The contribution made by the municipal militias in Iberia during the Central Middle Ages is remarkable. Spawned by the reality of contending societies across a military frontier, they filled a vital place in the needs of the peninsular monarchies they served, expanding their capabilities when the situation required and giving their kings valuable flexibility in military and economic programs. Most particularly, the town armies of the peninsula provided a defense in depth to protect their realms from Muslim intrusion; ranged the frontier in missions of their own initiative and that of their ruler; institutionalized their military procedures in complex law codes that continue to tell us much about their lives; and brought a set of frontier necessities and their hardships under control, so that risk might be insured, excesses punished, and even a profit turned. Neither the Reconquest nor the Iberian states it shaped could have taken the form they did without this municipal contribution.

The Iberian towns show some strong lines of comparison with their French and Italian counterparts. The conflict engendered by Florence and Siena has its echo in the battles of Salamanca, Ávila, Ciudad Rodrigo and Talavera to claim and hold the substantial territories which surrounded their towns. In a similar manner, the city of Toulouse used its military forces to extend its grasp throughout the central Garonne Valley during the mid-thirteenth century hiatus between the decline of the Counts of Toulouse and the increasing growth of royal power in southern France.⁽¹⁾

Moreover, one cannot fail to be struck by the parallel between the epic battles of [208] Las Navas de Tolosa and Bouvines. For the most crucial single battle of the Reconquest, Las Navas de Tolosa, King Alfonso VIII had at his disposal in 1212 the militias of Ávila, Segovia, Medina del Campo and Toledo (and probably more). In 1214, King Philippe II utilized the militias of Corbie, Amiens, Beauvais, Compiègne and Arras for that most crucial event in the development of the French monarchy, the battle of Bouvines. Yet in neither the Italian nor the French examples are the distances the same. The combats within the Papal States, Tuscany and the Lombard League rarely required the town militia to serve much beyond a hundred kilometer radius of the home city. To reach Bouvines, the French militias had to travel between fifty to one hundred fifty kilometers, and were so exhausted from their effort that they did not perform well in the battle itself.⁽²⁾ Excluding the four hundred kilometer range required to perform at Lucena, the militias which served Alfonso VIII at Las Navas traveled more than twice as far across more hostile country than any French militia at Bouvines. Whatever the level of their performance there, the chronicles make no reference to their exhaustion. It is this extraordinary range and capability for audacious independent action which give the Iberian militias an aura of fascination as a historical phenomenon.

1284 did not conclude the work of the Reconquest or the activity of the peninsular municipal militias. The Andalusian towns which remained in contact with the Muslim frontier of the principality of Granada maintained active armies which continued both to fight border skirmishes with Granadan forces and to join royal armies for larger expeditions against the Nasrid dynasty and their occasional North African allies. Protected by the crests, ridges, valleys and passes of the Baetic Cordillera, the Muslims would stand their ground for two more centuries before a determined ten-year campaign led by Fernando and Isabel crushed the last resistance and allowed the royal couple to receive the keys of the Alhambra from the last emir. While the older militias of the Meseta were largely isolated from this two-century conflict, they did find periodic outlets for their capabilities in the various brotherhoods which formed to protect municipal interests against the turbulent forces which buffeted the Castilian monarchy during the Later Middle Ages. Through these hermandades a number of military effectives would be recruited from the Meseta towns into the Santa Hermandad, to join the militias of the Andalusian concejos in the final peninsular assault against Granada and its territories. Their combat skills would survive to threaten Fernando and Isabel's Habsburg grandson Charles in the great Comunero [209] uprising of 1520-21. The urban military tradition thus had its place in the forging of a Spanish military system whose tercios and light cavalry would become the dominant European military force in the sixteenth century.⁽³⁾

However, the evolution of the peninsular municipal militias had crossed a significant historic divide by the end of the thirteenth century, marked largely by the reigns of Alfonso X, Jaime I and Afonso III. For Portugal and the Crown of Aragon, direct contact with the Islamic frontier had been broken. To be sure, both of these states remained keenly interested in frontier expansion in North Africa and, for Aragon, in the central and eastern Mediterranean. Both joint and separate enterprises were planned and occasionally executed by the Iberian monarchies after this time, including the final combined effort launched against Granada by the Catholic Kings. Nonetheless, the actual separation of Portugal and Aragon from direct land contact ended the direct participation of their municipal militias in the war to the Muslim south. Like the militias of Navarre earlier, the Portuguese and Aragonese municipal armies were destined to atrophy save for purely local concerns of order and defense. The great collections of customs granted to such towns as Garvão, Alcaçer, Guarda, Santarém and Beja in Portugal and to Valencia and Tortosa in the Crown of Aragon contain little or no reference to military obligations or their associated activities. Local defense remained well organized, as the records of Barcelona and Valencia indicate, and the large municipal musters by Jaime and his son Pedro demonstrate a continuing militia capability to the end of the thirteenth century, but the need for offensive campaigning by the towns in the peninsula certainly must have declined after Pedro II's reign.⁽⁴⁾ Indeed, without the concern of an active military frontier to police, the monarchy sought very sensibly to restrain this military capability on the part of the towns. As the future history of both Castile and Aragon would demonstrate, municipal militias could be used to resist royal will as easily as to execute it.

