From The New World Looks at its History, edited by Archibald R. Lewis and Thomas F. McGann, pages 47-69. Copyright 1963. This article appears in the LIBRO collection courtesy of the University of Texas Press.

[47] Few generalizations in Spanish historical thought command readier assent than that which affirms the profound influence of the Reconquest on the making of Castile. Yet it is only in recent decades that scholars like Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, J. M. Lacarra, Julio González, and others have established the thesis that those eight centuries of now slow, now rapid southward advance against the Moors were not merely an Iliad of military and political combat, but above everything else a medieval repoblación , or recolonization, of the Iberian Peninsula. ⁽¹⁾ From this standpoint, the Reconquest appears as a frontier movement in the authentic American sense -- the occupation and development of relatively empty territories on the margin of an expanding society.

Like all new historical interpretations, this frontier approach to medieval Iberian history raises many questions for investigation. Furthermore, it imposes the necessity of advancing beyond traditional lines of political, constitutional, and juridical research into the as yet little explored fields of medieval peninsular demography, ecology, anthropogeography, and agrarian history. At the same time it suggests the great utility of exploiting, on a comparative basis, the rich body of methods and interpretations evolved by frontier historiography in the study of other frontiers, medieval and modern, and not least that of the United States, where the subject of the frontier has been pursued more intensely, more heatedly, and surely more fruitfully, than anywhere else. ⁽²⁾
 
It is in the light of such reflections as these that the frontier historian might reappraise what has always been one of the obscurest, [48] least understood, and most hastily treated of all the main graphic and chronological subdivisions of the Castilian Reconquest This is the great region of the southern tableland or meseta of Iberia, the rolling plains and flat steppelands between the valley of the Tajo and the Sierra Morena that constitute the historic provinces of La Mancha and Extremadura. Historians concerned with more typical elements of medieval European life -- agriculture and land tenures, peasants and nobles, secular churchmen and monks, towns, middle classes, and urban economy -- have tended to dismiss the curious part of Spain where all these things were either lacking or of secondary importance. But it is precisely here, under such conditions, that a fresh approach in terms of the frontier holds much promise.
 
From this point of view, the Guadiana River Basin can be seen as one of the most interesting stages in the long advance. Its problems and their solutions are significant not only for Spanish history but also for the pastoral-plains society which the Castilian eventually transplanted to Northern Mexico and Texas, the Orinocan Llanos, the Chilean Central Valley, and the limitless pampas of the Río de la Plata.
 
North American historians are familiar with the classic work of Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains, which so brilliantly traces the institutional and psychological adaptations made by American frontiersmen moving from the humid, forested, agricultural East into the level, timberless, semiarid spaces of the plains. Medieval Castilian frontiersmen, on both the northern and southern halves of the meseta, as again in Andalusia, confronted parallel difficulties in establishing a new society in a dry plains environment of climatic extremes, insufficient water, limited cultivable soil, treelessness, and xerophytic brush vegetation; but in La Mancha and Extremadura these conditions were more widespread, more intense, more hostile to human occupation than anywhere else between the Cantabrians and the Sierra Nevadas. In addition, the land was virtually unpeopled -- the desert of the Guadiana is a southern frontier counterpart to Sánchez-Albornoz' desert of the Duero -- and under shadow of Almorávid and Almohade military power, which halted or slowed the Reconquest here for a significant century and a half.
 
The Guadiana Basin, still today the least populated major region of Spain, is a land of long, parching summers and cold, snowless winters; of an inadequate and irregular rainfall (ranging from under [49] sixteen inches in eastern La Mancha to thirty-two inches in favored parts of Extremadura), the effects of which are aggravated by a high evaporation rate and an extreme permeability of the soil; and of a drainage system of lakes and rivers which, like long stretches of the broad, shallow Guadiana itself, become in summer dry arroyos or mere trickles. ⁽⁴⁾ To a limited degree, the high watertable offsets the surface shortage, permitting the sinking of wells and the raising of ground water through the noria, the vertical waterwheel with pots fastened to its rim which is turned by animal power; such wells determined in large part the distribution of frontier settlements, but they never became the basis for more than a very limited regadío or irrigated farming system. Throughout the year the wind blows, raising in the dry season from the grey, bleak Manchegan steppes the dust-haze of the calina; but not until the end of the Middle Ages, with the expansion of cereal production, was it apparently deemed profitable to introduce the medieval invention, the windmill, into this area naturally suited to its use.
 
Climatic conditions and the lateritic Mediterranean red earth soils of clayey, sandy or saline structure account for the advanced treelessness of most of the basin, not, as so often alleged, medieval deforestation. The predominant vegetation is the matorral, which includes various woody, aromatic, deep-rooted, leathery-leaved, evergreen, drought-resistant bushes and shrubs -- broom, gorse, heather, sage, rosemary, cistus, and others. Ignacio Olagüe, who attempts to explain Spain's decline in the later sixteenth century as due to an alleged radical change in meseta climate, attributes forests, extensive grasslands, and flourishing crop farming to medieval La Mancha and Extremadura, but his thesis rests more on personal conviction than factual proof. ⁽⁵⁾ It seems highly probable, however, that in medieval times the region's grasslands were much more extensive than today, after centuries of overgrazing and spring burnings for it is upon grass, not matorral, that the medieval documents on grazing rights lay stress. In La Mancha this grass was to be found at its richest in the Murcian plains around Chinchilla and Albacete, on the campos of Montiel and Calatrava, in the sheltered Sierra Morena valleys near Alcaraz and the Vale of Alcudia; and in Extremadra, in the renowned pastures of La Serena, the Tierra de Barros, the campos of Badajoz, Cáceres, Alcántara, and Coria, and the Vale and Vera of Plasencia. One characteristic of Guadiana Valley grass is especially to be noted: it grows not only in the spring, [50] when grass is available in most of the Peninsula, but abundantly in the fall rainy season. This fact accounts for the great drives of transhumant sheep and cattle from the north, stock movements that play a central role in the history of the Manchegan and Extremaduran frontier period.
 
The other major factor in shaping the course of Castilian occupation of the Guadiana plains was military: the fact that between 1085 and 1235 La Mancha and Extremadura were the invasion corridor and battleground of Berber armies based in Andalusia and of Castilian-Leonese forces raised on both sides of the Central Sierras. ⁽⁶⁾ For a century and a half frontier warfare swept the plains, in four principal phases: (1) the Almorávid period, 1085-1150, which commenced disastrously, but under Alfonso VII in the early 1140's saw the first permanent establishments in the plains country at Coria in Extremadura and Calatrava in La Mancha; (2) the two extremely critical decades, 1155-1175, when ferocious Almohade offensives wiped out Ferdinand II's gains in León and recovered virtually all of La Mancha except the key fortress of Calatrava; (3) the period 1175-1212, of long-delayed Leonese arrival in the Tajo Valley and steady Castilian advance in La Mancha, culminating in the victory of Las Navas; and, finally, (4) the period 1212-1235, when the Almohades were driven from the remaining portions of La Mancha and Extremadura.

