I Before the Union

the regions commonly spoken of as Aragon and Catalonia occupy some 89,000 square kilometres of the most diverse and accidented terrain in the eastern Hispanic peninsula. They have their northern sectors in the high Pyrenees, with valleys extending generally southward into plateaux and secondary ranges before dropping to coastal lowlands in Catalonia and to the Ebro valley in Aragon. But the eastern lowlands are both more spacious and more fertile than the Aragonese Ebro; moreover, the uplands extending north-east and south-west of the Ebro are so much more arid and extensive than anything found in the east as to define an unfavourable climate for agriculture in much of greater Aragon. Grains, vines, garden crops, fruits, nuts, and oil were widely cultivated in both lands, especially in the lowlands and the Segre and Ebro valleys. For all its aridity Aragon was well drained in its north-eastern sectors, its rivers creating communications with the Segre and the lower Ebro that helped compensate for Catalonia’s better access to the Ebro delta and the sea.

Considered together, these lands were a crossroads and a homeland to prehistoric and ancient peoples. Traces of hunting-gathering cultures have been found which, in the eastern Pyrenees, may now be dated back some 300,000 years. No later than the fifth millennium bc came the fundamental shifts towards agriculture and the domestication of animals, followed around 2000 bc by metal-working. But it was only in the first millennium that there came the Indo-European and Mediterranean intrusions which left permanent marks on the language and topography of the eastern peninsula. Roman authors mentioned the ‘Iacetans’ and the ‘Ilergetes’ in localities corresponding to Jaca in old Aragon and Lérida (Ilerda) in the Segre valley, but many other Celto-Iberian groups have been identified. Osona, Berga, and Cerdanya take their names from such peoples. Greeks and Rhodians settled at Rhode and Emporion from the sixth century bc (or before), profoundly influencing the indigenous cultures of the eastern littoral and touching those even of the Ebro valley. The use of coined money and the alphabet spread through such contacts from coastal settlements as far as the Ilergetes.

The Romans moved into the acculturated coastal lands during the Second Punic War (218–201). Easily imposing on a long zone extending south-west to the Ebro delta, they founded Tarragona (Tarraco) and penetrated Spain through the Ebro valley. They met resistance from the Ilergetes and later from other tribes in an interior belt extending from the eastern to the central Pyrenees. Romanization proceeded over many generations; resulting in the displacement of indigenous settlements and the establishment of colonies (coloniae) and municipia whose continuous history thus dates from Roman republican times. Barcino and Tarraco were coloniae, although Tarragona later became an imperial capital, dominating a Provincia Tarraconensis that encompassed all (and more) of what later formed Catalonia and Aragon. Countless towns and cities of these lands still bear the names the Romans gave them: Llívia (Iulia Libica), Girona (Gerunda), Caldes de Montbui (Aquae Calidae), Huesca (Osca), Zaragoza (Caesaraugusta), to name but a few; and the Latin forms were in use throughout the Middle Ages. Roman landlords organized farms or estates (villae), sometimes (as at Can Sent-romà near Barcelona) on indigenous or prehistoric sites), in the fertile zones running from the easternmost Pyrenees to the upper Ebro valley.

Two aspects of romanization had extraordinary importance for the future: linguistic transformation and the spread of Christianity. Almost everywhere the native tongues gave way to Latin, a sure sign of assimilation and submission if not always of the Iberians’ numerical inferiority to Romans. Only in some remote uplands, such as Pallars and Ribagorza where a Basquelike dialect was spoken until the tenth century, can we discern the limits of Latin expansion. Of the Latin spoken in the Tarraconensis we know sadly little, but there can be no doubt that the romance vernaculars of the Middle Ages and after are descended from this speech. Why, then, do we find marked differences between modern Catalan and Aragonese (or Castilian)? Do these differences go back to the early confrontations of indigenous languages with Latin? If so, one might postulate a precocious ethnic differentiation antedating the Visigothic and Moorish invasions. But some philologists would place the determining changes later, as we shall see.

Of the transmission of Christianity to Spain next to nothing is securely known. It is no better than conjecture that ports of the Tarraconensis would have been the first communities to receive apostles or missionaries (possibly Saint Paul around ad 60?). The persecutions of Gallienus and Diocletian took their toll of martyrs, of whom Felix at Girona, Cugat at Barcelona, Fructuosus at Tarragona, and Vincent and Engracia at Zaragoza were among the most illustrious; their names with many others were perpetuated in countless altars and monasteries of later centuries. Tarragona and Barcelona were represented in the Council of Aries (314), but few bishops of Hispanic cities are known by name before the sixth century. Christian congregations evidently multiplied in the fifth and sixth centuries, when the councils of Tarragona (516) and Girona (517) testify to the administrative and liturgical organizing of affiliated bishops.

By this time the Tarraconensis was under Visigothic domination. The Visigoths, for all the violence of their kings, were tolerant masters who maintained Roman administrative order. Generally absent from their east Pyrenean lands, the kings governed through dukes and counts in the cities, where judges and saigs (agents of court) executed the law; most of these offices long survived the Visigothic regime in Catalonia. Alaric II’s breviary of Roman law (506) served to preserve the Roman order. Reissued with accumulated additions by Recceswinth and later known as the Liber iudiciorum, this code remained the legal basis of public order in Catalonia until the eleventh century (and, on some particulars, still later). What is more difficult to grasp is the social impact of the Visigoths. Once the kings had converted to orthodox Christianity, there was little to prevent the assimilation of Goths in the Christian populations of the towns. Yet it seems likely that the Goths were seldom more than a small minority in the old towns, that they were absorbed themselves instead of transforming the Romanized populations. Little that was peculiarly Gothic survived in the art and liturgy of the early known monasteries, such as San Pedro de Séptimo in Aragon, although it was in the councils of the sixth and seventh centuries that ecclesiastical law was forged.

