Sometime around 1190, King Alfonso VIII of Castile granted a royal charter to the community of Cuenca, a Castilian frontier town recently recaptured from the Muslims and resettled by Christians. The royal charter was in the form of a law code, or fuero. Fueros, which evolved from short lists of exceptions to standing royal directives into much more extensive commentaries on legal matters, were used as an incentive to Christian settlement on the frontier. Reflecting the complexities of administering a town that still had large Muslim and Jewish populations, the fuero or code of Cuenca was meant to assure the permanence of Christian conquest and settlement. James Powers provides the first translation into English of this notable historical document. The Code of Cuenca is of great importance to legal historians, particularly as a comparison to contemporary English and other European law texts. Because there is no similar urban compilation anywhere else in twelfth-century Europe that contains significant descriptions of everyday life in a medieval frontier town, the code will serve as a primary source for scholars and students of medieval Iberian and western European political, economic, and social history.

Patrick J. Geary's highly acclaimed collection of source materials on the Western medieval world is well known for offering an excellent selection of substantial excerpts – or entire documents wherever possible – from the most widely studied historical texts. This much-anticipated fifth edition features a larger format, as well as enlarged type, to make the collection more reader-friendly. Study questions have been added at the end of each section to help students focus on key points in the text. New documents on the Black Death, William of Rubruck, and Marco Polo are included, as well as a new selection from St. Benedict's Rule for Monasteries and a new translation of Einhard's The Life of Charlemagne. Two color photo sections have been added, introducing students to fascinating medieval art such as a fifth-century ivory from Constantinople, the two earliest images of Joan of Arc, the Sachsenspiegel, and a shirt that belonged to Queen Bathild.

5. Tamquam domino proprio: The Bishop and His Jews in Medieval Palencia -- Part 3. Jews and Christians in Northern Castile (ca. 1250-ca. 1370) -- 6. The Jews of Castile at the End of the Reconquista (Post-1250): Cultural and Communal Life -- 7. Jews, Christians, and Royal Power in Northern Castile -- 8. "Insolent, Wicked People": The Cortes and Anti-Jewish Discourse in Castile -- Bibliography -- Index

Patrick J. Geary's highly acclaimed collection of source materials on the medieval period is well-known for offering an excellent selection of substantial excerpts—or whole documents wherever possible—from the most widely studied historical texts. This much-anticipated fifth edition features a larger format, as well as enlarged type, to make the collection more reader-friendly. Study questions have been added at the end of each section to help students focus on key points in the text. Volume II includes new material on the Black Death as well as new readings on Western Europe and the Mongols. A color photo section has been added, introducing students to fascinating medieval art such as the two earliest images of Joan of Arc and the Sachsenspiegel.

Spanning the period from c.900 to c.1500 and containing primary source material from the European, Byzantine, and Islamic worlds, Barbara H. Rosenwein's Reading the Middle Ages, Second Edition once again brings the Middle Ages to life. Building on the strengths of the first edition, this volume contains 24 new readings, including 10 translations commissioned especially for this book, and a stunning new 10-plate color insert entitled "Containing the Holy" that brings together materials from the Western, Byzantine, and Islamic religious traditions. Ancillary materials, including study questions, can be found on the History Matters website (www.utphistorymatters.com).

This volume provides a series of new perspectives on the political, military, and religious history of the reign of Fernando III, king of Castile-León, from 1217-1252. The essays collected here address the conquest of al-Andalus and the policies of Fernando III, Christian-Muslim relations in the Peninsula, the creation and curation of royal networks of power, the role of women at the Castilian court, and the impact of religious change in Castile-León. Assembling an international group of eleven leading scholars on this period of Iberian history, this volume combines military and religious history with a variety of novel approaches and methodologies to ask new and exciting questions about the reign of Fernando III and his place in medieval European history. Contributors are Martín Alvira, Carlos de Ayala Martínez, Janna Bianchini, Bárbara Boloix-Gallardo, Cristina Catalina, Francisco García Fitz, Francisco García-Serrano, Edward L. Holt, Kyle C. Lincoln, Miriam Shadis, and Teresa Witcombe.

