A Society Organized for War: The Iberian Municip. Militias in the Central Middle Ages

[Ferran]

A SOCIETY ORGANIZED FOR WAR

The Iberian Municipal Militias in
the Central Middle Ages,
1000-1284

James F. Powers

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)

Palomeque Torres opened a new era in military studies based on primary source materials in his extended article, which has been for many the basic starting place for the investigation of the medieval Iberian military establishment during the Central Middle Ages. His work also initiates a common limitation for much that followed among Spanish military scholars, in that the study covers only Leon-Castile at the expense of the other peninsular kingdoms. Nonetheless, this is the first work to study the municipal militias in any detail. For some of the legal aspects of warfare, including the militias, there is the helpful article by Salvador de Moxó on military law. There are useful references to the militias in Huici Miranda's survey of the most important battles of the Reconquest. In English, general and detailed overviews of the Reconquest and its military implications have multiplied in the last twenty years. Julian Bishko and Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz outlined the importance of the militias in their respective papers given at the University of Texas frontier conference in 1959. Elena Lourie sums up a good deal of then recent Spanish research in her article of 1966, part of the title of which I have used for this book. Two comprehensive overviews of the Reconquest, which include the entire peninsula, have appeared in English since then by Bishko and Lomax, both stressing the military systems which achieved the expansion and place the municipal militias in that context. Most recently Salvador de Moxó has rendered a fine synthesis of the Reconquest and its attendant resettlement with its related military considerations. A useful general military history of Spain has also appeared recently by Redondo Diáz, covering the medieval period and profiting from its author's ability to read sources in English.(7)

Iberian urban studies have been produced at an increasing rate during [6] the last several decades, and some of these raise tangentially the question of military service.(8) Indeed, it can be argued that Hispanic municipal historians, especially those of Leon-Castile, have evinced more concern in general regarding municipal military service than has been the case outside of the peninsula. One ought to note especially the work of Carmela Pescador del Hoyo, whose lengthy study concentrates on the primary fighting class in the Leonese-Castilian municipalities, the caballería villana or the urban knightly class and their military obligations. The histories of particular periods, reigns and regions offer occasional coverage of the town armies, which taken together produce a sketch of their development over the Central Middle Ages.(9) Reilly, González and Burns have been particularly careful in their extensive archival research to examine military institutions and to consider the place of municipal militia service.

Works which focus on the municipal militias are comparatively few. The earliest is a short book by Juan Martínez de la Vega y Zegrí, Derecho militar en la Edad Media (Madrid, 1912), which despite its general title is essentially an examination of the military laws in the charter of Teruel. Given the extent of the material in this seminal member of the Cuenca-Teruel family of charters, Martínez has much to draw upon, but the work is basically a plea for further research on this interesting material, not a fully developed monograph in its own right. A more recent and more detailed study is by Luis Querol Roso, Las milicias valencianas desde el siglo XIII al XV: Contribución al estudio de la organización militar del antiguo Reino de Valencia (Castellón de la Plana, 1935), which examines one of the defense and police force militias of later medieval Aragon and includes a useful documentary appendix. Little of Querol Roso book covers the same time period as the present study, and for Valencia in the thirteenth century the studies of Robert Burns are far more valuable for military material. It was this paucity of studies on a compelling topic that drew my interests to this area. My unpublished doctoral dissertation at the University of Virginia in 1966 dealt with the militias but terminated with the reign of Fernando III in 1252 and was restricted to Leon-Castile. Since that time I have pressed my examination of the sources into all of the peninsular kingdoms, publishing my initial findings in a series of articles.(10) Even there, the approach was partial, dealing with particular aspects of the problem in Leon-Castile, Navarre and the Crown of Aragon, with no integration of any Portuguese material.