Visigothic administration collapsed before the onslaught of Muslim armies from Africa in the eighth century. Valencia was overrun in the years 711–13; the Ebro was breached in 714, when Tariq and Musa carried out devastating raids along the settled belt running from Huesca and Lérida to Tarragona, Barcelona, and Girona. Other expeditions crossed the Pyrenees, capturing Narbonne (720) and besieging Toulouse (721), but the strength of these advance positions was sapped by revolts and the defeat of a Moorish army near Poitiers by Charles Martel in 732. South of the Pyrenees the early Moorish incursions resulted in the replacement (or conversion to Islam) of urban administrators and the imposition of tribute on inhabitants. But there was no systematic expropriation for those—the vast majority—who accepted the new regime. Christians, called Mozarabs, maintained their clergy and churches in most cities, although monastic life seems to have been disrupted, and Jewish communities survived. Conversions to Islam were doubtless more general among the peasants, in the Ebro valley, for example, and the regions between Tortosa, Tarragona, and Lérida. In the course of time, many of the Roman-Visigothic estates changed hands, and were parcelled into smaller tenements.

From their earliest years the Moorish invasions created one fundamentally new condition: they divided the Tarraconensis into a southern zone of Muslim domination and an upland zone, generally north and east of the Ebro and in the Pyrenees, where the old Christian order persisted with little change. The resulting borderlands were ill-defined so long as they were not the scene of conflict. But the situation changed when, in 777, Moorish chieftains disloyal to the new emir ‘Abd al-Rahmān I (755–88) negotiated for Charlemagne’s support. The Frankish expeditions of 778, reaching Zaragoza by way of Barcelona and through the pass of Roncesvalles were unsuccessful, but they created the prospect of a Frankish protectorate that could only seem alarming to the emir. In 780–2 he recaptured Zaragoza and sent a punitive expedition through the upper Ebro lands, destroying strongholds and reimposing personal tribute in token of submission. From that point onward the Pyrenean valleys became a refuge for nonconformists, Muslims in some cases, but chiefly Christians for whom independence now took on new meaning. Most of the Moorish commands east of Tarragona were lost to the Franks by the end of the eighth century, but the Moors retained and confirmed their domination of Tortosa, Lérida, Huesca, Zaragoza, and Valencia, among other cities of the north-east. With a well-disciplined army of Berbers, ‘Abd-al-Rahmān I laid the foundation of a Muslim dynastic state that lasted until 1031. Its greatest days came in the tenth century, when ‘Abd-al-Rahmān III (912–61) governed a highly civilized court at Córdoba, then a prosperous city of some half a million inhabitants, and assumed the title of caliph in 929. In this period the provinces and major cities, such as Zaragoza and Valencia, were delegated to the wālīs, under whom the qādīs exercised justice, and the muh-tasib supervised markets, weights, and measures. The Moors developed irrigation for garden farming, notably in the Ebro valley and Valencia as well as in Andalusia, and cultivated oranges, sugar cane, rice, olives, and vines. They built baths and mosques, some of which are still visible (in Majorca city and Valencia); and city castles (sudes), such as may be seen at Tortosa, Siurana, and Lérida.

The great age of Islam in Spain passed with the tenth century, and the caliphate collapsed in 1031. From its ruins emerged a cluster of petty states, the taifa kingdoms, of which those at Valencia, Tortosa, and Zaragoza, were to be the principal adversaries of the Christian kings of Aragon and counts of Barcelona. The taifas in turn were mostly overcome by the Moroccan Berber Murābits (Almoravids), whose intense religiosity helped stir the crusading fervour that marked a new and decisive stage in the Christian Reconquista; and the Murābits were succeeded, in turn, by the Muwahhids (Almohads), whose defeats at the hands of the count-kings in the thirteenth century were to be milestones in the early history of the Crown of Aragon.

From the efforts of Hispano-Visigothic chieftains to organize a rural population against the Muslims of the Ebro valley arose the kingdom of Aragon. Confined to tiny valleys above the river Aragón (barely 600 square kilometres), the Aragonese were dominated in the early ninth century by one Oriol (d. 809), doubtless in consequence of previous Frankish thrusts, and then by Aznar Galindez (c.809–39), who was probably of native descent and was certainly recognized by Charlemagne. Culturally as well as politically the early county was oriented toward Frankland, easy of access through Hecho and Canfranc passes. The Benedictine house of San Pedro de Siresa, founded in the early ninth century, was nourished by the Frankish monastic reforms. When Saint Eulogius visited the monastery in 848 he found manuscripts of Virgil, Horace, and Juvenal; of Porphyry, and Aldhelm; and of Saint Augustine’s City of God, none of which (he said) were then available at Córdoba.

The Frankish orientation did not last, for the Aragonese ceased to be threatened by the Muslims in the ninth century. In the Ebro valley survived a considerable Mozarab population, whose Arabic-speaking masters had long since quarrelled among themselves. The Christians in Zaragoza retained their bishop. Although the mountaineers were nominally subject to tribute, the effective Moorish domination reached no further north-east than Huesca, Barbastro, and Monzón. A daughter of Count Aznar II (867–93) married the wālī of Huesca. But the most influential political factor was Aragon’s dynastic involvement with Navarre (or Pamplona) to the west. Her leaders were still no more than counts of uncertain title. Galindo Aznar (c.844–67) could only secure his father’s claim to Aragon at the price of dependence on the king of the Pamplonese; his son Aznar II Galíndez (867–93) married the daughter of King García Iñiguez. In the tenth century a new line of Navarrese kings threatened to swallow up Aragon entirely. The Navarrese fortified devastated lands south of the river Aragón, thus encroaching severely on Aragon’s zone of natural expansion. Aragon was to be virtually incorporated in the kingdom of Pamplona until the death of Sancho the Great (1004–35).

