[3] King alfonso and King James were born into a world of stunning change. Each was to accelerate that change within his own kingdom, and to contribute to it in the wider world. The immediate background of both men was the Iberian peninsula, at that time a patchwork of disparate countries, cultures, and languages crowded into a geography of contrasts. Castile and León occupied the center, Navarre and Aragon the mountainous upper right-center, Portugal the Atlantic side, Catalonia the Mediterranean flank, and Islamic al-Andalus the bottom third, with a symbiotic Jewish society inside each host country and culture. Societies of conquered Muslims lay embedded within the frontier Christian states like frequent raisins in a pudding; conversely, Christian communities survived within the Islamic south. Castile and León had tended to drift together in random pattern, but would permanently unite only during Alfonso's lifetime. Upland Aragon was linked with coastal Catalonia into a common realm by the external factor of a shared ruler; otherwise the two were separated by language, economy, institutions, and mentality. Al-Andalus was the monolithic empire of the Almohad dynasty and religious orientation, centered on Marrakesh at the Sahara's edge. (1)
[4]Framing the top or north of all this was Occitania, the gentle regions of troubadour southern France, with their tangle of communes and counts, the language a cognate of Catalan. On the Mediterranean verge Genoese shipping tended to dominate the busy sea lanes. Here the Catalan port-cities tied directly to sister ports in Languedoc, Provence, Italy, the Adriatic's Slavic shore, North Africa, and the farther reaches of the eastern Mediterranean. The Spanish countries did not represent political evolutions alone, but a fierce geography. The Castilian tableland or meseta, bare and stern, is one of Europe's highest points; the Catalan coast recalls in its land-forms Italy or Languedoc. Mountain walls, interrupted rivers, and broken country fragmented the land and its distinct peoples.
Our two kings appeared on this scene just as four great battles had transformed Europe. The battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, on the central Spanish highlands, precipitated the Almohad collapse. It began those intrigues and factions that shattered Western Islam into fragments, opened al-Andalus to virtually complete conquest by the Christians, and made North Africa a field of commercial exploitation by the Christian kingdoms. The battle of Muret in 1213, just south of Toulouse, ended Catalan hegemony in southern France; its confused aftermath threatened to split these linguistic-cultural affiliates apart, and to isolate Occitania as a vacuum of power vulnerable to takeover by its rough northern neighbor Francia. Just as Castile, León, and most of Islamic Spain were to fuse from now on, into an entity we think of as Castile, so Occitania and Francia would begin to merge into the single entity we call France. (2) Our third battle was the bloody fall of Constantinople in 1204, before the seapower of Venice and her allies on the Fourth Crusade, which toppled the thousand-year [5] empire of Byzantium. Recovery of rump-Byzantium after mid-century, much like the rump-emirate of Granada in mid-century Spain, could not conceal the disaster of colonial takeovers by Venetians, Genoese, French, and at the turn of the century Catalans. Finally, the battle of Bouvines in Flanders in 1214 rearranged the northern balance of power, signaling the expansion and rise of Francia as a major power, the temporary decline of England, the ascendancy of the Hohenstaufen-Ghibelline factions in Germany and Italy, and at mid-century the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire as an effective power in both countries, in the confusion of the Great Interregnum.
The logic of events unleashed by these four battles dictated the course of Iberian and western Mediterranean affairs for the lifetime of our two kings, through a roll call of subsequent battles on land and at sea. War was the dominant motif of their lifetime and century, an ever-recurrent fury of internal and external fighting, culminating in the twenty-year general war of the Sicilian Vespers just after both men died. The Mongol invasions before mid-century lent the violent scene an apocalyptic panic, and then a surge of hope as the far reaches of Asia opened to missionaries and merchants, as Islam diminished and seemed about to succumb before the Mongolian onslaught, as Catalans came to dominate the Mediterranean European trade of a weakened Alexandria, and as Mongol embassies negotiated for the cooperation of Spanish armies.
