Luscombe D., Riley-Smith J. The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 4: c. 1024-c. 1198, Part 2
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Spain in the twelfth century 481
agreement to surrender territory in Vizcaya, Alava and Guip
´
uzcoa which had
been annexed by Alfonso VI when the kingdom of Navarre had been parti-
tioned between Castile-Le
´
on and Arag
´
on after the murder of Sancho IV Garc
´
es
in 1076.Moreover, Alfonso I did not surrender to Alfonso VII all the lands stip-
ulated in the Rioja and eastern Castile. Nevertheless, the effect of the ‘Peace of
T
´
amara’ was to extend Leonese influence into areas where it had been ineffec-
tive since before 1109,adevelopment confirmed in 1127 when Alfonso VII took
as his wife Berenguela, daughter of the count of Barcelona, Ram
´
on Berenguer
III: his lovely, albeit little bride, as the author of the ‘Cr
´
onica’ describes her.
13
Throughout the previous half-century, during which Arag
´
on had been col-
onizing the Ebro valley, the kingdom of Navarre had remained in a state of
suspended animation, attached as a county to the kingdom of Arag
´
on. The
consequences for its future were far-reaching. Hemmed in between its mightier
Christian neighbours, Navarre was thereafter denied the opportunity of colo-
nizing Muslim territory: its expansion would have to be either at the expense
of the kingdoms of Castile and Arag
´
on, which regularly conspired to squeeze
it out of existence, or otherwise into Gascony. For the county of Barcelona,
by contrast, these had been years of growth. While consolidating his hold
over the historic ninth-century heartland, acquiring the counties of Besal
´
u and
Cerdanya (1111, 1117), Ram
´
on Berenguer III (1096–1131) extended Catalan in-
fluence northwards across the Pyrenees, by his marriage and acquisition of the
title of count of Provence in 1113 confronting the counts of Toulouse with a po-
tent rival. In 1114–15,inconcert with the Pisans and Genoese, he led a briefly
successful expedition against Almoravid Majorca. In the city of Barcelona
Ram
´
on Berenguer possessed a thriving commercial centre unequalled else-
where in Christian Spain. Yet, formally at least, the hegemony he exercised was
constrained by the past, in this case by the Frankish past: ecclesiastically his
territories remained subject to the see of Narbonne. Allied to the availability of
land-hungry crusaders from the north, however, the geographical advantage he
enjoyed over the other Christian leaders which enabled him to prosecute the
struggle against Islam by sea as well as land provided a remedy. To the extent
that its Muslim garrison had been dislodged, the ancient metropolitan see of
Tarragona had been reconquered in 1096, the first year of Ram
´
on Berenguer’s
rule, and already (in the jurisdictional aftermath of the reconquest of Toledo)
Urban II had decreed its restoration. But the realization of this outcome, and
the reconstruction of the place, was due to the combined efforts of Archbishop
Oleguer and the Norman Robert Burdet who, having left the service of the
king of Arag
´
on, was in 1128 established by Oleguer as ‘prince of Tarragona’.
The terms of the agreement between the archbishop and the warrior, which
13
‘puellam paruulam, totam pulchram et decoram nimis’ (ibid., bk i, ch. 12).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
482 peter linehan
extended to the latter’s descendants, were exceptionally favourable: Burdet was
to have 90 per cent of the profits of the place. The Tarragona settlement
demonstrated the richness of the opportunities that twelfth-century Spain was
capable of offering adventurers from the north. Equally, the strained relation-
ship which developed between the successors of the parties to it, culminating
in 1171 in the murder in his cathedral of Archbishop Hugo de Cervell
´
obyone
of Burdet’s sons, epitomized the difficulties that tended to arise one generation
on as appreciation dawned of the full implications of the transfer of residual (in
this case comital) authority in a corner of Europe in which human assistance
on any terms had once been welcome.
14
In England in the 1170s only the king
could have had an archbishop killed. But Spain was different, and there the
costa del crime was already establishing its ground-rules, which then as now
were dictated by riff-raff from the foggier north. We shall return later to their
exploits elsewhere in the peninsula.