Nevertheless, the county of the Aragonese retained its social and administrative identity. One spoke of it in charters as the land of the ‘Aragonese lords’. In the tenth century San Juan de la Peña, in the rugged frontier south of Jaca, replaced Siresa as the religious centre of Aragón. Traditionally associated with the arrival of Christian refugees from Zaragoza, the foundation of San Juan encouraged not only a restoration of Visigothic culture but also a patriotic militancy soon to be turned against the Muslims. Also symptomatic was the establishment of an Aragonese bishop in 922. The location of his see in the valley of Borau points to a growth of population in the upper valleys increasingly protected by military resettlement south of the Aragon river. Life in the latter zone, Aragon’s first frontier, already contrasted starkly with that of farmers and shepherds in the unwalled hamlets of the mountains. Similar frontiers were being defined in Sobrarbe and Ribagorza to the east, where the early allegiance was to the counts of Toulouse, but where ties with the Aragonese become visible in the tenth century. There, too, monasteries were founded: at Alaón and Obarra (Ribagorza) in the early ninth century and later at San Juan de Matidero and San Victorián in Sobrarbe; and a bishopric was established at Roda in the tenth century.

Aragon became a kingdom in the eleventh century. Ramiro I (1035–69), who had ruled the county as deputy ‘kinglet’ for his father (Sancho the Great) since 1015, conceded his brother’s supremacy in Navarre. He was permitted for his part to extend Aragonese authority deeply into the frontier formerly fortified by Navarre, a policy that resulted in a permanent enlargement of Aragon. The incipient realm grew to more than six times the territorial extent of the original county; nor was this all, for in 1044 Ramiro annexed Sobrarbe and Ribagorza, where his father had campaigned to protect the Christian settlements. If Ramiro did not quite claim to be king himself (using the expression ‘as if king’), he had manifestly assumed leadership in the struggle against the Moors, whose strongholds now faced his own across a long frontier. Ramiro’s precedence in the dynastic patrimonies was confirmed when his nephew became king of Pamplona in 1054; his son Sancho Ramírez (1062–94) submitted Aragon to papal protection, a dependence converted into vassalage in 1089; and when Sancho himself succeeded his cousin in Navarre in 1076, the supremacy of Navarre was ended. Sancho styled himself ‘king by God’s grace of the Pamplonese and Aragonese’.

This political success was enhanced by singularly favourable circumstances. The Muslim cities, while continuing to prosper economically and culturally, lost the military initiative to strengthened contingents of mounted knights on the Christian side. With the pressure thus reversed, so also was the flow of gold. Sancho Ramírez was able to impose tribute on the Moors of Huesca, Tudela, and Zaragoza, and derived great wealth from it. Meanwhile Christian Aragon became a crossroads. The Gascon passes carried a swelling throng of merchants and pilgrims: the former trading cloths, weapons, and hardware for Muslim spices, fruits, and manufactures; the latter finding Jaca a convenient stage on the route to Santiago de Compostela. The tolls of Canfranc and Jaca produced spectacular profits for the Aragonese monarchy and church. In an upland hitherto without urban life, Jaca became an ‘instant city’. It attracted settlers not only from its environs but especially from Gascony and Toulouse. Sancho Ramírez encouraged this movement, granting to Jaca a charter of liberties (1077) and instituting a silver coinage that would spread with the realm itself to become a national institution.

So transformed, the first city of Christian Aragon naturally became its ecclesiastical capital. What was conceived to be a restoration of the territorial church was inaugurated in a synod at Jaca (1063) attended by the archbishop of Auch and other prelates from both sides of the Pyrenees. The episcopal see traditionally belonging to Huesca was relocated at Jaca and grandly endowed. Its canons received the Augustinian Rule, which was also instituted in royal chapels at Siresa, Loafre, Montearagón, and Alquézar; the monastic customs at San Juan de la Peña and San Victorián were reformed; while churches throughout the realm gave up the Visigothic observance for the Roman liturgy. The bishopric of Roda, having been destroyed by the Moors in 1006, was restored under royal and papal protection in the 1070s. Together with economic prosperity the religious revival worked to revolutionize ecclesiastical architecture. The splendid cathedral at Jaca was built in monumental if eclectic styles drawing inspiration from Italy and France, There were similar innovations in the renovated churches at Iguácel (1063–72), San Juan (1094), and elsewhere; of the traditional, undecorated style little survived save, here and there, the Hispanic arch. Artists from southern France introduced new meaning and elegance to the sculpture of interiors and cloisters.

By the later eleventh century Aragon seemed to have come of age. Yet the young kingdom, so precociously expansive and receptive, was only then on the eve of conquests that would enlarge its territories nearly tenfold during the next two generations. There was nothing fortuitous about this renewed expansion. Jaca’s designation as a bishop’s see seems to have been provisional, pending the conquest of Huesca. Ramiro I died in conflict with the Muslims near Barbastro (probably in 1069), an event which, following on notorious struggles over Barbastro (1064–5), must have contributed to a hardening perception of the Moors as enemies of the Christian faith. French and Catalan-speaking knights were already fighting alongside the Aragonese in this zone of the frontier, and expeditions of this kind were to be promoted as pious works and, finally, as crusades. Progress, however, remained slow. The Muslims retained a string of fortified places well upland from the Ebro, extending from lower Ribagorza to Tudela. Moreover, the kings of Pamplona and Castile for a time supported the taifa of Zaragoza against the Aragonese. Then in the last quarter of the eleventh century the tide turned. The death of Sancho IV in 1076 ended the debilitating competition of Navarre, while Muslim leadership, threatened from the south by Almoravids, faltered with the death of al-Muqtadir of Zaragoza in 1081.

