The three decades which followed the death of Alfonso VII of Leon-Castile saw a remarkable development in the evolution of peninsular municipal law. This was especially true in Portugal, Castile and upland Aragon, whose groups or families of charters carried the specifications of rights and exemptions to unprecedented elaboration of detail, giving us our first indications of the specifics of the everyday existence of these townsmen. By the end of the twelfth century with the appearance of the Cuenca-Teruel family of charters, the fueros in Leon and Castile had reached the level of a municipal code of laws unmatched in its details anywhere else in contemporary Europe. Some of this law was destined to create future difficulties for the long-term programs of royal centralization, an instance where present needs outweighed future concerns. The cause of this outpouring of municipal rights and privileges is not completely clear, but one of the most basic considerations was a shortage of individuals to man the frontier. While the Templars and Hospitallers of the Near East had begun to garrison fortresses in the Peninsula decades before, especially in Aragon, their commitments elsewhere inhibited their ability to take up a major role on the frontiers of the Spanish kingdoms. These decades witnessed the appearance and growth of the first domestic military orders in Iberia, starting with the Order of Calatrava in 1158.⁽¹⁾ The call for settlers from beyond the Pyrenees which had made such a large contribution to the settlement of towns further north seemed to be declining as well. The French especially, with their commercial links already solidly established in the towns of Northern Aragon, Navarre, Castile and Leon, and with the [41] growing distractions provided by the rapid internal development of France and the external possibilities of the Crusader Near East, seemed to show little interest in coming to the warmer and drier districts which now constituted the southern frontiers of the Iberian kingdoms. This was doubtless influenced by the threat to daily life and possessions posed by the current expansiveness of the Almohads. Moreover, the compressed population reserve created in Asturias and the Cantabrians by the original Muslim invasions had long since exhausted itself in the resettlement of the Trans-Duero and the Tajo Valley. To continue to attract settlers to hold what remained of the gains of Alfonso VII's reign while attempting continued expansion into the Guadiana Basin, carefully specified rights and liberties were necessary to draw individuals from the comparatively secure north to the hazards of frontier life. Probably better than any other factor, this explains the growth and elaboration of the municipal charters we encounter in these three decades.
 
 

For Portugal, the decades which make up the mature and later years of Afonso I's rule (1157-85) witness the most remarkable expansion of municipal military law which was to occur in the Central Middle Ages. Here, the explanation seems tied to the considerable threats Afonso faced, not only from the Almohads but his fellow Christian rulers in Leon and Castile. Fernando II and Sancho III signed a treaty at Sahagún (23 May 1158) which outlined the future expansion of their respective realms. Fernando's Leon was allotted much of the Alentejo and the Algarve by this agreement, leaving Portugal no Muslim frontier to the south for the unconsulted Afonso I.⁽²⁾ Fernando II further expanded his threat against Portugal by establishing the town of Ciudad Rodrigo in the early 1160's, close against the Portuguese frontier and controlling the route from Salamanca into the Beira Alta. While this would ultimately cause Fernando more difficulty with Salamanca than gain against Portugal, Afonso I clearly saw it as a direct challenge to his eastern frontier.⁽³⁾

This event probably explains the reappearance of the Salamanca-related foral originally given to Numão in 1130, which was awarded to Trancoso and six other towns in the Beira Alta between 1157 and 1169.⁽⁴⁾ The region faced a major access [42] route from the Kingdom of Leon. The Salamanca-Trancoso charters, required the knightly class to retain two-thirds of their force at home during expeditions, providing a substantial defensive buffer against an unanticipated assault from the Leonese king or even the territorial ambitions of a militarily-active town such as Salamanca. Nonetheless, one-third of the knights remained available for offensive expeditions, as well.

His Leonese flank secured, Afonso then proceeded to move toward the northern Alentejo and even Leonese Extremadura with complete disregard for the Sahagún treaty. Drawing on the assistance of the great frontier fighter Geraldo sem Pavor (Gerald the Fearless), King Afonso oversaw campaigns which brought Extremaduran Cáceres, Trujillo and Montánchez as well as Évora and Serpa of the Alentejo into Portuguese hands from Muslim control by 1166. When Geraldo's stealth and surprise tactics allowed him to penetrate the major town of Badajoz and besiege its garrison within the town citadel in 1169, Fernando II was spurred into movement by the threatened loss of all Leonese Extremadura to the Portuguese. Fernando struck quickly to parry the threat, and aided by the Muslims captured Afonso I's relief expedition and promptly besieged the besiegers. As a result, Badajoz remained in Muslim hands, while Cáceres, Trujillo and Montánchez returned to the Leonese orbit.⁽⁵⁾ While quelled in his ambitions toward Leonese Extremadura, Afonso I had made the Sahagún Treaty a dead letter, and had secured major footholds in the central Alentejo for Portugal.

This same period witnessed the genesis of two new families of municipal charters, the prototypes given to Évora and Santarém, respectively. Like Trancoso, Évora received a charter styled after a Leonese-Castilian model, in this case Ávila. But at Évora and the three other towns receiving this charter by 1185, a larger portion of horsemen serve in offensive expeditions, with the resultant gaps apparently tightened by assigning defensive, and possibly offensive, service to foot soldiers. Horse indemnities emerge in these forais to alleviate the heavier horse casualties likely to result from the intensified offensive activity. These charters were destined especially for towns in the Alentejo, southern Beira and Portuguese Estremadura.⁽⁶⁾ The second family is the most original of the Portuguese charters, awarded primarily on the southwestern frontier in Estremadura both north and south of the Tejo. It was first given in the month of May, 1179 to Santarém, Lisbon and Coimbra. As was the case with the Trancoso and Évora families, it would be awarded liberally throughout the next four reigns. The Santarém military service laws provided the most extensive requirements to appear in the Portuguese municipalities in the Central [43] Middle Ages. Moreover, this military law reflects a second generation of frontier experience which gives it a sophistication not found in Trancoso or Évora. Older law concerned with defensive requirements, knightly archers and the status of aged knights is here combined with new material, focused for the first time on the tactical details of campaign and combat.⁽⁷⁾ These were regulations well suited to the additional manpower Afonso would need for the penetration of the Alentejo, born of the experience derived from the first generation of active frontier fighting. All three families of forais collectively stress an urgency heretofore absent from Portuguese municipal military law: the need to undertake offensive campaigning.

While the Portuguese chronicles were silent regarding any such activity on the part of town militias, the Muslim chroniclers, especially Ibn-cIdhârì, were certainly aware of their presence and spotlighted some of the combat actions which may have been related to these legal developments. The pressure exerted by Portugal on the Alentejo and Leonese Extremadura roused Almohad concern. In 1174 Serpa and Beja were retaken and repopulated by the Almohads. Emboldened by these successes, the Muslims of Seville, Beja and Serpa attacked the zone surrounding Alcáçer do Sal. A regional force sallied forth to meet them and a battle ensued. During the course of combat the Santarém militia arrived, catching the Islamic force off guard and turning the struggle into a rout of the Muslim army. The resultant alarm from this battle so discouraged the new settlers of Beja that they packed up and retreated to Mértola without awaiting a Christian assault. In 1180 the militias of Toledo and Santarém (Ibn-cIdhârì is unclear whether they were teamed or merely raiding separately) struck the region of the Guadalquivir while al-Mu'minin was directing a raid against Lisbon. In the following year a Muslim expedition marched into the Alentejo and laid siege to Évora, pinning the residents inside like "howling vixens." The entire campaign lasted from mid-May to late June, and Évora held despite battle losses and prisoners taken (400 men and 120 women). 1182-83 saw the militias of Santarém and Lisbon with both infantry and cavalry forces counter with an assault of their own against Sanlucar, launching algaras (raids), springing ambushes, killing Muslims and destroying crops before retreating with abundant booty.⁽⁸⁾

Two Muslim chroniclers rendered accounts of the Muslim assault on the prime troublemaker, Santarém, in June and July of 1184. The Muslim governor of Seville brought his Andalusian force to Badajoz, combining it with forces from Extremadura there, and then moved on to Santarém. The Muslim besiegers devastated the area around Santarém, destroying churches, crops and hamlets and routing the initial apelido sent out to [44] deal with the invaders. A more serious battle took place on July 2, with the Muslims breaking off combat after heavy losses. The Muslim commander Muhammad ibn Ibrâhìm, terminally ill, besought Allah for the gift of Santarém. Allah's apparent response was to take the commander's soul to heaven instead, and when one of the chief Muslim court officials defected to the Christian side, the besiegers became very discouraged. Finally autumn cold, rain and a swelling Tejo River doomed the project, and the Muslims withdrew empty-handed.⁽⁹⁾

One last twelfth-century raid involving Santarém was recounted from Muslim sources in 1190. In the summer of that year the Almohads moved out from Seville and Córdoba with Santarém as the initial target. Having devastated the cereals crop in the region, they then struck north some thirty kilometers across the Tejo to attack Torres Novas. King Sancho I arrived at Santarém with a relief force, and then turned north to pursue the invaders. Meanwhile, aided by the Templars the town of Torres Novas withstood a week's siege, causing the Almohads to withdraw, laden with booty, to the safety of Seville before Sancho I could intercept them.⁽¹⁰⁾ From the point of view of the Muslim writers, at least, the newly established and chartered Portuguese towns were beginning to perform outstanding service on Afonso I's southeast frontier.

In neighboring Leon during the approximately contemporary reign of Fernando II (1157-88), the surviving municipal record does not indicate a close parallel to the Portuguese model. The number of surviving municipal fueros with military references is far fewer than in Portugal for this period, matching the equally thin record for the municipal militias in the chronicles. In contrast to Portugal, the surviving narrative references are Christian, and are centered on the founding of Ciudad Rodrigo (c. 1160) and the reaction of Salamanca to that endeavor. Since the days of Alfonso VII, Salamanca had been an active frontier agent of combat, usually in cooperation with the king. Even during the initial struggle to populate the new town situated on the main road from Salamanca into Portugal toward Guarda, Salamanca's militia along with that of Zamora had joined Fernando II's relief expedition to save Ciudad Rodrigo, when the rebellious Fernando Ruiz de Castro with a combined force of Christian and Muslim renegades suddenly laid siege to the populace in 1160.

