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A FIRST APPROXIMATION TO THE LANDS OF MILITARY ORDERS IN CASTILE

Clara Almagro Vidal1 Historian

Introduction

During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Christian kingdom of Castile experienced one of its biggest territorial advancements, stretching its frontiers from the valley of the river Tagus, situated in the middle of the Iberian Peninsula, to that of the Guadiana in the South. At the same time, the growth of military orders in the Holy Land and the expansion of this model of action to defend Christianity took place. In the midst of such developments, great tranches of land between the Central Mountain System and Sierra Morena were granted to military orders to rule and administer. These lands, just as many others pre-viously under Islamic rule, were already populated at the time that they were incorporated to Castile. There has been some discussion about the fate of this Islamic population after the Christian conquest and how the Islamic communi-ties present at the end of the Middle Ages came to be.2 Independent of the origin

1 This paper is part of the Research Project ‘Los mudéjares y moriscos de Castilla (siglos XI-XVI)’

(HAR2011‒24915) in the National Research and Development Plan (2008‒11), under the coordination of Ana Echevarria Arsuaga.

2 Some specialists, such as Jean-Pierre Molénat and Carlos Barquero Goñi, support the idea that the Islamic population left at the time of the conquest and that the majority of Muslim presence in these lands was the result of the late introduction of Islamic individuals and/or the liberation of Islamic slaves.

However, others, such as myself, Luis R. Villegas and Pedro J. Ripoll Vivancos, consider that there are enough clues to let us suspect that at least a fraction of the Islamic population, mostly in rural areas, remained under Castilian rule (an overview on this position can be found in Clara Almagro Vidal ‘La Orden de Calatrava y la minoría mudéjar’, Isabel C. Fernandes (coord.), As Ordens Militares. Freires, Guerreiros,Cavaleiros. Actas do VI Encontro sobre Ordens Militares, Vol. 2 (Palmela: Camara Municipal de Palmela, 2012), pp. 617‒30). Likewise, it has been said that Muslims from Uclés left and that the Mudejar community found at the end of the Middle Ages was the result of immigration and former slaves (Maria Milagros Rivera Garretas, La encomienda, el priorato y la villa de Uclés en la Edad Media (1174‒1310).

Formación de un señorío de la Orden de Santiago (Madrid-Barcelona: CSIC, 1985), p. 70). An overview of this problem can be seen in Ana Echevarria Arsuaga ‘La “mayoría” mudéjar en León y Castilla: legislación real y distribución de la población (Siglos XI–XIII)’, En la España Medieval, 29 (2006), pp. 7–30.

Law and Religious Minorities in Medieval Societies: Between Theory and Praxis, ed. by Ana Echevarria, Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala and John Tolan, RELMIN 9 (Turnhout Brepols, 2016), pp. @@–@@

© FHG 10.1484/M.RELMIN-EB.5.109357

of the Muslim populations living in their territories, there is no doubt that their presence had to be regulated and policed. The efforts to do so in these lands seem to run parallel and in concurrence with kingdom-wide initiatives, although the particulars of the legal measures taken by these institutions still pose many ques-tions to researchers.

However, analysing how the coexistence of different religions in lands that belonged to the military orders in medieval Castile was regulated is problematic.

This is partly due to the fact that the sources that have reached us do not tend to delve into facets related to coexistence among religions, but also because most of the extant legislation tends to regulate the attitude of the military orders to-wards said religious minorities, rather than the actions of the religious minorities themselves.3

There are, however, exceptions that allow us to hypothesize different facets of how military orders regulated the presence of these communities and individuals, and how those policies affected the said communities. In this respect, rulings and mandates given by the authorities of those military orders constitute very rich sources for understanding how the different orders regulated the life and actions of adherents of other religions living under their rule.

The aim of this paper, thus, is to explore how written sources can be used to learn how these communities were ruled by their Christian lords as shown by the legal texts issued by them, wherever those are available, to present the panorama that they show, and to make a provisional interpretation of the findings. In order to do so, this paper will be centred on three such documents, each belonging to a different military order and a particular point in time, but all of them demon-strating a very suggestive point about facets of the relations created among com-munities of different religions and their lords.

Belonging to a certain religion in the Middle Ages implied participating in an entire way of life determined by religious rules which were linked to social, economic and ritual traditions. Therefore, religion was an essential part of a com-munity’s identity and frame of reference, and had more weight, to a certain ex-tent, than the geopolitical context in which individuals and communities were inserted.

