…de dinarios crossos’ ACCB82 (1007) and ACCB313 (1019). ACCB12 (1001): ‘in propter precium uncias iii et media de auro cogto a penso legitimo’; ACCB62 (1005); ‘uncias quatuor et media de auro cocto iahari et almuri legitime pensatas’; also ACCB163 (1011).

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Canto, A., I. Casas, T. ibn Ḥāfiẓ Ibrāhīm and F. Martín Escudero, ‘El tesoro de época islámica de la calle Santa Elena (Valencia)’, in A. Ribera and P. Ripollés (eds), Tesoros monetarios de Valencia y su entorno (Valencia, 2005), 177–96. Canto, A., P. Cressier and P. Grañeda (eds), Minas y minería en al-Andalus y Magreb Occidental: explotación y poblamiento (Madrid, 2008). Carbajo Serrano, M.J., El monasterio de los santos Cosme y Damián de Abellar. Monacato y sociedad en la época astur-leónesa (León, 1988). Chalmeta, P., ‘Monnaie de compte, monnaie fiscale et monnaie réelle en Andalus’, in Documents de l’ Islam Mediéval. Nouvelles perspectives de recherche, (Cairo, 1991), 65–88. Corral Lafuente, J.L. (ed.), Cartulario de Alaón (Zaragoza, 1984). Crusafont i Sabater, M., El sistema monetario, cobre y oro (Barcelona, 1994). Crusafont i Sabater, M., ‘La moneda barcelonina del segle x. Altres novetats comtals’, Acta Numismática 28 (2008), 91–122. Crusafont i Sabater, M., ‘Significado y valor del “sólido gallecano” (S. x–xi)’, in F. Cebreiro Ares (ed.), Introducción a la Historia Monetaria de Galicia. (s. ii a.C.–xvii d.C.) (Betanzos, 2012), 105–16. Davies, W., ‘Sale, price and valuation in Galicia and Castile-León in the tenth century’, Early Medieval Europe 11 (2002), 149–74. Day, W.R., ‘The monetary reforms of Charlemagne and the circulation of money in early medieval Campania’, Early Medieval Europe 6 (1997), 25–45. Díaz, P.C., ‘Acuñación monetaria y organización administrativa en la Gallaecia tardoantigua’, Zephyrus 57 (2004), 367–75. Feliu, G., ‘La moneda prefeudal’, in B. Riquer (ed.), Història: Politica, societat i cultura dels Països Catalans, ii (Barcelona, 1998), 152–3. Feliu, G. and J.M. Salrach (eds), Els pergamins de l´Arxiu Comtal de Barcelona de Ramon Borrell a Ramon Berenguer i (Barcelona, 1999). Floriano Cumbreño, A.C. (ed.), Diplomática española del período astur. Estudio de las fuentes documentales del reino de Asturias (718–910), 2 vols (Oviedo, 1949–51). Garrido, M. (ed.), Documentación de la Catedral de Burgos (Burgos, 1983). Gautier-Dalché, J., ‘Du royaume asturo-léonais à la monarchie castillano-léonaise. Une histoire monétaire singulière (viiie–ixe siècle)’, in Actes des Congrès de la Société des historiens médiévistes de l´enseignement supérieur public (Clermont Ferrand, 1997), 77–92. Gil Farres, O., ‘Influencia de la moneda árabe en los numerarios de la España cristiana. Dos interesantes documentos’, Boletín de la Asociación Española de Orientalistas 14 (1978), 137–42. Gomes Marques, M., A moeda peninsular na idade das Trevas (Sintra, 1998). Grierson, P., ‘Money and Coinage under Charlemagne’, in W. Braunfels, H. Beumann, H. Schnitzler and B. Bischoff (eds), Karl der Grosse (Dusseldorf, 1965), 501–36, repr. in P. Grierson, Dark Age Numismatics (London, 1979).

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Herculano de Carvalho e Araujo, A. and J.J. da Silva Mendes Leal (eds), Portugaliae Monumenta Historica a saeculo octavo post Christum usque ad quintumdecimum. Diplomata et chartae (Lisbon, 1867–73). Ibn al-‘Aṭṭār, K. al-watāʼiq wa l-siŷillāt, ed. P. Chalmeta (Madrid, 1983). Isla Frez, A., ‘Moneda de cuenta y organización monetaria en la Galicia altomedieval’, in Miscel.lània en Homenatge al P. Agustí Altissent (Tarragona, 1991), 487–510. Isla Frez, A., ‘Monnaie et échanges dans le royaume asturo-léonais, ixe–xie siècles’, in L. Feller and A. Rodríguez (eds), Objets sous contrainte. Circulation des richesses et valeur des choses au Moyen Âge (Paris, 2013), 181–96. Jarrett, J., ‘Currency change in pre-millennial Catalonia: coinage, counts and economics’, Numismatic Chronicle 169 (2009), 217–43. López Martínez de Marigorta, E., ‘Acuñaciones monetarias de al-Andalus en la primera mitad del siglo v/xi: Fin de un modelo, consolidación de las emisiones regionales’, Al-Qantara 36 (2015), 69–106. Loscertales de García de Valdeavellano, P., (ed.), Tumbos del Monasterio de Sobrado de los Monjes, 2 vols (Madrid, 1976). Manzano Moreno, E., Conquistadores, emires y califas. Los Omeyas y la formación de al-Andalus (Barcelona, 2006). Manzano Moreno, E., ‘Moneda y articulación social en al-Andalus en época omeya’, Villa 5 (2015) 133–55. Martín Duque, A.J. (ed.), Documentación Medieval de Leire (siglos ix al xii) (Pamplona, 1983). Martín Escudero, F., El Tesoro de Baena (Madrid, 2005). Martín Escudero, F., ‘Monedas que van, monedas que vienen. Circulación monetaria en época de cambios’, De Mahoma a Carlomagno (Siglos vii–ix), xxxix Semana de Estudios Medievales (Estella, 2012), 311–50. Martín Escudero, F., J. Mínguez and A. Canto, ‘La circulación monetaria en el reinado de Alfonso iii a través de las fuentes documentales’, in A. García-Leal, R. Gutiérrez and C.E. Prieto (eds), Asturiensis Regni Territorium. Documentos y Estudios sobre el período Tardorromano y Medieval en el Noroeste Hispano, 2 vols (Oviedo, 2011), vol. 2, 157–205. Martínez Díez, G. (ed.), Colección documental del monasterio de San Pedro de Cardeña (Burgos, 1998). Marugán, M. and P. Chalmeta (ed. and trans.), Formulario Notarial y Judicial Andalusí, (Madrid, 2000). Menéndez Pidal, R., R. Lapesa and C. García (eds), Léxico hispano primitivo (siglos viii al xii) (Madrid, 2004). Mínguez Fernández, J.M. (ed.), Colección diplomática del monasterio de Sahagún (siglos ix y x) (León, 1976). Mínguez Fernández, J.M., ‘Moneda y áreas de circulación en el dominio del monasterio de Sahagún en el siglo x’, Estudis d’ Història Agrària 2 (1979), 39–49.

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Mínguez Martínez, J., ‘Moneda medieval en el reino de León: análisis de términos monetarios en la documentación del archivo de la catedral de León’, Ab Initio 1 (2011), 11–67. Ordeig i Mata, R., Catalunya Carolingia iv, Els comtats d´Osona i Manresa (Barcelona, 1999). Peixoto Cabral, J.M. and D.M. Metcalf, A moeda sueva (Porto, 1997). Pérez Soler, M.D. (ed.), Cartulario de Valpuesta (Valencia, 1970). Pliego, R., La moneda visigoda (Sevilla, 2009). Pliego, R., ‘The circulation of copper coins in the Iberian Peninsula during the Visigothic period: new approaches’, The Journal of Archaeological Numismatics 5/6 (2015– 2016), 125–60. Prieto y Vives, A., ‘Tesoro de monedas musulmanas encontrado en Badajoz’, Al-­Andalus 2 (1934), 299–327. Retamero, F., ‘Els primers comptes catalans. Els números primerencs del feudalisme’, in M. Barceló, G. Feliu, A. Furió, M. Miquel and J. Sobrequés (eds), El feudalisme comptat i debatut. Formació i expansió del feudalisme catalá (Valencia, 2003), 103–18. Roma, A., ‘Emisiones monetarias del siglo vi con la leyenda LATINA MUNITA. Estado del debate’, Brigecio 12 (2002), 79–84. Ruiz Asencio, J.M. (ed.), Colección documental del archivo de la catedral de León (775– 1230), iii (986–1031) (León, 1987). Ruiz Asencio, J.M. (ed.), Colección documental del archivo de la catedral de León (775– 1230), iv (1032–1109) (León, 1990). Sáez, E. (ed.), Colección documental del archivo de la catedral de León (775–1230), i (775– 952) (León, 1987). Sáez, E. and C. Sáez (eds), Colección documental del archivo de la catedral de León (775– 1230), II (953–985) (León, 1990). Sánchez-Albornoz, C., ‘El precio de la vida en el reino astur-leonés hace mil años’, in idem, Estudios sobre las instituciones medievales españolas (Mexico City, 1965), 369–410. Sánchez-Albornoz, C., ‘Moneda de cambio y moneda de cuenta en el reino astur-­ leonés’, in idem, Estudios sobre las instituciones, 411–39. Ser Quijano, G. del (ed.), Colección Diplomática de Santa María de Otero de las Dueñas (León) (854–1037) (Salamanca, 1993). Serrano, L. (ed.), Cartulario de San Pedro de Arlanza (Madrid, 1925). Serrano, L. (ed.), Cartulario de San Vicente de Oviedo (781–1200) (Madrid, 1929). Ubieto Arteta, A. (ed.), Cartulario de Albelda (Valencia, 1960). Ubieto Arteta, A. (ed.), Cartulario de San Millán de la Cogolla (Valencia, 1976). Vico Monteoliva, J., Ma.C. Cores Gomendio y G. Cores Uría (eds), Corpus Nummorum Visigothorum. Ca. 575–714. Leovigildus-Achila (Madrid, 2006). Yáñez Cifuentes, M.P., El Monasterio de Santiago de León (Barcelona, 1972).

Part 3 Writing, Remembering, Representing

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Chapter 6

Record, Chronicle and Oblivion: Remembering and Forgetting Elite Women in Medieval Iberia Jeffrey Bowman Garcí Fernández, son of Castile’s legendary founder Fernán González, was count of Castile during the final decades of the tenth century. These were tumultuous times. In Castile and across the northern Iberian peninsula, the period was characterized by political fragmentation and instability. Great and petty lords sought to enrich themselves and their followers by launching raids on neighboring lords. The instability and disorder occasioned by violent competition among these magnates was further exacerbated by the disruptive raids of Andalusi armies. During his long reign, the powerful Andalusi leader al-Manṣūr led more than 50 such raids, some of which (such as the sack of Barcelona in 985 or the sack of Santiago de Compostela twelve years later) marked demoralizing defeats for leaders in the north.1 Although these leaders displayed occasional bouts of ambition and organization, the principalities of the north did not really begin to show signs of stability and confidence until the second half of the eleventh century. When later chroniclers and historians, such as the authors of the twelfthcentury chronicle known in Spanish as the Najerense and the thirteenth-­ century Estoria de Espanna, turned their attention to this period, they were interested not only in the military and political exploits of Count Garcí ­Fernández, but also in what we might call his family life. These later authors devoted special attention to the ways in which the schemes of Garcí’s wife had disastrous implications for the fledgling county of Castile. The narrative of Garcí Fernández’s achievements and of his downfall in the Najerense provided the kernel for subsequent accounts of the early history of Castile and, on a more intimate scale, of the toxic relations between the count and his wife. According to the Najerense, Count Garcí was renowned for his military prowess and for the pale beauty of his hands. Al-Manṣūr secretly contacted the count’s wife to ask whether she might prefer to be the wife of a ‘real

1 M. Makki, ‘The Political History of al-Andalus’, in S.K. Jayyusi (ed.), The Legacy of Muslim Spain, 2 vols (Leiden, 1992), vol. 1, 3–87, at 42.

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king’.2 Apparently, neither the count’s legendary valor nor the splendor of his hands had entirely satisfied the countess’s ambitions. She found al-Manṣūr’s offer appealing and so resolved to bring about her husband’s downfall and to facilitate the Andalusi leader’s success. She plotted to disperse the count’s faithful followers to their homes for Christmas. In doing so, she intended to thwart whatever resistance the knights of Castile would offer al-Manṣūr’s marauding armies. The countess then took steps to ensure that Garcí himself would be unable to defend Castile; she tampered with his horse’s diet so that it would fail him. Al-Manṣūr led his forces into the now poorly defended Castile. The count’s horse, weakened by adulterated and insalubrious food, faltered in battle. Garcí Fernández was badly wounded and died several days later. The Andalusi army proceeded to ravage Castile. In the ensuing months, the count’s widow, still keen to marry al-Manṣūr, plotted unsuccessfully to poison her own son. These events, reported in the Najerense and embellished in later chronicles, eventually became known as the legend of the condesa traidora or traitor-countess.3 The Najerense’s description of Garcí Fernández and the condesa traidora and later accounts of the same events dramatize the challenges of understanding the volatile political world of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Reconstructing this world is particularly challenging because the earliest narrative evidence (usually composed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries) so systematically misrepresents the realities of the earlier period. In what follows, Count Garcí Fernández’s wife (to whom I will return toward the end of the essay) is one of four countesses I use to examine the contours of commemoration, erasure, and oblivion on the Iberian peninsula in the high Middle Ages. To the condesa traidora of late tenth-century Castile, I will add three others 2 Chronica Naierensis, Chronica Hispana saeculi xii, Pars ii, ed. J.A. Estévez Sola, cccm 71A (Turnhout, 1995), 144–6. 3 The permutations of the countess’s story afford a striking example of the inventiveness of medieval historians, but the early history of Castile is clotted and confused generally because of the often whimsical fabrications of later historians and poets. Unraveling Castile’s early history is made especially difficult by the meagerness of the archival record and the relative abundance of later narrative evidence of questionable reliability, such as the poem of Fernán González, the legend of the siete infantes de Lara, and the legend of the jueces de Castilla. For a recent discussion of the significance of the condesa traidora, see S. Barton, Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines: Interfaith Relations and Social Power in Medieval Iberia (Philadelphia, 2015), chapter 4. For the jueces, see G. Martínez Díez, El Condado de Castilla (711–1038): La Historia frente a la leyenda (Valladolid, 2005), 280–90; G. Martin, Les juges de Castille. Mentalités et discours historique dans l’Espagne médiévale (Annexes des Cahiers de linguistique hispanique médiévale, 6) (Paris, 1992); F.J. Peña Pérez, Mitos y leyendas. Historia y poder. Castilla en sus orígenes y en su primer apogeo (siglos ix–xiii) (Burgos, 2003).

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(Ilduara Eriz, Ermessenda of Barcelona, and Almodis de la Marche), distributed chronologically from the early tenth to the late eleventh centuries and geographically from Galicia to Catalonia. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, several interwoven factors conditioned the power of elite women. These factors included: (1) the practice of partible inheritance evident throughout the principalities of northern Iberia; (2) the enduring vigor of Visigothic law which encouraged parity among male and female heirs; (3) the power of religious institutions connected to elite families; and (4) the political fragmentation that characterized the period generally. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the collaborative, associative practices of lordship and political power in the period were in broad terms advantageous to elite women with ambitions to power. The careers of these four countesses and the ways in which those careers were commemorated tell us a great deal about power in the period. At the broadest level, the surviving evidence helps us understand the practices of lordship in a period of political fragmentation. More narrowly, these four welldocumented countesses broaden our comprehension of the contours of power for elite women. Finally, the divergent representations of these countesses in records and in narrative evidence are emblematic of the ways in which different types of historical evidence prompt us to reconstruct the political, social, and economic realities of the period in different ways. Medievalists inevitably must tussle with evidence that is fragmentary and ambiguous. In the cases of these elite women, the fragmentary evidence often leads us toward flatly contradictory conclusions. My objective in what follows is not to trace in detail the political activities of a handful of powerful women (fascinating though these activities are), but to examine the curious relationship between the different varieties of evidence which describe these women.4 Narrative sources often contradict what we find in surviving records. By comparing the activities of elite women as they appear in records with their representations in narrative sources, we come to understand better the choices made by medieval historians as they shaped the past. Chroniclers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries invariably misconstrued the political landscape of the tenth and eleventh centuries. On the Iberian peninsula and elsewhere, the twelfth century witnessed a significant increase in the composition of narrative history writing. These texts were inevitably grounded in and motivated by the political circumstances surrounding their composition. Moreover, 4 For the political activities of these countesses and other elite women, see J. Bowman, ‘Countesses in court: elite women, creativity, and power in northern Iberia, 900–1200’, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 6 (2014), 54–70.

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in medieval Iberia, as elsewhere, the writing of history was political in two senses. Authors thought that the exercise of power by politically powerful men (usually kings) was the most suitable subject matter for historical narratives and the narratives themselves usually had political objectives. Chronicles were composed to validate one dynasty’s claim to particular lands and powers. Histories were written to substantiate a bishopric’s claims for primacy or to bolster a monastery’s claim to particular properties.5 Histories were composed not so much out of a concern to preserve the past as out of a desire to shape the present. While there was considerable diversity in the form, content, scope, coherence, and artistry of these texts, they were very often grounded in notions of lineal continuity and territorial integrity. Chroniclers and historians composed texts that were meant to warrant the legitimacy of a particular political order. The goals and ambitions of these authors merit attention; careful analysis of these texts yields insights into the mental and political world in which these authors wrote. What is most relevant here, however, is that the dominant concerns and objectives that characterized the writing of history in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries inevitably distorted the political and social realities of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Later historians inevitably downplayed or ignored the more fluid political structures and shifting territorial boundaries that prevailed in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Those historians seem generally to have misunderstood the often collaborative nature of lordship in the earlier period. Perhaps the most striking pattern is the way in which historians misunderstood and misrepresented the power of elite women in earlier periods. Centuries after the fact, chroniclers reshaped the fluid and unruly tenth and eleventh centuries into crisp narratives of genealogical inevitability and in doing so erased women from the political landscape. In what follows, I offer short biographical sketches of the four countesses before drawing conclusions about power, commemoration, and evidence. 5 See the introductory essays in J.M. Bak and I. Jurkovic (eds), Chronicon: Medieval Narrative Sources. A Chronological Guide with Introductory Essays (Turnhout, 2013); the essays collected in D. Mauskopf Deliyannis (ed.), Historiography in the Middle Ages (Leiden, 2003) provide useful starting points for these questions. For a recent review of evolving approaches, see J. Lake, ‘Current Approaches to Medieval Historiography’, History Compass 13 (2015), 89–109. Influential works in the field include S. Bagge, Kings, Politics, and the Right Order of the World in German Historiography, c. 950–1150 (Leiden, 2002); P. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, 1996); N. Partner, Serious Entertainments: The Writing of History in Twelfth-Century England (Chicago and London, 1977); L. Shopkow, History and Community: Norman Historical Writing in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Washington D.C., 1997); G.M. Spiegel, Romancing the Past: the Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (Berkeley, 1993) and eadem, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore, 1997).

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For each countess, I describe the nature of the surviving evidence. Broadly speaking, the evidence is of two types: narrative evidence of the sort found in histories like the Najerense, and records describing sales, gifts, and judicial assemblies. These four examples enable us to see the broad patterns of gender, power, and lordship in the earlier period and to track the ways in which those composing narrative histories in the twelfth and thirteenth century misunderstood the elite women of earlier periods. By confronting the starkly divergent pictures that emerge from different types of evidence, we come to understand the sometimes bizarre and almost invariably shabby ways in which twelfthand thirteenth-century historians treated aristocratic women of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Appreciating the ways that those who generated historical narratives ignored or reshaped the evidence of records allows us think more subtly not only about how the political world of the peninsula changed between 1000 and 1200 but also about the interpretive postures that we should assume toward different types of evidence. 1

Ilduara Eriz

In the second quarter of the tenth century, Countess Ilduara Eriz controlled (individually or with members of her family) a diverse range of properties, including farms, villages, churches, salt pans, and orchards. These were concentrated in southern Galicia, but ranged from Coimbra in modern-day Portugal to the peninsula’s northern coast and east into Asturias.6 Roughly two dozen records related to Ilduara Eriz allow us to reconstruct in part her scattered holdings. Ilduara was rich (probably the richest person in Galicia), but the records indicate more than impressive wealth. Among Ilduara’s most enduring achievements was her role in the creation of the monastery of Celanova, an institution over which the eldest of her five children, Rosendo, presided as abbot. A donation dated to 938 speaks not only of the various properties that the countess gave to Celanova, but also of her role in selecting a suitable site for the monastery, constructing buildings, and in endowing Celanova with an impressive range of books, furniture, and textiles, suggesting that even in these perilous times tenth-century elites had a taste for the finer things in life. At the same time, the bequest reflects Ilduara’s pervasive involvement in the management of the monastery. Ilduara’s son Rosendo (as abbot, bishop, and ultimately saint) looms especially large in 6 M.C. Pallares Méndez, Ilduara, una aristócrata del siglo x (Sada, 2004), 50. See also W. Davies, Acts of Giving: Individual, Community, and Church in Tenth-Century Spain (Oxford, 2007), 140.

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Celanova’s archive, but the records show clearly that the success of the institution was a family enterprise.7 The stewardship of Celanova and other institutions like it was important for men and women of Ilduara’s elevated social position, but it is clear that this countess enjoyed powers that extended beyond the patronage of religious institutions. When kings of Galicia and León delegated comital powers to Ilduara’s husband Gutier, they mentioned her responsibilities as well.8 In 942, when Ilduara’s nephew King Ramiro ii of León granted authority to Ilduara’s son Fruela, the king stipulated that he exercise that authority with his mother’s guidance.9 The most unequivocal sign of the power exercised by lay elites in this period comes in records describing the administration of justice. The corpus of surviving records from Galicia is not large for the early tenth century, but those records that do survive show that Ilduara played an active role in judicial assemblies. In 927, the monks of Santa Maria de Loyo brought a dispute before an assembly over which Ilduara, her husband, and her son presided.10 In other cases, Ilduara was litigant rather than judge. In 940, she pursued a case against a thug responsible for the death of one of her retainers.11 In collaboration with members of her family, Ilduara managed a vast condominium of diverse properties, vigilantly protected her family’s interests, fostered religious institutions, and supported the responsibilities of command and justice delegated to her husband and sons. All of this we know from the diplomatic evidence – mainly from records in Celanova’s cartulary. But there is some later narrative evidence relating to Ilduara that enriches our understanding of the countess and her career. The twelfth-century vita of San Rosendo describes aspects of Ilduara’s life about which records tell us little. While the text as a whole is devoted to documenting the sanctity and accomplishments of Ilduara’s son, early sections of the text discuss Rosendo’s parents, Gutier and Ilduara. According to the vita, although Ilduara and her husband enjoyed wealth, health, beauty, and illustrious parentage, they were distressed because they lacked the joy of children. For years, 7

The most important transaction was the foundation of the monastery, but other records provide ample evidence of the enduring collaboration between Ilduara and her children. On several occasions, Ilduara confirmed donations to Celanova by her son Rosendo and others: Pallares Méndez, Ilduara, 70–71, 87. See also L. Paz Mariñas, ‘La mujer y la práctica religiosa: el ejemplo de condesa Ilduara (c. 880–960)’, in Las mujeres en el Cristianismo medieval (Madrid, 1989), 363–72. 8 CCel44, in E. Sáez and C. Sáez (eds), Colección diplomática del monasterio de Celanova (842–1230), 3 vols (Alcalá de Henares, 1996–2006): charters cited as CCel1, CCel2, etc. 9 CCel73; Davies, Acts of Giving, 175. 10 CCel29. 11 The perpetrator was required to compensate Ilduara for her loss by surrendering half his rights to twelve villas: CCel64; see also Davies, Acts of Giving, 144, 182.

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they prayed to have children, traveling to different monasteries and making offerings to diverse saints. At one point, while Gutier was away on a military campaign, a barefoot and fasting Ilduara undertook an arduous solitary pilgrimage to offer further prayers. The vita puts into Ilduara’s mouth a supplicatory prayer addressed to God. Ilduara invoked a range of scriptural models, referring in particular to the childlessness of Abraham and Sarah. Finally, Ilduara concluded: ‘hear me, your slave, and deign to make me joyful with a child that I will offer to honor and praise your name, as Abraham did Isaac’.12 Almost immediately, Ilduara experienced a promising vision that prompted her to recall her husband from his campaign. She described to her husband her prayer campaign and her reassuring revelation. Soon thereafter, the couple conceived Rosendo.13 When Ilduara’s prayers were realized with Rosendo’s birth, the couple celebrated with a great feast, fed the poor, liberated slaves and ordered the construction of a church.14 We might see the feast sponsored by the comital couple as an example of how the well-documented construction of buildings might be accompanied by other forms of community-oriented largesse that tend to leave no written evidence. While depicting Ilduara in a positive light, the vita emphasizes certain aspects of her career that are not prominent in the records. The hagiographic mother and the diplomatic countess are not flatly contradictory, but neither are they exactly the same. The vita focuses on Ilduara as mother and, to a lesser degree, as patron; we hear of her scattered attention to numerous monasteries. The countess in the vita is patient, pious, and long-suffering. There is little mention of Ilduara’s direct and pervasive involvement in the construction and management of Celanova and no mention of the collaborative lordship she exercised with her husband and children. We hear nothing in the vita of Ilduara’s participation in the administration of justice. The vita notes the illustrious parentage of the comital couple, but aside from the off-hand reference to Count Gutier helping the king besiege his enemies, it says little about Gutier or Ilduara as lords or property-holders. The collected records in Celanova’s cartulary reveal an energetic, ambitious, connected administrator, working carefully to accumulate and manage wealth, foster institutions, and manage conflict. The vita, on the other hand, depicts a countess remarkable mainly because of her patience, her generosity, and her children.

12 13 14

M.C. Díaz y Díaz, M.V. Pardo Gómez, D. Vilariño Pintos and J. Carro Otero, Ordoño de Celanova: Vida y Milagros de San Rosendo (La Coruña, 1990), 120. Ibid., 122: ‘narratione eius reuelatione cognita, legitimo tempore coniugem cognouit’. Ibid., 116–25. Ilduara may have had other earlier children, but none had survived.