Carrying on this prolonged struggle imposed important changes upon Castilian military organization, changes that were to have lasting effects upon the methods of colonizing the plains. ⁽⁷⁾ For both Moors and Castilians, the endless warfare itself was a typically plains affair, where occasional major campaigns aimed at conquest of the settled territory on the other side of the despoblado; but it was normally characterized by incessant raids and hit-and-run a tacks ( algaras , correduras) which sought to surprise the enemy, devastate and pillage his towns and farms, and then swiftly withdraw across the intervening plains with captured humans, livestock, and other booty. In consequence the Guadiana zone forced Castilian and Leonese rulers into a costly defense in depth by mean castles and towns, and into desperate efforts to maintain control of strategic routes and mountain passes, such as Muradal, also Despeñaperros.
 
In the first half of the twelfth century the kings depended increasingly upon the powerful municipal militias, such as those of [51] Salamanca, Avila, Segovia, Madrid, Toledo, and Cuenca, which came be characteristic of the new concejos or towns of the region, between the Duero and the Tajo. From the Fuero de Cuenca (1189-1190) and similar sources, it can be gathered that these urban armies, adapting themselves to the exigencies of plains warfare, included a cavalry of caballeros villanos or petty nobles resident in the town; an infantry of peones, the free but non-noble citizen-soldiers; and archers, both mounted and foot. Elaborate procedures were developed for defense of the town during the army's absence; the siting and layout of encampments; the use of scouts and spies; compensation for wounds and losses of equipment; and division of spoils. Thus, in a very literal sense, urban frontier warfare was economic warfare. On campaigns, to judge by Cuencan practice, it was customary for the host to divide itself into equal halves; one, called the azaga, constructed a defensible base-camp, from which the other half, the algara proper, departed to launch its lightning thrust into enemy country, and to which it returned to await the inevitable counterattack. ⁽⁸⁾
 
But by the second half of the century, the advent of the Almohades and continuous bitter fighting in the Guadiana Basin proved conclusively that the frontier military needs of the crown could not be adequately met by municipal armies and nobles, resident at often considerable distances from the scene of combat, slow to muster, privileged in respect to length and frequency of service, and disinclined to take up homesteads or promote settlements in the plains. What was required in addition to these regular forces, as the Almohade crisis of 1155-1175 revealed, was fighters stationed in close proximity to frontier defense points in or below the Tajo Valley, capable of garrisoning exposed castles and fortresses, constantly alert for instant action against raiders, and willing to undertake the permanent conquest and colonization of La Mancha and Extremadura. This is the background for the sudden rise to prominence in Castilian-Leonese history of the six great military orders of the Templars, Hospitalers, Calatrava, Alcántara and the two branches of Santiago, San Marcos in León and Uclés in Castile. Before the mid-twelfth century, significantly enough, the older Temple and San Juan had not fought the infidel in the two western kingdoms of Spain; and it was the two decades of dire Almohade peril that brought into existence all the native orders, whose founding members were nearly all well-blooded in Guadiana Valley fighting. These [52] paramonastic warriors, the freires caballeros of the orders, whom the Rule of Calatrava pictures as sleeping dressed and armed, ready at a moment's notice to mount their chargers and ride against the Moor, along with the vassal caballeros and peones of their patrimonies, henceforth become the standing protectors of the frontier settlements and a persistent scourge of the Almohades. ⁽⁹⁾
 
The Castilian conquest of the Guadiana Basin, except in the lowest reaches of the river, was terminated by 1235; but the era of colonization extends to at least the end of the thirteenth century. ⁽¹⁰⁾ Throughout this period, royal efforts to promote settlement and economic development of the area depended almost exclusively upon two agencies, the town and the military order. Compared with its striking predominance in the twelfth-century colonization of the Duero-Tajo belt, where it served as the principal basis of political, ecclesiastical, social, and economic life, the royal concejo plays a distinctly secondary role in La Mancha and Extremadura. To be sure, towns founded by the king on his crownland ( concejos de realengo ), and largely self-governing under a royal fuero defining municipal laws and liberties, sprang up both in Extremadura, where we find notable examples in Coria, Cáceres, and Badajoz, and also in La Mancha, for example, Alarcón, Alcaraz, Chinchilla, and Villarreal (modern Ciudad Real). Yet such towns were comparatively few in number, partly because urban agglomerations remained scattered in the plains country, partly because so much of the territory was entrusted to the military orders. It is noteworthy that of these royal towns, only two, Coria and Badajoz, attained the level of episcopal sees.
 
Far more important than the concejos de realengo as colonizers were the military orders, which throughout La Mancha and Extremadura directed the settlement and Castilianization of the frontier. The military was but one of four vital functions these great corporations performed. From the governmental standpoint their broad patrimonies constituted palatine lordships, outside the law jurisdiction of the king and his officials, lands where the orders ruled and administered justice through their capable directorate of grand masters or priors, and subordinate district comendadores. Over much of the Guadiana Basin, until the days of the Catholic kings, government was thus the monopoly of the orders, as the royal laws and charters recognize when the king speaks of "mi tierra e las ordenes." But the orders largely replaced not only the [53] government, but also that of the secular church. The new Extremaduran bishoprics carried on the ecclesiastical policy followed in the Duero-Tajo settlement; but all La Mancha remained part of a huge diocese of Toledo, where the orders, secure in their papal, Cistercian, or Compostellan exemptions from episcopal control, administered their domanial churches, providing clergy and collecting tithes. No less startling, the orders entirely prevented monasticism from establishing itself in the Tierra de las Ordenes, and because Cáceres, Badajoz, and other towns in realengo prohibited the gift, sale or exchange of land to religious orders, the plains country was a strangely monkless land, the one large subdivision of the medieval West where monasticism -- Benedictine, Cluniac, Cistercian, Carthusian, Franciscan, Dominican -- plays no part whatsoever in religious life.
 
