1000-1284- The Iberian Municipal Militias in the Central Middle Ages
THE LIBRARY OF IBERIAN RESOURCES ONLINE
A SOCIETY ORGANIZED FOR WAR
James F. Powers
PREFACE
[xi]The primary and secondary research for this volume has been undertaken at a number of libraries and archives. In Madrid, I have used the Biblioteca Nacional, the libraries of the Casa Velázquez of the Ciudad Universitaria and of the Real Academia de la Historia. I have also sifted the records of the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid, the Archivo de la Corona de Aragón in Barcelona, and assorted municipal archives in Spain. I have also used the British Library in London and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Harvard University Libraries, the Library of Congress, the University of Virginia Alderman Library and the Yale University Sterling Library. I owe a great debt of gratitude to the staffs of all of these libraries and archives, as well as to the Interlibrary Loan staff of the Dinand Library of the College of the Holy Cross. Moreover, I received considerable support from the Committee on Professional Standards at Holy Cross, which awarded me three Batchelor (Ford) Summer Fellowships and one Faculty Semester Fellowship to advance the research and writing of the final product. The Council for the International Exchange of Scholars, in coordination with the Comité Conjunto Hispano Norteamericano para Asuntos Educativos y Culturales (a Fulbright-related committee of American and Spanish scholars based in Madrid), granted me an indispensable fellowship for six months of study in Spain, and the College of the Holy Cross supported me with two sabbatical leaves. The Holy Cross Committee on Research and Publication gave me numerous small research and travel grants. The present study would have been delayed interminably without this assistance, and I am most grateful.
[xii ]There are also persons to whom I am especially indebted. My former teacher, Charles Julian Bishko, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Virginia, has read the entire typescript of this book with his customary diligence and has offered many helpful suggestions. To him I dedicate the work. I have also benefited from the stylistic and scholarly advice of my colleague in Interdisciplinary Studies courses at Holy Cross,Professor Ellen Kosmer of Worcester State College, who brings her editing skills and the perspective of a very perceptive art historian to this effort. Also, Father Joseph Pomeroy, S. J. and the staff of the Holy Cross Data Processing Center, gave frequent assistance while permitting me to compose this book on their Digital Vax computer and store its several drafts in the computer memory. There is also the special debt to my wife Trudy who stayed up many nights trying to dissolve my unintended barriers of communication, and who endured my absences for research and writing at inconvenient times. None of these considerate persons is responsible for any errors which lie herein. They are my own property.
THE LIBRARY OF IBERIAN RESOURCES ONLINE
A SOCIETY ORGANIZED FOR WAR
James F. Powers
[1]
INTRODUCTION
In 1132, a small army of Christian soldiers advanced northwest along the road to Córdoba, offering periodic shouts and chants in the manner of armies attempting to keep up their spirits as they proceeded through enemy territory. Outside of the Iberian Peninsula in the twelfth century, this force would have to be regarded as remarkable in every respect. Their column consisted of both mounted and foot troops, they were situated over four hundred kilometers from their home base, and they consisted largely of the municipal militias of two towns, Segovia and Ávila, operating on a campaign they had chosen to initiate. They had passed three mountain ranges and three river valleys to arrive at their present location, and they moved far from home on a daring raid into the heart of Almoravid Spain. As they ranged over the countryside seeking targets of opportunity, a scouting party dispatched earlier to search for sources of booty rejoined the main body. It brought sobering intelligence information: a Muslim force commanded by the Almoravid prince Tâshfìn of Córdoba had been spotted encamped in the vicinity, probably dispatched in pursuit of their own squadrons. A more timorous force of skirmishers and raiders might well have sought the nearest ford in the Guadalquivir River and made its way back to the Trans-Duero region whence it had mustered. However, these troops were no panicky amateurs, prone to flight without consideration of the risk of being overtaken and routed. Like trained professionals, they instead sought out the enemy army.
The leaders demonstrated initiative and combativeness in the face of this threat. Frontier warfare in Iberia included taking risks, and sound strategy dictated a direct [2] assault on the opponent's force, especially if any kind of surprise could be achieved. Altering plans and direction and invoking "the God of Heaven and Earth, Holy Mary and Saint James" for their protection, the two militias undertook to search out the enemy army with whom they now shared the Campo de Lucena. In time, estimating that they were close by the Almoravid position, the militias encamped and divided into two detachments. The entire cavalry force and approximately one half of its infantry moved out on reconnaissance to locate the Muslims, while the other half of the footsoldiers remained at the campsite to guard the baggage and supplies.
The breadth of the campo proved sufficient to hide the Muslims and Christians from each other for a time. They traveled a half day's journey from their camp and found nothing; afternoon faded into evening and brought no contact. As the darkness of night intensified, the Christians stumbled upon the Almoravid encampment, catching the settled force completely off guard. The Muslims sounded the alarm, raced for their weapons, and a confused and fierce melée ensued. The Christians pressed the advantage of their surprise attack and cut down many opponents before they could arm themselves. In the darkness and disorder Christian and Almoravid could barely distinguish one another. Suddenly, Prince Tâshfìn burst from his field tent hastily shouting commands in an attempt to rally his men. He was greeted by a Christian lance which pierced his thigh, transforming his determination to sudden panic. Ignoring his wound, Tâshfìn hobbled to the nearest horse, mounted it bareback, spurred it into action, and galloped from the scene of the struggle, disappearing into the gloom in the direction of Córdoba. The surviving Almoravids soon followed their leader's example, retreating in confused disarray. Tâshfìn's troops never recovered from the initial surprise to put up a good fight.
