The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Medieval Iberia

Unity in Diversity

E. Michael Gerli, Ryan D. Giles, E. Michael Gerli, Ryan D. Giles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367771744
• eBook ISBN: 9781351809788
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Languages

The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Medieval Iberia: Unity in Diversity draws together the innovative work of renowned scholars as well as several thought-provoking essays from emergent academics, in order to provide broad-range, in-depth coverage of the major aspects of the Iberian medieval world.

Exploring the social, political, cultural, religious, and economic history of the Iberian Peninsula, the volume includes 37 original essays grouped around fundamental themes such as Languages and Literatures, Spiritualities, and Visual Culture.

This interdisciplinary volume is an excellent introduction and reference work for students and scholars in Iberian Studies and Medieval Studies.

SERIES EDITOR: BRAD EPPS

SPANISH LIST ADVISOR: JAVIER MUÑOZ-BASOLS

Part I

The environment

1

Humans and the environment in medieval Iberia

Abigail Agresta

Introduction

Hispania was first named “Iberia” after the river Iberus [Ebro]…It is situated between Africa and Gaul, closed off by the Pyrenees mountains to the north and everywhere else shut in by the sea. It is temperate in its healthy climate, abundant in all types of produce, and very rich in its abundance of precious stones and metals.

Isidore of Seville, Etymologies XIV.iv.28

Muslim and Christian writers alike in medieval Iberia tended to follow Isidore of Seville’s example in extolling the abundance of their homeland (Glick 2005, 45). Modern historians, however, have not always agreed. Those writing about the Christian kingdoms, particularly Castile, have stressed the “meager resources” of this “dry, barren, impoverished land” (Phillips and Phillips 1997, 8–9; Elliott 1963, 3). Historians of al-Andalus, by contrast, have observed that the region was “famed for its verdant landscapes”, gardens, and agricultural wealth (Ruggles 2000, xiii). Although Islamic and Christian Iberia occupied much of the same ground, different historiographical traditions have seen that ground very differently.

This is partly because, as has been often observed, the geography of the Iberian Peninsula is so profoundly varied. Iberia is divided both geographically and climatically; the mountains and high plains cut the interior off from the moderating effects of both Atlantic and Mediterranean, so that a true Mediterranean climate can be found only in a narrow belt around the east, south, and west coasts. The northwest, from Galicia to the Basque country, is mountainous, rainy, and green, with plentiful forest cover. The Meseta Central, a high tableland which rises across much of the center of the peninsula, is arid, with hot summers and hard winters. In the south and east, from the Catalan coast to Seville, dry mountains contrast with the rich, irrigated fields (huertas) that cover the valleys and the coastal plains (Ruiz 2007, 6–13; Way 1962). Each of these regions could be further subdivided into an almost infinite variety of landscapes. Transport between them was also difficult in the premodern period; mountain ranges crisscross the peninsula, and most of its rivers are navigable for only a short part of their length (Wing 2015, 9–13).

The different Iberias of medieval historiography, therefore, are to some extent a result of real geographic fragmentation. They are also a matter of perspective; the peninsula looks harsher and drier from Burgos or Toledo than from Valencia or Granada. But this focus itself bleeds into myth; the rich Andalusi landscape is as much cultural narrative as dispassionate observation, as is the austerity of the central Meseta. Furthermore (and here we come to the central subject of this chapter), humans have not simply wandered about Iberia’s landscapes like actors on an impressive array of sets. The landscapes of medieval Iberia were in large part the creation of the humans who lived in them, just as human environments are today.

That human beings and their activities can have a profound impact on their environments is obvious in the modern world, but less so in the Middle Ages. Scholars have just begun to write medieval history “as if nature mattered”. In order to do so, they have asked not only how medieval humans altered their environments over time, but also how those environments, and the species that lived in them, shaped the culture and history of the medieval period. Although medieval people have long been thought helpless, fearful, and ignorant in their environments, this new work has made clear that the opposite was true. All across Europe, medieval people managed and cleared forests, channeled water, drained marshes, and constructed habitats for a variety of economically valuable plants and animals (Hoffman 2014; Arnold 2013; Squatriti 2013). While they, like moderns, had a tendency to view the natural world as a metaphor for human society or faith, these lenses did not preclude keen observation. They approached natural disasters as calculated risks rather than terrifying mysteries, and they sought to mitigate those risks by means both religious and material (Gerrard and Petley 2013). To the scant harvest of environmental histories of medieval Iberia, this chapter will add the insights of agrarian history and the history of technology, and the fruits of related fields like archeology and paleoclimatology, which have revealed features of Iberian landscapes not visible in surviving documents.¹

All of these sources are marshaled to shed light on one complex question: how did the successive conquests of the Iberian Peninsula shape the relationships between humans and the peninsula’s environments? Although this question barely scratches the surface of possibilities for medieval environmental history, in Iberia it serves as the logical starting place. Medieval Iberian history is in large part defined by the shifting borders of Islamic and Christian rule. Only recently, however, have scholars begun to ask how these successive regimes affected the environment, and the answers to those questions remain very preliminary. It is clear that both Muslims and Christians in Iberia modified the landscapes in which they lived and that they did so in the context of a changing climate. Under Islamic rule, the creation of new irrigation networks transformed the human relationship with the land. The Christian conquest transformed this relationship again, both within and beyond the irrigated space. These successive transformations are still visible in Iberia today, in “cultural landscapes” such as the UNESCO-recognized Serra de Tramuntana in Mallorca.

