[301] The phenomenon of a frontier movement -- sudden, violent, and brief -- captures the imagination. Dramatic surges in history are all too few, and where they exist are largely undocumented. Here in Valencia it has been possible to assemble a mosaic out of small data, revealing something of such a movement. Even putting aside most of its important elements -- the government agencies, the land distribution, the evolution of the cities and their institutions -- in order to concentrate upon the church alone, one gains some feeling of that movement's scope.

Accustomed to consider as modern any social enterprise on a great and highly organized scale, we are surprised at the sophistication of the activity here in Valencia, the sureness of purpose, the attention to detail, the paper work, and the legal safeguards. Considered in its financial aspects alone, the ecclesiastical reorganization of Valencia was a business of some complexity. Taken from the institutional side, it was remarkably prolific and swift. Wherever we look -- from parish to hospital to tithe-network to school to military Order -- there is activity, intense, purposeful, and widespread. It is the energy of an elemental wave, impersonal and formidable.

A peculiarity of this actívity stands out. It is not monolithic and hierarchic. In its over-all pattern it is organic. A whole little world of independent energy sources is at work, a plurality of separate thrusts, combining with apparent fortuity to the same end. Each source labors toward its own goal, fights for its own privileges, brings up from afar its own prepared reserves, attracts the support of its own kind, fends off the encroachments of companion sources. In short, each represents a kind of private enterprise.

Each saw the new kingdom as open territory for its own purposes. There was a Franciscan map of Valencia, a Templar map, a parish map, and a tithe map. These had little enough to do with the map of the feudal countryside or of the free communes, the diverse map of legal codes, or the map of royal government agencies. But they surpassed in importance such secular divisions, and they did more toward creating the Christian community in the realm.

Activity was not only pluralistic, it was dynamic. One would not have thought the medieval religious world to have had such energies to throw away upon the frontier. Yet the effort was prodigal, and it continued long [302] after this chronological period ended. For example, it was precisely to the frontier that so many Orders sent a representation; even before the rhythm of settlement had begun, Orders were setting up their centers. Without much prospect of settlement the cathedral early planned its grand expansion, and the parishes proliferated.

None of this is a necessary note of Christianity. Its proper energies theoretically might have embodied themselves in any number of different forms. It might have drifted quietly over the frontier, assuming shapes more sympathetic to the native culture. But the activist Western culture of the thirteenth century comprised a very definite body to the Christian spirit it held. The Valencian church stands, for this reason, as a mirror of the times. The Mediterranean European community was still open, still offering opportunities and growth; it was only just beginning to congeal into an urban class structure and a new-model nobility. Law was its science and its passion, building its hobby, corporative forms its natural expression. Already it had advanced beyond its non-European Mediterranean neighbors in technology and in administrative technique.

All this can be seen on the frontier. The university movement was reflected, along with the wider movement in elementary and secondary education. The mendicant phenomenon shook the Valencian kingdom much as it did the settled parts of Europe. The hospital and eleemosynary enthusiasms were as strong here as anywhere. The crusade motif, the ransomer and military Orders, the new parish, the emphasis on proto-nationalism within the church, the new centralization, the conscious definition of self in opposition to Islam -- all were part of the Valencian frontier. The problems were here too: the tithe struggle, the capture of benefices by revenue-seeking upper classes, the clerical laxness, the legalism, and the malignant rivalries.

Both the problems and the movements, however, assumed different forms. Valencia was not the settled homeland. There was an urgency here, a thinness of resources, a sense of the Moslem danger sullenly abroad. Tithe quarrels abounded elsewhere, but in Valencia the elements in the quarrel were unique. Universities were going up throughout Europe but none with quite the background of the Valencian experiment. Cathedral chapters existed in the settled countries, as did the new parishes; but again the Valencian flavor was different, the pressures and orientations were different.

The very concurrence of so many diverse peoples to settle this one region would have lent distinction to its institutions, even without political novelties or Moslem milieu. And on a frontier of opportunity there is always the nuance of freedom: of being mobile, of being needed, of demanding and receiving support, of being bound to no unalterable ancient tradition. The Valencian frontier was not only an embodiment of the medieval energies, [303] and a mirror of its great movements; it was also a specific laboratory for examining these in an unusual local adaptation.

As this book progressed, the Moslem inhabitants of the kingdom seem to have dropped from sight. This oddity is a reflection of the documents themselves; churchmen refer to Moslems only in passing and where necessary. The conquered Moslem, without voice or presence, is submerged in a rush of parish-making, boundary-drawing, and the like. He becomes irrelevant, the servile tiller in the countryside, or the alien native on the periphery of a better world. The reader must actually make an effort to remember that there were very few Christians at all in the Valencia kingdom for about half of this period, almost for its first quarter-century. Even after the waves of immigrants which came toward the end of King James's reign, Moslem households still outnumbered Christian by four or five to one. The Christian towns displayed Moorish street plans and tastes in building. The general language in the realm remained Arabic. The most common political and social forms were Moslem. In terms of sheer numbers, the dominant religion was overwhelmingly Islam.

