Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices
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Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices

David Abulafia, Nora Berend

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Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices

David Abulafia, Nora Berend

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About This Book

In recent years, the 'medieval frontier' has been the subject of extensive research. But the term has been understood in many different ways: political boundaries; fuzzy lines across which trade, religions and ideas cross; attitudes to other peoples and their customs. This book draws attention to the differences between the medieval and modern understanding of frontiers, questioning the traditional use of the concepts of 'frontier' and 'frontier society'. It contributes to the understanding of physical boundaries as well as metaphorical and ideological frontiers, thus providing a background to present-day issues of political and cultural delimitation. In a major introduction, David Abulafia analyses these various ambiguous meanings of the term 'frontier', in political, cultural and religious settings. The articles that follow span Europe from the Baltic to Iberia, from the Canary Islands to central Europe, Byzantium and the Crusader states. The authors ask what was perceived as a frontier during the Middle Ages? What was not seen as a frontier, despite the usage in modern scholarship? The articles focus on a number of themes to elucidate these two main questions. One is medieval ideology. This includes the analysis of medieval formulations of what frontiers should be and how rulers had a duty to defend and/or extend the frontiers; how frontiers were defined (often in a different way in rhetorical-ideological formulations than in practice); and how in certain areas frontier ideologies were created. The other main topic is the emergence of frontiers, how medieval people created frontiers to delimit areas, how they understood and described frontiers. The third theme is that of encounters, and a questioning of medieval attitudes to such encounters. To what extent did medieval observers see a frontier between themselves and other groups, and how does real interaction compare with ideological or narrative formulations of such interaction?