Iberia provided by no means the only milieu in which municipal military service developed from 1000 to 1300. The Italian Peninsula, [7] particularly in Tuscany and Lombardy, generated some of the best developed municipalities in medieval Europe whose citizens rendered both horse and foot service to the commune.(11) Medieval France and England similarly experienced the emergence of municipal militiamen and from the twelfth century onward kings customarily sought military service from a number of their boroughs and towns.(12) No comprehensive study of the municipal militias of any of these states exists, for which a number of explanations might be offered. In Northern Europe the urban contribution is usually conceived of as a mere component of a larger royal military establishment, while in Italy the towns' extensive political and economic development tends to reduce the military component to a lower priority for study. Also, the Pirenne merchant school of municipal theory has tended to view townsmen as active participants in trade at the expense of any other roles they might have played. The impact of this force can be exemplified in the ravages laid upon the early municipal military theories of Arthur Giry by Pirenne's American disciple Carl Stephenson.(13) Indeed, the roles of merchant and soldier sit uncomfortably side by side in medieval society as well as our own, leading those towns with better developed economies to hire mercenaries or move to small professional standing armies to ease pressures on the popular military service that would disrupt the individual's commercial activity.

The towns of the Iberian Peninsula present a notable set of variables which contrast them with the municipalities in the rest of Western Europe in the Central Middle Ages. The most important single factor here is the ongoing expansion of the Christian kingdoms against the Islamic principalities, customarily referred to as the Reconquest. I use the term in this study simply to refer to that process of expansion, without any reference to the theoretical implications that some Spanish historians have attached to it regarding the continuity of Visigothic or imperial authority in the Peninsula. This expansion and the open frontier which it generated against Islam produced a multi-faceted conflict with the Muslim world. At times the frontier spawned a curiously variant set of circumstances which influenced the towns. At the level of settlement and livestock-raising the environment suggests aspects of the American West, and the future would indeed see elements from this world transplanted to the frontier across the seas. In other places the advanced culture, technology and economic network of Al-Andalus created yet another kind of frontier and another set of influences on the Iberian municipalities. This is not to suggest that the Christian frontier towns borrowed their model of the municipal militia from the Islamic world. Little evidence exists to indicate [8] that the towns of the Caliphate or the Almoravid and Almohad empires with their complete administrative submergence in princely administration ever functioned in so independent a fashion as to field their own armies. Certainly Muslim influence was active on the Christian military in borrowing administrative organization and the copying of riding styles and tactics. Nonetheless, the primary impact of this frontier against Islam lay in the institutions and style of life which the municipalities adopted to counter their physical exposure to daily insecurity. To settle and hold land the townsmen had to gird themselves for potential combat in a way not called for in the remainder of Western Europe. Only the Crusader Near East provides any kind of model, but the settlement pattern there was so at variance with the West that no similar pattern of municipal militias developed in that front against Islam.

This study does not limit itself to urban history, legal and institutional history, or to military history. Rather, it develops out of the interaction of all three areas. In spirit, the closest paradigms for this book have been provided by the Reconquest surveys of C. J. Bishko and Derek Lomax. But I have also borne in mind the work of John Keegan, whose book The Face ofBattle (New York, 1976) stresses the interaction of the institutions and attitudes of men and their warmaking, and underlines the impact of warfare on its participants and their communities. While military history has sometimes been left to pedants and amateurs who write battalion histories and concern themselves overmuch with the details of combat divorced from the individuals who gave their lives to engage in it, the three historians noted above pursue full investigations of warfare in its societal context. War simply represents another arena in which humans bring their ambitions, skills and weaknesses to bear upon the pursuit of particular goals. It is also one of the greatest catalysts for provoking historic change of any of the forces available to the historian's inquiry. It compels our attention to its impact, and it ought to do so.

I have endeavored to examine the entire Iberian Peninsula because all of the Christian states which it contained experienced the forces of expansion and the threat of Islamic counter-expansion during the period. There was also significant interplay in the municipal law and institutions both among the Christian states and across the Muslim frontier. On the other hand, Iberia possesses a complex mix of geographies and climates, cultures, and exposures to outside influences. Strong regional variations, themselves the partial products of the medieval experience, make Iberia a sum of many histories as well as a peninsula playing host for [9] one summation. The Reconquest, while potentially a unifying experience felt by all of the Christian peninsular states, touched these regions in a variety of ways, affected them differently, and ultimately contributed both to the consolidation of the Peninsula and to the internal dissimilarity of its parts. The towns and their militia experience thus become an important way of understanding how these forces helped shape the profiles of the Spanish kingdoms of the Middle Ages. They also suggest an illuminating basis for comparison and contrast with the rest of Western Europe.