The thirteenth-century Muslim poet al-Rundì mourned the loss of the great Islamic cities of Andalusia, Murcia and Valencia as the "pillars" of Arabic Spain.⁽⁵⁾ Were these and the other towns, which had been lost either through settlement or capture, destined to be the pillars of the Christian kingdoms instead? Certainly in the case of coastal Portugal and the Crown of Aragon this proved to be true. These towns of the littoral became the great economic centers for the growing Atlantic and Mediterranean maritime commerce, an enterprise that diversified their social and economic life to a substantial degree. In this trade, Catalonia possessed an edge not to be relinquished until the mid-fifteenth century. During this period, [210] the larger towns and cities of Portugal and Catalonia-Valencia conformed rather more closely to the experience of the other southern European municipalities than was to be the case in Castile, where the economic diversity was less and the enduring military influence much greater. The gradual completion of the Aragonese peninsular frontiers in the thirteenth century almost certainly contributed its booty-hungry militiamen to a group called the Almogavers who specialized in warfare and frontier fighting in Aragon and Castile. Emerging from obscure origins, they first appear as the initial assault force on Córdoba in 1236, and then reappear in the chronicles of Jaime I and Pedro III's reign. Even here, it was the overseas expansion of Catalan interests which provided military opportunities for this group, once Murcia had been consolidated in Castilian hands and that frontier closed.⁽⁶⁾

To be certain, Castile had conquered its share of great Muslim cities, especially Córdoba and Seville, but these were forced to undertake the total reintegration of their economies as a result of the Christian conquest. Cut off from North Africa, the Islamic economic network and Sudanese gold, their artisans dislodged from the heart of the cities, these great Andalusian municipalities would not survive the transition to Christian control in the same state of economic health as was the case with Valencia. The conquest had added the cattle ranching of Andalusia to the sheep farming of the Meseta as primary influences upon the urban economy of Castile. Leather and wool became significant export items, benefiting the trading fair towns of the north as Medina del Campo and commercial centers like Burgos, providing a contrast with the emerging fishing and shipping industry of the Asturo-Cantabrian coast. This tended to bring a rather narrow focus to a number of the economies of the sheep raising towns whose militias had played so large a role in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

In the final analysis, the tie between the sheep economy and the wide ranging militias of the Meseta towns seems always to have been close. The militias spawned during the first penetration of the Trans-Duero grasslands, and developed in part to protect the municipal livestock interests in the central Iberian grazing lands. As the Reconquest united the grazing zones of Andalusia with those of the northern Meseta, the sheep runs and cattle trails became increasingly important, causing wool to become the dominant product. These forces tended to harden some of the municipal economies into the molds which had formed during the era of expansion: a single-product economy based on a raw material produced for export. In the larger Andalusian towns and [211] the more important commercial centers north of the Duero, significant merchant and trading classes developed and merged with the older caballería villana class, a phenomenon made possible by the declining pressures of military service after the conquest of Andalusia and by the careful distinction made between caballeros who held their position through economic position and those who continued to enjoy the honor of serving in the older military class. The contrast between some of the narrower municipal economies as against those which developed a degree of economic diversity has led recent scholarship to divide on the question of the economic health and social diversity in the later medieval towns of Castile. Teófilo Ruiz argues that many of the later medieval municipal economies are strong, but Gautier-Dalché proclaims a far gloomier picture: "The great blossoming, which between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries covered the lands of the Kingdom of Castile with municipalities, did not render all the fruits that it promised."⁽⁷⁾ Newer research seems to be favoring the position of Ruiz as against that represented by Gautier-Dalché.

