From Galicia to the Rhône Legal Practice in Northern Spain Around the Year 1000
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chapter 8 From Galicia to the Rhône Legal Practice in Northern Spain around the Year 1000 Jeffrey A. Bowman In his contribution to a 1978 conference on feudalism, Pierre Bonnassie argued that the principalities of Christian Spain and Mediterranean France shared a similar history during the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. Bonnassie noted and deplored the sharp divide that separated historians of the French Midi from those of Iberia. He further suggested that the model of dramatic social and political change during the eleventh century that he had formulated for Catalonia might aptly describe the history of other regions to the east and west, as he put it, “from the Rhône to Galicia.”1 Bonnassie described a political order based on Visigothic law that remained vigorous in Catalonia during the ninth and tenth centuries.2 At its economic base was a vigorous, free peasantry, cultivating allodial land at least until the second quarter of the eleventh century. In Bonnassie’s account, this order rapidly degenerated between 1020 and 1060. Public order gave way to private violence in a feudal revolution. An epoch of political fragmentation and sei- gneurial depredation ensued. Bonnassie’s claims were rooted in his profound knowledge of Catalonia’s rich archives, but he suggested that Catalonia’s trans- formation in the period was very similar to that of a wide swath of territory sprawling across northern Spain and southern France. In other words, accord- ing to Bonnassie, although the feudal revolution of the eleventh century was especially well documented in Catalonia, it was not peculiar to that region. For some of Bonnassie’s followers, even this ample envelope of northern Spain and Mediterranean France could not contain the troubles of the feudal revolution, and Bonnassie’s account of Catalonia in the eleventh century became a model for understanding social and political transformation throughout Europe in this period.3 Historians have devoted a great deal of attention to Bonnassie’s description of the feudal revolution. Since the 1990s, many have offered more qualified assessments of the scale and pace of change in Catalonia and elsewhere during 1 Bonnassie (1991). 2 Bonnassie (1975–1976). 3 See Jean-Pierre Poly and Eric Bournazel’s synthetic treatment (1980). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004288607_011 344 Bowman the period.4 Critics point to significant interpretive problems. Bonnassie’s argument was grounded in a vocabulary of ‘feudalization’ whose usefulness some scholars have called into question. It is difficult to accept at face value complaints about violence in medieval charters, since many of these seem to be part of the give and take of at times contentious but not necessarily vio- lently exploitative relations. It is similarly difficult to establish tight connec- tions between formal changes in the nature of records during the eleventh century, on the one hand, and comprehensive social transformation, on the other.5 And, perhaps above all, the private-versus-public distinction that was fundamental to Bonnassie’s model seems in many respects unsustainable for the period. These accumulated reservations have largely undone the feudal revolution as Bonnassie described it.6 But while Bonnassie’s account of the ‘feudal revolution’ in Catalonia and elsewhere has been subject to a good deal of scrutiny, the comparative impulse of Bonnassie’s project in “From the Rhône to Galicia” has unfortunately attracted fewer followers. Bonnassie suggested that his fellow historians “…adopt a wider perspective and consider the group of countries relatively close in language and habits of life which extended from the Rhône to Galicia, and ask to what extent, by what means, and according to what chronology the process described for Catalonia can be applied to them.”7 Today—as thirty years ago—historians who mine charters for information about the social, economic, and political orders of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries often pursue their research with circumscribed regional foci. They tend to focus on Galicia, León, Catalonia, Picardy, or Tuscany without systematically comparing the institutions and ‘habits of life’ of one region with those of others. In other words, even while historians embraced Bonnassie’s feudal transformation, suggesting that the chro- nology he described for Catalonia did indeed apply more or less precisely to scattered parts of western Europe, few accepted his invitation to conduct trans- regional comparisons and few pursued his suggestion that we might try to trace the broadly shared political and social features of super-regions, such as the one he described stretching from Galicia into Mediterranean France. There is still much to be gained from comparative examinations of the type that Bonnassie proposed even if the template of the feudal revolution cannot 4 For overviews of the debates: Rosenwein and Little (1998); Maclean (2007). 5 Barthélemy (1997). 6 At least some scholars have suggested that Bonnassie’s model of revolution reflects the Galician experience: Portela (1989); Andrade (1997), 7–15. 7 Bonnassie (1991), 110–111..