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Ermessenda of Barcelona

A century later, at the other end of the peninsula, Countess Ermessenda of Barcelona, Girona, and Osona left a remarkably rich record of her activities over the course of seven decades. From the earliest record which mentions her (a 991 donation to Montserrat) to the execution of her testament in 1058 shortly after her death, she appears in 186 records.15 These records include sales, gifts, exchanges, disputes, and records of church consecrations. They are widely distributed chronologically and geographically. While the evidence for Ilduara’s activities is concentrated in Celanova’s cartulary, records related to Ermessenda survive both as original parchments and as copies in several cartularies, including those of Sant Cugat del Vallès, the Seu d’Urgell, and the cathedral of Barcelona. This rich corpus of diplomatic evidence allows us to reconstruct Ermessenda’s career with greater precision than is possible for most of her contemporaries across Europe. Ermessenda was born around 975 to the count and countess of Carcassonne. In the early 990s, she married Count Ramon Borrell of Barcelona, Girona, and Ausona and in so doing began a three-decade period of collaborative lordship with her husband. After the count’s death in 1017, Ermessenda managed the county during the minority of her son, Berenguer Ramon i. The count’s will stipulated that the countess would continue to enjoy extraordinary powers even when their son reached his majority. Ermessenda seems to have acted as co-ruler for much of her son’s lackluster countship. After Berenguer Ramon’s death in 1035, Ermessenda again exercised comital authority during the minority of her grandson, Ramon Berenguer i. Most of the records involve the buying, selling, and giving of property. Ermessenda was a major benefactor of churches and monasteries, making gifts to the cathedrals of Barcelona, Vic, Girona, and Urgell, as well as to numerous monasteries including Sant Cugat del Vallès, Sant Daniel de Girona, Sant Feliu de Guíxols, and Sant Pere de les Puelles. Records of sales are even more numerous. Throughout the 990s, the countess and her husband sold houses, fields, 15

This tally does not include a generous handful of posthumous references. The most comprehensive study of Ermessenda is X. Gil i Roman, ‘Diplomatario de Ermesèn, condesa de Barcelona, Girona y Osona (c. 991–1 de marzo de 1058)’ (Ph.D., Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2004). See also P. Humphrey, ‘Ermessenda of Barcelona: the Status of Her Authority’, in T. Vann (ed.), Queens, Regents and Potentates (Dallas, 1993), 15–35; P. Wolff, ‘Deux maitresses femmes dans la Marche d’Espagne au xi siècle: Ermessende et Almodis’, in Media in Francia: recueil de mélanges offert à Karl Ferdinand Werner (Maulévrier, 1989), 525–37; M. Aurell, Les Noces du comte: mariage et pouvoir en Catalogne (785–1213) (Paris, 1995), 223–56.

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olive groves, vineyards, fish ponds, chestnut groves, and orchards both to magnates and to modest individual property-holders.16 She continued buying and selling land in every decade through the 1050s.17 It is clear from the accumulated records that Ermessenda, individually and in concert with her husband and son, played a central role in the major religious institutions of the region. It is also clear that Ermessenda, again individually and in concert with others, controlled a great deal of valuable land. The number and tempo of these transactions reflects not only Ermessenda’s vast personal wealth, but also the lively land market and entrepreneurial energies that animated Catalonia in the early eleventh century. Ermessenda, like Ilduara, was intimately involved in the spiritual, economic, and political life of the institutions to which she gave. She not only supported churches and monasteries with gifts, she also played an active role in the administration of these institutions. In 1005, she approved the appointment of a new abbot for Santa Maria d’Amer.18 In 1010, the comital couple approved the election of new bishops of Barcelona and Vic, and orchestrated the consecration of a new cathedral in Urgell.19 In 1038, Ermessenda was one of the leading figures in the consecration of new cathedrals in both Vic and Girona.20 In 1043, the countess installed her hand-picked favorite as abbot of Sant Feliu de Guíxols.21 Actions like these reflect Ermessenda’s extensive network of institutional support and, more generally, the intimate interpenetration of secular and spiritual power. Records also describe the countess’s sometimes tumultuous relations with other magnates. On several occasions, she became embroiled in litigation. 16

17

18 19 20 21

See, for example, PAC4, in G. Feliu and J.M. Salrach (eds), Els pergamins de l’Arxiu Comtal de Barcelona de Ramon Borrell a Ramon Berenguer i, 3 vols (Barcelona, 1999): charters cited as PAC1, PAC2, etc.; G137, in R. Martí Castelló (ed.), Col.lecció diplomàtica de la Seu de Girona (817–1100) (Barcelona, 1997): charters cited as G1, G2, etc.; SCM94, in F.X. Altés i Aguiló, ‘El diplomatari del monestir de Santa Cecília de Montserrat, i: Anys 900–999’, Studia monastica 36 (1994), 223–302, charters cited as SCM1, SCM2, etc.; SCV337, SCV343, in J. Rius Serra (ed.), Cartulario de ‘Sant Cugat’ del Vallés, 2 vols (Barcelona, 1945–6): charters cited as SCV1, SCV2, etc. Late examples include Vic1091, in E. Junyent i Subirà (ed.), Diplomatari de la Catedral de Vic, segles ix–xi (Vic, 1980): charters cited as Vic1, Vic2, etc.; LFM390, in F.M. Rosell (ed.), Liber feudorum maior: cartulario real que se conserva en el archivo de la corona de Aragón, 2 vols (Barcelona, 1945–7): charters cited as LFM1, LFM2, etc. SMA1, in E. Pruenca i Bayona (ed.), Diplomatari de Santa Maria d’Amer (Barcelona, 1995): charters cited as SMA1, SMA2, etc. Vic719; U315, in C. Baraut (ed.), ‘Els documents, dels segles ix i x conservats a l’Arxiu Capitular de la Seu d’Urgell’, Urgellia 2 (1979), 7–143: charters cited as U1, U2, etc. PAC256; G224. She also served as executor of testaments for other notables, e.g., G174.

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Shortly after her husband’s death, she was involved in a particularly bitter dispute with Count Hugh of Empúries.22 If surviving records are any indicator, the countess usually (though not always) emerged from these scrapes victorious.23 Her relations with her son, her grandson, and her grandson’s wife (Countess Almodis de la Marche, about whom more below) were sometimes rocky and, in the final decade of Ermessenda’s life, we catch glimpses of the fraught negotiations through which she tried to prevent the erosion of her power.24 Finally, in addition to giving gifts, making sales, orchestrating consecrations, and forging convenientiae, Ermessenda administered justice. We know the countess presided over judicial assemblies in 996, 1000, 1002, 1011, 1013, 1016, 1017, 1018, and so on.25 The ample corpus of records of Ermessenda administering justice, often in collaboration with other lay and ecclesiastical magnates, offers palpable and unequivocal evidence of the political authority of female lords. Collectively, then, the extensive charter evidence shows us that Ermessenda was rich in her own right. She acted both in concert with her husband and later with his heirs to consolidate the comital dynasty’s power in the region. She cultivated relationships with institutions and individuals. Bishop Oliba of Vic, the local pioneer of the Peace of God movement, was her staunch ally. Her brother, Pere, was bishop of Girona and appears alongside her in many records. A core group of professional judges appear alongside her on numerous occasions as she administered justice. In its duration, in the diversity of her projects, and in the richness of the surviving records, her career was impressive. Countess Ermessenda affords a vivid example of the diverse varieties of economic, social, and political power that elite women exercised in tenth- and eleventh-century Europe. The peculiar bounty of Catalonia’s archives allows us to see in high resolution the sinews of power, and the energy of a magnate in this politically fragmented world. What, then, does narrative evidence say about this countess? We might ask whether such evidence offers a broadly synthetic portrayal of the countess’s significance to complement the granular precision of the records. Do chroniclers endow the countess, whose actions are so richly documented in surviving 22 23 24 25

Ol56, in E. Junyent (ed.), Diplomatari i escrits literaris de l’abat i bisbe Oliba (Barcelona, 1992): charters cited as Ol1, Ol2, etc. In rare cases, Ermessenda was obliged to restore disputed property to other claimants. See, for example, Ol71 and PAC105. LFM204; PC534, PC535, PC537. For example, Vic604, and B345, the latter in À. Fàbrega i Grau (ed.), Diplomatari de la Catedral de Barcelona: Documents dels anys 844–1260 (Barcelona, 1995): charters cited as B1, B2, etc. Cf. U278; SCV437, SCV451.

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records, with personal attributes or qualities? Do the narratives allow us to see Ermessenda’s ‘personality’? Our hopes must in the first place be modest since little narrative evidence from Catalonia and its near neighbors survives.26 The scarcity of narrative evidence is in some ways a mirror image to the richness of the charter evidence. We find references to Ilduara Eriz in the hagiographic text devoted to her son, the vita of San Rosendo. Ermessenda’s children did not inspire the same hagiographic impulses that Rosendo did; there were some vigorous administrators in her family, but there were no saints.27 The region’s earliest significant work of narrative history, the Gesta comitum Barcinonensium or Deeds of the Counts of Barcelona was composed at the monastery of Santa Maria de Ripoll, probably in the 1180s.28 The monastery had long been renowned as a center of learning. In Ermessenda’s day, Ripoll hosted the eminent scholar Gerbert of Aurillac, later Pope Sylvester ii.29 The lavishly illuminated bibles of Ripoll and Roda were created at Santa Maria de Ripoll around 1020, during a period when Countess Ermessenda and Abbot Oliba often collaborated closely. With the support of Ermessenda and other magnates, Oliba worked vigorously to strengthen the region’s monasteries and to ensure that they were vibrant centers of learning. By the second half of the twelfth century, Santa Maria de Ripoll had been intimately tied to Barcelona’s comital family for generations and had become the dynasty’s favored burial spot. In the Gesta, the monks of Ripoll traced the consolidation of power by Barcelona’s comital dynasty from its foundation in the late ninth century by the quasi-mythical Count Guifré to their own day. In 26

27

28

29

Catalonia’s eleventh-century diplomatic record is among the richest in Europe, but there are no significant surviving narrative sources composed in the region during the tenth and eleventh centuries. A few fragmentary early narratives are discussed by M. Coll i Alentorn, ‘La historiografia de Catalunya en el període primitiu’, Estudis Romànics 3 (1951– 52), 139–96. Other comital families in the region could boast of saints, including Ermengol of Urgell (son of the viscount and viscountess of Conflent), Ot of Urgell (son of the count and countess of Pallars), Oliba of Vic (son of the count and countess of Cerdanya). For Ermengol, see J. Bowman, ‘The Bishop Builds a Bridge: Sanctity and Power in the Medieval Pyrenees’, Catholic Historical Review 88 (2002), 1–16. See J. Aurell, ‘From Genealogies to Chronicles: The Power of the Form in Medieval Catalan Historiography’, Viator 36 (2005), 235–64 and idem, Authoring the Past: History, Autobiography, and Politics in Medieval Catalonia (Chicago, 2012); N.L. Taylor, ‘Inheritance of Power in the House of Guifred the Hairy’, in R. Berkhofer, A. Cooper and A. Kosto (eds), The Experience of Power in Medieval Europe, 950–1350 (Aldershot, 2005), 129–50. On the monastery’s cultural production, see R. Beer, Die Handschriften des Klosters Santa Maria de Ripoll (Vienna, 1907–08); M. Zimmerman, Écrire et Lire en Catalogne (ixe–xiie siècle), 2 vols (Madrid, 2003).

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this work, we have, in other words, a chronicle composed a little more than a century after Countess Ermessenda’s death under the patronage of one of her descendants at a monastery that had enjoyed the countess’s generosity as well as that of her husband, son, and grandson. During the countess’s own lifetime, Ripoll’s abbot was her close ally, friend, and advisor. The authors of the Gesta would have had at their disposal some of the same diplomatic archive I have surveyed above and a good many more, now lost records.30 Had they been interested in doing so, they would have been able to consult many records reflecting Ermessenda’s pervasive involvement in every sphere of economic, spiritual, and political life in the region during the first half of the eleventh century. Some of the walls of the very cloister through which Ripoll’s historians walked had been constructed in the second quarter of the eleventh century and had probably been paid for at least in part by Countess Ermessenda. Given the circumstances of the composition of the Gesta, we might very naturally be eager to see how these historian-monks made sense of the ample archive at their disposal. How would the monks of Ripoll commemorate one of the dynasty’s most dynamic figures who lived a century earlier? Do the chroniclers tell the same story about Countess Ermessenda’s activities that the nearly 200 charters do? When we turn to the relevant sections of the Gesta to answer these questions, we find nothing. The countess who dominated the political landscape of Catalonia for the first half of the eleventh century, controlled vast tracts of territory, presided over judicial assemblies, had cathedrals consecrated, and bore a comital title longer than her husband, son, or grandson is not mentioned. The domina vanishes. It is hard to know how to explain Ermessenda’s absence. The Gesta’s narrative style is, as a general rule, telegraphic. Count Guifré, the dynasty’s founder, enjoys a picaresque treatment at the start of the Gesta. Just as the Najerense endows Count Garcí with especially beautiful hands, the Deeds attributes to Guifré a distinguishing physical characteristic that was just as vivid and more peculiar. According to the Gesta, the count had ‘hair where other men did not’. But as a general rule the Gesta does not operate with this level of anecdotal detail. We learn nothing about the hair, conventionally situated or otherwise, of other members of Barcelona’s comital dynasty.31 The careers of many counts are dispatched with a terse few sentences. 30

31

We would know more about Ripoll, Oliba, the patronage of the comital family, and the political world of the region, had not the bulk of Ripoll’s records been destroyed in a nineteenth-century fire. The records we do have mostly survive as cartulary or early modern copies. We do learn that the monks of Ripoll had a low opinion of Ermessenda’s son, Count Berenguer Ramon: ‘Post Raimundum vero Borrelli, Berengarius filius eius tenuit ­comitatum

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Many powerful individuals – counts, countesses, bishops, and abbesses – who are well documented in surviving records go unmentioned in the Gesta. So, although Ermessenda’s absence from the Gesta is striking, it is hard to know exactly what to conclude from it. Does it spring from partisan hostility to the countess? Was it a deliberate and calculated omission on the part of the monastic authors for reasons now impossible to reconstruct? Is it possible that the authors of the Gesta were somehow ignorant of the contents of dozens or hundreds of records that must have rested within a few meters of where they composed their history? Is Ermessenda’s absence simply a function of the Gesta’s essentially patrilineal framework, which leaves little room for countesses, however long-lived, well-documented, and energetic they may have been? There are several discrete explanations for why the monks of Ripoll so decisively ignored Ermessenda when they set about describing the history of Barcelona’s comital dynasty. Even so, the dramatic gap between what records say and what the Gesta does not must make us think about how counts and countesses made history in the eleventh century and how monks commemorated (or failed to commemorate) them in the twelfth. Records tell us about her legal expertise, political skill, and, not least, her raw stamina; the Gesta operates with a different set of preoccupations: dynastic legitimation through the articulation of a foundation myth. Ermessenda’s biography affords a striking example of how the patrilineal, dynastic framework of a chronicle necessitated the erasure of the skills, qualities, and calculations that made these families successful in the first place.32

Barchinonae, nihilque ibi boni gessit, immo in omni uita sua parentelae probitate fuit inferior; et vixit xviii annis post patrem in praedicto comitatu…’, in L. Barrau-Dihigo and J. Massó Torrents (eds), Gesta Comitum Barcinonensium (Barcelona, 1925), 30. 32 The Gesta was composed at a moment when dynastic legitimation was a keen concern for Aragonese rulers. See Aurell, Authoring the Past, 4, and T.N. Bisson, ‘The Rise of Catalonia: Identity, Power, and Ideology in a Twelfth-century Society’, in idem, Medieval France and Her Pyrenean Neighbors: Studies in Early Institutional History (London and Ronceverte, 1989), 125–52. Alternatives to this rigidly patrilineal model appear occasionally. Some narratives embraced bilateral genealogies. Richard Fletcher points out that the Historia Silense’s author paid special attention to Alfonso vi’s female ancestors: ‘A twelfth-century view of the Spanish past’, in J.R. Maddicott and D.M. Palliser (eds), The Medieval State: Essays Presented to James Campbell (London and Rio Grande, 2000), 147–61, at 155–6. See also L.K. Pick, ‘Gender in the Early Spanish Chronicles: John of Biclar to Pelayo of Oviedo’, La corónica 32 (2004), 227–48. For a geographically broader perspective, see L. Shopkow, ‘Dynastic History’, in Mauskopf Deliyannis, Historiography in the Middle Ages, 217–48.

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Almodis, Countess of Barcelona

Another countess of Barcelona – and a rough contemporary of Ermessenda’s – suffered a very different although no more pleasant fate in narrative sources. My fourth and final example is also drawn from Catalonia, but jumps forward two generations to the middle of the eleventh century. Sometime around 1053, just a few years before Ermessenda’s death, Almodis de la Marche married Ermessenda’s grandson, Count Ramon Berenguer i, and became countess of Barcelona. Both Ramon Berenguer and Almodis were experienced at comital politics and at marriage. Each had been married twice before. The authors of the Gesta treated Almodis much as they did her husband’s grandmother, Countess Ermessenda; they ignored her. But while the monks of Ripoll had no interest in Almodis, the countess’s exploits caught the eyes of historians farther afield. By the standards of the day, Almodis seems to have been a minor international celebrity. The Chronique de Saint-Maixent enumerated Almodis’s three successive marriages: to Hugh v of Lusignan, to Count Pons of Toulouse, and finally to Ramon Berenguer. In his History of the Kings of England, William of Malmesbury told in broad terms the same story, and offered an unsympathetic assessment of Almodis’s character: ‘…Almodis had … many husbands, and had borne children by them all; she was a woman of crazy and unprincipled appetite, such that when through long familiarity she had grown tired of one husband, she would go elsewhere to “stock another home”. Thus she had first been married to the Count of Arles, but soon growing tired of him, had allied herself with William [of Toulouse]; and when she had borne him two sons, she enticed the count of Barcelona into marriage…’33 In general, William was rigorous and systematic, an exemplary historian by the standards of any age. But, as Antonia Grandsen suggests, he could chase a story.34 Almodis must have seemed to William an irresistibly rich subject. As William’s account indicates, Almodis’s career was full of colorful incident, but if we turn from the histories to the records we can say more about her activities. Dozens of records describe her active role in the administration of the county. We might not be surprised to discover that in some respects she was nearly as potent a political force as her husband’s grandmother had been. On at least 34 occasions, nobles in Catalonia swore oaths of fidelity jointly to 33 34

William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, ed. R.A.B. Mynors, 2 vols (Oxford, 1998), vol. 2, 695. A. Grandsen, Historical Writing in England (London, 1974), 176: ‘He had a great gift of imagination, which appears in his numerous excellent stories … But sometimes this led him to extremes. One slender fact or unauthenticated rumour could rouse the story-teller in him’.

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Almodis and her husband and on a few occasions to Almodis alone.35 She was her husband’s partner in developing the reciprocal agreements (convenientiae) that became the key mechanism for the organization of political power during the course of the eleventh century.36 The cooperation and partnership is not only reflected in the records, but also depicted in the lavishly illustrated cartulary, the Liber Feudorum Maior. She played a central role in extending comital power through establishing networks of castles and adding the county of Carcassonne to the family condominium. The prologue to the twelfth-century law code, the Usatges of Barcelona, describes her as the wise and prudent partner to her husband in the administration of the county.37 This is to say nothing of the individual records that describe Almodis individually and in partnership with other magnates buying and selling property or presiding over judicial assemblies. In other words, a large corpus of evidence suggests that Almodis was as energetic, innovative, and powerful as her husband’s grandmother had been. Like any powerful lord, Almodis had rivals and enemies who had more or less serious grievances with her and took more or less drastic steps to redress those grievances. On the mild end of the spectrum of complaints, the bishop of Barcelona lamented that Almodis did not return a copy of the Visigothic Code she had borrowed from him. At the more extreme end, the countess’s stepson, fearful (with good reason) that she was trying to freeze him out of his rightful inheritance, allegedly bludgeoned her to death. But whatever her rivals and enemies might have said about her, they must have acknowledged that she did a great deal more than indulge her appetites as William of Malmesbury suggests. A long string of records leaves no doubt that if she was a scheming temptress, she was also an energetic administrator and domina. Moreover, in the rough-and-tumble context of the eleventh century, even William’s bitter attacks seem like small beer. One of Almodis’s sons by an earlier husband was nicknamed diabolus. One of the countess’s sons by Ramon Berenguer killed his own twin brother. And, as I said, her step-son may well have killed her. In an environment like this, a little ‘lewdness’ seems not so much a shortcoming as it does a remarkable achievement. Perhaps she was as lewd and wanton as William says, but these qualities did not prevent her from playing a key role in the 35

P. Bonnassie, La Catalogne du milieu du Xe à la fin du xie siècle: croissance et mutations d’une société, 2 vols (Toulouse, 1975–76), 706. 36 For convenientiae, see A. Kosto, Making Agreements in Medieval Catalonia: Power, Order, and the Written Word, 1000–1200 (Cambridge, 2002). 37 D. Kagay, The Usatges of Barcelona: The Fundamental Law of Catalonia (Philadelphia, 1994), 63–4.

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management of the county for nearly twenty years, guided by sharp political instincts and boundless energy.38 The careers of these countesses reveal the diverse political activities of elite women in the tenth and eleventh centuries and dramatize the ways in which narrative evidence represents (or fails to represent) those activities. These are vivid and interesting cases, but in order to grasp how representative or typical these cases are, we should situate them in the broader context of the available narrative evidence more generally. In other words, if we are to try to understand why the Gesta comitum Barcinonensium devotes so little attention to Ermessenda and other countesses, we should look to how the Gesta fits into the evidentiary landscape more generally. A survey of a wider range of chronicles and histories from the Iberian peninsula can contextualize the fates of these four countesses at the hands of later authors. The term ‘chronicle’ here is used broadly to describe about three dozen historical texts composed on or near the Iberian peninsula between the fifth and the thirteenth centuries.39 Some, such as the tenth-century Chronicle of Bishop Gotmar are little more than regnal lists. Others (the seventh-century Historia Wambae, the Chronicle of Alfonso iii, or the twelfth-century Historia Compostellana) are ambitious in scope and sophisticated in structure. They vary in their chronological and geographic horizons. Some focus on the local politics affecting a particular institution; others strive to encompass the entire peninsula or the western Mediterranean. In one sense, it is an easy task to survey this corpus of narrative evidence for information about the political roles of elite women, because, generally speaking, they say little on the subject. There are, of course, notable exceptions. The Silense speaks in positive terms about the diverse activities of Elvira, daughter of Ramiro ii.40 The same text also includes a generous sprinkling of references to Sancha of León, wife of King Fernando i, and to the sisters of King Alfonso vi. The Compostellana includes a largely enthusiastic account of the reign of Queen Urraca. The Chronicle of Sahagún also describes Urraca’s struggles with the insolent Aragonese and rebellious burghers. The famous chronicle of Jaume the Conqueror devotes several sympathetic passages to Countess Aurembiaix of Urgell.41 These exceptions are almost invariably royal. If we go looking 38 39 40 41

D. Kagay, ‘Countess Almodis of Barcelona: “Illustrious and Distinguished Queen” or “Woman of Sad, Unbridled Lewdness”’, in Vann, Queens, Regents, and Potentates, 37–48. This corpus would correspond roughly to the Latin and Romance texts listed in inventory numbers 127–142 and 519–559 in Bak and Jurkovic, Chronicon: Medieval Narrative Sources. Pick, ‘Gender in the Early Spanish Chronicles’. D. Domingo, A la recerca d’Aurembiaix d’Urgell (Lleida, 2007); M. Shadis, ‘“Received as a woman”: Rethinking the concubinage of Aurembiaix of Urgell’, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 8 (2016), 1–17.

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for countesses or viscountesses – elite, but sub-royal, women, the evidence is slim indeed. Decades and even centuries pass without reference to a single woman.42 The narrative evidence would lead us to conclude that the scope of women’s political power in the period was limited indeed. Similarly, the narrative evidence would prompt us to describe the unremitting, uncomplicated, and unchallenged maleness of lordship and political power. There is a good deal of diversity in these texts, but we might say with little distortion that the narrative evidence suggests that despite their elevated social position elite women commanded only very circumscribed sorts of power.43 Of course, as these four countesses will have shown, the gloomy portrayal of the powers of elite women in narrative sources is not easily reconciled with what we learn about them from other evidence. The condesa traidora, Ilduara, Ermessenda and Almodis help us understand the dynamics of commemoration and oblivion because we have non-narrative evidence (records) about their activities and because their fates in the narrative sources are so varied. Different varieties of evidence represent very different realities. To some extent this is always true even of the most amply documented political leaders like kings, but the discrepancies between the stories told by chronicles and the stories we piece together from records are particularly yawning in the case of the political activities of elite women.

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In her study of gifts in tenth-century Galicia, León, and Castile, Wendy Davies comments: ‘The chronicles of the late ninth and tenth centuries portray a world almost entirely inhabited by men; the rare references to women are brief, mentioning them only as objects of marriage, or seduction, or as models of virginity.’: Acts of Giving, 183. See also Pick, ‘Gender in the Early Spanish Chronicles’, who describes some of these sources in greater depth. Admittedly, some of the chronicles are laconic not only on the subject of elite women and power, but on most subjects. The Anales Toledanos, for example, say little about any activity that cannot be encompassed in the verbs ‘to take’, ‘to kill’, and ‘to die’. But even sources that are more expansive generally pay little attention to women. Nowhere is narrative evidence especially abundant for the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, but the Iberian Peninsula is especially wanting. Thomas Bisson aptly characterized the ‘Unheroed Past’ of the Frankish-Catalan zone of the northeast: ‘Unheroed Pasts: History and Commemoration in South Frankland before the Albigensian Crusades’, Speculum 65 (1990), 281–308. In ncmh iii, Timothy Reuter, Roger Collins and Michel Zimmerman each point to the dearth of narrative sources for the tenth century: T. Reuter, ‘Introduction: reading the tenth century’, 1–24; M. Zimmerman, ‘Western Francia: the southern principalities’, 420– 455, esp. at 422; R. Collins, ‘The Spanish Kingdoms’, 670–91, at 672. For northern Spain, Sampiro is the only narrative on the events of the tenth century: Crónica de Sampiro, in J. Pérez de Urbel, Sampiro. Su crónica y la monarquía leonesa en el siglo x (Madrid, 1952).

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Ava of Castile and the condesa traidora

This brings us back to the countess with whom I began, Ava of Castile. In her role as condesa traidora, the wife of Garcí Fernández receives the most extensive treatment by later chroniclers of any tenth- or eleventh-century countess. By this point, we should not be surprised that the twelfth-century histories and the tenth-century records are not easily reconciled. Count Garcí’s wife, Countess Ava, appears in roughly 20 records during the 970s and 980s. She always appears alongside her husband, most often making donations to major monasteries, but also resolving conflicts, issuing fueros, and at the oblation of their daughter Urraca to the monastery of Covarrubias.44 The count himself rarely appears in records without her. Although the diplomatic evidence is patchier and more problematic for Castile than it is for countesses in Catalonia such as Ermessenda and Almodis, it is at the same time consistent. It suggests that Countess Ava was in every respect the count’s partner in the lordship of Castile. The countess of Castile who appears in narrative sources as the condesa traidora bears little resemblance to the Countess of Castile as she appears in records. Or I should probably say that Countess Ava of the charter evidence does not closely resemble the ‘countesses’ who appear in later narratives, since the Estoria de Espanna thickens the already rich plot by giving Garcí Fernández a second wife even more treacherous than the first. These later traitor-­countesses of the chronicles are curious confections.45 In general, later historians writing about Castile’s beginnings omit references to the actual countesses who helped to make Castile in favor of jaunty accounts of treacherous countesses who threaten to unmake Castile. The apparently supportive and competent Countess Ava of the tenth-century records is replaced in the chronicles by scheming, ruthless, often nameless countesses whose driving ambition is to marry an Andalusi prince.46 It is interesting to note the diverse ways in which chroniclers get things wrong. Here I am not referring to details like names or dates – the fact, for example, that the Count of Castile was captured by Andalusi forces in May, a 44

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See the following examples in M. Zabalza Duque (ed.), Colección diplomática de los condes de Castilla (Salamanca, 1998): 36, 37, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 57, 58, and 59. Most of these are cartulary copies. Many are of doubtful authenticity and/or interpolated. The editor does an exemplary job of sorting out the mess. Garcí’s grandmother, Countess Muñadona, played a role in cementing the alliances that made Garcí’s father, Fernán González, successful. Perhaps predictably, her activities go largely unreported in later chronicles. Or, in some versions, first a French, then an Andalusi prince. See Barton, Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines, chapter 4.

