Heath Dillard’s 1984 classic, Daughters of the Reconquest: Women in Castilian Town Society, 1100-1300, details the practice of abduction and forced marriage (raptus in medieval Latin) in the cities and countryside of Iberia during the Middle Ages.¹ Dillard suggests that municipalities across Iberia – both Christian and Muslim – had an abduction problem, wherein men forced women into marriage through sexual violence and kidnapping. The problem had reached so great a height by the thirteenth century that laws against raptus appeared in royal legal codes and in fueros, or legal charters, from Castile-Leon to Catalunya. Situating gender and sexual violence in the history of the Iberian Middle Ages highlights the ways in which violence against women effected the settlement of newly emerging urban spaces after 1000 and how the trafficking of women was supported by local and royal legal codes before the Las Siete Partidas of Alfonso “El Sabio” in the late thirteenth century outlawed the practice.²

Sargent, Catharine. "Spain and Portugal."  Map. 1790.  Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, https://collections.leventhalmap.org/search/commonwealth:cj82m241b.

As new polities expanded from the Basque lands to the borders of Granada by the fifteenth century, the conquest and settlement of urban spaces in the areas surrounding large cities such as Toledo, Zaragoza, Barcelona, Pamplona, and Perpignan required the movement and settlement of people to facilitate trade, establish local governments, and for the Christian polities, spread Latin Christianity. For instance, towns such as Guadalajara and Cuenca issued abduction protections in the mid-twelfth century to allow for the trafficking of women into their city walls. A man that entered with an abducted wife in tow was allowed to remain as long as he intended to settle and raise a family in the region.³ To entice new settlers to these areas, Guadalajara, Cuenca, and nearby cities allowed men to bring abducted women at their will to expand the city’s population through childbirth and coercion.

The movement of women into Castile-Leon’s borders, however, was not confined to Christian women since Islamic and Jewish women were forced to convert and enter into marriages with Christian men. In his 2015 study of sexuality, interfaith marriage, and political authority in early and central medieval Iberia, Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines: Interfaith Relations and Social Power in Medieval Iberia, Simon Barton argues that for both the Taifa (Islamic) kingdoms of the south and the Christian kingdoms of the north around 1031, “sex was power.”⁴ In forcing women of all of the Abrahamic faiths into marriage, noblemen could manipulate the social and religious makeup of emerging municipalities in Castile-Leon and their own political authority over the regions that they governed. The control of women’s bodies, faith, and space, as Barton and Dillard suggest, was central to the restructuring of the Iberian Peninsula in the centuries after 711.

This problem raises important questions about the role of women in medieval Iberia during what Dillard and other historians have labeled as the “Reconquista” (Reconquest) and the idea of colonisation in the medieval Mediterranean. Specifically, what can, and should, the process of coercive marriage and abduction say about the expansion of Castile-Leon, Aragon, Catalunya, and Navarre in the central Middle Ages? In what ways were women central to the histories of colonisation and cultural interaction in Iberia? The consequences of this problem in relation to territorial expansion stresses the ways in which gender is central to understanding the emergence of Castile-Leon and Aragon since colonisation, premodern or modern, requires women and families to work. Conquest, colonisation, and, to a degree, crusading in medieval Iberia centred the sexual and marital manipulation of women to settle and populate the peninsula.

Raptus in Iberian Law –

As a legal category, the practice of abduction marriages shifted from a once-supported practice by the Castilian monarchy and local legal charters to an outlawed practice by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. For instance, the Fuero (legal charter) of Guadalajara stipulated that men who entered the city walls with an abducted woman in tow could remain and were protected by a bounty of 500 sueldos.⁵ This charter gained the support of the reigning king of Castile-Leon, Alfonso VII, in 1133. Alfonso’s support of this practice allowed for nearby cities such as Oreja and Ocaña to adopt similar policies that protected abductors and other criminals. This support and protection of raptors (abductors in Latin) lasted until the thirteenth century since the legal codes of Castile-Leon and Aragon outlawed the practice of raptus in the aftermath of the 1212 Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa and the expansion of their own political authority into Mediterranean France, the Balearics, and the Italian Peninsula by 1250.

Alfonso “El Sabio” in miniature of a manuscript copy of the Las Siete Partidas (Wikimedia Commons).