The following study is divided into two basic sections: historical survey and institutional development. Part One, the first three chapters, begins with a chronological narrative of the emergence and development of municipal military service in the peninsular kingdoms, and examines its evolution and its role in Reconquest warfare from the early eleventh through the later thirteenth centuries. In Part Two, the last five chapters discuss the impact of the frontier and its warfare on town life as seen in particular aspects of the municipal military experience: the organizational structures; the protective traditions of limitation, exemption and compensation which insulated the towns from war's most devastating effects; the defensive and offensive methods of operation in the field; the economics of warfare as seen in the collection and the division of booty; and the sanctions against violators of municipal precepts. Finally, the results of this interweaving of frontier municipal tradition and militarization of life are considered over the last two centuries of the Reconquest in the Epilogue.

I have used basically two kinds of primary sources: first, municipal charters and royal documents both published and unpublished pertaining to the towns; and second, the narrative chronicles both Christian and Muslim of the Iberian Middle Ages. I explain the difficulties of utilizing these materials in the early chapters and in the appendices of the book. In citing the published documentary materials, I have tried to list editions which are the most recent or at least the most accessible. These I customarily cite by page numbers of their printed text, with the exception of some of the more extended charters which can be grouped into "families", such as those of the Cuenca-Teruel and Coria Cima-Coa groups. Here I employ the internal section numbers in the published editions, both because it will often take the reader to the cited material more quickly and because the sections numbers often reveal connections among the various charters that would not be otherwise discernible. With regard to Arabic materials, I have used the transliteration system [10] established in the History of the Crusades series edited by Kenneth M. Setton and Harry W. Hazard, at least where possible.

I have attempted to use Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan versions of the place names where appropriate, except where an English form has become exceptionally common (e.g. Seville for Sevilla). The only exceptions are the names of kingdoms which are commonly Anglicized. Hence, no accent appears on Leon and Aragon as kingdoms in the text and similarly none appears on the town of León.

Notes for the Introduction

1. This entire narrative is contained in the CAI, 91-92. The date of 1132 is not certain, as the chronicler offers none for the encounter. However, the context of this episode in the chronicle belongs with events which can be dated to that year. See Recuero Astray, Alfonso VII, 156-65, who does not, however, recount the Lucena episode. Fletcher, Saint James's Catapult, 270, offers the date I am accepting for this raid. Its significance has also been underlined by Sánchez Belda, "La Mancha," 14-15.

2. "Llibre dels feits del Rei En Jaume," 397. "...que havem totes les ciutats d'Aragó e de Catalunya que seran contro vós, e de guerra saben tant com vosaltres."

3. Oman, Art of War. Delbrück, Geschichte der Kriegskunst, Vol. 3. Verbruggen, Art of Warfare.

4. Lot, L'art militaire, 2:261. Beeler, Warfare in Feudal Europe, 158-84. Contamine, La guerre au Moyen Age, 11-68, 144-49.

5. Suárez Fernández, Historia de España. Valdeavellano, Historia de España a la baja Edad Media. Valdeavellano, Historia de las instituciones. Soldevila, Història de Catalunya, Vol. 1. Oliveira Marques, History of Portugal. O'Callaghan, A History of Medieval Spain. Hillgarth, The Spanish Kingdoms, 1250-1516, Vol. 1. MacKay, Spain in the Middle Ages. Thomas F. Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain.

6. Ayres de Magalhães, Historia do exercito portuguez, Vols. 2-4. González Simancas, España militar. Botelho da Costa Veiga, Estudos de história militar portuguesa.