This bloody backdrop, its fire and iron a familiar element to both Alfonso and James, insured that both men would be warriors by trade. At the same time, it throws into strong relief the equally radical creative achievements of their lifetime. Paradoxically, all the promise of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance flowered now in great works of law, philosophy, religion, medicine, letters, translations, travel, technology, and art. The protagonists or celebrated symbols of such movements flourished during the reigns of our two kings -- men like the philosopher Aquinas, the poet Dante, the merchant traveler Marco Polo, and the religious genius Francis of [6] Assisi. Some of the greatest protagonists, as we shall see, came from the Spanish peninsula. The great figures included kings contemporary with Alfonso and James. No king is more central to the creation of France and its culture, for example, than the warrior and patron St. Louis IX. Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen, quintessential patron of culture, is still the Stupor Mundi to southern Italians and Germans alike. The thirteenth century, whose decades our two Spanish kings nearly fill, was not "the greatest of centuries" in human and cultural terms, as is often said (the fourth and the twelfth, for example, have stronger claims to the title); but it was perhaps the most startling and dramatic century, a chiaroscuro of achievement and failure, the promise and the threat of Western civilization's future directions.
It is time now to introduce our two kings. James the Conqueror lived from 1208 to 1276 and ruled (in his own words) "from the Rhone to Valencia." (3) His disparate realms of Aragon stretched down the Mediterranean, oriented outward toward Italy, North Africa, and the Near East. Though he has strong claims to literary, administrative, educational, and legal fame, James's renown is particularly as a military leader. He conquered the Balearic emirates and the extensive sharq al-Andalus, or Almohad Valencian and Murcian provinces (often bloodlessly, by maneuver), made Hafsid Tunis almost an economic dependency, took over the Hohenstaufen claims in Italy, and plotted joint action with the Mongols in the Near East.
His father Peter the Catholic (leader against the Albigensian Crusade) and his son Peter the Great (Dante's hero) were troubadour patrons and lively participants in troubadour activity. James, brought up by the Knights Templar at their bleak headquarters castle on the border of hinterland Aragon proper, left his only literary monument in a warrior's prose. The king's large book is unique: the only autobiography by a medieval king (except for an imitation by his great-great- [7] grandson), a revelation of his values and psychology. James reorganized the great medical university at Montpellier, founded another university at Valencia, and helped the Dominicans create the unique network of polemical schools of Arabic in his realms. He published the first generally applicable Roman Law code in Europe, the Furs of Valencia. Partly by absorbing the Muslims' paper industry at Játiva, he was able to amass the first monumental archives of secular government in Europe. His relations with Muslims, both domestic and foreign, were remarkably enlightened for his time. For the Jews, his reign is often called "a golden age."
James's role was central in crystallizing the semirepublican institutions of his city-state region and in adopting the new public finance. He turned the main direction of his realms' expansion to a considerable degree away from their traditional hegemony in southern France toward that Mediterranean "empire" that would soon stretch its holdings from Sardinia and Sicily to Athens. A man of action, personally leading his armies, he laid the foundations of Catalan naval power in the Western Mediterranean and of an open-ended society rooted in world commerce, whose intellectual and literary culture was symbolized by such of his contemporary subjects as the physician Arnau de Vilanova, the troubadour Cerverí de Girona, the philosopher-publicist Ramon Llull, the Arabist Ramon Martí, the Jewish scholar Salomó b. Adreth, and the lawyer Ramon de Penyafort.
To supplement this thumbnail sketch of James's public achievements, a chronological approach can trace his life sequentially, relating private to political landmarks. His very birth, in a burgher's home at Montpellier in 1208, illustrates the convergence of his public and private turmoils. His father, a war hero of Christendom, in effect repudiated James by seeking a divorce from the heiress of Montpellier. James's mother, Marie I of Montpellier, in her own way abandoned him, fleeing to Rome to protect the infant's rights and dying there as the "Holy Queen" with a miracle-working tomb in St. Peter's. The orphan James remained in the hands of his father's slayer, Simon de Montfort, who led the Albigensian [8]Crusade -- a hostage at Carcassonne destined to marry Simon's daughter. James's later life was marked by ambivalence toward his hero-villain father and by awe of his saintly mother with her Byzantine Comnenoi antecedents. James's exploits in war and his exploits with women may well relate to this early trauma. Innocent III, greatest of medieval Christendom's political popes, wrested the six-year-old boy from Simon, placing both the boy and his kingdom under the protection of the Knights Templar. From his sixth to his ninth year the child grew up at the Monzón castle of these "lions in war and lambs in the cloister."