So a new wave of Aragonese conquests began in the later years of Sancho Ramírez. Acting as viceroy in Sobrarbe and Ribagorza, his son Pedro captured Estada in 1087 and Monzón in 1089, opening the way to rapid advances southward in the Cinca valley and as far east as Almenar (taken in 1093). Progress toward Barbastro and Huesca proved more difficult. Although Montearagón, within view of the city, fell in 1088, it was not until November 1096 that Huesca surrendered to Pedro I (1094–1104), now king of Aragon. Barbastro capitulated in 1100, leaving only Lérida unconquered among cities of the eastern frontier. To the west progress along the sparsely settled Gallego river had been no less spectacular. By 1101 Pedro’s forces were in control of strong points virtually under the walls of Zaragoza and Tudela.

At this stage the campaign was slowed. Alfonso VI, who had previously resisted Aragonese expansion as a threat to Castilian destinies, was moved by the conquest of Huesca to renew his aid to the Moors. The Aragonese, for their part, while breaking the enemy frontier, had failed to secure the lands behind their advanced positions. Nor could the kings of Aragon yet safely commit all their resources to this enterprise. They had felt obliged to collaborate in Castilian expeditions to the lower Ebro and to Valencia so as not to jeopardize their own claims to rich coastal domains; Pedro I had allied with the Castilian mercenary Rodrigo Díaz de’ Vivar (el Cid Campeador) against the Almoravids in 1097. The preoccupation with Castile continued during the reign of Pedro’s brother Alfonso I (1104–34), whose stormy marriage to Alfonso VI’s widow Urraca ultimately failed to effect a dynastic union. In his early years Alfonso I conquered Ejea and Tauste on the western frontier, thus gaining control of the Cinco Villas, and Tamarite de Litera in the east (1105–7), but another decade passed before the campaign against the taifas now dominated by the Banū Hūd dynasty at Zaragoza, Lérida, and Tortosa was seriously renewed.

Inspired by the crusading ideal then in its flower, Alfonso I welcomed papal support in the form of indulgences and military aid from foreign knights, notably Count Centulle II of Bigorre and Viscount Gaston IV of Béarn. Zaragoza fell in 1118 after a long siege, followed in 1119 by Tudela and Tarazona. In 1120 Soria was resettled and Calatayud besieged. News of a counter-attack on Zaragoza diverted the king to the Valencian borderland where at Cutanda his forces routed an Almoravid force in June 1120. Soon afterwards Alfonso captured Daroca and Calatayud. The destruction of the Moorish realm of Zaragoza was almost complete. Alfonso secured his southern positions against Valencia, and established knights under religious vow at Monreal del Campo and Belchite. To the east he established a new frontier extending virtually from Morella to Mequinenza, seriously threatening the Moors of the Cinca and lower Ebro. For all this success Alfonso was frustrated in his ambition to conquer Lérida and Tortosa, which lay in zones claimed for annexation by the count of Barcelona, who had made a treaty with the kinglet of Lérida in 1120. In 1134 the king of Aragon lost a battle at Fraga and died a few weeks later.

Alfonso I (‘the Battler’) ranks among the greatest kings of the Hispanic ‘Reconquest’. His victories substantially defined the medieval realm of Aragon, establishing borders with Catalonia, Valencia, and Castile. Under him Aragon lost the defensiveness of her upland origins and assumed an expanded role as liberator of oppressed Christians. ‘No king of Aragon was inflamed with a spirit so authentically religious and crusading as the Battler king’, wrote Lacarra. It is in light of these circumstances that most historians have explained the strange testament by which Alfonso, childless and probably sterile, bequeathed his kingdom to the military orders of the Holy Land: an exalted but unrealistic act of piety. But it seems at least possible that this testament, which was composed in 1131 and confirmed shortly before the king’s death in 1134, was a shrewd contrivance intended to have almost precisely the consequences that, in the event, ensued. The defeat at Fraga touched off Moorish uprisings in which the south-eastern frontier collapsed. Zaragoza was saved from recapture by forces of Alfonso VII of Castile (December 1134), who had a good dynastic claim to Aragon and Navarre. The purpose of the will may therefore have been to neutralize papal influence in support of this claim. The Aragonese magnates set aside the testament in favour of the Battler’s younger brother, the monk Ramiro, who was married to Agnes of Aquitaine in order to beget the needed heir. In the end the Navarrese rejected this arrangement, choosing a king of their own, García Ramírez, descended from the old house of Pamplona. Ramiro II (I 134–7), for his part, retired to the monastic life after fathering a daughter, Petronilla, who was promptly betrothed to Count Ramon Berenguer IV of Barcelona. Aragon had escaped Castilian domination, at what cost remained to be seen.

Enormous problems of organization faced Alfonso I and his successors. Their domains, a compounding of frontiers, had multiplied too fast to be assimilated. South of the Pyrenean valleys in which Aragon had originated lay the ‘old frontier’ (Vieja Extremadura) dating from the tenth century. Next came the ‘new land’ conquered at the end of the eleventh century, the key points of which were Huesca and Barbastro. Relatively densely inhabited, this frontier was organized in military tenancies awarded to barons who had contributed service and fighting men in the campaigns, while its extension west of the Gallego remained an incompletely subjugated no man’s land. Imported from the old frontier, the tenancies of the new land were devised to support fighting men on the produce of peasants progressively less free. That the king was obliged to create baronies in lands over which he claimed sole dominion points to a characteristic weakness in his position. The military obligations of (old) Aragon, having become customary at a level suited for defensive service, were too light to sustain the prolonged campaigns and sieges of the twelfth century. The king had to persuade and to pay. Less a popular than a royal idea, the expansion of Aragon obliged the king to raise up powerful tenants-in-chief in the new land.