Lastly, the orders were active colonizers of the Guadiana frontier, making grants to nobles who undertook settlement projects, and establishing towns and villages to which they conceded, in order to attract colonists, liberal fueros, often those of Cuenca or Cáceres. Alcázar de San Juan, Consuegra, Madridejos, Calatrava, Almadén, Quintanar de la Orden, Mérida, Usagre, Alcocer, Medellín, Montánchez, Trujillo: such are some of the many pueblos sponsored by the orders. Yet most of these towns remained small and overwhelmingly rural in social and economic composition, partly again because of environmental handicaps to urban growth, but also because the often more limited rights of self-government allowed by the orders, the retention of various seigneurial rights and monopolies, the exclusion of royal law, and prohibition of appeals in judicial cases to the crown repelled settlers. ⁽¹¹⁾ The well-known case of Cáceres, where the colonists compelled Alfonso IX to swear that the town would never be transferred to an order, is indicative of the hostility frontiersmen felt. ⁽¹²⁾
 
Population in all the plains towns, whether of the orders or of the crown, belonged mostly to the two social classes characteristic of the Castilian meseta frontier: the caballeros villanos and the peones. ⁽¹³⁾ Each charter member of the town, of either class, received a town lot, and often a piece of arable land just outside it, at the time of its foundation; a land distribution or repartimiento was effected, either by the order's comendador (as at Madridejos in 1238), or, in the royal towns like Cáceres, through a two-stage partition by cuadrelleros to soldiers of the conquest and subsequently by [54] sexmeros to later arrivals. ⁽¹⁴⁾ These land cessions, in line with Castilian frontier practice, were full allodial grants. After at most a three-year period, the settlers could sell, exchange, or give them away, although both the crown and the royal concejos forbade land transfers to religious orders, and the military orders required prospective owners to promise vassalage to them. ⁽¹⁵⁾
 
That farming, particularly the raising of grain, was carried on in the land close to the town is evident from references in the sources to units of arable land and to wheat, barley, and the like; to plow-teams of oxen and mules, the latter probably a Moorish carryover and to various tithes and taxes levied on crops. Olive culture is rarely mentioned, but viticulture on the other hand was obviously widespread and the subject of promotion by at least one order, Calatrava. This order, in establishing Miguelturra near Ciudad Real in 1230, compelled caballeros to plant two arrunzadas , and peones one, of vineyard under threat of losing their allotments. ⁽¹⁶⁾
 
Far more economically significant, however, than cereal agriculture or viticulture was stock raising in that advanced form, more fruitfully developed in the Iberian Peninsula than anywhere else in the medieval world, which is properly called ranching. ⁽¹⁷⁾ The systematic ranging of large numbers of sheep, cattle, horses, and other livestock on the open meseta plains had first developed above the Duero River; all the way from the Rioja and Burgos westwards to León, Zamora, and the trans-Miño country there occurred in the late ninth and the tenth centuries, as part of the Asturoleonese-Castilian colonization of the desert of the Duero, a shift towards the pastoral side of the balance in the old Cantabrian-Pyrenean mixed farming system of crops and livestock. After 1085 both the limited arable and water resources of the northern meseta, and the military conditions of the Reconquest that favored mobile property over easily destroyed crops and orchards, promoted the rapid expansion of ranching into the new frontier settlements of the Duero-Tajo region such as Segovia, Sepúlveda, Avila, Valladolid, Salamanca, and Ciudad Rodrigo above the Central Sierras, and Soria, Guadalajara, Madrid, Cuenca, Toledo, and Talavera beyond them.
 
From the middle twelfth century this flourishing Castilian pastoralism, made aware of the rich pasturage resources of the trans-Tajo plains, must have acted as a powerful if now little-mentioned factor in Castilian southward expansion. Certainly by the second half of the century towns like Cuenca, Toledo, and Plasencia, and [55] the military orders of Calatrava, the Hospital, and Uclés, were sending their herds and flocks into the Guadiana Basin in spite of the ever-present danger of Almohade attack. With the final expulsion of the Moors under Alfonso IX, Ferdinand III, and Alfonso X in the succeeding century, and the opening up of the richest Manchegan and Extremaduran grasslands, there occurred, simultaneously with parallel development in Lower Andalusia, an explosive expansion of the ranching industry of the plains. This movement is strongly reflected in the extraordinarily numerous chapters which such fueros as those of Coria and Cáceres devoted to pasturage rights, stock taxes, and tithes, disputes among stockmen, compensations for crop damage, and similar topics; and it appears also in the many pastoral references of the charters of the military orders and the Guadiana towns. ⁽¹⁸⁾
 
These sources also throw considerable light upon three central questions in the rise of frontier ranching in La Mancha and Extremadura: the social status of the stockmen themselves; the grazing system upon which the industry was based; and the evolution of new regulatory institutions. Aside from a small number of seigneurial ranchers, of whom we know next to nothing, the frontier stockmen of the Guadiana Basin were either the orders with their great flocks and herds, or the many small and middle-sized ranchers living in the towns. Early in their history, as their records prove, the orders became heavily engaged in stock raising; as usual, figures are hard come by, but the Templar-Alcántara quarrel in 1243 over 42,000 sheep in the vicinity of the Tajo Valley town of Ronda, is suggestive. ⁽¹⁹⁾ Thirteenth-century Calatrava diplomas show that great Manchegan order protecting its brand against use by others, and driving its animals eastward into the pastures of Uclés and northwards into the Sierras of Guadarrama and Malagón, where they aroused the opposition of Segovia and Avila. ⁽²⁰⁾ Ferdinand III's generous grants to the Templars of wide pasturelands around Almorchón, Alcocer, and Capilla, in the heart of the most prized grazing ranges; Sancho IV's extension to Uclés of free pasturage rights throughout the realm; and the appointment of special pastoral administrators,  frayles veedores and comendadores de las vacas, by Calatrava, Uclés' and San Marcos, all bear witness to the basic importance of pastoral enterprise in the economic activity of these corporations. ⁽²¹⁾
 
On the other hand, there were numerous small and middle-sized [56] ranchers, the townsmen, both caballeros villanos and ordinary free-men. In the Guadiana region even more than above the Tajo, it is patent that the majority of such townsmen were in no significant sense landed proprietors; although they possessed small holdings in or near the town, their real wealth was not in land but in livestock and in the cherished right of access to the grazing grounds not only of the town, but very commonly also of either the military orders or of the crown. Such stipulations as those of the Fuero de Cácere requiring stockmen to combine their separate herds of animals into cabañas of 400 cattle, 200 mares, or 2,000 sheep, and the royal provisions on exemption of herdsmen from military service, which contemplate ranchers owning fewer than 40 cows or 100 sheep, or between 40 and 100 cows and 100 and 1,000 sheep, prove that the small-ranching class, which is also typical of northern meseta ranching, was strongly established throughout La Mancha and Extremadura. ⁽²²⁾
 
In the more northern centers of Castilian ranching, on both sides of the Duero, the grazing of livestock was normally carried on through seasonal rotation of pastures within the confines of the municipal bounds; lowland pastures near the town served in the winter, while the summer months saw the stock driven into the upland grazing grounds of the nearest sierra. Such a pasturage system, which is really more sedentary than truly transhumant, required a minimum of special institutions. Pastores and vaqueros at the duly specified times drove the stock to or from the pastures and kept it under constant herding; montaneros might be named to patrol the municipal montes or pastures against entry of outsiders; and the regular alcaldes or other town officials, on the basis of provisions in the fuero or unwritten custom, handled all questions of stray animals, pasturage rights, and stock damage to vineyard or arable, the wages and misdeeds of herdsmen, the settlement of disputes, an the imposition of penalties.
 
