Garcia-Oliver, Ferran. “The Valley of the Six Mosques: Work and Life in
Medieval Valldigna”. The Medieval Countryside 8. Turnhout:
Brepols, 2011. Pp. xx, 311. $150.00. ISBN: 978-2-503-53130-4.
Reviewed by Tom Barton
University of San Diego
barton@sandiego.edu
This brilliantly translated monograph is a rare example of medieval
scholarship that is both path-breaking and literary. When its bestselling
original version, “La vall de les sis mesquites: El treball i la vida a la
Valldigna medieval”, first appeared in 2003, this combination may have come as
less of a surprise to Catalan readers who already knew Ferran Garcia-Oliver as
an accomplished medievalist (“profesor catedràtic” of medieval history at the
Universitat de València) as well as a popular novelist and essayist.
In addition to several important but more conventional monographs
concerning the feudal, religious, and ethno-religious history of medieval
Valencia, his works at the time included novels and a well- received biography
of the fourteenth-century Valencian knight and poet, Ausiàs March.
Garcia-Oliver took fifteen years to publish his doctoral research, but the time
enabled him to substantially rewrite and season the work, yielding a much more
mature and elegant book. Its translation into English, in turn, has afforded
the author another opportunity to revise and expand, adding material and
clarifying discussion to make this relatively unknown microcosm within the
Crown of Aragon more intelligible to an international audience.
Valldigna ("Worthy Valley") is the name the Christians gave the
Alfàndec valley after conquering it in the mid-thirteenth century and awarding
its Muslim inhabitants the free religious practice and other concessions meant
to encourage them to continue working the land for Christian landlords. Even
though he delves into the cultural and administrative repercussions of the
Germanies revolts of 1521 that transformed the Muslims of the kingdom into
Christian converts (Moriscos), Garcia-Oliver is chiefly interested in the messy
coexistence of Muslims, Christians, and sometimes Jews in the valley's six
Muslim (and one Christian) villages in the preceding years. These residents
were ironically preserved by the stern yet pragmatic lordship of the Cistercian
house that was invested with the valley by the king at the turn of the
fourteenth century. The book describes dynamics of coexistence in which
ethno-religious identity, in spite of mutual distrust, ultimately mattered
little in much day-to-day interaction. Certain kinds of contact (chiefly sexual
relations) were of course strictly forbidden, and Christian settlement was
mostly segregated within the walled planned village of El Ràfol. Christian
vassals were also generally better off than their Muslim counterparts, with
more land, lighter taxes, and additional privileges. Yet despite these barriers
and patent differences in their religious laws, places of worship, and certain
customary practices, the diverse situational evidence presented by
Garcia-Oliver reveals that Christian and Muslim peasants were strikingly alike:
conservative, hard-working, and not especially devout, and caught in a similar
peasant existence under the same absolute lordship of the abbot (12-17).
While Garcia-Oliver repeats the common medievalist's lament about the
"labyrinth of silences" that impair the "tracks left by peasants
from Valldigna," it is apparent from the chunks of primary sources
punctuating the narrative that for all of its frustrating gaps, the incredible
richness of the documentation pertaining to this valley helped him capitalize
on his gifts of capturing the "drama [that] gives birth to life" in
vivid, often mesmerizing prose. The variegated and detailed nature of these
sources, from colorful court proceedings to terse records of account,
recommended an unconventional approach.
Instead of disciplining the material to support a single primary argument,
Garcia-Oliver chose to organize the monograph as a series of diffuse topical
chapters filled with case studies and digressions.
Although, for many subjects, he borrows evidence from different time
periods throughout the valley in order to present overarching phenomena before
the “Germanies” revolts, Garcia-Oliver also considers dynamics over time, when
relevant, in order to present spatial patterns and inter-connections: for
instance, he profiles the management styles of individual abbots (e.g., 16,
197), documents the exodus of Muslim and Christian families from the valley to
indicate the difficulty of sustaining a living there (186), and accounts for
changes in the seigniorial administration (277). With the rural life of the
valley serving as book's topical thread, this organization engenders a less
cohesive but ultimately more satisfying narrative because it equips the author
to pursue the implications and stories that interested him most within this
evidence. This is not to suggest that any of these sources speak for
themselves. Anyone who has slogged through scores of thick, irregular, often
deteriorated register volumes will appreciate the inordinate toil required to
locate, select, decipher, and recreate the illuminating chains of vignettes
that occupy the analysis of each chapter. Yet throughout most of Garcia-
Oliver's discussions my dominant impression was awe at how much he was able to
recover, with such apparent effortlessness, about life in this small place over
half a millennium ago.
The book begins with a chapter that describes the physical and human
geography of the valley: the roads integrating villages and the centers of
seigniorial power with the fields, marshes, and mountains where the peasants
conducted their work; the political context; and demographic growth in the
valley. It then turns, in Chapter 2, to the largely indistinguishable agrarian
pursuits of Muslim and Christian peasants in the valley. While peasants were
interested in the protection afforded by diversification, their conservatism,
combined with the heavy rents demanded by the monastery, led many of the less-
well-off to prefer the customary cultivation of wheat, which could feed their
families in times of scarcity, rather than innovating with potentially more
lucrative (yet labor- or capital-intensive) engagements such as sugarcane,
mulberry leaves for silk production, bee-keeping, and stock-breeding. The
agrarian economy of the valley, in general, benefited from the melding of
Andalusi agricultural techniques and the peasants' own experience gained since
the conquest, which made it, in Garcia-Oliver's view, one of the most
productive regions in Western Europe and made possible the high rents and taxes
imposed by the monastery. Valldigna's fecundity and its residents'
desire for supplemental income encouraged the marketing of high-value goods
well beyond the valley via both land and sea-based commercial routes, which
offered both the possibility of profit and the danger of misfortune from
banditry and legal claims.
