LITMIR.BIZ

      The concept of “frontier,” so central to this book, deserves some explanation. For many modern Americans, the term conjures a variety of images. We speak of the frontiers of science and medicine, of new or unexpected frontiers in the farthest reaches of the globe, of space as the “final frontier.” The word itself implies action: frontiers are to be crossed, conquered, pushed back, and made civilized. To be on the frontier is to be forward thinking, a pioneer at the forefront of a great and progressive endeavor; by implication, the alternative is stagnation, decline, complacency. These frontiers of our popular imagination are not so much physical locations as they are processes by which the unknown is made known and wilderness tamed, an understanding that owes much to the work of Frederick Jackson Turner and his influential 1893 paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”¹⁵ Turner never offered a precise definition of “frontier,” which he claimed was an “elastic” term. Rather, as the “outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization,” it was a set of conditions that challenged settlers, forcing them to leave behind European norms and establish a distinctly American way of life.

      For medieval Castilians, frontier, or frontera, meant something quite different. There was never an encounter between civilization and wilderness. Rather, frontiers were arenas for interaction, both peaceful and hostile, between different cultures. Contact between Christianity and Islam in Iberia dates to at least 711, when Muslim armies from North Africa crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and swiftly conquered much of the peninsula. A Christian enclave survived in the northwest, however, forming the nucleus of what would become the kingdom of Asturias. Although there was no grand strategy of “reconquest” at this time, Muslim power in that region was weak and the Christians expanded slowly and unevenly for the next several centuries as Asturias was succeeded by the kingdoms of Castile-León, Navarre, and Aragón across northern Iberia.¹⁶ Internal divisions and civil war, meanwhile, led to the breakup of the Caliphate of Córdoba and establishment of a number of small city-states or taifa kingdoms. Despite a number of setbacks, Christian rulers conquered nearly all these states between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries.

      This process seemed to culminate in 1238, when Fernando III of Castile (the original owner of the famous sword) signed a treaty that made the Emirate of Granada, the last independent Muslim state, into a vassal. Fernando likely envisioned that the Christian reconquest of Iberia would soon be complete. In the preceding decades, after all, the Christians had won great victories and gained vast swaths of territory. The speedy dissolution of Granada was not to be, however. It instead remained independent for another 250 years and, as Map 1 shows, Christians coming to settle the newly conquered regions around Jaén, Córdoba, Murcia, and Seville found themselves in close proximity to Muslims, often trading together and sharing pastureland even while intermittent frontier warfare continued.

      From the beginning, boundaries between the various Christian and Muslim states were porous; there were never effective barriers to contact. Even clearly delineated borderlines were vanishingly rare and it would be more accurate to speak of zones in which authorities held varying degrees of control. People dwelling near the Granadan frontier—on both sides—encountered challenges and opportunities that differed markedly from those in more central regions. They lived in constant fear of physical attack and developed protective strategies ranging from militia forces to extensive fortification to frontier “institutions” meant to curtail private violence and mitigate the effects of general hostilities.¹⁷ They were subject to influences from both their home culture and that of their neighbors. The dual dynamics of war and cultural exchange meant that the frontier was a place apart and was seen as such by contemporaries.

      MAP 1. Fifteenth-century Iberia.

      Although his arguments have been alternately adopted, adapted, and debunked in the century since they were first published, Turner’s central contention—that frontiers matter—has remained tenaciously relevant. Historians have devoted much effort to understanding both the nature and the significance of frontier communities, seeing them both as windows into myriad aspects of past societies and as engines of historical change. The Granadan frontier has been a particularly popular subject for inquiry. It has been seen, at one time or another, as a region of free land, an arena for the expansion of Latin Christendom, a militarized border zone, or a site for cultural contact and exchange.¹⁸

      Early generations of historians hewed closely to Turner’s original argument, contending that the freedoms and risks of the Granadan frontier spurred the development of a particular set of Iberian cultural values quite different from those of the rest of western Europe, even romanticizing it as a “miniature wild west.”¹⁹ Later medievalists, while retaining an emphasis on frontier-driven cultural change, linked the transformation to cultural contact and exchange, noting the ways in which populations on either side of the frontier intermingled to the point where they bore more similarities with each other than their nominal home cultures. Acculturation, however, was not an all-or-nothing proposition that led either to cultural immersion or strictly controlled interactions. People living in contact with other societies were able to adapt, borrow, or reject particular aspects of those societies as they saw fit, leading to highly localized modes of cultural exchange.²⁰

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