To give strong royal presence to his disordered realms, the boy-king led his troops as an armored knight by the time he was ten, had taken two castles by storm at twelve, and by thirteen had married Leonor, daughter of the king of Castile (a marriage not physically consummated for some time, he confides). At seventeen he led his first invasion of Islamic Spain, failing to overwhelm coastal Peñíscola in 1225. After imposing peace on his rebel nobles in 1227, James in 1229 mounted his amphibious conquest of Majorca island; the other large Balearic island, Minorca, submitted as tributary in 1232. These he constituted a separate kingdom. From 1232 to 1245 he fought a series of stubborn campaigns to subdue the prosperous cities and regions of Islam from below Tortosa all the way to the borders of Murcia, organizing that conquest as the Kingdom of Valencia. Every decade thereafter, James had to contend with serious revolts in the Valencian regions. In 1266 he even crossed down into Murcia, to help Alfonso the Learned reconquer that rebellious kingdom. And James ended his life on the Valencian frontier in 1276, battling vainly to contain the most serious revolt or countercrusade.
James never relinquished hope of reestablishing his dynasty's position in southern France, though he was reasonably prudent in his machinations and challenges to the new presence of Francia there. In 1258 by the treaty of Corbeil, he renounced much of his southern French claims, but that was not so definitive an act as events have since made it seem. His treaties and adventures in North Africa confirmed his control [9]of trade there, particularly at Tunis. While establishing his colonial kingdom in Valencia, a formidable and multifaceted enterprise, James found time for two abortive crusades to the Holy Land, for a gaudy but abortive project to crusade in support of the Latin empire of Constantinople, for coping with several nobiliary revolts led by rebellious sons, and for a principal role at the second ecumenical Council of Lyons. Though invited to head the Guelph cause in Italy after the conquest of Valencia, and indeed invested with the sonorous title of Admiral and Captain General of the church, James shifted ground as his rivals the French made their presence ever more widely felt in the Mediterranean and in Italy under the machinations of Charles of Anjou. James married his heir Peter to the Hohenstaufen heiress of Sicily, thus setting in motion the confrontation between Anjou and Peter that eventuated in the war of the Sicilian Vespers and the conquest of Sicily for Aragon.
James's domestic life was equally busy. Not long after the start of his Valencian crusade, the king's first marriage had been annulled and his ex-queen and son sent away. In 1235 James married Violante (Catalan Violant), daughter of King Andrew of Hungary. After her death, he married Teresa Gil de Vidaure in 1255, repudiating her ten years later despite angry papal intervention. James also found time for over half a dozen long-term lovers or formal concubines. Besides his six sons and three daughters (one of whom married Alfonso the Learned), James produced at least two illegitimate sons.
If King James himself were asked about his greatest achievements, he would probably pass over legal, educational, institutional, political-commercial, and other phases of his reign, and present us instead with a copy of his autobiography, the Llibre dels feyts. This combined his proudest achievement, the conquest of the Balearics and Valencia, with a revelation of his inner sentiments and self-view, done vigorously in his vernacular Catalan. He worked at it, on and off, through most of his busy reign; and it sparkles with life even today. James did not pen the book himself, of course, but rather worked through redactors and secretaries, whose identities [10] and personal contributions to the whole have long been under debate. These were not ghostwriters but collaborators, and they incorporated many prosified poems through which the king's exploits had been broadcast in his own day. Martí de Riquer, the premier literary scholar of Catalonia, sums the current consensus on the book's basic authenticity: "without any reserve" it is the king's own, and "its essence is the personal memories of the monarch." It was already famous in a Latin version, some thirty-five years after James's death, when King James II ordered a copy from his own original, and when the king of Majorca requested such a copy for himself. Our earliest surviving Catalan version is a splendid copy made in 1343 at Poblet monastery from a lost original. "The most superficial reading" of the Catalan, as Riquer's examination concludes, shows it to be "the personal work of James," his "autobiography or memoirs." Miquel Coll i Alentorn analyzes the stages of redaction as two -- at Játiva in 1244 for the first three hundred chapters, and at Barcelona in 1274 for the remainder, with the last twenty chapters and the prologue wholly the work of assistants. (4)
