Medieval Colonialism: Postcrusade Exploitation of Islamic Valencia

by Robert Ignatius Burns

Overview

This first major study of tax structure in pre-Renaissance Spain gives new insight into the condition of the conquered people of postcrusade Valencia. Drawing on tax records, it provides the reader with a fascinating glimpse of life among the thirteenth century Mudejars. By showing the financial links between a medieval ethnic enclave and the dominant society, the author illuminates aspects of intergroup relations that have previously been neglected. This volume is the second in the author's trilogy on Muslim society in Eastern Spain.

Originally published in 1976.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691617527
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/08/2015
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #1677
Pages:	430
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

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Medieval Colonialism

Postcrusade Exploitation of Islamic Valencia

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By Robert Ignatius Burns

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1975 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05227-4

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CHAPTER 1

The Crusader Kingdom of Valencia

King James the Conqueror had just turned twenty-five when he rode out of Teruel, late in the spring of 1233, to lead his invading army down a hinterlands road into the heart of the Moorish kingdom of Valencia. Young in years, he was haloed by the charisma of greatness. Already he had humbled the island principality of Majorca, littering its battlefields with slain Muslims and taking its walled capital bloodily by storm. Now, as he rode under the crimson-and-gold barred standard of his confederated Arago-Catalan realms, his royal person caught even the casual eye. "This king was the most imposing man in the world," observed the contemporary Desclot, "taller than any other by a palm, well proportioned and perfect in every member, and he had a large face fair and ruddy, a nose long and very straight, a generous, well-made mouth, large white teeth resembling pearls, eyes of unequal color, good reddish hair like gold thread, large shoulders, a body long and elegant, arms sturdy and well made, good hands, long fingers, sturdy thighs, legs long and straight and thick for their size, and feet long and well made and elegantly shod." To match this impressive form, the young monarch bore a lion's heart: "he was very bold, knightly in battle-skills and strong, brave, generous in giving, cordial to everyone, and very merciful; and he bent all his heart and all his will to battle against Saracens."

Disinterred in modern times, the king's skeleton helps confirm this description and displays as well the great cut along his skull, soon to be sustained in combat under the walls of Valencia city. Troubadour romantic by temperament, cold realist under the iron demands of circumstance, King James could hardly have hoped to wrest more than a border section from his Islamic adversaries. A deeper ambition burned in him, nevertheless, a dream from childhood on, that by conquering Valencia he would prove himself "the best king in the world and the one who has done the most." The Cid was more than a century dead ; it was time for a new Cid to ride.

The Crusade

What force had converted the interminable border wars of this northeastern peninsular kingdom into a surging crusade that would double its territory, fill its coffers, and help make it the master sea-power of the western Mediterranean? Nothing in the young giant's boyhood had promised such a future. His dissolute father, Peter the Catholic, had continued the southern expansion of Arago-Catalonia by snatching three outlying towns at the western margin of the Valencian region, but Peter's concern to reinforce his dynasty's wide feudal power in Languedoc led to catastrophic defeat and death in 1213 on the Muret battlefield at the hands of Simon de Montfort's Albigensian crusade.

The child James had inherited an oddly yoked set of territories, basically a heavily feudal upland region that lent its name, Aragon, and its royal title to the confederation, and the more mercantile city-state culture along the coast with an agricultural hinterland under the generic name Catalonia. Barcelona was the center of gravity for the Catalan counties as Zaragoza was for the Aragonese, though in practical affairs Lerida at their border served James I as a kind of capital or center of operations. Both regions backed onto the Pyrenees, the Catalans spilling over especially to include the Roussillon county and a far-flung network of feudal lords in Languedoc. King James himself was born in 1208 at Montpellier, a city on whose affairs and celebrated university he kept a close eye, making visitations during eighteen, or nearly half, of the latter forty years of his reign. Aragonese and Catalans differed in language, social structure, money system, laws, parliaments, landscape, economy, traditions, and temperament. Neither yielded to the other in its devotion to the king of Aragon, of the county-house of Barcelona, under whose "Crown" or realms they cooperated.

