Luscombe D., Riley-Smith J. The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 4: c. 1024-c. 1198, Part 2
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
Spain in the twelfth century 501
in 1196 was attributed to it, and although in 1197 he would reknight himself
before the altar of Santiago Cathedral, as though to remove the stain, the sense
of slight remained and fuelled feelings of resentment which ultimately were
responsible for his notable absence from the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in
1212. And either shortly before or soon after
85
he convened a curia of his own
kingdom at Le
´
on.
The curia of Le
´
on of 1188 is renowned as an occasion of exceptional signif-
icance because, it is claimed, ‘for the first time in medieval European history
the sovereign recognized and accepted that power be shared directly and fully
with the bishops, nobles and “good men” of the cities’. ‘There can be no doubt
(it is alleged) that the decisions taken [there] were intended to create a new
political constitution for the country’, no less. This is ‘demonstrated clearly’,
for example, by ‘the undertaking given by the king to follow the counsels of
his bishops, nobles and wise men in all circumstances in matters of peace and
war’. Moreover, these were not simply ‘good men’; they were elected ‘good men’:
‘cum electis civibus ex singulis civitatibus’ as is stated in the decrees presumed
to have been issued on that occasion.
86
In fact, the authenticity of the ‘decrees
of 1188’ishighly questionable. In the late manuscript in which they occur they
are undated, and the only authority for ascribing them to Le
´
on in 1188 is the
aprioristic conviction of the nineteenth-century liberal Mu
˜
noz y Romero that
that was a fitting occasion for their enactment. The credentials of the so-called
‘Leonese Magna Carta’, and of Alfonso IX’s undertaking only to make war and
peace ‘with the counsel of bishops, nobles and good men per quorum consilium
debeo regi’ (c. 3), are therefore distinctly unimpressive.
87
However, there were representatives of the concejos present at Alfonso IX’s
curiae of Benavente and Le
´
on (1202, 1208), thereby qualifying them to be
described by historians as ‘Cortes’ (though they were absent from the Le
´
on
assembly of 1194),
88
and despite the fact that the Castilian curia of Carri
´
on is
if not the last then certainly the last-but-one such meeting of Alfonso VIII’s
reign of which record survives, and that in Navarre, Portugal and the crown of
Arag
´
on the ‘third estate’ did not figure before 1200, their growing involvement
in the management of public affairs in the last years of the century has to be
allowed for. In the judgement of some historians it was the reception of Roman
Law in the peninsula in these years that provided a ‘theoretical justification’
85
‘Chronique latine in
´
edite’, c. 14;Palacios Mart
´
ın (1988), p. 171.Onthe crucial question of the precise
date of the Le
´
on curia, whether before or after that of Carri
´
on, consensus is lacking. Gonz
´
alez (1944),
ii,no.12, O’Callaghan (1989), p. 17, and P
´
erez-Prendes (1988)p.514, opt for April. For the reasons
adduced by Estepa D
´
ıez (1988), p. 28,July seems altogether likelier.
86
Marongiu (1968), pp. 32, 62.Cf. O’Callaghan (1975), p. 242; C
´
ortes de Le
´
on y de Castilla, i,p.39.
87
Arvizu (1988)p.48;P
´
erez-Prendes (1988), pp. 512–13; Estepa D
´
ıez (1988), p. 28.
88
Estepa D
´
ıez (1988), pp. 82–103.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
502 peter linehan
for this development.
89
This appears fanciful. The hard-headed veterans of the
concejos did not need sapient jurists from abroad to teach them that quod omnes
tangit ab omnibus debet approbari.Nor did a king with his stepmother in hot
pursuit, for whom representative propositions would not have constituted the
most attractive feature of Romanist ideology anyway.
90
Nevertheless, sapient jurists from abroad were indeed a feature of Alfonso
VIII’s Castile. In the next century Archbishop Rodrigo of Toledo reported their
arrival in great numbers from France and Italy, ‘masters of all faculties’ attracted
thither by the magna stipendia proffered by the king.
