Warrior Neighbours: Crusader Valencia in Its International Context. Collected Essays of Father Robert I. Burns, SJ ed. by Mary Elizabeth Perry (review)

Collected studies are a notoriously difficult genre. Frequently, as in this case, the author is deceased and unable to make those changes that one always hopes to do before a reprinting. Moreover, a healthy academic field is always a moving target, and the earliest of these thirteen articles was published in 1971—more than four decades ago. Left to Robert I. Burns himself, we may be sure that it would have been another four decades before he would have had them in shape to satisfy his very exacting standards. As it is, he is fortunate to have found an editor, Mary Elizabeth Perry, almost as careful as he himself. Paul Freedman’s foreword does justice to the man, the researcher, and the creator of the modern study of the medieval kingdom of Valencia among American historians.

That said, one needs to recall that Burns was always, inveterately, and primarily the researcher. Those who approach these studies wisely will do so primarily to find the shortest and most informed route to the particularities of their own interests. It is typical of the man and his method that of the thirteen studies, some seven have a combined 109 documents in their appendices (excluding notes), including two documents for chapter 10 that itself has just two pages of text.

In contrast, the opening chapter to the book is a reprint of another opening chapter to a book published in 1985, edited by Burns, that compared Alfonso X of Castile and Jaume I of Aragón-Barcelona-Valencia. It sets the tone for the volume here considered, but it contributes little to the present state of that question. Chapter 4 consists of a seventeen-page article that he published in Military Affairs in 1971, which details the intricacies, the niceties, the legalities, and the subtleties of designing peace treaties that may or may not long outlive their signing. It does provide a case study that could inform both historians and diplomats of the present.

Quite different is chapter 12 that recounts a major episode in Jaume’s loss in 1245 of the County of Provence to Charles of Anjou and eventually to the dynasty of France. This event is assessed with Burns’s usual careful attention to such things as a review and correction of the historiography of the event and is bolstered by his publication from the Archivo de la Corona de Aragón in Barcelona of twenty unpublished bulls of Pope Innocent IV relevant to it. At the very least Burns’s study suggests to this reviewer the necessity of another that would reconsider the deeper roots of the Sicilian Vespers of 1282, the history of the Angevin Empire in Italy, and the rise of that lesser remarked and understood Aragonese empire in the Mediterranean.

Fresh materials again are assembled in chapters 5, 6, and 7 that open further perspectives on the details of post-Reconquista relationships between Christian and Muslim in the Corona de Aragón, the necessities of power in that process, and the frequently central position of matrimony and of women therein. In these eighty-five pages treating the career of Abū Zayd, last Muslim ruler of Valencia, and the subsequent fortunes of himself and his progeny as Christian notables, Burns has left an entire book to be written.