By 1162, the Salamancans had come to view the matter differently, and turned hostile to Ciudad Rodrigo when Fernando II began to build a fortress as a citadel for the town. When it became clear that Salamanca's [45] militia, led by Nuño Serrano, intended to march against Ciudad Rodrigo to tear down its fortress, the king attacked with his own force. Salamanca's army was defeated at Valmuza (near modern Salvatierra del Tormes), and Nuño was beheaded for his mischief. The revolt quelled, Fernando soon reinstated Salamanca in his favor. In 1166 the town's militia joined him on campaign against the Portuguese at Argañán and assisted the king once more in the taking of Alcántara in 1167.⁽¹¹⁾ We have no evidence that militias took part in Fernando's strike against Geraldo the Fearless at Badajoz in 1169 nor any indications of their contributions to the military frontier for the remainder of the monarch's rule.

The charters are equally thin both in numbers and military indications for Fernando II's reign. Among a group of charters which tend to exempt individuals from military service or non-service fining, Benavente obtained a fuero (variously dated from 1164 to 1183) that indicated both old and new trends. By now familiar exemptions from military service were provided for the ill, for those who had lost wives within a year, and for those who were on pilgrimage to Rome. Older residents were now permitted to send sons or nephews on campaign in their stead. But Benavente's most interesting precedent would have important implications for the future of the Leonese municipal military capability. Office holders or individuals who brought specific equipment to military campaigns could secure exemptions from service for other residents (provided they were not caballeros), presumably those whom they might name.⁽¹²⁾ In addition to the political clout acquired by town officials for this type of inverse patronage, granting excuses from service in return for equipment implied a new set of priorities for the Leonese monarchy: namely, a smaller, better-equipped force from the town was preferable to a more numerous but poorly-equipped militia contingent. Certainly there is little evidence to suggest in the comparative expansion rates of Castile versus Leon that Alfonso IX would have been correct in the assumption that this made for a more effective militia. But more problematically, this principle, once established, would appear repeatedly in the charters of the frontier Extremaduran towns in the next century. Therefore, one might advance an alternative explanation, arguing that royal concern over the capability of a town militia might dictate a curbing of such potentially dangerous municipal threats within the realm. The same royal conservatism could also explain the comparative lack of frontier advance in the Leonese kingdom even in the face of Portuguese, Castilian and Almohad expansionism.

East of Leon in Castile and Aragon, events moved much more rapidly both in the contest for the frontier and in institutional development. King Alfonso VIII's Castile and the turncoat Muslim prince Ibn-Mardanìsh of Murcia (known to Christians as King Lobo) seemed to rank as the Almohad priority targets, followed by pressure on the Tajo Valley to drive the Christian kings back into the Trans-Duero. The Christian enclave at the Mediterranean port of Almería soon fell along with Baeza, the advanced staging point for Christian raids into Andalusia.⁽¹³⁾ During the next several decades, the main battleground would be the lands south and east of Toledo: New Castile and La Mancha. In this zone, everything pivoted upon the ruler's making the time and finding the energy to take and retake fortresses and towns, as well as his generating the human resources to repopulate and defend what he had conquered. In this regard, the towns of the frontier were to play a vital role. We can infer from the scattered references in the chronicles and in royal documents which have survived that their military and settlement activity were widespread.⁽¹⁴⁾ However, the town of Ávila stands out especially, not only due to its active frontier status but because a chronicle of its deeds in this period, written in the thirteenth century, has survived. While the Crónicadelapoblación de Ávila might serve to distort that to his place in the frontier history of the twelfth century, many of the Abulense adventures contained there are substantiated in the Muslim chronicles, where Ávila also merits frequent reference both as victor and as vanquished. Had all of our sources survived, Ávila's true position in frontier warfare could be assessed more evenly. As matters stand, we can assume at least that the Abulense experience is representative of that encountered by a number of the municipalities of the Trans-Duero and the Tajo Valley.

The Abulense militia possessed a leader who must have matched the Fearless Geraldo of Portugal in his picturesque aspect if not in his romantic one. His name was Sancho Jimeno, called Hunchback (el Giboso) by the Christians and the Packsaddler (AbúuBardaca) by some Muslims. With his brother Gómez, Sancho the Hunchback was credited with leading some 25 raids against the Muslims from the 1140's until 1173. Sancho was in many ways the heir of Munio Alfonso, the great combat leader of Ávila in the 1130's and 1140's, and like him died heroically but tragically in combat. The Christian sources take note of Sancho's command of the Ávila militia for a raid against Seville in the latter part of Alfonso VII's reign, as well as others he led against the same city in 1158 and 1171.⁽¹⁵⁾ The spectacular nature of his last expedition with the [47] Abulense militia in 1173 drew citation from four Muslim sources, one of which mentions the "Friars" of a military order (ifrîr) who may have accompanied the militia on campaign. By one Muslim account, the Hunchback and his Abulense raiders had already struck deep into the Muslim south at Tarifa and Algeciras and returned home once that year. This second campaign took the force into central Andalusia, where it crossed the Guadalquivir at Palma del Río and laid waste to the region southwest of Córdoba. If they brought back even a substantial fraction of the 50,000 sheep and 2000 head of cattle attributed to their booty-taking by one Muslim source, they would have made a spectacular sight as they herded their animals and prisoners back across the Guadalquivir. They got no farther than the southern approach to the old fortress of Calatrava just north of the Muradal Pass in the Sierra Morena. Doubtless slowed down by the pace of their four-legged booty, Sancho and his militia were overtaken at Caracuel by an Almohad force mustered at Seville and reinforced at Córdoba. Unwilling to give up the profits of combat, the Christians gathered their herds and prisoners in a large cluster and made a stand against the numerically superior Almohads. Driven up the side of a mountain, the Hunchback and his followers fought to the last man while a handful of the Abulense militiamen who still survived in other parts of the battlefield fled the hopeless contest. The Muslims recovered all of the stolen animals and their kindred taken prisoner. The head of Sancho the Hunchback rode a spear back to Seville with an accompaniment of Muslim tambourines. Nonetheless, the Muslims paid Sancho the ultimate compliment by the great value they placed on the victory and the termination of his career.⁽¹⁶⁾ Possibly the grimmest indication of all of the extent of the Christian losses was the comparative silence of the Chronicle of Ávila regarding Abulense militia exploits for the next two decades.

Nor had the Almohads been sitting idly awaiting Christian raids during this period. Under Abú Yacqúb Yúsuf I, the Muslim caliph who had just crossed over from North Africa, they led an assault on King Lobo's Murcia in the spring of 1172, and with the death of Lobo accepted the surrender of Murcia. Yúsuf then moved to retake the sections of northern La Mancha which Lobo had granted to Castile, a drive which saw the capturing of the castles of Vilches and Alcaraz and was climaxed by the siege of the town of Huete. This was not a seasonal booty-gathering raid but an assault designed to capture critical strategic locations to anchor the Muslim frontier well north of Andalusia. Whether the Muslims would have simply destroyed Huete or attempted to resettle it, we do [48] not know. In either case they were to be frustrated. The young Alfonso VIII had just reinforced Huete and its militia a few weeks before, and the added numbers may explain why the Muslim force caught the town shy of supplies, particularly water. The attendant clergy of both sides besought the heavens for relief or submission, respectively. Forays and costly combats proved unavailing to force the capture or break the siege, and surrender terms could not be agreed upon. Then the arrival of an unusual summer rain front appeared on Sunday, refilling the cisterns of Huete and dampening the effectiveness of a Monday Muslim assault. Abú Yacqúb chided his troops for their lackluster fighting, which had persuaded Allah that they had not wanted victory keenly enough. The large and famished Muslim army then withdrew to neighboring Cuenca for resupply. Ultimately the Muslim force was to campaign in La Mancha and Murcia, and even attack the Tajo Valley near Toledo and Talavera before the year was out. The campaigns terminated as mere booty-gathering raids with no lasting impact on the frontier settlement pattern. Even Beja was lost to the fearless Geraldo and Portugal that year. The Almohad caliph accepted a seven-year truce with Alfonso VIII, which signaled the conclusion of a period of Muslim expansive frontier momentum.⁽¹⁷⁾

Shortly thereafter in 1177, the Castilian king violated this truce by assembling an expedition to lay siege to Muslim Cuenca, a town of great strategic significance since it functioned as a supply base for Andalusian expeditions in La Mancha (as at Huete) and controlled a crucial passage through the Iberian Cordillera to Aragon. The city, sitting astride the Júcar and Huécar river gorges on an extended ridge flanked by precipitous cliffs, was thought to be invulnerable by Ibn Sâhib al-Salâ who mentioned its "lofty citadel, unconquerable, whose height reached heavenward to touch the clouds." Apparently Alfonso's besieging forces were too large to be attacked directly by the Islamic musters available, and the historian Ibn-cIdhârì tells us instead the profitable raids that were launched that year against the Tajo Valley at Toledo and Talavera, almost certainly as a diversion to dissuade Alfonso from his project. These sources also note the 1177 raids of Ciudad Rodrigo and Talavera and the capture of a portion of the latter's militia when these Christian towns launched a counter-strike at Arcos and Jérez de la Frontera. What Ibn-cIdhârì and the Anonymous Chronicler of Madrid and Copenhagen do not mention is the failure of all of this 1177 activity to accomplished its basic mission, the relief of Cuenca or the capture of any other Christian towns in compensation. [49] Rather, Cuenca capitulated to Alfonso VIII on 21 September 1177 after a siege of several months.⁽¹⁸⁾ For the Almohads it was a major loss, and possession of the town substantially enhanced Castile's grip on La Mancha. As we have seen, Seville concentrated its campaigning efforts in the next few years against the Alentejo in Portugal, although the Muslim sources do note a raid of dubious success against Talavera in 1182, as well as a counter-strike by the militia of Toledo against Córdoba in the same year.⁽¹⁹⁾ Certainly the militias demonstrated that they could hold their own in raiding and in the defense of their region. It is difficult to imagine how Alfonso VIII could have taken Cuenca without being able to count on the municipalities to maintain the campaigning pressure throughout the remainder of his frontiers.