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time of year when the premature dispersal of the count’s Christmas court would have made little difference but which certainly meshes more easily with the campaigning habits of Andalusi armies. Or that later chroniclers get Countess Ava’s name wrong if they use it at all. I am not trying to ‘fact-check’ one source against another for accuracy and precision, but instead to trace patterns of difference. Treachery there certainly was in tenth-century Castile, but not of the variety that later chroniclers describe. In dozens of military campaigns, al-Manṣūr focused his attention on León and paid little attention to Castile or to its count. Until, that is, around 990, when Count Garcí provided refuge for one of alManṣūr’s rebellious sons, Abd Allah ibn al-Manṣūr.47 Garcí very likely came to regret this decision in the following year when the apparently enraged alManṣūr brought his forces to bear on Castile. He conquered and garrisoned a string of strategic castles and forced the Castilian count to surrender his traitorous, refugee son; the son was promptly executed. A similar process happened in reverse a few years later, when Garcí’s own son Sancho rebelled against him, perhaps at al-Manṣūr’s instigation. When his rebellion lost steam, Sancho fled to al-Andalus and sought al-Manṣūr’s protection.48 Al-Manṣūr saw an opportunity in the rift between Castilian father and son and launched a flurry of raids. The initial Andalusi campaign against Castile was motivated by al-Manṣūr’s anger at his son and Garcí’s unsuccessful attempt to exploit divisions between the Andalusi leader and his son. Later raids (including the one which resulted in Garcí’s capture and death) were prompted by al-Manṣūr’s own more successful attempt to exploit divisions between Castilian father and son. The marital ambitions of a treacherous countess (or a pair of treacherous countesses) have nothing to do with these machinations. There were indeed traitors and troublemakers, but they were apparently sons, not wives.49 The chroniclers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries found rebellious sons less 47 48 49

For the broad political narrative here, I rely on Martínez Díez, Condado de Castilla, 510–35. There were, for example, no Andalusi raids in Castile between 984 and 989. Of the 31 campaigns al-Manṣūr waged up to 989, only four affected Castile: Martínez Díez, 514–17. There is some uncertainty about the date, but probably 992: Martínez Díez, Condado de Castilla, 525–6; see also Makki, ‘Political History of al-Andalus’, 43. Some have suggested that the legend of the condesa traidora may be a sort of distant echo of the historical Countess Ava’s support for her son Sancho in his rebellion against her husband. As Martínez Díez notes (Condado de Castilla, 529), this remains purely conjectural since there is no specific evidence to support this theory. See also J. O’Callaghan, A History of Medieval Spain (Ithaca, NY, 1975), 129. Ultimately, García Fernández was wounded and captured in 995, apparently by a very small raiding party (not a great expeditionary force under al-Manṣūr’s direction): Martínez Díez, Condado de Castilla, 535–7.

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appealing subjects than treacherous wives and were unaware of and/or indifferent to the fact that the former outnumbered the latter. In the case of Countess Ava, the author of the Najerense betrays both an ignorance of the historical countess’s actions and a misunderstanding of the politics of marriage on the frontier of al-Andalus and Christian Spain in preceding centuries.50 Al-Manṣūr’s own sometime rival was Subh, the sultana and (probably Basque) mother of the caliph Hishām ii who served as virtual regent for many years. Al-Manṣūr himself married a daughter of Sancho Garcés ii of Navarre in 983.51 Women from Christian Spain, both slaves and free noblewomen, were crucially important in the matrimonial strategies of northern elites and Andalusi rulers in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. Christian princes and lordly muwallad kin-groups like the Banū Qasī cemented alliances through marriage. Andalusi rulers sought to have children with Christian wives or concubines. Such practices go some way toward explaining why the proudly Arab Umayyad rulers were famed for their blond hair and blue eyes. But the matrimonial and procreative strategies of the ninth and tenth centuries are in later chronicles pathologized as sexual depravity and political betrayal on the part of elite women. While cross-border marriages might have been seen as mutually beneficial and pragmatically astute in the tenth century, by the twelfth century this kind of mixing was a source of acute anxiety.52 Other later 50

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The mother of the great caliph ‘Abd al-Raḥmān iii was a Basque Christian. More than once, Queen Toda of Navarre reminded him of their shared ancestry. The caliph al-Ḥakam ii, a rough contemporary of Garcí and Ava, had at least two children with a Basque Christian woman: D.F. Ruggles, ‘Mothers of a Hybrid Dynasty: Race, Geneaology, and Acculturation in al-Andalus’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34 (2004), 65–94. As Ruggles puts it on page 69: ‘The men of the Hispano-Umayyad house traced their ancestry to the Umayyad house of Damascus and they appear to be of pure, noble, Muslim, and Arab stock. However, the mothers of these Umayyad heirs were predominantly Christian women from the north’. S. Barton, ‘Marriage across frontiers: sexual mixing, power and identity in medieval Iberia’, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 2 (2011), 1–25, at 8. See also idem, Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines, 28–40. Some of the same dynamics are apparent in Pelayo of Oviedo’s account of Teresa Vermúdez’s marriage to a Muslim ‘king’. Simon Barton translates the relevant passages as follows: ‘After the death of her father, Teresa was given away in marriage by her brother Alfonso to a certain pagan king of Toledo for the sake of peace, although she was herself unwilling. But as she was a Christian, she said to the pagan king: “Do not touch me, for you are a pagan. If you do touch me the Angel of the Lord will slay you.” Then the king laughed at her and slept with her once, and just as she had predicted, he was immediately struck down by the Angel of the Lord. As he felt death approaching, he summoned his chamberlains and his councilors and ordered them to load up camels with gold, silver, gems and precious garments, and to take her back to León with all these gifts. She stayed in that place in a nun’s habit for a long time, and afterwards she died in Oviedo and was buried

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narrative evidence includes a host of similarly treacherous elite women who betray their husbands for material gain and sexual satisfaction, often with Muslim leaders.53 5

Conclusion: Elite Women, Power, History, and Evidence

If Ava, Ilduara Eriz, Ermessenda, and Almodis are representative of the experience of elite lay women, we might conclude that narrative evidence tells us much more about the preoccupations of twelfth- and thirteenth-century chroniclers than it does about the women of the tenth and eleventh centuries or about the political worlds these women inhabited and shaped. The place of elite women was of course not the only realm in which chroniclers misunderstood the past or reshaped it to their own purposes. Historians of the high and late Middle Ages actively transformed the legacies of Visigothic kings.54 The genealogical preoccupations of ninth-century chroniclers led them to endow Visigothic queens with more political significance than they actually had.55 Chroniclers also varied considerably in how they understood and represented Umayyad rulers of al-Andalus.56 And, while the Gesta Comitum Barcinonensium erases aristocratic women from the region’s political history with special enthusiasm, this was by no means the only reworking of the recent past upon which the monks of Santa Maria de Ripoll embarked. Just as the Gesta ignores

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in the monastery of San Pelayo’: Barton, Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines, 77. Versions of this story also appear in the Najerense and in several other later narratives. Elsewhere (‘Marriage across frontiers’, 18), Barton discusses this alliance and its treatment in later narratives: ‘To conclude, the story related by Bishop Pelayo and amplified by other chroniclers matters to us not simply because it sheds some light on the particular circumstances under which crossborder matrimonial pacts were agreed by the Christian and Muslim political élites in Iberia shortly after the millennium, but also because it demonstrates that ideas about sexual mixing and religious identity in the Iberian Peninsula did not remain fixed throughout the centuries of the Islamic settlement and occupation. On the contrary, they were highly dynamic. There was a shift in attitudes and custom from the mid-eleventh century onwards that was closely tied to events unfolding on either side of the Pyrenees’. Idem, Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines, chapters 2 and 4. A. Ward, History and Chronicles in Late Medieval Iberia: Representations of Wamba in Late Medieval Narrative Histories (Leiden, 2011). See also T. Deswartes, ‘Le viol commis par Rodrigue et la perte d’Espagne dans la tradition Mozarabe (viiie–xiie siècles)’, in M. Rouche (ed.), Mariage et sexualité au moyen âge. Accord ou crise? (Paris, 2000), 69–79. Pick, ‘Gender in the Early Spanish Chronicles’, 237. O.R. Constable, ‘Perceptions of the Umayyads in Spanish Christian Chronicles’, in A. Borrut and P. Cobb (eds), Umayyad Legacies (Leiden, 2010), 105–30.

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the role of eleventh-century countesses, the chroniclers underreport the power of other comital and vicecomital families in the region – families that played a vital role in the political order of the tenth and eleventh centuries and whose territories and titles were eventually absorbed by the Count-Kings of Aragon. More generally, the protean political boundaries among Christian principalities and between the principalities and al-Andalus that characterize the tenth and eleventh centuries are ill-represented in narrative sources of later centuries that come to focus on Christian conquest. My four countesses were particularly accomplished and are especially welldocumented, but in many respects their careers were not freakishly idiosyncratic. Dozens of other countesses, viscountesses, and abbesses scattered from Galicia to Catalonia offer corroborating evidence of the wide-ranging political agency of elite women.57 In the fractured world of the tenth and eleventh centuries, power depended less on the coherence of institutions or the delegated authority of office than on the ability to shape and maintain alliances based on kinship, shared interests, oaths, and reciprocity. Of course, power depended on force too, that is, on the oppressive technology of castles and the command of military might. The face of lordship often was, as Thomas Bisson reminds us, arbitrary, exploitative, and violent.58 But lordship was almost inevitably collaborative and associative and for that very reason depended in 57

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Two of the examples I mention (Ilduara and Ava) enjoyed connections to royal courts. These courts themselves provide other compelling evidence of the powers of dowagers, regents and infantas. Ramiro iii’s mother, Elvira of León, is one notable example. See R. Collins ‘Queens-Dowager and Queens-Regent in Tenth-Century Léon and Navarre’, in J.C. Parsons (ed.), Medieval Queenship (New York, 1993), 79–92, and L.K. Pick, ‘Dominissima, prudentissima: Elvira, First Queen-Regent of León’, in T.E. Burman, M.D. Meyerson and L. Shopkow (eds), Religion, Text, and Society in Medieval Spain and Northern Europe: Essays in Honor of J.N. Hillgarth (Toronto, 2002), 38–69. There was much that was distinctive about the Iberian Peninsula, but the same process of erasure, vilification, and reconsideration in other parts of Europe suggests that other chroniclers nursed growing and programmatic suspicions about politically powerful women. See, for example, K.S. Nicholas, ‘Countesses as Rulers in Flanders’, in T. Evergates (ed.), Aristocratic Women in Medieval France (Philadelphia, PA, 1999), 111–37, at 113: ‘The bias of those chroniclers has misled modern historians, who have accepted uncritically the same attitudes, failing to appreciate the actual exercise of rule by twelfth-century women through family connections, administrative actions, and control of property. Narrative accounts written by secular clergy, by contrast, exhibited different attitudes toward the women whom they often encountered as church patrons and lay rulers, and whom the writers frequently supported as rulers acting to further the aims of both church and state’. T.N. Bisson, ‘Medieval Lordship’, Speculum 70 (1995), 743–59; idem, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship, and the Origins of European Government (Princeton, 2010); idem, Tormented Voices, Power, Crisis, and Humanity in Rural Catalonia, 1140–1200 (Cambridge, MA, 1998).

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part on building and maintaining relationships with collaborators and followers. Here we might think of Countess Ermessenda’s collaborations with her husband (Count Ramon Borrell), her brother (Bishop Pere of Girona), Bishop Oliba of Vic, other magnates (such as Gombau de Besora), and a core group of professional judges. We might think of the ways in which judicial assemblies were very often presided over by groups of lay and clerical elites. On the Iberian peninsula, we see the constant and intimate collaboration among brothers, sisters, and cousins.59 Without denying the exploitative features of lordship, Kimberly LoPrete and Amy Livingstone suggest that ‘love’ was at the center of how male and female lords exercised power. LoPrete suggests that ‘in a world where lordly households were centers of political activity, lands and titles were largely transmitted within families, and effective power depended on the ability to command the loyalty of other powerful people, the love ideally thought to bind family members to each other and followers to their lords could not be taken for granted. This love had to be actively fostered and renewed, through the exchange of gifts and favors, effective protection, and generous patronage’.60 Effective power depended on affective ability. In her probing study of the aristocratic families of the Loire valley, Livingstone argues persuasively that we should not look to lineage or patriarchy to explain the dynamics of power in this period; she proposes that the best word to describe the operating principles of these families might be ‘inclusion’.61 Both Livingstone and LoPrete are focused on northern France, but in many respects the logic of lordship was similar on the Iberian Peninsula. Aristocratic families functioned in fluid and flexible ways. Elite women thus enjoyed manifold opportunities to exercise diverse forms of political power that were often indistinguishable from the sorts of power exercised by their husbands, brothers, nephews, and sons. This is most emphatically not the world that later chroniclers imagine and describe. And it is not simply a matter of later historians misconstruing the cross-border marriage alliances that so clearly troubled them. The loose, cognatic kin groups and informal alliances that were keys to success in the tenth and eleventh centuries were difficult to square with the impulses of history-writing in the 59 60 61

Bowman, ‘Countesses in court’; Pallares Méndez, Ilduara, 81. K. LoPrete, ‘Adela of Blois’, in Evergates, Aristocratic Women, 7–43, at 42. A. Livingstone, Out of Love for my Kin: Aristocratic Family Life in the Lands of the Loire, 1000–1200 (Ithaca, NY, 2010), 235. See also F. Cheyette, Ermengard of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours (Ithaca, NY, 2001), especially chapter 13, ‘Love and Fidelity’. For a broad overview, see J.H. Drell, ‘Aristocratic Economies: Women and Family’, in J.M. Bennet and R.M. Karras (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 2013), 327–42.

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twelfth and thirteenth, which focused on dynastic continuity and territorial coherence. The institutional and cultural frameworks in which chronicles were written militated against any lucid or sympathetic account of the political activities of aristocratic women in earlier centuries. There is, of course, some variety to the historical texts generated in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but it is not an unfair generalization to say that on the Iberian peninsula and elsewhere these texts generally sought to legitimize some feature of the political order by insisting on its endurance through time. At times, this involved the privileging of a lineal model and one comital family over horizontal ties and a looser order, as in the Gesta Comitum Barcinonensium. It might involve promoting the privileges and prerogatives of a particular monastery or episcopal see, as in the Compostellana. Some of the same concerns would be shared by the authors of hagiographic texts such as the vita of San Rosendo, pegging the institution’s success to the heroic abbot’s sanctity rather than to the collective efforts of his parents and siblings. The emerging reality of the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries demanded histories that did little to accommodate the scrappier, improvisatory, horizontal, and loosely affiliative political practices that characterized the world of the year 1000.62 The articulation of histories focused on continuity of lineage and integrity of territory entailed fulsome commemoration of some figures and the strategic forgetting of others. The paradoxical result is that the more sophisticated, polished, self-conscious historical narratives of later periods actually tell us less

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That these narrative texts so distorted the political realities of the early period does not necessarily mean that they accurately depicted the political worlds in which they were written. Whether the diminished and marginal position of aristocratic women in chronicles and histories written in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries actually meant that the power of these women had in fact declined is a discrete question. Historians have challenged the model once proposed by JoAnn McNamara, Suzanne Wemple, and Georges Duby in which the power of aristocratic women eroded dramatically from the eleventh century on. For the Iberian peninsula, see, for example, T. Earenfight, ‘Absent kings: queens as political partners in the medieval Crown of Aragon’, in idem (ed.), Queenship and Political Power in Medieval and Early Modern Spain (Burlington, VT, 2005), 33–51 and idem, ‘Royal Women in Late Medieval Spain: Catalina of Lancaster, Leonor of Albuquerque, and María of Castile’, in C.N. Goldy and A. Livingstone (eds), Writing Medieval Women’s Lives (New York, 2012), 209–25; M. Shadis, Berenguela of Castile (1180–1246) and Political Women in the High Middle Ages (New York, 2009); and J. Bianchini, The Queen’s Hand: Power and Authority in the Reign of Berenguela of Castile (Philadelphia, 2012). For challenges to the model from other parts of Europe, see Livingstone, Out of Love for my Kin; S. Johns, Noblewomen, Aristocracy, and Power in the Twelfth-century Anglo-Norman Realm (Manchester, 2003); and P. Stafford, Gender, Family, and the Legitimation of Power: England from the Ninth to the Early Twelfth Century (Burlington, VT, 2006).

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about the worlds they purport to describe than do the humble and scattered records.63 The four countesses I have described were women of action; it is unlikely they spent much time fretting about how later authors would depict them. If a tenth- or eleventh-century countess were concerned about her legacy, my examples suggest that she might foresee an array of possible ways she might be ‘chronicled’. She might, like Countess Almodis, appear in more than one chronicle, the reach and complexity of her political activities replaced with a vituperative attack on her sexual behavior. She might enjoy the fate of Almodis’s grandmother-in-law, Countess Ermessenda, attested in close to 200 records buying and selling property, exercising comital powers during the minorities of her son and her grandson, leading the patronage of institutions throughout Catalonia, only for her name then to not merit a mention in the twelfth-­century Deeds of the Counts of Barcelona. She might, in other words, spend decades consolidating her family’s hold on a county and strengthening religious institutions, only to find her activities unnoted in a historical work designed with the explicit goal of commemorating those accomplishments. She might, like Richildis, a tenth-century countess of Barcelona, find her political activities unnoted in the works of her correligionists, but described in Arabic sources like the Muqtabis of Ibn Ḥayyān.64 Finally, she might, like Ava of Castile, find herself replaced in later chronicles by two wives who sabotage her husband’s horse and try to poison her son in order to pursue a romance with an Andalusi warlord. A countess of the eleventh century might then imagine a range of possible ways she was likely to be remembered, but very few appealing prospects.

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Elite women did at least occasionally direct their attention to the special responsibilities of commemoration. Dhuoda, the Carolingian aristocrat who so memorably counseled her son William to pray for deceased members of his family, was countess of Barcelona two centuries before Ermessenda and Almodis occupied the same position. Even Dhuoda, however, pays more attention to her husband’s ancestors than to her own. See M. Innes, ‘Keeping it in the family: women and aristocratic memory, 700–1200’, in E. van Houts (ed.), Medieval Memories: Men, Women, and the Past, 700–1300 (Harlow, 2001), 17–35; R. Le Jan, Famille et pouvoir dans le monde franc (viie–xe siècle) (Paris, 1995); Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance; E. van Houts, Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe, 900–1200 (Toronto, 1999). O.R. Constable, Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources (2nd edn, Philadelphia, PA, 2012), 85–6; See also T. Bruce, ‘An Intercultural Dialogue between the Muslim Taifa of Denia and the Christian County of Barcelona in the Eleventh Century’, Medieval Encounters 15 (2009), 1–34.

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If aristocratic women were, as Janet Nelson suggests, especially interested in history, history did not always repay the favor.65 The rich store of Iberian records allows us to trace the political, social, and economic details of the lives of men and women with greater precision and confidence than we can in most other parts of tenth- and eleventh-century Europe. Wherever we look at this record alongside later narratives the omissions, distortions, and augmentations of the chronicles are manifold, confusing and, in some cases, frankly bizarre. In describing his goals, the author of the twelfth-century Historia Roderici noted: ‘The flux of years is vast and ceaseless: if the doings of this mutable world are not fixed in written form, they will without doubt be consigned to oblivion’.66 Like many other chroniclers who crafted ambitious narratives and scribes who recorded gifts or sales, this author depicted himself as salvaging and preserving knowledge of important events that would otherwise be lost. The practices of historical writing in all their diversity were more complex and more entangled with political aspirations than this author suggests. Many of these projects involved not rescuing the ‘doings of the mutable world’ from oblivion, but rather engaging in diverse forms of politically motivated misremembering. Given what our four examples tell us about the ways in which chroniclers shaped the past, oblivion may have been the most sympathetic treatment an eleventh-century countess could have hoped for. Bibliography Altés i Aguiló, F.X., ‘El diplomatari del monestir de Santa Cecília de Montserrat, i: Anys 900–999’, Studia monastica 36 (1994), 223–302. Aurell, J., ‘From Genealogies to Chronicles: The Power of the Form in Medieval Catalan Historiography’, Viator 36 (2005), 235–64. Aurell, J., Authoring the Past: History, Autobiography, and Politics in Medieval Catalonia (Chicago, 2012). Aurell, M., Les Noces du comte: mariage et pouvoir en Catalogne (785–1213) (Paris, 1995). Bagge, S., Kings, Politics, and the Right Order of the World in German Historiography, c. 950–1150 (Leiden, 2002).

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J. Nelson, ‘Gender and genre in women historians of the early Middle Ages’, in J-P. Genet (ed.), L’historiographie médiévale en Europe (Paris, 1991), 149–63, at 150–1. S. Barton and R. Fletcher (trans.), The World of El Cid: Chronicles of the Spanish Reconquest (Manchester, 2000), 98.

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Bak, J.M. and I. Jurkovic (eds), Chronicon: Medieval Narrative Sources. A Chronological Guide with Introductory Essays (Turnhout, 2013). Baraut, C. (ed.), ‘Els documents, dels segles ix i x conservats a l’Arxiu Capitular de la Seu d’Urgell’, Urgellia 2 (1979), 7–143. Barrau-Dihigo, L. and J. Massó Torrents (eds), Gesta Comitum Barcinonensium (Barcelona, 1925). Barton, S., ‘Marriage across frontiers: sexual mixing, power and identity in medieval Iberia’, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 2 (2011), 1–25. Barton, S., Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines: Interfaith Relations and Social Power in Medieval Iberia (Philadelphia, 2015). Barton, S. and R. Fletcher (trans.), The World of El Cid: Chronicles of the Spanish Reconquest (Manchester, 2000), 98. Beer, R., Die Handschriften des Klosters Santa Maria de Ripoll (Vienna, 1907–08). Bianchini, J., The Queen’s Hand: Power and Authority in the Reign of Berenguela of Castile (Philadelphia, 2012). Bisson, T.N., ‘The Rise of Catalonia: Identity, Power, and Ideology in a Twelfth-Century Society’, in idem, Medieval France and Her Pyrenean Neighbors: Studies in Early Institutional History (London and Ronceverte, 1989), 125–52. Bisson, T.N., ‘Unheroed Pasts: History and Commemoration in South Frankland before the Albigensian Crusades’, Speculum 65 (1990), 281–308. Bisson, T.N., ‘Medieval Lordship’, Speculum 70 (1995), 743–59. Bisson, T.N., Tormented Voices, Power, Crisis, and Humanity in Rural Catalonia, 1140–1200 (Cambridge, MA, 1998). Bisson, T.N., The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship, and the Origins of European Government (Princeton, 2010). Bonnassie, P., La Catalogne du milieu du Xe à la fin du xie siècle: croissance et mutations d’une société, 2 vols (Toulouse, 1975–76). Bowman, J., ‘The Bishop Builds a Bridge: Sanctity and Power in the Medieval Pyrenees’, Catholic Historical Review 88 (2002), 1–16. Bowman, J., ‘Countesses in court: elite women, creativity, and power in northern Iberia, 900–1200’, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 6 (2014), 54–70. Bruce, T., ‘An Intercultural Dialogue between the Muslim Taifa of Denia and the Christian County of Barcelona in the Eleventh Century’, Medieval Encounters 15 (2009), 1–34. Cheyette, F., Ermengard of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours (Ithaca, NY, 2001). Chronica Naierensis, Chronica Hispana saeculi xii, Pars ii, ed. J.A. Estévez Sola, CCCM 71A (Turnhout, 1995). Coll i Alentorn, M., ‘La historiografia de Catalunya en el període primitiu’, Estudis Romànics 3 (1951–52), 139–96.

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Collins, R., ‘Queens-Dowager and Queens-Regent in Tenth-Century Léon and Navarre’, in J.C. Parsons (ed.), Medieval Queenship (New York, 1993), 79–92. Collins, R., ‘The Spanish Kingdoms’, in NCMH iii, 670–91. Constable, O.R., ‘Perceptions of the Umayyads in Spanish Christian Chronicles’, in A. Borrut and P. Cobb (eds), Umayyad Legacies (Leiden, 2010), 105–30. Constable, O.R., Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources (2nd edn, Philadelphia, PA, 2012). Crónica de Sampiro, in J. Pérez de Urbel, Sampiro. Su crónica y la monarquía leonesa en el siglo x (Madrid, 1952). Davies, W., Acts of Giving: Individual, Community, and Church in Tenth-Century Spain (Oxford, 2007). Deswartes, T., ‘Le viol commis par Rodrigue et la perte d’Espagne dans la tradition Mozarabe (viiie–xiie siècles)’, in M. Rouche (ed.), Mariage et sexualité au moyen âge. Accord ou crise? (Paris, 2000), 69–79. Díaz y Díaz, M.C., M.V. Pardo Gómez, D. Vilariño Pintos and J. Carro Otero, Ordoño de Celanova: Vida y Milagros de San Rosendo (La Coruña, 1990). Domingo, D., A la recerca d’Aurembiaix d’Urgell (Lleida, 2007). Drell, J.H., ‘Aristocratic Economies: Women and Family’, in J.M. Bennet and R.M. Karras (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 2013), 327–42. Earenfight, T., ‘Absent kings: queens as political partners in the medieval Crown of Aragon’, in idem (ed.), Queenship and Political Power in Medieval and Early Modern Spain (Burlington, VT, 2005), 33–51. Earenfight, T., ‘Royal Women in Late Medieval Spain: Catalina of Lancaster, Leonor of Albuquerque, and María of Castile’, in C.N. Goldy and A. Livingstone (eds), Writing Medieval Women’s Lives (New York, 2012), 209–25. Fàbrega i Grau, À. (ed.), Diplomatari de la Catedral de Barcelona: Documents dels anys 844–1260 (Barcelona, 1995). Feliu, G. and J.M. Salrach (eds), Els pergamins de l’Arxiu Comtal de Barcelona de Ramon Borrell a Ramon Berenguer i, 3 vols (Barcelona, 1999). Fletcher, R., ‘A twelfth-century view of the Spanish past’, in J.R. Maddicott and D.M. Palliser (eds), The Medieval State: Essays Presented to James Campbell (London and Rio Grande, 2000), 147–61. Geary, P., Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, 1996). Gil i Roman, X., ‘Diplomatario de Ermesèn, condesa de Barcelona, Girona y Osona (c. 991–1 de marzo de 1058)’ (PhD, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2004). Grandsen, A., Historical Writing in England (London, 1974). Humphrey, P., ‘Ermessenda of Barcelona: the Status of Her Authority’, in T. Vann (ed.), Queens, Regents and Potentates (Dallas, 1993), 15–35.