Meanwhile, by the extent of their activities the kings of Aragon and Le
´
on had
been defining the perimeters within which they were able to operate. In 1130
Alfonso I of Aragon was at Bayonne, besieging the city in support of Gaston of
B
´
earn, the vassal to whose skills he was beholden for Saragossa and who was now
at odds with Duke William of Aquitaine. And three years later he was engaged
in riparian warfare up the Ebro as far as Tortosa,
15
while Alfonso VII had struck
as far as Cadiz. From Cadiz on a fine day Africa is visible, but in the early 1130s
such expeditions south were nevertheless possible. The Almoravids, who had
annihilated the armies of Alfonso VI at Zalaca in 1086 and as recently as 1118
had had to be beaten off from Saragossa, were themselves being pressed from
behind. In Morocco sometime in 1121 IbnTumart had declared himself mahdi.
ABerber from those parts noted for extreme asceticism, he rejected Almoravid
doctrine as altogether too literal and at the same time too anthropomorphic
in its interpretation of the koran, favouring instead an interpretation of the
prophetic text more in tune with the sense of the Muslim community. The
name of his followers, al-Muwahhidun,has been transliterated as Almohad.
16
Of the fury of the zeal with which they would pursue the heretic Almoravids,
climaxing in the weltering bloodbath at Marrakesh in 1147 (and a fortiori the
even more benighted Christians), Alfonso VII was almost certainly not yet
aware as he peered across the straits in 1133.Hesoon would be.
The following year presented the Christian kingdoms with a crisis nearer
home. At Fraga in July 1134 Alfonso I of Aragon fought and lost his last
battle against the Almoravids, and two months later died childless. Despite
14
Soldevila (1962), pp. 136–8; La documentaci
´
on pontificia hasta Inocencio III,no.32;Villanueva (1851),
pp. 155–60, 289–90;Defourneaux (1949), pp. 224–30.
15
Lacarra (1971), pp. 102–24.
16
Le Tourneau (1969), pp. 25–41; Lomax (1989), pp. 38–40.
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Spain in the twelfth century 483
the fact that his experience of Urraca provides sufficient explanation of his
lack of interest in procreation, Alfonso I’s childlessness continues to fascinate
historians and to foster speculation at a number of levels. At the time, however,
it was his will’s consequences rather than its causes that counted, for Alfonso
had named as his heirs the Orders of the Temple and St John of Jerusalem and
the Holy Sepulchre.
17
Conjecture regarding that has been rampant too. Was
his will a subtle ploy, intended to provide breathing space by involving the
papacy on behalf of the military orders, thereby keeping Alfonso VII at bay?
Or did the king of Aragon really mean it to be effective?
18
Whatever he may have meant, events took their course. In Aragon the late
king’s younger brother was called upon to do his dynastic duty. Ramiro was a
monk; he had been an abbot and at one time or another bishop-elect of at least
three sees. On the question of whether he was also either a priest or a deacon,
opinions have differed. But Ramiro II (as briefly he counted) selflessly coupled
with Agnes of Poitiers, a lady known to be reliable for the purpose, and she
promptly bore him a daughter. Named Petronilla, her mother’s milk scarce dry
upon her lip, the infant was betrothed to the new count of Barcelona, Ram
´
on
Berenguer IV (1131–44). This singular sequence of events, dynasty’s triumph
over humanity, marked the foundation of the ‘Corona de Arag
´
on’. Meanwhile
Navarre had seized the opportunity of escaping Aragonese tutelage. Amidst the
confusion an illegitimate member of the Navarrese royal house was acclaimed
king at Pamplona: Garc
´
ıa Ram
´
ırez (1134–50). The kingdom of Aragon and the
county of Barcelona had been yoked together, and the kingdom of Navarre
had been resuscitated. In a matter of months the political profile of northern
Spain had changed out of all recognition.
19
The inhabitants of Saragossa, fearful of a repetition of the disaster at Fraga,
welcomed Alfonso VII into the city (Dec. 1134) and the monk-king Ramiro
‘gave’ the place to him to be held by him and his forever. Shortly afterwards the
count of Barcelona and Count Alphonse of Toulouse came to Le
´
on, promised
Alfonso VII obedience and ‘were made his knights’, Ram
´
on Berenguer receiving
Saragossa from him ‘in honorem’. The new king of Navarre likewise became
Alfonso’s vassal. So extensive was the throng of warriors, so numerous the array
of noble sons from Gascony, France and Poitou who received money fiefs from
the king of Le
´
on that his chronicler felt able to describe him as ruling from the
Atlantic to the Rh
ˆ
one.