One of the primary considerations which persuaded Alfonso VIII to move against Cuenca was the potential threat constituted by his neighboring Christian monarch to the east, King Alfonso II of Aragon-Catalonia (Count Alfons I of Catalonia). The son of Count Ramon Berenguer IV and the grandson of King Ramiro, Alfonso II was the first person to rule these two highly diverse realms in his own right. Concluding his minority and receiving the king-count position in 1162, Alfonso soon acquired yet more territory with the acquisition of his uncle's lands in Provence in 1166. 1169 saw the conquest of Alfambra, and by 117l the king had established a settlement in Teruel, soon to prove his most redoubtable frontier town in the south.⁽²⁰⁾ Teruel could have been seen as a gateway for Aragon to take Cuenca and reopen the old claims of Alfonso I to Castilian lands and what was left of King Lobo's Murcian kingdom. Any possibilities for this development were stifled by Alfonso VIII's successful siege of Cuenca, a siege during which Alfonso II rendered assistance in exchange for the removal of the last vestiges of Castile's feudal suzerainty over Zaragoza. In the next two decades Alfonso II and Alfonso VIII made a number of agreements with each other over the future rights of conquest of the Muslim south, Castile to receive Murcia and Aragon Valencia.⁽²¹⁾ During the same period the two monarchs monitored each other's progress along their mutual Iberian Cordilleran frontier with great care.

During the course of the middle and later twelfth century, the development of the municipalities in the Cordilleran zone where Castilian and Aragonese competition was concentrated produced a large body of municipal law. The primary catalyst behind this emergence lay in the needs of the monarchs to populate and hold this zone and the bargaining power this necessity gave to the new settlers. By the end of the century the Aragonese town of Teruel and the Castilian town of Cuenca received charters which contained remarkably extended statements of the laws heretofore unprecedented. Further, the codes of Teruel and Cuenca are exceedingly similar to each other, and must have been generated [50] from a base formulary upon which both chanceries could draw as a model. That original formulary has long since been lost, and the relative input of Castilian versus Aragonese law into that collection is still much debated by institutional historians. These charters were destined to become the format for numerous subsequent fueros granted both in Castile and Aragon, spreading the law of the Cordillera into the lower Meseta. Further, these extended fueros seem to have had their impact in the Kingdom of Leon, as well. Shortly after the issuing of the Cuenca-Teruel charter, Alfonso IX appears to have granted an extended charter to Ciudad Rodrigo around 1190 or thereafter, not closely modeled after the eastern formulary but close enough to suggest influence from it into Leon. Here again a family of charters spawned from the Leonese formulary, of which versions survive for several towns in Leonese Extremadura and the Portuguese Alentejo.⁽²²⁾
 
 

How does all of this legal advance affect the combat capability of the militias? If we can assume that the earliest versions of Cuenca, Teruel and Ciudad Rodrigo were in place by the end of the twelfth century, then the first event which we can tie to the newly formalized militia laws is an unmitigated Christian military disaster, the battle of Alarcos of 1195. The Almohad Caliph al-Mansúr led an expedition across La Mancha in July of 1195 probably directed against Toledo and the Tajo Valley. King Alfonso VIII, unwilling to await reinforcement from his cousin Alfonso IX of Leon, moved south to Alarcos near the Guadiana River, where the Almohads sought to prevent a new fortress being constructed by the Order of Calatrava. Alfonso VIII's prompt arrival relieved that pressure at the cost of facing a numerically larger enemy. In the subsequent conflict, an attempt to break the Muslim center was parried by al-Mansúr's reserve, followed by the rapid deterioration of the Christian position. Alfonso VIII barely got away with his life in the ensuing rout, at the price of very heavy losses. The degree to which the municipal militias participated in this critical battle remains very much in doubt, although it is a commonplace among town historians to suggest that their particular Castilian municipality participated in the struggle. The only contemporary evidence of municipal participation in this disaster is the account in the Chronicle of Ávila citing Abulense service in the battle, service which took the lives of two hundred of the town's caballeros. Men of Ávila seem also to have served as Alfonso VIII's rear guard as he retreated to Sotillo.⁽²³⁾ However, the fact that Ávila's [51] militia was present at Alarcos strongly suggests a general muster of available military resources which probably included contingents from other municipalities, as well. Their identity and performance remain matters of conjecture.

Alarcos may tell us all too little concerning the level of municipal readiness for combat in the wake of the legal elaborations toward the end of the twelfth century, but the Muslim expeditions which followed the Almohad victory offer stronger indications that institutionalizing the municipal military contribution bore significant frontier dividends. The Muslims wisely followed up their victory at Alarcos with major expeditions in the summers of 1196 and 1197. The first came up from Seville through Extremadura, capturing the exposed frontier settlements at Montánchez, Trujillo and the newly-founded town of Plasencia as the defenders withdrew from the walls into the keep of the citadel, only to capitulate. The Muslims then struck the Tajo Valley towns, moving in turn against Talavera, Escalona, Maqueda, and devastating the area around Toledo (including a "pleasure residence" of King Alfonso VIII at Munia). Save a castle or two, this raiding gained the Almohads nothing as the Christian towns withstood the assaults.

The following year the Andalusians returned to the central Tajo district once more, this time testing the defenses of Maqueda and Toledo, and then swinging north into the Manzanares and Henares valleys to harass Madrid, Alcalá and Guadalajara, finally trying the walls and militias of the municipalities of upper La Mancha at Uclés, Huete, Cuenca, Alcaraz and Alarcón (these last in the process of receiving or soon to receive copies of the FuerodeCuenca). The AnalesToledanos likened the two years to a visitation of the "wrath of God." Doubtless the booty was comparatively rich and the disruption of town life substantial, but the Muslims achieved nothing of permanence save the fortresses of Alarcos and Calatrava gained in the wake of the great battle and their subsequent conquests in Extremadura early in 1196.⁽²⁴⁾ The Tajo Valley and La Manchan towns, without any assistance from Alfonso's depleted forces or the military orders, absorbed the shock of the post-Alarcos assaults and sufficiently discouraged al-Mansúr so as to persuade him to seek a truce with the King of Castile. A more classical example of deep-based defense would be difficult to find. Moreover, the municipal military capability constituted a decisive factor in the Christian kings being able to maintain their conquered territories even in the aftermath of disasters like Alarcos. To besiege the towns one by one took time and resources, and these were never sufficiently available to the Almohad caliphs, particularly when they had to consider [52] what mischief the other Iberian kingdoms and their North African tributaries might be plotting. There is a case to be made here that municipal military capacity and its legal maturity were indeed developing in close parallel.
 
 

The chronicles give no indications of military activity by the towns for the first decade of the thirteenth century, but this proved to be merely a pre-storm lull. By 1210, Alfonso VIII was again prepared to renew settlement pressure in La Mancha by settling Moya and the Castilian zones of Extremadura by settling Béjar. In May of 1211 Alfonso led a raiding force made up of the militias of Madrid, Guadalajara, Huete, Cuenca and Uclés down the Valencia road to attack Játiva and the Mediterranean coast. The Almohads responded by assaulting the castle of Salvatierra, the last Calatravan fortress deep in the south of La Mancha. While the knights of Calatrava held out against the extended siege in the summer of 1211, Alfonso VIII pressed his municipalities for a second time in that year to gather a relief army. Despite the fact that Alfonso VIII would be able to gather the same municipal militias utilized in the Júcar Valley castles later in October, sufficient assistance in July and August was not forthcoming, and the king had to stand by helplessly as Salvatierra capitulated by the end of summer.⁽²⁵⁾ However, for Muhammad an-Nâsir, the Almohad caliph, Salvatierra was a decidedly pyrrhic victory, since it both distracted him from further campaigning against a possibly vulnerable Castile for the remainder of that year, and because the fall of Salvatierra alarmed both the papacy and the Cistercian order, to whose organization the Calatravans were attached. Innocent III promptly assisted Alfonso VIII in the summoning of a great crusade which brought thousands of reinforcements across the Pyrenees, as well as the troops and personal leadership of Sancho VII of Navarre and Pedro II of Aragon to Alfonso's side. The result was a gathering of the largest Christian army in Spanish history in Toledo in June of 1212, assembling with the ostensible purpose of re-taking Salavatierra but with a far greater destiny to achieve as events unfolded. Included in the assemblage were a number of municipal militias which would enjoy a share of that destiny.

The huge expeditionary force proceeded south to the Guadiana Valley. After the capture of the Old Calatrava fortress, the July heat persuaded the Trans-Pyreneans, mostly Frenchmen, to return home well short of fulfilling their crusading vows. But Alfonso VIII drove onward with his Hispanic allies into southern La Mancha while receiving his first indications [53] that a massive Muslim army outnumbering his own reduced forces was gathering on the far side of the Sierra Morena beyond the Muradal Pass. In consultation with the other Christian leaders, Alfonso determined to engage in a decisive battle with the large Muslim relief army. Bypassing Salvatierra, Alfonso VIII made for the Muradal Pass, but discovered Muslim detachments had already arrived to occupy the vital passageway. The Christian army, stalled by this parry, encamped to consider returning to Toledo, but information provided by an old shepherd suggested an alternative route around Muradal Pass. Alfonso crossed the Sierra Morena and descended into Andalusia, arranging his forces for battle on the Navas (plains) of Tolosa immediately to the south of the mountain range. The stage was set for the greatest battle in the annals of the Reconquest.

Both sides apparently resorted to a conventional arrangement of their troops in three units along a line (a center and two wings) with a reserve held back. The Muslims also had an advance line of light skirmishers, whose provocative thrust at the Christian lines probably opened the battle. The number and disposition of the municipal militias at Las Navas, while the best described of any major battle until then, have remained somewhat uncertain due to the ambiguous surviving narratives and the numerous claims made by assorted municipal historians concerning their own town's role. Had all the municipal claimants produced their alleged forces along with the myriad of aristocratic families who claimed ancestors participating in the battle, the support column might well have extended back to Santander. This much seems clear by combining accounts: there were town forces in all three main battle lines, and specific reference is made to the militias of Ávila, Segovia, Medina del Campo and Toledo and their placement in the Christian right wing under the command of King Sancho the Strong of Navarre. Since other militia forces were collectively alluded to in the other wings of Alfonso VIII's forces, other towns must have contributed their militias, as well. We will probably never possess the complete list or deduce the full numbers involved.⁽²⁶⁾ The infantry detachments from the towns were mixed with cavalry forces in all wings, a mixture subsequently justified by King Alfonso in his letter to Pope Innocent III as needed to secure his flanks from envelopment. There may have been another reason in addition. The Archbishop of Toledo Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, King Alfonso's companion throughout the battle, tells us that the king began to voice fears in the early phases of engagement that his unsophisticated [54] infantry forces might break under combat pressure and flee the battlefield.⁽²⁷⁾ Given the course of events which followed, the archbishop appears to have used historian's hindsight to frame this prophetic remark.