At the age of seventeen James, having survived the multiple perils and baronial turmoil of his minority — partly owing to the protective authority of Innocent III — launched his first invasion or raid in 1225 against Islamic Valencia. Unwisely he targeted the mighty offshore castle Peñíscola; his abortive adventure gained only a face-saving annual tribute from the Valencian wali. James did not return for nearly a decade, but by that time much had changed. The boy had metamorphosed into the Conqueror, leader of an amphibious crusade preached by the papal legate and bitterly fought through 1229 and 1230, by which he had become master of strategic Majorca. His Languedocian prospects had meanwhile grown less tenable. The upland Aragonese, jealous of Catalan preponderance in this Balearics enterprise, desired a countervailing expansion into Valencia. Most important of all, the monolithic Almohad empire of North Africa and Spain had come unstitched like some long-rotten garment, and King James found himself advantageously allied with one faction of the ensuing civil war dividing Valencia.

James had been an infant when western Islam's time of troubles began. Las Navas de Tolosa, that stunning victory of the Spanish Christian states in 1212, portended the end of the Almohad caliphate and the downfall of its capital, Marrakesh, at the edge of the Sahara. Less causative than catalytic, the battle triggered a series of misfortunes, intrigues, revolts, and failed opportunities. A victim of this terminal convulsion fragmenting both North Africa and Spain, the wali or governor of Valencia Abu Zayd found himself retreating north under the attacks of the usurper Zayyan. Murcia, the neighboring region to the south, which Abu Zayd ineffectively claimed, had earlier fallen to the popular hero Ibn Hud. Local dynasts entrenched themselves at internal enclaves like Játiva. Desperate for allies, the cultivated wali entered alliance with Aragon in 1229, transforming the nominal tribute into partnership and surrendering to James whatever the Christians might conquer during their joint war plus a fourth of general revenues.

By the time the Conqueror could disengage from the Balearics to take advantage of his bargain, Abu Zayd found his own position so deteriorated that he had to sign away to James all revenues from Valencia city and its huerta. While the white standard of the Almohads took its place beside the crimson bars of Aragon in chivalrous show, the canny lawyers computed crown profits, arranged for property redistribution, and in general prepared the colonial regime. Four years later Abu Zayd reduced himself to vassalage, saw James borrow the title "king of Valencia," which the wali had employed in dealings with the Christians, and as a convert began like the Cheshire cat to diminish and then disappear from the public scene.

The crusade itself falls into three general stages — for the north, the center, and the south. In 1232 a baronial incursion took over Morella and its mountainous northwest region. The next year James led his first invasion down the Teruel road. His strategy during these first years was to fasten upon key points, starting with the crucial city of Burriana, so as to isolate subsidiary castles and induce their surrender on terms. It was a game of guile as much as of force, minimizing a feudal king's intermittent and imperfect control of his military resources but leaving him at the mercy of evolving contingencies as the years wore on. By 1235 James had overrun the north; in early 1236 he installed a symbolic little garrison on the hillock of Puig, within distant sight of Valencia city. He had accomplished this with very little damage to property or interruption of the economy, except for a siege at Burriana with expulsion of its populace.

Assiduously he rounded out his military efforts by a multiplicity of local capitulations, involving charters or constitutions which guaranteed privileges and spelled out the main revenue conditions. Though overextended, he had succeeded beyond expectation. With the road open into central Valencia, James found himself in position to inaugurate a more massive national effort. Rallying his realms by a joint parliament at Monzón in 1236, he assumed the royal title over Valencia and returned to the attack in impressive force. This time the crusade, again formally preached in the name of Rome, attracted warriors widely, from Languedoc, Provence, and Italy.