20
It was this new prestige that Alfonso VII’s imperial
coronation proclaimed in May 1135, fifty years and a day after the reconquest
of Toledo.
17
Garc
´
ıa Larragueta (1957), ii,no.10.
18
Lourie (1975); Forey (1980–1); Lourie (1984–5).
19
Soldevila (1962), pp. 147–69; Lacarra (1972), i,pp.330–3.
20
Chronica Adefonsi imperatoris,bki, chs. 64, 67; Bonnassie (1980), pp. 38–9.
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484 peter linehan
Or so Alfonso’s chronicler wished it to be believed. In fact, at the level
of peninsular power politics, the advantage which Alfonso VII had derived
from the death of Alfonso of Arag
´
on had been far less than had been hoped
for, and actually represented a serious reverse. This his chronicler contrived to
disguise by reshuffling the order of events. Thus, Ram
´
on Berenguer IV’s receipt
of Saragossa from the king of Le
´
on occurred not in 1134–5,asthe‘Cr
´
onica’
records, but in 1137, and signified the failure of an alternative dynastic settlement
involving the marriage of Petronilla to the Infante Sancho, Alfonso VII’s heir,
a match which, had it occurred, must have taken the history of medieval Spain
on a wholly different course. Certainly there would have been no ‘Corona de
Arag
´
on’. Instead of combining with the county of Barcelona, the fate of the
kingdom of Arag
´
on would have been unification with Castile-Le
´
on. Navarre’s
fate would have been sealed, and Garc
´
ıa Ram
´
ırez (who had already broken with
the emperor) acknowledged as much by making common cause with Afonso
Henriques the master of Portugal.
21
But the bid for Leonese hegemony foundered on a combination of Aragonese
intransigence and papal insistence that the terms of Alfonso I’s will be hon-
oured. The kingdom of Arag
´
on was a papal fief and Innocent II was insistent
that the military orders should not be deprived of their inheritance. Yet Alfonso
I’s provisions were both impracticable and incompatible with law and custom.
Ram
´
on Berenguer, whose father had died a Templar,
22
was best qualified to
provide an escape from the impasse, and although it was not until 1158 that
Adrian IV confirmed the terms of compensation to the orders and recognized
the count of Barcelona’s title,
23
by 1137 the latter (henceforth styling himself
princeps not king of Arag
´
on) was already master of the north-east.
The resolution of the succession crisis in Aragon was not the only setback
suffered by Alfonso VII in these years, despite his chronicler’s proud boast that
his rule reached the Atlantic. While his schemes to drive a territorial bridgehead
across the Ebro were meeting with failure, to his rear control of the old county
of Portugal was slipping from him fast.
24
The death of the ambitious Count Henry in 1112 had left his widow with
a son of about five, a political inheritance which despite Urraca’s preoccupa-
tions elsewhere was as delicate as it was dangerous, and an empty bed. Teresa,
however, was in all matters resourceful, and moreover was sustained by Count
Pedro Froilaz, guardian of the still young Alfonso Raim
´
undez, and (at least
for the time being) by Bishop Diego Gelm
´
ırez of Santiago. But the latter’s
promotion to metropolitan rank in 1120 inevitably affected his attitude to
21
Valdeavellano (1968), ii,p.438.
22
There appears to be no warrant for the regularly repeated assertion that he himself was a member.
23
Forey (1973), pp. 17–21.
24
Serr
˜
ao (1979), i,pp.77–86; Livermore (1966), pp. 46–9.
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Spain in the twelfth century 485
Portuguese affairs and brought him into contention with the see of Braga just
as Braga’s prestige had been besmirched by the appointment of its archbishop,
Maurice Bourdin, as the Emperor Henry V’s antipope, Gregory VIII (1118–
21).
25
However, the consolations of religion having been compromised, by
then Teresa was otherwise sustained. Pedro Froilaz had sent his son, Fernando
Peres, to be her military adviser. Their relationship developed along other
lines, however, and by 1121, when she and ‘comes Fernandus’ began to attest
diplomas together, it was generally assumed that his services to her were not
principally strategic, and for all that her lover’s (or husband’s) Galician connec-
tions were to Teresa’s advantage, south of the Mi
˜
no his influence was widely
resented.