Las Navas began in earnest when the Christian forces began a full-scale advance against the Muslim skirmishing line and scattered it while moving toward the main Islamic lines. The two forces then engaged and grappled in indecisive combat. In time Muhammad an-Nâsir committed a portion of his reserve with the initial effect of buckling the Christian lines, causing some of the Christians to flee. While it was not clear who was involved in the flight, townsmen, nobles, or military orders (all these had experience in battlefield flight prior to Las Navas), the threat was sufficient for King Alfonso to consider ending his life in the center of the fray rather than survive another loss such as Alarcos. But Archbishop Rodrigo, again with the prophetic hindsight of his post-battle history, rejoined that triumph, not disaster, was Castile's destiny that day. The archbishop's portion of the reserve and the Toledan standard were committed to the conflict at that point, while the fleeing Christians were persuaded to return to the yet undecided battle. The lines stabilized once more, and indeed began to bend in the opposite direction when the Andalusian Muslims began to give ground and flee. The Muslim loss of momentum had unnerved Muhammad an-Nâsir. When a detachment of Christians approached his battlefield position and broke through his line of chained Negro bodyguards, the Muslim caliph himself broke into headlong flight toward Jaén. By now the North African Almohad and Arabic units were retreating, a retreat which quickly evolved into a disastrous rout with the Muslims taking heavy losses of men and battle gear, during a pursuit which lasted into the evening. The Christian army then re-grouped during the following day to assess the number of Muslim dead and the profits to be taken from the field. The booty taken by the Christians was enormous, so much so that one observer insisted that two thousand asses were insufficient to carry it away. While assessments of the performance of the municipal militias at Las Navas vary, it is difficult to see how Alfonso VIII could have won without the troops mounted and unmounted that they provided.⁽²⁸⁾ He was certainly impressed sufficiently with their contribution to use their forces for the remainder of that year and to call on them for the third year running in 1213.

In the follow-up campaigning for the remainder of the summer of 1212, Alfonso VIII concentrated on the capturing and garrisoning of fortresses which would assure that the passageway forced into [55] Andalusia would remain secure. The upper Andalusian towns of Baeza and Úbeda were captured, their walls dismantled and fields devastated, and the population of the latter carried off into slavery. Córdoba, Jaén and Granada sent forces to attempt recapture of the fortresses of Baños, Tolosa and Ferral, but the Muslims were stymied by the Christian municipal militias of Toledo, Madrid and Huete.⁽²⁹⁾ Finally, the plague which ensued from the spreading death and destruction accomplished what the Muslims could not, and the growing illness in the Christian ranks persuaded the Castilian king to return to the victorious celebration awaiting in Toledo.

1213 proved a busy year for the militias and Alfonso remained active on the frontier as well, despite the gradual onset of the terminal illness which took his life in 1214. The combination of disease, a hard winter in 1212-13 and a drought in the spring and summer of 1213 made it difficult to even hold on to, to say nothing of expand on, the gains of the previous year. Nonetheless, in February of 1213 Alfonso VIII led a hueste which included the militias of Madrid, Guadalajara, Huete, Cuenca and Uclés to the capture of the Júcar fortresses of Las Cuevas and Alcalá. From March through May the Castilian king besieged and captured the key crossroads town of Alcaraz with the aid of the militias of Toledo, Maqueda and Escalona. By July, the Talaveran militia was off on its own expedition into Andalusia, but was badly beaten by a Muslim force under the governor of Seville near Alcalá de Guadaira, who took much of the Talaveran force prisoner. Following the reckless example of Talavera, the son of the governor of Córdoba led a mixed force of Andalusians and Berbers in a raid north of the Tajo in September. Initially the Muslims were quite successful, but acquisition of booty slowed their progress and they were overtaken by the reinforced Toledo militia. The Córdoban force lost its booty and many of its members lost their lives. The victorious Toledans bore the lorigas (mail jackets), horses and heads of the vanquished back to their town in triumph.⁽³⁰⁾ The death of Alfonso VIII in 1214 and the untimely death of his son Enrique I in 1217 meant that no further advance would be made in the wake of Las Navas de Tolosa in the immediate future. However, much that would be accomplished by Alfonso's grandson Fernando III in the next thirty-five years had been made possible by the achievements of the military forces so adroitly harnessed in these few critical years by the king of Castile. Clearly, the municipal militias had been a vital component of those frontier forces.

The second decade of the thirteenth century witnessed the passing of a number of significant milestones in the Iberian Peninsula. The kings of Portugal (Sancho I), Castile (Alfonso VIII and Enrique I) and Aragon-Catalonia [56] (Pedro II-Pere I) died, resulting in a transition of power to younger hands in those realms. Alfonso IX and Sancho VII the Strong continued their rule in Leon and Navarre, respectively, but were ever more hemmed in by the expansion of their neighbors. For Sancho of Navarre the containment was virtually total, but Alfonso IX attempted to maintain his options on southern expansion while exerting pressure against the eastward expansion of Castile. The total absorption of Leon by Castile was not yet inevitable. The great enterprise at Las Navas in 1212 had borne fruit for all of the peninsular monarchs in renewed opportunities for expansion at the expense of the thoroughly disrupted Islamic states, which were slipping into a disunity even Almohad determination could not arrest. Indeed, that determination became increasingly enervated by political and religious uncertainty resulting from al-Ma'mun's proclamation against the infallibility of Ibn-Túmart, the founder of the fierce orthodoxy of the Almohad Berbers. Al-Ma'mun, the former governor of Córdoba and Seville, thereby provoked widespread disagreement and self-doubt among the Almohad leaders, giving one more example of the highly cultivated civilization of Muslim Hispania providing the shoals on which North African puritanism floundered.⁽³¹⁾

The Almohad succession crisis sparked widespread revolt on the part of the Spanish Muslims of al-Andalus after 1224. Thus, Spanish Islam moved from stubborn resistance to factious disarray in the thirty-five years after Las Navas, while the Christian monarchs intensified their pressure and sought to obtain greater unity of purpose. The result was an age of spectacular military successes for Portugal, Leon, Castile and the federated Crown of Aragon, a harvest of victories in which the urban militias of all four realms had a hand in the reaping. The Kingdom of Navarre had become moribund as a frontier state by 1217, and King Sancho the Strong had rendered his last great contribution to the Reconquest with his outstanding performance at Las Navas. Such urban combat of which we have record seems largely to have taken place between the French and Basque barrios of Pamplona, which saw King Sancho and Bishop Ramiro hard at work on pacification in 1222. ⁽³²⁾ The military precedents in Navarrese fueros virtually disappear for the remainder of the century. For the other Christian kingdoms, however, the frontiers lay open and the opportunities beckoned.
 
 

For Leon, most of the town militia activity of the preceding decades seems to have focused on the borders of their Christian neighbors, doubtless due to [57] the expansive pressures coming from Portugal in the west and Castile in the east, countered by King Alfonso IX's tendency to remain at peace with the Almohads. The Primera Crónica General occasionally cites the combat against the Muslims of a particular town's militia, such as Plasencia, during the earlier part of Alfonso IX's reign.⁽³³⁾ However, this does not seem to have been typical of the Leonese town militias and Plasencia was granted a charter of the Cuencan type and mustered by the king of Castile. The role of Ciudad Rodrigo as a strong point against the Portuguese has already been noted, and the only other evidence we have derives from Ávila's town chronicle, which mentions border skirmishes of that Castilian town's active militia with their old rivals, the Leonese militias of Salamanca and Alba de Tormes during the reign of Enrique I. This activity seemed to have peaked with a major raid of Leonese forces headed by Alfonso IX's brother Sancho Fernández in 1217, which included the militias of Salamanca, Alba de Tormes, Toro and Salvatierra de Tormes. The Ávila militia apparently dispatched the entire force and sent them retreating into the Kingdom of Leon.⁽³⁴⁾ Once Fernando III was solidly positioned on the throne of Castile, the Archbishop of Toledo with papal backing arranged peace between the father and son monarchs of Leon and Castile, and the elder Alfonso IX took the Cross and turned his attention to the south. With the assistance of the military orders of Calatrava, Santiago and the Order of Alcántara (recently placed in the custody of the Order of San Julián del Pereiro but known by the former name hereafter) and in all probability the militias of the more active Leonese towns, the king sought to relieve pressure on the Tajo Valley frontier with a major thrust toward the Guadiana Valley. The central impediment to Alfonso's progress along the old Roman Silver Road to the south was the town of Cáceres. Muslim Cáceres was besieged initially and unsuccessfully in 1218-19, pressured again by continuing campaigns during 1220 to 1222, and besieged once more in 1223, again without success. The Almohad succession crisis of 1224 generated new opportunities, and Cáceres was besieged again in 1227, this time successfully.⁽³⁵⁾

The acquisition of Cáceres combined with a major victory in the area over the renegade Almohad Ibn-Húd from Murcia at Alange served to pull out the linchpin of Muslim resistance in the entire lower Guadiana. By 1230 Alfonso IX was positioned before Mérida. Despite the gradual onset of his terminal illness, the king pressed the siege vigorously, again fending off a relief army under Ibn-Húd. The militia of Zamora earned particular merit for itself during the siege by capturing the Roman bridge across the Guadiana, [58] an action which opened Mérida for the taking. In gratitude for this, Alfonso IX authorized the adding of a representation of the Mérida bridge to its city shield. Moreover, a contemporary stone plaque commemorating Zamoran valor at Mérida was installed on the Puerta de Olivares in Zamora, the eroded remains of the inscription still visible.⁽³⁶⁾ The summer of 1230 saw yet more striking gains with the Leonese capture of Montánchez and finally Badajoz, the old Muslim principality which had traditionally managed the defense of the entire lower Guadiana. Alfonso IX had signaled the towns and military orders to be ready for campaigns in the winter of 1230-31, but his death in September precluded further Leonese advances against the lower Guadiana for two decades.⁽³⁷⁾ At that point with the aid of rapid diplomacy, Fernando III of Castile, the only son of Alfonso IX, reunited the Kingdom of Leon to that of Castile. Henceforth, Castilian territorial priorities prevailed.
 