When the frontier moved southward, from the reign of Alfonso VI on, municipal grazing and pastoral regulation under the control of the alcaldes remained the general rule in the new concejos of the Duero-Tajo region. But certain important changes soon appear. These were due chiefly to the fact that many of these towns particularly those near the Central Sierras, like Avila, Segovia, Madrid, and Escalona, came to possess much larger municipal territories than were common hitherto. These often stretched far up [57] Guadarramas and Sierra de Gredos, where were the highly desirable agostaderos , or summer pastures. At the same time, other towns on the edge of the plains, among them Cuenca, Toledo, and Talavera, began to winter their livestock southwards in the Guadiana Valley. Thus, for the first time, absence from the town during several months on the part of herdsmen driving sheep and cattle in far parts of a town's own territory or, on the southern plains, completely outside it, became a frequent occurrence; and this in turn naturally raised new problems of protecting the livestock and the herders, and of municipal control over the latter. 
 
One consequence of this, in the towns of the Central Sierras, and on the margins of the Guadiana plains, was the introduction of an organized escort of armed riders and men on foot, who accompanied the animals during their sojourn in distant feeding grounds, with the function of guarding both them and their herders. The oldest and fullest description of such a pastoral military escort survives in the Fuero de Cuenca, a frontier town only a dozen years old in 1189-1190, which, although located up in the Serranía de Cuenca, stood on the very edge of La Mancha Alta. According to the Fuero, each year at the beginning of December the sheep and cattle of the Cuencan ranchers were placed under the formal guard of what is called the esculca , which was clearly a company of armed, mounted men who were provided by the stockowners on the basis of one caballero for each herd of cattle or for every three flocks of sheep they owned. Accompanied by these esculqueros , who elected alcaldes de la esculca as their officers, and by the pastores and vaqueros, the sheep and cattle were driven southward onto the plains of La Mancha, very likely as far down as Villora, Tabarrosas, and Iniesta, points mentioned elsewhere in the Fuero as limits within which Cuencan livestock might be found. Here four and a half months were spent in winter grazing. By mid-March the whole outfit returned to the environs of Cuenca, where the esculca disbanded and the concejo , between that time and St. John's Day (June 24), supervised what must have been the spring branding of calves and lambs, and the cutting out of animals for sale or slaughter. On St. John's Day the herds were driven north into the summer pastures high in the Serranía; this time, however, they were escorted only by sixty herdsmen on foot, supplied by seven of Cuenca's villages, who were commanded by the alcaide of Cuenca. By the first of November, when the alcaide's term of office expired, the herds [58] were once again trailed back to Cuenca, presumably for some sort of fall roundup and in readiness to be entrusted at the start of December to the protection of the esculca. ⁽²³⁾

This Cuencan innovation of an armed guard for herds and pastores on the plains was certainly in use among plains towns th adopted the Fuero de Cuenca; these would include not only concejos de realengo , such as Alarcón, Alcaraz, and Plasencia, but also many settlements of the military orders which used it either in its original form or in the adaptations of the Fueros of Consuegra and Montiel. Furthermore, the existence of an armed pastoral escort, this time under the name of rafala, can be discovered in a number of ranching towns well to the west of Cuenca. The rafala first turns up so far as we now know, in the pasturage agreements made ca. 1200 among the concejos of Plasencia, Escalona, and Avila; and in the Fueros of Coria and Cáceres a few years later. ⁽²⁴⁾ The latter codes give us some data regarding the terms of service of the mounted rafaleros, and certain regulations governing them during the months when the rafala was away from the town on duty. So, too, the Fuero de Salamanca refers to a rafala guarding the municipal herds of swine when they were driven across the sierra, doubtless the Sierra de Peña de Francia. ⁽²⁵⁾
 
The rafala-esculca, however, was not the only new institution developed by Castilian municipal pastoralism to meet the frontier conditions of long-range grazing. Historically more important is the concomitant evolution of a system by which the herdsmen and their armed guards could be governed during their now prolonged seasonal absence from their homes. In his able book on the Mesta, Julius Klein assumes that from a very early date medieval Iberian towns possessed a kind of local stockmen's association called the otero or mesta , which met two or three times a year to restore stray animals to their owners, regulate the hiring of shepherds and cowboys, and punish violations of pastoral law. These meetings, which he sees continuing throughout the Middle Ages, Klein distinguishes carefully from what he regards as their institutional offshoot, celebrated Real Mesta, or national association of Castilian stockmen which Alfonso X founded in the thirteenth century. ⁽²⁶⁾ But the existence before the middle of the twelfth century of such local pastoral organizations is highly dubious, and indeed contradicts the many fuero references we have to the regulation of all aspects of stock raising, including specifically the restoration of strays to their [59] owners, by the regular town officials, normally the alcaldes. Why are not such assemblies ever mentioned in the Leonese-Castilian fueros of the tenth to thirteenth centuries, such as those of Soria, Molina de Aragón, Guadalajara, Alcalá de Henares, Zamora, Salamanca, Alba de Tormes, Ledesma, and other pastoral centers? To assume that otero and mixta or mesta, place names common in northern Spain, designate the customary meeting places of these hypothetical assemblies would be unwarranted. ⁽²⁷⁾ The truth is rather that so long as municipal stock raising operated within the more or less narrow territories of northern Castilian and Leonese towns, the ability of local officials to handle pastoral matters was adequate; but, as with the rafala-esculca, it was the growing practice of transhumant grazing and its southward extension that produced changes from the traditional pattern.
 
