The Age of Chivalry

by Hywel Williams

  But the psychological impact that is a hallmark of Giotto’s figures is also present in the work of the preceding generation. The Virgin present in Cimabue’s “Maestà” (1280s) is an approachable intercessor, and the animation of Duccio’s own “Maestà” (1308–11) comes from the spiritual intensity of the 20 angels and 19 saints who crowd round the Madonna. Giotto certainly brought a new dramatic focus to his representations of the Passion, as in the celebrated “Lamentation” (c.1305) painted in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. The artificially elongated figures and swirling drapery of the Byzantine tradition have now disappeared, and our involvement as engaged spectators is partly a result of Giotto’s supremacy as a draftsman who can set the scene and control the perspective. But this is still an artist who is indebted to his masters; the gestures of those who surround the saint’s dead body in the “Mourning of St. Francis,” painted for the Bardi Chapel in Florence’s Santa Croce, evoke the stylized grief of Byzantine mosaics and icons. Giotto’s art, like that of his Florentine contemporary Dante, escapes facile categories, and to see him as just the pioneer who prepared the way for a later renaissance is to miss the point of genius.

  “Lamentation” (c.1305) by Giotto di Bondone is a fresco painted in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. The Holy Family and the disciples mourn the dead Christ whose body has been taken down from the Cross.

  THE RECONQUISTA

  722–1492

  The re-conquest of the Iberian peninsular territories occupied by Muslim invaders was a process that lasted, on one interpretation, for some seven and a half centuries. Christian forces secured their first major victory as early as 722, just over a decade after the first invaders arrived in Spain from North Africa. The Battle of Covadonga was fought by members of the Visigothic aristocracy who had fled to the mountainous Asturias region in the far north, and their victory led to the establishment of a Christian kingdom that became a base for the re-conquest of Spain. The end of Islam’s territorial power in Spain came in 1492, when the emirate of Granada fell to the united kingdoms of Aragon and Castile after a ten-year military campaign. Granada had, however, been an anomalous outpost since 1238 when it became Castile’s vassal state, and by that stage the rest of Spain had already been re-conquered for Catholic Christianity.

  The reconquista, which gathered pace in the 11th century, was a product of the conviction that Iberian Christianity had only a precarious toehold on the southern European border with Islam. Hunger for land and the urge to populate empty territories played their part as the Christian leaders moved southwards, taking some of their subjects with them. Towns that were being repopulated were granted fueros or charters by Christian rulers, and the popularity of these written guarantees of liberties and immunities helped to ensure higher population levels from the mid-tenth century onward. Fueros created a direct relationship between rulers and townspeople, and they therefore offered an attractive escape route from lordship (or feudalism) and its local obligations. But Western Europe’s first major crusading enterprise also stirred hearts and minds with an intensity whose effects would be lasting both in Spain and in Europe. The continent’s Christian culture, still so experimental in the 11th and 12th centuries, learned from the reconquista the hard lesson of negativity: in order to exist and flourish it had to be an oppositional force, one defined by its enmity. The papacy’s decision to launch a series of crusades in the Middle East owed much to the Iberian experience, and subsequent Spanish rulers whose rationale of power included a Christian missionary element were similarly indebted. It was not for nothing that Francisco Franco chose Burgos, the Castilian city that was a major base for the re-conquest, as the symbolic location for his self-proclamation in October 1936 as generalissimo of the Spanish army and head of state.

  ABOVE Loarre Castle was a major Christian fortification, built by Sancho III in Aragon in the early 11th century, on the frontier between the Christian and Muslim lands. The castle was much restored during the 20th century.