 

The young Fernando III had spent his early years of rule consolidating his grip on his newly-won realm in the wake of the sudden death of his cousin Enrique I. Between that time and the opportunity presented by the death of his father in 1230, Fernando was active on his own frontiers. Again, the Almohad succession crisis seemed to have provided the spark. In 1224, Fernando attacked and sacked Quesada in the upper Guadalquivir Valley with the assistance of the militias of Ávila and Huete. The king formed a more impressive expedition in 1225 targeted for upper Andalusia and Granada. This expedition included the militias of Ávila, Segovia, Cuéllar and Sepúlveda, the veteran militias of the towns north of the Central Sierras. The army crossed through the Muradel Pass and tested the defenses of Jaén. When that city resisted their siege, Fernando struck south on the road to Granada, taking Priego and Loja en route. A tribute from the thoroughly-alarmed Granadans persuaded the Christian monarch to return to Jaén, where he dismissed his municipal contingents.⁽³⁸⁾ In that same summer, operating independently in the southeastern zone, Alfonso Tellez and the bishop of Cuenca led the militias of Cuenca, Huete, Moya and Alarcón on a long foray against Valencia and Murcia. These town militias were all products of the more recent conquests and resettlements of the eastern cordilleran frontier and recipients of the long Cuencan fuero. The culmination of this Valencian [59] and Murcian expedition was a major conflict against the combined regional forces of Murcia and Seville at Aspe near the town of Murcia. The Christians routed the defenders, due in the view of the Muslim source to the inexperience of the Sevillians and the cowardice of their leader, cAlì Ibn-Aarkì.⁽³⁹⁾

Whatever the reason for the triumph, the municipal militias were demonstrating a capability for a variety of regional musters, and providing a resource able to apply pressure on different frontiers simultaneously. The Ávila militia, possibly in the company of units from other towns, participated in the siege of Jaén in 1230. The Abulenses initially took heavy losses in a position exposed to fire from the wall, until Fernando repositioned them at a safer distance. They then launched a number of raids during the siege, but again Jaén held firm in the hands of the Muslim defenders.⁽⁴⁰⁾ Any disappointment arising from this frustration for King Fernando was soon forgotten, however. On his return from Jaén, the Castilian king learned of his father Alfonso IX's death, and knew that the Kingdom of Leon with all of its recent conquests, resources and its militias were soon to be his to utilize in future frontier efforts.

Once the Kingdom of Leon was successfully reunited to Fernando III's Kingdom of Castile, the king was not slow to test the new municipal militias now at his disposal. Renewing his pressure on Upper Andalusia in 1233, Fernando besieged Úbeda and called up the Leonese militias of Toro, Zamora, Salamanca and Ledesma (all situated well to the northwest in the Trans-Duero south of the Duero River) to assist him in this undertaking. Their service term expired prior to the end of the siege, but Úbeda succumbed to the king's forces after their departure.⁽⁴¹⁾ Nonetheless, Fernando may have learned an important lesson here in the use of the town militias in the maintenance of a siege. Unlike a full-scale battle in the field, where the maximum force is needed for a vigorous effort at one point in time, sieges required a concerted effort of fewer effectives over an extended period. Since time limitations on military service were written into the municipal fueros and were thus a reality with which the king had to deal, sieges required a manipulation of the urban resource if they were to be effective for the numerous assaults on the Andalusian towns which the monarch envisioned in the decades ahead. In 1235, some unspecified municipal concejos sent forth contingents to assist Alvar Pérez and the king in their assault on Ibn-Húd in Andalusia.⁽⁴²⁾ However, a far richer prize soon beckoned. An isolated group of warriors secured a suburb of the old Umaiyad capital of Córdoba in January of 1236, and called for help when they were [60] besieged by the other residents of the city. Fernando braved winter roads and swollen rivers to make his way to the city, and a full-scale siege of Córdoba soon developed.

Possibly drawing on the experience at Úbeda three years earlier, the Castilian monarch appears to have rotated the service terms of his militias for the first time so that the first arriving detachments from some towns would have their places taken once their terms had expired by those concejos which came later. The Castilian contingents from Cuenca and Baeza had gotten to Córdoba by February. The Leonese towns of Salamanca, Zamora and Toro had arrived by early April, to be followed by forces from Madrid and other unspecified municipal militias from Castile, Leon and Galicia in the same month. By June, the service terms of even the later arrivals had begun to run out, but Fernando avoided the kind of frustration which had dogged him in the sieges of Jaén by threatening to give Córdoba to Ibn al-Ahmar, a former ruler of the city whom the citizens had exiled, unless Córdoba surrendered promptly. This ploy succeeded, and Ibn-Húd gave the city up on June 30. Even so, the militia of Segovia appeared in the wake of the surrender with relief supplies. As events unfolded, the Segovians helped supervise the occupation of the city in lieu of besieging it.⁽⁴³⁾ The principle of a staged muster of the militias to man an extended siege had worked well, indeed, in the capture of the ancient Muslim capital.

Within a decade, the militias were mustered once more for a siege, this time of the stubborn bastion of Jaén. The campaign opened in 1244 with an raid led against the supply line from Granada to Jaén by Alfonso de Molina, an assault force made up of the recently-founded militias of Baeza, Úbeda, Jódar and Quesada. By this time the entire eastern flank of this zone had been lost to Islam by Prince Alfonso's conquest of the Kingdom of Murcia, so that Jaén was exposed to Christian attack as never before. By 1246, Fernando III besieged Jaén itself, aided by a number of municipal militias, some of which assisted in the use of a battering ram. Ávila's militia engaged in much of the combat, including an assault on the Fonsario gate, and suffered heavy losses. By early spring Jaén had capitulated, and the ceremony of formal entry and occupation with its attendant pomp staged ten years earlier at Córdoba was repeated here at Jaén, again with the standards of the militias in prominent view.⁽⁴⁴⁾ Fernando and council then considered the course of future campaigns, Granada being eliminated by the Leonese-Castilian king's alliance with the King of Granada as a part of the surrender agreement at Jaén. The Christians resolved to begin the drive down the valley of the Guadalquivir toward the last great prize in that direction, Seville.

By late summer of 1246 a raiding force struck at Seville, an expedition which included the recently-formed militia of Córdoba and 500 mounted troops from Fernando's Granadan ally. By 1247, we have the first indications of the use of the Leonese Extremaduran militias [61] in the lower Andalusian campaigns, as Coria, Granadilla, Cáceres, Montánchez and Medellín assisted in the taking of Carmona, a fortified town just to the east of Seville which was crucial in its regional defense.⁽⁴⁵⁾ Early in 1248, Ramón Bonifaz commenced to assemble a blockading fleet, drawn from the Cantabrian towns and the real beginning of the Castilian navy, in the Guadalquivir west of Seville to sever a major source of potential Muslim relief coming from North Africa. When the Sevillans responded by attacking the ships from the banks of the Guadalquivir, Fernando III sent a relief contingent to reinforce Bonifaz which included concejo militias. Once Seville was placed under siege, the Christian monarch probably utilized his municipal militias in much the same fashion that he had developed against Córdoba twelve years earlier in the system of a staged muster. However, the accounts in the various chronicles are less clear on this subject in the siege of Seville. Córdoba's militia had arrived by June and there is reference to the presence of Madrid's militia as well, along with that of the Extremaduran militias which served against Carmona.⁽⁴⁶⁾ Beyond that, one can only surmise the full extent of the participation of the municipalities in this greatest of King Fernando's conquests. Seville capitulated in December of 1248, and Fernando promptly set about the large task of distributing the city and its territories among the victors. Fernando III's death in 1252 concluded a spectacular age which had seen the Muslim heartland of Andalusia absorbed completely into Leonese-Castilian control, an age in which the municipal militias had contributed a full measure of their capabilities to this cause.
 
 

The achievement was not less spectacular to the East in Aragon-Catalonia. Here King Jaime I (Count Jaume I of Barcelona) would earn the title "Conqueror" as his sobriquet in response to a career which fully merited that accolade. Together he and Fernando constituted the twin engines which powered the Reconquest through its most decisive phase. However, prior to launching any of his historic campaigns, Jaime had to bring stability to the realm so long hampered by his extended minority and its attendant regency. Jaca played a large role in this work within its own region, as evidenced by pacts of peace made by the concejo of that city from 1215 to 1217 and the gratitude extended to them for this by Jaime.⁽⁴⁷⁾ Moreover, the royal Corts of 1218 at Villafranca, Tortosa in 1225 and Barcelona in 1228 all placed townsmen specifically under the protection of the royal peace.⁽⁴⁸⁾ The towns of the Upper Ebro, possessing [62] their own armies and able to act on their own behalf, on occasion took independent action to halt the disorder and lawlessness which still bedeviled Jaime's early years. Putting one in mind of a typical Castilian hermandad or town alliance, Huesca, Jaca and Zaragoza combined to deal with such problems in a pact of 1226. Jaime apparently considered this kind of banding together as much a threat as the lawlessness which provoked it, and he chastised the three towns for taking this step in 1227.⁽⁴⁹⁾ As late as 1238 the municipal government of Jaca was still attempting to ease the disruptions by passing arms control ordinances within the city.⁽⁵⁰⁾

Once Jaime freed himself of such early encumbrances and was able to launch his first major campaign of expansion against the island and town of Mallorca, he could draw little upon this interior Aragonese military tradition. He utilized instead his Catalan feudal retinues and such military forces as the towns could grant him from the Catalan coast. In addition to Lleida on the Segre, Jaume seems to have drawn forces from Tarragona, Girona and Barcelona, or at least the episcopal clergy, deacons and sacristans of those towns offered substantial forces.⁽⁵¹⁾ How much of this consisted of feudal forces under clerical control as against any available municipal militiamen remains difficult to say, but the substantial number of infantrymen offered increased the likelihood that townsmen were involved. We know that in addition to these forces the Catalan towns offered naval assistance to ease the normal royal problem of going to the north Italian towns to obtain that type of aid. Once the siege of Mallorca had been undertaken, we hear of Lleidans engaged in filling the city's moat and of the dramatic assault of some Barcelonan footsoldiers who seized key sections of the walls as an immediate prelude to Mallorca's capture.⁽⁵²⁾ Mallorca would have offered a readily attractive objective for the Catalan towns, especially Barcelona. However, the next thrust for Jaime was targeted for a large and contiguous territorial state: Valencia. The Catalan resources, still committed to the absorption and settlement of the Balearic prize, would be insufficient for the new enterprise.

