A Bishopric between Three Kingdoms: Calahorra, 1045–1190 (review)

The town of Calahorra, sited on a rock some 1200 feet above the Ebro River about seventy-five miles northwest of Zaragoza, had been important since Roman times. A Christian bishopric from 456 AD, its prelates appeared in eight Iberian councils before disappearing from sight early in the Muslim period. Some dim memory of its former existence as a bishopric was reflected sporadically in later northern Christian sources. In 1045 García Sánchez III of Navarre captured the town in one episode of the contemporary general movement of the mountain peoples of the north of Iberia down into the river valleys. But Calahorra remained an exposed frontier post until Zaragoza itself was conquered by Alfonso I of Aragón in 1118. Thus it became one matrix for the gradual amalgamation of northern Christians, Mozarabe Christian immigrants from the south, Muslim Arabs, and a yet newer stream of south French pilgrims from beyond the Pyrenees into a unique society. This present study therefore has the potential to stimulate the first fundamental reconceptualization of the history of the Christian churches of the early Reconquista period since the Augustinian Enrique Flórez published his España Sagrada in the eighteenth century.

The current study extends an earlier one by the author.¹ The titles of the two studies indicate the change of emphasis in the author’s approach, as the Basques as an ethnic entity of the first give way to the emerging political kingdoms of Navarre, Aragón-Barcelona, and Castile-León of the second. Within this latter, wider arena the author moves with a generally sure touch as she mines the source materials edited and the scholarship deployed upon them by three generations of medieval historians of Iberia since the end of World War II.

In addition, Carolina Carl is able to employ a knowledge, unparalleled in its detail, of the machinery of this heretofore largely obscure diocese. She details the interaction there of church governance with the emerging power of urban municipalities and the growth of royal dynasties that furnished the essential dynamic of contemporary Iberian society. Within this context she correctly, one is tempted to say almost uniquely, identifies the new institution of the cathedral chapter as a critical fulcrum of change. More often than the bishopric itself, the cathedral chapter was an essentially urban institution, and Carl is quite right to investigate its familial, social, and financial ties to the urban elite of the similarly emerging municipality in what is surely the single most valuable portion of her study.

She relates this story within the context of the emerging monarchies of Christian north Iberia, of course, but her work here is largely derivative and her conclusions often arguable, as are still those of most other current scholarship of the period. Notwithstanding, it is curious that the other major player in the dynamic—the emerging Roman papacy—is largely neglected. She focuses largely upon this latter’s initiative in the substitution of the Roman rite for the Mozarabic but adds little to that subject. On the other hand, she entirely ignores the growing acceptance at Rome of the desirability of formally recognizing the cathedral chapter as the ordinary canonical instrument for the election of bishops. This was to be a crucial step that placed the cathedral chapter at the center of the competing interests of its own canons, the urban patriciate, the local nobility, the crown, and even the distant papacy in Iberia as everywhere in Western Europe.

Given that many of the critical arguments will have to be from the history of architecture, art, and even archaeology, it is to be hoped that the author will continue to press her own researches back into refoundation of the Christian churches of Iberia in the aftermath of the Muslim Conquest of the peninsula.