The king's memoirs reveal both his womanizing and his Marian piety, his brutal and his tender moments, and his childlike vanity. He is concerned to show himself a warrior without fear; on the other hand, "I don't want to die until God wants, if I can help it." Whenever death comes, he tells King Sancho of Navarre with characteristic practicality, "we kings take no more from this world than a single shroud, except that it is of better cloth than those of other people." In battle "I've never fled nor know how to flee"; and to escape "shame" for failure at the siege of Burriana, "twice I exposed my whole body so that those [Muslims] within would wound me." He presents himself as honorably true to his word, but slyly finds "cunning is better than force" and manages by dubious means to "get it all." He describes a loving episode or [11] two with his wife, displays at length his courtesies toward Muslim enemies, and devotes much attention to artillery and its placement. Like contemporaries he is easily moved to sentimental tears: "and when they saw me weeping, they began to weep with me." He was an enthusiastic trencherman, stopping to give details of meals taken and meals missed. And he has a lively eye for describing the many people passing through his life, Moors and Christians alike. James's memoirs are complete: from conception to death. They are filled with anecdote and telling detail. Through their confessional pages, running to two large volumes in the English translation, we have our most complete portrait of any medieval king, and one of the most fascinating portraits of any medieval person. (5)
James was already a sturdy boy-king of thirteen years, with a wife and a strong military record, when Alfonso of Castile-León was born at Valladolid. A profile can introduce his main achievements. Alfonso "el Sabio" (Learned or Erudite in his case, rather than Wise) lived from 1221 to 1284, but ruled only from 1252. As king he inherited from his father, the revered Reconquest hero Fernando III "the Saint" (canonized in 1671), a double kingdom of Castile and León, which had just expanded from covering a seventh of the peninsula to englobing the larger part of it, including a corridor to the Mediterranean at Murcia. The last fragment of Spanish Islam, Granada, was appended to this realm as a tributary. Alfonso, whose lands had a more warlike past than James's, as well as a more rural and stock-raising economy, was determined to elevate the Castilian language and sensibility, to transform his nation's law and administration, and to introduce cultural elements.
Though Alfonso was a crusader and an innovative administrator, and though he almost managed to have himself elected Holy Roman Emperor over Christendom, his more fundamental claims to fame are his encyclopedic law code, his histories, his translations of Arabic science, games, and fiction, [12] and that unique summa of medieval painting-cum-music-cum-poetry, the codex Cantigas de Santa María. No other medieval king, not even his relative the Hohenstaufen Frederick II, can boast so extensive and elevated a creative production. Those who know Alfonso's lyrics, secular and Marian, think of him as the greatest of the poet-kings. Anyone who has read seriously in his laws, including the posthumously expanded collection of nearly 2,700 legal essays systematized as the Siete partidas code, recognizes Alfonso not so much as a lawgiver (he was that too) but as the best claimant to the title philosopher-king. Alfonso not only ruled a Castile suddenly become a world power; he set its future directions and he foreshadowed, by his fecund creativity, its future cultural grandeur.
As with James, a brief chronology can organize Alfonso's biographical details. The eldest of thirteen children, he spent his childhood in the Celtic countryside of Galicia under the care of surrogate parents. Though his education was obviously of a high order, military training was not neglected. He passed his first thirty years in the shadow of his formidable father, the hero and saint Fernando, himself more crusader than patron. If the young prince showed himself already a cultivated erudite, he also proved effectively bellicose in the field, particularly helping his father siege Seville in 1248. Alfonso's marriage to Violante of Aragon (betrothed in 1242, solemnities in 1246 or 1249) made him son-in-law to James the Conqueror. Unfaithful after the fashion of powerful men of his time, Alfonso produced at least one notable bastard, the Beatriz who became queen of Portugal. A near-contemporary legend, perhaps concealing a real crisis beneath its improbable timing and details, also has Alfonso contemplate divorce. By that account, Violante's seeming infecundity led Alfonso to import the princess Christina of Norway as part of a divorce plan; in the nick of time Violante produced a daughter. Eventually she did supply Alfonso with a family of five sons and five daughters.
From the moment he personally crowned himself in 1252, as he had previously knighted himself with the aid of a mechanical statue of Santiago (St. James), Alfonso entertained [13] grandiose ambitions of becoming preeminent king or even emperor of all Spain, of expanding the immense conquests of his father by invading Africa, and particularly of becoming Holy Roman Emperor through claims to Swabia from his German mother. Peninsular ambitions involved him in the conquest of southern Portugal (to 1253), in an abortive claim on and eventual renunciation of Gascony, and in forcing tributary vassalage from Navarre in 1254. His election in 1257 as Holy Roman Emperor began nearly two decades of obsessive but vain efforts to validate the title.