With the slowing of the Reconquest frontier and the isolation of many of the municipalities and their militias from regular combats typical of the era from Alfonso VII through Fernando III, the social process which had favored upward movement through military prowess began to lose the sources of its fluidity. In the more important commercial centers, business success provided some alternative options, but this route did not effectively exist in many towns and, when available often did not offer full equality with the older caballero aristocracy. In the heyday of the fluid frontier, the Cuenca-Teruel family of charters had specifically awarded horses to those peones who had unhorsed a Muslim jinete at a crucial location on a battlefield, thereby changing that footsoldier's social class, and improving his future options in combat, in the division of booty, and even in pasturage rights in the grazing lands of the town. The Alfonsine codes offered considerable prizes, even houses and property, for similar heroic acts.⁽⁸⁾ How often the footsoldiers found themselves in this opportune position or actually received the prizes offered in these codes is unknown to us, but the widespread incidence of such law suggests that the possibility was genuine. Decreasing these options for the peones through the declining incidence of combat, which also reduced the periodic casualties that assured vacancies in the municipal knightly class, inevitably contributed to the hardening of class stratifications.

Alfonso X's fueros also indicate the caballeros villanos attempted [212] to maintain and extend their class prerogatives, expanding their dependent retinues while performing their military duties with increasing reluctance. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries this class of urban knights gradually increased its domination of municipal government. The Castilian monarchy from Fernando III's time onward abetted their political and social aggrandizement by attempting to develop an armed knightly class of high ranking caballeros de linaje (blood nobility) and lesser caballeros villanos in the towns of the Toledo charter family and the Andalusian south, seeking to retain a mobile fighting force in the lower Meseta and the Granadan frontier. In striving to solidify their aristocratic position the caballeros villanos, who might have aimed for manufacturing and trading dominance in many of the other towns of medieval Europe, rather disassociated themselves from such activities, concentrating instead on their livestock and agrarian interests, enhancing their blood lines, their rights and their tax exemptions, and occasionally rendering military service, although not always of a kind that benefited the monarchy.⁽⁹⁾

As a result, the war machine developed during the Central Middle Ages to absorb Muslim lands and "retake" the Peninsula from the faithful of Allah had a differing residual effect in the various Christian Iberian kingdoms. The capability of the militias in the "society organized for war" had been least developed in Portugal, Navarre and the coastal Crown of Aragon. Long distance campaigning and booty had not permanently affected the municipal way of life in these regions, and their rulers could dull the edge of urban military experience through economic options and adventures not so closely associated with continuing border warfare. In Castile this facile possibility lay beyond reach. As long as the border with Granada remained open and North African reinforcements loomed hard by the Straits, a continuing military capability was necessary. The highly institutionalized military structures of the Castilian towns, the regular infusion of booty into the municipal economies, and even royal codes which sought to assure that "men will continue to seek war and derive pleasure from it," produced an intense experience regarding the importance of warfare in daily life. The Castilian militias could still be mustered, especially in the unsettled last years of the Burgundian dynasty and the early decades of the Trastámaras. While booty opportunities slowly declined, occasional gluts such as that provided by the battle of the Río Salado in 1340 occurred to remind municipal militiamen of the "pleasures" of combat.⁽¹⁰⁾

So it was that a kind of militarization permeated municipal life in the [213] Castilian Central Middle Ages. The lands to be won, the spoils to be divided, the hopes and opportunities of the battlefield, all this became solidly infused into municipal tradition. As with the turbulent war machines built by the contemporary English and French monarchies, these urban forces sought their natural outlets either in foreign wars or turned themselves toward internal conflicts, instead. When Islamic Granada succumbed in 1492, the New World opened new frontiers for the application of the same experience and skills. Angus MacKay has seen an analogy in the rejoicing over booty and the power it brought between the Cid and his men on their conquest of Valencia in the eleventh century and Francisco Pizarro and his followers celebrating their acquisition of the rooms full of Inca Peruvian gold and silver at Cajamarca in the sixteenth century.⁽¹¹⁾ The militiamen who celebrated similar windfalls in the Andalusian raids of the twelfth century, the triumph at Las Navas in 1212, and the captures of Córdoba, Jaén and Seville fit well into this same analogy. It was after all their descendants who would pursue the dreams of conquest provided by Cortés and Pizarro. The Portuguese also annexed a part of this world, fueled by the naval expertise acquired in part by their coastal towns in the Later Middle Ages. But in the Castilian conquests the armies of freebooting warriors constituted the major portion of the driving force. The towns and their militias had contributed to this restless, avaricious, enterprising mind set with all of its potential and its limitations that gloried and bedeviled Castile in the Early Modern Era. The extent to which this attitude influenced the making of the Castilian cultural mentality in the Spanish Renaissance has been deftly typified by Sánchez-Albornoz: "Don Quixote and Sancho were the sons of the frontier spirit of medieval Castile, populated with heroic warlike fantasies and hallucinated by sudden, half-fantastic hopes."⁽¹²⁾ Thus the militiamen of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries served in the epilogue of one age and the prologue of another.