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Innes, M., ‘Keeping it in the family: women and aristocratic memory, 700–1200’, in E. van Houts (ed.), Medieval Memories: Men, Women, and the Past, 700–1300 (Harlow, 2001), 17–35. Johns, S., Noblewomen, Aristocracy, and Power in the Twelfth-century Anglo-Norman Realm (Manchester, 2003). Junyent i Subirà, E. (ed.), Diplomatari de la Catedral de Vic, segles ix–xi (Vic, 1980). Junyent i Subirà, E. (ed.), Diplomatari i escrits literaris de l’abat i bisbe Oliba (Barcelona, 1992). Kagay, D., The Usatges of Barcelona: The Fundamental Law of Catalonia (Philadelphia, 1994). Kagay, D., ‘Countess Almodis of Barcelona: “Illustrious and Distinguished Queen” or “Woman of Sad, Unbridled Lewdness”’, in Vann, Queens, Regents, and Potentates, 37–48. Kosto, A.J., Making Agreements in Medieval Catalonia: Power, Order, and the Written Word, 1000–1200 (Cambridge, 2002). Lake, J., ‘Current Approaches to Medieval Historiography’, History Compass 13 (2015), 89–109. Le Jan, R., Famille et pouvoir dans le monde franc (viie–xe siècle) (Paris, 1995). Livingstone, A., Out of Love for my Kin: Aristocratic Family Life in the Lands of the Loire, 1000–1200 (Ithaca, NY, 2010). LoPrete, K., ‘Adela of Blois’, in T. Evergates (ed.), Aristocratic Women in Medieval France (Philadelphia, PA, 1999), 7–43. Makki, M., ‘The Political History of al-Andalus’, in S.K. Jayyusi (ed.), The Legacy of Muslim Spain, 2 vols (Leiden, 1992), vol. 1, 3–87. Martí Castelló, R. (ed.), Col.lecció diplomàtica de la Seu de Girona (817–1100) (Barcelona, 1997). Martin, G., Les juges de Castille. Mentalités et discours historique dans l’Espagne médiévale (Annexes des Cahiers de linguistique hispanique médiévale, 6) (Paris, 1992). Martínez Díez, G., El Condado de Castilla (711–1038): La Historia frente a la leyenda (Valladolid, 2005). Mauskopf Deliyannis, D. (ed.), Historiography in the Middle Ages (Leiden, 2003). Nelson, J., ‘Gender and genre in women historians of the early Middle Ages’, in J-P. Genet (ed.), L’historiographie médiévale en Europe (Paris, 1991), 149–63. Nicholas, K.S., ‘Countesses as Rulers in Flanders’, in Evergates, Aristocratic Women, 111–37. O’Callaghan, J.F., A History of Medieval Spain (Ithaca, NY, 1975). Pallares Méndez, M.C., Ilduara, una aristócrata del siglo x (Sada, 2004). Partner, N., Serious Entertainments: The Writing of History in Twelfth-Century England (Chicago and London, 1977). Paz Mariñas, L., ‘La mujer y la práctica religiosa: el ejemplo de condesa Ilduara (c. 880– 960)’, in Las mujeres en el Cristianismo medieval (Madrid, 1989), 363–72.

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Peña Pérez, F.J., Mitos y leyendas. Historia y poder. Castilla en sus orígenes y en su primer apogeo (siglos ix–xiii) (Burgos, 2003). Pick, L.K., ‘Dominissima, prudentissima: Elvira, First Queen-Regent of León’, in T.E. Burman, M.D. Meyerson and L. Shopkow (eds), Religion, Text, and Society in Medieval Spain and Northern Europe: Essays in Honor of J.N. Hillgarth (Toronto, 2002), 38–69. Pick, L.K., ‘Gender in the Early Spanish Chronicles: John of Biclar to Pelayo of Oviedo’, La corónica 32 (2004), 227–48. Pruenca i Bayona, E. (ed.), Diplomatari de Santa Maria d’Amer (Barcelona, 1995). Reuter, T., ‘Introduction: reading the tenth century’, in NCMH iii, 1–24. Rius Serra, J. (ed.), Cartulario de ‘Sant Cugat’ del Vallés, 2 vols (Barcelona, 1945–6). Rosell, F.M. (ed.), Liber feudorum maior: cartulario real que se conserva en el archivo de la corona de Aragón, 2 vols (Barcelona, 1945–7). Ruggles, D.F., ‘Mothers of a Hybrid Dynasty: Race, Geneaology, and Acculturation in al-Andalus’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34 (2004), 65–94. Sáez, E. and C. Sáez (eds), Colección diplomática del monasterio de Celanova (842–1230), 3 vols (Alcalá de Henares, 1996–2006). Shadis, M., Berenguela of Castile (1180–1246) and Political Women in the High Middle Ages (New York, 2009). Shadis, M., ‘“Received as a woman”: Rethinking the concubinage of Aurembiaix of Urgell’, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 8 (2016), 1–17. Shopkow, L., History and Community: Norman Historical Writing in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Washington D.C., 1997). Shopkow, L., ‘Dynastic History’, in Mauskopf Deliyannis, Historiography in the Middle Ages, 217–48. Spiegel, G.M., Romancing the Past: the Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in ­Thirteenth-Century France (Berkeley, 1993). Spiegel, G.M., The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore, 1997). Stafford, P., Gender, Family, and the Legitimation of Power: England from the Ninth to the Early Twelfth Century (Burlington, VT, 2006). Taylor, N.L., ‘Inheritance of Power in the House of Guifred the Hairy’, in R. Berkhofer, A. Cooper and A. Kosto (eds), The Experience of Power in Medieval Europe, 950–1350 (Aldershot, 2005), 129–50. van Houts, E., Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe, 900–1200 (Toronto, 1999). Vann, T. (ed.), Queens, Regents and Potentates (Dallas, 1993) Ward, A., History and Chronicles in Late Medieval Iberia: Representations of Wamba in Late Medieval Narrative Histories (Leiden, 2011). William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, ed. R.A.B. Mynors, 2 vols (Oxford, 1998).

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Wolff, P., ‘Deux maitresses femmes dans la Marche d’Espagne au xi siècle: Ermessende et Almodis’, in Media in Francia: recueil de mélanges offert à Karl Ferdinand Werner (Maulévrier, 1989), 525–37. Zabalza Duque, M. (ed.), Colección diplomática de los condes de Castilla (Salamanca, 1998). Zimmerman, M., ‘Western Francia: the southern principalities’, in NCMH iii, 420–455. Zimmerman, M., Écrire et Lire en Catalogne (ixe–xiie siècle), 2 vols (Madrid, 2003).

Chapter 7

‘He lashed his mawlā with a whip, and shaved his head’: Masculinity and Hierarchy in Early Andalusi Chronicles Nicola Clarke Over the past thirty years, scholars have made considerable strides towards writing the history of women back into that of the medieval Islamic world in general,1 and of al-Andalus in particular.2 Building on pioneering work by the likes of Huda Lutfi,3 assumptions about the invisibility of all but a handful of remarkable women have been challenged through explorations of the way that individuals – whether women or men – negotiated, exploited or subverted the gendered frameworks of power in society. While it is undeniably true that medieval Arabic chronicles focus overwhelmingly on men4 – and a small social and political elite of men at that, primarily urban and educated – studies on topics such as women’s labour inside and outside the home (including the right of women to be paid for the labour of breastfeeding their children),5 divorce (women turning the law to their advantage by using serial marriages to

1 N.R. Keddie and B. Baron (eds), Women in Middle Eastern History: shifting boundaries in sex and gender (New Haven, CT, 1991); G.R.G. Hambly (ed.), Women in the Medieval Islamic World (New York, 1998); M. Marín and R. Deguilhem (eds), Writing the Feminine: women in Arab sources (London, 2002); Amira El-Azhary Sonbol (ed.), Beyond the Exotic: women’s histories in Islamic societies (Syracuse, NY, 2005). 2 M.J. Viguera Molins, La mujer en al-Andalus. Reflejos históricos de su actividad y categorías sociales (Madrid, 1989); M. Marín, Mujeres en al-Andalus, Estudios Onomástico-Biográficos de al-Andalus, xi (Madrid, 2000). 3 H. Lutfi, ‘Al-Sakhāwī’s Kitāb al-nisāʾ as a source for the social and economic history of Muslim women during the fifteenth century ad’, The Muslim World 71 (1981), 104–24; eadem, ‘A study of six fourteenth century iqrārs from al-Quds relating to Muslim women’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 26 (1983), 246–94. 4 M.J. Viguera Molins, ‘A borrowed space: Andalusi and Maghribi women in chronicles’, in Marín and Deguilhem, Writing the Feminine, 165–82, at 166. 5 M. Shatzmiller, ‘Women and wage labour in the medieval Islamic west: legal issues in an economic context’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 40 (1997), 174–206.

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improve their social status and economic prosperity),6 and education­7 have allowed us to glimpse a much wider range of women than ever before; so, too, has work on biographical dictionaries.8 Other scholars have read against the grain of foundational and classical texts, whether to complicate the picture of a rigid and unchanging social and legal sex segregation in medieval society, call for reform in the present, or both.9 It is over thirty years since Joan Scott urged historians to take a step back and examine gender in a broader sense, arguing that while it is vital that we write women back into history, we cannot adequately think about women, or femininity, in isolation.10 Expectations attached to masculinity are implicit in any statement made about femininity, because each of these things gains its meaning from the other.11 Gender is both a product and a producer of power relations: it is a set of roles, behaviours, and expectations, ostensibly tied to the sexed body,12 whose performance governs an individual’s interactions with other individuals, groups, and institutions. It is also a key component of selfidentity, as Judith Butler has argued.13 6 7

Y. Rapoport, Marriage, Money and Divorce in Medieval Islamic Society (Cambridge, 2005). J.P. Berkey, ‘Women and Islamic education in the Mamluk period’, in Keddie and Baron, Women in Middle Eastern History, 143–57; A. Sayeed, ‘Women and ḥadīth transmission: two case studies from Mamluk Damascus’, Studia Islamica 95 (2002), 71–94. 8 A. Afsaruddin, ‘Reconstituting women’s lives: gender and the poetics of narrative in medieval biographical collections’, The Muslim World 92 (2002), 461–80. 9 F. Malti-Douglas, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Word: Gender and Discourse in Arabo-Islamic Writings (Princeton, NJ, 1991); F. Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite (New York, 1991); L. Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: historical roots of a modern debate (New Haven, CT, 1992); D.A. Spellberg, Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: the legacy of ’A’isha bint Abi Bakr (New York, 1994); A. Geissinger, Gender and Muslim Constructions of Exegetical Authority: a re-reading of the classical genre of Qurʾān commentary (Leiden, 2015). 10 J.W. Scott, ‘Gender: a useful category of historical analysis’, American Historical Review (1986), 1054–56; R.W. Connell and J.W. Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity: rethinking the concept’, Gender and Society 19 (2005), 829–59, at 837. 11 D.S. Ahmed, ‘Gender and Islamic spirituality: a psychological view of “low” fundamentalism’, in L. Ouzgane (ed.), Islamic Masculinities (London and New York, 2006), 11–34, at 15. 12 Scott, ‘Gender’, 1056. Even biological sex is less binary than it might appear, as the sexing of the body is not stable either, due to cultural constructions of sex and the existence of, for example, intersex individuals. See J. Butler, Gender Trouble (New York and London, 2006), 175–81; K.S. Lesick, ‘Re-engendering: some theoretical and methodological concerns of a burgeoning archaeological pursuit’, in J. Moore and E. Scott (eds), Invisible People and Processes: writing gender and childhood into European archaeology (London, 1997), 31–41, at 34–5. 13 Butler, Gender Trouble, 185–6. I used ‘sexed body’ in preference to ‘biological sex’ for the reasons given by Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne, ‘Introduction’, in A. Cornwall and N. Lindisfarne (eds), Dislocating Masculinity: comparative ethnographies (London and New York, 1994), 1–10, at 9–10.

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As such, gender shapes the inner and outer lives of men every bit as much as it does those of women,14 and it is essential to study men, as men: as gendered beings, not as an unexamined default whose standards and values are taken for granted.15 Although much of masculinity’s power lies in its claims to universality, in reality it is every bit as contingent and changeable as constructions of femininity,16 the result of a complex process of negotiation between individuals, institutions, and traditions.17 Moreover, while gender’s most obvious expression lies in the written and unwritten rules of society, by which relations between men and women are conducted, that is not the only context in which it operates. It also plays into relationships among men in ways that can both reinforce and undercut other forms of social hierarchy, most notably in the privileging of certain forms of masculinity over others, giving rise to what R.W. Connell has labelled ‘hegemonic masculinity’, or the most culturally favoured way to be a man in a given setting.18 It is in the interaction between dominant and subordinated masculinities that we can see where social power lies, and explore the language and ritual used to express it.19 In medieval Islamic law, gender determined what someone was and was not permitted to do: what spaces they could move in, what their rights and obligations were, with whom they could interact; even who was allowed to wash their body after death. At least in theory, boundaries between the sexes – like boundaries between religious communities, or between free and unfree individuals20 – were seen as indispensable to the proper ordering of society. This concern with maintaining boundaries can be seen among writers of ḥisba literature (marketplace regulations), like Ibn ʿAbdūn (fl. early 12th century, Seville), who cautions against the free mixing of men with women, Muslims with

14 15 16 17 18 19 20

L. Abu-Lughod, ‘Islam and the gendered discourse of death’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 25 (1993), 187–205, at 189. S. Kingsley Kent, Gender and History (Basingstoke, 2012), 66; T. Fenster, ‘Preface: why men?’, in C.A. Lees (ed.), Medieval Masculinities: regarding men in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis, MN, 1994), ix-xiii, at x. Cornwall and Lindisfarne, ‘Introduction’, 3. Z. Mir-Hosseini, ‘The construction of gender in Islamic legal thought and strategies for reform’, Hawwa 1 (2003), 1–28, at 2. R.W. Connell, Gender and Power: society, the person and sexual politics (Cambridge, 1987), 183–4. Cornwall and Lindisfarne, ‘Introduction’, 3–4. The literature on this in the context of interfaith relations is enormous; two of the more recent discussions in the context of al-Andalus are J. Safran, Defining Boundaries in alAndalus: Muslims, Christians and Jews in Islamic Iberia (Ithaca, NY, 2013) and S. Barton, Conquerors, Brides and Concubines: interfaith relations and social power in medieval Iberia (Philadelphia, PA, 2015).

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non-Muslims, and respectable people with the lowly likes of policemen.21 Gender, therefore, was central to an individual’s identity and to their functioning in society.22 Yet while gender theory has been embraced by many fields of history, medieval Islamicists have continued to treat ‘gender’ as largely synonymous with ‘women’, a practice that, as Julia Bray has noted, only tells part of the story.23 This is, however, changing. Recent volumes have looked at ­masculinity – or rather a plurality of different masculinities – in the Islamic world, albeit primarily in a modern context,24 while individual scholars have also explored masculinity through the lens of historical sexuality,25 or modern legal systems.26 Just because much of our source material takes masculinity as a universal and unitary given, it does not follow that we are obliged to do the same. In this chapter, then, I shall explore the presentation of masculinity and social power in three case studies from the annals of early medieval al-Andalus. All three are portraits of asymmetrical relationships between a pair of prominent (but not equally prominent) men: that is, of interaction between men of different social and political rank. After expanding on some of the general ­discussion of scholarly approaches to gender outlined above, I will begin by discussing the fractious patron-client alliance that united Mūsā b. Nuṣayr and Ṭāriq b. Ziyād, conquerors of the Iberian Peninsula in the year 711 and – in most accounts – rivals for the treasure and the credit of the enterprise. Secondly, I will move forward one hundred years, to the Umayyad court of Cordoba and the interplay between the Umayyad amīr ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ii (822–52) and his favourite singer, Ziryāb. Finally, I shall look at Ibn Ḥayyān’s (d. 1076) commentary on the relationship between ʿAbd al-Raḥmān iii (912–61), the first of the Cordoban Umayyads to adopt the title of caliph, and his son and heir, the future al-Ḥakam ii (961–76). In order to sketch these relationships, I shall concentrate on Andalusi Arabic chronicles from the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries – this being the earliest period from which we have surviving texts,

21 22 23 24 25

26

Ibn ʿAbdūn, Risāla fi-l-qada wa-l-muḥtasib, ed. E. Lévi-Provençal, Journal Asiatique AvrilJuin (1934), 177–299, at 235–7, 240–1, and 242, respectively. P. Sanders, ‘Gendering the ungendered body: hermaphrodites in medieval Islamic law’, in Keddie and Baron, Women in Middle Eastern History, 75–95, at 74–5 and 88. J. Bray, ‘The family in the medieval Islamic world’, History Compass 9 (2011), 731–42, at 731. M. Ghoussoub and E. Sinclair-Webb (eds), Imagined Masculinities: male identity and culture in the modern Middle East (London, 2000); Ouzgane, Islamic Masculinities. E.K. Rowson, ‘The categorization of gender and sexual irregularity in medieval Arabic vice lists’, in J. Epstein and K. Straub (eds), Body Guards: the cultural politics of gender ambiguity (London and New York, 1991), 50–79; R. Roded, ‘Alternate images of the Prophet Muhammad’s virility’, in Ouzgane, Islamic Masculinities, 57–71. A.M. Abdel Halim, ‘A home for obedience: masculinity in personal status for Muslims law’, Hawwa 9 (2011), 194–214.

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and most likely also the earliest period in which chronicles were composed at all in al-Andalus – although I will also look ahead to variations in the way these figures were constructed in later works. In all three cases, I will highlight the cues the chronicles offer to help us understand the values that mattered to their audiences, with a particular focus on how gender and gendered performance intersected with political and social hierarchy. 1

Medieval Islamic Masculinities

Before we turn to the examples from the chronicles, it is necessary to explore in more depth the ways in which masculinity has been explored in other fields, and offer some suggestions as to how this may be applied to medieval Islam. We do, of course, have to be careful about drawing upon theories of gender formulated in a modern western scholarly context.27 If gender is situational, born of the values and perceptions of specific historical contexts and traditions,28 we must avoid – as far as possible – importing assumptions that may not fit our chosen area of focus. If generalising across, say, a modern ­nation-state is risky – since gender is intersected and inflected by other aspects of personal status and identity, such as class, ethnicity, or institutional affiliations29 – it is even more so when we seek to discuss an entire culture, spread across three continents and multiple centuries, such as Islam. Lahoucine Ouzgane calls masculinity ‘a set of distinctive practices defined by men’s positionings within a variety of social structures’,30 and it is vital to keep the plurality in view when we talk about gender theory in general, or a specific manifestation of it.

27 28 29

30

A. El-Azhary Sonbol, ‘Introduction’, in eadem, Beyond the Exotic, xvii-xxxviii, at xvii-xviii; A. Najmabadi, ‘Beyond the Americas: are gender and sexuality useful categories of analysis?’, Journal of Women’s History 18 (2006), 11–21. D.M. Hadley, ‘Introduction: medieval masculinities’, in eadem (ed.), Masculinity in Medieval Europe (London and New York, 1999), 1–18, at 2. Cornwall and Lindisfarne, ‘Introduction’, 4–5; P. Lozios, ‘A broken mirror: masculine sexuality in Greek ethnography’, in Cornwall and Lindisfarne, Dislocating Masculinities, 66–81; for a more systematic exploration of the problems of intersectionality, see K. Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalising the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics’, The University of Chicago Legal Forum 140 (1989), 139–67. L. Ouzgane, ‘Islamic masculinities: an introduction’, in Ouzgane, Islamic Masculinities, 1–7, at 2.

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The deployment of masculinity (or masculinities) as a category of analysis centres on the idea that gender is not a biological ‘fact’, but a historicallycontingent­language of symbolic power.31 Investigating masculinity means looking at those aspects of a man’s social being that define him as a man: what Rosalind O’Hanlon, in her work on Mughal manhood, has called the ‘psychic and social investment’ that sustains a man’s sense of his gender,32 such as how that identity is understood and expressed, and what rights and responsibilities go along with it. Perhaps the most influential – though not uncontested – scholarly formulation of this has been R.W. Connell’s concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’. Drawing on Gramsci’s study of class relations in Italy, Connell has argued that gendering is a historical process, not an inevitable and selfreproducing system, in which the social ascendancy of certain models of manhood is achieved through largely consensual, non-coercive means (though often with an implicit possibility of violence).33 This ascendancy is enacted in a variety of social, political, economic and cultural contexts, and can be seen in both relations both between and within genders. The form of masculinity with the greatest cultural capital in any given context is defined by the traits, preferences and roles of elite men within it, even if we sometimes see it most clearly through its negative image – that is, through what is condemned as deviant and/or feminine.34 Latin European ideas of manhood towards the end of the period under discussion in this chapter set much store by the fathering and financial support of a wife and (legitimate, male) children, presenting those who did not or could not fit the model – celibate monks,35 apprentices,36 sons who remained dependent on their fathers37 – with significant problems when establishing their place in the masculine social hierarchy. The fact that Christian monks and clergy were celibate, for example, led to the stereotyping of them as simultaneously both effeminate and dangerous to leave alone with 31 32

Scott, ‘Gender’, 1067–9, 1072. R. O’Hanlon, ‘Manliness and imperial service in Mughal north India’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 42 (1999), 47–93, at 48. 33 Connell, Gender and Power, 184. 34 E. Sinclair-Webb, ‘Preface’, in Ghoussoub and Sinclair-Webb, Imagined Masculinities, 7–16, at 13. 35 V.L. Bullough, ‘On being a male in the Middle Ages’, in Lees, Medieval Masculinities, 31–45, esp. 34; A. Holt, ‘Between warrior and priest: the creation of a new masculine identity during the Crusades’, in J.D. Thibodeaux (ed.), Negotiating clerical identities: priests, monks and masculinity in the Middle Ages (Basingstoke, 2010), 185–203, at 187–8. 36 Hadley, ‘Introduction’, 5–6. 37 W.M. Aird, ‘Frustrated masculinity: the relationship between William the Conqueror and his eldest son’, in Hadley, Masculinity in Medieval Europe, 39–55, at 43–7.

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women.38 The latter concern can also be seen in Andalusi Arabic texts: Ibn ʿAbdūn fulminates against good Muslim women entering Christian churches, because such places are a hotbed of alcohol and sex; priests, he says, are fornicators (zunāh) and sodomites (lūṭa).39 Hegemonic masculinity is thus best understood as a standard against which all men are judged, by others and by themselves, not necessarily the way all men act all the time: it is a public status whose successful performance relies in part upon recognition and acceptance by other men,40 and an understanding of the self that is subject to conscious and unconscious self-policing, akin to Michel Foucault’s conception of the social order that maintains itself through a belief in, rather than the reality of, surveillance.41 Hegemonic masculinity is by definition unattainable in its entirety; it is something to be striven for and judged against.42 In this respect, perhaps, the Prophet Muḥammad is the perfect example, a paradigm for Muslim men to measure their masculinity against, whether in terms of prodigious sexuality, sweeping military success, noble lineage (nasab), or the more nebulous matrix of good qualities known as murūʾa.43 Indeed, murūʾa – often glossed simply, and tellingly, as ‘manliness’ – is an excellent example of how hegemonic masculinity could change over time, the qualities associated with it shifting over the early centuries of Islam from wealth and status, to Quranic piety, to political skill, to polished conduct and good manners (adab).44 Medieval juristic conceptions of masculinity, meanwhile, privileged eloquence and reason – rather than, say, physical strength – since those were the skills that enabled a jurist to succeed in his profession; femininity, correspondingly, was identifiable by irrationality.45 It is not difficult to see the potential downside of being presented with such lofty goals; the expectations of masculinity confined and even harmed boys and men, even as it privileged them. For example, the assumption that masculine sexuality was active and centrally about penetrating – and that masculinity, 38

R.N. Swanson, ‘Angels incarnate: clergy and masculinity from Gregorian Reform to Reformation’, in Hadley, Masculinity in Medieval Europe, 160–77, at 168–71. 39 Ibn ʿAbdūn, Risāla, 239. 40 O’Hanlon, ‘Manliness and imperial service’, 49. 41 M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London, 1991), 201–4, 208–9. The duty incumbent upon all believing Muslims to ‘command the right and forbid the wrong’ may in some senses have contributed to a feeling of watching and being watched in medieval society. 42 Connell, Gender and Power, 184–5. 43 Roded, ‘The Prophet Muhammad’s virility’, 57–9. 44 B. Farés, ‘Murūʾa’, Encyclopedia of Islam (2nd edn, Leiden, 1954–2005), vii, 636–8, at 636–7. 45 Geissinger, Exegetical Authority, 52–3.

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within the Islamic world as within Europe, could be measured in fertility, as will be discussed in the final section of this chapter – caused serious problems for men who were victims of rape or sexual coercion.46 If penetration had taken place, went the reasoning of Mālikism, the dominant legal discourse in alAndalus, the man concerned must have taken pleasure in it, and be punished accordingly for fornication or adultery.47 Expression of emotion, too, could be problematic; mourning the dead is viewed with suspicion in Prophetic ḥadīth current in al-Andalus,48 but in many contexts it has been something women have (uneasy) licence to do, while men – for whom public piety is more important – do not.49 Gender is not immune to challenge: competing models of masculinity may be subordinated by the power of the elite, but they can never be suppressed entirely. Manuela Marín warns against treating ‘women’ as a unitary category in Andalusi social history, however much medieval texts try to make it so,50 and the same certainly goes for ‘men’. Indeed, Aisha Geissinger has suggested that when looking at gender in medieval Islam it might be more useful to think in terms of a gender spectrum – albeit a hierarchical one – rather than a binary division.51 While – as discussed above – binaries are important within many strands of Islamic thought,52 legal and social space has also been made for intersex individuals,53 as discussed above, and also for mukhannathūn, a term that Everett Rowson translates as ‘effeminates’ (men who adopted dress and mannerisms associated with women, without taking on a transgendered identity, as such).54 The Galenic ‘one-sex’ model upon which many medieval Muslim medical writers drew for their ideas about men, women and sexual

46

Rowson, ‘The categorization of gender and sexual irregularity’, 54; Geissinger, Exegetical Authority, 64; for a more general discussion of medieval Islamic sexuality, see F. Rosenthal, ‘Fiction and reality: sources for the role of sex in medieval Muslim society’, in A. Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot (ed.), Society and the Sexes in Medieval Islam (Malibu, 1979), 3–22. 47 D. Serrano, ‘Rape in Maliki legal doctrine and practice (8th–15th centuries c.e.)’, Hawwa 5 (2007), 166–207, at 175. 48 Al-Muwaṭṭaʾ of Imam Mālik b. Anas: Arabic and English, ed. and trans. A. Abdurrahman Bewley (Norwich, 2014), §16.12. 49 Abu-Lughod, ‘Islam and the gendered discourse’, 193, 196 (a modern ethnographic study). 50 M. Marín, ‘Women, gender and sexuality’, in nchi, vol. 4, ed. R. Irwin (Cambridge, 2010), 355–79, at 355–6. 51 Geissinger, Exegetical Authority, 34–7. 52 Ahmed, ‘Gender and Islamic spirituality’, 19. 53 Sanders, ‘Gendering the ungendered body’, 80–5. 54 E.K. Rowson, ‘The effeminates of early Medina’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 111 (1991), 671–93, at 672–5.