The Islamic hosts gathered in 1237 for their major offensive effort, a pitched battle intended to overrun Puig and roll back the Christian front. It failed dismally. Zayyan fell back within Valencia city, resigned to a siege. From April until late September the vise tightened, until famine stalked the town's arabesque of streets. It was a half-year of epic incident — sallies by the defenders, close combat under the walls, heavy artillery sullenly thudding, even a staged tournament of Islamic and Christian champions. Meanwhile Christian armies ranged the area in slashing raids, while James kept up his reliable trick of separate surrenders. The celebrated poet and chancellor Ibn al-Abbar contrived to slip out from the stricken city and make his way to Tunis, now an independent power; his eloquence unleashed a fleet and army to lift the siege, but the crusaders repulsed it at Valencia's shores and the garrison of Peñíscola beat back its landing in the north. In faraway England Matthew Paris recorded how "the splendid and indefatigable warrior the lord king of Aragon so ravaged the great city of Valencia by bloody war, and so closely invested it, as to force its surrender." On September 28, 1238, Zayyan handed over all his holdings down to the Júcar River. Valencia city's population followed Burriana's into exile.

There the crusade might have rested, with the lower third of the former "kingdom" and Murcia beyond that as surviving Islamic states. At the Júcar, however, James realized that Játiva castle under the Banu 'Isa dynasty "was the key to the kingdom, and I could not be king of the kingdom of Valencia if Játiva were not mine." Appetite had fed on conquest. Just as at Puig the king had realized that Valencia was ripe for the taking, if only he could rally his kingdom to the cause, so now on a visit to Játiva he eyed its castle and panorama with "great joy and great happiness in my heart," for God surely destined it for Christendom. A pseudo-siege in 1239 failed to bluff the ruling qa'id. In 1240 James sent a second host, this time securing the small prize of minimal vassalage. Soon the king's sly eye discerned a technical breach of feudal contract. He suffered the embarrassment of having the Banu 'Isa countermove by shifting their vassalage to Castile, bullied the Castilian king into a partition agreement at the treaty of Almizra, and in 1244 negotiated the isolated qa'id into releasing the lesser castle (with surrender of the main castle due by 1246) in return for a powerful but less central fief of Montesa. Meanwhile Alcira, on an island in the Júcar, followed a pattern resembling Játiva's, while other towns of the south fell like ripe fruit into the Aragonese basket. Biar's surrender in 1245 marked the end of the crusade and its southern limits.

Fighting did not wholly stop. Castile's share from the Almizra treaty was Murcia; a restive garrison state of Castile from 1243, it boiled into revolt in 1264. Alfonso the Learned, embroiled in the wider revolt throughout Andalusia, invoked the military aid of Aragon. James sent his son Peter twice at the head of armies in 1265, conducted the final decisive campaign himself in 1266, then honorably restored the region to Alfonso. Castile had not slumbered idly while the Conqueror labored in Majorca and Valencia. The whole Spanish front had surged forward, Cordova falling in 1236, Jaen in 1246, Seville in 1248, and Cadiz in 1265. Behind mountain ramparts at the peninsula's tip, the last remnants of Spanish Islam had organized itself as Granada, relict and heir of glories departed. Across the straits, Morocco's new Marinid dynasty had settled in at Fez, while the Hafsids at Tunis presumed to affect the caliphal title and a strong principate emerged between the two at Tlemcen.

In conquered Valencia; King James's lot was not a happy one. Revolts recurred so continuously that their chronology still confuses modern historians, every decade counting one major uprising and the longest period of peace lasting less than a decade. Patriot heroes like al-Azraq used their Mudejar fiefs as bases to rally rebellion and harry the ill-secured country. My own reconstruction of this moot and muddled story puts a first phase of revolt beginning shortly after the close of the crusade and probably before the traditional date of 1247, running through late 1249; a second phase began in early 1257, continuing through June 1258; an interim period of unrest disturbed the kingdom between 1252 and 1256, with some disquiet as postscript in the early l260's.