In the Las Siete Partidas of Alfonso “El Sabio” in the mid-thirteenth century, non-consensual marriages and rapes were outlawed if there was proof that the crime had occurred. If no physical signs of an assault (e.g., torn clothing, scratched face or arms, bruising) were present, a woman and her raptor could be forced into marriage if her parents were consenting.⁶ This legal code, ultimately, outlawed the abductions of women without parental consent because by 1270 when Alfonso commissioned the Las Siete Partidas, Castile-Leon’s borders spanned from Santiago de Compostella to the border of Granada. The Castilian monarchy no longer needed to entice settlement in its urban spaces since Castile now had a large and thriving population that did not require the rape, abduction, and trafficking of women to support.

The change in the Castilian legal understandings of raptus reflect the changes in Iberia’s borders from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries since the prohibition of the practice corresponded with the rise in political authority of both Castile-Leon and Aragon. As their borders expanded and their own political importance in Iberia and the Mediterranean changed, neither polity needed to entice settlement in the same way as before.

The Iberian Peninsula in 1300 (Wikimedia Commons).

Gender, Violence, and Iberian Women –

What, then, can this practice tell modern scholars about the connections between sexual violence and colonisation in medieval Iberia? In many ways, this violent practice challenges the idea of La Convivencia (coexistence) and what Darío Fernández-Morera has described as the “Myth of the Andalusian Paradise,” since for women, this moment in Iberia’s history was marked by threats to their bodies, families, and lives.⁷ This “Myth,” suggests that medieval Iberia was a place of racial, religious, and gendered harmony between the three Abrahamic faiths in both Christian and Islamic controlled polities. The practice of raptus challenges this idea since both Islamic and Christian women were trafficked around the peninsula and in some cases, forced to convert to Latin Christianity. The violence done to these women, their bodies, and their marriageable possibilities reflected in Iberian legal codes highlights the ways in which gender was central to the moulding of the Iberian map from the eighth to fifteenth centuries since urban spaces were settled, in part, through the movement and forced marriages of the peninsula’s women.

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[1] Heath Dillard, Daughters of the Reconquest: Women in Castilian Town Society, 1100-1300. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

[2] “El Sabio” can translate into English as “the Wise,” or “the Learned.”

[3] Dillard, 139-141.

[4] Simon Barton, Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines: Interfaith Relations and Social Power in Medieval Iberia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 31.

[5] Tomas Muñoz Romero, ed. Coleccion de fueros municipales y cartas pueblas de los reinos de Castilla, Leon, Corona de Aragon y Navarra. (Madrid: Imprenta Alonso, 1847), 507-511.

[6] Alfonso X of Castile. Translated by Samuel Parsons Scott. Las Siete Partidas: Underworlds the Dead, the Criminal, and the Marginalized, edited by Robert I. Burns (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 312-313.

[7] Darío Fernández-Morera, The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews Under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain. (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2016); Elena Lourie, Crusade and Colonisation: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Aragon (Aldershot: Variorum, 1990); Mark T Abate, ed., Convivencia and Medieval Spain: Essays in Honor of Thomas F. Glick (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

Bibliography:

Abate, Mark T. ed., Convivencia and Medieval Spain: Essays in Honor of Thomas F. Glick Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

Alfonso X of Castile. Translated by Samuel Parsons Scott. Las Siete Partidas: Underworlds the Dead, the Criminal, and the Marginalized, edited by Robert I. Burns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001, 312-313.

Barton, Simon. Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines: Interfaith Relations and Social Power in Medieval Iberia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015, 31.

Dillard, Heath. Daughters of the Reconquest: Women in Castilian Town Society, 1100-1300. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Fernández-Morera, Darío. The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews Under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain. Wilmington: ISI Books, 2016.

Kagary, Donald J. ed. and trans., The Ustages of Barcelona: The Fundamental Law of Catalonia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.

Lourie, Elena. Crusade and Colonisation: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Aragon Aldershot: Variorum, 1990.

Muñoz Romero, Tomas ed. Coleccion de fueros municipales y cartas pueblas de los reinos de Castilla, Leon, Corona de Aragon y Navarra. Madrid: Imprenta Alonso, 1847.