3 For example, the internal ordinances of the military order of Saint James established in 1249, and con-firmed at later dates, imposed limitations to who could revenue the master’s income, and among those banned to act as collectors were both Jews and Muslims: ‘otrosy que nyngund freyre ni pariente nin criado del maestre nin de comendador nin de freyre nin judío nin moro no coxga nin recabe los derechos del maestre mas por mandado del maestre o de aquellos a quien el diere el poder cojan dos omes buenos e raygados que den buena cuenta e verdadera al maestre o a aquellos que por el oviere poder de poner estos cogedores segund dicho es’, and that point is reiterated in 1310 (Library of the Hispanic Society of America, catalogue number HC380/434).

In relation to this, the Middle Ages were also a time when secular and religious matters were deeply intertwined. This meant that religion played a strong role in the formulation and content of the laws. This was not a very problematic matter when the person and the state shared one religion, as there would be little to no contradiction between religious rules and secular laws and, in fact, both tended to overlap. However, living under the rule of lords who belonged to a religion different to one’s own made matters more complicated. Muslims living under Christian rule — similarly to Jews — were subject to both their own religious laws and to those established by the secular power of the kingdoms in which they lived. In this sense, Muslims living under Castilian rule were obliged to follow not only the rules decreed by their own religion, but also the regulations imposed by their Christian lords.

Location of the case studies (made by Jose Luis Pascual Cabrero)

The three documents on which this paper is constructed, which are presented in chronological order, have a few points in common. On the one hand, all of them were dispatched by the master or another high authority of one of the military

orders settled in Castile. On the other, all of them reflect certain aspects of life and coexistence regarding the presence of members of a religious minority in their lands. Lastly, the regulations and rulings contained in them do not concern individual matters but general ones and, although at times they are a reflection of the general laws of the kingdom, they are also specifically tailored to the problems the authorities encountered at a given moment.

Mandate and Regulations Given to the Town of Alcázar de San Juan

In the General Chapters of the military orders it was common practice that all complaints raised by their subjects and representatives of the town councils in their lands would be heard, and then the Chapter would take decisions in regard to their requests and observations. These documents, of which, to my knowledge, not many have survived, occasionally regulated the coexistence between the three religions in their lands.

One instance of these actions took place in 1308, when the town council of Alcázar de San Juan (Ciudad Real), a small town belonging to the Hospitaller Order, and situated in the so-called Campo de San Juan, in the Southern Castilian Plains, raised a number of requests and complaints to the General Chapter of the said military order. Among those petitions, there was one related to the abuse they were suffering at the hands of a ‘moor’ called Ali, who was, or so we believe, in charge of the administration of one of the order’s houses and/or fortresses, situated near that town.4 Ali, of whom we do not know a last name, is suspected to have been a slave belonging to the military order, albeit one with a certain level of power.5

4 This document is dated May 31st of that year and was published first by Philippe Josserand,

‘Nuestro moro que tiene a Cervera. Un châtelain musulman au service de l’ordre de l’Hôpital au début du XIVe siècle’, Stéphane Boissellier, et al. (dir.) Minorités et régulations sociales en Méditerranée médiévale (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2010), pp. 175‒77, and later by Pedro A. Porras Arboledas, et al. Documentos medievales del archivo municipal de Alcázar de San Juan (Siglos XII-XV) (Alcázar de San Juan: Patronato Municipal de Cultura, 2012), pp. 60‒62;. There is also a copy of this document inserted in a later one dated the 5th of May, 1490, that has also been published by Juan M. Mendoza Garrido and Luisa Navarro de la Torre ‘Unas ordenanzas sobre Alcázar de San Juan a comienzos del siglo XIV’, Cuadernos de Estudios Manchegos, 21 (1991), pp. 171‒91, specially pp. 189‒91.

5 Different interpretations have been given on this point. Mendoza Garrido and Navarro de la Torre

‘Unas ordenanzas sobre Alcázar de San Juan’, on the one hand, sets forward a similar interpretation to the one espoused here, while Carlos Barquero Goñi simply states that he had a place in the organisation of the military order (Carlos Barquero Goñi, ‘Mudéjares bajo el señorío de la Orden Militar del Hospital en la España medieval (siglos XII-XV)’, Ana Echevarria Arsuaga (ed.), Biografías mudéjares o la experiencia de ser minoría: biografías islámicas en la España cristiana (Madrid: CSIC, 2008), pp. 183‒99, p. 194). On the other hand, Ph. Josserand, stresses the use of a possessive article in the mention of Ali in the text, reading in that his condition of slave, without dismissing the importance of the position he occupied (Josserand,

‘Nuestro moro que tiene a Cervera’, p. 166).