Yet, the conquering minority did manage to prescind from this massive fact. They created all around themselves the illusion of a single presence, which slowly took on a bizarre reality. They achieved this in the traditional way of colonials: by creating an urban and landlord superstructure, endowing their immediate surroundings with every quality they could borrow from the homeland, and treating the native population as a lesser caste to be tolerated in ghettos apart. They did this spontaneously, naturally, and without conscious arrogance.

This process is never easy for a small minority to contrive in a land where the native levels of competence and sophistication are embarrassingly close to those of the conquerors. The secret of doing so does not lie only in military power. Nor is it merely a matter of transplanting institutions and habits. To be effective the process must derive from an underlying dynamism. And this usually arises from some special self-image. In the thirteenth century, where the Valencian case involved two cultures rooted in two antagonistic religions, that image owed much to the church and in many ways was kept alive by the church.

All the forms by which a society assumes and maintains its identity -- legal, educational, social, charitable, political, and moral -- were fused with the theological principles and the ecclesiastical forms. The society was penetrated with clerical and monastic ideals, and to a surprising extent staffed by clerics. The medieval Mediterranean man, materialistic and anarchic at bottom, functioned fairly effectively in a society so organized. The common religious motive was the easiest way to rally him when there was need of [304] caring for the sick, building bridges, manning unpleasant outposts, policing violence, or providing schools.

Thus, even had the motives of property acquisition and primitive imperialism sufficed for the colonial adventure in Valencia, the church would inevitably have had a role in building the frontier. As it was, with an alien religious ideology to displace, her role was paramount. It was from an instinctive knowledge of this importance that the Christians made Valencia city, to borrow a phrase from Fuster, a fortress of Christian spirituality; even in the thirteenth century the city was well on its way toward becoming "an enormous ecclesiastical concentration."⁽¹⁾ Entrenched wherever she could dig in, up and down the length of the frontier kingdom, the church expanded her presence to the limits of her capacity.

The word "church" here is imprecise. It had too many levels of meaning for such casual use as it is given. But take it even at its most external and least profound level: all the institutions, services, and centers, all the inspirations, applied values, familiar customs, disciplines, and consolations. This congeries contributed mightily to the psychology behind frontier reconstruction in Valencia, and provided springs of action for the pioneer. This aspect of the church represented to the pioneer a continuity with his past, identity with his group, essential and significant framework in which he moved and had his being. At this level too the church most reflects the limitations of its century and locale, incarnating the common assumptions, creative and intellectual directions, and inherited culture patterns, as well as the human needs, stupidities, hopes, and worries.

The waves of friars, contemplatives, military monks, canons, parish clerics, and nuns, transported like a numerous garrison into this borderland, gave tangible shape to the Christian self-image, making it a living thing. What is more, these people in city and countryside represented to the Moslem majority, by implication in this unitary Christian society, the directive super-power, the conquerors. The theme might be carried beyond the purely ecclesiastical into the less direct agencies of transformation -- the Christian calendar, the Christian money, the Christian law codes, and so on, each elaborated with the conscious intention of dissipating the Moslem atmosphere. Even in the limited field of ecclesiastical institutions, however, the note of confident dynamism in Valencia sounded clearly. These men were building their special world. They were serenely sure that the Moslem world would dim before it and mysteriously recede. And they were right.

The great social philosopher Ibn Khaldûn was to speak wisely in the following century of the remarkable power and capacity which result when "religious feeling" combines with "group feeling" in an expanding society; and, conversely, how the people whom such a society subjects will lose hope, lose the energy generated by hope, and lose the creative, civilizing and commercial [305] results of the energy. Disintegration in such circumstances "is in human nature" and inevitable for the conquered society.⁽²⁾

This extreme afflicted Moslem Valencia. Moslem forms and society persisted. A certain stir of life continued within the segregated Moslem community. Rebellious outbreaks had always to be guarded against. But the dominant society was the minority Christian group. The religious institutions so carefully erected in the frontier Christian kingdom functioned as a main instrument in subduing and transforming Moslem Valencia.

1. Joan Fuster, Nosaltres, els valencians (Barcelona, 1962), p. 150; see also pp. 17 ff.

2. Ibn Khaldûn, The Muqaddimah; an Introduction to History, tr. Franz Rosenthal, Bollingen Foundation series, no. 43, 3 vols. (New York, 1958), I, esp. ch. 2, secs. 22-23, and ch. 3., sec. 5. In ch. 3, see. 9, he speaks of the civil troubles which demoralized Moslem Valencia just as King James was planning his conquest.