The Ebro valley, with its old cities, gardens, and orchards, posed a different problem. This zone had to be secured and exploited without destroying its prosperity. The solution was to clear the cities for Christian resettlement, while allowing the Muslims to retain their movables and rural property. Every effort was made to preserve the traditional structure of obligations and irrigation in the countrysides. The king compensated his knights with properties confiscated in Zaragoza and Tudela and enticed settlers from the old Aragonese lands, the east Pyrenean counties, Gascony, and Castile, even Christians from Granada, to share in the spoils. Although many Muslims abandoned these homelands—particularly administrative officers and expropriated landlords—the mass of peasants and artisans remained, so that the Mudejars, as they were called, lohg outnumbered the Christians.

Finally, there was the ‘new Extremadura’ established by Alfonso I on the borders of Castile and Valencia. Rugged and arid, this sector was organized in military zones projecting from towns such as Soria, Medinaceli, Calatayud, and Daroca. These places, generally commended to the king’s barons-in-arms, were Settled on unusually liberal terms which included freedom from prosecution for felonies. Castilians, Navarrese, and Gascons joined the immigrants to this frontier. These were communities of peasant warriors: foot-soldiers and mounted men shared a common status. Governed by customary statutes (fueros) and by councils, thè early settlers here were resistant to seigneurial exploitation.

Aragon was, therefore, far from being a homogeneous state at the death of Alfonso the Battler. Although the ‘Aragonese’ (aragonesos) were fighting and settling on all the frontiers, the term ‘Aragon’ (Aragónia) continued to be reserved for the old mountain homeland, while the king’s authority remained a cluster of lordships: over Aragon, Sobrarbe, Huesca, Zaragoza, etc. The process of assimilation was beginning, to be Sure. Settlers in Barbastro received the same privileges as the knights (infanzones) of Sobrarbe. Alfonso I encouraged his followers to serve him regardless of local custom. That is why in 1134 the ‘infançones and barons of Aragon’ insisted, in ohe of the earliest of Europe’s ‘great charters’, on having their customs confirmed as they were in the time of Pedro I. Moreover, the Christian clergy supported the royalist view that the war was a reconquest. Bishop’s churches were to be ‘restored’ where they once existed—in Tarazona as well as in Huesca and Zaragoza, for example—and they were endowed in similar ways, often by expropriation of mosques. Upland churches lost their early centrality and influence, becoming annexes of restored sees: Jaca of Huesca, Roda of Lérida.

Yet the monarchy as an institution had evolved very little. Alfonso I, like his ancestors, was a war-lord. He dominated and rewarded followers who derived status and privilege from association with him; acting through men of his court, their functions unspecialized, he exploited his estates in the old Aragonese lands and his rents, justice, and tolls everywhere. While the common military obligation was derived from an ancient conception of public order upheld by the king, the prevailing forms of service, obligation, and right were essentially personal and patrimonial. The situation was such that the king retained the initiative while the expansion continued; few military tenancies were yet hereditary in the early twelfth century. But the stability of this royal-baronial condominium remained to be tested.

Like Aragon the eastern Pyrenean regions later to be known as Catalonia were first organized as a Christian frontier against the Muslims. But the Frankish initiatives here were more important, and their impress more lasting, than in Aragon. Charlemagne himself ordered the campaigns in which Girona (785) and Barcelona (801) were reconquered. Moreover, the earliest counts of these districts seem to have been appointed by the Frankish king, as their successors certainly were. Whether the native peoples would necessarily prefer Frankish to Moorish masters was another matter. In Barcelona, as in Narbonne a generation before, the Muslim governor had found support among Christians who had prospered in the eighth century, and local coalitions of Goths and Moors would plague Frankish leaders for decades to come. On the other hand, Charlemagne’s welcome to Hispano-Gothic refugees north of the Pyrenees together with his acceptance of Visigothic law as the basis of social order had fostered sentiment favourable to Frankish rule in the diverse lands (over 40,000 square kilometres) stretching from the Conflent to the Ebro. The Franks spoke of this region as the ‘March of Spain’ in the ninth century.

The Frankish protectorate extended naturally from positions north of the Pyrenees. The key figure was Count Guilhem of Toulouse (d. 812), a cousin of Charlemagne, whose first wife was probably a Visigoth, and who retired to the monastic life in 806 (he was later canonized) after valiant campaigns against the Moors. From his time date monastic foundations at Aries, Sant Ahdreu de Sureda, and Sant Genís de Fontanes in the Vallespir and the restoration of Gerri in upper Pallars; in most of these may be discerned the influence of the reformed Frankish observance of Benedict of Aniane. Saint Guilhem and his sons, in shifting and turbulent combinations, administered nine of the fourteen counties that later constituted Catalonia. But the opportunism of Bernard of Septimania (826–44) alienated his indigenous subjects as well as King Charles the Bald, who found legitimist support in Sunifred of Carcassone (844–8), who was of Visigothic descent. Conquering Cerdanya (835) and Urgell (838), Sunifred seems also to have checked a Moorish invasion before it reached Septimania. These exploits, by a native equally loyal to his homeland and the king, were not forgotten. But Sunifred fell victim, before his sons were grown, to a revolt by Guilhem, son of Bernard of Septimania; and the king, having restored order (849), found it increasingly difficult to secure loyal and competent service from the Frankish counts he appointed to the Spanish March. As the kingdom itself reeled, it fell to the loyal house of Carcassonne to fulfill its destiny. Guifré (or Wifred) the Hairy, Sunifred’s eldest son, seems to have been invested with Urgell, Cerdanya, and Conflent as early as 870; to these were added Barcelona and Girona in 878. Guifré associated his younger brothers Miró and Radulf in the administration respectively of Conflent and Besalú.

The Catalans of later times viewed the reign of Guifré the Hairy (870–97) as a heroic age of national formation. He was, in fact, the last count of the Spanish March to receive his commission from a king, and he supported popular initiatives in resettlement that helped to create a sense of political and cultural identity in his lands. Guifré and his descendants were to rule Catalonia for more than 500 years.