By 1126–7 when Alfonso VII first visited her as king, not only was his
aunt describing herself as queen,
26
opposition to her was forming around the
adolescent Afonso Henriques, and in the summer of 1128 he got the better of
his mother in pitched battle at S
˜
ao Mamede
27
and sent her and her consort
packing to Galicia where she died (?1130).
For the emergent kingdom of Portugal the next ten years were critical.
Afonso Henriques had to have eyes everywhere. J. Ver
´
ıssimo Serr
˜
ao refers to
the necessity of his maintaining a ‘double policy’, to the need for him to keep
his frontier under surveillance while not losing sight of developments on his
doorstep.
28
But this understates the extent of his problem. Afonso Henriques
had three frontiers to patrol: Galicia north of the Mi
˜
no, where Fernando Peres
was now active in the service of Alfonso VII; Alfonso VII himself to the east;
and the south where he had to prove his worth to the political community by
masterminding profitable raids into Almoravid territory. Until 1136 the sea to
the west was his only ally. In that year, however, the promotion of Jo
˜
ao Peculiar
to the metropolitan see (for which he had lobbied earnestly) provided him with
another. As archbishop of Braga for the next thirty-seven years Jo
˜
ao Peculiar
steered the infant kingdom through innumerable perils. Much maligned, to
the extent of being charged with having trampled the sacred host underfoot
and of castrating a cleric with his bare hands, and not unjustly criticized for the
directness of his methods, it is to him after Afonso Henriques himself that the
kingdom of Portugal owed its existence. It was he above all who successfully
countered Alfonso VII’s various attempts to invoke arguments from Hispania’s
ecclesiastical past, dodging and parrying the primate of Toledo’s shafts when
Leonese arms and diplomacy had failed.
29
25
David (1947), pp. 489–99;Fletcher (1984), pp. 197–206;Vones (1980), pp. 365–427.
26
As the daughter of Alfonso VI. Thus Chronica Adefonsi imperatoris,bki, ch. 5.
27
On 24 June or 24 July; authorities vary. It is to be noted that the later date is the eve of the feast of
Santiago.
28
Serr
˜
ao (1979), i,p.81.
29
Erdmann (1928), pp. 54–5;Ferreira (1928), pp. 284–319.
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486 peter linehan
Which by 1140 they had. By the treaty of Tuy (July 1137) Afonso Henriques
had again acknowledged Alfonso VII’s authority. But in April 1140 he began
to describe himself as king, rex.
30
Just like that. And three years later the
emperor accepted the fact. In return for his cousin’s renunciation of his claims
in Galicia, by the treaty of Zamora (1143) Alfonso VII tacitly acknowledged
the new kingdom’s existence, whereupon Afonso Henriques commended his
kingdom to the Roman church and declared himself a vassal of the pope. The
scarcely perceptible nature of this development continues to intrigue historians.
Why 1140? Why was the break not made sooner? By 1140 Afonso Henriques
had been securely established at Coimbra for ten years, and in 1135 had been
conspicuous by his absence from Alfonso VII’s imperial coronation. Posterity
would not be satisfied by a mere absence however. A military achievement was
required, a great display, a Portuguese Covadonga, a foundation myth.
31
By about 1300 it was believed that it was as a result of his victory over
the Moors at ‘Erich’ that Afonso I assumed the royal title. Later the story
was embellished: at the battle of Ourique (25 July 1139) Christ Himself had
taken the field and assisted him in putting the ‘innumerable armies’ of no
fewer than five Moorish kings to flight. As with Covadonga there are problems
about Ourique however. One is its date, the feastday of Santiago suggesting a
concerted attempt to appropriate the mystique associated with Castile-Le
´
on’s
patron saint. Another is the scale of an encounter which to judge by the earliest
accounts of it was no more than a skirmish of the sort in which Christian raiding
parties regularly engaged all along the frontier in these years. Finally, there is
that of the location of the chroniclers’ Oric or Ouric: the modern Ourique
in the Lower Alentejo, only fifty miles from the coast of the Algarve, was
far beyond the range of the northerners at this date. Amongst other possible
identifications, even the castle of Aurelia (Colmenar de Oreja, near Toledo),
currently being besieged by Alfonso VII has been suggested!
