Possessing the Land: Aragon's Expansion into Islam's Ebro Frontier under Alfonso the Battler (1104-1134) (The Medieval Mediterranean, 7)

Book info: Possessing the Land: Aragon's Expansion into Islam's Ebro Frontier under Alfonso the Battler (1104-1134) (The Medieval Mediterranean, 7) (Leather Bound, 356 pages) – Brill, 1995. Language: English.

Possessing the Land is the first comprehensive treatment of Christian Aragon's expansion under Alfonso I (1104-1134) into a major arena of medieval Christian/Islamic contact: the Islamic Ebro River march of Aragon. Based on an extensive examination of primary and secondary sources, the book's insights into the social and political processes of Christian settlement and the fate of post-conquest Islam are of particular importance. Its conclusions that the freeholding of land characterized the Ebro's Christian settlement, and not heavy seignorialization, and that Christian settlement relied on the Muslim infrastructure, challenge significantly the neo-Marxist thesis of the “feudalization” of twelfth-century Christian Iberian society and the corresponding Christian break with Iberia's Islamic Past. This book constitutes a fundamental work in Iberian frontier studies. Editorial Reviews Review '...a valuable work for upper-division undergraduates and above. Strongly recommended.'
J.F. Powers, Choice, 1997.
'...einer Fülle von soliden Einzelergebnissen sowie faktischen Klärungen, die die großen politischen Linien auf der Iberischen Halbinsel in dieser Epoche deutlicher hervortreten lassen...'
Ludwig Vones, Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters, 1998.
About the Author Clay Stalls, Ph.D. (1991) in History, University of California, Los Angeles, is currently a lecturer in the UCLA Department of History. He is the author of numerous articles on Muslim/Christian relations in medieval Iberia and on medieval Iberian social history.