  CHARLEMAGNE’S CHRISTIAN BORDER STATES

  Charlemagne’s army returned to Spain in the late 790s following the earlier, and disastrous, expedition of 778, and his formation in 795 of a Frankish-controlled Spanish march had created a buffer zone along the border between Umayyad Spain and his empire’s southern limits. The march extended from the Basque region in the west and along the Pyrenean frontier. Following a victory for the Franks in 801 it also incorporated the county of Barcelona. This was one of Europe’s most ethnically diverse regions consisting of Basques, Jews, Germanic Visigoths and native Iberians, as well as Hispano-Romans whose ancestors had populated Spain when it was a Roman imperial province. Frankish-appointed governors, called walis, administered each of the march’s 17 counties.

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  THE RECONQUISTA

  795 Charlemagne establishes the Spanish march, a buffer zone whose separate counties will evolve into the independent principalities of Navarre, Barcelona and Aragon.

  791–842 Alfonso II rules the Christian kingdom of the Asturias in northwest Spain. His forces conquer Basques to the east and Galicia to the west.

  924 The Asturias kingdom, following its southward expansion and incorporation of the county of Castile, becomes known as the kingdom of León.

  939 León’s southern boundaries extend toward the River Douro.

  970 Death of Fernan Gonzalez, count of Castile, who has established his county’s independence of León.

  1002–31 The Córdoban caliphate disintegrates into petty principalities (taifas).

  1004–35 Sancho III (“the Great”) rules Navarre: he annexes Castile, and León becomes his protectorate. He bestows (1029) Castile on his son Ferdinand (1017–65).

  1037 Ferdinand, count of Castile, turns his county into a kingdom and, having defeated his brother-in-law militarily, becomes king of León. Ferdinand I’s son, Alfonso VI, succeeds (1065) to the throne of León and (1072) becomes king of Castile when his elder brother, Sancho II, is assassinated.

  1085 Toledo is taken by León-Castile.

  1090–94 Almoravid forces invade from North Africa and conquer most taifas.

  1118 Aragon’s army retakes Zaragoza.

  1137 Dynastic union between the county of Barcelona and the kingdom of Aragon.

  1139 Portugal attains independence from León-Castile.

  1170 The Almohad dynasty has replaced the Amoravids as rulers of Islamic Spain.

  1212 Aragon, León-Castile, Navarre and Portugal unite in battle to defeat the Almohads. Cordoba is retaken (1236).

  1238 The emirate of Granada becomes Castile’s vassal.

  1248 Ferdinand III of Castile retakes Seville.

  1492 Aragon-Castile conquer Granada.

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  As Carolingian power declined in the ninth century the walis became increasingly independent and hereditary rulers of their own fiefdoms, and they started to call themselves counts. It was this region of the march that would later become part of the principalities of Navarre, Catalonia and Aragon, and right from its Carolingian origins onward it was something of a socio-economic experiment. Settlers were attracted into this sparsely populated and strategically vital area by Charlemagne’s land grants. These allowed extensive rights and immunities in return for a promise of military service when required. A military aristocracy, based in the myriad small castles that dotted the landscape, was thereby created. Its martial obligations, owed first to Charlemagne and subsequently transferred to the regional counts, anticipated later European developments in lordship and feudal duties.

  Although these Christian border states regarded Islam as their foe, they were also keen to establish their independence from their northern neighbor, the kingdom of the Western Franks. To this end, each of them was quite content to play off their Muslim and Christian neighbors against each other. Navarre, centered on its capital Pamplona, was a hereditary kingdom by the 820s, and Barcelona’s counts—the region’s predominant magnates—were passing on their holdings to their sons from the 880s onward. Borr
el II asserted the county of Barcelona’s formal independence of France’s Capetian rulers in 948, and all of these frontier states of the ninth and tenth centuries had remarkably stable boundaries. Nevertheless, they were mostly small entities, and the same mountains that protected them from invasion also limited their ability to break out and take on al-Andalus (the Arabic name for the part of the Iberian Peninsula held by the Muslims). The kingdom of the Asturias in Spain’s northwest was, however, better placed for expansion, and during the long reign of Alfonso II (r. 791–842) his forces conquered Basque dissidents to the east as well as the province of Galicia to the west.