The earliest sure instance of this innovation appears in the Fuero de Cuenca, which shows that before starting south in early December the caballeros forming the esculca chose special alcaldes, and that these alcaldes de la esculca exercised not merely military but judicial and general governmental authority over herdsmen and esculqueros , serving in fact as substitutes for the ordinary alcaldes to enforce the pastoral and other provisions of the Fuero. This authority, furthermore, was final, decisions of these special alcaldes not being open to appeal or rehearing when, on returning home in mid-March, they surrendered their authority to the concejo . The arrangement was quite different from the one Cuenca followed for the summer interval, when in the upland grazing grounds the sixty village herders were subject to the authority of the alcaide . The principle, in the case of the esculca and the winter herdsmen (who were men of Cuenca, not villagers) is the same as that which other sections of the Fuero show governed the organization of the town army, and even of the town hunt club (recloba). That is to say: a collective group of townsmen, absent from municipal territory on official business, remained subject to the rights and obligations of the Fuero, and continued to be governed by it under what were in effect itinerant alcaldes. ⁽²⁸⁾
 
Whether, or how often, the whole company of guards and herdsmen assembled for special meetings at which the alcaldes de esculca gave judicial decisions and distributed strays, we are not told; but in the Fuero de Cáceres, which unlike that of Coria mentions both rafala and otero, some additional light is thrown on what must have [60] been a growing practice where long-distance grazing was involved. The Cáceres fuero in several chapters speaks of the compulsory assembly of rafala guards and herdsmen, apparently three times a year, for the holding of an otero, at which judicial matters were settled. ⁽²⁹⁾ So too the Fuero de Salamanca's chapter on the rafala that guarded the driving of pigs across the sierra mentions the otero, only in this case the otero meets daily, doubtless out of the need for frequent re-deployment of lithe but distinguishable porkers. ⁽³⁰⁾ Presumably, Mérida, Usagre, and other towns using the Cáceres fuero followed the same pattern, so that at least here in Extremadura if not in La Mancha, the existence of municipal pastoral assemblies in the thirteenth century seems certain.
 
In none of these texts, it may be noted, is the term mesta applied to meetings of herdsmen and guards; indeed, the use of the word in the Fuero de Cáceres to mean a stray animal shows that at least in northern Extremadura the terms were by no means synonymous. ⁽³¹⁾ What would appear to be the oldest documentary occurrence of mesta in the sense of an otero-like pastoral assembly is to be found in two diplomas of Alfonso X, issued at Seville on the same day in 1266; in these the king authorizes the holding of mestas at Seville and at Alcaraz in deep southern La Mancha. ⁽³²⁾ The Seville charter, which thus sets up the later famous municipal mesta of Seville, has not yet been published, but was probably of the same tenor as the Alcaraz text, which has been. In the latter document the king orders that compulsory mestas of the sheepmen and cowmen of Alcaraz be held (literally 'made') three times a year at the forks of the Guadalmena River; and lays down a number of brief rules regarding the handling of strays, brawling among the herdsmen, and similar topics. Pretty clearly, this is what in Extremadura would have been called an otero ; on the other hand, no less clearly, it hardly reflects the necessity of having regulations for stockmen who are encamped on ranges some distance away from their regular municipal government, since the Guadalmena forks are not far from Alcaraz. Whether the background for this was Andalusian is uncertain; Alcaraz possessed the Fuero de Cuenca, and the king advises the Alcaraz stockmen to consult Cuenca or Alarcón if problems arise, which suggests that before 1266 such mestas were to found at those two places. The prime mystery here is why the king intervened to establish a mesta -- which, unlike otero, seems to be the royal term for a pastoral organization -- at Alcaraz; whereas, so [61] far as we know, he did not do so in the case of the oteros already cited. The matter is not without wider implications. First, because from this type of royal-founded municipal mesta is descended a series of others in later medieval and early modern Spain, which are the prototypes of those eventually founded in a very few towns of the Indies, principally Santo Domingo and Mexico City. ⁽³³⁾ Elsewhere in the New World pastoral matters were handled, according to the older tradition, by the town governments, or cabildos. Secondly, the Alcaraz and Seville mestas are somehow linked with the earliest evolution of the great Real Mesta of Alfonso X. If we hypothesize that these privilegios represent royal assent to local mestas and, in effect, exempt these from inclusion in the Real Mesta, then we may assume that the latter was already in existence before 1273, the usually assigned date of foundation, as is also indicated from other quarters.
 
The solution to this question, if it can be found, is involved in an even larger problem of the Castilian ranching frontier in La Mancha and Extremadura, that of the origins of the Real Concejo de la Mesta itself. In its main lines, the history of the Real Mesta has been admirably surveyed in Julius Klein's standard work on the subject, which, although published in 1920, stands up remarkably well after many years. Yet Klein's treatment of the Mesta's beginnings leaves something to be desired, especially when one attempts to determine to what extent the Mesta was really the product of the Guadiana Basin frontier.
 
The origins of the Mesta are more obscure than commonly supposed. What is often called Alfonso X's foundation charter is in fact four separate documents, dated in 1273 but claiming to replace older ones worn out by hard usage. ⁽³⁴⁾ These texts do not set up an organization; they assume its existence and grant it royal protection and certain grazing and other privileges. Thus the Mesta must have existed before 1273, and its beginnings can be postulated not so much in the wide period 1212-1273, as Klein suggests, but more narrowly in the interval between the conquest of the Extremaduran pasturelands and a date as much before 1273 as it might have taken to wear out the original parchments. If we set 1230-1263 as approximate limits, we shall not be far wrong.
 
Now within this period the most important development leading towards the creation of the Mesta was certainly the initiation by northern stockmen in Galicia, Asturias, León, and Old Castile, of [62] the great autumnal transhumant drives of sheep and cattle into Extremadura and La Mancha. Klein's assumption that these drives had been going on for centuries before the conquest of the plains on the basis of agreement with the Moors seems completely without foundation; his chief proof-text, a Cuencan charter of 1200, actually deals with the driving of stock south for sale in Moorish markets, a very different thing. ⁽³⁵⁾ The Chronicle of Alfonso VII and other sources, which depict the incessant warfare of the plains and the no less incessant cattle and sheep lifting by both sides, emphatically contradict this view. ⁽³⁶⁾
 