91
Their destination was
Palencia, whose cathedral chapter had contained a Catalan contingent ever
since the restoration of the church there in the 1030s, and where from the late
1170sItalians were increasingly in evidence. Though it is difficult to imagine
a more unsuitable time and place for the establishment of an academic foun-
dation, in 1177 Alfonso is alleged to have instituted a studium in the Ucl
´
es
garrison of the order of Santiago.
92
But the king certainly had Romanists in his
entourage. One was the Catalan Pere of Cardona, a luminary of Montpellier
and Alfonso’s chancellor from 1178 to 1181/2 when Lucius III spared him pro-
motion to the see of Toledo by appointing him a cardinal. Also prominent
were Ardericus, a Milanese appointed bishop of Sig
¨
uenza in 1178/9 and trans-
lated to Palencia in 1184 (d. 1206) and Ugolino da Sesso, author of a number
of procedural treatises, who hailed from Reggio Emilia.
93
While scientists of
the calibre of Gerard of Cremona flocked to Toledo,
94
it was to Palencia that
the jurists came. So did the young Domingo of Guzm
´
an, between 1185 and
1195,tostudy arts and theology, and it was at Palencia during that decade that
the peninsula’s first studium can be said to have been established by Alfonso
VIII, the process being completed, according to the testimony of Lucas of Tuy,
sometime between 1208 and 1214.
95
The foundation of Castile’s first university perhaps represented a bid to
monopolize the talents of the peninsula’s increasingly cosmopolitan clergy,
hence doubtless Alfonso IX of Le
´
on’s establishment of a rival seat of learning
at Salamanca late in his reign. Evidence of links between the university and
the court has been discerned in the development by the royal chancery of
89
O’Callaghan (1989), p. 15.
90
In the 1110s, for example, the citizens of Sahag
´
un and Santiago had not needed Justinian to tell them
that the shoe pinched, while in 1185 (or shortly before) dissidents at Vic, where Pere of Cardona
(next paragraph) had been active before he came to Castile, found that Justinian’s Code was against
them: Freedman (1983), pp. 86–7.
91
Rodrigo of Toledo, Historia de rebvs Hispanie,bkviii, ch. 34.
92
Beltr
´
an de Heredia (1935), p. 216.
93
Garc
´
ıa (1985), p. 49; Linehan (1993), ch. 9;Maffei (1990).
94
D’Alverny (1982), pp. 452–4.
95
Maffei (1990), pp. 18–20;Lucas of Tuy, Chronicon mundi,p.109;Beltr
´
an de Heredia (1970), pp.
37–53.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Spain in the twelfth century 503
sets of rules and conventions for the writing of documents in the vernacular
(first adopted in 1206,treaty of Cabreros with Le
´
on).
96
The increasing sense of
national differentiation implied by this development is confirmed by evidence
that by 1200 the Portuguese were already accustomed to regarding inhabitants
of other areas of the peninsula as ‘foreigners’.
97
Meanwhile, in April 1196, Alfonso II had died aged thirty-nine, his thirty-
four-year reign having witnessed the continuation of his father’s policy of
internal consolidation. ‘For the public utility of all my land’, at Fondarella in
1173 Alfonso decreed the extension as far as L
´
erida and Tortosa of the Peace
and Truce of God which since the 1020s had supplemented the guarantees of
vassalic conventions in the cause of law and order thoughout Catalonia. Vicars
were instituted as secular judges of the peace to assist the diocesan bishops,
and under the direction of Ram
´
on of Caldes, dean of Barcelona, control over
comital bailiffs was tightened, culminating in the compilation of the Liber
feudorum maior, the ‘Great Book of Fiefs’, in 1194.
98
However, progress was
neither steady nor uninterrupted. Deprived of the measure of outdoor relief
which campaigns against the Moorish south had previously afforded, in the
mid-1170s the military elite of Old Catalonia, to whom Alfonso’s activities in
Provence and Navarre offered few prospects of profit, found a focus for their
frustrations and a symbol of their desire for a return to the expansionist policies
of the previous generation in the person of a pseudo-Alfonso the Battler, and
proceeded to conspire against the implementation of the count-king’s Peace in
their territories. Their protest at Gerona in 1188 that the statutes of Fondarella
were in breach of the Usatges forced Alfonso to abandon these measures and to
reissue them in 1192 in a revised form addressed to the ‘good men and people of
the cities and towns’ as well as to the military establishment of Catalonia.