Meanwhile Alfonso pressed his wars against Islam relentlessly, sacking Salâ on the Atlantic Moroccan coast in 1260, conquering Cádiz and in 1262 Niebla, and coping with a general Muslim rising in the early 1260s, with a war against Granada that made that region tributary by 1266, and with a Murcian reconquest helped by James the Conqueror in 1266. The final years of Alfonso's life were a tangled disaster. While his dreams of Roman emperorship died at his interview with Pope Gregory X at Beaucaire below Avignon, Granadan and North African armies invaded his realms on a countercrusade in 1275. When the king's son and heir Fernando died on that military frontier, the second son Sancho rallied support to become heir in place of Fernando's sons. During the confrontation by Sancho, Alfonso in 1277 had his own brother executed. Sancho gained the backing of the Valladolid Cortes, as well as of Aragon, Portugal, and Islamic Granada in 1282. Alfonso in turn summoned the armies of Morocco as ally, which proved of little use, and fell back upon his favorite city of Seville, scene of his youthful exploits at arms. There he died.
Throughout this life of war and tension, Alfonso promoted and closely directed at his court an outpouring of creative works, including major translations, in law, fiction, music, astronomy, education, history, games, and Islamic and Jewish erudition. The Calila e Digna translation of the Arabic Kalila wa-Dimna tales came out in 1251, before his coronation, the Alfonsine astronomical tables with their astrological import in the decade ending 1262, and his Roman Law summa the Espéculo [14] by 1260. His most impressive and personal work, a convergence of poetry, music, and narrative miniatures in the Cantigas de Santa María, occupied the quarter-century ending in 1279. His celebrated book on chess appeared in 1283, on the eve of his tragic death.
By decreeing that all such creations (except Galician lyrics like the Cantigas), plus nearly all charters flowing from his chancery, should be in Castilian instead of Europe's usual Latin, Alfonso single-handedly elevated Castilian into a flexible, sophisticated language. He thus became the father of Spanish prose as a literary tool. If his translations, largely by Jewish and Italian scholars, enriched the West with Arabic concepts and learning, they were less influential in wider Europe by reason of that linguistic restriction. Besides all such activity, Alfonso like James embarked on an ambitious colonial reconstruction of his father's and his own extensive conquests, inventing or applying administrative institutions destined to be significant also for the future. The sixteenth-century Jesuit historian Juan de Mariana assessed Alfonso's career as turning his back on practical life in order to pursue scholarship: meditating on the stars, he lost the earth. More recently Cayetano Socarras has modified that judgment, seeing Alfonso as a contradictory "dual" character, who did indeed plunge into the world of practical affairs but proved tragically inept in that profane role. (6)
Most historians, invited to select a single creative work from the entire range of Alfonso's contributions, would turn to the monumental law code, to his epoch-making histories, or to the scientific and translation projects. Alfonso himself would doubtless have selected for comment a work closer to his own affections but relatively inaccessible in its original today, the Cantigas de Santa María. Like theatrical opera later, the Cantigas aimed at fusing the arts into a single new art; beyond opera, Alfonso's production fused not only the arts, but life and religion. Eight separate human experiences [15] converged here. (1) It was a corpus of 427 poems, composed expressly for this project, some lyric and some narrative, in the Galician-Portuguese favored by Spain's troubadours. (2) Each poem was set in its own musical composition, to be sung with instrumental accompaniment. (3) The poems comprised a folkloric summa of Marian miracle tales. (4) Each was accompanied by a sheet of brilliantly crowded miniatures, structured like a modern comic strip to tell the song's narrative visually, a prodigality of nearly 1,300 small scenes from life. (5) This was all performed and experienced within the larger setting of a cathedral, in just-conquered Seville on the Islamic-Christian frontier. (6) It may have included dances, popular and sacred, a Davidic art before God's altar. (7) It took place as a filial celebration of the Virgin's feast day, in the context of general community celebration, a paraliturgical action. John Keller, a dedicated student of the Cantigas, believes the performances were for the general public, in dramatic mode, while a select few followed the manuscript itself. (8) The songs but particularly the pictures drew in every element of secular daily life, realistically portrayed: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, black as well as white, rich and poor, old and young.
In that sacred setting we see the world of work: tales of sheep-shearing, bee-keeping, farmers plowing, fishermen at sea, goatherds, construction-hands, bankers, shopkeepers, painters, and traveling merchants. We see physicians, apothecaries, house calls, surgeons at their bloody work, varieties of illness, coffined bodies, and vultures at the end. The world of crime, low life, and the marginal is generously present: pirates, gamblers, prostitutes, beggars, slaves, the dissolute, malefactors hanged, stoned, and dragged. We see hundreds of women, with a confusing array of costume and hairdo, enough life to study medieval women from this source alone. Love and marriage are prominent, with here and there lovers embracing in bed -- some married and some not. There are babies and children -- pregnancies, childbirth, baptism -- and games, including a game resembling baseball and a crowded bullfight. Street scenes abound, and domestic interiors: tables [17]set for dinner, beds turned down, chairs, chests, closets, ovens, wells, and wives spinning.