To ignore the novelty of the northern entry into the Guadiana ranges is to misunderstand what happened. That this entry began immediately on the morrow of the Reconquest is manifest. Ferdinand III's charter of 1237, authorizing the Templar towns to collect grazing fees (montazgos) on the transhumants, follows by only one year his grant to the Templars of Almorchón, their earliest big southern Extremaduran acquisition. This document, along with Alfonso X's establishment in 1253 of Alcántaran and Templar toll-collecting stations at Capilla, Alcocer, Benquerencia, and an unidentifiable "Burgo" in the same region, and his 1255 privilegio to Logroño exempting that town's livestock from tolls except at Toledo, Murcia, and Seville, show a rapid development of transhumant drives along fairly fixed routes, the historic cañadas. ⁽³⁷⁾ It must be remembered that these drives southward involved large numbers of animals; the montazgo payments were calculated on the basis of flocks of sheep numbering between 500 and 5,000, and cattle herds of 50 to 500. In accordance with the century-old custom, small urban ranchers would bunch their individual holdings into a municipal herd, so that the cañadas must have presented the colorful spectacle twice a year of one municipal herd after another, trailing along, under the command of its alcaldes and surrounded by its herdsmen and guards. Under these circumstances, mix-ups of strays between different town outfits and disputes among townsmen appealing different fueros must have multiplied, and stressed the need for ne regulatory machinery on a supra-municipal level. ,
 
But the handling of interurban strays and disputes was not only or most serious problem confronting transhumant stockmen in their southern drives. Even more pressing was assurance of grazing rights, and defense against attack by Guadiana Basin stockmen who could hardly be expected to welcome these annual encroachments [63] on their grass and water. Current views, largely shared by Klein, that it was farmers in general, or townsmen everywhere defending their liberties, who opposed transhumant pastoralism, and that Alfonso's Real Mesta was a nationwide association of stock raisers set up in reaction, are particularly distorting. ⁽³⁸⁾ The plain fact is that the violent antagonism to the transhumants was largely Extremaduran and Manchegan. It was the military orders, and the towns of the Guadiana Basin -- not those of trans-Tajo Castile, which were mostly members of the Mesta -- which became the bitterest enemies of the northern stockmen and, after its formation, of the Real Mesta. This hostility, as the earliest Mesta charters make plain, found outlet in various forms, violent and nonviolent: in excessive impositions on the transhumants of montazgos , portazgos, and restrictions designed to impede passage or pasturage of the livestock; in seizures of animals, including breeding rams and the indispensable bellwethers, and the killing or dispersal of whole flocks and herds; in armed attacks upon the herdsmen, resulting in injuries and deaths; and in the deliberate closing of cañadas by converting sections of them into enclosed pastures across which transit was forbidden. The struggle was basically one between two competing groups of cowmen and sheepmen, northern and southern, each fighting for possession of the winter grass in the choice pasturelands of the southern plains. It was a conflict in which the northerners, far from home and faced with determined opposition, welcomed royal intervention.
 
By just what steps, and in what chronological order, events led to royal recognition of the Mesta, it is at present impossible to determine. The more eastern towns, trailing through Cuenca into the grasslands of La Mancha, Murcia, and Andalusia, became united at some time in the second half of the thirteenth century in what was called the concejo de la mesta de la cañada de Cuenca, which held meetings attended by representatives from the towns using this cañada. ⁽³⁹⁾ But did the towns or the king take the initiative in establishing it? We cannot now say, anymore than we can in the parallel case of Extremadura, the region primarily the subject of Alfonso X's pre-1273 charters. Several trunk cañadas terminated in Extremadura; whether, as in La Mancha, single mestas first developed for each route, is uncertain. The king was to name royal itinerant justices (entregadores) for each cañada , but whether this action preceded or followed a union of northern stockmen wintering in Extremadura present unanswerable. All we can be sure of is that out of the [64] autumnal influx into Extremadura there emerged, probably between 1260 and 1265, the Real Concejo de la Mesta. And in this sense, the Mesta can be recognized as the product of the ranching frontier of the Guadiana Basin.
 
It lies beyond the bounds of this paper to estimate the full significance of the Guadiana Basin frontier, but certain broad consequences may be briefly suggested. For Iberian frontier history the Guadiana chapter presents unique features of considerable interest: the successful Castilian adaptation to semi-arid plains conditions unsuited to normal medieval agrarian and urban institutions; the development more than anywhere else in the Peninsula of an intensely pastoral society of small towns and small stockmen ranching great numbers of sheep and cattle on the open ranges; the supremacy -- military, governmental, and religious -- of the military orders at the expense of town, crown, and church; the transhumant invasions that produced the fateful establishment of the Mesta. In some measure the predominance of pastoralism, and of the Mesta, in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish economic life may be traced to the very success of the Guadiana Valley frontier; when, in the eighteenth century Jovellanos attacked pastoralism and the Mesta as responsible for most of the ills of Spanish society, he represented the reaction to the undue degree to which for so long the world of the plains, and notably that of La Mancha and Extremadura, had dominated the economic life of the nation. ⁽⁴⁰⁾ For America also the Guadiana frontier has its implications, and not only in the conquistadores, Pizarro, Valdivia, and thousands of others, whom the region early sent to the Indies and who there created New Extremaduras in Mexico and Chile. ⁽⁴¹⁾ We are often told how in the New World the Spaniard succeeded only where he could conquer and exploit Indian agrarian societies, and critics lament his suppose failure to fill American plains regions from Texas to Argentina with farms and bustling urban communities. But it should be remembered that the development of a plains country through ranching was Castilian frontier experience, as rule over great subject masses was not; that pastoralism has its own legitimate claims to respect in early civilization of many regions and the permanent economy of some; and that where, from the sixteenth century on, the New World frontier of the Americas has fostered the rise of pastoral societies, they have been -- with all their own many original [65] contributions -- deeply indebted to the way of life and institutional patterns of an Iberian plains background in which the Guadiana Basin was a central and integral element.
 

Research grants from the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences and from the Research Committee, both of the University of Virginia, materially aided the preparation of this paper and are gratefully acknowledged.

1. C. Sánchez-Albornoz, España, un enigma histórico (2 vols. Buenos Aires, 1956), II, Chap, xii; José María Lacarra, ed., La reconquista española y la repoblación del país , Escuela de Estudios Medievales, Estudios XV (Zaragoza, 1951); J. González, "Repoblación de la 'Extremadura' leonesa," Hispania, III (1943), 195-273; J. González, Repartimiento de Sevilla, Escuela de Estudios Medievales, Textos XV-XVI (Madrid, 1951); and cf., despite its errors, Jean Gautier, "Le repeuplement de l'Espagne au moyen age (regions du nord, du centre et du sud)," Revue de Géographie Humaine et d'Ethnologie , I (1948-1949), No. 2, pp. 91-94.

2. For the evolution, bibliography, and foreign applications of American frontier methodology, see, most recently, Gene M. Gressley, "The Turner Thesis -- a Problem in Historiography," Agricultural History, XXXII (1958), 227-249.

