[xii] My interest in the history of irrigation in Valencia began in 1959 when, in answer to an advertisement in the Harvard Crimson, I set to work translating the regulations of the Valencian irrigation communities. This was the beginning of a most fruitful friendship with Professor Arthur Maass that led me to the irrigated fields of Valencia and Gandia in 1960-61 and finally in 1965-66 to the archives of Valencia, Castellón, and Alicante on a grant from the Social Science Research Council. Over the years we identified several areas of historical development which seemed challenging and ripe for research. The first, most elusive, most often discussed, and of most immediate interest to me was that of the influence of Islamic culture and practice upon present institutions of irrigation. We searched for documents; there were none. We talked to historians, arabists, lawyers, and civil servants; few had anything to offer but conjecture.

Discussion with some of the few social scientists who are familiar with irrigation in Islam convinced me of the utility of the comparative method. Even in the absence of historical documentation, the main outlines of irrigation practice in Al-Andalus could be unearthed by working carefully backward from the present traditional systems of Spain and by comparing these systems to Islamic ones. This paper is by no means that comparative study; but I have tried in Part Two to block out some of the major areas where comparative study might yield worthwhile results. My own comparative data, largely from Yemen, North Africa, and Syria, have been selected (or, rather, preselected, for studies of these irrigation systems are rare) more on the basis of intuition and general knowledge of Islamic settlement patterns in Al-Andalus than on a rigorous search of all the possible Islamic [viii] models for Valencian irrigation. Nonetheless, it has always been known that the areas under consideration were settled principally by Syrians and Yemenites, and on this basis I have limited most of my attempts at comparison to the homelands of those two peoples.

Although my attention was initially centered on the problem of cultural continuity, in time I became interested in the institutions for their own sake. When I set out for Spain I had originally planned to study social control in medieval irrigation, the agrarian institutions of the huertas, and, as far as possible, the technological and economic ramifications of irrigation agriculture. Unhappily -- and, perhaps, luckily -- the sources did not permit such a broad inquiry.

During a year in the Valencian archives I was able to study a vast number of documents dealing solely with irrigation problems. Though these documents shed some light on certain technological problems of irrigation and on economic problems internal to the irrigation systems, generally they are relevant to the areas of social and administrative control. I had to abandon for the present any hope of understanding the broader economic ramifications of irrigation agriculture in Valencia and, indeed, I remain largely ignorant of the actual farming methods, since the interest of the water documents typically is in the distribution of water from the river up to the farmer's "turn-out," but no further. Mentions of crops, for example, are incidental, and data about plowing and other agricultural techniques are absent in my documents.

On the other hand, the political dimension of water control of which I had been largely unaware when I began my search of the archives -- provided an unexpected challenge.

The major limitations of the documents on which this study is based can be summarized as follows:

1) Data concerning actual day-to-day operations of the medieval irrigation systems are very scarce. Most of the documents (irrigation ordinances, royal privileges, and so on) describe a generalized or idealized situation. Litigation documents fill in some gaps by describing specific situations in great detail, but because [ix] these documents are the product of stress or conflict they do not describe the daily routine either.

2) Almost all of the documents are administrative or legal in nature. They tell much, therefore, about social control, the nature of conflicts and their resolution, but little about the agricultural regime or economy. The litigation material, however, is composed largely of accounts of the governor's court, which heard only important cases. Most instances of trivial, local conflict were adjudicated orally by the local irrigation officers; hence almost no records of minor offenses exist.

3) Reliance on the records of municipal archives, which are particularly rich in irrigation material, tends to exaggerate the towns' control over irrigation affairs and to de-emphasize the role of the communities of irrigators. The council books of Valencia (extant from the early fourteenth century to the present in an almost unbroken series), Castellón, Alcira, and Elche contain an inexhaustible wealth of detail about medieval irrigation.

4) The records of the irrigation communities themselves are mostly modern (that is, from the seventeenth century to the present), with only sporadic holdings from the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But similar material from the Middle Ages, the study of which would go far in rectifying any bias resulting from over-reliance on municipal records, does survive in notarial series (notals and protocols). These sources have hardly been searched at all for irrigation material, yet as my unsystematic and largely fortuitous findings attest, their study is of the utmost importance in filling gaps left by more specialized series of documents.

5) The time span of this study is naturally dependent upon the available documentation, most of which falls between the years 1375 and 1460. Considerable documentation, largely royal privileges, does exist for the thirteenth century, however, and in some cases, where medieval concerns were continued into the sixteenth century or later I have found it worthwhile to carry through into the post medieval period. Furthermore, in traditional systems such as those of eastern Spain, where custom dies hard, modern practices contain many medieval elements. Where medieval documents are lacking, I do not hesitate to draw on [x] more recent material. The regulations of the Valencian communities, most of which were codified in the eighteenth century, contain many provisions of medieval origin.

The spelling of Valencian place names presents numerous problems, owing to the existence of many variant spellings -- both Catalan and Castilian -- for the same place. No one criterion is completely satisfactory. For major place names I have used the familiar spellings found in standard maps and atlases. For minor toponyms I have followed, when possible, Catalan orthography according to M. Sanchis Guarner's Contribució al nomenclàtor geografic del País Valencia (Barcelona, 1966), which does not cover all the names in this study. In certain cases I have preferred an archaic or Castilian orthography when it more closely accords with English pronunciation (Benacher rather than Benatger, for example; Chiva rather than Xiva). All common variants are included in the index.

Professors Arthur Maass and Giles Constable read the original draft of this study and offered many insightful comments, the former from the point of view of a political scientist and irrigation specialist, the latter from the vantage point of the medievalist. Robert I. Burns read a later draft and suggested numerous emendations and corrections based on his profound knowledge of medieval Valencia. Harold A. Thomas helped me to interpret the hydraulic background of specific situations discussed in Chapter III. The portions of Chapter IX dealing with the diffusion of hydraulic techniques were presented as a paper at the December 1968 meeting of the Society for the History of Technology, in Dallas. As a result I have benefited from the suggestions and criticisms of Paul W. English, Eugene S. Ferguson, and Chris Field who were able, I hope, to redress somewhat my lack of technical expertise. Portions of Chapters III and XI have appeared in Technology and Culture (1968, 1969 by The University of Chicago and the Society for the History of Technology).

Many persons were of great help to me in Spain. In Valencia, the assistance of Rosa Rodríguez de Tormo, archivist of the Archivo del Reino, and her staff was invaluable. My two good [xi] friends Vicente Giner Boira, assessor of the Tribunal of Waters, and José M. Cueco Adrián, a distinguished historian of Spanish irrigation, gave generously of their time and interest. Historians of Castellón de la Plana are most fortunate in that the archivist, Don Eduardo Codina Armengol, is also mayor and strives to make foreign scholars feel at home; he and the historian José Sánchez Adell made my work there both enjoyable and fruitful. Lastly, Luís V. Aracil made many strong and compelling suggestions toward solving my orthographical dilemmas. That I did not follow his advice in all cases reflects only my own timorousness. The final draft benefited greatly from the work of my wife, Betty, which has spared the reader numerous long-winded digressions of which medievalists are overly fond, and of Mrs. Margaret Ritchie; my debt to both is great.
 

Austin, Texas                                                                                                 Thomas F. Glick
June 1969