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reproduction,55 moreover, also lends itself rather better to a spectrum of gender rather than a binary. Nonetheless, the lengths to which legal texts go to find ways to gender individuals – even to the extent of accepting the testimony of slave girls, not generally a social group whose views are given much weight in legal thought – speaks to scholars’ fear of the social disorder represented by people who have not been categorised as male or female.56 Gendered assumptions and practices are inextricably bound up with both the conceptualisation and the symbols of political and social hierarchy, and they shaped how men (and women) in the medieval Muslim world lived their lives. In order to explore this, I shall now move on to look at literary representations of three key types of relationship between men in al-Andalus: patronclient; ruler-favourite; and father-son. 2

Patron and Client: Mūsā and Ṭāriq

The Mālikī jurist Ibn Ḥabīb (d. 852), the earliest Andalusi chronicler of Andalusi history, rounds off his account of the conquest of Iberia with an episode in which the new caliph, Sulaymān b. ʿAbd al-Malik (715–17), interrogates the returning conqueror Mūsā b. Nuṣayr. With what initially seems idle curiosity, but gradually becomes more aggressive and sinister, Sulaymān asks Mūsā a series of questions about his experiences in the west. One such question is about the Berbers, among whom Mūsā, as the governor of the Maghrib, has spent several years; Sulaymān wishes to know what they are like. ‘They are the people most like the Arabs’, replies Mūsā, ‘in their courage, endurance, steadfastness, and horsemanship, but they have no care for loyalty, or keeping pacts’.57 In my previous work, I have been most interested in the part of this formulation that touches upon questions of ethnic stereotyping,58 but in this chapter I want to draw attention to the positive qualities assigned to the Berbers. All of the Andalusi chronicles that describe the conquest discuss the tension that emerged within the patron-client partnership at the head of the Muslim armies, between Mūsā and his mawlā (client, pl. mawālī), the Berber Ṭāriq 55

56 57 58

S. Sayed Gadelrab, ‘Discourses on sex difference in medieval scholarly Islamic thought’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 66 (2010), 40–81, at 51–2 (noting, on pages 40–1, that medieval Islamic ideas on this topic were far from coherent, or unified); on how ideas about foetal development fit into this, see U. Weisser, ‘The embryology of Yūḥannā ibn Māsawaih’, Journal of the History of Arabic Science 4 (1980), 9–22. Sanders, ‘Gendering the ungendered body’, 84–5. Ibn Ḥabīb, Kitāb al-taʾrīkh, ed. J. Aguadé (Madrid, 1991), 148. N. Clarke, ‘“They are the most treacherous of people”: religious difference in Arabic accounts of three early medieval Berber revolts’, eHumanista 24 (2013), 1–16.

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b. Ziyād.59 Ṭāriq is the first of the pair to enter Iberia, and he enjoys a charmed expedition across the Peninsula (or perhaps a blessed one, since in some retellings he is visited by the Prophet Muḥammad in a dream).60 Hearing of the riches Ṭāriq has gained, his patron Mūsā hastens across the Straits the following year, annoyed that his client is getting all the glory, and the pair confront each other at Toledo. As Ṭāriq’s patron, Mūsā could well expect to benefit from his client’s labours; a patron was entitled to inherit a share of his or her clients’ property,61 and Mūsā was not alone in this period in using his mawālī as his own private frontier army,62 a source of some concern for the Umayyad caliphs. But there was also a pervasive assumption of a sharp social hierarchy between patron and client. Clientage was, at least in the early period, inextricably linked with ethnic difference and prejudice against non-Arabs;63 as a key element of non-Arab religious conversion, it promised access to higher status and better resources, but entailed a legal subordination to a patron.64 While Mūsā was not an Arab, the fact that he was responsible for Ṭāriq’s entry into Muslim society gave him authority over Ṭāriq, something which is expressed in a ritualised – and, I would argue, gendered – way in the texts.65 Ninth-century accounts describe the conflict between Mūsā and Ṭāriq largely in terms of inter-personal tension, between a superior and a subordinate jostling for position. Both Ibn Ḥabīb and his Egyptian contemporary Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam (d. 870) – another Mālikī jurist by profession – dwell on Mūsā’s anger during the confrontation at Toledo, and the fact that Ṭāriq defuses this by ‘appeasing’ Mūsā and ‘yielding’ to him,66 acknowledging and demonstrating his subordinate relationship to his patron, through the deferential behaviour 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

For a more detailed bibliography on patronage in al-Andalus and in the Muslim world more broadly, see N. Clarke, The Muslim Conquest of Iberia: Medieval Arabic Narratives (London, 2012), Ch. 3. Fatḥ al-Andalus, ed. L. Molina (Madrid, 1994), 17. M. Fierro, ‘Mawālī and muwalladūn in al-Andalus (second/eighth-fourth/tenth centuries)’, in M. Bernards and J. Nawas (eds.), Patronate and Patronage in Early and Classical Islam (Leiden, 2005), 195–245, at 199. I. Hasson, ‘Les mawālī dans l’armée musulmane sous les premiers Umayyādes’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 14 (1991), 176–211, at 183. When asked how many mawālī he has, Mūsā says several thousand: Ibn Ḥabīb, Kitāb al-taʾrīkh, 148. R.P. Mottahedeh, ‘The shuʿūbīyah controversy and the social history of early Islamic law’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 7 (1976), 161–82. J.A. Coope, ‘Religious and Cultural Conversion to Islam in Ninth-Century Umayyad Córdoba’, Journal of World History 4 (1993), 47–68, at 48 and 56. Cornwall and Lindisfarne, ‘Introduction’, 8: ‘Social boundaries which protect material and other privileges of superiors are often defined by gender markers’. Ibn Ḥabīb, Kitāb al-taʾrīkh, 138; Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam, Futūḥ Miṣr, ed. C.C. Torrey (New Haven, CT, 1922), 207.

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typical of a lower-status man in a masculine hierarchy.67 Both authors also touch upon the fact that Ṭāriq’s success belongs to his patron, because of the asymmetrical relationship between them; Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam underlines how the confrontation restores the relationship’s equilibrium with a direct statement to this effect from Ṭāriq: ‘I am your mawlā’, he tells Mūsā, ‘and this conquest is yours’.68 Legalistic formulations like this are even more important in tenth-century versions of events, as the Umayyad court at Cordoba began to take a greater interest in the writing of conquest narratives. In the chronicle of Ibn al-Qūṭīya (d. 977), a pair of prospective Visigothic allies of the invading force – disaffected young sons of the previous king, cheated of their birthright by the usurper Roderic – display an unexpected perspicacity with regards to the forms and procedures of early Islamic society, taking care to check whether Ṭāriq has the authority to make them promises of safe conduct. Ṭāriq duly spells out the hierarchy of command – himself, then Mūsā, then the caliph – and writes to Damascus for the appropriate authorisation.69 Gendered behavioural markers also became more pronounced when the story told above was rewritten for new audiences. Ibn Ḥabīb’s ninth-century text alludes to the power dynamics between his protagonists with an anecdote about Mūsā’s father, the main point of which is that he prompts the caliph Muʿāwiya (661–680) to quote a proverb: ‘It is better to receive a blow from a sword when one is strong, than a blow from a whip when one is in disgrace’.70 Later chronicles, like the anonymous Akhbār Majmūʿa, drop the allusive proverb in favour of a rather more direct dramatization of its message. In such texts Mūsā actually hits Ṭāriq with his whip (‘fa-waḍaʿa Mūsā al-sūṭa ʿalā raʾsihi’), aligning Ṭāriq with the emasculated and legally inferior status of a slave.71 The choice of verb here is interesting: while the more common ḍaraba could have been used to convey the meaning of striking someone with something, waḍaʿa carries additional overtones, when used with a direct object, of humiliation or degradation. Whereas in ninth-century accounts Ṭāriq ‘receives’ Mūsā, suggesting that the confrontation happens in a semi-private space (and on Ṭāriq’s terms), in later versions Ṭāriq leaves the city to meet Mūsā, turning it into an overtly ­public – and therefore unquestionably male-identified – display. When the 67 68 69 70 71

D. Kandiyoti, ‘The paradoxes of masculinity: some thoughts on segregated societies’, in Cornwall and Lindisfarne, Dislocating Masculinities, 197–213, at 208. Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam, Futūḥ Miṣr, 207. Ibn al-Qūṭīya, Taʾrīkh iftitāḥ al-Andalus, in J. Ribera (ed.), Historia de la conquista de España (Madrid, 1926), 3–4. Ibn Ḥabīb, Kitāb al-taʾrīkh, 139. Akhbār majmūʿa, ed. E. Lafuente y Alcántara (Madrid, 1867), 18–9.

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two meet, we are told in the Akhbār Majmūʿa, Ṭāriq dismounts from his horse, while Mūsā does not.72 This is Ṭāriq performing the humility of the subordinated man: accused of overstepping his social bounds,73 he literally places himself on a lower footing than his patron, and publically cedes the ground of masculinity to Mūsā.74 We have already seen that horsemanship was an admired quality, linked with the masculine virtues of bravery and endurance; Ibn al-Qūṭīya, moreover, underlines the connection between riding and adult male status when he notes that Ṭāriq’s Visigothic allies, though young, had the capacity to make decisions for themselves because they had grown old enough to ride their own horses.75 In several accounts, moreover, the Visigothic king Roderic’s impotence in the face of his Muslim enemies is illustrated by his inability to control his horse; riding out decked in jewels to face Ṭāriq’s army, he meets his end when his mount becomes stuck in the mud of the riverbank, and he is thrown from the saddle and drowns.76 Other writers go further. In the now-lost text of Aḥmad al-Rāzī (d. 955), as quoted by Ibn ʿIdhārī (d.c. 1307), Mūsā even shaves Ṭāriq’s head and face. While a pilgrim on the ḥajj might shave his head as part of the associated rituals, Mūsā’s gesture of cutting off Ṭāriq’s beard is beyond the pale: a strike against the ultimate symbol of adult masculinity.77 Medical scholars explained the beard as something exclusive to masculine physiology, comparable to the womb for women;78 Mālik b. Anas’ (d. 795) Muwaṭṭaʾ, a foundational text for Islamic law in the Iberian Peninsula, cites a ḥadīth advising men to trim their moustache but warning them to leave their beards alone;79 in homoerotic literature, moreover, the smooth cheeks of beardless boys aligned them with 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

Ibid., 18. Something made explicit in Ibn ʿIdhārī, Kitāb al-bayān al-mughrib, ed. G.S. Colin and E. Lévi-Provençal, 2 vols (Leiden, 1948–51), vol. 2, 16, where Mūsā is looking to reassert his precedence (‘taqaddum’). Aird, ‘Frustrated masculinity’, 39, notes that in the context of Norman England, dismounting from one’s horse was a way for a (rebellious) son to show deference to an angry father. Ibn al-Qūṭīya, Taʾrīkh iftitāḥ al-Andalus, 3. For example, ibid., 7; Akhbār Majmūʿa, 9. The Persian exegete al-Zamakhsharī (d. 1143) defines men as people who possess beards and turbans; Geissinger, Exegetical Authority, 44–5. Ibn ʿIdhārī, Kitāb al-bayān al-mughrib, vol. 2, 16; Gadelrab, ‘Discourses on sex difference’, 77. Mālik b. Anas, Muwaṭṭaʾ, §51.1; a few paragraphs later, under the same heading, an opinion is cited disapproving of castration, because it destroys the completeness of the created being (‘kāla yakrahu al-ikhṣā’a, wa-yaqūlu: fīhi tamām al-khalq’). The juxtaposition of beards and genitalia, here, presents a clear message: beards were symbols of manhood.

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­feminine beauty.80 Mūsā, by contrast to his forcibly shaven subordinate, has a separate adventure in the Akhbār Majmūʿa, in which his beard plays a pivotal role: it is variously dyed, in secret, to represent the vibrancy of youth or the wisdom of age, thus always displaying his adult masculine status to the duly tricked and suitably cowed inhabitants of the city, Merida, that he is besieging.81 While in most versions of the conquest narrative, Mūsā initially gains the upper hand – and more than his fair share of the conquest loot – through the public dressing-down of his mawlā at Toledo, things do not end this way. The tension between the pair is ultimately resolved in Ṭāriq’s favour. While Ṭāriq represents a subordinated masculinity, that does not automatically mean he lacks agency;82 nevertheless, he must resort to the feminine tactic of guile to challenge and subvert Mūsā’s social power as his patron.83 He outwits Mūsā with a clever ruse involving the treasure known as the ‘Table of Solomon’, which he found during the conquest but which Mūsā stole from him. Having secretly swapped one of the Table’s golden legs for a dummy version, Ṭāriq exposes Mūsā’s lies in front of the caliph in Damascus, producing the real leg after Mūsā expresses ignorance when the caliph asks why the legs do not match. Mūsā is shamed, and Ṭāriq is rewarded. 3

Ruler and Favourite: ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ii and Ziryāb

While the relationship that I have chosen as my second example is more outwardly harmonious, and the gender cues differ somewhat, the basic dynamic remains comparable: a low-status man, the courtier Ziryāb, is elevated through a social alliance with a higher-status man, the amīr ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ii, but in return he is required to perform his subordination. Unlike Ṭāriq, however, he does not have a triumphant narrative arc in which his true qualities are recognised, except in the sense that Ziryāb’s reputation as a musician grew after his death; the anecdotes and poetic fragments that the sources have to offer about Ziryāb tend to culminate in stark reminders of his social place. The gendered dynamic in this case is arguably more explicit, since the low-status man is not 80 81 82 83

Rowson, ‘The categorization of gender and sexual irregularity’, 58. Akhbār Majmūʿa, 17–8. Connell and Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic masculinity’, 847–8. Afsaneh Najmabadi, ‘Reading “Wiles of Women” stories as fictions of masculinity’, in Ghoussoub and Sinclair-Webb, Imagined Masculinities, 147–68, at 147. Women were believed to be cowardly and to rely on cunning due to the predominance of cold humours in their physiology (as opposed to, say, their lack of access to power); Gadelrab, ‘Discourses on sex difference’, 65.

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just a courtly intimate of the amīr – there were, after all, plenty of those – but a court entertainer. Specifically, Ziryāb is a singer, a profession proverbially associated with alluringly beautiful slave-girls.84 ʿAlī b. Nāfiʿ (d. 852), nicknamed Ziryāb (variously linked to ‘lark’ or ‘blackbird’) for his singing voice, was a migrant from the east, and a glittering figure in Andalusi cultural history. He arrived in 822, having apparently fallen out with his previous patrons – or perhaps his jealous rivals for their attention – at the ʿAbbāsid court in Baghdad.85 In the accounts of later medieval and early modern writers, such as that of the historian and literary anthologist alMaqqarī (d. 1632), Ziryāb appears as an almost revolutionary presence in elite circles, a trend-setter extraordinaire who captivates the amīr and brings fashion, glamour and improved hygiene to the benighted Cordoban backwater. As Dwight Reynolds has convincingly demonstrated, however, much of his sparkle comes from the romantic nostalgia of the period after the Umayyad caliphate’s eleventh-century collapse.86 Ziryāb’s story grew in the telling: while Ibn Ḥayyān goes to some lengths to outline Ziryāb’s cultivation, his musical innovation,87 and his influence on food,88 perfume,89 and clothing trends,90 neither he nor the anonymous text he used as a source go so far as al-Maqqarī, who claims that Ziryāb single-handedly changed elite hairstyles. In fact, as Reynolds observes, al-Maqqarī is rather selective in his quoting; Ibn Ḥayyān says only that Ziryāb set the fashion for what the elite did with the hairstyles of their slaves.91

84 85

86 87 88 89 90

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D. Reynolds, ‘Music’, in M.R. Menocal, R.P. Scheindlin and M. Sells (eds), The Literature of al-Andalus (Cambridge, 2000), 60–82, at 71. Ibn Ḥayyān, Al-Sifr al-thānī min kitāb al-muqtabas li-Ibn Ḥayyān al-Qurṭubī, ed. Maḥmūd ʿAlī Makkī (Riyadh, 2003), 309–13; cf. Ibn Ḥayyān, Al-Muqtabis al-thānī: anales de los Emires de Córdoba Alhaquém i (180–206 H. / 796–822 J.C.) y Abderramán ii (206–232 H. / 822–847), facs. ed. Joaquín Vallvé Bermejo (Madrid, 1999), ff. 147v–148v. Since the critical edition (2003) is still not accessible to many scholars, I will also supply references to the more widely distributed facsimile edition (1999), in parentheses. D.F. Reynolds, ‘Al-Maqqarī’s Ziryāb: the making of a myth’, Middle Eastern Literatures 11 (2008), 155–68. Ibn Ḥayyān, Al-Sifr al-thānī, 316–7 (al-Muqtabis al-thānī, f. 150r). Ibid., 321–3 (al-Muqtabis al-thānī, ff. 151r–151v). Ibid., 314 (al-Muqtabis al-thānī, f. 149r). Ibid., 323–4 (al-Muqtabis al-thānī, f. 151v). This is another aspect of Ziryāb’s gendering within a non-hegemonic form of masculinity, since excessive attention to rich clothing was seen as too worldly and therefore too feminine for pious youths; H. Hirsch, ‘Outward appearance of children in medieval Muslim legal texts: modesty, adornment and gender’, History and Anthropology 25 (2014), 614–26, at 618 and 623. Reynolds, ‘Al-Maqqarī’s Ziryāb’, 163; Ibn Ḥayyān, Al-Sifr al-thānī, 319–20 (al-Muqtabis althānī, f. 150v).

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This last point seems a fairer reflection of the status Ziryāb had in his own day. Early medieval chronicles discuss him almost exclusively in the context of his singing, an activity gendered as feminine, taking place in the relative privacy of the court and associated with those objects of poetic yearning and objectification, women and beautiful young men; in Ibn Ḥayyān’s chronicle, he is grouped with other singers, most of whom are women.92 Ziryāb was an undoubtedly impressive example of medieval social advancement, being the black son of a poor convert – likely once a slave – but the means of his advancement put him in an awkward gendered space: he made his fortune and raised his social profile by performing other people’s words for elite men, rather than (as is more usual in early medieval accounts of courtly interactions between rulers and their male boon-companions) writing them himself. According­ to Ibn Ḥayyān and others, Ziryāb’s rivals at the court targeted him with racist slurs and mocked his lowly origins93 – since, like Ṭāriq, Ziryāb was a nonArab mawlā. His contemporary Ibn Ḥabīb, the historian and jurist whom we met above, apparently complained that Ziryāb earned more money from the caliph’s largesse – including a stipend of some two hundred dinars a month – than he did, even though Ziryāb was a mere singer.94 The snobbery is plain.95 One interesting anecdote about Ziryāb’s relationship with ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ii, and in particular the gifts he received from the amīr, appears in the chronicle of Ibn al-Qūṭīya. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ii is portrayed, by Ibn al-Qūṭīya and other tenth-century writers, as a reforming ruler well versed in protocol and religious knowledge,96 and a generous gift-giver.97 His gifts go to people of many different statuses, but the manner of them and the things being rewarded vary: hierarchy and gender are reinforced through how and why gifts are bestowed. He rewards male companions for composing excellent verses, often with land,98 but he lavishes enumerated sums of money – or items worth specified amounts – on women, and on Ziryāb. Gift-giving of any sort is a way for an amīr to reinforce his position at the top of the social and political hierarchy: he has the wherewithal to give greater gifts than anyone else, and can expect dependence

92 93 94 95

Ibn Ḥayyān, Al-Sifr al-thānī, 300–7 (al-Muqtabis al-thānī, ff. 145r–147r). Ibid., 332–5 (al-Muqtabis al-thānī, ff. 153v–154r); Reynolds, ‘Al-Maqqarī’s Ziryāb’, 156. Ibn Ḥayyān, Al-Sifr al-thānī, 315 (al-Muqtabis al-thānī, f. 149v). It was also a common charge levelled at the pretty young male slave (ghulām); F. Rosenthal, ‘Male and female: described and compared’, in J.W. Wright Jr. and E.K. Rowson (eds), Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature (New York, 1997), 24–54. 96 Safran, Defining Boundaries, 43–4. 97 Akhbār Majmūʿa, 135–8. 98 Ibn al-Qūṭīya, Taʾrīkh iftitāḥ al-Andalus, 59–60; Akhbār Majmūʿa, 138.

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and service in return. This is another attribute of hegemonic masculinity: the ability to deploy wealth to exercise control over other men’s bodies.99 Ibn al-Qūṭīya describes an occasion when ʿAbd al-Raḥmān decides to give Ziryāb thirty thousand dinars because he has sung especially beautifully.100 Initially, it seems ʿAbd al-Raḥmān’s status is threatened by this gesture, since the treasury officials refuse to pay out the sum on the basis that the state coffers are not the amīr’s to squander on a singer; they belong to the whole Muslim community. Hearing this, Ziryāb disparages ʿAbd al-Raḥmān’s authority within his own government – synonymous, in this patriarchal society, with his household and thus his masculinity – scoffing, ‘What sort of obedience is this (‘mā hādha ṭāʿa’)?’101 But ʿAbd al-Raḥmān is unfazed. The officials are quite right, he says; their obedience lies in steering him to the correct path. ʿAbd alRaḥmān promptly pays Ziryāb out of his own pocket, and promotes the officials concerned. As is frequently the case in medieval texts, the anecdote is being used to glorify the dominant man and warn other men what is expected of them.102 While the feminine-coded Ziryāb is made to sound petulant, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān is used to demonstrate that the authority of a Muslim ruler lies in accepting truth spoken to power by steadfast men, not in forcing obedience to morally wrong orders. 4

Father and Son: ʿAbd al-Raḥmān iii and al-Ḥakam ii

As discussed above, hegemonic masculinity is not the only form of masculinity in any given time and place, but it is the dominant form and one from which all men benefit, even if they do not perform it themselves, since it shapes social life in tandem with a discourse of masculine authority that feminist scholars have labelled ‘patriarchy’.103 In a patriarchal social system, masculinity resides in power over others; men’s authority within the household is reflected in wider social organisation, and confers upon them the ability to participate in commercial and political transactions in the public sphere.104 Within Islam, justifications of patriarchal authority have often been based on Q. 4:34 (‘Men 99 Connell and Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic masculinity’, 852. 100 Ibn al-Qūṭīya, Taʾrīkh iftitāḥ al-Andalus, 68–9. 101 Ibid., 69. 102 Hadley, ‘Introduction’, 8. 103 Connell, Gender and Power, 184–5. This is clarified further, in response to criticism of the original, in Connell and Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic masculinity’, 832. 104 Kent, Gender, 10, 51–2. Patriarchy is not identical in all times and places, of course; for some examples of varieties of patriarchy within Islamic contexts, see D. Kandiyoti, ‘Islam

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are overseers of women, because God has granted some of them bounty in preference to others [‘baʿḍahum ʿalā baʿḍin’]’),105 which has been widely read as meaning that men hold the power in the household because they are the providers,106 although this has come in for robust challenge in recent years.107 The duty to provide for wives produced its own literature, including that of the later medieval Andalusi jurist Ibn Bāq (d. 1362).108 Yossef Rapoport, in his study of ‘divorce oaths’ in Mamluk Egypt (1250–1516), has shown very clearly how this private authority could translate into public standing. The unilateral right of a Muslim man to divorce his wife became a way, in Egypt in this period, to demonstrate standing and establish trust in a wide variety of male-to-male social, political and economic interactions.109 In this final section, it is the household – and its patriarchal translation into the state – that will be the focus. Fatherhood, and in particular fathering sons, was an indelible requirement of hegemonic masculinity within medieval Islam, just as becoming a mother was a marker of adulthood for women.110 In medical literature, like the work of the Andalusi ʿArīb b. Saʿīd (d. 980),111 the existence of sons was taken as proof of a man’s strength and vitality. The Hippocratic notion that women as well as men produced sperm and thus contributed to the making of a child was widespread, even beyond medicine;112 Mālik’s Muwaṭṭa contains several versions of a ḥadīth in which the Prophet Muḥammad, or his wife Aisha, declare this (‘May your right hand be full of dust’, says Aisha in one version, when Muḥammad expresses confusion over the point; ‘From where does family resemblance come?’).113 But ʿArīb and others and Patriarchy: a comparative perspective’, in Keddie and Baron, Women in Middle Eastern History, 23–42. 105 The Qurʾān, trans. A. Jones (London, 2007). 106 Abdel Halim, ‘A home for obedience’, 194, 199–200, 207–8; O. Abou-Bakr, ‘Turning the tables: perspectives on the construction of “Muslim manhood”’, Hawwa 11 (2013), 89–107, at 96–7. 107 A. Barlas, ‘Women’s readings of the Qurʾān’, in J. Dammen McAuliffe (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Qurʾān (Cambridge, 2006), 255–71, at 263–4; Geissinger, Exegetical Authority, 42–7. 108 Ibn Bāq, Kitāb zahrat al-rawḍ fī tajlīṣ taqdīr al-farḍ, ed. R. el Hour (Madrid, 2003): obligations include food (123–25), clothes (123–25), and servants (126–35). 109 Rapoport, Marriage, Money and Divorce, esp. Ch. 5. 110 Marín, ‘Women, gender and sexuality’, 366. 111 For more on ʿArīb, see A.C. López, ‘Vie et oeuvre du fameux polygraphe de Cordoue, ʿArīb ibn Saʿīd (xe siècle)’, in R. Barkai, (ed.), Chrétiens, musulmans et juifs dans l’Espagne médiévale: de la convergence à l’expulsion (Paris, 1994), 77–101. 112 K. Kueny, ‘Marking the body: resemblance and medieval Muslim constructions of paternity’, Journal of Feminist Studies of Religion 30 (2014), 65–84, at 72–4; Gadelrab, ‘Discourses on sex difference’, 48. 113 Mālik b. Anas, Muwaṭṭaʾ, §2.21.

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built upon this ­foundation, describing conception as essentially a contest between the male and female bodies involved, and counselling men on measures to help them produce more vital sperm than their wives, so that they might ensure they beget sons.114 Sons whose physical features clearly resembled those of their fathers were the most prized, since they were proof of the father’s contribution to conception.115 Fatherhood is also something that features regularly in chronicles about the ruling dynasty.116 In the account of Ibn Ḥayyān, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān iii is shown to take very seriously the duty of not only fathering sons but also preparing them for life as befits their status, in terms of maintenance, education, and socialisation.117 He follows – and surpasses – the caliphs of old, we are told, in the programme of education he sets for his sons, including the religious disciplines of ḥadīth and sunna – long a badge of achievement for a pious ruler – and the cultivated manners and courtly knowledge of adab,118 something the tenthcentury easterner Ibrāhīm b. Muḥammad al-Bayhaqī singled out as beloved by ‘only the manliest of men (al-dhukhūr min al-rijāl)’, and hated by ‘effeminates’ (muʿannath).119 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ensured that each of his sons had a monthly stipend (rizq hilālī), ownership of estates and help in managing them, and a qaṣr (palace, fortress).120 As they came of age, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān’s sons were allowed to move out, and form households of their own: ‘All of those who had reached maturity and puberty (man adraka minhum wa-iḥtalama) started to leave [the palace], one after the other, for their quṣūr’.121 All, that is, except ʿAbd al-Raḥmān’s heir (walī ʿahduhu), the future al-Ḥakam ii, son of his favourite concubine, Marjān.122 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, having earmarked al-Ḥakam to

114 ʿArīb b. Saʿīd, Kitāb khalq al-janīn wa-tadbīr al-ḥabālā wa-ʾl-mawlūdīn, ed. H. Jahier and N. Abdelkader (Algiers, 1956), 9–12, 15–17, 24. ʿArīb declares, on page 9, that children most resemble the parent whose desire (shahwa) is the strongest. Men have agency over this process, but women do not; Kueny, ‘Marking the body’, 78–9. 115 Kueny, ‘Marking the body’, 74–6, 77–8. 116 For more on father-son relations among the Umayyads, see N. Clarke, ‘Heirs and spares: elite fathers and their sons in the literary sources of Umayyad Iberia’, Al-Masāq 28 (2016), 67–83. 117 A. Giladi, ‘Ṣaghīr’, Encyclopedia of Islam (2nd edition), ix, 821–7. 118 Ibn Ḥayyān, al-Muqtabis (al-juzʾ al-khāmis), ed. P. Chalmeta Gendrón and F. Corriente (Madrid and al-Ribāṭ, 1979), 14–5. 119 Ibrāhīm b. Muḥammad al-Bayhaqī, Kitāb al-maḥāsin wa-ʾl-masāwī, ed. F. Schwally (Giessen, 1902), 1. 120 Ibn Ḥayyān, al-Muqtabis v, 14. 121 Ibid., 16. 122 For more on concubine wives, many of whom were Christians from the north of the peninsula, see D. Fairchild Ruggles, ‘Mothers of a hybrid dynasty: race, genealogy, and acculturation in al-Andalus’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34 (2004), 65–94.