3. W. P. Webb, The Great Plains (Boston, 1931).

4. For the geography of the Guadiana Valley see especially Juan Dantín Cereceda, Regiones naturales de España (2nd ed., Madrid, 1942), I, 11-84; G[onzalo] de R[eparaz] R[odríguez], Vol. I of José Gavira, ed., España, la tierra, el hombre, el arte (Barcelona, 1943), pp. 300-304, 340-342, 344 ff., 451-452, 469 ff.; Hermann Lautensach, "Spanien und Portugal," in Fritz Klute, ed., Handbuch der geographischen Wissenschaft, IX (Potsdam, 1936), 426-557; and the virtually inaccessible E. W. Gilbert, R. P. Beckinsale, and S. da Sá, Spain and Portugal , British Admiralty, Naval Intelligence Division, Geographical Handbook Series (4 vols. Oxford, 1941-1944), Vols. I and III. On La Mancha there is the excellent study by Otto Jessen, "La Mancha: Ein Beitrag zur Landeskunde Neukastiliens," Mitteilungen der geographischen Gesellschaft in Hamburg , XLI (1930), 123-227; also published as "La Mancha: Contribución al estudio geográfico de Castilla la Nueva," Estudios Geográficos , VII (1946), 269-312, 479-524. Unfortunately, there is no comparable geographic survey of Extremadura.

5. See his La decadencia española (4 vols. Madrid, 1950-1951), IV, Chaps. 24-25; and "El paisaje manchego en tiempos de Cervantes," Anales Cervantinos, III (1953), 215-279.

6. On the military history of the Guadiana Basin in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, see Luis G. de Valdeavellano, Historia de España , (2nd ed., Madrid, 1955), I, Part 2, Chaps, xvi-xxi; A. de Ballesteros, Historia de España (2^nd ed., Barcelona, 1943-1956), II, 307-407; III, Part I, pp. 1-13; Julio González, Regesta de Fernando II (Madrid, 1943); González, Alfonso IX (2 vols., Madrid, 1944).

7. No good study of the organization and tactics of the medieval Castilian army has yet appeared, but certain aspects are well treated, largely from the juridical standpoint, in A. Palomeque, "Contribución al estudio del ejército los estados de la reconquista," Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español, XV (1944), 205-251; cf. also Jaime Oliver Asín, Origen árabe de rebato, arrobd y sus homónimos (Madrid, 1928) and Ferdinand Lot, L'art militaire et 1 armées au moyen âge (2 vols., Paris, 1946), II, 260-297.

8. Rafael de Ureña y Smenjaud, ed., Fuero de Cuenca (Madrid, 1935) Chaps. XXX-XXXI.

9. Of the early history of the military orders in Castile only that of the Hospitalers has yet been carefully scrutinized: Santos A. Garcia Larragueta, El Gran Priorado de Navarra de la Orden de San Juan de Jerusalén (2 vols. Pamplona, 1957) I, 35-61; García Larragueta, "La Orden de San Juan en la crisis del imperio hispánico del siglo XII," Hispania, XII (1952) , 483-524. For the native Castilian orders I have depended chiefly upon I. J. Ortega y Cotes, et al., Bullarium ordinis militiae de Calatrava (Madrid, 1761); Francisco Uhagón y Guardamino, "Indice de los documentos de la Orden Militar de Calatrava existentes en el Archivo Histórico Nacional," Boletín de la R. Academia de la Historia , XXXV (1899), 5-167; A. F. Aguado de Córdova, et al., Bullarium equestris ordinis s. Iacobi de Spatha (Madrid, 1719); Consuelo Gutiérrez del Arroyo de Vázquez de Parga, Privilegios reales de la Orden de Santiago en la edad media (Madrid, 1946); I. J. Ortega y Cotes, et al., Bullarium ordinis militiae de Alcántara (Madrid, 1759).

10. For colonization by both crown and military orders in southern New Castile and Extremadura, the basic guides are the Colección de fueros y cartas-pueblas de España, Catálogo, edited by Tomás Muñoz y Romero for the R. Academia de la Historia (Madrid, 1852), and the Bullaria of the orders cited in n. 9 above.

11. Illustrations in FMonreal [Fuero de Monreal], granted in 1207 by Uclés (Luis Salazar y Castro, Historia genealógica de la Casa de Lara [4 vols., Madrid, 1636], IV, 678 [bis]); FMiguelturra, 1230, Calatrava (Eduardo de Hinojosa, Documentos para la historia de las instituciones de León y Castilla [Madrid, 1919], pp. 148-150); FMérida, 1235, San Marcos de León and Archbishop Bernard of Compostela ( Bullarium s. Iacobi, p. 106); FMadridejos, 1238, San Juan (Hinojosa, pp. 151-152); FSalvaleón, 1253, Alcántara (Hinojosa, pp. 158-160; Bullarium de Alcántara, p. 68); FVillasbuenas, 1256, Alcántara (Bullarium de Alcántara, p. 91).

12. Latin Fuero of Cáceres, 1229: González, Alfonso IX, II, 691-692.

13. Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, "Las behetrías," Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español, I (1924), 196-205; Sánchez-Albornoz, "El precio de la vida en el reino astur-leonés hace mil años," Logos: Revista de la Faculta Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires, III (1944), 244-249; Sánchez-Albornoz, España, un enigma histórico, II, 7-55; Sánchez-Albornoz, "La frontera y las libertades de los castellanos," in these Proceedings.

14.Hinojosa, pp. 151-152; Antonio C. Floriano, "Cáceres ante la historia: El problema medieval de la propiedad de tierra," Revista de Estudios Extremeños. V (1949), 3-29, especially pp. 7-10; Esteban Rodríguez Amaya, "La tierra en Badajoz desde 1230 a 1500," op. cit. , VII (1951), 395-497.

15.Cf., for example, FCuenca, II, 2; the reales privilegios of Alfonso X to the Concejo of Badajoz (A. Tomás González, Colección de cédulas, cartaspatentes, provisiones, reales órdenes y otros documentos [6 vols. Madrid, 1829-1833] VI, 112, 116); and the fueros of Mérida, Madridejos, Salvaleón and Villasbuenas, cited above, n. 11.

16.FMiguelturra, c. 6 (Hinojosa, p. 150).

17.For what follows, and for bibliography on medieval Castilian ranching of sheep and cattle, see Julius Klein, The Mesta (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1920; Spanish translation, Madrid, 1936); C. J. Bishko, "The Peninsular Background of Latin American Cattle Ranching," Hispanic American Historical Review , XXXII (1952), 491-515.