Background

Although this chapter is concerned with the period from the Arab conquest of 711 to the fall of Granada in 1492, the history of human influence on the Iberian environment goes back millennia. Human land use has been shaping Iberian ecosystems since at least the Bronze Age, when pastoralists began to clear the forest and human industries first raised lead levels in the Iberian environment (Carrión et al. 2010; García-Alix et al. 2013). As Iberia was incorporated into the Roman Empire during the first two centuries BCE, the population grew, leading to overgrazing and deforestation in some places, as well as an increase in mining activity (Carrión et al. 2003; Kulikowski 2004; García-Latorre et al. 2001; López-Merino et al. 2011). To mine the gold-bearing areas of the northwest, the Romans developed an elaborate hydraulic system, as well as other systems throughout the peninsula to supply water to cities and to irrigate fields (Ruiz del Árbol Moro et al. 2014; Sánchez 2015).

As the empire disintegrated, population pressure on the marginal mountain areas eased, and the population overall may have diminished (García-Latorre et al. 2001, 78). Paleoecological evidence suggests that herding and salt production decreased in the Visigothic period, and forest cover increased (Corella et al. 2013, 565). Agriculture and other economic activities likewise became more limited in scope, and irrigation systems seem to have fallen out of use (Glick 2005, 16–18). From 400 to 800 CE, known as the Dark Ages Cold Period, the climate was cooler than before or after. Iberia, however, saw a great deal of regional variability in both temperature and humidity (Sánchez-López et al. 2016, 143). Storms became more frequent along both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic coasts (Degeai et al. 2015; Costas et al. 2012), and chronicles from the late seventh and early eighth centuries record a string of disasters on the peninsula, including plague, famine, and locust swarms (Glick 2005, 16–17). Here, however, we must be cautious; a chronicler reporting disaster may have been as intent on narrative aims as on weather-reporting (Squatriti 2010). Modern readers, like medieval ones, find the confluence of natural and political turmoil satisfying, even if climate and history do not always track so neatly.

The landscape of al-Andalus

The surviving histories of the Arab conquest of the Iberian Peninsula were written after the event, as records of memory shading into myth. In these histories, many written in the eastern Mediterranean, the landscape takes on the marvelous qualities of a place on the edge of the world (Hernández Juberías 1996). In the ninth-century history of ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Habı¯b, as Janina Safran has observed, the land that the conquerors encounter is described as alien, forbidding, and remote (2002, 138–140). Some features remain recognizable; two early stories describe the ruins of Roman fountains, canals, cisterns, and aqueducts (Hernández Juberías 1996, 260–65). A later tenth-century historian, by contrast, described a landscape defined by the toponyms of the conquerors; most famously, Tariq gathered his men on a promontory (jabal) that later bore his name (Jabal Tariq, or Gibraltar) (Safran 2002, 142).

Irrigation

The conquerors soon made their mark on the land, with agricultural innovations that transformed the cultivated landscape of al-Andalus. The new settlers introduced a variety of new crops imported from Syria and points east, watered with irrigation systems constructed across the peninsula’s valley floors. The innovative nature of Andalusi agricultural practices has been clear to scholars only since the 1970s. For much of the twentieth century, Islamic agriculture was caught up in larger debates about the place of al-Andalus in Spanish history. Scholars who followed Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz in rejecting Islamic influence tended to presume that Iberian irrigation must have been Roman in origin. In the 1970s, however, Thomas Glick demonstrated that these systems were Islamic, not Roman, and that they had been constructed by decentralized communities of irrigators rather than by the state. Glick built on the work of Pierre Guichard, who mapped the settlement patterns of Syrian and Berber groups, to show that irrigation technologies had spread along the same migration patterns (Glick 1969).² These arguments were based on textual sources, but by the later 1980s the work of archeologists, chief among them Miquel Barceló, confirmed and elaborated this picture of Andalusi agriculture and its transformation of the Iberian cultivated space (Barceló and Kirchner 1996).

When selecting sites for farming, the Arab and Berber settlers of al-Andalus prioritized land suited for irrigation. Settlements in al-Andalus were entirely designed around the water flow, and rights to the water were initially embedded in a kin-based property system, although this became less important over time (Trillo San José and Carmen 2005, 170; 2012, 268–69). They built their villages (Arabic al-qarya, rendered into Spanish as alquería and Portuguese as alcaria) above and outside the fields, out of the way of the hydraulic systems (Trillo San José and Carmen 2005, 167–68). For the irrigated fields they chose flat areas, often valley floors, but stayed well back from riverbanks, so that their crops would not, as in Egypt, be dependent on an annual inundation of the floodplain. The earliest irrigation canals were fed not by rivers, but by wells, springs, or qanats—underground galleries that passed through a water table, into which the water filtered and was carried to the desired site (Glick and Kirchner 2000, 305). Later, larger irrigation networks (huertas) usually took their water from the river by means of diversion dams, which raised the water level to flow into subsidiary channels. Sometimes the water sources were some distance from the fields, meaning that water would be lost to evaporation. The goal was not to maximize the area irrigated by a given water source, but rather to select the best, sunniest, and most fertile fields and bring the water to them (Puy 2014).

The technologies necessary to construct these systems were fairly simple, and the work was probably carried out by the farmers themselves. Nonetheless, as Barceló’s pioneering work established, these systems were planned. Powered only by gravity, canals must be designed so that the water flows through to all parts of the system. If it runs too fast, it will erode the canal banks, but if it runs too slowly, it will pool and stagnate. Because of these considerations, a system that has already been constructed is not easy to modify; any changes must remain within the parameters set by the original design. Modifications were extremely rare prior to the Christian conquest (Puy 2014; Kirchner 2009).

Climate changes around the eighth-century conquest may have prompted the shift toward irrigated agriculture in the Islamic period. As noted above, the conquerors may have arrived in the midst of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• PART I The environment
• PART II Societies, polities, and governments
• PART III Histories
• PART IV Philosophy and spirituality
• PART V Gender
• PART VI Languages and literatures
• PART VII Visual culture
• Index