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take on ‘his sulṭān (authority) after him’,123 subjected his son to a strict regime: he ‘did not allow him to leave the [royal] qaṣr for a single day’, and imposed sexual abstinence upon him.124 Al-Ḥakam, we are told, was forbidden to consort with women, young or old (lā makkanahu maʿa dhālika min ittikhādha imraʾa ṣaghīra wa-lā kabīra) – and he obeyed, for the sake of his duty to the dynasty: But al-Ḥakam bore the burden that was imposed on him by [his father] with virtue (faḍl) and forbearance; because of his vow to extend the length of his father’s reign, he lived out the best days of his life, depriving himself of pleasure (wa-ʿaṭṭāl bawāṭin ladhdhatahu naẓaran) so he would inherit the caliphate after him (li-irth al-khilāfa baʿdahu).125 Deniz Kandiyoti argues that boys are not born patriarchs,126 and here is a prime example. When they enter the adult male world, boys are powerless, subordinated to the senior men including (but not limited to) their father,127 in a way explicitly mirrored by master-disciple relations in traditions such as Sufism, wherein displays of deference are modelled on the automatic, unquestioning respect expected of a son towards his father.128 Al-Ḥakam’s enforced extended childhood is the other side of patriarchy: the side that is dependent upon age,129 the side in which elite boys are denied access to the markers of masculine adulthood,130 such as property and marriage – that is, authority over women and subordinate men – in order to make them better servants of the dynasty, and their father.131

123 Ibn Ḥayyān, al-Muqtabis v, 7. 124 Ibid., 16. 125 Ibid., 17. Further down the same page, there is an allusion to al-Ḥakam’s sexuality that suggests that forgoing the company of women may not have been too great a sacrifice for him, personally. 126 Kandiyoti, ‘Paradoxes of masculinity’, 198. 127 Ibid., 204, 207. 128 M. Malamud, ‘Gender and spiritual self-fashioning: the master-disciple relationship in classical Sufism’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64 (1996), 89–117, at 90–6 and 105. 129 Marín, ‘Women, gender and sexuality’, 362. 130 Aird, ‘Frustrated masculinity’, 40, 42–3, 48–50. William the Conqueror, likewise, would not allow his eldest son Robert Curthose to marry, for fear of the basis this would give Robert to challenge his authority: ibid., 47. 131 Mālik b. Anas, Muwaṭṭaʾ, §37.2, groups immature boys with the mentally ill in terms of their capacity to make a bequest of property.

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5 Conclusion The legal and social segregation of genders was only one of numerous boundaries whose observation medieval literary and legal writers saw as essential in order to preserve group identity in medieval al-Andalus. While modern attitudes often lead commentators on Islam to highlight gender segregation to the exclusion of all others, it is perhaps more useful to think of gender division in context. Negotiating shared space is an overriding concern of legal texts on religious communities;132 arguably, the same understanding should be applied to those texts which deal with the potential interactions between men and women, or between men and lower-status men. None of these gendered divisions are inevitable – as Ouzgane comments, men are made, not born133 – but examining their formation and expression, as explored here in the chronicles, tells us much about the society’s concerns and values. Bibliography Abdel Halim, A.M., ‘A home for obedience: masculinity in personal status for Muslims law’, Hawwa 9 (2011), 194–214. Abou-Bakr, O., ‘Turning the tables: perspectives on the construction of “Muslim manhood”’, Hawwa 11 (2013), 89–107. Abu-Lughod, L., ‘Islam and the gendered discourse of death’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 25 (1993), 187–205. Afsaruddin, A., ‘Reconstituting women’s lives: gender and the poetics of narrative in medieval biographical collections’, The Muslim World 92 (2002), 461–80. Ahmed, D.S., ‘Gender and Islamic spirituality: a psychological view of “low” fundamentalism’, in L. Ouzgane (ed.), Islamic Masculinities (London and New York, 2006), 11–34. Ahmed, L., Women and Gender in Islam: historical roots of a modern debate (New Haven, CT, 1992). Aird, W.M., ‘Frustrated masculinity: the relationship between William the Conqueror and his eldest son’, in D.M. Hadley (ed.), Masculinity in Medieval Europe (London and New York, 1999), 39–55. Akhbār majmūʿa, ed. E. Lafuente y Alcántara (Madrid, 1867). Al-Muwaṭṭaʾ of Imam Mālik b. Anas: Arabic and English, ed. and trans. A. Abdurrahman Bewley (Norwich, 2014).

132 Safran, Defining Boundaries, 17–18. 133 Ouzgane, ‘Introduction’, 2.

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ʿArīb b. Saʿīd, Kitāb khalq al-janīn wa-tadbīr al-ḥabālā wa-ʾl-mawlūdīn, ed. H. Jahier and N. Abdelkader (Algiers, 1956). Barlas, A., ‘Women’s readings of the Qurʾān’, in J. Dammen McAuliffe (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Qurʾān (Cambridge, 2006), 255–71. Barton, S., Conquerors, Brides and Concubines: interfaith relations and social power in medieval Iberia (Philadelphia, PA, 2015). Berkey, J.P., ‘Women and Islamic education in the Mamluk period’, in N.R. Keddie and B. Baron (eds), Women in Middle Eastern History: shifting boundaries in sex and gender (New Haven, CT, 1991), 143–57. Bray, J., ‘The family in the medieval Islamic world’, History Compass 9 (2011), 731–42. Bullough, V.L., ‘On being a male in the Middle Ages’, in C.A. Lees (ed.), Medieval Masculinities: regarding men in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis, MN, 1994), 31–45. Butler, J., Gender Trouble (New York and London, 2006). Clarke, N., The Muslim Conquest of Iberia: Medieval Arabic Narratives (London, 2012). Clarke, N., ‘“They are the most treacherous of people”: religious difference in Arabic accounts of three early medieval Berber revolts’, eHumanista 24 (2013), 1–16. Clarke, N., ‘Heirs and spares: elite fathers and their sons in the literary sources of Umayyad Iberia’, Al-Masāq 28 (2016), 67–83. Connell, R.W., Gender and Power: society, the person and sexual politics (Cambridge, 1987). Connell, R.W. and J.W. Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity: rethinking the concept’, Gender and Society 19 (2005), 829–59. Coope, J.A., ‘Religious and Cultural Conversion to Islam in Ninth-Century Umayyad Córdoba’, Journal of World History 4 (1993), 47–68. Cornwall, A. and N. Lindisfarne (eds), Dislocating Masculinity: comparative ethnographies (London and New York, 1994). Crenshaw, K., ‘Demarginalising the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics’, The University of Chicago Legal Forum 140 (1989), 139–67. El-Azhary Sonbol, A. (ed.), Beyond the Exotic: women’s histories in Islamic societies (Syracuse, NY, 2005). El-Azhary Sonbol, A. ‘Introduction’, in eadem, Beyond the Exotic, xvii–xxxviii. Fairchild Ruggles, D., ‘Mothers of a hybrid dynasty: race, genealogy, and acculturation in al-Andalus’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34 (2004), 65–94. Farés, B., ‘Murūʾa’, Encyclopedia of Islam (2nd edn, Leiden, 1954–2005). Fatḥ al-Andalus, ed. L. Molina (Madrid, 1994). Fenster, T., ‘Preface: why men?’, in Lees, Medieval Masculinities, ix–xiii. Fierro, M., ‘Mawālī and muwalladūn in al-Andalus (second/eighth-fourth/tenth centuries)’, in M. Bernards and J. Nawas (eds.), Patronate and Patronage in Early and Classical Islam (Leiden, 2005), 195–245.

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Chapter 8

Islam Concealed and Revealed: The Chronicle of 754 and Beatus of Liébana’s Commentary on the Apocalypse Lucy K. Pick One of the casualties of defining the emergence and expansion of the kingdoms of Christian Spain after 711 exclusively as a consequence of the interplay between Reconquista and Convivencia is that it reduces our categories for interpreting relations between Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the peninsula. Arguments drawn from a spectrum in which battle and social harmony are the only possible opposing poles foreshorten our gaze such that we focus on a limited set of themes that tend to pit ideology and socio-cultural or political arguments against each other. In particular, this has impoverished our understanding of the intellectual and spiritual side of religious life, which has seemed simpler and less nuanced than elsewhere in Europe, motivated solely by a desire to get the non-Christians out, though potentially resisted by political or socio-cultural imperatives that support coexistence. Questions that have excited our colleagues who work elsewhere in the medieval world, about the role of memory and meditation in the creation and use of texts; of relationships between the visual, the textual, and the material; and time and its relationship to history, have been under-examined, especially for the early Middle Ages. Wittingly or unwittingly, these omissions keep us in the ‘Spain is different’ school of historiography. When the evidence of Iberian texts which seek to intervene in ideological ways does not follow the simple trajectory we lay out for it, we are surprised; the originators of this evidence seem backward at best and at worst irrelevant. Our expectations in favour of certain kinds of relationships between Christians and Muslims in medieval Iberia have affected our interpretation of two texts that are closely contemporary with one another, the Chronicle of 754 (also known as the Mozarabic Chronicle)1 and Beatus of Liébana’s Commentary on

1 Chronica Muzarabica, in csm, vol. 1, 15–54, cited here as the Chronicle in the body of the chapter. The most recent edition and comprehensive study is J.E. López Pereira, Estudio crítico sobre la Crónica Mozárabe de 754 (Zaragoza, 1980), revised as Continuatio isidoriana hispana. Crónica mozárabe de 754. Estudio, edición crítica y traducción (León, 2009). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004423879_010

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the Apocalypse.2 Very different from each other in genre, they are rarely considered together, though they were composed relatively near each other in both time and place; yet despite their differences, I will argue that they share both method and goals. The Chronicle of 754 is a historical chronicle written in Latin by an anonymous Christian living in newly-conquered Muslim Spain, covering the events of both the eastern and western Mediterranean between 611 and 754. It is our earliest and best source for the events of the Muslim conquest of Spain in 711 and has been read carefully by historians seeking to disentangle these events.3 The text, however, seems to fail to present a clear moral narrative that would define the Arab conquerors of Spain by their religion, and various explanations have been given for this apparent failure.4 The second is the ­better-known Commentary on the Apocalypse by Beatus of Liébana, completed only a few decades after the Chronicle by a Christian living in Cantabria, under the putative rule of the remnant Christian kingdom of the Asturias in the north. It is well known for its spectacular illustrations, but the text itself has been dismissed as wholly derivative of earlier works and thus proved harder to interpret and is far less often read than the Chronicle.5 Neither text appears, to someone looking to them for early stirrings of a ‘Reconquest sensibility’, to pay much attention to the Islamic nature of the new occupiers of the peninsula.6 2 Beatus of Liébana, Tractatus de Apocalipsin, in R. Gryson and M.-C. de Bièvre, Beati Liebanensis Tractatus de Apocalipsin, 2 vols, ccsl 107B-C (Turnhout, 2012). Further references to this work in the body of the chapter will refer to Beatus’s Commentary. 3 On its value as a historical source see R. Collins, The Arab Conquest of Spain 710–797 (Oxford, 1989), 26–7. 4 A. García Sanjuan, La conquista islámica de la península ibérica y la tergiversación del pasado (Madrid, 2013), 303–8; Collins, Arab Conquest, 62–3; C. de Ayala Martínez, ‘La memoria del 711 en la historiografía cristiana medieval y actual’, in M. Fierro et al. (eds), 711–1616: de árabes a moriscos (Córdoba, 2012), 343–78 at 347–9; and K.B. Wolf (trans.), Conquerors and Chroniclers of Early Medieval Spain (Liverpool, 1990), 25–42. A.P. Bronisch, Reconquista y guerra santa. La concepción de la guerra en la España cristiana desde los visigodos hasta comienzos del siglo xii (Granada, 2006), 125–41, argues, by contrast, that the Chronicle of 754 offers its readers a coded but unequivocal explanation of the negative role of Islam in Christian eschatology, citing some of the passages I will discuss here. 5 Its most recent editors suggest, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, that the sole value of the text is that it transmits the lost commentary on the Apocalypse of Tyconius: Beatus of Liébana, Tractatus de Apocalipsin, v. 6 John Williams supposes that Beatus’s generation may not have even had a consistent perception of the Muslims as an ‘enemy’: J. Williams, ‘Purpose and Imagery in the Apocalypse Commentary of Beatus of Liébana’, in R.K. Emmerson and B. McGinn (eds), The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 1992), 217–33, at 228. Wolf concludes that the explanation for what he sees as the Chronicle’s silence about Islam can be explained by the fact that its author could not imagine the restoration of a Christian Spain: Wolf, Conquerors and Chroniclers, 43–4.

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Reading the Chronicle against the Commentary elucidates the aims of both and prompts skepticism about the rigidity of their respective genres. Medieval historians did not write with the goal of producing an objective, accurate, and complete account of past events. They were more concerned with the creation of meaning, which was to some degree the purview of the reader. The text was not a seamless, finished product, but an invitation to memorization, meditation, and ethical interpretation. Histories did not so much provide answers as they proposed questions, outlined patterns of thought and behaviour, and suggested avenues of comparison and connection between past, present and future, all of which taught the Christian reader how to make correct moral judgements. Moreover, medieval theologians themselves were preoccupied with the meaning of time and of history, and with questions of eschatology that depended on an understanding of the course of Christian history. In this chapter, I will reinterpret both the Chronicle and the Commentary to show that what they appear to exclude – explicit reference to Islam and a way for Christians of the peninsula to think about their Islamic overlords – is not a real exclusion at all. Both texts are anchored by a historical sensibility, a sense of embeddedness in time that looks forward to the End of Time. They promote ethical reflection on time, its passing, and the individual’s place within time and ultimate destiny. While their aims are theological and exegetical, their perspective is historical. They neither participate in a ‘Reconquest’ ideology, nor do they eschew it, but they do give their readers tools for understanding the contemporary events of Muslim domination of the peninsula. They invite readers to evaluate current conditions in the peninsula and to make ethical judgements about who is on the side of God and who is not that invite speculation on the nature of their enemies and how their world fits into the history of salvation and the coming of the End Times. Beatus of Liébana and the author of the Chronicle were heirs to a late antique historical-theological tradition. The tradition in question had a vexed relationship with the practice of interpreting current events in order to discern the workings in them of God’s plan for human salvation, and by so doing, to divine the moment of the End Times. Augustine’s City of God is a response to contemporaries’ desire to interpret history in order to discern their future. It is full of historical material, both classical and biblical, but Augustine uses this material not to urge meditation on history, but to deflect attention away from it and onto ourselves. First he recounts then ‘undoes’ the pagan Roman interpretation of his and many readers’ own past; then he rewrites the history of the world from a Christian perspective in a narrative of two cities, the City of God and the earthly city, subordinating the old understanding of the classical past to the new, Christian narrative. But this is not to encourage ongoing historical

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reflection among his contemporaries – quite the reverse. For Augustine, this is the only explanation of history we need; its patterns and meanings need no further meditation.7 Augustine maps out seven ages of human history beginning at Creation. We live in the sixth age, between the Incarnation that begins it and the Second Coming of Christ, which will usher in the seventh and final age.8 However, for Augustine, outside the limits of the Bible text, that is to say in the sixth age in which we currently reside, we cannot assess the meaning of any action, event, or person.9 Augustine then remaps the seven ages of history onto the human life-cycle to deflect attention away from the unfolding of God’s plan through time and onto the plan for each individual person. History is thus understood theologically and ethically to refer to the individual and it is only our personal salvation we should worry about, leaving the salvation of the human community to God. Augustine also deflects attention away from speculations on the timing and nature of the coming seventh age and firmly rejects millenarian hopes.10 His prohibition against millenarian prediction was forceful and influential but, though it restrained his successors from prophesying with certainty about the End Times, it did not eliminate the temptation to speculate. In lieu of millenarian predictions and firm identifications of eschatological signifiers, we get hints and suggestions; invitations, couched in caveats, to muse privately on future times; no one knows when the End Times would begin or what form they would take.11 Isidore of Seville’s Chronicon, a universal history that creates a single narrative of biblical and non-biblical peoples and events, is a work that revalorizes the study of history that Augustine turned away from, and in so doing, invites tempered eschatological speculation. Written two centuries after The City of God, it uses Augustine’s seven ages as a framework, but Isidore’s account of the sixth age, the age Augustine neglected, is longer than the first five ages combined. Isidore thus encourages the reflection on the recent past that Augustine 7

P. Fredriksen, ‘Tyconius and Augustine on the Apocalypse’, in Emmerson and McGinn, The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, 20–37, at 33–4; R.A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St Augustine (Cambridge, 1989), 3–5. 8 Augustine of Hippo, De ciuitate dei, ed. B. Dombart and A. Kalb, 2 vols, ccsl 47–8 (Turnhout, 1950), xxii.30. 9 Markus, Saeculum, 158. 10 Augustine, De ciuitate dei, xviii.52–53. K. Pollmann, ‘Moulding the Present: Apocalyptic as Hermeneutics in City of God 21–22’, in M. Vessey, K. Pollman and A.D. Fizgerald (eds), History, Apocalypse, and the Secular Imagination (Bowling Green, OH, 1999), 165–81, at 167–9. 11 Fredriksen, ‘Tyconius and Augustine’, 35–6.

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rejected, and invites a view of the sixth age that sees its events as a unity with those described in the Bible.12 His close attention to chronology and his announcement at the end of the Chronicon that 5,814 years have passed since the beginning of the world invite speculation about how many years are left, notwithstanding his concluding caution that the time remaining for the world cannot be ascertained by human investigation, citing Acts 1:7 (‘It is not for you to know times or the moment which the Father has fixed by his own authority’), and Matthew 24:36 (‘But of that day and that hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, but the Father only’). He urges instead, like a good Augustinian, mindful attention to one’s own sins and moment of death.13 Beatus of Liébana and the anonymous chronicler of 754 were heirs of both Isidore and Augustine. They shared much of Augustine’s concern with explicit and overt predictions about the End Times and concern with personal moral formation, but as we shall see, it was Isidore’s appreciation for the value of history, even recent history, that they followed. The Chronicle interweaves three strands of history: the Byzantine Empire, the Visigothic kingdom of Spain, and the interactions of the newly emergent Arab state with both. The text begins in the eastern empire with Heraclius’s successful rebellion against Emperor Phocas. Having assumed the imperial dignity himself, Heraclius was then victorious against Chosroes and the Persians but was soon after defeated by the Arabs. The Arab victory was a punishment for Heraclius’s pride and his people’s trust in him, rather than in God.14 Yet if we had hoped that this moral would be carried through the Chronicle, with the Arabs reprising their role as the scourge of God when they came to conquer the Visigoths in 711, then we are to be disappointed. The author bemoans the conquest of Spain but gives no reason for it.15 And his account of the Arab governors who subsequently rule Spain is of a piece with his description of the rule of their Visigothic predecessors; there are good rulers and bad ones, but overt disapproval of the Arab governors as such is missing.16 The Chronicle as a whole is fragmentary and episodic. We move from tales of military slaughter to accounts of church councils and the writings of holy men, to astrological portents and cataclysms, with no consistent narrative line threading these together, evaluating them and making judgements. The Chronicle is 12

P.M. Bassett, ‘The Use of History in the Chronicon of Isidore of Seville’, History and Theory 15 (1976), 278–92, at 280–2. 13 Isidore of Seville, Chronica, in Isidori Hispalensis Chronica, ed. J.C. Martín, ccsl 112 (Turnhout, 2003), 206–9. 14 Chronica Muzarabica, 18. 15 Ibid., 36; Wolf, Conquerors and Chroniclers, 35. 16 Wolf, Conquerors and Chroniclers, 37.

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repetitive. The same types of stories of death and destruction, avarice and rebellion happen over and over, punctuated by the lives of holy men who are pinpoints of light on this dark canvas; only the names of the villains and saints seem to change. With its three strands of history, the Chronicle also maintains a triplestranded chronology which its author takes pains to collate. First, events are dated according to the number of years since the creation of the world. Each time there is a new Byzantine emperor, the date since creation is given. Regnal years of the emperors date events they participated in, and it is these years that structure the earliest extant manuscripts of the Chronicle.17 Second, events are dated by the Spanish era, which takes 38 bc/bce as its point of origin. Regnal years of the Visigothic kings are also given, until their line is cut short by the conquest in 711. Finally and most surprisingly, caliphal regnal years are given and events are dated by the year ‘of the Arabs’. This is not the date from the Hijra, Mohammed’s flight to Medina in 622, from which conventional Islamic dating takes its origin, but the date 618, the year when the Arabs successfully concluded their rebellion against Heraclius, and the first year of Mohammed’s rule, according to the Chronicle.18 The chronicler thus replaces a scheme of Islamic religious significance with one related to Arab political and military power, and so secularizes the programme of the Arabs. This substitution is of a piece with another puzzle of this text. The Chronicle makes little mention of Mohammed’s role as a prophet and no explicit reference to the Islamic faith of the Arabs, who are neither heretics, apostates, nor pagans.19 Why this silence? Beatus’s Commentary shares some of these interpretive challenges, and adds new ones. One of the latter is how to deal with Beatus’s status as author given the derivative nature of his text. Scarcely two of the thousand pages or so 17

These differ from the sections imposed by later editors and translators. Collins, Arab Conquest, 17, n. 24. 18 ‘Post cuius Mammet decem regni expletis annis in era dclxvi [Chronica Muzarabica, 19]’, that is to say, 666 of the Spanish era, or 628, making 618, the year they defeated Heraclius, the beginning of their dating system. That being said, the first time the ‘Arab’ year is mentioned, and from time to time in the chronicle afterwards, the year is dated from 617, not 618; e.g. ‘Huius Eraclii temporibus in era dclxviiii, anno imperii sui xx, Arabum incipiente xiiii [Chronica Muzarabica, 19]’. Here, era 669 is 631, and if this is the fourteenth Arab year, the first is 617. This variation may have to do with an understanding that the era and the Arab year each start at different times of year, so do not perfectly coincide. The text, however, never dates the Arab year from the Hijra, pace Wolf, Conquerors and Chroniclers, 115, n. 16 and Collins, Arab Conquest, 60. Bronisch views the dating from 618 rather than 622 as an error, not a choice: Bronisch, Reconquista y guerra santa, 141. 19 Wolf, Conquerors and Chroniclers, 39–40, who notes that only one of the seven times he is mentioned is Muhammed called ‘prophet’: Chronica Muzarabica, 19.

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of the edition are Beatus’s own work; the rest is compilation.20 His base texts are Tyconius’s otherwise lost commentary on the Apocalypse, as well as those of Victorinus and Apringius, interwoven with passages from Augustine, Jerome, Gregory the Great, and Isidore, among others.21 This has led modern readers to discount his own contribution. I would suggest that Beatus’s choice of texts to include with Tyconius reflects a deliberate, thoughtful, and creative programme designed to use exegesis of the Apocalypse to create a primer of both theological method and dogmatic content. He calls his book, ‘the key to the library’ and its scope is wide, touching the nature of God, the Trinity, Christ, Mary, ecclesiology, the nature of sin, repentance, and redemption – though topics are treated seemingly randomly, in no systematic order, and often repetitively.22 His dependence on Tyconius puts him squarely in the Tyconian and Augustinian tradition of reading the Apocalypse as a book about personal, not universal, salvation history, with lessons about the individual human soul, rather than as a political roman à clef about imminent future events.23 This has seemed to explain why Beatus also ignores the Islamic presence in Spain.24 This strikes readers as orthodox, but maybe a little perverse. If anyone could be forgiven a little millenarian speculation, surely it was a nervous Christian hiding in the mountains of northern Spain. Are not Mohammed, the rise of Islam, and the destruction of Christian Spain perfect candidates to be precursors to the Antichrist? His apparent silence on Islam seems especially odd because, as we shall see, Beatus does indeed predict that the End Times will begin only a few years hence. Frustrated with the text, scholars look to the illustrations for coherence, creativity and originality. They ask if the image of a beautifully decorated and ornamented city in flames, depicting the destruction of Babylon (Apoc. 18: 1–20), in a mid-tenth-century manuscript known as the Morgan Beatus (fol. 202v), was meant to recall a city like Córdoba with its luxury goods and merchandise. The manuscript was produced for the monastery of San Miguel de Escalada, founded by refugees from Muslim Córdoba. Was this image a warning and call to piety for a monastery like Escalada, which might use Islamic luxury goods as

20 21 22 23 24

So says the introduction to the Spanish translation: A. del Campo Hernández, ‘Introducción al Comentario del Apocalipsis’, in J. González Echegaray, A. del Campo Hernández, and L.G. Freeman (eds), Obras completas de Beato de Liébana (Madrid, 1995), 14–20, at 19. Beatus of Liébana, Tractatus de Apocalipsin, cxxxiv–cxxxvii. Ibid., 2. Beatus’s most recent editor speaks of Tyconius as having ‘vaccinated’ the Latin Church against millenarianism: ibid., v. See also: Fredriksen, ‘Tyconius and Augustine’, 24–9. Campo Hernández, ‘Introducción al Comentario del Apocalipsis’, 20.

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spolia and borrow its architectural forms?25 An image of Baltassar’s feast in the same manuscript (fol. 255v), in which the divine finger writes on the wall about the pagan king’s destruction, illustrating Jerome’s Commentary on Daniel (which circulated with some Beatus manuscripts), reinforces the impression; the use of alternating red and white voussoirs in the arch framing the scene may be a signpost, encouraging the viewer to connect these sinners with the Muslim rulers of Spain. Perhaps it recalls the Great Mosque of Córdoba, famously known for this kind of decoration. Or does it recall instead not the Great Mosque, but rather a church like San Cebrián de Mazote, a monastery not far from Escalada?26 That is to say, is this image a literal reference to the eschatological significance of the Islamic enemy, or an allegorical call to the personal awareness of sin and a command to the repentance of monastic life? To resolve our problems with these two texts we must question our assumptions about how a text makes sense, has a coherent plot, argument, or even a personal theological programme. Karl Morrison argues that the episodic nature of medieval historical writing was deliberate, not a sign of authorial failure. The coherence modern readers seek within the text was located rather in the twinned process of aesthetic judgement with which the text was composed, and in the imaginative responses of its audience, the reader.27 Texts were constructed through deliberate decisions of inclusion and exclusion to be a series of segmented episodes that could each be visualized as images. These provoked affective responses in the reader of fear, pity, and/or love. Meditating on the text, the reader performed an aesthetic and visual recreation of both the events described and the affective responses provoked by his or her reading of the events.28 The segmented nature of the histories was designed to invite readers to play within the gaps of the narrative in order to complete the images found there with appropriate moral reactions.29 By means of this play of mind, even historical texts could be instruments of cognition about God.30 The repetition we find in the Chronicle maps well onto this way of understanding medieval historical writing as a type of text composed of repeating patterns. Episodes were included with attention to patterns of events, understood to 25 26 27 28 29 30

J. Williams, A Spanish Apocalypse (New York, 1991), 203. J.D. Dodds, Architecture and Ideology in Early Medieval Spain (University Park, PA, 1990), 73, 88–9. See also Williams, ‘Imagery in Beatus of Liébana’, 225–32; idem, Spanish Apocalypse, 219. K.F. Morrison, History as a Visual Art in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance (Princeton, NJ, 1990), xv. Ibid., 102. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 49, 51.

