Possessing the Land: Aragon's Expansion into Islam's Ebro Frontier under Alfonso the Battler, 1104-1134 by Clay Stalls (review)

776book reviews Possessing the Land:Aragon's Expansion into Islam's Ebro Frontier under Alfonso the Battler, 1104-1134. By Clay Stalls. [The Medieval Mediterranean: Peoples, Economies and Cultures, 400-1453,Volume 7.] (Leiden: E.J. Brill. 1995. Pp. xv, 337. $115.50.) The conquest of the great Muslim taifa of Zaragoza by the tiny Christian kingdom ofAragón in 1118 was a spectacular event and one destined to have enduring significance for the development of medieval and early modern Iberia. It has been, moreover, an event whose history has been neglected on the whole.The reign ofAlfonso I ofAragón has not been the subject of an adequate history. WhUe a collection of his documents has been recently (1990) published , this latter cannot be styled a fully critical edition, and a more general framework for one has not been established by a fundamental study of the chancery practices of the early kingdom ofAragón.This book, then, is a hopeful sign that its subject is beginning to attract the attention it merits. In six chapters StaUs furnishes first a sketch of AUonso's conquest of that taifa, then a treatment in turn ofhis role in the administration ofthat conquest, of the role of the new Christian nobility there, of that of new Christian settlers ofhumbler status, ofthe place ofthe post-conquest Christian church, and finally of the continuing significance of the conquered Muslim population. The very importance ofthis material makes it doubly the pity that the work wUl be so dUficult to use. Since the book buUds so strongly on individuals cited in the documents it is regrettable that so few of the former appear in the inadequate, four-and-a-haUpage index. Moreover, the particular focus of the study, that makes it so valuable , also enhances the need for a strong context of related studies and this is most imperfectly supplied. Works such as Defourneaux on the French in medieval Spain and Ledesma Rubio on Cartas de población that are cited in the footnotes faU to appear in the bibUography. Other works that one expects to see, Luis Rubio, Documentos del Pilar or Dufourcq and Gautier-Dalché on Iberian economic and social history appear in neither.The combined effect is unsettling . The author makes important points about important subjects. This area of Aragón, along with Murcia andValencia, was one in which a Muslim population remained numerous and relatively prosperous right up until the expulsion. Stalls details that fact and the way in which it affected both the possibiUties of Christian settlement and the legal and economic forms that governed the relations of the conquered and conquerors. He also points up the limited character of both royal and noble authority and effectiveness during at least the early years of the reconquest. His views will and should attract attention and argument . Nevertheless, the book suffers from a too limited initiative on the part of its author.While retaining the particular focus on the lands of the middle Ebro, he should have cast his net wider at least for purposes of comparison. As it is, he book reviews777 asks his readers to depend excessively on his research which is clearly limited in both intensity and scope. But sometimes he is clearly wrong. For example, Bishop Miguel ofTarazona was not French but Aragonese, and Bishop Pedro of Librana may well not have been Bearnese despite Lacarra's assertions to that effect (p. 225). Bishop Miguel was, in fact, the brother of the Aragonese noble Fortún Aznárez. Moreover, Fortun did not disappear as lord of Tarazona after 1 126 (p. 126) but was tenant in 1 132 and was so as late as 1 149.These may be particulars, but they do bear on one major argument of Stalls regarding the extent , and indirectly the motivation, ofAlfonso Fs employment of French nobles and churchmen in his new conquest. Again a wider frame of reference might have deterred the author from too hastily accepting the ability of anyAragonese noble to field a force ofthree hundred knights (p. 139). Such a force required royal resources as even his own footnotes suggest. Or again, it is perhaps unwise to depend too much...