For this phase of Aragonese expansion Jaime drew heavily on the municipal militias of the upland interior. The Corts of Monzón in 1236 indicated some division of opinion regarding the advisability of the Valencian campaign on the part of Lleida, Tortosa, Zaragoza, Teruel, Daroca, Calatayud, Tarazona, Huesca and Barbastro which sent representations.⁽⁵³⁾ The towns of Teruel, Daroca and Zaragoza were nonetheless destined to make major military contributions to the undertaking. In truth, they [63] already had done so. Teruel's militia had been present for the assault on Ares and Morella in 1233, and forces from Teruel and Daroca were a part of the royal host which besieged and captured Burriana in the same year, with forces from Zaragoza, Calatayud, Lleida and Tortosa arriving after the conquest.⁽⁵⁴⁾ When Jaime moved against the key fortress overlooking the approaches to Valencia at Puig de Santa Maria in 1236, the militias of Teruel, Zaragoza and Daroca volunteered for extra duty in reconstructing the walls of that citadel after its capture. When the garrison suffered severe losses to the Muslim relief army which tried to retake Puig, seventy to eighty light cavalrymen from Teruel rode quickly to the site on their own volition to ease the impact of this attrition.⁽⁵⁵⁾ In addition to the militias of Teruel, Daroca and Zaragoza available at Valencia, Jaime received assistance from the towns of Alcañiz and Castellote, located on the Guadalope River northeast of Teruel to the north of the Sierra of Gúdar. On occasion municipal enthusiasm created unwanted complications in the campaign against Valencia itself, as with the instance of Jaime's request that some townsmen give over an advanced spearhead they had taken and were eagerly sub-dividing among themselves.⁽⁵⁶⁾ Jaime had a far more systematic partition of Valencia and her lands in mind. The contemporary chronicles made it clear that Jaime was able to harvest the fruit of the Cordilleran Aragonese municipal militias which had been planted by Alfonso el Batallador and nurtured to maturity by Alfonso II (Alfons I) at Teruel.

Thus, Valencia's submission in 1238 and the acquisition of that city's material and territorial wealth by the king-count was very much the product of a combined effort on the part of all of the Aragonese-Catalan military resources, municipalities included. The differing natures of these two municipal traditions, the upland Aragonese kingdom and the coastal Catalan county, are elaborated in Appendix B. The surviving charters and chronicles tell us far more about the contribution of the former than the latter. Yet, the generous allotments for settlement in Valencia granted to Barcelona, Tortosa, Tarragona, and even the trans-Pyrenean town of Montpellier suggest rewards for substantial military service rendered during the conquest of the city. Nevertheless, the forms of military service which such towns could have utilized to muster for Valencian duty remain hidden from us. Thus, Jaime possessed two forms of municipal military components for the drive on Valencia: one group with clearly delineated laws and traditions which commands a significant portion of his Chronicle by its exploits, and another whose legal foundation and particular deeds have been left largely unrecorded, save for isolated indications of their role in the conquest of Mallorca.
 
 

On the other side of the Peninsula in Portugal, territorial expansion advanced with a speed equal to that of Leon-Castile and Aragon in the period, but our narrative evidence is virtually non-existent. The [64] surviving Christian chronicles are late and offer little information on town militias. The Muslim chronicles make a substantial contribution to filling this information gap in the later twelfth century, but maintain less interest in the Portuguese frontier during the thirteenth. Thus we are left with the pattern of town charter grants and renewals during the two very troubled reigns of Afonso II (1211-23) and his son Sancho II (1223-45, died 1248) to offer some indication of the rate of progress in expansion. Of the narrative exploits of town militias, we have none. Yet they must have been active, since both in renewals and in new charters the military obligation for townsmen continues to be as predominant as in the days of Afonso I and Sancho I. Towns continued to receive awards of the three major families of charters (Trancoso, Évora and Santarém), although increasingly these were granted by persons other than the king.⁽⁵⁷⁾

As with the other peninsular Christian monarchs, internal difficulties prevented Afonso II from seizing prompt initiative in frontier expansion after the battle of Las Navas. By 1217, however, aided by a large force of Rhenish and Dutch crusaders on their way to Egypt for the Fifth Crusade, Afonso was able to besiege and retake Alcáçer do Sal, aided in part by the fine performance of the militia of Palmela. Through the acquisition of this key port and Muslim base between the western Ribatejo and Alentejo, the king allied with the military orders was able to resume pressure on the Alentejo and reestablish municipal military bases beyond the Tejo River frontier once more.⁽⁵⁸⁾ The advance has traditionally thought to have been quite modest, but should be moderately reassessed in the light of Afonso's reconfirmations of forais, which indicate the extension of his territorial grip. The old salient at Évora had held all through the years of Almohad reconquest, and was now for the first time substantially reinforced. In 1219 the frontier advanced further with the reacquisition of Marmelar 55 kilometers southeast of Évora near the Guadiana River and the reconfirmation of its foral.⁽⁵⁹⁾ If Afonso II was not leading the armies which retook these towns in person, he certainly took a prompt interest in establishing his law and his militias in these regions. Also, while the military orders were beginning to lay claim to the waste and grazing lands of the Alentejo, the king maintained an interest in the charters of the frontier towns. The monarch's reconfirmations may well have had as a part of their motivation the restatement of the military obligations for the older towns further back from the frontier, possibly sought as a means to balance his resources against those of the military orders on the frontier.

The reign of Sancho II (1223-45) proved both longer and no less troubled. His relationship with the Portuguese church exceeded even the unhappy level [65] established by his father, and was ultimately climaxed by his deposition through an alliance of the bishops, the papacy, some rebellious nobles and his younger brother Afonso. Unlike his father, Sancho was active on the frontier particularly along the emerging boundary with Leon-Castile. Possibly sensing a threat to his Guadiana frontier during Alfonso IX's last years given the Leonese king's lack of male heirs, Sancho II awarded charters to the frontier towns north of the Tejo (Marvão, Sortelha, Idanha-a-Velha and Salvaterra) between 1226 and 1230 and climaxed his efforts by garrisoning Elvas near the Guadiana in 1230 in the wake of the fall of Badajoz to Leon.⁽⁶⁰⁾ Sancho then struck across the Guadiana to take Moura and Serpa in 1232, thereafter turned his attention to the lower Alentejo and the eastern Algarve at the mouth of the Guadiana, taking the coastal towns of Cacela and Tavira in 1239. The monarch's conflict with the church overtook events at this juncture, and he was unable to pursue his plans for the conquest of the western Algarve, a task left for his brother Afonso III. Much of the actual work of conquest was in the hands of the military orders, a fact evidenced not only by their considerable acquisitions in the Alentejo but also by their increasing use of the Évora-Ávila model charter which they granted to the growing number of municipalities under their control.⁽⁶¹⁾ But contemporaries witnessed the loss of royal initiative in the Portuguese Reconquest. Royal absence from the conquests caused these events to be so poorly chronicled. Similarly, royal distractions permitted the military orders to become the dominant property holders and the controllers of the expansion program in the south. The Leonese-Castilian expansion experienced some of these same forces at work, although with a different blending of power blocs.
 
 

The panorama of municipal militia evolution and achievement at the mid-thirteenth century could be characterized essentially as a spread of older forms into newly reconquered areas, a generalization which applies in Portugal, the Crown of Aragon and Leon-Castile. The success of the Christian offensive was in large part a testimony to the effective functioning of the municipal institutions and the townsmen who gave them life, specifically cited for their achievements in the chronicles of Leon-Castile and Aragon, and almost certainly making an additional unrecorded [66] but nonetheless significant contribution in Portugal. The era also marked a closer relationship between the frontier military orders and the towns to whom they increasingly granted fueros in lieu of the king, especially in Portugal and Leon-Castile. As the result of the conquest, the great regional systems of municipal law, those of Cuenca-Teruel, Toledo, Coria Cima-Coa, Évora-Ávila and Santarém, would have the opportunity to spread their influence into the newly conquered lands, although with unequal impact. The use of such diverse forces on the frontier bred its own risks. The towns often utilized their bargaining position as frontier maintainers to obtain as many grants, privileges and immunities as they could from their lord, and the Castilian monarchy would come to see a charter format such as Cuenca as potentially threatening to royal prerogatives and effective centralization of rule. Certainly the municipal possession of a military force and the authorization to use it presented risks of independent activity that could be a problem even in a period of strong kingship.

The aggressiveness of old combat towns like Ávila and Segovia did not always diminish in periods of peace, given the temptation to expand the zone of one's grazing lands and the size of one flocks. Plasencia expended substantial concern regarding the pressures felt from her neighbors at the western end of the Gredos Mountains, working out her conflicts with Escalona in a charter of c. 1200, forming a hermandad (brotherhood, alliance) with Talavera against Ávila in 1248, and even refusing to permit any Abulense to settle in the lands of Plasencia. Segovia's expansive tendencies caused temporary loss of lands even to Toledo and her differences with Madrid required Fernando's personal intervention to secure the military contingents from the two militias for the attack on Seville in 1248.⁽⁶²⁾ Nor was Castile the only kingdom to experience municipal aggressiveness and mutual alliance efforts. Zaragoza, Huesca and Jaca had formed a mutual aid pact in 1226 to defend their collective interests, an initiative countered by King Jaime in the following year. Salamanca's fuero notes salaries for medianeros (adjusters, negotiators) who go to attend juntas with the towns of their vicinity in Leon. Even in Portugal, the question of common grazing rights led to conflict between Santarém and Évora.⁽⁶³⁾ This municipal independence was largely the result of the militarization and frontier aggressiveness of these towns, part of the price to be paid for creating such enterprises to aid in the Reconquest. So visible had been their contribution that a contemporary Muslim geographer's description of Christian Spain paid little heed to the [67] nature of the political kingdoms and a great deal of attention to the towns and their environs. For him it seemed the natural way for a Muslim to perceive Christian Hispania.⁽⁶⁴⁾ It was, therefore, the effective absorption of these conquests and the taming of these frontier towns that would concern the latter part of Jaime I's reign, and the new kings of Portugal and Castile, Afonso III and Alfonso X, in the decades to come.