Medieval scholars have presented all this to us relatively recently. Higinio Anglés edited the music in several large volumes; and the Spanish government has finally reproduced the pictures in color, while John Keller and others have commented on selected episodes. What is easily neglected, however, is the infusing soul of all this: that each element simultaneously transformed every other. Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo rightly presents the pictures as "an esthetic Bible, encyclopedically condensing all the elements of medieval art"; but the pictures are less than half-alive without their music. Keller rightly sees the whole as "one of the richest of sources of medieval folklore -- folk music, folk motif, folkways, and even to some extent folk speech"; but it is also a prayer and a sacred action. Ramon Menéndez Pidal rightly joins text and music, describing the music as "the most extensive and varied secular monody of the thirteenth century"; but it is also a summa of daily life, all the bawdry and minor ills, all the domestic rounds and street life. Within the cocoon of a great cathedral, suffused by the atmosphere, statuary, windows, incense-redolent air, and structure of belief, this was incarnation and Dantesque ascent.
The musical element long confounded musicologists. Only in the 1930s did Anglés finally crack the code, reveal the structures, and explain even the notation as "in synthesis the whole evolution of measured notation in Europe." He showed how pilgrimage and processional airs, the profane folk song, liturgical chant, dance forms, the rondeau, the virelais, "the medieval sequence, the troubadour lay, [and] the motets of French and Spanish polyphonists" had all been laid under tribute. Arabic contribution, both in text and in music, is still under discussion; it was perhaps at least an indirect influence. (7)
[18] Alfonso and James not only met but on several occasions enjoyed each other's extended hospitality. James described in his memoirs how he had towns decked out, provisions and comforts laid on, and "many games and marvels" presented to enliven these visits. He also tells at length, and several times, how he gave Alfonso advice on warfare, governance, deportment, and the Holy Roman Empire title. (8) The two kings afford a fascinating contrast not because one was an "emperor of culture" and the other a magnificent "conqueror," but because each was at once patron and warrior in such different ways and such different balance. The contrast appears even in their childhoods. Both had warrior-fathers famed throughout Christendom, and both were brought up by surrogates in spartan conditions far from home. James had been a true orphan, however, shielded only by pope and Templars, never favored with the family security, extensive education, and cultural opportunities Alfonso enjoyed. Although both men had a warrior youth, Alfonso's was a leisured apprenticeship under a strong father, with much time for affairs of the mind and free from most cares of state. Alfonso thus came late to the throne, an experienced and mature adept; James was thrust, as a boy without resources or experience, into a chaotic situation in the interest of stability. Each king married a princess from the other's family, each undertook or contemplated a divorce action, and each sired illegitimate [19] children; but James had three wives to Alfonso's one, and an unusually disordered sex life for which even his contemporaries rebuked him.
Both kings suffered not only recurrent revolts by recently conquered Muslims, but also the usual medieval rebellions by sons, though Alfonso's war with Sancho was by far the more traumatic and indeed definitive. Both men experienced strong Islamic influences, and each in his own way fostered Muslim life. Alfonso's welcome to Islamic learning and influence was direct, however, especially as reflected in educational efforts and in scholarly productions. James approached Muslims partly as protected Mudejars profitable as tenants, partly as an object of conversion, and partly as exotic chivalric encounter. Thus Alfonso reflected his region's steady experience of close interaction with peninsular Muslims; and he Islamicized Castilian letters, art, and fashions even while discouraging too considerable a Muslim presence in his conquered southlands. James, as a practical Mediterranean man, resisted such overt borrowings but actually worked to maintain the massive Muslim presence and to increase it by immigration. Alfonso's scholarly projects were not so purely intellectual as many have thought, nor his attitude toward Muslims and Jews so innocent of proselytizing aims. Nor was James the expeller and exploiter seen by an older generation of historians.