All these troubles proved minor compared to the rebellion that rocked Valencia, and indeed all Spain, from 1275. James struggled desperately to retain his new kingdom, until death overtook him in July 1276 on the Valencian frontier, with no time for the niceties of a proper entombment at the royal pantheon of Poblet. His thirty-six-year-old son and successor, Peter the Great (1276-1285), soon to become liberator of Sicily by the War of the Sicilian Vespers and to go down in history as Dante's troubadour hero, had to put off his coronation. As his contemporary Muntaner remarked, Peter was forced to "conquer part of the kingdom of Valencia a second time." The new king describes succinctly how the Valencian Muslims "rebelled with many castles and strongholds," bringing in armies from Islamic Granada and from "the regions of Barbary," so that his own "large armies" had to subdue Valencia "with great slaughter, toil, and expense."

Trouble had begun by December 1275; in March 1276 James was convoking an army from all his realms; by June the rebels controlled forty castles and the king had established his base at Játiva. After a heavy defeat at Luchente, followed by the old king's untimely death, Peter contrived a three-month truce, which began in September. Slow progress throughout 1277, culminating in the Montesa campaign that fall, with mopping-up operations and diminuendo echoes thereafter, finally secured the Valencia kingdom. Castile had not been so lucky; from mid-1275 it had to contend with invasions led by Morocco's ruler Abu Yusuf as well as with general revolt of its Moorish subjects into 1279, followed by civil war among the Castilians.

These alarums and excursions bore relevance to the revenue scene in Valencia. They did not result in general repression or loss of privilege, but they ended Mudejar nobiliary control over large segments of the country, dealt the coup de grâce to lingering hopes for Islamic restoration, disorganized collections temporarily, occasioned their tighter organization afterwards, introduced successive drafts of Christian immigrants, diminished some town populations of Muslims into Moorish quarters, and in general hastened the demographic rearrangement, the displacement of Muslims from high commerce and from establishment or control situations, and the intensification of colonial grip that made Valencia by 1285 a far different human situation than it had been at crusade's end in 1245·

Colonial Mudejarism

King James had inherited the pattern by which Arago-Catalonia absorbed and administered subject Moors; it reflected general Mediterranean experience and had analogies in Islamic and Byzantine lands. Treatment of Jews, and to a lesser extent of foreigners like the Genoese within Spain, betrayed this same mentality. Neither tolerance nor discriminatory ghetto, it pragmatically accepted parallel, antipathetic societies. Where such an enclave existed as a unitary religio-social entity, it became in effect a second established religion in the realm, protected in its liturgies, subject to its separate law and courts, enjoying its local officers of rule, conducting its schools, living by its proper calendar, and in general standing apart carapaced in limited autonomy and alien cultural forms. The system permitted any anomaly proper to each society, from polygamy to the Mecca pilgrimage, but sternly forbade crossing over — Christian to Jew for example, or Jew to Muslim. Theoretically the host society welcomed and even sought converts; in practice Valencia's Christians demonstrated lively prejudice against them as cultural aliens, and her barons resisted the economic loss to tithes and the untidy repercussions in life, law, and real estate exchange.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Medieval Colonialism by Robert Ignatius Burns. Copyright © 1975 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• Frontmatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. vii
• ILLUSTRATIONS. MAPS, pg. ix
• PREFACE, pg. xi
• ABBREVIATIONS, pg. xxv
• CHAPTER I. The Crusader Kingdom of Valencia, pg. 1
• CHAPTER II. The Economics of Crusade Victory, pg. 17
• CHAPTER III. Public Monopolies and Utilities, pg. 41
• CHAPTER IV. Life and Work: Household, Community, Commercial, and Agrarian Charges, pg. 79
• CHAPTER V. Spectrum: Water, War, Salt, Moneyage, Livestock, Labor Services, Hospitality, and Fines, pg. 121
• CHAPTER VI. Treasure, Tithe, Fees, and Miscellany, pg. 180
• CHAPTER VII. Harvesting the Taxes, pg. 211
• CHAPTER VIII. Collectories: Muslim, Christian, Jew, pg. 248
• CHAPTER IX. Delinquents, Anomalies, and Exemptions, pg. 323
• CHAPTER X. The Human Factor, pg. 344
• BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 349
• INDEX, pg. 377