1.  For bibliographical surveys of the foundation of the military orders, see: Bishko, "Spanish and Portuguese Reconquest," 418. Also, Lomax, The Reconquest of Spain, 182.

2.  Bishko, "Reconquest," 414-15.

3. PCG, 2:674. Nogales-Delicado, Historia de Ciudad Rodrigo, 43-58.

4.  "Foral de Trancoso," 1:326-27. "Foral de Marialva," 1:328-30. "Foral de Aguiar-da-Beira," 1:331-33. "Foral de Celorico da Beira," 1:334, 336. "Foral de Moreira," 1:337. "Carta de foral concedida aos habitantes de Mós," 1:363, 365. "Carta de foral outorgada aos povoadores de Linhares," 1:385-87. Of the above six forais, Aguiar-da-Beira, Celorico and Moreira cite their derivation from Salamanca in the text of their charters, as Trancoso. Marialva cites its derivation from Trancoso, while Mós and Linhares list no derivative. See James F. Powers, "The Creative Interaction of Portuguese and Leonese Military Law, 1055-1279," Speculum, forthcoming.

5.  Bishko, "Reconquest," 414-16. Lomax, Reconquest, 113-15. AMC, 3-6, gives us a Muslim account, although omitting Geraldo.

6.  "Foral de Évora," 1:371. "Foral outorgado aos moradores de Abrantes," 1:451. "Carta pela qual se concede aos povoadores de Coruche," 1:466-67. "Foral de Palmela, 1185," 1:481. The original charter of Ávila has not survived in original or copied form. Its potential origins are discussed in Chapter One (pp. - ). There was no precursor such as Numão, and Évora was the earliest known copy. Abrantes, Coruche and Palmela all cite their derivation from Évora in the text of their charters. See Powers, Portuguese and Leonese Municipal Military Law," forthcoming, and Gama Barros, História da administração pública, 3:61-63.

7.  "Foral de Santarém," 1179," 1:438-39. "Foral de Lisboa, 1179," 1:443-44. "Foral de Coimbra, 1179," 1:447-49. "(Foral de) Miranda da Beira," 1:373-74. "Carta a favor dos moradores de Arouce (Louzã)," 1:287-88. "Carta foral concedida aos moradores de Sintra," 1:300-03. Sintra lacks the knight archer law. Gama Barros, História, 3:65-67. Powers, "Portuguese and Leonese Municipal Military Law," forthcoming.

8.  IIM, 2:21, 38-41. AMC, 9-10.

9.  IIM, 2:70-73. AMWM, 4:210-11. AMC, 32-35.

10.  "Relation d'un raid d'Abû Yûsuf Yacqûb au Portugal," 28:64-65.

11. PCG, 2:674. Nogales, Ciudad Rodrigo, 43-44. Hernández Vegas, Ciudad Rodrigo, 15-16. Villar y Macías, Historia de Salamanca, 1:102-04. González, Regesta de Fernando II, 50-52.

12.  "Fuero de Benavente, 1164-83," 2:626. The remainder of the sources discuss only the need to pay or be exempt from the fonsadera exemption payment. "Privilegio de Fernando II a Salamanca, 1167," 1:234-35. "Fuero dado a los moradores de Rabanal del Camino, 1169," 2:115-19. "Fuero de La Coruña," 143. "Fuero de Zofraga," 14:565.

13.  "Relation de la prise d'Alméria, de Baeza et d'Úbeda et de la mort du roi chrétien Alphonse VII," 28:40.

14.  Layna Serrano, Historia de Atienza, 54-55, 81-83, 89-94, indicates considerable activity for that town in this period, although without documenting much of this activity. See also his, "La histórica cofradía," 2:503-20. Represa Rodríguez, "La 'Tierra' medieval de Segovia," 21:5-17. The twelfth-century rewards for Segovia's militia service were sometimes returned to the prior holders of territory in the thirteenth century. "Privilegium super restitutione aldearum de termino de Alcalá," 8:240.

15. CPA, 23-24, 26. "Anales Toledanos I," 23:390. It is not clear in the context, but the Anales seems to be recounting the same 1158 expedition as described in the Abulense Crónica. Ávila's reputation was such that the newly founded Order of Santiago recruited actively among the city's caballeros in 1172. See Vergara y Martín, Estudio histórico de Ávila, 62-63.

16.  IIM, 2:4-6. It is he who suggests the earlier raid and offers livestock estimates, while complementing the Abulense specifically for their great valor and offensive spirit. "Relation d'un raid des Chrétiens d'Avila dans la région de Cordoue," 28:52-53. This Almohad letter gives us our fullest account of the Abulense disaster. AMC, 1-3, also renders an extended account, including the same cattle estimates as IIM. ISS, 227-32. Ibn Sâhib suggests that Ávila initiated its raid as the result of a prior Muslim raid on the Tajo Valley. AMWM, 4:162, a source which strangely passes over this great Muslim triumph, but one of those which awards Sancho his packsaddle nickname. Sánchez Belda, "La Mancha," 7-26.

17.  ISS, 204-17. AMWM, 4:203-04. Derek Lomax gives the most thorough account of the Huete campaign in English, apparently based on Ibn Sâhib. See, Reconquest, 114-15.

18.  ISS, 116-19. This is our richest account of Muslim Cuenca. IIM, 2:28-30. AMC, 13-14, which adds the account of the Ciudad Rodrigo militia. López, Memorias históricas de Cuenca, 1:54-55. González, Castilla en la época de Alfonso VIII, 1:924-25.

19.  IIM, 2:41, 49-51. AMC, 22-24, contains a very similar account.

20.  Arco, "Referencias a acaecimientos históricos," 3:351, Doc. 105. Caruana Gómez, "Itinerario de Alfonso II," 7:94, 105-06. Rafael Estebán Abad has argued that the militias of the Aragonese towns, including Daroca, took part in this conquest of Teruel, an assertion which goes unsupported by Zurita's late medieval chronicle or any other collaborating source. See his, Estudio de Daroca, 55. Zurita makes no mention of town militias in the conquest of either Albarracín or Teruel. See Jerónimo Zurita Anales de la Corona de Aragón, I:260-61, 266.

21.  Ventura, Alfons 'el Cast', 179-83. Caruana, "Itinerario de Alfonso II," 95-98. Caruana Gómez Historia de la provincia de Teruel, 44-45. Liber Feudorum Maior, 1:46. Lacarra, "El rey Lobo de Murcia," 3:520-23.

22.  For a full discussion of the relationship of the two great formularies and their respective networks of charters, see Appendix B.

23.  Colmeiro y Penido, De la constitución y el gobierno, 2:149-50. José María Martínez Val places the town militias in the right wing against the Guadiana River in one article, but frankly admits we have no specific sources on their placement. "La batalla de Alarcos, y la Orden de Calatrava," 79, and "La batalla de Alarcos," 12:115-22. Ambrosio Huici Miranda suggests in an early study that the concejos performed poorly at Alarcos, affecting Alfonso VIII's placement of them seventeen years later at Las Navas, Estudio sobre la campaña de Las Navas, 47, but he makes no reference to municipal militias whatsoever in his more recent account of Alarcos itself, Grandes batallas, 160-63. Derek Lomax makes a similar assertion regarding the militias at Alarcos in his account of Las Navas, again without mentioning this in his account of Alarcos proper and without supporting references, possibly derived from Huici Miranda, Lomax, Reconquest, 126-27. Alonso Fernández without adequate supporting references places Plasencia's newly formed militia at Alarcos, Historia y anales de Plasencia, 52. Gerardo Moraleja Pinella dutifully puts Medina del Campo at the battle, also without satisfactory evidence, Historia de Medina del Campo, 42-43. CPA, 32. Three Muslim sources recount the conflict, but make no reference to Christian militias. Ibn-Abì-Zarc, Rawd al-qirtâs, 2:440-45. Lévi-Provençal, Péninsule, 18-19. AMC, 76-82.

24.  "Anales Toledanos I," 23:393. PCG, 2:682. Lévi-Provençal, Péninsule, 18-19. "Relation de l'expédition," Lévi-Provençal, "Recueil," 28:66-67. AMC, 83-85, 86-89, the only source which adds Guadalajara to the list of towns attacked.

25.  "Anales Toledanos I," 23:394-95. CLRC, 40. AMC, 119-21. Zurita, Anales, 1:333. González, Alfonso VIII, 1:986-94. Gautier-Dalché, Historia urbana de León y Castilla, 391.

26.  PGC, 2:700. CPA, 33. Ximenius de Rada, "De Rebus Hispaniae," 185. Ibn-Abì-Zarc and the Anonyous of Madrid and Copenhagen have lengthy descriptions of the battle, but no specific citation of any Christian municipal militias, Rawd al-qirtâs, 2:440-45, and AMC, 122-24. Huici Miranda, Estudio sobre las Navas, 90-91. Huici Miranda, Grandes batallas, 253-71. Huici Miranda estimates 100-150,000 troops on the Muslim side as against 70-80,000 Christians. Anaya Ruiz, "La cruzada de las Navas," 25:29. Of the many town historians who add their town to the Las Navas participation list, Fernández de Cañete at least argues the presence of Alarcón on the basis of documents in that town's archive, citing mercedes given to the caballeros of Alarcón for their participation, Apuntos históricos, 20-22. Most interesting is the very reliable Julio González, who lists the presence of the militias of Talavera, Madrid, Huete, Cuenca, Alarcón, Soria, Sepúlveda, Cuéllar, Atienza, Burgos, Carrión "and others" without benefit of a source citation to support this list, Alfonso VIII, 1:1011. To be sure, the chronicles would indicate that many of these militias had been active in this period, but none specifically place them at Las Navas.

27.  Ximenius de Rada, "De Rebus," 183. Alfonso attempted to counter this threat, as he later wrote to Pope Innocent III, by mixing cavalry in with his infantry with particular regard for the avoidance of flank envelopment, "Carta de Alfonso VIII al Papa Inocencio III," 168.

28.  Ximenius de Rada, "De Rebus," 186-87. "Carta de Arnaldo Amalarico," 173-74. The best accounts of the battle in Spanish can be found in González, Alfonso VIII, 1:1031-55, and in Huici Miranda, Grandes batallas, 253-89. Briefer but very useful English language narratives are available in Bishko, "Reconquest," 3:423-24, and Lomax, Reconquest, 124-28.