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2017
ISBN
9781351918589
Topic
History
Edition
1
Chapter 1
Introduction: Seven Types of Ambiguity, c. 1100–c. 15001
David Abulafia
Basic Ambiguities: Some Historiographical Frontiers
If the essays in this volume prove anything, it is that the ‘medieval frontier’ poses difficult problems of definition; these problems are part of a wider difficulty that historians at the start of the twenty-first century are bound to have with the description of a society whose political foundations rested on different concepts of the relationship between man and man (not to mention woman) and between God and man to those that have developed in the wake of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution. While modern society retains a good number of medieval institutions, such as the universities, parliaments, the English legal system, virtually none of them operates any longer within the conceptual framework which brought them into being. It is only recently that historians of either frontier societies or the ‘inner lands’ of medieval Europe have come to terms with the problems in describing a political world built on different assumptions about power relations, about the nature of territorial control, about overlordship and sovereignty.
The need to work within a different conceptual framework to that supplied by the modern sovereign state is a theme which also underlies the contribution by Dr Ellenblum to this volume. Though rulers in the years around 1200, like the governments of modern states, might see an advantage in controlling contiguous territories rather than a multitude of scattered slices of land, they also saw advantages in holding those lands in different ways to suit local exigences: here as a king, there as another king’s vassal, here creating an extensive royal demesne, there granting palatine rights to responsible feudatories. This was as true of the highly centralised Sicilian state as it was of Capetian France, in which royal power was much more obviously circumscribed. The move towards territorial integration, documented, for example, in Henry Cohn’s classic study of the Rheinpfalz in the years around 1400, is primarily associated with the state-building of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in which other considerations, such as an incipient sense of ‘national identity’ in some areas of Europe, also helped to shape the early nation state.2
Turning to the outer edges of Christian Europe, the work of Robert Bartlett has emphasised the role of frontier expansion not merely in the drawing of a much larger map of Europe, extending far to the north and east, but also, to some degree, in describing the social impact of developments in the new territories on the societies from which the pioneer settlers hailed.3 Thus Latin Europe was ‘made’ not just in France, England and the Rhineland, but also in the peripheral areas that interacted feebly or strongly with the lands from which colonisers had originally come. Bartlett’s work shows an impressive mastery of such areas as legal practice, military techniques and forms of tenure, above all in the Celtic lands of the British Isles and on Germany’s eastern frontier; less successful, Mediterranean historians are inclined to think, is his treatment of the south of Europe, where many of his generalisations about the nature of trading contacts, cultural ties and so on between ‘mother’ and ‘daughter’ territories seem not to apply. It is striking that his work to a large degree ignores Sicily and extensive areas of Spain, particularly those conquered by the Catalans and Aragonese; of course, one would no more want to build a general theory out of such distinctive societies as Catalonia-Aragon, with its curious view of royal–noble relations, or out of the Sicilian melting pot, than it is appropriate to do from the cases of Wales, Ireland, Prussia and Denmark. It stands to reason that the confrontation between Western Europeans and the inhabitants of wealthy and cultured Islamic lands in the Mediterranean took on a different character to the confrontation with pagans living a rather simpler life on the north-eastern edges of Europe.
Interestingly, the same objection applies to the 1989 volume on frontier societies edited by Robert Bartlett and Angus Mackay, which laid a particularly strong emphasis on the Anglo–Celtic frontiers and the German East, without paying any real attention to Latin frontiers along the Mediterranean shores, let alone Byzantine ones.4 The exception is the Castilian–Granadan frontier, which is a particular interest of one of the editors of that volume, and which elicits three contributions; all are certainly of great merit, but the concentration on one part of Iberia is a regrettable confirmation that some see the history of the peninsula as to all intents and purposes the history of Castile.5 Then there is a characteristically wide-ranging and well-informed survey of the historiography of the frontier by Robert I. Burns, going back to Frederick Turner and his interpretation of the American frontier, but also citing his own work on the extraordinarily rich documentation from Valencia and the Catalan world; yet, despite Father Burns’s best efforts, this cannot make up for the obvious imbalances in the book.6 Therefore no excuse is really needed for the fact that in what follows here a good many examples are taken from the Mediterranean area. So, too, the contents of this book are intended to provide fuller coverage of the Mediterranean world (including Byzantium) than can be found in earlier attempts to provide a survey of medieval frontier societies, while in no way neglecting other parts of Europe.
Another recent book on medieval and early modern frontiers, edited by Daniel Power and Naomi Standen, has a wider chronological and geographical range than that edited by Bartlett and Mackay; and, interestingly, it pays attention to internal frontiers within areas such as France as well as to the edges of Europe and Asia; overall, its concern is mainly with military frontiers, while a rather wider view of frontier societies has been adopted in this collection than in that of Power and Standen.7 The emphasis of Power and Standen, and their authors, is on ‘frontier control’ and, while they refer more than once to the human encounters that took place and to their cultural results, they are primarily interested in a particular phenomenon: how the medieval frontier zone, whether in China or the West, was controlled, and to what extent the idea of boundary-lines is a creation of the modern nation state. Particularly welcome is their attention to Eurasia: not just imperial China, but also the vast expanses between China and Eastern Europe, which pose special problems to historians of frontiers and of nomadic societies. By contrast with Power and Standen’s book, this volume seeks to examine some of the cultural encounters that took place in frontier regions as well, whether between Lithuanian paganism and Christianity (Raza MaĆŒeika), or between Frankish masters and their Muslim and eastern Christian subjects in the Latin East (Jonathan Riley-Smith) and in Cyprus (Peter Edbury), in al-Andalus, Hungary and Crimea, where many faiths co-existed (Christys, Berend, Balard), or still further afield in the eastern Atlantic (my own contribution). This is not, as the contributions by Catherine Holmes and Nora Berend well show, to ignore the problem of frontier defences. Particularly important in the approach adopted here, however, is the role of religious attitudes and institutions on the medieval frontier, as can be judged from Brendan Smith’s valuable account of Church reform in Ireland and the other Celtic lands, or Jonathan Riley-Smith’s assessment of the quasi-dhimmi status of the indigenous inhabitants of the Latin East.