99
But
tensions remained. The year in which the Liber feudorum maior was completed
was also marked by the hacking to death of the archbishop of Tarragona,
Berenguer of Vilademuls, an act performed with such deliberation that the
dying man was able to record his last will and testament between blows. He
was the second prelate of that church to be butchered during Alfonso’s reign,
but whereas in 1171 the assassin had been an immigrant, this time it was a local,
Count Guillem Ram
´
on I of Montcada. Whether or not, as Pope Celestine
III insisted, all Christendom was aghast at the outrage, Catalan society was
evidently in need of the means of sublimating the violent instincts that were
endemic there.
100
In the following year the train of events began which in 1212 would provide
just that opportunity and establish the king of Castile as both the peninsula’s
96
Rico (1985), pp. 6–15;Wright (1982), p. 283.
97
Mattoso (1986), ii,p.205.
98
Soldevila (1962), pp. 198–216;Bisson (1977), pp. 297–8, and (1986), i,pp.78–121.
99
Bisson (1986), pp. 52–7.
100
Villanueva (1851), pp. 169, 305–8;Shideler (1983), pp. 124–6.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
504 peter linehan
senior monarch and the champion of Christendom. After the disappointments
of the Third Crusade observers abroad viewed with increased dismay the divi-
sions of Christendom’s leaders on its western frontier. As in 1147,Portugal had
benefited from the crusading fervour of the late 1180s, a fleet of northerners
assisting in the capture of Silves on the Algarve (Sept. 1189) and providing
Sancho I – a king given to melancholy according to a contemporary source –
with the first military success of his reign (1185–1211).
101
But in 1191 the caliph
Ya‘qub not only recovered Silves but also seized Alc
´
acer do Sal, Palmela and
Almada, leaving the Christians with
´
Evora as their only stronghold in the
Alentejo. Meanwhile the anti-Castilian coalition of 1190 held. Not until 1194
was a breach created, facilitated by the death of Sancho VI of Navarre and the
efforts of Celestine III’s legate Cardinal Gregory of S. Angelo. But the treaty
of Tordehumos (April 1194) between Castile and Le
´
on, whereby it was agreed
that if Alfonso IX died sonless his kingdom would be incorporated with Castile
and Alfonso VIII undertook to restore to him various disputed territories,
102
failed to provide a basis for Christian cooperation against the Almohads and,
indeed, was followed in July 1195 by the worst disaster that the Christians had
suffered since 1086, the rout of Alfonso VIII and his army at Alarcos.
Alarcos revealed the full extent of Christian Spain’s divisions in the face of a
determined foe. Rather than await the arrival of Leonese and Navarrese contin-
gents (the latter under the command of Sancho VII el Fuerte, 1194–1234), the
king of Castile chose to engage the enemy alone but for the assistance of a to-
ken force of Portuguese. After the annihilation of the Christian army, of which
apart from Alfonso there were only twenty survivors, the surrender of the castle
of Alarcos by Diego L
´
opez of Haro was taken by Pedro Fern
´
andez of Castro
who had fought alongside Ya‘qub. The baneful consequences of the Haro–Lara
rivalry, medieval Castile’s Montagues and Capulets, were never more plainly
demonstrated. In seeking to apportion blame for the defeat, Spanish writers
of the next generation perpetuated the memory of these divisions.
103
And while Christian Europe looked on aghast, and the troubadovr Peire
Vidal castigated Spain’s kings for failing in its defence, Spain’s kings looked to
their own advantage. Despite the earnest efforts of Alfonso of Aragon to forge
an effective defensive alliance, the high point of which was the dinner party
held between Agreda and Tarazona in March 1196 at which, tradition had it, he
101
‘Narratio de itinere navali’; ‘Chronique latine in
´
edite’, c. 2.
102
Gonz
´
alez (1944), ii,no.79.
