Spain, 1157-1300. A Partible Inheritance (review)

This volume, according to its publishers, is the latest and the tenth in a series on the whole of Spanish history from prehistoric times to the present day. It spans a period of roughly 150 years in 234 pages of text. In the preface the author notes the publisher's "ration of words"—as well he might. The overarching difficulty is that there was no such thing as Spain, as we would conceptualize it, during that time period. There were, instead, five different kingdoms in Christian Iberia; Castile, León, Portugal, Navarra, and Aragón-Catalonia that collectively then boasted no fewer than twenty-nine kings. Muslim Iberia during those years participated in the decay of one African empire, the Almoravid, and the meteoric rise, followed by the more leisurely collapse, of another African empire, the Almohad, this latter resulting in the emergence of a host of splinter, or taifa, kingdoms, shortly to be conquered from the Christian north. Hence, perhaps, this volume's laconic subtitle.

Given the series' limitations of space, only an approach tightly organized along defined thematic lines (such as demography, town resettlement and organization, political institutional development, and cultural elaboration) and devoted exclusively to Christian or Muslim Iberia could have succeeded. The traditional narrative of political, court, military, and diplomatic events could only produce a concatenation of factual materials bewildering for the interested amateur historian and relatively profitless for the scholar.

The author takes to task the Latin chroniclers of thirteenth-century Castile for neglecting the richness of the full Iberian historical development by their construction of an account centered upon that kingdom with only asides and occasional excursions to the other political entities of the peninsula. This charge is not novel; indeed, it is a central issue in Iberian historiography. The diverse panorama presented by the period and the peninsula defies orderly presentation, and regrettably, Linehan's approach is not ideal. He resorts frequently to courtiers', troubadors', and travelers' accounts to frame, relieve, and enliven otherwise trying stretches of packed, political detail. Unfortunately, that technique often presents difficulties in the subjectivity of accounts such as the Welsh chronicler who asserts that some 3, 000 Muslim women were slaughtered at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212. In addition, Linehan's highly charged language virtually convicts the queen-regent, Berenguela, of assassinating the young Enrique I, her brother, in 1217 in an effort to favor her son, the future Fernando III. However, the available evidence does not support this conclusion.

There are, however, more serious deficiencies in this volume. The uninitiated could depart it virtually unaware that the kings in Iberia during this period put a term to Muslim dominance in the peninsula. The author treats the actions of rulers in Portugal, Castile, León, Navarra, and Aragón-Catalonia and the flourishing literary and scientific scholarship in the region in an episodic and intermittent fashion that obscures their cohesion and importance as major historical phenomena. Such an approach makes it difficult to determine the audience for which this book was designed.