Already in the 870s Guifré had encouraged colonization of the wastelands in the Lord valley in the frontier of Cerdanya and Urgell. After 878 settlers spread into the plain of Vic and the upper Llobregat valley (the later Berguedà). Coming mostly from the Pyrenees, these people received lands on the liberal tenure of aprisio, which created a quasi-proprietary right under comital protection; the new county of Osona was organized. New parish churches were consecrated and endowed, old ones restored. The bishopric of Vic was restored by 887. The most notable of the new monastic foundations were Sant Miquel de Cuixà in the Conflent (878) and, in the newly resettled domains, Ripoll (879) and Sant Joan de les Abadesses (887). Nevertheless, the situation throughout this pre-Pyrenean frontier remained insecure. Guifré lost a battle against the Moors near Lérida in 884; and he was killed in 897 resisting a Moorish incursion that reached Barcelona. There had been no provision for the succession, still legally at the disposition of the Frankish king.

The crisis was resolved through the resolute efforts of Guifré’s sons and grandsons, in whose time the Spanish March attained a new degree of political stability. The brothers of the first generation divided the counties among themselves, while reserving nominal superiority to the eldest, Guifré II (897–911), who administered Barcelona, Girona, and Osona. Miró II (897–927) succeeded to Cerdanya, Conflent, and Berguedà; Sunifred II (897–950) to Urgell. Upon Guifré II’s early death, Barcelona passed to his younger brother Sunyer (911–47), an irregular devolution for which Miró II was apparently compensated by the succession to Besalú in 913. This remarkable condominium persisted in the second generation (and, in some respects, much longer), although the counties soon became heritable in themselves. The counties of Pallars and Ribagorza remained in an equivocal position, linked to Urgell and the eastern counties by their Frankish origin and Catalan speech, yet pressed from the ninth century onward to consolidate with the Aragonese.*

Juridically, nothing had changed. The embattled count Guifré II thought it prudent to do homage to King Charles the Simple (899), whose protection still seemed useful to March-land monasteries as well. As late as 986–7, following a devastating Moorish attack, appeals were directed to the king. In reality the counts had progressively assumed the Carolingian cause for their own, continuing the work of resettlement, notably in the lower Llobregat region and the Vallès, sponsoring ecclesiastical councils and inspiring a more aggressive resistance to the Moors. The accession of a new generation of counts was marked by political reorientation. From Cerdanya and Conflènt were initiated contacts with Rome (950–1) which resulted in the first papal privileges of exemption for peninsular monasteries. At the same time an embassy to Córdoba from Borrell II of Barcelona and Urgell (947–92) concluded a treaty with the caliph that virtually nullified the historic dependence of the March on Frankland. Improved security and confidence encouraged a flowering of ecclesiastical culture. Bishops and abbots, typically scions of the comital lineages, splendidly promoted and endowed their congregations. Cuixà, Vie, and Ripoll became renowned centres of letters and learning. Vic must already have had cultural contacts with Córdoba when Gerbert of Aurillac sojourned there around 967–70. In the time of Oliba (b. 971), son of Oliba Cabreta (count of Cerdanya-Besalú, d. 990), abbot of Ripoll and Cuixà (1008–46) and bishop of Vic (1017–46), Benedictine observance came into touch with newly reformed religious currents in Frankland and Italy. Classical Latin, patristics, and Visigothic legal studies were revived at Ripoll, where, moreover, the recording of Frankish king-lists began to give way to commemoration of comital deeds. Lombard styling predominated in the churches dedicated at Ripoll (1032), Vic (1035), and Cuixà (1038).

Yet if the new culture was nurtured in the uplands, political and economic circumstances were raising Barcelona to predominance in the condominium. Borrell II bore the brunt of al-Mansūr’s invasion which unexpectedly broke the peace in 985. His courageous defence of Barcelona nearly coincided with the demise of the western Carolingian dynasty, which explains why in 988 he styled himself ‘duke and marquis by God’s grace’. Under Ramon Borrell, count of Barcelona and Girona (992–1017), new thrusts by al-Mansūr and ‘Abd-al-Malik (1001–3) were not merely parried but reversed in damaging counter-attacks which culminated in a daring raid on Córdoba itself (1010). This exploit proved a turning-point. Henceforth the frontier west of the Llobregat (the Penedès) would be relatively secure, while the booty distributed among Christian warriors arid the payments of tribute by taifa chieftains gave impetus to the economy.

For the renewed raids had done little more than deflect a movement of sustained economic growth in the east Pyrenean lands. Contacts with Moorish Spain friendly or otherwise resulted in exchanges of slaves, weapons, horses, and cloth. Muslim gold coins circulated around Barcelona in the 970s, and were minted there by 1018. Metallurgy developed together with new markets for rural exchange, such as at Salient and Besalú; a fair was instituted at Urgell in 1048. Even more remarkable was agrarian expansion: continued resettlement, reaching to the coasts of Girona; the improvement of older peasant cultivations, as in the Vallès and the Gironès owing to better tools for labour; the exploitation of new and marginal lands, as in the lower Penedès and the Segarra, by terracing and ditching. Centred in the coastal plains and their hinterlands, the revitalized economy continued to draw people from the mountains. The primacy of the mountains came to its end earlier in this sector than in Aragon.

Traditional legal and institutional structures persisted intact into the eleventh century. Ancient settlements and public (fiscal) domains adjoined new peasant settlements in the coastal and sub-Pyrenean valleys. Small properties, parcels, and allodial farms were common everywhere. The law remained Visigothic, public and territorial; the administration Carolingian. Counts, viscounts, and vicars dominated their lands from well-spaced castles and relied on the military and economic services of a mostly free population. They held public courts assisted by judges and clerks learned in the Gothic law.

