Chapter 2 Council and Urban Militias in the Crown of Aragon during the 13th Century: From Conquering Militias to Monetary Exemptions
Enric Guinot
According to the King James i chronicle – Llibre dels Feits – in autumn 1232 the infantrymen attached to a militia force raised by the town of Teruel conquered the castle of Ares, in the Maestrat de Castelló. This fortress was located ap- proximately 100 km to the south of the foremost Christian positions around Teruel, a region that some authors have referred to as a “march,” a politically and militarily open, half populated territory, which in the period from 1150 to 1230 remained wedged between Aragon and southern Catalonia, and Sharq al- Andalus.1 Barely six months later the council militias of Teruel, Daroca and Zaragoza participated in the siege and conquest of the madīna of Borriana, in la Plana de Castelló, and between 1237 and 1238 the largest concentration of urban militias of the 13th century in the east of the Iberian Peninsula gathered to take part in the siege of the city of Valencia (this included militias from Barcelona, Lleida, Tarragona, Tortosa, Montblanc, Montpellier, Jaca, Zaragoza, Daroca, Calatayud, Teruel and some few other minor towns).2 On the other hand, in 1263 Christian colonists recently installed in the new settlement of Alcoi, in the mountains to the south of Valencia, assaulted and sacked the nearby Muslim village or alqueria of Ibi, taking as much grain and as many items as they could load on their donkeys, according to a document
* This research forms part of the projects Modificaciones del ecosistema cultivado bajomedi eval en el reino de Valencia (har 2011-27662) and Crecimiento económico y desigualdad social en la Europa mediterránea (siglos xiii–xv) (HAR2014-58730-P), funded by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Spanish Government. 1 Antonio Gargallo, El Concejo de Teruel en la Edad Media, 1177–1327, 3 vols. (Teruel: Instituto de Estudios Turolenses, 1996); Antonio Ubieto, Orígenes del reino de Valencia (Zaragoza: Anúbar, 1979) 2:37–60. List of abbreviations: aca (Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, Barcelona); ahn (Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid); amv (Archivo Municipal de Valencia); arv (Archivo del Reino, Valencia); om (Sección Órdenes Militares). 2 For this and other evidence contained in the royal chronicle we follow Llibre dels feits del rei en Jaume [hereafter cited as lf], ed. F. Soldevila, J. Bruguera and M.T. Ferrer (Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2008).
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3 Josep Torró, La formació d’un espai feudal: Alcoi de 1245 a 1305 (Valencia: Diputació de Valèn- cia, València, 1992), 129–130. 4 Archivo de la Corona de Aragón [hereafter cited as aca], Cancillería, reg. 23, f. 8v–9r. These towns are: Morella, Peníscola, Onda, Borriana, Morvedre, Segorbe, Llíria, Alpuente, Cullera, Ademuz, Castielfabib and Alzira.