32
Of greater significance than the legend of Ourique is the near-contemporary
evidence for the existence of a distinctive historiographical tradition, associated
with the Augustinian house of Santa Cruz de Coimbra. Established by about
1130, with Jo
˜
ao Peculiar as one of its co-founders, in June 1139 Santa Cruz
received extensive territorial endowment from Afonso Henriques. Thereafter it
providedthe young monarchy with unwavering ideological support, a historical
identity and a sense of nationhood, a service similar to that rendered to the
counts of Barcelona by the monks of Ripoll,
33
and an advantage which the
contemporary kings of Le
´
on and Castile did not enjoy. According to the so-
called ‘Annals of Alfonso I’, written there before the end of the century, that
30
Feige (1978), p. 245.
31
See NCMH, II, ch. 11,pp.272–89.
32
Herculano (n.d.), ii, note xvi; Lindley Cintra (1957).
33
Mattoso (1986), ii,pp.205–6;Bisson (1984a), pp. 462–5.
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Spain in the twelfth century 487
king’s reign had commenced not in 1139–40 but in 1128 with his defeat of Teresa
and her ‘foreign’ confederates.
34
The new kingdom’s credibility was finally established in October 1147 when,
after a seventeen-week siege, the city of Lisbon was taken. The conquest of
Lisbon was described with great
´
elan by an English participant, one of a large
force of northerners en route to the Holy Land for the Second Crusade whose
fleet had put in at Oporto for supplies. There they were learnedly harangued
by the local bishop, Pedro Pit
˜
oes. However, his listeners were unmoved by his
discourse on the canon law of the just war and by appeal to their Christian
sentiment. What persuaded them to stay and fight were the king’s written
promises of material benefits, and what spurred them to action was indignation
when the enemy unsportingly attacked a group of them out fishing.
35
The Tagus
valley was now secure. Santar
´
em had surrendered earlier in the year, Sintra and
Palmela soon followed.
These successes were facilitated by the disarray of the Almoravids whose
military inability to recover Toledo or Saragossa from the Christians and
increasing religious laxity provoked a series of risings in the cities of the
south from the Algarve to Cordoba and Valencia (1144–5), largely inspired
by Abu-l-Qasim, a sufi demagogue and Ibn Tumart’s successor as mahdi. In
1146 Abu-l-Qasim persuaded the Almohad caliph, ‘Abd al-Mu’min, who was
engaged in destroying the Almoravid amirate in the Maghreb, to send troops
across the straits where early in 1147 they gained control of Seville. However,
the taifa rulers of al-Andalus had not rid themselves of the Almoravids in order
to submit to new masters, and an influential anti-Almohad movement now
developed, the leading spirit of which was Muhammed ibn Mardanish, ruler of
Valencia, Murcia and the Levante. Known to the Christians as King Lobo, Ibn
Mardanish claimed to be of pure Arab descent, but his lifestyle was emphatically
Spanish – it has been conjectured that his strange name was a corruption of the
Romance ‘Mart
´
ınez’ – and his guiding principle was self-preservation: a reverse
Cid in short. Ibn Mardanish preferred to recruit his troops from amongst the
Christians of the north, and accordingly in 1147 he allied himself with Alfonso
VII, Garc
´
ıa Ram
´
ırez of Navarre and Ram
´
on Berenguer IV for the siege of
Almer
´
ıa, Muslim Spain’s principal port and link with Africa and the east.
36
Almer
´
ıa was captured on 17 October 1147, just six days before Lisbon sur-
rendered. It was a gala event, attended by contingents from every region of
Christian Spain, William of Montpellier and the Pisan and Genoese as well
as the Catalan navies, and celebrated in Latin hexameters in the (incomplete)
‘Poem of Almer
´
ıa’ attached to the chronicle of Alfonso VII.
37
‘Terror of the
34
Bl
¨
ocker-Walter (1966), p. 152.
35
De expugnatione Lyxbonensi,pp.141;Hehl (1980), p. 259.
36
Lacarra (1952); Le Tourneau (1969), pp. 48–55.
37
Prefatio de Almeria.
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488 peter linehan
Ishmaelites’, the chronicler had just called Alfonso VII (ii,p.107), and the
Castilian historian Valdeavellano describes the conquest of Almer
´
ıa as ‘his most
brilliant achievement’.