In artifacts of culture, Alfonso presided directly over monumental cooperative works. James did create a more personal artifact than any of these, in the one book for which he is responsible; but his cultural contributions are far fewer, immediately effective mostly in law and education, and above all more due to the general workings of his whole society than to the king's own stimulus or personal initiative -- as befit the diffused power and wealth and strong urban patterns of Catalonia. If both men created a navy, Castile did so mostly with foreign personnel, especially Italian. If both men encouraged Jewish settlement and a strong Jewish presence at court, Alfonso's notable recourse was to their scholarly contribution and financial expertise. James, while obviously sensible to the scholarly decoration afforded his court by the presence of a [20] Jewish hakîm, rather used his Jews practically in chancery and diplomacy and as profitable settlers. Even tax-collecting did not give as large a role to Jews in Catalonia as in Castile.
As with their childhood, their old age shows a similar pattern: a life's work coming undone, the king in the saddle on his former field of conquest as death approached, with a formidable enemy in the ascendant. Here too the balance is subtly different. The troubles of Alfonso were rooted in a deeply troubled society, so that they were to worsen even after the immediate crisis had passed with the king's death; the realms of Aragon, once the frontier was again secure, were to enter an ascending arc of prosperity and expansion.
Some of these many differences reflect the kind of people and economy each sovereign headed, for they had very dissimilar contexts with very dissimilar histories. Other differences reflect the kind of man each king was, the personal influences that shaped their early development, and the kind of resources and limitations with which they had to work. Resemblances between each king and reign are nevertheless striking. Together they presided over the central expansion of the Spanish Reconquest, over the restructuring of their respective expanded realms, over a legal and cultural renaissance (academic, artistic, literary, medical, musical, and scientific), over commercial and technological breakthroughs, and over an intensifying relationship with Islamic and Jewish cultures that affected the evolution of Europe at many levels.
To discuss either King is to explore his society, consequently, a convergence of the military-commercial model with a scholarly-cultural model. Although each king's society comprised the elements of both models, each knew those elements in its own mix of priorities and context. The models themselves are Classical, of course: the philosopher-king or patron versus the warrior-upholder of justice. By an irony of literary genre, James presents himself to us today as overwhelmingly in the activist-warrior model, because the Islamic influences on his autobiography favored that fantasy. With equal irony, Alfonso's brilliant cultural achievements almost wholly obscure the solid warrior model in his career. Yet, like [21] two Don Quixotes, the two kings once passed a day of travel together, discussing their respective battlefield heroics.
In applying such models, five of the characteristics or elements just touched on should particularly be kept in mind. (1) Both societies had just acquired vast territories from Islam, and repercussions in each colonialist homeland were immediate and far-reaching. Administrative innovation and colonization became priority activities for both. (2) Each society was experiencing a surge of pride and local consciousness one might term protonationalist. If Alfonso's masterworks were deliberately written in Castilian, James composed his autobiography in Catalan rather than in Latin, and James's archives and actions reflect this regional emphasis. (3) Each society, throughout its legal stratum, was a prime mover in introducing Roman Law into Europe. James's Furs had more practical Romanist effect than such celebrated secular codes as the Melfi constitutions of Frederick II, while Alfonso's collections would in time not only reshape Castilian life but have wide impact in later contexts abroad. (4) Each society faced the problem of confrontation between the mercantile way of life and the baronial. The urban-commercial element assumed some prominence in Castile. But in Aragon-Catalonia the conquests fortified the already dominant urban-commercial interest and thus hastened a confrontation with upland Aragon's barons, while simultaneously redistributing and diffusing the urban bases of power. (5) Each society entered the wider political stage of Europe. Alfonso long campaigned to become Holy Roman Emperor, to a degree that precipitated domestic crises. James fell heir to the collapsing Hohenstaufen cause, and by marrying his heir to its heiress paved the way for the conquest of Sicily by the realms of Aragon within a few years of his death. Both monarchs opened an African front, commercial as well as military.
The confrontation of military-commercial and scholarly-cultural models is of special relevance to Hispanists, since that century and the trends symbolized by these two kings were central to the social evolution of the peninsula. For medievalists at large it would be difficult to select a topic, focused in [22] time and place, that offers so much upon which to reflect. Scholars in any field, or for that matter thoughtful people of any background, should find stimulation in discussing these models with their parallels in other times and places, not excluding our own. Americans will find these two medieval kings fascinating not only as a topic for humanistic reflection, or as a vital element in the evolution of Western civilization, but because their work has specific relevance to the United States. Their colonialist expansion set patterns for Spain's later settlement of the New World; our society was formed, in turn, by converging frontiers that transformed a seaboard United States into a continental mingling of cultures. The Hispanic contribution to the United States today is assuming an ever larger role in our national evolution. And Alfonso's Siete partidas is still a relevant component of United States law. (9) Its English translation, carried out and published by the American Bar Association, is a standard reference in law libraries.
