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A History of Spain
Spain 1157 - 1300 A Partible Inheritance
Spain, 1157-1300 makes use of a vast body of primary and secondary source material to provide a balanced overview of a crucial period of Spanish as well as of European history.
- GenresHistory
304 pages, Hardcover
First published April 30, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 25, 2015
This book depicts the political and social history of Léon and Castile from the death of Alfonso VII of Castile and Léon to the year 1300.
It has many interesting details, but I feel that the author ended up focusing too much on the reign of Alfonso X of Léon and Castile (1252-1284), even if he intended to give a greater emphasis to the period, and in the end couldn't manage to tell his History in a clear way for everyone. I actually could catch it up because I have some background on these issues, but I bet many people with less knowledge would have slipped in the first 2 chapters (the worst of them all).
Anyway, I loved much of the facts Linehan wrote and his reflections on the "Learned King", especially on his internal policies and intelectual activities (it's likely he wasn't the author of most of the texts ascribed to him, being only an author in the sense he comissioned them). I also like the title because it's in itself a statement of what was modern Spain at the time: a collection of kingdoms which could be (re)united and desunited according to personal inheritances, although in this period the idea of primogeniture sucession was appearing in the peninsula. It's just a pity the author focused a bit too much in Castile and Léon and didn't give more emphasis to Aragon while forgetting Portugal (even if Portugal was forming slowly its own identity, I think it should have been more referred given its close ties to Léon and later to Castile and Léon, besides the fact that is mucg culturally closer to the central kingdom than Aragon), but that's also the result of a modern view of Spain that is part of this ollection of History books by Blackwell Publications (the author starts by debunking it).
To end the list of flaws, I have one or two quibbles with one or two assertions he made that were in fact sheer speculations, such as the role of Berenguela of Castile in the death of her brother Henry I or the extent of Castilian rule in Algarve under Alfonso X (it seems he probably received its incomes between 1253 and 1267 in a regime close to an appanage, although the Portuguese king was entitled to recover it when the heir to the Portuguese throne was 7 years old) and think he contradicted himself in chapter 4 by describing the complex interactions between the three monotheistic religions and asserting its mutual influences right at the beginning ("The year 1248 provides a high-water mark from which to observe some of the peninsula’s non-narrative features during our period, and the recent death of D. Rodrigo serves as a focus for the most significant of these, convivencia, the term used to describe the coexistence of Spain’s three great religions. The signs of this are everywhere, in the melding processes evident in the languages, literatures and verse forms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which I do not attempt to summarize, in the Mudéjar architecture of Aragón’s cathedrals and the synagogues which the law both canon and civil forbad to be built (but not to be repaired),1 in the hesitant Latin signature of the Toledo Mozarab, Sibibib Micael, appended to an Arabic document of 1231.2 As is testified by the Arabic words for ‘clement’, ‘felicity’ and ‘blessing’ in kufic characters sewn into the richly embroidered sweat-stained silk dalmatic in which D. Rodrigo was buried, influences operated in both directions.3 Not even the archbishop whose own cathedral was to be more French than its French Gothic models was immune from them." - pp. 87), and in the end suggesting it was more an elitist issue ("Wrong though it would be to read history backwards from 1300, the question must nevertheless arise how, if at all, the celebrated convivencia of the past can be reconciled with the agonies that lay ahead. It is a question one answer to which has already been suggested here: that convivencia is largely a thing in the mind of modern scholars and, so far as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were concerned, largely one of the best minds of the age, largely an elitist thing. The answer may therefore be thought to lie somewhere between Márquez Villanueva, with his talk of truce or dis- armament between the three religions ‘at a collective level’, and Tolan and his insistence on the ‘key role (...) played by the affirmation of the superiority of Christianity and the denigration of Judaism and Islam’.39 Historians ought not to be surprised when ruffians behave badly." - pp.95). It's true not all interactions between religious communities were peaceful even inside the same realm and that the treatment of Jews and Muslims started worsening in this period, but discarding in such a way all the other side of the coin seemed to be illogical. At least the evolution of the idea of "holy war" in the period in the Peninsular mindset was well told and Linehan doesn't fall in certain modern political traps on the issue.
Anyway, I loved much of the facts Linehan wrote and his reflections on the "Learned King", especially on his internal policies and intelectual activities (it's likely he wasn't the author of most of the texts ascribed to him, being only an author in the sense he comissioned them). I also like the title because it's in itself a statement of what was modern Spain at the time: a collection of kingdoms which could be (re)united and desunited according to personal inheritances, although in this period the idea of primogeniture sucession was appearing in the peninsula. It's just a pity the author focused a bit too much in Castile and Léon and didn't give more emphasis to Aragon while forgetting Portugal (even if Portugal was forming slowly its own identity, I think it should have been more referred given its close ties to Léon and later to Castile and Léon, besides the fact that is mucg culturally closer to the central kingdom than Aragon), but that's also the result of a modern view of Spain that is part of this ollection of History books by Blackwell Publications (the author starts by debunking it).
Concluding, despite some misorientation regarding the book's aims and audience, it isn't a bad work of scholarship on the issue especially if the reader is barely familiar with the subject, although experts won't find many new things. Linehan is nonetheless a fine scholar and I'm hoping to read more books from him without a "ration of words" which doesn't help at all in crafting complex narratives. Considering he had a restrictive limit of words, what's delivered, if not excellent, is good enough and could have been much worse than it is if it had been written by a worse historian.