38
In fact, the initiative for the campaign seems to have
originated with the count of Barcelona and the Italians, Almer
´
ıa having long
provided the pirates of the Mediterranean with a safe haven. In the autumn of
1147 the reign of the emperor still had ten years to run, though for this period
our information is meagre: the emperor’s chronicler fell silent at this point. To
a degree these were years of disappointment and unfulfilment. In the south
the Almohads were consolidating their power; in 1157 they recovered Almer
´
ıa.
The secession of Portugal was definitive and signalled the end of Leonese hege-
mony in the peninsula. There are signs that Alfonso VII retained hopes of
compensating for the political reverses he had suffered and, by appealing to
the past and to other traditions, of maintaining the possibility of eventual
peninsular reunification. It was now that he was to be found seeking to ma-
nipulate Toledo’s ecclesiastical primacy for secular ends, and assuming certain
of the imperial trappings of Frederick Barbarossa.
39
But these new departures
led nowhere.
The fate of Almer
´
ıa serves to explain why they led nowhere. As an episcopal
chronicler a century later remarked (though whether in respect just of Almer
´
ıa
or in general is unclear), Alfonso VII was more successful in capturing places
than in keeping them. The emperor’s reign was full of spectacular sorties
south and sieges successfully completed. But he was overstretched, his lines
of communication were too extended. Places taken were soon lost again. The
extent of his operations was beyond the capacity of his resources, necessitating
devolution of his authority. Thus, for example, in the last year of his reign
Manrique de Lara, Alfonso’s tenente at Baeza, was authorizing diplomas issued
in the emperor’s name.
40
The contrast with Ram
´
on Berenguer IV is striking. The places reconquered
by him – in 1148–9 To r tosa, L
´
erida, Fraga and Mequinenza, although far to
the north of Ucl
´
es and Cordoba where Alfonso VII was actively engaged at
the time – remained reconquered. Hence the real significance of the treaty of
Tudell
´
en, agreed by the two monarchs in January 1151.Ostensibly this agree-
ment confirmed the traditional pan-peninsular authority of the kings of Le
´
on.
The emperor and the ‘prince of Aragon’, who were currently contemplating
the partition of the kingdom of Navarre on the death of Garc
´
ıa Ram
´
ırez, used
the opportunity to look further forward to the reconquest of the Levante. The
regions of Valencia, Denia and Murcia were to be the responsibility of Ram
´
on
Berenguer. In accordancewith ancient expectations, they wereto be held by him
38
Valdeavellano (1968), ii,p.454.
39
Linehan (1993), ch. 9.
40
‘Felix siquidem in acquirendo, sed minus discretus in retinendo’: ‘Chronique latine in
´
edite’, c. 5;
S
´
anchez Belda (1951).
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Spain in the twelfth century 489
as the emperor’s vassal. But he was to have them: the principle of peninsular
partition had been surrendered.
41
Ninety years on, another constructive anti-
quarian would similarly seek to ignore the ineluctable consequences of several
centuries, invoking the evidence, such as it was, of the Visigothic councils to
establish Toledo’s claim to exercise ecclesiastical jurisdiction in Valencia.
42
For
the moment, the hopelessness of that procedure was demonstrated on the le-
gitimists’ own terms. On the death of Alfonso VII (Aug. 1157)his realms were
divided between his two sons. In the thirteenth century the dismemberment of
Alfonso VII’s realms was widely deplored, an episcopal chronicler of the 1240s
attributing it to human sinfulness. In fact it was strictly in accordance with the
same principles of dynastic legitimacy that had governed events on the deaths
of Sancho III of Navarre in 1035 and Fernando I in 1065 that Castile should
pass to the elder son, Sancho (since although Castile was the junior kingdom
it comprised the family’s patrimonial lands), and that the younger, Fernando,
should receive Le
´
on.
43
The death of Alfonso VII left Ram
´
on Berenguer IV the peninsula’s senior
ruler and, despite his Provenc¸alpreoccupations, also its most effective one.