  The discovery of St. James’s supposed bones in the Galician town of Santiago de Compostela turned the Asturias into a major pilgrimage center from the early ninth century onward, and the shrine was an important element in the kingdom’s leadership of the reconquista. Alfonso II’s reliance on plunder in order to maintain his kingdom, based on the city of Oviedo, makes him a characteristic medieval ruler. The tribute that he exacted gave him the means to raid Muslim-held towns such as Lisbon and Zamora. A more consistent pattern of continuous expansion to the south developed after his time, with the Asturian possessions in the regions of Castile and León being fortified and systematically repopulated.

  LEÓN—SPRINGBOARD TO POWER

  Alfonso III (r. 866–910) made the city of León his new capital, and from this base he campaigned to establish control over the lands to the north of the Douro river. A major reorganization of his kingdom saw Galicia and Portugal becoming duchies, and Castile was founded as a county. The southward movement of peoples from Galicia and Asturias changed the region’s center of gravity. From 924 onward it was known as the kingdom of León, and although the Cordoban caliphate was at the height of its power in the tenth century Leónese forces were still able to mount damaging attacks on both Toledo and Seville.

  The Battle of Simancas (July 19, 939) was a great moment in the history of León, and the victory gained by the forces of Ramiro II (r. 931–51) over the caliph’s army extended his kingdom’s boundaries toward the Douro. Ramiro’s army was, however, in a coalition with forces loyal to Fernan Gonzalez, the ruler of Castile who was now using his position of power in order to assert his county’s independence of León. Such maneuverings show that for most of the tenth century the Christian states of Spain had little conception of the reconquista as a strategic campaign which might coordinate their individual interests and efforts. By the end of the century, however, Navarre had made itself the Iberian region’s greatest Christian power, and its ruler Sancho the Great (r. 1004–35) had shown little fastidiousness in pursuing that goal. A marriage alliance meant he could annex Castile, a powerful army helped him to conquer the two adjacent Christian marcher states of Sobrarbe and Ribagorza, victory in war against King Bermudo III turned León into Sancho’s protectorate and Barcelona’s count came to pay homage to Navarre.

  The reign of Sancho III the Great covers the period of the Cordoban caliphate’s disintegration into a number of small principalities termed taifas in the generation following the death of al-Mansur (c.938–1002), chief adviser to the caliph and effective ruler of al-Andalus. Al-Mansur was the greatest military strategist ever to confront the reconquista, and at the Battle of Cervera fought near Burgos on July 29, 1000 he inflicted a great defeat on Castile’s army. But the succession disputes that arose after al-Mansur’s death plunged the caliphate into civil war, and by the 1030s it had disappeared to be replaced by myriads of emirs running their own taifas.

  Sancho divided his legacy among his sons, but he had shown how a tough hegemon could build up a Christian coalition, and his son Ferdinand, who had been allocated the county of Castile, shared a similar resolve. After waging a successful war on León, whose monarch was his own brother-in-law, Ferdinand succeeded him on the throne in 1037 and in the same year he turned Castile into a monarchy. The dynasty of Navarre had become the greatest power in Christian Spain, but it was the united realm of León and Castile—along with its contiguous areas in Galicia and the Asturias—which was the real political center of Spanish Christianity. As king of León and of Castile, Ferdinand kept up the pressure on the Muslim-run taifas until his death in 1065, and the system of tributes known as parias was designed to weaken his Islamic subjects both financially and politically.

  Ferdinand’s son succeeded his father as Castile’s King Sancho II, and then defeated his brother Alfonso in battle to become king of León in the months preceding his assassination in 1072. Alfonso had fled for safety to the taifa of Toledo (one of his Muslim client states), and Sancho’s murder meant that he could now reunite León and Castile. The great event of Alfonso VI’s reign (r. 1072–1109) was the conquest of Toledo in 1085, and the city’s designation as an archbishopric made it the spiritual center of Spanish Christianity. Alfonso had already proclaimed himself “emperor of all Hispania” in 1077, and the close links he established with the papacy and European monarchs opened his kingdom to external influences. The Roman liturgical rite was now adopted by the Spanish Church, and the reconquista started to attract non-Spanish crusaders including, especially, the French.

