There are occasions where new volumes receive less praise than they merit because they do not strive for trendy conclusions. Like a phonebook, they appear to be less useful to those that cannot see the patient hand that is required to compile them or the durability that their form commands. In his 2017 volume, Alexandre Giunta rewards his reader with the patient craftsmanship of careful and detailed scholarship. In Les Francos dans la vallee de l'Ebre, Giunta carefully unravels and documents the knotted records of settlement in the upper Ebro valley from the reign of Sancho III of Navarra-Aragon to the middle of the twelfth century's dynastic shift toward Barcelona. In doing so, Giunta demonstrates the impact that "Franks"--broadly defined as people from beyond the Pyrenees and usually from formerly-Carolingian territory--played on settlement patterns in the region after Muslim powers had been pushed south and southwest from the combined Navarrese and Aragonese borders. The great achievement of the volume is that it presents a relatively simple and readily-acceptable conclusion--Franks were quite important and their participation actively cultivated by the kings of Aragon and Navarra--in a thorough and detailed fashion that draws on cartulary, narrative, and epigraphic evidence to make its case.
Giunta's volume is divided into five sections, each with a handful of constituent chapters. These major divisions in the volume present the background to the study, examine the role played by "Franks" in each of the so-called "three orders" in the kingdoms, and then examines how the "Franks" existed within the larger milieu of the Navarrese and Aragonese kingdoms at the time. Within each section, there are a handful of chapters that demonstrate the impact of each of the section's conclusions with extensive recourse to primary source evidence, deferring to the texts themselves more frequently than to dated treatments of the themes in question. In doing so, Giunta establishes that the prosopographical nature of his research presents a rigorous reading of the evidence itself and can clarify the picture of life in the towns along the Ebro during a period of major colonization efforts in the period. Although this wider portrait is relatively simple, the lengths to which Giunta goes to clarify this picture make clear that it is hard work to show something so complex with such transparency.
The first part presents the histories of Navarra and Aragon from the early eleventh through mid-twelfth century, and reconstituted much of the background material for the study at large. In chapters covering monarchical power, settlement patterns, and economic and social change, Giunta is able to portray the two kingdoms--sometimes united, often divided--as participants in a world replete with changing circumstances. As a survey of the historical background, Giunta presents nothing extraordinary or remarkable, but rather reconstitutes the material developments of the periods and regions in question with the necessary detail to ground much of his later work. The first part's constituent chapters are careful and mostly-chronological in a fashion that will likely upset few scholars who work in the same sub-fields. In setting the historical context so clearly at the core of the work, Giunta establishes considerable credibility with his readers, making the catalog approach of the second through fourth sections all the more effective.
In the second part of his book, Giunta excavates the considerable records of aristocratic activity in Navarra and Aragon to show that a variety of factors pulled nobles from north of the Pyrenees toward the Upper Ebro. To begin his sectional study of the nobility that settled in the upper Ebro, he first deploys a survey of the toponyms used in archival documents in subscription lists. With a measure of critical skepticism, Giunta shows that familial links between the monarchy and families north of the Pyrenees encouraged similar exchanges among the native Navarrese and Aragonese nobility. While family connections pulled nobles toward the Ebro, religious and cultural energy pushed aristocrats toward the battles by Navarrese and Aragonese monarchs into feats of arms against al-Andalus. These two precedent factors helped, as the third chapter of the section demonstrates, to encourage these immigrant aristocrats to take a growing role in the two kingdoms, thereby expanding the reach of the ruling monarchs by providing them with a well-connected and politically viable noble base.
Having laid out the connections forged by aristocratic influx into the Upper Ebro, Giunta covers similar ground with the clergy in Navarra and Aragon. Beginning with the special relationship forged between Navarra, Aragon, and Rome, Giunta shows how papal legations, liturgical changes, and Roman support for wars against Islamic polities in al-Andalus forged a strong bond between the Roman pontiffs and the Pyrenean Kingdoms of Iberia. As one of the most storied themes in medieval historiography, Giunta shrewdly charts the history of the "Gregorian Reform" in Navarra and Aragon, paying special attention to the cleric who journeyed from the Midi--a hotbed of reform--and began to populate the ecclesiastical establishments that followed the southward march of the border in the Ebro Valley. Having set both the Roman and local ecclesiastical histories on a firm footing with ample historiographical and prosopographical work, the third chapter of the third section shows that clerical establishments--both monastic and episcopal--spurred the development of communities along the border and, as Giunta notes, played a key role in royal efforts "to Christianize and populate the conquered lands [of al-Andalus]" (306). The role of clerics in the processes that helped expand Navarra and Aragon in the late eleventh and early twelfth century, as Giunta shows, was tangible--epigraphic evidence and the remains of churches make that point for his work--and clearly documented in the hagiographical, narrative, and diplomatic sources of the period.
The penultimate section of the volume is the slowest read but perhaps the most significant. In documenting the role of laborers, merchants, and craftsmen, the fourth section of Giunta's work shows that a large number of the "Franks" that helped re-colonize the Upper Ebro Valley were "regular people." The first chapter of the section shows that both along the Camino de Santiago and in new royal settlements like Jaca, "Franks" were important and often-privileged (both in the legal and social sense) members of the communities of the Upper Ebro. With ample recourse to the documentary record, Giunta then documents both the frequent subscriptions of documents by craftsmen of a variety of skilled professions and the role these individuals played in their new communities. By charting the integration of these "Franks" and their development of family networks in their villages, Giunta shows that individual subscriptions betray much larger communities in the settlement of the region.
In the last section of his volume, Giunta demonstrates that the work of his volume has been to show that, rather than being a separate group isolated from developments in the region, the "Franks" of Navarra and Aragon played a key role and were increasingly integrated into the work of the kingdoms. The first section of the final chapter returns to a previous theme developed in the first section, examining the ways in which the very word "Franks" appears to be prevalent in echoes in narrative sources while still being well-preserved in the onomastic evidence of charters. The second section takes a deep dive into the example of "Franks" settling in Pamplona and the way the shape of the city was altered by the presence of substantial barrio development in the city, then follows up on that examination with a survey of the diffusion of the fuero of Jaca, which privileged "Franks" especially, in the region. The final section of the fourth part examines the way that cultural and especially artistic trends were imported in communities with strong evidence of settlement by "Franks." Taken together, the fourth chapter charts a fine path: "Franks" were different in several key factors from their neighbors in the Upper Ebro but were nevertheless deeply enmeshed into the work of Navarra and Aragon.
As a whole, Giunta's work in Les Francos dans la vallée de l'Èbre makes clear that the role of the "Franks" in the kingdoms of Navarra and Aragon was significant. Although it was generally understood by scholars working in Medieval Iberian studies to be quite likely, Giunta's patient and thorough examination of the evidence puts the question beyond reasonable doubt. In doing so, he also demonstrates that the border that the Pyrenees represent was more porous than it might seems. If one wanted to offer criticism of the volume as a whole, the only critique that would rest on substantive evidence would be that the twenty-five maps in the volume should have been produced differently: either in color or with patterns, rather than in grayscale, to make them more easily intelligible. The bibliography for the volume presents only surveys on individual themes, but that too is a small mark against a volume with 2600 footnotes to its credit. For specialists in Iberia during the period, Giunta has presented a useful and durable work of scholarship that will provide useful comparanda and conversation for similarly-nuanced; for non-specialists, he has made clear that "Franks"--howsoever they might be defined--were vital members of the communities on the borders of the Ebro Valley in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. While it may be a dry read, it is a thorough and detailed study that deserves thanks and praise for its efforts.