But this social and institutional cohesion collapsed in the second quarter of the eleventh century. Berenguer Ramon I (1017–35) was unable to sustain his father’s momentum against the Moors, thereby depriving an upwardly mobile military class of its most cherished outlet. The castles of the aggressive lineages, manned by mounted warriors more numerous and less disciplined than their Aragonese counterparts, proliferated beyond comital control. Castellans fought among themselves, ravaged peasant lands, and requisitioned crops, and imposed upon helpless peasants an array of obligations that soon hardened into a custom of banal lordship. The old procedure of courts gave way to private settlements. Wishing to restore public order and perhaps encouraged by associated peasants, the bishops of Elne and Vic inaugurated the Truce of God (1027, 1033) so as to curb the excesses of the new militarism. Specific protections for the clergy, the monks, and the unarmed were defined under episcopal sanctions in a territorial statute that would later be appropriated by the counts. For the time being, however, the assault on comital prerogatives continued. The revolt of Mir Geribert, who styled himself ‘prince of Olèrdola’, took two decades (1040–59) to overcome.

It was Count Ramon Berenguer I (1035–76) who finally prevailed and established a new political order. Regaining control of the principal castles, often by purchase (Pierola, Cardona, Fornells, Malla, Copons, etc.), he progressively secured the alliance or fealty of the other counts and viscounts as well as of other lords of castles. He insisted on the sworn fidelity even of subordinate castellans and knights together with the right of entry to castles. In using such methods, however, he was not reactionary: little of the old order survived. Ties of personal fidelity proliferated throughout society, replacing the weakened sanctions of the law. The fief, having originated in the Spanish March as a form of remuneration from fiscal land, became the normal reward, and eventually the pre-condition, for service and fidelity. Castellans and their enfeoffed knights formed a new aristocracy whose social superiority was progressively defined in rites of initiation. Most portentously, the old free peasantry disappeared wherever castles arose—that is, almost everywhere. Because the counts and viscounts as well as the new aristocracy had violated tenant liberties for economic gain, there could be no redress for the masses north and east of the Moorish frontier. They were becoming a subservient class. The new order was thus a feudal order dominated by the count of Barcelona. His domains came to be perceived by foreigners as a land of castellans (castlàns), whence the new appellation Catalonia that came into familiar use in the twelfth century.

About 1060 dawned the great age of independent Catalonia. Acting firmly as ‘princes of the land’ to secure the new internal order, Ramon Berenguer I and the countess Almodis imposed the Peace and Truce as a territorial statute in 1064. They legislated so as to bring the procedures and tariffs of the Visigothic law up to date, although it is not clear whether they sought to have these measures recognized in counties nominally independent, such as Empúries, Besalú, and Roussillon. Externally, Ramon Berenguer I renewed the pressure on taifa chieftains of Lérida, Tortosa, and Zaragoza, who were obliged to pay tribute.

Thenceforth the counts entered vigorously into affairs of the wider Mediterranean world. Ramon Berenguer II (1076–82) married a daughter of the Norman prince Robert Guiscard, and their son was to marry first the Cid’s daughter and later the heiress of Provence. The Gregorian reform of the church was introduced to Catalonia in legatine councils held at Besalú (1077) and Girona (1078). Not even domestic violence, which for the first time jolted the peace of Guifré’s dynasty, seriously disrupted political affairs: the matricide Pere Ramon was packed off to Castile, while Berenguer Ramon II (1082–96), charged with the murder of Ramon Berenguer II, was permitted to retain the comital title on condition of its passing ultimately to his nephew Ramon Berenguer III. Berenguer Ramon II fought to extend Catalonian claims far to the south-west of secure frontier positions. His attempts to capture Valencia (1085, 1089) were frustrated by the Cid, and settlers were still too few to justify attacking Tortosa. But the coincidence of Catalan advances in this zone with the Castilian reconquest of Toledo (1085), the primacy of which seemed to threaten Barcelona’s ecclesiastical autonomy, led Pope Urban II to proclaim the restoration of the archbishopric of Tarragona (1089, 1091), This was premature. Political complications together with new invasions by the Almoravids, who devastated the Penedès in 1107 and threatened Barcelona in 1115, ended hopes of swiftly securing Tarragona and conquering Tortosa.

Ramon Berenguer III (1096–1131) devoted himself to the possibilities of his dynastic position in the old counties. In 1107 he married his child-daughter to the dotard Bernát III of Besalú on condition of succeeding to that county should Bernát die without leaving children. This condition was fulfilled, surely not unexpectedly, in mi. Then at the death of Count Bernat Guillem (1109–17) without heirs, Ramon Berenguer annexed Cerdanya, the dynastic homeland. These devolutions, deliberately planned, went far toward reconstituting the Guifredian patrimony. But, as in the ninth, so in the twelfth century the Pyrenees were no barrier. Having inherited the suzerainty of Carcassonne and Razès, counties acquired by his grandparents in 1067, Ramon Berenguer III secured sworn fidelities from the men of Carcassonne in 1107 and the homage of their viscount in 1112. In that year, too, Ramon married Dolga of Provence, yet another diplomatic triumph. Entitled count of Provence from 1113 and possessed of trans-Pyrenean domains stretching from Nice to the Ariège, Ramon Berenguer III henceforth threatened the Occitanian hegemony of the count of Toulouse, with whom a treaty of partition was passed in 1125.

Since establishing ties with Norman Sicily, the lords and merchants of the coastal counties had taken to the sea. Toward 1100 Barcelona was a thriving place, rebuilding within its old walls, expanding in its suburbs, prospering in its trades and industries. Its mariners probably joined the Pisans and Genoese in complaining of piracy by Moors in the Balearic Islands. In 1114–15 Ramon Berenguer III, called ‘duke of the Catalans’ by admiring Pisans, led a coalition of crusaders to seize Majorca. Although the islands were promptly recaptured by the Almoravids, the exploit was symptomatic of enlarged Catalonian designs in the Mediterranean. In 1118 began new efforts to restore Tarragona. The count commended the city and its hinterland to Bishop Oleguer of Barcelona, who was designated archbishop of Tarragona by the pope. Another decade would pass, however, before resettlement began in earnest under the Norman knight Robert Bprdet, to whom Oleguer ceded his jurisdictional rights in 1129. These were trying years on the Christian frontier, for the Almoravids had cut off tributory payments from taifa chieftains and otherwise discouraged campaigning. The Aragonese now seemed as threatening to Catalonian prospects as the Moors themselves. In his last years Ramon Berenguer III worked to secure his rights—to develop mercantile tolls, to correct violators of the peace—and he planned an overseas crusade.