  MESSIANIC BERBERS TAKE CHARGE

  Although Arab-led, the Muslim conquest of Iberia had always relied on large numbers of Berbers from North Africa, both as fighters and as settlers. Confronted by the Christian advance, the rulers of al-Andalus decided to summon an additional force of Berber auxiliaries in 1086, and the warriors who crossed the Straits of Algeciras under the command of Yusuf ibn Tashfin ensured that Alfonso VI suffered a rare defeat in the Battle of Sagrajas (October 23, 1086). As well as being a Berber, Yusuf also belonged to the Almoravid dynasty, whose rule already extended over Morocco, Algeria and through the southern Sahara into Senegal. Fortified by a vividly fundamentalist Islamic faith, the Almoravids regarded al-Andalus as a Muslim society that had weakened and whose defeats were a form of divine retribution. When Yusuf returned in 1090, therefore, he came at the head of an army of conquest whose enemies were now the emirs of al-Andalus.

  The qualified toleration extended to its Christian and Jewish subjects by the Córdoba caliphate started to be threatened in the early 11th century. However, the Almoravid regime was set on a course of outright persecution, and that policy gave a new solidarity to the government of Islamic Spain. By 1094 Yusuf had removed most of Spain’s local Muslim princes from power and the taifas, with the exception of Zaragoza, were absorbed within a single Almoravid caliphate. The dynasty’s rule contained the reconquista for some two decades, but it was coming under increasing pressure in its North African base from the Almohads, another dynasty of Islamic Berbers and whose fanaticism rivaled that of the Almoravids.

  Zaragoza maintained its resistance to the Almoravids until 1110. Its emir played a major role in the Almoravids’ loss of authority, because following the defeat he and his army became allied to Aragon. In 1118 the Aragonese force seized Zaragoza, and the city became the capital of a Christian kingdom that was in the vanguard of the reconquista. Toward the west the Almoravids’ defeat at the Battle of Ourique (July 25, 1139) was another immensely significant event, since it enabled Prince Afonso Henriques to proclaim himself as Afonso I, Portugal’s first king, and to declare his realm’s independence of the kingdom of León and Castile.

  ABOVE A 12th-century painting of Alfonso VI, king of León, Castile and Galicia, from the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.

  The Almohads had replaced the Almoravids as emirs of Marrakesh in 1149, and in the years that followed they would also displace them in al-Andalus. In 1170 the Almohad capital was transferred to Seville, and although the regime lasted in al-Andalus for half a century its indifference to the arts and sciences made for a melancholy contrast with the sophistication of the Islamic Iberian past. The Almohad dynasty was nonetheless an effective warrior class and the victory gained by its Berber forces at the Battle of Alarcos (July 18, 1195) undermined the Castilian kingdom’s self-confidence. That defeat, however, instilled
in the Christian states a new conviction that unity was the key to success. At the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (July 16, 1212), fought near Jaen in modern Andalusia, the forces of Castile were joined by those of Navarre, Aragon, León and Portugal as well as by a French contingent. Together they inflicted the defeat on the Almohads that signified the end of the reconquista of the central Middle Ages.

  It fell to Ferdinand III of Castile to consolidate the conquest by taking Córdoba in 1236 and Seville in 1248, with Jerez and Cadiz falling soon after. The Almohads were forced to retreat to North Africa, though here, too, they suffered a gradual attrition of authority, and when the last of the dynastic line was murdered in 1269 he held only Marrakesh. In the 1230s, therefore, Spain’s Islamic far south was a power vacuum, and it was the Nasrid dynasty that seized the moment of regional opportunity. In 1237 Mohammed ibn Nasr established his authority in Granada, which then became the capital of his kingdom, and in the following year he accepted his status as Castile’s vassal emir.