18.El Fuero de Coria, ed. José Maldonado y Fernández del Torco (n.p., 1949), passim; Fueros y privilegios de Cáceres , ed. Pedro Ulloa y Golfín (n. p., ca. 1657?); Antonio C. Floriano, Documentación histórica del Archivo Municipal de Cáceres ( Cáceres, 1934 ) ; Esteban Rodríguez Amaya, "Inventario general de los Archivos de la S. I. Catedral y Ciudad de Badajoz, formado por D. Ascensio Morales en 1753-1754," Rev. Estud. Extrem., VIII (1952), 389-492; Fuero de Usagre, ed. Rafael de Ureña y Smenjaud and Adolfo Bonilla y San Martín (Madrid, 1907), títulos 432 ff.; Miguel A. Ortí y Belmonte, "Las conquistas de Cáceres por Fernando II y Alfonso IX de León y su fuero latino anotado," Rev. Estud. Extrem., III ( 1947 ).

19.Bull. de Alcántara, pp. 51-53.

20.Uhagón, Indice de documentos de Calatrava, p. 22, No. 104 (1255); Bull. de Calatrava, pp. 683-686 (1221); Antonio Benavides, Memorias de D. Fernando IV de Castilla (2 vols., Madrid, 1860), II, 813-815, Nos. dlii-dliii (reales of 1311 but referring to reigns of Alfonso X and Sancho IV).

21.Bull. de Alcántara, pp. 73-75 (1236, in inspeximus of Alfonso X, 1255); A. López Ferreiro, Fueros municipales de Santiago y de su tierra (2 vols., Santiago, 1895), I, 365; Gutiérrez del Arroyo, Privilegios de Santiago, No. 495 (1282); Bull. de Calatrava , p. 685 (1221), pp. 150-151 (1293); Benavides, Fernando IV, II, 728, Col. 2 (1310).

22.FUsagre (= FCáceres), títulos 456, 464; Memorial Histórico Español, I (1851), 178, 225; Hinojosa, Documentos , p. 169; Benavides, II, 292, Col. 1.

23.FCuenca, cc. XXXIX, 1-3; XXXI, 16.

24.Texts published by Luis Suárez Fernández, "Evolución histórica de las hermandades castellanas," Cuadernos de Historia de España, XVI (1951), 47, 49; FCoria, título 163; FUsagre (= FCáceres) títs. 167, 443-466, 479, 482, 489-505.

25.FSalamanca, tít. 196, in Américo Castro and Federico de Onís, Fueros Leoneses (Madrid, 1916), p. 148.

26.Klein, The Mesta, pp. 9-13.

27.Pending a careful philological examination of Iberian pastoral nomenclature in its historical as well as etymological aspects, it seems unwise to attempt as yet any inferences based upon philological evidence alone. Juan Corominas, Diccionario crítico etimológico de la lengua castellana (4 vols., Berne, 1954) regards esculca as of Germanic origin (II, 369); rafala as probably Arabic (III, 1069-1071, s.v. "rehala"); and otero (I, 173 s.v. "alto") and mesta (III, 358-359) as from the Latin. But his retention of Klein's mistake (The Mesta, p. 12, n. 3; p. 74) about the rafala at Cáceres as being concerned primarily with horse trading, his almost certainly erroneous derivation of mesta in its pastoral sense from Latin, mixta , and his surprising failure to discuss the well-known equation of mesta with Berber mechta, a winter encampment of nomadic shepherds (Klein, p. 10), all sufficiently underline the need for a study of Spanish pastoral vocabulary on the scientific level of e.g., Y. Malkiel, "Estudios de léxico pastoril: 'piara' y 'manada'," Bulletin Hispanique, LIII (1951), 41-80.

28.FCuenca, XXXIX, 1-3; XXX, 1, ff.; XXXIX, 4.

29.FUsagre (= FCáceres), títs. 448, 451, 467; note the reference in tit. 448 to the "día de la descamia" on which the "caualleros de rafala" are required to attend the otero.

30.FSalamanca, tít. 196.

31.FUsagre (= FCáceres), tít. 463.

32.González, Repartimiento de Sevilla, II, 347; González, Colección de cédulas, VI, 142-145.

33.Klein, The Mesta, pp. 8-9; José Miranda, "Notas sobre la introducción de la Mesta en la Nueva España," Revista de Historia de América, No. 17 (June 1944), pp. 1-26.

34.The texts have been published by Klein, "Los privilegios de la Mesta de 1273 y 1276," Bol. R. Acad. Hist., LXIV (1914), 202-219.

35.The Mesta, pp. 166-170.

36.See, for example, Chronica Adefonsi imperatoris, ed. Luis Sánchez Belda (Madrid, 1950), cc. 36, 39, 88, 122, 131, 187; E. Lévi-Provençal, "Un recueil de lettres officielles almohades," Hespéris, XXVIII (1941), 52-53.

37.Klein's description and map of the cañadas (The Mesta , pp. 18-20) have been corrected in various respects by the much more detailed studies of the geographer Juan Dantín Cereceda, "Las cañadas ganaderas del Reino de León," Boletín de la R. Sociedad Geográfica , LXXVI (1936), 464-499; "Cañadas ganaderas españolas," Congresso do mundo português, Publicaçoes (Lisbon, 1940), XVIII, 682-696; "La cañada ganadera de La Vizana," Bol R. Soc. Geog., LXXVIII (1942), 322-335. See Robert Aitken, "Routes of Transhumance on the Spanish Meseta," The Geographical Journal, CVI (1945), 59-69. It should however be noted that both Klein and Dantín Cereceda draw chiefly upon nineteenth-century accounts of the cañada system as then surviving rather than upon the medieval documentation for the original network of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

38.Klein, pp. 75 ff., 301 ff., 351-352; in certain passages, e.g., p. 98, where he seems to recognize that the conflict centered in the Guadiana Valley, Klein fails to reckon with the predominantly pastoral character of the Mesta's southern opposition.

39.Benavides, Fernando IV, II, 222-224.

40.Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, Informe de la Sociedad Economic Madrid . . . en el Expediente de Ley Agraria [1795] in Biblioteca de autores españoles, Vol. L (Madrid, 1898), 80-98.

41.See the suggestive comments on continuities between the medieval Iberian and the Ibero-American frontier by Silvio Zavala, "The Frontiers of Hispanic America," in Walker D. Wyman and Clifton B. Kroeber, eds., The Frontier in Perspective (Madison, Wisconsin, 1957), pp. 35-58; and "Las fronteras de hispanoamérica," Cuadernos Americanos, XVII (July-Oct, 1958), 374-384.