In a major contribution to the debate among medievalists about the nature of social and political change in Europe around the turn of the millennium, Jeffrey A. Bowman explores how people contended over property during the tenth and eleventh centuries in the province of Narbonne. He examines the system of courts and judges that weighed property disputes and shows how disputants and judges gradually adapted, modified, and reshaped legal traditions. The region (which comprised Catalonia and parts of Mediterranean France) possessed a distinctive legal culture, characterized by the prominent role of professional judges, a high level of procedural sophistication, and an intense attachment to written law, particularly the Visigothic Code. At the same time, disputants relied on a range of strategies (including custom, curses, and judicial ordeals) to resolve conflicts. Chronic tensions stemmed from conflicting understandings of property rights rather than from pervasive violence; the changes Bowman tracks are less signs of a world convulsed in struggle than of a world coursing with vitality. In Shifting Landmarks, property disputes serve as a bridge between the author's inquiry into learned ideas about justice, land, and the law and his close examination of the rough-and-tumble practice of daily life. Throughout, Bowman finds intimate connections among ink and parchment, sweat and earth.

No subject looms larger over the historical landscape of medieval Spain than that of the reconquista, the rapid expansion of the power of the Christian kingdoms into the Muslim-populated lands of southern Iberia, which created a broad frontier zone that for two centuries remained a region of warfare and peril. Drawing on a large fund of unpublished material in royal, ecclesiastical, and municipal archives as well as rabbinic literature, Jonathan Ray reveals a fluid, often volatile society that transcended religious boundaries and attracted Jewish colonists from throughout the peninsula and beyond. The result was a wave of Jewish settlements marked by a high degree of openness, mobility, and interaction with both Christians and Muslims. Ray's view challenges the traditional historiography, which holds that Sephardic communities, already fully developed, were simply reestablished on the frontier. In the early years of settlement, Iberia's crusader kings actively supported Jewish economic and political activity, and Jewish interaction with their Christian neighbors was extensive. Only as the frontier was firmly incorporated into the political life of the peninsular states did these frontier Sephardic populations begin to forge the communal structures that resembled the older Jewish communities of the North and the interior. By the end of the thirteenth century, royal intervention had begun to restrict the amount of contact between Jewish and Christian communities, signaling the end of the open society that had marked the frontier for most of the century.

From Al-Andalus to the Americas (13th-17th Centuries). Destruction and Construcion of Societies offers a multi-perspective view of the filiation of different colonial and settler colonial experiences, from the Medieval Iberian Peninsula to the early Modern Americas. All the articles in the volume refer the reader to colonial orders that extended over time, that substantially reduced indigenous populations, that imposed new productive strategies and created new social hierarchies. The ideological background and how conquests were organised; the treatment given to the conquered lands and people; the political organisations, and the old and new agricultural systems are issues discussed in this volume. Contributors are David Abulafia, Manuel Ardit, Antonio Espino, Adela Fábregas, Josep M. Fradera, Enric Guinot, Helena Kirchner, Antonio Malpica, Virgilio Martínez-Enamorado, Carmen Mena, António Mendes, Félix Retamero, Inge Schjellerup, Josep Torró, and Antoni Virgili.

King Alfonso VIII of Castile: Government, Family and War brings together a diverse group of scholars whose work concerns the reign of Alfonso VIII (1158–1215). This was a critical period in the history of the Iberian peninsula, when the conflict between the Christian north and the Moroccan empire of the Almohads was at its most intense, while the political divisions between the five Christian kingdoms reached their high-water mark. From his troubled ascension as a child to his victory at Las Navas de Tolosa near the end of his fifty-seven-year reign, Alfonso VIII and his kingdom were at the epicenter of many of the most dramatic events of the era. Contributors: Martin Alvira Cabrer, Janna Bianchini, Sam Zeno Conedera, S.J., Miguel Dolan Gómez, Carlos de Ayala Martínez, Kyle C. Lincoln, Joseph O’Callaghan, Teofi lo F. Ruiz, Miriam Shadis, Damian J. Smith, James J. Todesca