Session Abstract

The term authority often evokes state power.  From the High Middle Ages to the early modern period, European monarchies consolidated their power vis-à-vis both local interests such as municipalities and external forces like competing states.  The process of state expansion was manifested in boundaries, and Teofilo Ruiz’s work has explored the budding concept of “territory” within medieval Castile and its ultimate expression in the form of empire.  Indeed, the Iberian monarchies were some of Europe’s most prodigious state builders.  In honor of Teofilo Ruiz, the papers on this panel examine physical, ideological, and social boundaries and frontiers.  William Jordan launches the proceedings off by investigating the construction of boundaries between the Spanish kingdoms and France in an age of increasing competition among European states.  He focuses on King Louis IX’s desire to maintain peace between France, the Spanish kingdoms, and England in face of Islamic power, and how this policy goal shaped the boundaries between France and its Iberian neighbors.  Christian power ultimately gained hegemony over Islamic communities on the Iberian Peninsula with Castile and Aragon overcoming Granada in 1492.  Claire Gilbert’s paper draws upon Ruiz’s thesis that the consolidation of linguistic and legal practices went hand-in-hand with negotiation to establish physical and ideological boundaries between cultural groups.  She analyzes how language, currency, and political representation helped establish boundaries between Castile and Granada as well as across the broader Mediterranean maritime frontier.  Messianic attributes were often applied toward the Spanish imperial enterprise and the Encubierto (“Hidden One”), a figure who was to defeat Islam, purify the Church, and rule with justice leading up to the End of Times was associated with King Ferdinand of Aragon, rebels in the Germanías revolution, and the Emperor Charles V.  Bryan Given’s paper explores the intertwining of state expansion with messianism and discusses how ideological concepts like encubiertismo could transcend bodily boundaries and be applied to a number of figures.  The movement of bodies, indeed, was critical for the expansion of the Spanish empire as individuals and families pulled up roots and roamed across the realm.  Carrie Sanders considers the Catalan Vallgonera clan, whose cadet branches settled in Sicily, and elucidates the relationship between the different lines despite both the physical and social frontiers that separated them.  Early on in the reign of King Philip II, Spanish expansion was reaching a plateau, having conquered northern Mexico and Chile in the Americas and facing long-term Protestant adversaries in northern Europe.  Xavier Gil’s paper fittingly closes the panel by analyzing the debates that raged among theorists, jurists, and administrators as to the limits of imperial expansion and the appropriate size of territorial states.  Teofilo Ruiz’s scholarship has long helped bridge the medieval and early modern periods of Iberian history.  Taken as a whole, the papers on this panel advance our knowledge of the formation of physical, ideological, and social boundaries in Iberia from the inception of kingdoms in the Middle Ages to the the zenith of the early modern Spanish empire.