103
Thus the Leonese Lucas of Tuy charged the Castilian with impetuousity for failing to await
reinforcements, claiming that Alfonso IX had already reached Toledo (Chronicon mundi,p.108),
whereas the Castilian Rodrigo of Toledo alleged that the assistance of the Leonese and Navarrese
kings was a sham (‘cum uenire simulassent’: Rodrigo of Toledo, Historia de rebvs Hispanie,bkvii,
ch. 30) and that at the time of the battle they had only reached the Castilian frontier: ibid., p. 252.
Cf. Huici Miranda (1956), pp. 137–69.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Spain in the twelfth century 505
and the kings of Castile and Navarre ate from the same table while seated each
within his own kingdom, Le
´
on and Navarre preferred to collaborate with the
caliph at the expense of Alfonso VIII
104
. The effects of the intervention of
Celestine III (the extent of whose anxiety at last resulted in papal recognition
of the Navarrese royal title in April 1196)were offset by the death of Alfonso of
Aragon three days later. In 1197 events moved from tragedy to folly in the shape
of a Castilian–Leonese marriage alliance which, even allowing for the relaxed
attitudes current south of the Pyrenees regarding such matters, was singularly
ill-advised.
For although they were not uncle and niece (as the papal chancery seems
to have supposed), Alfonso IX and the Infanta Berenguela, Alfonso VIII’s
eldest daughter, whose Hohenstaufen prospects had withered on the birth of
her brother Fernando, as descendants of a common great-grandfather were
plainly within the limits. Otherwise, the match had everything to recommend
it. Moreover, by the time that the knot was tied (?Oct. 1197)Alfonso VIII had
agreed a truce not only with the Almohads but even with the king of Navarre. In
England Roger of Howden heard that Celestine III had approved the match as
expedient (pro bono pacis), also that Alfonso IX had offered Celestine’s successor
and his cardinals 20,000 marks of silver and 200 men for a year ‘for the defence
of the Christians against the pagans’ if only they would allow Berenguela to
stay with him until she had given him an heir – ‘or for three years, say’.
105
But the cure proved worse than the disease, for unfortunately Celestine III’s
successor was Innocent III, with whom arguments from expediency cut as little
ice as hard cash. For their effrontery in suggesting that there were worse things
than incest (item Muslims, heretics, Jews, priests on the streets, all of which
were rife on account of the papal interdict imposed on the kingdom of Le
´
on),
in May 1199 a deputation led by the archbishop of Toledo and containing
at least one canonist of note experienced a pontifical roasting of an intensity
sufficient to cause Spanish bishops to give the papal curia a wide berth until
well into the next century.
106
When in the same year Pedro II, the new king
of Aragon, having agreed with Alfonso of Castile to partition the kingdom of
Navarre (treaty of Calatayud, May 1198), declared his intention of marrying the
king of Navarre’s sister, the pope forbad it, the king of Le
´
on invaded Portugal
and by the grace of the Christian God the caliph Yu‘qub died (Jan. 1199). By
occupying the Basque provinces of Alava and Guip
´
uzcoa, Alfonso VIII, now
with French rather than Aragonese assistance, while Sancho VII enjoyed the
support of John of England, dealt Navarre the most serious blow it had suffered
104
Avalle (1960), pp. 70, 325.
105
‘Vel saltem per tres annos’: Roger of Howden, Chronica, iii,p.90, iv,p.79.
106
Innocent III, Register,pp.130–1; linehan (1993), ch. 8.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
506 peter linehan
since the restoration of the kingdom in 1134.Inthe spring of 1204 Alfonso IX
bowed to papal pressure and, the father now of four children including the
future Fernando III, separated from Berenguela and resumed hostilities against
Castile.
107
Although in the will he made in December 1204 Alfonso VIII acknowleged
the injustice of his seizure of Navarrese territory, not until October 1207 (treaty
of Guadalajara) did hostilities cease and even then he did not surrender his
recent conquests. But at Cabreros in the previous year he had reached a new
truce with Le
´
on, and at Monteagudo in February 1209 the rulers of Navarre and
Arag
´
on were also reconciled. For the first time since Alarcos a Christian alliance
against the Almohads seemed feasible, the Infante Fernando of Castile was
anxious for battle, and in February 1210 Innocent III directed the archbishop
of Toledo, Rodrigo Jim
´
enez of Rada, and his suffragans to urge Alfonso VIII to
imitate the example of the king of Arag
´
on and take the fight to the enemy.