Once the dust had settled, the Christian militiamen looked about them at the campsite, and the booty left there for the taking. They gathered all that they could carry and marched back to their own camp. The raid had been extremely successful: mules, camels, gold, silver, weapons, and even Täshfïn's own battle standard were included in the spoils. The warriors of Ávila and Segovia divided the booty on the spot, then began the trek back to their own towns while the men praised God for their good fortune. They would discover that Tâshfìn had planned a raid against Toledo with the force they had encountered, a raid the militias had terminated. The Muslim soldiers instead straggled back to Córdoba empty-handed. Prince Tâshfìn stayed under the care of his doctors [3] in a prolonged convalescence of several weeks. Soon the prince resumed his normal activity and commanded new armies. Although the pain of his wound subsided, but he walked with a limp for the remainder of his days, and it is doubtful whether his pride ever fully recovered.(1)
While the episode just recounted is one of the more colorful in the chronicle of deeds of the municipal militias of medieval Iberia, it is in no way unique. The town armies of the medieval Spanish frontier rendered similar service throughout the critical period of Christian expansion against Muslim Spain, and pursued various other activities as well. The monarchs of the peninsular kingdoms consistently utilized these municipal forces for their varying military needs, causing the standards of the town militias to appear regularly in the great battles and sieges of the Reconquest. Certainly the most emphatic endorsement of towns and their military prowess was offered in November of 1264 at the Cortes of Aragon in Zaragoza, when King Jaime I threatened his recalcitrant nobles with the use of the municipal militias of the realm, noting "I have all the towns of Aragon and Catalonia that would be against you, and concerning warfare they are as skilled as yourselves."(2) No contemporary thirteenth-century monarch outside of the Peninsula could have made such a threat credible to the most powerful nobles of his kingdom.
The Lucena incident, especially, reveals some important characteristics of these frontier militias. By the middle of the twelfth century these forces gave clear evidence of a well-organized command and operations system, demonstrated a knowledge of tactics and a capacity for the intricacies of spoils division, and possessed the vital features of a well planned and smoothly functioning military entity. Offensively, they could supplement royal armies on campaign, rendering service at some distance from their homes, or they could operate independently on their own initiative. Defensively, their greatest contribution to the realm lay in their provision of a standing defense in depth along the Islamic frontier, a belt of populated fortresses with striking power capable of hammering and harassing an invading force. Their mission consisted in holding land and defending it, and the steady advance of the Christian frontier owed much to their skill in performing this task.
The present study seeks to gain for these municipalities and their armies the recognition and the thorough analysis that their contribution merits. In the survey of three centuries which follows, the emergence of these towns and their armies will be explored with an eye to the causative factors of frontier life that gave them their genesis. The work investigates the rapid growth of their record of service in the twelfth century, [4] their role in the disasters and triumphs of the great Reconquest battles and sieges, and the changes wrought by the stabilization of the forces of Iberian expansion toward the end of the thirteenth century. Following this, a close examination of the municipal military system in its legal and institutional forms is presented reflecting the extent to which municipal military activity shaped their way of thinking and became ingrained in their daily lives. Further, this study examines medieval municipal developments in all of the peninsular Christian kingdoms (Leon, Castile, the Crown of Aragon, Navarre and Portugal), since the expansive southern conquests of the Central Middle Ages constituted an experience that all of these states shared, while reacting to the common heritage in ways shaped by their varying traditions. Few studies of Spanish and Portuguese history have chosen to do this, causing internal political frontiers to delimit detrimentally a proper understanding of historical influences which have had a peninsula-wide impact. Certainly the history of town armies in medieval Iberia merits a full study across the several states in which they served so importantly.
However, this municipal contribution, along with every other aspect of the military establishment in Iberia, went largely unnoticed by some of the military historians of the twentieth century purporting to survey the Medieval West, such as Delbrück, Oman and even in the more recent work of Verbruggen.(3) By mid-century, possibly due to the consciousness-arousing Spanish Civil War, this insouciance to Iberian military history changed with the work of Ferdinand Lot, who did include a chapter on the Peninsula in his two-volume study. More recently John Beeler and Philippe Contamine have followed Lot's example. Although none of these three go beyond secondary sources in making their rather general analyses and have little to say regarding the municipal militias, Contamine has a particularly rich bibliography of both articles and books in which Spain and Portugal do receive careful attention.(4)
A number of the more recent general histories, such as Valdeavellano, Suárez Fernández and Soldevila, offer important background information on Spain and Portugal in the Central Middle Ages. These include several significant surveys in English, including Oliveira Marques, O'Callaghan, Hillgarth, MacKay and Glick, that considerably enrich the American student's knowledge of the medieval history of the Peninsula.(5) Among them one can find an excellent variety of viewpoints, regional emphases, and social, economic and cultural approaches to understanding the complex historical forces at work both inside and outside of Iberia.
[5]
The best general studies dealing with Iberian military institutions have been written by scholars devoted to peninsular history, starting at the end of the nineteenth century with the multi-volume history of the Portuguese army by Ayres de Magalhães Sepúlveda, three volumes of which are devoted to the Early and Central Middle Ages, although mostly drawn from secondary sources. In 1925, González Simancas wrote his study on medieval Spanish military history which does draw upon primary sources and even includes material from illustrated manuscripts, a comparatively progressive method for his time. Botelho da Costa Veiga wrote his studies in Portuguese military history in 1936, including a detailed analysis of the military content of regional sources in northern Portugal and a partial examination of the northern town charters. But in all of these general works, the municipal militias receive only small consideration.(6)