It has many interesting details, but I feel that the author ended up focusing too much on the reign of Alfonso X of Léon and Castile (1252-1284), even if he intended to give a greater emphasis to the period, and in the end couldn't manage to tell his History in a clear way for everyone. I actually could catch it up because I have some background on these issues, but I bet many people with less knowledge would have slipped in the first 2 chapters (the worst of them all).
Anyway, I loved much of the facts Linehan wrote and his reflections on the "Learned King", especially on his internal policies and intelectual activities (it's likely he wasn't the author of most of the texts ascribed to him, being only an author in the sense he comissioned them). I also like the title because it's in itself a statement of what was modern Spain at the time: a collection of kingdoms which could be (re)united and desunited according to personal inheritances, although in this period the idea of primogeniture sucession was appearing in the peninsula. It's just a pity the author focused a bit too much in Castile and Léon and didn't give more emphasis to Aragon while forgetting Portugal (even if Portugal was forming slowly its own identity, I think it should have been more referred given its close ties to Léon and later to Castile and Léon, besides the fact that is mucg culturally closer to the central kingdom than Aragon), but that's also the result of a modern view of Spain that is part of this ollection of History books by Blackwell Publications (the author starts by debunking it).
To end the list of flaws, I have one or two quibbles with one or two assertions he made that were in fact sheer speculations, such as the role of Berenguela of Castile in the death of her brother Henry I or the extent of Castilian rule in Algarve under Alfonso X (it seems he probably received its incomes between 1253 and 1267 in a regime close to an appanage, although the Portuguese king was entitled to recover it when the heir to the Portuguese throne was 7 years old) and think he contradicted himself in chapter 4 by describing the complex interactions between the three monotheistic religions and asserting its mutual influences right at the beginning ("The year 1248 provides a high-water mark from which to observe some of the peninsula’s non-narrative features during our period, and the recent death of D. Rodrigo serves as a focus for the most significant of these, convivencia, the term used to describe the coexistence of Spain’s three great religions. The signs of this are everywhere, in the melding processes evident in the languages, literatures and verse forms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which I do not attempt to summarize, in the Mudéjar architecture of Aragón’s cathedrals and the synagogues which the law both canon and civil forbad to be built (but not to be repaired),1 in the hesitant Latin signature of the Toledo Mozarab, Sibibib Micael, appended to an Arabic document of 1231.2 As is testified by the Arabic words for ‘clement’, ‘felicity’ and ‘blessing’ in kufic characters sewn into the richly embroidered sweat-stained silk dalmatic in which D. Rodrigo was buried, influences operated in both directions.3 Not even the archbishop whose own cathedral was to be more French than its French Gothic models was immune from them." - pp. 87), and in the end suggesting it was more an elitist issue ("Wrong though it would be to read history backwards from 1300, the question must nevertheless arise how, if at all, the celebrated convivencia of the past can be reconciled with the agonies that lay ahead. It is a question one answer to which has already been suggested here: that convivencia is largely a thing in the mind of modern scholars and, so far as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were concerned, largely one of the best minds of the age, largely an elitist thing. The answer may therefore be thought to lie somewhere between Márquez Villanueva, with his talk of truce or dis- armament between the three religions ‘at a collective level’, and Tolan and his insistence on the ‘key role (...) played by the affirmation of the superiority of Christianity and the denigration of Judaism and Islam’.39 Historians ought not to be surprised when ruffians behave badly." - pp.95). It's true not all interactions between religious communities were peaceful even inside the same realm and that the treatment of Jews and Muslims started worsening in this period, but discarding in such a way all the other side of the coin seemed to be illogical. At least the evolution of the idea of "holy war" in the period in the Peninsular mindset was well told and Linehan doesn't fall in certain modern political traps on the issue.
Anyway, I loved much of the facts Linehan wrote and his reflections on the "Learned King", especially on his internal policies and intelectual activities (it's likely he wasn't the author of most of the texts ascribed to him, being only an author in the sense he comissioned them). I also like the title because it's in itself a statement of what was modern Spain at the time: a collection of kingdoms which could be (re)united and desunited according to personal inheritances, although in this period the idea of primogeniture sucession was appearing in the peninsula. It's just a pity the author focused a bit too much in Castile and Léon and didn't give more emphasis to Aragon while forgetting Portugal (even if Portugal was forming slowly its own identity, I think it should have been more referred given its close ties to Léon and later to Castile and Léon, besides the fact that is mucg culturally closer to the central kingdom than Aragon), but that's also the result of a modern view of Spain that is part of this ollection of History books by Blackwell Publications (the author starts by debunking it).
Concluding, despite some misorientation regarding the book's aims and audience, it isn't a bad work of scholarship on the issue especially if the reader is barely familiar with the subject, although experts won't find many new things. Linehan is nonetheless a fine scholar and I'm hoping to read more books from him without a "ration of words" which doesn't help at all in crafting complex narratives. Considering he had a restrictive limit of words, what's delivered, if not excellent, is good enough and could have been much worse than it is if it had been written by a worse historian.
April 9, 2020
An enriching read, but disjointed and abruptly (and unnecessarily) informal at times.
May 19, 2021
The mid-1150s saw three kingdoms established in Christian Spain, with an Alfonso growing old in Castile, an Alfonso in the prime of his life in Portugal, and a small Alfonso growing up to be heir of Aragon, all dedicated to spread moderate confusion among the Muslims of their own day, and extreme confusion among historians until the end of the world.
June 8, 2010
Not terribly well written - it's a bit meandering, with no clear narrative or structure.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews