Where Were Court Cases Heard in Northern Iberia in the Early Middle Ages and Were These Community Places?
From Firenze University Press Journal: Reti Medievali
Wendy Davies, Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity
This paper is about court cases in northern Iberia (that is, northern Spain and Portugal) in the ninth and tenth centuries, a period for which we have plenty of localizable written evidence. Before addressing the particularities of the location of court cases, I want to draw attention to the textual references to community space that clearly was territorialized, because this is relevant. And after considering court cases, I want to end by raising a question about a different kind of community space. But first some general orientation.The Iberian peninsula is dominated by a high central plateau, the Meseta, up to 760m in altitude, cut by the great river systems of the Duero and Tagus, which enter the Atlantic at Porto and Lisbon, and that of the Ebro which flows into the Mediterranean. There are high mountain ranges on the northern and north-western edges of the plateau and across the middle of the peninsula. This means that there is a great diversity of landscapes and a tendency to political fragmentation. Although the whole of Iberia had in fact been a single Visigothic state in the late seventh century, by the ninth and tenth centuries much of the North fell within two Christian kingdoms, while the South and centre had since 711 been a Muslim polity, al-Andalus, at first an emirate and a caliphate from 929. This polity extended in a north-easterly direction to include much of what is now the autonomous community of Catalonia, though Barcelona and area to the north had become part of a Frankish March or bor-der zone from 801. The two Christian kingdoms were that of Asturias-León, initially ruled from Oviedo in the far North but transferring to León round about 910; and that of Pamplona (or Navarre), for which significant territorial acquisitions began to be noted from the 920s. Both kingdoms were subject to Muslim raids intermittently through the tenth century and both, in their turn, raided the South and took prisoners. Despite these continuing hostil-ities, there were periods of close diplomatic relations between North and South, particularly with the andalusi political centre of Córdoba, and there were also strong contacts between northern clerics and the Christian commu-nities of al-Andalus. Although northern kings were able to mount campaigns against their Muslim opponents, they were not associated with much govern-mental activity in this period and powerful aristocratic families in effect con-trolled many parts of the North, including Portugal, which had no separate political identity at this time. Among those aristocrats, Galician families had a distinctive regional interest, while on the eastern edges of the Meseta the counts of Castile commanded a large territory which ran north to the sea by the middle of the tenth century. Much of the Ebro valley in the North East was dominated by Muslim families but a series of Christian Catalan coun-ties developed from the March established by Carolingian rulers of Francia in the early ninth century, in the hinterland of the Pyrenees; the Catalan counts looked north-east towards the Frankish state for more than a century. In due course in the later tenth century one count, the count of Barcelona, emerged predominant and the Frankish orientation began to weaken.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.6093/1593-2214/9962
Read Full Text: http://www.serena.unina.it/index.php/rm/article/view/9962
