‘Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Perspectives on State Building in the Iberian Peninsula’, Reading Medieval Studies 36 (2010), pp. 57–75. (original) (raw)

The process of state-building was a defIning characteristic of later medieval European history and rightly holds a prominent place in both general and regionspecific studies of the period. ' The history of the Iberian peninsula i,>certainly no exception to rhis rule, but unlike other 'regions of the medieval West the process of stare-building in Iberia is closely associated with another, more localised, historical and historiographical phenomenon: the Reconqw'sta. As Angus MacKay pointed out in 1977, for many scholars 'the related concepts of the frontier and the reconquest provide the key to Spanish historical development',' morc recendy, and with reference to the kingdom of Portugal, Stephen Lay has argued that 'the successful prosecution of the reconquest appears to have been intricately interconnected with a process of national ronnation'. a In.this context, and given the over-arching thematic and chronological scope of the present volume, an examination of eleventh-and twelfth-century perspectives on the process of statebuilding in the Iberian peninsula suggests itself as a worthy topic for investigation. However, this paper is not so much concerned with the practicalities of statebuilding -the institutions and mechanisms that were developed for the administration of fberian frontier societies, and so forth' -as it is with the ideological frameworks and narrative strategies that were used by those who sought to justify their expansionist activities; in other words, it offers an examination of some of the language and ideas by which various groups and individuals attempted to legitimise their state-building endeavours in the period c.l 050-c. 1I 50. As will be demonstrated, for many contemporaries the process of Christian state-building in Iberia was rarely associated with the extension of political and military authority over virgin territory; rather, it was more often defined by the reclamation and reconstitution of lands that were believed to have been lost to external aggressors in generations past.. 1 In this way, state-building in the Iberian peninsula in the later Middle Ages was inextricably linked with the successful prosecution of what was understood to be a process of territorial reconquest, and thus might be 58 Purkis characterisedat least in ideological, if not practical, tenus -as a process by which Iberian states were being 'rebuilt'.