This brief survey of some recent literature on the frontier cannot conclude without mentioning important contributions that have been made in France, Spain and elsewhere. Particularly valuable for their range, both geographically and chronologically, have been two volumes edited by Michel Balard and Alain Ducellier.8 Like any conference proceedings – and perhaps this volume is no exception, despite the inclusion of additional material to improve the overall balance – the Balard–Ducellier tomes have something of the character of a miscellany. But in a sense that is the point: there was an enormous variety of frontier ‘experiences’, and any attempt to reduce them to a simple formula is bound to do violence to the evidence. The open spaces of central Asia or the Sahara saw different types of encounter to those experienced along the tightly packed shores of the western Asiatic Levant, or indeed the Spanish Levante, with their numerous towns and intensive agriculture.
Of course, it could be argued that the heavily urbanised societies of parts of the Mediterranean generated a different type of contact or confrontation to that found in the wide spaces of Ireland or Prussia. One criterion which might be helpful here is the degree of urbanisation that had taken place in the societies of Western Europe, Byzantium and Islam at particular moments; even in Italy, around 1050, there existed no city to compare in wealth and population with the metropolises of the Muslim and Greek Mediterranean, not even partly Byzantine Venice, which was still largely constructed of wood. (Palermo was, of course, at this time a large and prosperous city within the Islamic sphere, populated by Muslims, Greeks and Jews.) The large, complex economies of the Islamic cities of the Mediterranean were characterised by wide diversification and specialisation, by intensive agriculture in those areas which were able to produce suitable crops in what was often a hostile environment short of water, and by short- to medium-distance trade in necessities such as grain and salt. The scale of these enterprises was for long much larger than in Western Europe, though it is possible to argue that by the fifteenth century the economy of Western Europe had moved in a similar direction, helped as well as hindered by the shock of plague and by relative economic decline in the East. Thus we could say that, in economic terms, the Islamic world was more ‘advanced’ than Western Europe for much of the medieval period. No one would doubt that this was true of agricultural technology around 1200.9 Equally, there can be no question that the ‘Stone Age’ societies of the Canaries and the Caribbean penetrated by Western navigators in the fifteenth century were primitive by comparison with late medieval Europe: lacking most or all metals, lacking large conurbations, mostly lacking writing systems. Terms like ‘Stone Age’ impose a set of judgements about the criteria that mark a society as primitive or advanced (thus the highly organised Inca empire lacked wheeled transport, extensive use of metals and writing), though this is not to say that one society cannot be described as more technologically or economically advanced than another.
The aim here is to look at several ways in which one might approach the frontier, bearing in mind the different emphases provided by the authors of each chapter in this book. Given the diversity of approaches to the concept of the frontier, this essay will attempt to approach frontiers from very different angles, looking at such features as economic contrasts, language, religion, descriptions of alien human bodies, as well as underlying political concepts which were applicable not just on the outer edges of Greek or Latin Europe, but also to some extent within the heartlands. Such a broad series of approaches should not be taken to imply that there was no concept of the frontier in the minds of medieval observers. Thus we can certainly identify the use of language which describes the special military and ethnic character of border regions, as we see in Byzantine southern Italy after 976, in the ‘theme’ (thema) of Longobardia, or in the Marcher lands of western Britain, Hungary, eastern Germany and so forth.10 Such territories might possess a distinctive autonomy, which could last for many centuries, as can be seen from the experience of the palatine counties in northern England, or in the remarkable survival of local customs enshrined in town statutes in Spanish towns such as Teruel (Aragon) and Cuenca (Castile) long after they had ceased to be anywhere near the frontier with Islam.11 But in general we could say that the ‘medieval frontier’ was not so much an identifiable phenomenon, a hard fact, as it is a conceptual tool used by historians in a wide variety of ways to make sense of social and political developments in those areas of medieval Europe where the predominant values and assumptions of Latin Christendom encountered (or indeed collided with) the values and assumptions of other societies; and pari passu for Byzantium and its own neighbours. Even this is to underestimate the degree of interpenetration between Latin Christendom and its neighbours in areas such as Spain, Sicily or Hungary; or between high Byzantine culture and the societies of Bulgaria, Serbia and indeed Seljuq RĆ«m: frontiers also provided opportunities for cultural exchange, for religious conversion and for the borrowing of languages or at least of valuable vocabulary.
Where we might find genuine surprise at encountering a different intellectual and religious milieu is among that small group of travellers who went as far as Karakorum and Peking in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, or among those who ventured into Atlantic waters before and soon after 1492.12 The early history of European discovery of a larger world cannot be disconnected from the study of medieval frontiers, as Felipe FernĂĄndez-Armesto showed in his masterful study of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, Before Columbus.13...

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