29.  "Anales Toledanos I," ES, 23:397.

30. Ibid., 23:397-98.

31.  AMC, 136-48. Huici Miranda, Historia política del imperio Almohade, 2:476-77. Lomax, Reconquest, 140.

32.  Marichalar, ed., Colección diplomática del Rey Sancho VIII, 181-85.

33. PCG, 2:680.

34. CPA, 33-36. González, Alfonso IX, 1:176-77.

35.  Lumbreras Valiente, La reconquista de Cáceres, 58-59. Bishko, "Reconquest," 3:425. Duarte Insúa, Historia de Alburquerque, 52.

36.  AMC, 17:143. González, Alfonso IX, 1:209. The inscription on the Puerta de Olivares in Zamora is discussed in several sources. Gómez Moreno, Catálogo monumental, 1:85-86, 144. Álvarez Martínez, Historia general de Zamora, 184. Fernández Duro, Memorias históricas de Zamora, 1:386-90. Regretably, M. C. Díaz y Díaz does not discuss the inscription in his Index scriptorum latinorum medii aevi Hispanorum (Salamanca, 1958). The surviving inscription can be seen in Plates 5 and 6. Gómez Moreno's transcription (with restored segments in parentheses) is as follows:

(Era millesima ducentesima sexagesima octava

Alfonsus rex Legionis cepit Caceres et Montanches et)

Merita(m et) Badaloz et vicit Abe(mfuit)

regem maurorum qui tenebat xx mi(lia)

equitum et lx miliu peditum et Zamo(ren)

ses fuerunt uictores in prima acie (et)

eo anno ipse rex vii kl octobris obiit (et xlii)

annis regnavit et eo anno factum fuit hoc port(ale).
 

An Olivares Gate is listed as far back as 1172. See: A. Matilla Tascón, Guía-inventario de los archivos de Zamora y su provincia (Madrid, 1964), 162. The only remaining depiction of a bridge with any specific connection to Zamora is a city seal from 1273, which shows a vista of the city seen from across the Duero with two bridges indicated. Since Zamora, as Mérida, has a Roman bridge, and since the seal is pictorial rather than heraldic, it is difficult to argue that we have a clear reference to the performance of the Zamoran militia at Mérida. The thirteenth-century Fuero of Ledesma indicates that Ledesma's militia also rendered good service at Mérida. "Fuero de Ledesma," Federico de Onís, ed., Fueros Leoneses de Zamora, Salamanca, Ledesma y Alba de Tormes (Madrid, 1916), 279.

37.  González, Alfonso IX, 1:207. Bishko, "Reconquest," 3:425-26 Lomax, Reconquest, 142.

38. CPA, 41-42. CLRC, 85-86. González, Reinado y diplomas de Fernando III, 1:297-300. Lomax, Reconquest, 138.

39. CLRC, 87. Lévi-Provençal, Péninsule, 163. There is some dispute among historians on the dating of this Murcian raid, but I have accepted González's chronology here.

40. CPA, 42. Jiménez de Rada notes a general presence of urban forces, but lists no particular towns. Ximenius de Rada, "De Rebus," 202-03. González, Fernando III, 1:315.

41. CLRC, 107. González, Fernando III, 1:319.

42. CLRC, 110. González, Fernando III, 1:321.

43. Ximenius de Rada, "De Rebus," 205. PCG, 2:726-33. CLRC, 116-23. González, Fernando III, 1:323-28. AMC, 17:162-63. Madrid's militia was present at the siege as well, although not mentioned in the chronicles. See: "Carta de Fernando III en que se confirma el privilegio de Segovia," 1:1. The same source verifies the presence of Madrid's militia at the taking of Seville in 1248.

44. PCG, 2:743-46. CPA, 44-46. González, Fernando III, 1:357-60. Mozas Mesa, La conquista de Jaén, 21-22.

45. PCG, 1:748-49. González, Fernando III, 1:368-71.

46. PCG, 2:746-60. AMC, 17:190-91. González, Fernando III, 1:373-81. González, Repartimiento de Sevilla, 1:203. "Orden de Fernando III, 1248," 217-19. See also note 42.

47.  "Jaca hace una carta de paz con los hombres del Valle de Echo (1215)," 257-62. "Jaca hace una carta de paz y convenio con Lope de Arresella (1217)," 263-65. "Jaca hace una carta de paz con Lope Arresella y sus compañeros (1217)," 267-73. "Jaime I da a concejo de Jaca salud y confianza," 309-10.

48.  "Jaime I, rey de Aragón, preside Cortes en Villafranca, 24 junio 1218." "Jaime I, rey de Aragón, reune Cortes en Tortosa, 28 abril 1225." "Jaime I, rey de Aragón, reune Cortes en Barcelona, 21 diciembre 1228," 1:35-39, 139-44, 206-07.

49.  "Los jurados de Zaragoza, Huesca y Jaca pactan." "Jaime I de Aragón reprueba las confederaciones, 1 abril 1227," 149-51, 154-56.

50. "Los concejeros y los prohombres de Jaca, (1238?)," 334-36. This must be balanced against the expeditionary and mounted service required by Jaime in the upper Ebro at Miranda de Ebro in 1236 and at Jaca in 1249. "Jaime I concede franquicias a Miranda de Ebro (16 March 1236)," 1:246-47, and "Carta de Jaime I a Jaca (1249)," 367. Military needs could not be totally overriden by concerns for pacification.

51.  Desclot, "Crònica de Bernat Desclot," Ch. 15-20. Duran i Sanpere, "Defensa de la ciutat," 312-13.

52.  "Llibre dels feits del Rei En Jaume," Ch. 73. Desclot, Crònica, Ch. 47. Testifying to Lleidan participation are the 198 shares received by the citizens of that town in the Repartiment of Mallorca and the two Lleidans who served on the repartiment council for Mallorca. Lladonosa i Pujol, Lérida medieval, 1:51-53.

53.  Ubieto Arteta, "Dos actitudes ante la reconquista," 3:3-22. Ubieto notes that while the other towns were active sooner, Barcelona and Tortosa were drawn into the Valencian campaign after Monzón largely by their interest in the papal crusade rather than their interest in territorial expansion. Catalan historians have been resisting the notion that Aragonese settlement was the more extensive and deeper in its historical continuity than Catalan, as with Josep L'Escrivà, Els repobladors de València, (Valencia, 1979), 99-145. The town concejos may have been active as far back in Jaime's reign as the retaking of Albarracín in 1220. The chronicle of Jerónimo Zurita places the militas of Zaragoza, Lleida, Calatayud, Daroca and Teruel at the reconquest of the town. Anales de la Corona de Aragón, Angel Canellas López, ed. (Zaragoza, 1967), 1:382. While Zurita's sixteenth-century account is not supplemented by any surviving contemporary evidence, King Jaume's chronicle has these same militias active in the conquest of Valencia only a few years later. There is, therefore, good reason to accept Zurita's version.

54. Llibre dels feits, Ch. 157, 170-71.

55. Llibre dels feits, Ch. 211, 218.

56. Llibre dels feits, Ch. 210, 288.

57.  Seven are in the Évora group: Sarzedas (1212), Castelo Branco (1213), Proença Velha (1218), Sobreira Formosa (1222) and Lardoza (1223) being given by a grantor other than the king, and Alcáçer do Sal (1218) and Avis (1218) by Afonso II. Three are from the Santarém group: Montemor-Velho (1212), Alenquer (1212) and Lisbon (1217), only the last granted from Afonso II. There are two in the Trancoso pattern at Valença (1217) and Touro (1220), the first being from Afonso II. See MPH-LC, 1:555-61, 566-67, 569-72, 577-82, 586-94. "Confirmação do foral alfonsino de Lisboa, 1217," 1:3-6.

58.  Powell, Anatomy of a Crusade, 125-26. Bishko, "Reconquest," 3:425. Lomax, Reconquest, 132.

59.  "Foral de Évora," 1:371-73. "Carta pela qual se concede aos povoadores de Coruche," 1:466-69. "Foral de Palmela," 1:481-83. "(Foral de) Marmelar, 1194," 1:489-90. "(Foral de) Benavente, 1200," 1:512-14. "(Foral de) Cesimbra, 1201," 1:515-17. "(Foral de) Monte-Mór o Novo, 1203," 525-27.

60.  "(Foral de) Marvão, 1226," 1:606-07. "(Foral de) Sortelha, 1228-29," 1:608-10. "(Foral de) Idanha Velha, 1229," 1:613-16. "(Foral de) Salvaterra," 1229," 1:616-18. "(Foral de) Elvas, 1229," 1:619-20. Sortelha, Idanha Velha and Salvaterra have new forms of the Évora pattern with considerable additions in legal material. However, none of this added material has military implications.

61.  Bishko, "Reconquest," 3:431-32. Lomax, Reconquest, 142-44. After 1229, there are only ten municipal forais issued until the death of Sancho II. Only one of these at Mós was given by the king, and it contains no military material. A group of military laws appears in the charter given to Sancta Cruz in 1225, including possible influence of the defensive service law from the Coria-Cima Coa family, but there is no other example in Sancho's reign. "(Foral de) Sancta Cruz, 1225," 1:601-04. Also, two interesting charters given to Cidadêlhe in 1224 and to Alijó in 1226 signal the beginning of a small regional family of charters with military law in the northeast of Portugal, but these develop primarily in the subsequent reign of Afonso III. "(Foral de) Cidadêlhe," 1:599-600. "(Foral de) Alijó," 605-06. Sancho II gave real indication of fostering military and municipal developments in the early part of his tenure, but this start was blighted competely after 1230. See also Powers, "Portuguese and Leonese Municipal Military Law," forthcoming.

62.  "Carta de hermandad entre Plasencia y Escalona," 3:506-07. "Carta de hermandad entre los Concejos de Plasencia y Talavera," 57-58. FP, 156. "Privilegium super restitutione aldearum de término de Alcalá," 8:240. "Orden de Fernando III a Madrid, 1248," 217-18. Represa Rodríguez, "Segovia," 21:5-17.

63.  For the Aragonese municipal pact, see note 19. "Fuero de Salamanca," 165, 181-82. Oliveira Marques, History of Portugal, 81-82.

64.  AMWM, 4:300-02.