The King, the Coin, and the Word: Imagining and Enacting Castilian Frontiers in the Early Modern Mediterranean

In 2002, Teofilo Ruiz argued that the rise of the vernacular, the introduction of autochthonous coinage, and the consolidation of unsacred monarchy around martial goals and accomplishments in Castile in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were symptomatic of a change in mentalités influenced by broader European trends but forged by the particular circumstances within the Iberian Peninsula.  This shift took place in the dynamic later Middle Ages in the context of intensive circulation of individuals and ideas along routes of pilgrimage, trade, and military campaign within the Peninsula and from without.  Ruiz identified a consolidation of legal and linguistic practices in the face of constantly shifting political frontiers and the negotiation of ideological boundaries between cultural, religious, and linguistic groups who lived in varying degrees of contact, collaboration, and conflict.  In this paper, I consider the triad of language, money, and political representation in frontier making and breaking in the sixteenth century, with a particular focus on the Granada-Castile frontier before and after the 1492 conquest and the maritime frontier of the Mediterranean.  I argue that the way these frontiers were imagined and enacted in the sixteenth century was dependent on the ideals of property, language, and cultural boundaries that were forged in earlier centuries. The continuity of these ideals supported the process of nascent state formation and global empire.  This paper also advocates historiographical continuity across the medieval-early modern temporal frontier, as Ruiz himself has long advocated.