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occur in cycles in which the meaning of the events described, if not the actual events themselves, was re-enacted and repeated. This attention to historical repetition stemmed from a notion of sacred recurrence, the idea that the events of the New Testament were contained within the Old, and the time of the New Testament continued to the end of the world.31 The subjects of the historical texts, like the actors in the biblical tales, were subordinated to the ultimate Subject which both kinds of writing shared – God – and all the tales told ultimately point to their divine source.32 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. Medieval histories guide readers to connect their own history and the biblical past, both by comparing characters to biblical figures and by quoting bible verses in connection with recent events. The Chronicle uses both methods to guide the reader towards making connections between current events and the biblical past. For an example of the first, Emperor Heraclius’s defeat of the Persian Chosroes in single combat at the beginning of the history is compared to the defeat of Goliath by David, pointing readers to the description of that event in i Kings 17 in the Vulgate.33 The Chronicle connects a biblical citation to a contemporary event when it concludes the narrative part of the chronicle with the question, ‘The remaining deeds … were these not recorded in the book of the words of the days of this age (‘nonne hec scripta sunt in libro uerborum dierum seculi’) which we have taken time to add, one by one, to past chronicles?’34 This sentence is followed by a final section of chronological calculations inviting speculation about the coming end of the sixth age. The whole of the sentence quoted above refers to a now-lost historical text written by our author on contemporary Arab rebellions that affected Spain.35 But the phrase within it given here in Latin as well as English quotes a phrase found first in 3 Kings 15:7 and repeated over and over in books three and four of Kings: ‘Nonne haec scripta sunt in libro uerborum 31 32 33

34 35

Ibid., 69–70. E.B. Vitz, Medieval Narrative and Modern Narratology (New York, 1989), 117. ‘Sed Cosdro more Philistinorum auctior spurium quendam tanquam alterum Goliam, educit in prelio. Territi omnes Eraclii bellatores pedem subtrahunt retro. Tunc Eraclius de Domini confidens auxilio super eum descendens uno hostem perimit iaculo’: Chronica Muzarabica, 17. Ibid., 52. Referred to already twice earlier in the same text: ibid., 47 and 49.

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dierum?’36 Liber uerborum dierum is the Vulgate’s name for the two biblical books of Chronicles. Thus, just as the books of Kings gesture outside their confines to the books of Chronicles, our author gestures outside the book of his that we are reading to his other book of chronicles ‘of this age’ (‘seculi’), constructing a relationship and a parallel between himself and the author of the biblical histories. This gesture lets us know we need to read the events he has described through these books of the Bible. The reference to David and Goliath at the outset and the reference to the books of Chronicles at the end bracket the text of the Chronicle; the story they bracket in the Bible is the dissolution of Israel into two separate kingdoms following the reigns of David and Solomon. Our author guides us to interpret the events he recounts – the Byzantine losses, the conquest of Spain and its subsequent rule by the Arabs, all of which divide the Christian world – through the tragic division of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel after the death of Solomon and the rebellion of Jeroboam against Rehoboam, which was followed by their apostasy and the subsequent conquest of their kingdoms by Assyria and Babylon, and to draw the same moral conclusions through the repetition of these events. This is far from a secularizing approach to history; it is a work of biblical exegesis. The Chronicle uses repetition in this way to encourage readers to make connections between the events it describes. By describing the Arabs as the scourge of Byzantine pride, the author does not need to repeat this judgement when he describes the conquest of Spain; it is the readers’ task to draw the conclusion. By underplaying their religion, he can allow Arabs to play a double role as external scourge in the manner of Babylon and as apostates who have abandoned God in the manner of the biblical Jeroboam. The most unusual part of this text is the way the author urges his readers to draw moral lessons from the vicissitudes of Arab, as well as Christian, rule. For example, after ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, governor of Spain in the 730s, quashed the Berber rebel, Munnuza, who had carved out an independent principality for himself north of the Pyrenees, the chronicler writes: When the warrior (Munnuza) was found in the town of Cerdanya, he was surrounded by a siege. After being walled in for some time, he suddenly burst into flight, as a result of a judgement of God, and was deprived of his authority. And since he had made himself drunk on the blood of the 36

This exact phrase is repeated fourteen times in 3 and 4 Kings. It appears with some variations (e.g. ‘uerborum’ replaced by ‘sermonum’) some thirty-four times. Collins, Arab Conquest, 59 and López Pereira, Estudio crítico, 31, n. 22, both miss the biblical echo of this phrase.

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Christians – the innocent blood that he had shed in the same place – and had burned to death the illustrious bishop Anambadus in the flower of his youth, he was already damned for these crimes… Mocking the army in pursuit, Munnuza, already wounded, threw himself onto the sharp edges of the rocks from a high pinnacle, so that he would not be captured alive, and there he gave up his soul.37 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān serves as a scourge, an instrument of God’s vengeance on Munnuza for his attacks on God’s people. Although their shared Islamic faith is not mentioned, they are distinguished from a group described as Christian, which includes a saintly martyred bishop. Islam does not need to be named for this to be a Christian moral tale. When ʿAbd al-Raḥmān is subsequently defeated by the Franks at Poitiers, it is left up to the reader to discern whether this is a good or a bad thing.38 The chronicler and his readers know the Arabs are Muslims; by encouraging a reading of their rule against the actions of saints and martyrs whose tales he juxtaposes with the war and taxes of the Arabs, the chronicler teaches his readers how to interpret their religious difference. It is by no means a neutral portrayal. His concealment of Islam has an ethical purpose. He refers to the Muslim leader correctly as the Amir Almuminim, which he translates incorrectly as ‘carrying out all things prosperously’ rather than the correct ‘commander of the faithful’.39 I regard this as a deliberate mistranslation, made for an audience that might be wondering if the spectacular Arab success it saw all around was a sign of God’s favour, and growing curious about the Islamic faith of the conquerors. Our author diverts attention away from the emir as a leader of a group of the faithful, towards an understanding of the emir as one capable (albeit only with God’s permission) of enjoying worldly victory, and of being used by God as a scourge. He secularizes Muslim success, just as he did when he reckoned their calendar from the date of a military victory, rather than the year of the Hijra. Like the biblical books of kings and chronicles that it evokes, the Chronicle juxtaposes accounts of villainous rulers and rebellious subjects with tales of saints and miracles. This juxtaposition has its own ethical purpose. First, it represents a vision of the nature of historical time in this world. History is fragmentary and discontinuous, and the ‘miracles of saints’ coexist in time and 37 38 39

Chronica Muzarabica, 41–2; translation based on Wolf, Conquerors and Chroniclers, 143. Ibid., 42–3. ‘Amir Almuminim, quod idioma regni in lingua eorum resonat “omnia prospere gerens”’: ibid., 34.

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space with ‘slaughters of peoples’ and will continue to do so until the end of the world, for ‘such was the nature of history’.40 Events repeat and the past is like the present. Also deliberate is the author’s use of understatement to describe both villains and saints. This is not a result of his acceptance of disasters, like the Muslim conquest, or the acts of evildoers, but because of his confidence that his readers will recognize their disastrous implications and supply the emotions he omits. It is a description of human events that separates things into extremes. There is little middle ground in this account, nothing of humdrum, everyday life. This portrayal of extremes teaches readers how to categorize their own world. On the surface, my reading of the Chronicle shares much in common with that of Alexander Bronisch. We concur that its author is far more preoccupied by the Arab conquerors of Spain as Muslims in his text than scholars give him credit for. And I fully agree with his argument that the moralization of the defeat of Byzantium at the hands of the Arabs at the outset of the history is meant to guide our interpretation of the defeat of the Goths at their hands in Spain. But Bronisch describes the chronicler writing under a repressive Islamic regime in which he fears to write openly and so instead must invite contemporary readers to read between the lines to decode the hidden message of the Chronicle, which Bronisch describes as a critique of Islam and an unequivocal explanation of the role of Islam in Christian eschatology.41 I argue, in contrast, that the reading the chronicler invites is anything but unequivocal.42 While Bronisch is correct that our author invites eschatological speculation on the model of Isidore’s Chronicon, the chronicler also backs away from any overly concrete identification. I suggest that this was more because the author was trying to be a good Augustinian who interpreted his own moral life against the cosmic backdrop of salvation history, than because he feared a crack-down by the local Muslim authority. Our chronicler learned from both Isidore and Augustine that no one really knows when the end of days will come, no matter what signs seem to be present and what dates appear to approach.

40 41 42

I am quoting here W. Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History (Princeton, NJ, 1988), 172, whose description of Gregory of Tours’ Histories provides a useful parallel and comparison with the texts I discuss in this article. ‘Proporcionaba a los cristianos de forma inequívoca una explicación sobre el papel del islam en la escatología cristiana’: Bronisch, Reconquista y guerra santa, 140. Cf. Mary Carruthers’s resistance to understanding the interpretation of allegory as an act of decoding rather than a meditation on that which has been left obscure, hidden, dark: The Craft of Thought (Cambridge, 1998), 124.

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What is more, Bronisch’s argument ignores the chronicler’s many statements about the Arab governors that are frankly positive.43 Here again, our chronicler is a good Augustinian: the Arab governors rule only over the earthly City, not the City of God, which is commanded by Christ alone. Therefore, Christians owe obedience to Arab authorities because these latter were placed in their positions by God, and, at their very best, the earthly peace which the Arabs might establish would better allow Christians to pursue the City of God in this world.44 But even Christian earthly rule is not an end in itself; the true end is the personal salvation of each individual Christian. Our chronicler recognizes that Christians may fare better or worse under individual Arab governors, but to build a Christian kingdom on earth is not the chronicler’s aim. He instead gives his readers lessons in submitting to the judgements of God and evidence of those who have managed to live a correct Christian life even under adverse circumstances.45 The author of the Chronicle invites not a rigid decoding but rather an exegesis that provides a moral understanding of the events of his day for the salvation of his readers. The saints he describes, who have visions, attend church councils, and uphold correct dogma, embody man as he ought to be, as a realized actuality, not an abstract ideal or potential. The author creates a vision of a transformed world existing in the midst of ordinary politics and warfare.46 The successes and the failures of the kings of this world are mocked both by the ironic understatement of the chronicler who describes them, and by the inevitable turn of fortune’s wheel, seen, for example, in Munnuza’s rise and fall. Perhaps the End Times are near; perhaps not. In either case, the saints point outside this world to the Kingdom of Heaven, a kingdom that is both at hand and not yet; a kingdom that is both out of reach and knowable to us through contact with the saints. Beatus’s Commentary provides us with another kind of vision of the end. Texts like his biblical commentary invite the same kinds of reading practices that Morrison identifies for historical texts. Their episodes, built on verses from the Bible, inspire the construction of mental images and produce emotional reactions which allow readers to fill in gaps and make connections.

43

So, for instance, al-Hurr restores to Christians estates confiscated from them at the time of the conquest: Chronica Muzarabica, 36. Umar’s rule is described as benign and patient, and praised by all: ibid., 37. And Yazid i is described as showing mercy in victory to a rebel: ibid., 37. 44 Augustine, De ciuitate dei, xix.17 and 23. 45 M.C. Díaz y Díaz, ‘La historiografía hispana desde la invasión árabe hasta el año 1000’, in his De Isidoro al siglo xi (Barcelona, 1976), 203–34, at 209. 46 Again, Goffart on Gregory of Tours: Narrators, 203.

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Their recollection allows the reader to develop a personal sense of morality.47 These mental images can be based on word-pictures ‘drawn’ by the text, or on actual images.48 Beatus’s Commentary is divided into twelve books, each one divided into shorter sections in which a passage from the Book of the Apocalypse, called the storia, is followed by an illustration and then commentary (known as the explanatio) on both text and illustration together. As its most recent editor writes, Beatus never conceived of his work other than illustrated.49 At the same time, the fact that these images differ from manuscript to manuscript is not important, so long as they convey the gist or spirit of what they represent, because their intent is not to depict an actual object or moment, but to be used as cues for recollection.50 This mode of division makes the Commentary, like the Chronicle, episodic and fascicular, demanding close reading and meditation on a single segment rather that the creation of a narrative that overarches the whole text with clear lines of cause and effect. Text and image together are subjects for meditation in the Commentary. For example, the storia reciting Apoc. 12 is accompanied in the Morgan Beatus by a dramatic image spread across a full two pages (fols. 152v–153r), designed to be memorable and to draw forth strong emotions of fear, horror and wonder from the viewer. The woman clothed with the sun, standing on the moon, and crowned with a dozen stars (Apoc. 12: 1) stands backed into the top left hand corner, menaced by a terrible red-patterned dragon with seven heads and ten horns (Apoc. 12: 3). The rays of the sun that clothe her encircle her midsection in a burning ring that highlights her pain in childbirth (Apoc. 12: 2). But she is not wholly without help, for the Archangel Michael together with six more angels fight the many-headed dragon (Apoc. 12: 7–8). We see a curl of the dragon’s tail pulling nine stars out of the sky (Apoc. 12: 4), and hurling them to the ground where, in the bottom right corner of the page, they are revealed as the defeated angels, cast by three more angels down to the earth. The dragon, now revealed as Satan himself, is struck down with them (Apoc. 12: 9). We see the woman, having escaped to a desert, assisted by two eagle wings (Apoc. 12: 14), and the river created by the dragon in that place to carry the woman away (Apoc. 12: 15). The pictures on these two pages provoke emotions of fear and horror that can in turn paint pictures in the mind which function as meditative gathering sites.51 Indeed, one viewer of this image in the Morgan Beatus was so 47

On recollection and the creation of a moral sense: Carruthers, Craft of Thought, 19–21; on the creation of mental images and their connection to a range of emotions in a range of texts, including Beatus’s Commentary, see ibid., 130, 133, 144, 151–3. 48 Ibid., 151. 49 Beatus of Liébana, Tractatus de Apocalipsin, xviii. 50 Carruthers, Craft of Thought, 120–1. 51 Ibid., 154.

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Beatus, Commentary on the Apocalypse. The Morgan Library & Museum. MS M.644 fol. 152v–153r

moved by what he saw that he scratched out the face of Satan in the bottom right corner. It was the illustrator’s plan to affect the emotions of his viewers as a result of what they saw. Maius, who was in charge of this manuscript, writes about his aim in its colophon (fol. 293): ‘As part of its adornment I have painted a series of pictures for the wonderful words of its stories so that the wise may fear the coming of the future judgement of the completion of this age’.52 Beatus himself was attuned to the visual qualities of the texts he uses, and their potential function as loci of memory; the texts and images he added to his Tyconian base were elements that could be as readily visualized and memorized as the Apocalyptic material, such as his use of Noah’s Ark.53 Moving from storia and image to explanatio, Beatus, like the chronicler, makes frequent use of repetition in his text. He repeats important lessons over 52

53

‘Inter eius decus uerba mirifica storiarumque depinxi per seriem ut scientibus terreant iudicii futuri aduentui peracturi seculi’: cited in Williams, Spanish Apocalypse, 225, n.4. Williams translates ‘peracturi seculi’ as ‘the world’s end’, but I translate it as ‘the completion of this age’, to show that Maius is thinking of the Apocalypse in relationship to the ages of the world. E.g., fol. 79r of the Morgan Beatus. Cf. Carruthers, Craft of Thought, 232 on the potential of Noah’s ark as a site of meditation.

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and over again in different books, and he describes and reads the biblical book of the Apocalypse itself as inherently repetitive. Both types of repetitions are thought to take place in historical time, and thus Beatus’s Commentary invites its readers to make the same kind of connections between past, present, and future that we saw in the Chronicle. For example, six scattered but repeated references in Beatus that puzzle commentators refer in the present tense to the current destruction and suffering of Africa. The first reference comes in the commentary on the message of the angel to Philadelphia, the sixth church (Apoc. 3: 7–13), about the faithful and their persecutors. The commentator states that the promise of protection in times of suffering was not only relevant to Philadelphia in the past, for it applies both to the sufferings of Africa in the present, where he intimates that Antichrist has been revealed, and the whole Church in the time of the Antichrist in the future, announcing that, ‘Just as has happened in Africa, so it is fitting that the Antichrist be revealed in the whole world, just as he has been revealed in part to us’.54 These passages on Africa are probably taken from Tyconius, where they would originally have referred to the persecution of the Donatists in Africa, of whom Tyconius was one. They are not found in the fragmentary remnant of Tyconius’s original text nor in other texts borrowed from Tyconius, and scholars suggest that later scribes and authors wisely ignored these sections as no longer relevant, while Beatus blindly copied these tales of an ancient persecution of heretics, all the while ignoring the sufferings of Spain under Islam in his own day.55 But it seems to me that these passages are an invitation for readers to make precisely this connection, between old sufferings, the sufferings of the Church in Spain under Islam, and the coming trials under the Antichrist. The African Church was both intellectually and mythically the mother church of the Spanish Church; texts, liturgy, and monks came from Africa into Spain. The use of the present tense and references to ‘us’ are intended to evoke Spain’s current trials and remind readers there of their historic bond with Africa, its predecessor in suffering under the Muslim yoke. Beatus follows Tyconius’s division of the world into three, in contrast to Augustine’s two-part division of the world into the earthly city and the City of God. For Tyconius and Beatus, the world is split between the Church and the kingdoms of the world, and the Church itself is divided between the faithful and the followers of the devil – false prophets, heretics and schismatics.56 54 55 56

‘Sicut enim in Africa factum est, ita fieri oportet in toto mundo reuelari antichristum, sicut et nobis ex parte reuelatum est’; in Beatus of Liébana, Tractatus de Apocalipsin, 343. Cf. 482, 613, 631, 736, and 739. Campo Hernández, ‘Introducción al Comentario del Apocalipsis’, 19–20. So, in his prologue, Beatus divides the world into good and bad, the Church and the kingdoms of the world (Tractatus de Apocalipsin, 14), but further on he relates that the Church

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Beatus’s last group, the wicked within the Church, represented for Tyconius the persecutors of the Donatists. Beatus’s readers were required to read these sections in a new way, to understand who the new enemies-from-within might be. The obvious candidate is Bishop Elipandus of Toledo and his fellow supporters of the Adoptionist heresy, against whom Beatus would later write a treatise. Toledo, now under Muslim rule, had once been the royal seat of the Visigoths, and as the two traded accusations of being schismatics and antichrists back and forth between each other, Elipandus scoffed at Beatus’s attacks, ‘Since when have those in Toledo taken lessons in theology from Liébana?’57 To Beatus and his readers in the beleaguered Christian north, Elipandus, living safely under a Muslim ruler, must have seemed to be a collaborator with the enemy, and such quislings were blamed for the fall of Spain to the Muslims. The Chronicle blames the death of the Visigothic nobles attempting to flee Toledo at the time of the conquest on Oppa, reputedly a son of the deceased Visigothic king, Egica.58 The late ninth-century chronicle written under the Asturian king, Alfonso iii, promotes this Oppa to bishop of Toledo, a suitable predecessor for Elipandus from the perspective of the Christians in the north. In both Beatus’s discussions of Africa and his understanding of the threefold world, the repetition of these notions throughout the Commentary invites readers to create coherence in the text. Readers must conclude for themselves that in the sufferings of the African Church may be seen the problems in Spain of their own day under Islam, and that the wicked inside the Church are those who compromise with their Islamic overlords and introduce into the Church heretical notions about the nature of Christ. When Beatus quotes Isidore of Seville to announce that the Antichrist is he who denies that Christ is God, his readers may interpret from it that the Antichrist refers to the Muslims, who reject Jesus’s divinity, or to their Christian enemies in Toledo, who debase Christ’s divinity by declaring him to have been adopted by God the Father. In addition, those perusing the text may read in it Isidore’s own rejection of Arian Christology.59 The second way that Beatus uses repetition is how he reads the biblical text itself. Bernard McGinn argues there were three ways of reading the book of the

57 58 59

itself is full of pseudo-prophets, false priests and preachers (Tractatus de Apocalipsin, 41). Cf. Campo Hernández, ‘Introducción al Comentario del Apocalipsis’, 23–4. ‘Nam numquam est auditum ut Libanenses Toletanos docuissent’: Elipandus of Toledo, ‘Epistola Ad Fidelem’, in csm, vol. 1, 80–1. Chronica Muzarabica, 32. ‘Ille antichristus est qui negat esse deum christum’, in Beatus of Liébana, Tractatus de Apocalipsin, 180; Isidore accessed here in S.A. Barney (ed.), The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (Cambridge, 2006), viii.xi.22, at 185.

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Apocalypse of John: as if it describes a sequential history of future events; as a completely non-linear theological treatise, in the manner implied by Augustine; or lastly, as a cyclical or recapitulative reading of future events, that is to say, as a series of alternate accounts, using different sets of symbols, of the same message.60 This third way is how Beatus reads the Apocalypse. For Beatus, the seven churches, the seven angels with their trumpets, and the seven angels with the basins filled with plagues from the biblical text are three cycles which each recount the same single set of events. The first six elements of each cycle describe the theme while the seventh recapitulates the previous six and introduces the next cycle of seven. These cycles are not merely construed as sets of symbols interpreted theologically and allegorically, however; for Beatus they must also be construed historically. Beatus reminds us several times that the biblical text is using these cycles to recapitulate the history of the Church from the time of the Passion to the Second Coming, that is to say, the period of the sixth age. Commenting on the storia of the seven angels with seven plagues (Apoc. 15: 5–8), he writes, ‘The seven vessels, and the seven angels, and the seven trumpets and the four animals [of the Evangelists] are all one thing, which is to say, one Church’.61 When the story of these cycles of sevens concludes, the text ‘ends and recapitulates from the beginning, that is, from Christ’s Passion’.62 For Augustine, the history of the sixth age is not susceptible to interpretation because it is not part of the Bible. For Beatus, however, the story of the sixth age, including how it will end, is part of the Bible because it is told in Apocalypse. The Apocalypse of John describes the coming of Antichrist and the events that will follow, but it also describes the state of the world throughout the sixth age, a world divided, as we saw, between the pagans, the unfaithful within the Church, and the few faithful, the Church of God. The past persecution of the Church by the Roman emperors is described in it, and both past and future precursors of the Antichrist can be understood from its pages. Its description of an age in which the saints constantly suffer at the hands of the worldly is parallel to what the Chronicle describes. The Apocalypse of John is a book of history: past history, current events, and future history, a history that will repeat over and over again until the end of time with Christ’s Second Coming. It neither predicts clear dates nor names key figures; rather, again like the 60 61 62

B. McGinn, ‘Introduction: John’s Apocalypse and the Apocalyptic Mentality’, in Emmerson and McGinn, The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, 3–19, at 14. Beatus of Liébana, Tractatus de Apocalipsin, 761. The opening of the storia of the preceding section announces that Apoc. 15 recapitulates a previously described persecution: ‘Facit finem et recapitulat eandem persecutionem’, 753. ‘Hic facit finem et recapitulat ab origine, id est a Christi passione’: ibid., 801.

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Chronicle, it helps its readers to interpret and endure their suffering. The moral behaviour Beatus preaches, the call to repentance and penitence, is set within a historical moment, within a consciousness of a beginning and an end and a time of judgement; not just a personal end, but a final end.63 This way of understanding Beatus’s aims illuminates his use of chronology. Faithful to his sources though he is, he still translates all dates into the Spanish era. In his fourth book, he indulges in speculation about the coming of the 6,000th year after Creation, which is to herald the end of the sixth age and the beginning of the End Times. The manuscript tradition contains two sets of predictions, each reflecting a different edition of the Commentary, and each reckoning the six ages slightly differently. The earlier dates the writing of the Commentary to 814 of the Spanish era, or 776, with 25 years remaining until the seventh age, and the latter dates it to 822 Spanish era, 784, leaving only 16 years for repentance in the face of the End. But in both, he reminds readers that the actual date of the End is not known to humankind, quoting the same two biblical passages Isidore cited in his Chronicon, discussed above. We have to understand this allegorically, not literally, Beatus reminds his readers. Maybe the world will end at this time, and maybe not; only God knows. Perhaps the remaining years will be shortened, as they were before the flood when God saw that the people were not taking advantage of the time available to them to do penance. Beatus urges all Catholics to think of the remaining time as one hour, and do penance night and day, with ashes and hairshirts, and not investigate further the calculation of the actual day.64 Elsewhere in the volume, Beatus denies a literal millennial period after the Second Coming and says that the thousand years in Apoc. 20: 1–3 refer to the period of the sixth age when we have Christ. This not to be taken literally as a period of a thousand years, however. One thousand in Greek stands for Alpha, referring to the beginning and therefore to Christ, who is Alpha and Omega,65 images of which open and close so many Iberian manuscripts of this period, giving a wide variety of theological texts an apocalyptic frame, situated between beginning and ending.66

63 64 65 66

An example would be when he concludes his discussion of why John writes to each of the seven churches with the statement that ‘He calls all these to penance; he calls everyone to future judgement’: ibid., 132. Ibid., 517–23. See the editor’s discussion of these passages on xli-xlv. Ibid., 869–71. Alphas and omegas begin and/or end the Gerona Beatus, the Tábara Beatus, the Fernando and Sancha Beatus, the León Biblia Primera, the León Antiphonary, and the Florentius Moralia in Job: M. Mentré, Illuminated Manuscripts of Medieval Spain (London, 1996), 97–8. Since first and last folios were very vulnerable, it is likely there were once many

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Beatus thus uses specific periods of time to both gesture towards a coming End Time, and also to gesture away from it. The Chronicle does the same thing. Its concern with chronology, especially with dating events from the beginning of the world, puts it in the universal chronicle tradition, and indeed the chronicler thought of himself as continuing the universal histories of Eusebius/Jerome and Isidore, whom he names in its conclusion. This conclusion abandons the recital of events in Spain to consider a debate between historians about whether Christ was born in the 5,196th or 5,200th year from the beginning of the world, favouring the latter date. The chronicler’s concern with years from the beginning, and his reference to the demonstration of the ‘fullness of time’ through the generations and reigns of kings he has described, invites readers to speculate about the End Time. According to his scheme, the 6000th year would come in 800, the same date Beatus gives.67 Further speculation is invited by the chronicler when he places the death of Mohammed in the Spanish era 666, leaving him open to identification by Christians who can read the signs correctly as a precursor of the Antichrist; an Antichrist for Spain.68 Moreover, when the author describes the destruction of Spain by the Muslims, he compares it to five others: the Fall of Adam, of Troy, of Jerusalem, of Babylon, and of Rome: ‘All this and more, Spain, once so delightful and now rendered so miserable, endured as much to its honour as to its disgrace’.69 It is an apocalyptic-sounding, empire-crushing, era-ending moment, a sixth transformative event in human history. But no explicit lessons are drawn by the chronicler, no explicit dates are given, or future events predicted. Here again, the reader is simply invited to ponder the End Times in relationship with current struggles and the recent past. These are not the only medieval authors who both gesture towards the date of the End Times, and then away from it. Richard Landes emphasizes the gesture towards a specific date and suggests the hedging that follows is simply there to disguise the author’s real intention, which is to predict a particular eschatological moment.70 I propose instead that Beatus and the chronicler expected their readers to pay

67 68 69 70

more examples, and some manuscripts which now either begin with an Alpha or end with an Omega, may originally have included both. Chronica Muzarabica, 52–4. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 33; Wolf, Conquerors and Chroniclers, 133. Cf. Bronisch, Reconquista y guerra santa, 140. R. Landes, ‘Lest the Millennium Be Fulfilled: Apocalyptic Expectations and the Pattern of Western Christendom 100–800ce’, in W. Verbeke, D. Verhelst, and A. Welkenhuysen (eds), The Uses and Abuses of Eschatology in the Middle Ages (Leuven, 1988), 137–211, at 158–60.