In 1131 Ramon Berenguer IV succeeded to his father’s peninsular lands and the suzerainties of Carcassonne and Razès, while Provence passed to his younger brother Berenguer Ramon (1131–44). He was faced at once with Aragonese advances on Lérida and Tortosa that were cut short by Alfonso the Battler’s defeat and death in 1134. Three years later Ramon Berenguer IV was betrothed to the heiress of Aragon.

Catalonia was affected less than Aragon by events of the early twelfth century. The major social and institutional changes had occurred earlier, her greatest peninsular conquests still lay ahead. While the division separating what were later called Old and New Catalonia was well established by 1137, the latter remained a deep and insecure frontier of mingled Moorish and Christian settlements running from the hinterlands of Tarragona north and west through the massif of Siurana to Lérida. In the old counties the conditions of people remained diverse. The castellans and knights were not yet fully assimilated in the old aristocracy, which continued to command the greater fortunes. Lay estates and castles were becoming hereditary, while peasant tenants were progressively bound to their masters and the land. Towns of the old counties possessed a rising mercantile class, unlike the Aragonese, but only a few places in Catalonia—such as Vilafranca del Conflent and Tàrrega—could yet boast charters.

The exercise of power was hardly less rudimentary than in Aragon. The counts exploited their domains through castellans and bailiffs. They relied on favoured barons and clerics for counsel, and they rewarded a bellicose aristocracy in their campaigns. But the equilibrium between comital and baronial interests was balanced precariously on the prospect of continued conquests.

On the eve of dynastic union, the historic realities of the Tarraconensis must have faded from common memory. Where centuries of invasions and reconstructions had failed to obliterate an ancient if superficial unity defined by the Roman imperial province, the Christian baronial conquests from the ninth century created new cellules of power and society with astonishing rapidity and unprecedented solidity. Aragon and Catalonia are thus, strictly speaking, products of the Middle Ages; products of the confrontation between Islam and Christianity in the eastern peninsula. Neither had any basis in tribal culture, both were inherently geopolitical constructions. Yet the characteristic novelty in both stemmed from the Moorish conquest, which, prolonged over several centuries and experienced typically as disconcerting thrusts, forced those who resisted to consolidate in the Pyrenees and work their ways southwards. So for the first time in Iberian history the mountain resisted the plain, and prevailed. Yet, as elsewhere in the northern peninsula, it did so in the eastern and central Pyrenees in different ways, with different results.

In Aragon the Moorish imprint went much deeper. Most of the enlarged realm of the twelfth century lay in rugged lands lately conquered and incompletely assimilated. The cultural gulf between the Ebro and the Aragón corresponded more nearly to a geographical contrast than was true in the eastern counties. Aragonese cultural identity was among the most precocious in all western Europe, defined from the early ninth century in relation to an upland system of natural drainage; the kingdom of Aragon proclaimed in the eleventh century was confined to this upland and its first tentative frontier, which lent it a precarious coherence that was weakened with the conquests of the twelfth century. In 1137 Aragon was a royal-baronial confederation for the exploitation of multi-cultured lands united by little more than name.

The situation in Catalonia was quite different. There, too, the Moors had struck in the eighth century, but in contrast to what happened in Aragon, the early Frankish retaliation had been decisive. Only in the south-west borderlands had Moorish settlements and protectorates lasted in the ninth century, so that while the occasional raids that long persisted helped to kindle a defensive militancy, they did not prevent the early demographic expansion from the mountains that resulted in a more culturally homogeneous society extending over most of historical Catalonia. The frontiers of Catalonia, save for that defined in the twelfth century when the days of Moorish domination were visibly numbered (and when all Christian fighting men were eager for the spoils), tended to be agrarian rather than military. On the other hand, while the Aragonese early found identity in their name and their king, the people of the eastern counties still lacked such marks of cohesion as late as the mid-twelfth century. As in the past, their rulers were counts and their law was Gothic and none but foreigners yet saw the need to name them according to a pancomital idea that seems to have had more to do with a new custom of the multiplied castles than with fears of the Moors. Something, after all, survived here from the old Tarraconensis.

It remains to mention language, perhaps the most mysterious and certainly the most influential survival in the two lands. The transformation of spoken Latin into Aragonese and Catalan must have been virtually complete by the middle of the twelfth century. Here we have the single clearest sign of ethnic individuation in our two realms and we may be sure that the differentiation had occurred no later than the time of the first Moorish invasions, when it was doubtless accelerated. There is reason to believe that, whatever influence may be attributed to the various tribal substrata of language, the contrast between Moorish occupation in much of Aragon and its early eradication in Old Catalonia largely accounts for the phonetic and dialectical differences between East Catalan and Aragonese. According to Badia i Margarit, moreover, it was Moorish settlement in the Ebro-Segre frontier that produced a deromanizing resurgence of a native substratum that brought about marked differences between the multifarious West Catalan forms of these borderlands and East Catalan. If this theory perhaps underestimates the strength, pervasiveness, and variability of the Latin substratum, it none the less helps to explain how the processes of acculturation worked in the forming of Aragon and Catalonia quite independently of the reconquest politics of Christian kings and counts. The forging of divergent linguistic identities long antedated the new processes of national formation in Aragon and Catalonia in the early years of the union.