1.  Hyde, Society and Politics in Medieval Italy, 80-81, 116, 183-84. Waley, "Army of the Florentine Republic," 70-108. Waley, "Papal Armies of the Thirteenth Century," 72:1-30. Waley, "Condotte and Condottiere," 337-71. Schevill, Siena, 131-32, 166-68. Bowsky, A Medieval Italian Commune, 117-58. Schevill, Medieval and Renaissance Florence, 1:105. Mundy, Liberty and Political Power in Toulouse, 14-15, 46-47, 71, 153, 261, 333. Mundy, Europe in the High Middle Ages, 249, 430.

2.  Petit Dutaillis, The Feudal Monarchy in France and England, 175-76, 314. Petit-Dutaillis, French Communes, 63-74.

3.  Bishko, "Spanish and Portuguese Reconquest," 3:435-56. Lomax, Reconquest, 173-78. Hillgarth, The Spanish Kingdoms, 1250-1516, 2:374-88. Ladero Quesada, Castilla y la conquista del Reino de Granada, 105-46, 229-38. Lunenfeld, Santa Hermandad, 17-51. Haliczer, Comuneros of Castile, 114-79.

4. Marsá, ed., Onomástica Barcelonesa del siglo XIV, 3-212. Querol Roso, Las milicias valencianas, 23-181. "Jaime I mandó exercitum civitatibus," 1150. "Orden del Rey Jaime por carta a las ciudades," 1152. "Misit litteras dominus Rex jacobus hominibus villarum," 1158. Misit litteras dominus Rex Petrus hominibus villis, Reg. 43, ff. 106r-108v, 118r-118v.

5.  Nykl, Hispano-Arabic Poetry, 338.

6.  Hillgarth, Spanish Kingdoms, 1:16-89, 242, 2:3-87. Oliveira Marques, History of Portugal, 1:89-100. Soldevila, Els almogàvers, passim. Moreno Echevarría, Los almogávares, 13-29. Ximenius de Rada, "De Rebus Hispaniae," 205. "Llibre dels feits del Rei En Jaume," Ch. 103, 260, 333. Desclot, "Crònica de Bernat Desclot," Ch. 65, 67. Muntaner, "Crònica de Ramon Muntaner," Ch. 10. "Privilegio de Alfonso X al concejo de Lorca, eximiéndoles del quinto de las cabalgadas, 1265," 67-68. Espéculo, 3:8:2.

7.  Ruiz, "Expansion et changement," 34:548-65. Ruiz, "Transformation of the Castilian Municipalities," 77:3-33. Cabañas González, caballería popular en Cuenca, passim. Even in the comparative frontier location of Córdoba, the integration of the commercial caballeros de premia class presented problems in the mustering of a military force. See Edwards, Christian Córdoba, 143-47. Bishko, "Peninsular Background of Latin American Cattle Ranching," 32:491-515. Pastor de Togneri, Conflictos sociales, 133-71. Gautier-Dalché, Historia urbana de León y Castilla, 465. See also the best overall review of the economic vitality of the various Iberian regions during the Later Middle Ages in Vicens Vives, Economic History of Spain, 155-288.

8.  FCfs, 30:29. FCmsp, 30:26. FTL, 426. FAlbL, 488. FCcv, 3:14:18. FTR, 587. FAlbR, 184-85. FP, 508. FAlz, 10:29. FAln, 617. FZ, 635. FBa, 694. FI, 665. FAlr, ff. 98r-98v. FUb, 54Y. MS8331, 709. FBe, 923. FVH, 519. Espéculo, 3:5:7. Siete partidas, 2:27:7-8. Pastor de Togneri, Conflictos sociales, 188-89.

9.  Pescador, 33-34:190-238, 39-40:190-209, 237-60. Carlé, Del concejo medieval castellano-leonés, 69-80. Bó and Carlé, "Cuando empieza a reservarse," 4:114-24. Pastor de Togneri, Conflictos sociales, 173-95. Gautier-Dalché, Historia urbana, 278-96. For examples of this process operating in particular towns in the Later Middle Ages, see: Ruiz, "Transformation," 77:3-33, and Edwards, Christian Córdoba, 24-57, 131-63.

10.  Espéculo, 3:7:11. Lomax, Reconquest, 166-78. Lourie, "A Society Organized for War," 35:54-76. The spoils from the Río Salado not only enriched Iberian combatants, but flooded the gold market of Western Europe as well. Grassotti, "Para la historia del botín," 39-40:98-132.

11.  MacKay, Spain in the Middle Ages, 211.

12.  "The Frontier and Castilian Liberties," 46.