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attention to both the gesture towards, and the gesture away, and to meditate on their proximity and their distance from their final end – that is, their own death – in a way that was entirely orthodox. Beatus concludes his own musings on chronology by reminding us that when someone dies, that is for that person the completion of the age.71 The Kingdom of Heaven was at once both at hand, and not yet. The Kingdom of Heaven (Apoc. 21:1–27) was often depicted as one of the final illustrations of Beatus’s Commentary.72 In the example from the Morgan Beatus, produced for the monastery of San Miguel de la Escalada, it occupies the whole of fol. 222v. John is given a God’s-eye view of the Kingdom, and looks down on it from above to see its four walls, each pierced with three adjacent horseshoe-shaped arches and topped with crenellations like those on the Great Mosque of Córdoba, which likewise line the apex of the roof of the royal church of Valdediós in the Asturias. In each arch stands an apostle, his head surmounted by one of the twelve precious gems from Apoc. 22: 19–20. Christ, the Lamb of God at the centre, has a clear view of the whole. He holds a staff topped with an equal-armed cross. The walls of this tenth-century schematic diagram of the Heavenly Jerusalem evoke contemporary triple-apsed churches, which likewise used three horseshoe arches to frame and set off the space where the church altars were placed, as at San Miguel de la Escalada itself, and at San Cebrián de Mazote. Nonetheless, it is impossible when standing inside these churches to find a place from which to gain an unobstructed view of all three apses at once. Sightlines are blocked at all angles by pillars and columns, low chancel screens occlude the view of each apse, and the backlight that comes in from the east-facing windows over each altar serves to darken the area outside the apse, further concealing what goes on in that space. It is no accident, I argue, that it is not possible to see a clear view of the three apses from one vantage point, while at the same time knowing that they are there. The screening is deliberate. In these churches, as in our texts, the Kingdom of Heaven is achingly close, yet still concealed. The art of the Beatus manuscripts had a crucial role in ensuring its text would be read correctly and that the right kind of connections would be drawn by its readers. The images that follow the plan of the Heavenly Jerusalem in the 71 72

‘Quando enim quisque de seculo migrat, tunc illi consummatio seculi est’: Beatus of Liébana, Tractatus de Apocalipsin, 523. An illustration of this scene appears in twelve of the extant manuscripts: J. Williams, The Illustrated Beatus: A Corpus of the Illustrations of the Commentary on the Apocalypse. The Ninth and Tenth Centuries (London, 1994), 289.

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Beatus, Commentary on the Apocalypse. The Morgan Library & Museum. MS M.644 fol. 222v

Morgan Beatus create visible connections between past, present, and future in the sixth age by linking the churches of John the Evangelist’s Asia with contemporary Iberian structures, and again with the Kingdom of Heaven. The proportions of the external arcade at San Miguel de la Escalada reflect the arches surmounting the apostles in the second to last Beatus illustration (Apoc. 22:

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San Miguel de la Escalada, interior

1–5; fol. 223), which faces the plan of the Heavenly City, as well as those of the churches of Asia in the final illustration (Apoc. 22: 6–21; 231v). These arches work together to connect the past time of the revelation to John with the present time of the monks and the future time of glory in the Kingdom of Heaven.

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The churches of this period are designed to give the faithful a glimpse of the Kingdom of Heaven, an experience they renew when they view their manuscripts, and which they know how to interpret because of the texts they read. The effect of the church architecture and the manuscript illustrations, together with Beatus’s text, was to create a feeling of urgency in their audience, a sense of the relevance of the message of the Apocalypse and its commentary in their own time, and a sense of living with a view of the End Times and the proximity of the Kingdom of Heaven. These visual cues, created in the century and a half or so after Beatus compiled his text, fulfill the imperative of his text to make the problem of salvation vivid and present to his audience. The images in the illustrations worked cumulatively, as did the texts of the Commentary and the Chronicle, and the arches are only one element in this program. Another is the equal-armed cross carried by the Lamb of God in the Heavenly Jerusalem image. This type of cross features in full-page illustrations in numerous Iberian manuscripts of this period, where it is accompanied with one of two mottos; either Pax Lux Rex Lex (Peace, Light, King, Law) or another recalling the legend of Emperor Constantine’s vision, ‘In this sign the pious are protected; in this sign the enemy is defeated’.73 Both mottos, but especially the second, evoke Christ’s spiritual kingship and conquest of the devil at the same time as they recall worldly kingship and domination over more tangible enemies defined by their opposition to piety, namely the Muslims. Christ is praised and the king is reminded of his duties. These crosses put mundane kingship, such as that which appears in the Chronicle, in parallel with the transcendent reign of Christ in Beatus’s Commentary. Asturian kings appreciated this connection; the so-called Cross of Angels was a gift from Alfonso ii, the Asturian king contemporary with Beatus, and it bears the ‘Constantinian’ motto on its verso, while its jewels recall the Heavenly Jerusalem. The Chronicle of 754 and Beatus’s Commentary on the Apocalypse select content that reflects when and where they were written, both in terms of what they exclude and what they include. And what they may seem to exclude – ­explicit reference to Islam – is not a real exclusion at all. Both texts invite their readers to make ethical judgements about who is on the side of God and who is not. The Chronicle and Beatus’s Commentary share an understanding of theology in which time and history are of central importance, and a belief that the time between the Passion and the Second Coming of Christ is a valid locus of theological reflection. Although different in terms of their formal genre, these two texts expect the same kind of audience to read them in the same way, and to complete their half-told lessons with theological and exegetical reflection. 73 Mentré, Illuminated Manuscripts, 100–1.

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McGinn, B., ‘Introduction: John’s Apocalypse and the Apocalyptic Mentality’, in R.K. Emmerson and B. McGinn (eds), The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 1992), 3–19. Mentré, M., Illuminated Manuscripts of Medieval Spain (London, 1996). Morrison, K.F., History as a Visual Art in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance (Princeton, NJ, 1990). Pollmann, K., ‘Moulding the Present: Apocalyptic as Hermeneutics in City of God 21–22’, in M. Vessey, K. Pollman and A.D. Fizgerald (eds), History, Apocalypse, and the Secular Imagination (Bowling Green, OH, 1999), 165–81. Vitz, E.B., Medieval Narrative and Modern Narratology (New York, 1989). Williams, J., A Spanish Apocalypse (New York, 1991). Williams, J., ‘Purpose and Imagery in the Apocalypse Commentary of Beatus of Liébana’, in R.K. Emmerson and B. McGinn (eds), The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 1992), 217–33. Williams, J., The Illustrated Beatus: A Corpus of the Illustrations of the Commentary on the Apocalypse. The Ninth and Tenth Centuries (London, 1994). Wolf, K.B. (trans.), Conquerors and Chroniclers of Early Medieval Spain (Liverpool, 1990).

Index ʿAbd al-Malik, Umayyad caliph 173, 240 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ii, emir of Umayyad Spain 69, 78, 235, 244–47 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān iii, emir and caliph of Umayyad Spain 71–2, 76, 175, 187n.61, 220n.50, 235, 247–49 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Marwān ibn Yūnus al-Jilliqī (‘the Galician’), rebel leader of Lower March 70–1 ʿAbd al-Wāḥid al-Marrākushī, historian 68 adoptionism 76, 82, 273 Afonso Henriques, king of Portugal 33 Aḥmad al-Rāzī, historian 65, 243 Akhbār majmūʿa 68, 70, 242–44 Álava 149, 151, 153–54, 159 Albeldensis, see Chronicle of Albelda Alfonso i, king of Asturias 26–8, 31, 38 Alfonso ii, king of Asturias 71, 83–4, 88, 90, 280 Alfonso iii, king of Asturias-León 28, 38, 41, 71, 82, 85–6, 88, 90, 93, 149, 273 Alfonso v, king of León 96–7 Alfonso vi, king of León 92–3, 95, 97, 99, 216 Alfonso vii, king of Castile-León 9 Almodis de la Marche 203, 210, 214–18, 221, 225 Alodia, Christian martyr 92 Alvarus of Córdoba, author of Vita Eulogii 79–80 ʿAmrūs ibn Yūsuf, governor of Toledo 68 al-Andalus (Muslim Iberia) 12, 26, 28, 30–1, 53, 65–6, 126, 150, 170, 171, 173–74, 176, 179, 181–83, 185, 191, 193, 219–22, 232, 235–36, 239–40, 251 etymology of 65–6 ‘Anbasa ibn Suḥaym al-Kalbī, governor of Umayyad Spain 74 Anglo-Saxon England 34 Apringius of Beja 85, 263 aprisio 98n.215, 129, 138 Aragón 91, 98, 126, 147–48, 155–56, 159 rulers of 213n.32, 222 archaeology 26, 28, 36, 37, 43 Ardón, monastery of 186 Argentea, Christian martyr 75–6

Passion of Argentea 75 argenteo, argenceo, arenzo etc. 171, 180–86, 188 Artabās, al-qimāsah 150 Astorga 83, 148, 158 Asturian Church 82 Asturias expansion of territory 36, 205 kingdom of 11, 26, 53, 70, 81, 86, 88, 90, 94, 96–7, 99, 258 kings of 23, 28, 33, 91 Augustine of Hippo 259–61, 263, 268, 272, 274 aureas 190 Almodis de la Marche Ava of Castile, the condesa traidora 201, 202, 218–21, 225 al-Bakrī, historian and geographer 67 Banū Qāsī 91, 220 Barbero, Abilio, and Vigil, Marcelo 3, 37, 38–44 Barcelona Carolingian mints in 187, 189 county of 188, 190 Ermessenda of (see Ermessenda) sack in 985 127–28, 133, 201 wealth of 193 see Borrell ii see Ramón Borrell Beatus of Liébana 76, 82, 259, 261, 263, 270–78, 280 Commentary on the Apocalypse 81, 257–59, 262–63, 269, 271–73, 275, 277, 280 Berber revolt 240n.58 Berbers 27, 66, 68, 240, 266 Berenguer Ramón i, count of Barcelona 191 Besalú-Cerdanya, counties of 126 Bible 260–61, 265–66, 269, 274 Bodo-Eleazar, Frankish deacon and convert to Judaism 79 Borrell ii, count of Barcelona, Girona, Osona and Urgell 123–28 Braulio, bishop of Zaragoza 61 Burgos 149, 159

284 see Diego see Gonzalo Fernández Byzantine empire 261–62, 268 Byzantium 268 Caesarius of Montserrat 95 cancellarius 135 Cantabria 144, 258 as conceptualised in Barbero and Vigil paradigm 38 Cardeña, monastery of 147, 152, 154, 170, 179, 184 Carolingian empire 170, 187 Castile 29, 147–54, 156, 159, 170, 178–79, 190, 201–02, 218–19, 225 dominant role in Spanish historiography of 6, 23–4 see Fernán González Castilian Annals 146, 149 Castro, Américo 23, 34 Catalan counties 125, 169, 180, 187–88, 190 Celanova, monastery of 144, 147, 160, 170, 176, 177–78, 180, 205–07 see Rosendo, abbot and bishop Celedonius of Calahorra 53 Charlemagne, king of the Franks 97, 127, 180, 187 Charles the Bald, king of West Francia 189 charters chronological distribution 146 expressions of identity in 53, 86–7, 89–90 formulaic aspects of 129, 130–31, 139 from Portugal 147–48, 156 narratives in 86, 123, 129–31, 138–40 numbers of 86, 146 of donation 124, 150 of sale 129, 138, 146–47, 169, 171, 176 sanction clauses 86, 135, 144n.5, 150–51, 154–55, 156n.63 single sheets 144n.6, 146–48, 150, 154, 156, 159, 160, 162 see count(s) Chintila, king of the Visigoths 63 Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris 8n.19, 9 Chronica Adefonsi tertii regis, see Chronicle of Alfonso iii Chronica Naierensis, see Najerense

Index Chronicle of 754 12, 74–5, 257–59, 261–62, 264–66, 270–76, 280 Chronicle of Albelda 6, 84, 149 Chronicle of Alfonso iii 6, 83, 89, 91, 94, 146n.12, 149, 216, 273 Chronicle of Bishop Gotmar 216 Chronicle of Pseudo-Isidore 75 Chronicle of Sahagún 216 Chronicle of Sampiro 88, 94, 146, 149, 158 church councils 58–60, 76, 88–9, 97, 158 Cixila of Abellar 185–86 Coimbra 71, 205 coins Carolingian 170, 174, 176, 180–81, 187–89 Roman 170, 172, 181 Visigothic 170, 173 units of account 170 see also argenteo, argenceo, arenzo etc.; aureas; denarii curribiles; denarii grossos; denarius/denarii; denier; dīnār; dīnār darāhīm; diners de transició; dirham(s); dirham kayl; fals; mancusos de auro iafaris, amuris; pesas d’or; solidi gallicani, gallicanos, gallicenses etc; solido argenteo; solidos kazimis; solidus/ solidi; uncia Collins, Roger 6n.13, 44 Condesa traidora see Ava of Castile convenientia/convenientiae 191, 193, 210, 215 convivencia 3, 4, 21, 34, 257 Córdoba 7, 53, 63, 69, 72–7, 87, 91, 174, 190, 235, 242, 263 Great Mosque 264, 277 count(s) geographical distribution 153–54 in charters 143–44, 149, 150, 153 in witness lists 144, 152n.45, 153–55 pecuniary compensation due from 183 title 143, 144 see qūmis counts of the palace 149 county, territorial unit 143 Covadonga, battle 83 Crónica de Alfonso iii see Chronicle of Alfonso iii

Index Damascus 173, 242, 244 Depopulation 1, 9, 22, 25, 29, 36, 45 basis of theory 26–7, 30 critical response to theory 38–44 ideological potency of theory 23–4, 31–2, 35 reception in Portugal 32–4 denarii curribiles 189, 192–93 denarii grossos 189, 192–93 denarius/denarii 180, 187–90 denier 180 Diego, count of Burgos 149 Diego Rodríguez, count of Castile 149 dīnār see dinar(s) dinar(s) 173, 175, 182, 190 dīnār darāhīm 182–84, 186, 192–93 diners de transició 189 dirham(s) 173–75, 182–86, 188, 190, 191–92 dirham kayl 183 Duero river basin 24–30, 32, 35, 37, 40–4 Egica, king of the Visigoths 63, 273 El Castellar 37 Elipandus of Toledo 76, 80, 82, 273 Emeterius of Calahorra 53 Empúries 187 Empúries-Rosselló, counties of 126 Ermengol i, count of Urgell 126 Ermengol ii, count of Urgell 191 Ermessenda of Barcelona 203, 208, 211–14, 216–18, 221, 223, 225 Erwig, king of the Visigoths 60, 63–4 Eterius, bishop of Osma 82 Eulogius of Córdoba 77 Europeanization of Spanish medievalism 39, 40 fals 173 Felix, bishop of Córdoba 76 Ferdinand i see Fernando i, count of Castile and king of León Fernán González, count of Castile 6, 10, 86, 149, 150, 152, 154, 162, 201

285 Fernando i, count of Castile and king of León 8, 93, 216 Feudalisation 26, 40, 43 Feudal Revolution 1, 43 Flaino Muñoz, count 144–45 Fletcher, Richard 7, 213n.32 Formulae Visigothicae 132 Forum Iudicum see Visigothic law Francia 70, 76, 78, 82, 171 Francoist intellectual establishment 31, 39 Froilán, bishop of León 94 frontier, the 2, 10, 12, 21, 34, 53, 70, 92, 98, 99, 185, 220, 241 Fruela, Galician count 149 Fruela Gutiérrez, son of Ilduara Eriz 160, 206 Fruela ii, king of Asturias 71 Fuero de León 97 Galicia 28, 42n.73 and n.77, 75, 86, 147, 149, 151–53, 155–56, 158, 170, 176, 178–80, 203, 205–06, 222 Gallaecia 54–5, 57–9, 60–1, 63, 69–72, 75, 84, 86, 88, 94, 178 García de Cortázar y Ruiz de Aguirre, José Ángel 40–1, 42n.67 García (or Garcí) Fernández, count of Castile 87, 96, 149, 201–02, 218 de Gayangos, Pascual, Spanish orientalist scholar 65 gendered narratives 204, 221, 232, 236, 240–02, 246, 251 Girona 77, 126, 187, 189, 208–10, 223 see Borrell ii see Ramón Borrell Godescalc of Le Puy 94 Gómez of Albelda, scribe 94 Gonzalo Fernández, count of Castile and Burgos 149 Gonzalo Sánchez, count of Galicia 149 Gonzalo Téllez, count of Castile, Lantarón and Cerezo 149 Gregory of Tours 27, 268n.40 Gutier, count and husband of Ilduara Eriz 160–61, 206–07

286 al-Ḥakam i, emir of Umayyad Spain 68 al-Ḥakam ii, caliph of Umayyad Spain 72, 175, 190, 220n.50, 235, 247, 249–50 Herculano, Alexandre 25, 32–3, 45 Hermenegildo of Sobrado 144, 157–58 Hispani 98–9 Hispania Arabic renderings of term 66–7 contested notions of 9, 52, 54, 68, 73, 90, 99 geographical and territorial divisions  55 meaning ‘Muslim Spain’ 53, 72, 75–84, 86–7, 90–2 meaning ‘the Christian kingdoms of the north’ 88, 93–9 origins of term 55–7 Visigothic 58, 60, 61–4, 70, 74, 82, 83, 99, 172 Historia Compostellana 216, 224 Historia Roderici 226 Historia Silense 93, 213n.32, 216 Historia Wambae 216 historiography of Spain 11, 23, 29–30, 34, 45, 52, 143, 156, 257 History of Octavian and the Seven Stars 95 hoards of coins in Iberia Carolingian 176 Umayyad 171, 173–76 Visigothic 173 Hostegesis of Málaga 81 Hydatius, bishop of Chaves and chronicler 57 Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam, historian 241–42 Ibn ʿAbdūn, muḥtasib 234, 238 Ibn Antunīyān al-Naṣrānī, qūmis and poet 73 Ibn Bāq, jurist 248 Ibn Ghālib, historian 65 Ibn Ḥabīb, historian 69, 84–5, 240–42, 246 Ibn Ḥawqal, scholar and geographer 69–70, 73 Ibn Ḥayyān, historian 65, 68, 71, 150, 225, 235, 245–46, 249 Ibn ʿIdhārī, historian 243 Ibn Khaldūn, historian 65

Index Ibn al-Qūtīya, historian 64, 68, 73, 78, 149, 242–43, 246, 247 Ibn Saʿīd, historian and geographer 65 Ildefonsus of Toledo 79, 80, 94 Ilduara Eriz, Galician noblewoman 205–07, 209, 211, 217, 221 see Celanova see Gutier see Rosendo ʿĪsā ibn Aḥmad al-Rāzī, historian, son of Aḥmad al-Rāzī 72 Isidore of Seville 56, 60–1, 66, 74, 79, 80–1, 95, 260–61, 263, 268, 273, 275–76 Islamic conquest of Iberia in 711 7, 27, 52, 64, 68–9, 72, 85, 173, 235, 257–58, 261–62 Islamic law 234, 243 al-Iṣṭakhrī, geographer 69 Italy 180, 237 Jerusalem 74, 78, 276–77, 280 Jews 4, 71, 257 jihād 72, 99 John of Biclarum 57–8 John of Seville 79 judges 133, 136–37, 150–51, 153, 206, 210, 223 judicial hearings 123, 132, 144, 156, 160, 161–64, 205–06, 210, 212, 215, 223 Julian, figure of dubious historicity embroiled in conquest of 711 65 Julian of Toledo 62, 63 see Historia Wambae Kingdom of the Sueves 60, 178 Leocadia 62, 87 León 29, 147, 151, 180, 190, 216, 219 charters from 155, 159, 170, 177–80, 183, 185 kings of 33, 36, 149, 206 Leovigild, king of the Visigoths 58, 60, 74, 76 Lex Visigothorum see Visigothic law Liber Iudicum see Visigothic law libra 180 Liébana 150 see Beatus of Liébana

287

Index Lorvão, monastery of 92, 156, 187 Louis the Pious, king of the Franks 69, 98, 127, 187 Lugo, see of 87, 148, 151, 158 Maḥmūd ibn ‘Abd al-Jabbār al-Māridī, Andalusi rebel 71 mancusos de auro, iafaris, amuris etc. 190– 91, 193 al-Manṣūr, Muḥammad b. Abī Amir, ḥājib and military strongman 87, 94, 126–27, 191, 201–02, 219–20 al-Maqqarī, historian 65, 245 martyrs 53, 62, 267 of Córdoba 73, 77–9 masculinity 232–39, 243–44, 247–48 Maurice, Byzantine emperor 59 memory 9, 53, 73, 77, 99, 133, 135, 178, 225, 257, 271 Menéndez Pidal, Ramón 23–5, 29, 31 Mérida modius/modii 171, 177 mozarabs 36, 53, 76, 92, 99, 186–87 Muhājir ibn al-Qatīl, Andalusi rebel 71 Muḥammad, emir of Umayyad Spain 73 Muño Núñez, count of Castile 149 Mūsā ibn Mūsā, leader of the Banū Qāsī 91 Mūsā ibn Nuṣayr 68, 74, 235, 240–44 Najerense 201–02, 205, 212, 220 Navarre 80, 86, 91, 125, 147, 220, 222 neo-gothicism 2, 36, 38, 81–4 notarius  see notary notary 94, 133, 134 Nunilo, Christian martyr 92 Odoario, semi–mythical bishop of Lugo and Braga 87 Oppa, bishop of Toledo 83, 273 Ordoño i, king of Asturias 7, 83–4, 88 Ordoño ii, king of Galicia and León 71 Ordoño iv, king of León 86, 157 Orosius, Paulus 57–8, 67, 88 Osona, county of 133, 188–89 see Borrell ii, see Ramón Borrell Otero de las Dueñas, monastery of 96, 148, 151, 159, 176, 186

Oviedo 84, 88–9, 92, 94, 97, 132, 148, 158 Pallars, county of 188 Pelagius, Christian martyr 75 Passion of Pelagius 75 Pelayo, king of Asturias 38, 70, 82–4, 90 Pelayo of Oviedo, historian and skilled forger 88 Perfectus, Christian martyr 78 pesas d’or 190 Phocas, Byzantine emperor 261 Poema de Fernán González 6, 10n.24 Portugal 158, 170, 178–80, 205 historiography of 32–3 pre-Roman origins of 33 presura(s) 10, 32, 38 Prophetic Chronicle 6n.13, 9, 84, 96 Qāsim b. Khālid 187 qūmis, Arabic term for count 73, 149–50 Ramiro i, king of Asturias 83, 88, 91 Ramiro ii, king of León 72, 76, 86, 206, 216 Ramiro iii, king of León 157 Ramón Borrell, count of Barcelona, Osona and Girona 126, 208, 223 Reccared, king of the Visigoths 58–9 Reccesuinth, king of the Visigoths 63, 82 Ribagorça, county of 188 Roderic, king of the Visigoths 64–5, 74, 242–43 Rodrigo, count of Amaya 149 Roman antecedents of comital title 145 Rosendo, abbot and bishop 144 vita of 206–07 Sa‘dūn ibn Fatḥ al-Surunbāqī, client of al-Jilliqī 71 Sahagún charters of 145, 147, 150–52, 155, 159, 162, 177–79, 181, 184 monastery of 86, 90, 170, 179, 181, 184 Saint James the Greater (Santiago) 81–2, 93, 95–7 Saint-Michel de Cuxa, monastery of 133 Saint Peter of Casseres, monastery of 136

288 Saldaña 150, 156, 159 Samson of Córdoba 80–1 San Cosme and San Damián, monastery of 185 San Juan de la Peña, monastery of 89, 148, 155–56 San Julián de Samos, monastery of 90, 147 San Martín de Castañeda, monastery of 92 San Miguel de Escalada, monastery of 92, 263–64, 273, 277 San Miguel de la Vega, monastery of 186 San Millán de la Cogolla, monastery of 147, 179 San Pedro de Eslonza, monastery of 148, 155 San Salvador de Oña, monastery of 148 Sancho i, king of León 86, 95 Sancho Garcés ii, king of Navarre 86, 149, 220 Sancho Garcés iii, king of Navarre 89, 93 Santa María de Loyo, monastery of 206 Santa María del Puerto, monastery of 148 Santa Maria de la Seu d’Urgell see Urgell, cathedral of Santiago de Compostela documents from 147, 158–59 donations to 87 pilgrimage to 94 sack in 997 95, 201 see of 145 Voto of 88 see also Saint James the Greater Santo Toribio de Liébana, monastery of 148, 154–55, 177 see Liébana semissis/semisses 172 Sendred, archdeacon of Urgell cathedral 123–26, 136 Seville 68–9, 74, 234 Silos, monastery of 183 Sisebut, king of the Visigoths 62, 77 Sobrado de los Monjes charters of 144, 147, 155, 157, 176–77 monastery of 147, 158 solidi gallicani, gallicanos, gallicenses etc. 177–78 solido argenteo 179, 180–84, 186–87, 191–93 solidos kazimis 187

Index solidus/solidi 66, 172–73, 177–81, 183, 188–90 Suinthila, king of the Visigoths 60 Sunifred ii, count of Cerdanya 189 Ṭāriq ibn Zīyād 64, 65, 235, 240–44 Tarragona 57, 95 Toledo 58, 60–5, 68, 70–4, 76, 84–5, 92–5, 97, 185, 241, 244, 273 tremissis/tremisses 172–73, 177–78, 184 Tuy, diocese 96 ‘Umar ibn Ḥafṣūn 75 Umayyads of Córdoba 53, 64, 67–9, 71, 75, 77, 84, 91, 126, 173–76, 182, 184–85, 220, 235, 241 uncia 191–93 ʿUqba ibn al-Ḥajjāj, governor of Umayyad Spain 70 Urgell cathedral of 123, 136 county of 188 see Borrell ii see Sendred Usatges of Barcelona 215 Valdediós, church of 277 Valpuesta, monastery of 148 Vandals 65–6, 95 Vela Jiménez, count of Álava 149 Vermudo Núñez, count of Salamanca 150 Vermudo ii, king of Galicia and León 86–7, 96 Vic, county of 93, 133, 136, 189, 208–09, 211, 223 Visigoths 6, 7, 52–3, 57, 60, 63–4, 68, 74, 79, 95, 178, 261, 273 Visigothic antecedents of comital title 145 law 11, 63, 67, 90, 96, 131, 183, 203 liturgy 61, 81, 90 Vita Ildefonsi 80 Vita Rudesindi see Rosendo Vulfura, companion of Argentea 75 Wamba, king of the Visigoths 62, 63 see also Historia Wambae

289

Index Wiliesindus, bishop of Pamplona 80 Wistremirus, bishop of Toledo 80 Witiza, king of the Visigoths 64, 150 women as political operators 202–04, 221–26 see also Ava of Castile; Ilduara Eriz; Ermessenda of Barcelona;

Zamora 70 Ziryāb, fashionista, musician and trendsetter 235, 244–47 Zoilus, Christian martyr 77