108
We have it on his own authority, from the De rebus Hispanie written under
his supervision in the 1240s, that the archbishop did so. In 1218 his admirer,
the chancellor of Castile, Diego Garc
´
ıa, would pay the archbishop the very
same compliment that the Arab writer Ibn Bassam had once paid the Cid: the
damage that one Rodrigo had caused Spain (in 711) another of the same name
had now repaired.
109
A native of Navarre, Rodrigo had already been involved
in the peninsular diplomatic round and on his appointment to the primatial
see in 1209 he immediately emerged as the impresario of the coming conflict.
Events moved swiftly. In May 1211 Alfonso VIII raided as far as the Mediter-
ranean coast at J
´
ativa to the south of Valencia while the king of Aragon success-
fully laid siege to Moorish castles to the north. The Almohad response came
in the following month. A huge army led by the caliph Muhammad al-Nasir
(known to history as ‘Miramamol
´
ın’) invested Salvatierra, the stronghold of
the order of Calatrava high in La Mancha not far from Alarcos. ‘The king
of Castile’s right hand’ as the caliph described the place, Salvatierra seemed
of all places the most impregnable. Its significance was as much symbolic as
strategic, and its capture by the enemy in September, followed by the death
of Alfonso’s heir the Infante Fernando in the following month, sent shock
waves across Europe and the archbishop of Toledo to France (and according
to some historians to Italy and Germany too, which seems scarcely possible),
and other envoys in all directions from Portugal to Constantinople, allegedly
to encourage recruits to come to Castile ready for battle at Pentecost 1212.
To the churches of France and Provence Innocent III wrote offering plenary
indulgences as inducement, issued fierce inhibitions directed especially at the
107
Lacarra (1972), ii,pp.93–8.
108
La documentaci
´
on pontificia hasta Inocencio III,no.416.
109
Alonso (1943), p. 181;Men
´
endez Pidal (1969), pp. 413, 573.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Spain in the twelfth century 507
king of Le
´
on, and ordered solemn processions to be held at Rome to coincide
with the muster at Toledo.
110
By June 1212,vast numbers of volunteers had crossed the Pyrenees to present
themselves for action: by Alfonso’s reckoning, up to 2,000 knights with their
attendants, 10,000 mounted men and as many as 50,000 infantry. But most
soon deserted on account of the sheer slog and the heat – and, true, it was ‘a
bit hot’, the king informed the pope. He also implied that they had done so
despite his having acquiesced in the demands of the king of Aragon and the
transmontani that he permit the Moors ensconced at Calatrava to surrender,
thus providing them with rich pickings, rather than raze the place to the
ground. (The truth was probably the opposite, the foreigners with no stake
in the future insisting on the papal injunction of ‘no quarter’, and the king,
conscious of rebuilding costs and with an eye to the future, preferring terms
of surrender.)
111
Anyway, only 150 of the tens of thousands remained, together
with the papal legate, Arnaud Amaury (archbishop of Narbonne, ex-abbot of
C
ˆ
ıteaux). At this point the Castilians pressed on while Pedro of Aragon awaited
the arrival of Sancho of Navarre. Alfonso made a point of stressing how small
the contingents were that his ‘illustrious friends and relations’ brought with
them cum potentatu suo ‘in the assistance and defence of the Catholic faith’. He
refrained from mentioning either the new ruler of Portugal, Afonso II, whose
corpulent frame was not designed for such exertions, or Alfonso IX of Le
´
on,
for whom the inexperience of his Portuguese neighbour offered opportunities
requiring his urgent attention.
Moving south across the Sierra Morena the Christians encountered the
enemy encamped on the plain of Las Navas de Tolosa to the south of the (later
entitled) Despe
˜
naperros pass. Barring a miracle, there seemed no way forward.