Each of the two kings remains a living presence also in his respective section of Spain. As today's democratic Spain emerges, the two kings assume new symbolic weight. The United States has a stake in this heightened cultural awareness, as evidenced in our recent military treaty with Spain that expressly provides for large-scale cultural interchange.
1. In so wide-ranging an introductory chapter, I shall refrain from piling up footnotes. My Bibliographical Essay at the book's end supplies ample indication of general and detailed works.
2. On James's role in Occitania, even after the treaty of Corbeil in 1258, see Archibald Lewis's challenge to traditional historiography below in chapter 6. On King James's wild ride to kidnap the heiress of Provence in 1245, previously dismissed as a chronicler's romance, see the probative new documentation in my Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Crusader Kingdom of Valencia (Cambridge 1984), chap. 10 on "The French Connection."
3. Treaty with the count of Toulouse, in my The Crusader Kingdom of Valencia, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass. 1967), vol. 1, p. 370 (23 April 1241): "a Rodano usque Valenciam."
4. Riquer, Història de la literatura catalana, 4 vols. (Barcelona 1964), vol. 1, pp. 394-95, 402; and his introduction to the facsimile L[l]ibre dels feyts del rey En Jacme (Barcelona 1972). Coll, "Llibre dels feits," in Gran enciclopèdia catalana, 15 vols. (Barcelona 1969-80), vol. 9, pp. 250-51.
5. See these and similar quotations in my "The Spiritual Life of James the Conqueror, King of Arago-Catalonia, 1208-1276: Portrait and Self-Portrait," CHR 62 (1976), pp.1-35.
6. Socarras, Alfonso X of Castile: A Study on Imperialistic Frustration (Barcelona 1976), pp. 110-12.
7. Higinio Anglés, La música de las Cantigas de Santa María, 3 vols. in 4 (Barcelona 1943-64); Las Cantigas de Santa María (the poems), ed. Walter Mettmann, 4 vols. (Coimbra 1959-72). Facsimile Las Cantigas de Santa María, with studies by Matilde López Serrano et al., 2 vols. (Madrid 1980). John Keller, Alfonso X, el Sabio (New York 1967), pp. 64, 85-86. Matilde López Serrano, Cantigas de Santa María (Madrid 1974), pp. 16-17, 33~34' Menéndez Pelayo, "Las Cantigas del rey Sabio, "La ilustración española y americana 39 (1895), nos. 8-10. José Guerrero Lovillo, Las Cántigas: estudio arqueológico de sus miniaturas (Madrid 1949). (The accent on Alfonso's Cántigas, as here in Guerrero's work, is frequently omitted today.) An international symposium on the Cantigas at the Spanish Institute of New York in November 1981 will soon be published, and an English translation of the poems has been completed by Kathleen Kulp-Hill of Eastern Kentucky University. Considered simply as a Marian collection, of course, the Cantigas had antecedents in medieval Europe; as Joseph Snow remarks, however, "none is as extensive, as richly illuminated, as beautifully composed, nor as elegantly mounted" ("Trends in Scholarship on Alfonsine Poetry,"Corónica II [1983], p. 251). Julian Ribera's theories on Arabic music incorporated are now rejected.
8. Llibre delsfeyts, chap. 501 (games); chaps. 432-33, 474-75, 494-99, 505-7, 607 (advice).
9. Dramatized for us notably in "the most unusual case" in the current term of the U.S. Supreme Court. The Summa Corporation of the late Howard Hughes, with a supporting brief from the Reagan administration, has been protesting the intrusion of the California Supreme Court into a billion-dollar development on the Ballona wetlands adjoining my residence. The state traces its "public trust" interest, in a major argument, through Mexican property law to a provision of Alfonso's Siete partidas. The case, which Summa warned would affect "vast areas" along five hundred miles of California coastline, was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, appropriately enough, in the very month of Alfonso's seventh centennial, April 1984. The decision left the king's principle untouched, reversing the state's court as too tardy "at this late date" in applying it to these private properties. See the in-depth account in the Los Angeles Times, 9 January 1984, and the decision of 17 April 1984.