PEASANTS, MARKET EXCHANGE AND ECONOMIC AGENCY IN NORTH-WESTERN IBERIA, c.850-c.1050

Abstract

Given the manifest complexity of early medieval Iberian society - all those Christians, Muslims and Jews busily rubbing shoulders in a land of shifting frontiers and hard-won allegiances - it is no surprise that the causes and consequences of political aggregation remain the focus of most scholarship on early medieval Iberia in both its northern Christian and Andalusi contexts.1 Variations on this theme range from the Minimalist to the Romantic, but they are almost all insufficiently attentive to the economic underpinnings of these societies, our understanding of which remains rudimentary, the important contributions of a handful of scholars notwithstanding.2 In this regard Muslim Spain has fared somewhat better than the Christian northern kingdoms, thanks to the work of Manuel Acién, Miquel Barceló, Pedro Chalmeta, Alejandro García Sanjuan, Pierre Guichard, Eduardo Manzano Moreno and others.3 Studies of the socio-economic conditions and structures of the Christian societies of early medieval Spain are hardly thin on the ground, but they have tended to marginalize (and indeed under-theorize) the straightforwardly economic aspects of the social relations upon which they have focused.