A miracle was duly vouchsafed however. ‘A certain rustic’, later confidently
identified as St Isidro the patron of Madrid, came forward and indicated a
path unknown even to the locals, thus enabling the Christians to adopt the
position from which on Monday 16 July they dealt the caliph and his forces a
crushing and decisive blow.
112
Never before had the Christians defeated the caliph in pitched battle, Al-
fonso’s daughter Berenguela informed her sister Blanca (Blanche of Castile,
wife of the future Louis VIII of France). And where had the French been that
110
La documentaci
´
on pontificia hasta Inocencio III, nos. 465, 470–2;Go
˜
ni Gaztambide (1958), pp. 110–
30. Alfonso’s letter to Innocent after the battle mentions only legates ‘ad partes Francie’: Gonz
´
alez
(1960), iii,p.567.One of these was his physician Master Arnaldus (‘Chronique latine in
´
edite’,
c. 21) whom he sent to Poitou and Gascony. Was Arnaldus one of the king’s celebrated foreign
recruits?
111
Gonz
´
alez (1960), iii,p.568;Huici Miranda (1956), p. 246.
112
Gonz
´
alez (1960), iii,pp.569–71;Huici Miranda (1956), pp. 219–327, Lomax (1978), pp. 124–8.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
508 peter linehan
day? By means of Archbishop Arnaud’s report to the Cistercian general chapter,
news of the victory spread as far and as fast as that of Salvatierra. Spain had
saved not only itself, the bishop of Cremona recorded, ‘but Rome too and
indeed the whole of Europe’. And when he said Spain what he really meant
was Castile, he explained.
113
Later ages would agree. Las Navas was ‘the greatest battle ever fought between
the Moors and the Christians’.
114
And at the time the triumphalism engendered
by victory echoed and re-echoed within Castile itself in the works of canonists as
well as in the chronicles. So much for Charlemagne! Frenchmen had a lot to say.
Butitwas Spaniards who got things done, the canonist Vincentius Hispanus
tartly observed in a gloss. It was Spanish kings who fought for the Faith, Lucas
of Tuy insisted after the event.
115
And before Las Navas too perhaps. There
is, for example, the intriguing possibility that the Poema de mio Cid was in
some sense a piece of Alfonsine propaganda intended to galvanize Castile into
action, ‘a sort of recruiting poster’ for the Las Navas campaign, perhaps that
it was even commissioned by the king who had attracted to Palencia the best
scholars of law and theology that money could buy.
116
Certainly the vernacular
poem presents a very different Cid from that of the earlier Latin Life in which
the late eleventh-century warrior figures as a mercenary no less willing than the
kings of Christian Spain themselves until the early 1200stocollaborate with
the Muslim. Now he is a born-again Christian crusader, the inveterate enemy
of Islam, Castile incarnate. In this connection, scholarly attention in recent
years has centred on the significance of the date May 1207 when, according to
the unique manuscript of the work, the poem was ‘written’ by ‘Per Abbat’; the
nature of the latter’s links with the royal court and Archbishop Rodrigo; and
the relationship of the fictional cortes of Toledo at which the poetic hero was
finally vindicated to what appears to have been an authentic assembly there in
1207 itself.
117
The contrast between the highly charged Poema de mio Cid and the chron-
icler of Alfonso VII’s bathetic ‘it seemed useful’ would suggest that the emer-
gence of a ‘crusading ideology’ in the peninsula occurred later rather than
earlier in the century.
118
Whether that spirit of exultation accurately reflected
a widespread consensus, however, it is impossible to determine. Doubtless de-
grees of intensity of feeling regarding the confessional foe were at least partially
113
Gonz
´
alez (1960), iii,pp.572–4; Linehan (1971), p. 5; Lomax (1988), pp. 39–41.
114
Gibbon (1972), p. 179.
115
‘Facto, ut ispanus, non autem uerbis, ut francigena’: Post (1964), p. 485;‘Pugnant Hispani Reges
pro fide’: Lucas of Tuy, Chronicon mundi,p.113.
116
Smith (1983), pp. 97ff.
117
Duggan (1989); Hern
´
andez (1988); Michael (1991) Linehan (1992),
ch. 10.
118
Above, n. 71 Cf. Fletcher (1987), pp. 42–6. The tone of the poem of Almer
´
ıa might seem to indicate
otherwise – if, as is universally assumed, the poem is indeed a work of the late 1140s.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Spain in the twelfth century 509
determined by distance from the front line, making convivencia easier to main-
tain in the hinterland than at Salvatierra, for example. Thus at Tudela in
Navarre the prosperous Mudejar community continued to enjoy the consider-
able advantages which it had been granted, by Alfonso the Battler incidentally,
in 1118. And the reason was Christian self-interest, just as it was for the converse
phenomenon of refusing Muslims baptism, reported from
´
Avila in 1185.
119
Yet
there are no clear signs that convivencia was a casualty of these years. At the
highest level popes continued to rail against the likes of Alfonso IX for allying
themselves with the enemy. But it was the Christian hero of Las Navas who
favoured the orderly capitulation of Calatrava, it was in his foundation at Las
Huelgas that the nuns were ministered to by Jewish physicians and Mudejar
servants who had their own mosque, and it was he who in 1205 had to be repri-
manded by Innocent III for infringing the liberty of the church and appearing
rather to extol the synagogue and the mosque.
120
Likewise, although Alfonso
VI reportedly attributed the defeat of his army at Sagrajas in 1086 to his soldiers’
taking too many baths, in the togetherness of various municipal bath houses
across the land over the next century cleanliness, godliness, Muslims, Jews and
Christians all shared the same installations, and to that extent bathed in the
same water. Albeit with racial as well as sexual segregation rigidly enforced,
here, at least, ‘some degree of acculturation clearly took place’.
121
The ‘society
organized for war’ had not altogether forgotten how to relax.
119
Garc
´
ıa-Arenal (1984), pp. 15–16; Documentos medievales de la catedral de
´
Avila,pp.22, 24.
120
Torres Balb
´
as (1954), pp. 78–9; La documentaci
´
on pontificia hasta Inocencio III,no.312.
121
Powers (1979), p. 665, noting a greater degree of permissiveness in Aragonese towns whose fueros
were based on that of Teruel than in Castilian places whose regulations were modelled on that of
Cuenca; Dillard (1984), pp. 151–2.Cf. Lucas of Tuy, Chronicon mundi,p.102, and (another century
on) Alfonso X, Las siete partidas,pp.673 (‘And we forbid any Jew to bathe together [de ba
˜
narse en
ba
˜
no en u
˜
no] with any Christian’).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
chapter 17(a)
CROWN AND GOVERNMENT
John W. Baldwin
from the death of Philip I in 1108 to that of Philip (II) Augustus in 1223
the Capetian monarchy made steady progress in asserting its authority over
France. This secular rise levelled off in the second half of the twelfth century,
but concluded with a dramatic upswing after the Third Crusade in 1190.
Early accessions combined with congenital longevity produced lengthy reigns
(Louis VI, 1108–37, Louis VII, 1137–80 and Philip Augustus, 1179–1223), but
these regnal dates are of little import in charting the evolution of government.
More significant is the punctuation introduced by military campaigns. By
removing the monarchs from their realm, the Second (1147–9) and Third
Crusades (1190–1) induced administrative innovations in the king’s absence.
After Philip Augustus’s return in 1191 governmental tempo accelerated, marking
the Norman invasion in 1202/3 and the victory at Bouvines in 1214 as the chief
transitions.
from the accession of louis vi to the second
crusade (1108–1147)
History is little more than a function of its sources. As medieval governments
began to generate their own documentation, these written sources subsisted
in symbiosis both as products and evidence of the institutions that produced
them. Louis VI inherited two genres of sources, charters and chronicles, from
the first Capetians. Royal charters were written declarations of the king’s ac-
tions addressed to designated parties. Transcribed on parchment either by
clerics working for the royal chancellor or by those employed by the recipients,
they were authenticated by a wax seal. Since the royal household took few
pains to copy these documents, their survival depended on their preservation
or recopying by recipients, for the most part monasteries and churches. A good
sign of the progress of royal activity is the rapidly increasing number of these
extant charters from 5.7 per annum during Philip I’s reign to 14.0 under Louis
510
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008