Less than thirty years before, his father had been informed by the count of
Montcada, Berenguer Ram
´
on I, that ‘for all I hold from you, I would not
thank you with one fart’. Four generations on, in 1227, Count Guillem III
acknowledged to the then king of Aragon ‘the debt that I hold to you...,
for your lineage, that of the count of Barcelona by name, has made our very
lineage’. But by 1157,inless than a third of a century, the relationship of the
parties had been more than half transformed. For more than a century the
lords of Montcada, with their patrimonial lands situated just to the north
of Barcelona, had possessed the title of seneschal of Barcelona, and while
periodically bickering with the counts whose seneschals they were had striven
to establish hereditary title to the office. They thus typified the dynasties
and vested interests with which Ram
´
on Berenguer had to contend, dynasties
and vested interests which since the 1070s had encountered and succeeded in
containing the forces unleashed by Pope Gregory VII and his satellites.
44
By
about 1150 Ram
´
on Berenguer had mastered them. The Usatges of Barcelona, the
regalian code which he issued at this time, purporting to date from the time
of Ram
´
on Berenguer I (d. 1076), not only vested ultimate judicial authority
in the count-prince but also stated his right to the service of all men within
his jurisdiction when necessity demanded, a claim not asserted in Castile until
41
Colecci
´
on de documentos in
´
editos del archivo de la corona de Arag
´
on,p.168;Soldevila (1962), pp. 186–7;
Lacarra (1976), pp. 209–10.
42
Linehan (1993), pp. 344–8.
43
‘Chronique latine in
´
edite’, c. 7 (‘permittente Deo propter peccata hominum’); Lacarra (1976).
44
Shideler (1983), pp. 38, 155;Freedman (1983), pp. 45–67.
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490 peter linehan
1166.In1151–2 he followed this with a survey of peasant tenures and obligations
in the county of Barcelona and the regions surrounding it, which its recent
historian has described as ‘virtually a “Domesday” for Catalonia’. Aragon seems
to have been spared such scrutiny. Not until the compilation of the Libros de
las Behetr
´
ıas 200 years later would Castile experience the like.
45
The division of Alfonso VII’s realms in 1157 points a crucial truth about
twelfth-century Spain which the most celebrated event of Alfonso’s reign, his
imperial coronation, tends to obscure. The peninsula accommodated what one
recent historian has described as a veritable ‘throng of kings’. Arag
´
on, Navarre,
Portugal after 1139,Le
´
on again after 1157, each had its own king as well as
Castile; kings who, for all their dedication to the cause of peninsular unity,
did not hesitate to subscribe documents recording their children as ‘regnante’
or ‘rex similiter’ (as Sancho III was with Alfonso VII in the 1150s), or to
leave their inheritance to be partitioned when they died, in accordance with
family tradition, as Alfonso VII did in 1157.There was no even approximate
correlation between ‘rex’ and ‘regnum’. In accordance with this ‘principle of
fragmentation’, kings were kings ‘not of a kingdom but of a space’, a space
the extent of which was capable of measurement by reference to the summary
which the dating clauses of the king’s own charters contained of the segments
of the notional whole over which he currently claimed to exercise control.
46
The emperor’s death provides a convenient opportunity to attempt a lateral
survey of the peninsula at mid-century and a rough description of these ‘spaces’
and of the human supplies which fed and maintained the political structures
outlined in the preceding pages.
Christian Spain was subject to forces exerted by two different systems of
coordinates, creating a two-dimensional complex which greatly complicates
the describing of it. At the time, the author of the chronicle of Alfonso VII
met the difficulty by dealing with the emperor’s activities to east and west
in the first book of his work, and his forays against the peninsular Muslims
separately in the second. The course of the reconquest was determined by geo-
physical characteristics aeons older than the peninsula’s religions.
47
Impassable
mountain ranges separated the northern nodes of Christian reconquest from
one another: then as now, for Oviedo and Barcelona communication with
C
´
ordoba and Valencia respectively was easier than it was with each other. And
the climatic shock administered to the northerner on reaching the Meseta was
made all the more severe by the absence of safety and shade in the vast frontier
area over which armies and raiding parties passed and repassed, burning crops
45
Bisson (1986), pp. 31–5;Soldevila (1962), pp. 170–97; Usatges de Barcelona; i,Bisson (1984b) p. 25,
ii,pp.3–29.
46
Maravall (1964), pp. 359, 366 (‘pululaci
´
on de reyes en un mismo
´
ambito’), p. 369.
47
Vicens Vives (1967), pp. 22–4.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008