7. Palomeque Torres, "Contribución al estudio del ejército," 15:205-351. Moxó, "Derecho militar," 12:9-59. Huici Miranda, Grandes batallas. Bishko, "The Castilian as Plainsman," 47-69. Sánchez-Albornoz, "The Frontier and Castilian Liberties," 27-46. Lourie, "A Society Organized for War," 35:54-76. Bishko, "Spanish and Portuguese Reconquest," 3:396-456. Lomax, The Reconquest of Spain. Moxó, Repoblación y sociedad. Although its primary coverage precedes the Central Middle Ages and the emergence of the municipal militias, a useful background study is Sánchez-Albornoz, "El ejército y la guerra en el Reino Asturleonés, 718-1037," 1:293-428. Redondo Diáz, Ejércitos de la reconquista.

8. Sacristán y Martínez, Municipalidades de Castilla y León, 105, 122. Valdeavellano, Orígenes de la burguesía. Font Ríus, "Orígenes del régimen municipal de Cataluña," 16:389-529, 17:229-585. Torres Balbás, "La Edad Media," 97-104, 136-41. Carlé, Del concejo medieval castellano-leonés. Lacarra, "Les villes-frontières," 69:218-19. Pescador, "La caballería popular en León y Castilla," 33-34:101-238, 35-36:56-201, 37-38:88-198, 39-40:169-260. García Ulecia, Los factores de diferenciación, 355-448. Gautier-Dalché, Historia urbana de León y Castilla, 7-95. While not new, the vast work on the history of governmental institutions in Portugal, Gama Barros, História da administração pública, vols. 3-4, discusses in brief the military role of the Portuguese towns.

9. Reilly, Queen Urraca. González, Regesta de Fernando II. González, Alfonso IX, 2 vols. González, Castilla en la época de Alfonso VIII, 3 vols. González, Reinado y diplomas de Fernando III, 2 vols. to date. Ballesteros y Beretta, Alfonso X el Sabio. Burns, Islam Under the Crusaders. Burns, Medieval Colonialism. González, Repoblación de Castilla la Nueva, 2:212-37.

10. Powers, "Origins and Development of Municipal Military Service," 26:106-08. Powers, "Townsmen and Soldiers," 46:641-43. Powers, "Frontier Competition and Legal Creativity," 52:475-87. Powers, "Frontier Military Service and Exemption," 45:75-78.

11. Hyde, Society and Politics in Medieval Italy. 80-81, 116, 183-84. Waley, "Army of the Florentine Republic," 70-108. Waley, "Papal Armies of the Thirteenth Century," 72:1-30. Waley, "Condotte and Condottiere," 337-71. Schevill, Siena, 131-32, 166-68. Bowsky, A Medieval Italian Commune, 117-58. Schevill, Medieval and Renaissance Florence, 1:105.

12. Petit Dutaillis, Feudal Monarchy in France and England, 175-76, 314. Petit-Dutaillis, French Communes, 63-74. Mundy, Liberty and Political Power in Toulouse, 14-15, 46-47, 71, 153, 261, 333. Mundy, Europe in the High Middle Ages, 249, 430. Powicke, Military Obligation in Medieval England, 24-25, 36-59. Hollister, Military Organization of Norman England, 231, 246.

13. Petit-Dutaillis, French Communes, 63-74.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

Part One
The Evolution of Peninsular Municipal Military Service

Chapter 1 : The Origins and Development of the Militia Concept, 1000-1157

Chapter 2 : Institutional Maturity and Military Success, 1158-1252

Chapter 3 : The End of an Era, 1252-1284

Part Two
The Organization for War and its Social and Economic Influences

Chapter 4 : The Symbosis of Urban and Military Organization

Chapter 5 : The Conditions of Service and the Warriors' Arms

Chapter 6 : The Militia in Defense and on Campaign

Chapter 7 : Spoils and Compensations: Municipal Warfare as an Economic Enterprise

Chapter 8 : Military Justice and Frontier Security

Epilogue -- and Prologue

Appendix A : Portuguese Charter Families Based on Military Law

Appendix B : The Cuenca-Teruel, Coria Cima-Coa, and Toledo Forumlaries

Appendix C : Rulers of Leon-Castile, Aragon, Navarre, Portugal, and the County of Barcelona (1000-1284)

Abbreviations for Frequently Used Sources

Glossary

Bibliography




Source: http://libro.uca.edu/socwar/war.htm