The six studies here assembled deal with various aspects of the formation of Spain and Portugal between the tenth and the sixteenth century. In subject matter they range from the introduction of Carolingian-Benedictine monasticism into early Castile and Navarre, and the relations between the Leonese Empire and the abbey of Cluny as affected by the presence of Muslim tributary states, all the way to a broad survey of the southward progress of the Reconquest between the Tagus river basin and the peaks of the Sierra Nevada, and the rise in late medieval Castile and Andalusia of a distinctive pastoral culture destined to be transplanted, with many lasting consequences, throughout the New World.

Yet, diverse in individual focus as these papers may appear, all are nevertheless bound together by a common underlying concern with a central theme of Luso-Hispanic history in the Middle Ages which over many years has contributed strongly to inspire my research interests. This is the emergence after 711 on the southwestern rim of medieval Europe of a new Iberian civilization, rooted in pre-Roman, Roman and Visigothic-Suevic antiquity, responsive to all the normal forces of medieval change, but compelled, under peculiarly demanding conditions of geographical ambient and social fluidity, to confront the special stresses and stimuli that affected it from two opposite quarters. From the north came the ever intensifying impact of the dynamically changing world across the Pyrenees. To the south, the persistent necessities of warfare and of the colonization of conquered territories -- the twin challenges of reconquista and repoblación -- demanded the adaptation or fresh creation of institutional, social-economic and technological constructs in one of the principal [ii] sectors of that general marginal expansion of Europe in the Middle Ages which can be termed the medieval frontier.

The immediate purpose of the present selection from my published work is in no sense to tackle, or even necessarily to limit itself to, all the complex historical questions raised by the Luso-Hispanic border experience; but it will be patent that the concept of a new, medieval, frontier-dominated society has significantly influenced the writing of each of these essays. It should be observed, moreover, that the term 'frontier' is here used primarily in the authentic North American sense of transplantation from and evolution beyond an older expanding metropolis, rather than with the meaning (so fashionable today among anthropologically-minded students of confronting civilizations) of inter-ethnic 'acculturation'.

My approach is already evident in the opening paper, which in 1948 first demonstrated the prime interest of an unrecognized Nuns' Rule of the tenth century as the key to understanding the confluence of Hispanic and Carolingian-Benedictine forms of monastic organization in the newly conquered territory of the Rioja, on the edge of the Navarrese and Castilian expansion across the Ebro. The second study, hitherto available only in the Spanish translation published in Buenos Aires in 1971-2 and now first appearing in the original English, breaks with the conventional ascription of Cluny's historic establishment in Spain to Kings Sancho el Mayor of Navarre and Alfonso VI of Leon-Castile, arguing that this actually occurred in connection with the king-emperor Fernando I's inauguration of a new, imperial phase of Reconquest expansion against Muslim al-Andalus. As for the Reconquest itself, Study III, in tracing its general sweep from the late eleventh century to the fall of Granada in 1492, assumes that this phenomenon is to be viewed as not only the vital western theatre of the medieval crusading movement but in addition, and above all, as a basically indigenous drive of frontier expansion, profoundly Iberian in its fundamental aims, conduct and -- by contrast with the Near East -- permanent triumphs.

[iii] The three remaining essays relate to problems of Hispanic agrarian history which stem from the perfection under frontier circumstances of a new pastoral society in late medieval Castile and Andalusia. This can be considered, in its concentration upon large-scale production on the open range of wool, meat and hides for commercial markets, the first true ranching system in world history, and certainly the most influential. Study IV shows how such a development first gained real momentum during the twelfth-century Castilian advance against the Muwahhids (Almohads) in the rolling plains country of the Guadiana river basin. Study V reminds historians still swayed by traditional fascination with the great Castilian pastoral corporation of the Royal Mesta (Mesta Real), of the need to reckon also with the hardly less significant non-transhumant pastoral bodies, the crown-chartered municipal Mestas, which flourished especially in Andalusia. It provides the first muster roll of these local entities and explores how they functioned, down into the sixteenth century, within the governmental and social structures of the medieval Andalusian municipality. Finally, the terminal essay (VI), after thirty years still virtually the only extended discussion of this subject, draws attention to yet another little understood sector of Luso-Hispanic frontier history, cattle ranching -- so important in the Peninsula's late medieval and modern epochs and the prototype of the many regional cattle kingdoms of modern times between the Argentine Pampas and Texas, between Brazil and the Saskatchewan prairie -- but generally overlooked in the scholarly preoccupation with the Merino sheep and the export of its golden fleece.

Acknowledgement is gratefully made for the kind permission to reproduce these studies granted by the Mediaeval Academy of America (I), D. Claudio Sánchez Albornoz and the Instituto de Historia de España (II), the University of Wisconsin Press (III), the Duke University Press (IV), Professor Emilio Cabrera Muñoz and the I Congreso de Historia de Andalucía (V), and the University of Texas Press (VI). Inclusion of the maps prepared by the Cartographic Laboratory UW-Madison (III) has been authorized by the [iv] University of Wisconsin Press. A few annotations have been enlarged in Study II. The Addenda preceding the Index records for the most part key subsequent bibliography.

I am indebted to many friends and colleagues over the years on both sides of the Atlantic, some of whom are named in connection with the several papers. But I would mention in particular the University of Virginia Research Committee; the Alderman Library of the University of Virginia, especially its Interlibrary Loan Department; Professor Lewis Hanke of the University of Massachusetts; Professor Harold B. Johnson, Jr. of the University of Virginia; the sagacious Mr John Smedley of Variorum Reprints; and, above all, my indefatigable wife, Lucretia Ramsey Bishko, whose learned and stenographic cooperation has been so cheerfully given as it has been consistently exploited.

CHARLES JULIAN BISHKO

University of Virginia March 1980