Chapter 3 delves more deeply into the factors underlying the individualism
and conservatism of the peasantry. Self-sufficiency and the priority of
"intimate domestic decisions" fostered the normalcy of individualism
that was only occasionally disrupted by collective action inspired by
extraordinary abuses by the abbot, urban creditors, or rival communities. The
family's well-being was prioritized above all else since peasants recognized
that it represented their most important protection against both financial and
criminal misfortune.
In spite of the productivity of the valley's rural sector, peasants lived
in constant fear of debt (which inspired otherwise resistant agriculturalists
to innovate), and the general scarcity of land made it more difficult for
upwardly mobile peasant families to assemble a landed patrimony and establish
themselves among the landowning elite.
Peasants therefore had to start working at a young age, hiring themselves
out as day laborers or servants, in hopes of saving enough to afford marriage,
and many left the valley in search of better opportunities. Moneylenders of all
faiths preyed upon these marginal communities through the offer of vital credit
in the form of both loans and “censals” (leveraging land). The many obstacles
spread throughout the year that stood between peasant families and viability
were worsened by the multitude of taxes imposed by the monastery.
The individualism of peasants and their families--combined with clear
memories of ineffective past action against the lord--impeded effective
collective action against seigniorial abuses. The Muslim vassals of the valley
preferred to exercise 'weapons of the weak'
(Garcia-Oliver does not use the term or reference Jim Scott) to undermine
the “corvée” (“manaments”) and other offensive rights exercised by the lords.
Arguably the biggest disruption of these rights was the conversion of the
Moriscos, which entitled the formerly Muslim vassals to the same exemptions as
Christian residents of the valley.
What were the internal dynamics of families in Valldigna? The next chapter
pursues this question using a fascinating body of archival materials. We learn
how Muslim youths, in particular, struggled to earn sufficient money to marry,
due primarily to the excessively high customary value of the dowers (“acidacs”)
with which men "purchased" their brides. Even though men exercised
considerable authority over most family affairs, both “acidacs” and dowries
invested wives with increased agency, since husbands had to obtain their
consent before utilizing this property. Desperate young men and women could
deviate from this traditional pattern by either abducting would-be wives or
offering their bodies in the hopes that it would engender a union,
respectively; these were interactions that, Garcia- Oliver finds, ended in
clandestine marriages, unwanted pregnancies, and even mortal abortions. Just as
achieving successful marriages represented a considerable relief for families,
the difficulty of establishing or perpetuating a family drove many settlers out
of the valley, never to return. Nevertheless, Garcia-Oliver caps off the
chapter with two in-depth (mixed) success stories: he uses the story of Pere
Baldó, who was born a peasant and ended up the abbot of Valldigna, to
illustrate the mechanisms of upward mobility at work in the valley and the case
of the Christian Colomer family to show how a family's prosperity established
by its enterprising founder could be challenged by political conflicts and
obstacles facing its second generation.
Chapter 5 turns to consider the condition of the individual peasant in the
valley and what characteristics would have been required to establish him as
"A Man of Qualities." Violence, preferably perpetrated by dagger (the
peasant's favorite weapon), was the language by which residents codified their
daily relationships and solved their conflicts and thus ironically was the most
effective way to restore harmony to Valldigna's communities. The rules of
conduct for the quarrelling punctuating daily life were dictated less by the
“Furs” of Valencia (the kingdom's territorial law) than by custom and
tradition, "a collection of experiences and referents" (222). The
competition and feuding between the "big men" of the valley was more
common, more deeply linked to the political order, and more ritualized. The
initial causes of the feuding usually remained deliberately hidden, and when
the injured honor was finally restored, the families tended to emerge
emboldened with a better-united purpose. Garcia-Oliver also explores how the
engagements of adults at the family level over their honor were emulated by
adolescents in their sexual relations. Although accusations of sodomy as well
as Christian-Muslim liaisons were prosecuted and punished severely in
accordance with both Christian and Muslim laws, in general the monks
"turned a deaf ear to the sins of the flesh" (260). They opposed only
clandestine prostitution because it deprived the monastery of tax revenues and
hostels of patronage and increased the potential
for Muslim use of Christian public women.
The final chapter concerns the activity and handling of miscreants in the
valley. Peasants were vigilant about protecting their crops against
thievery--which, if frequent, could begin to undermine a family's finances. The
fact that these were tight-knit communities meant that it was difficult for
anyone to make a living through theft alone. In contrast to urban crime,
thievery in the valley tended to be motivated by hunger; it was primarily an
effort to supplement meager incomes. Despite the best efforts by the lords and
their officers to uphold law and order and punish thieves, the local court
proved ineffective: it did not hold malefactors accountable or serve as a
deterrent to crime. There was simply too much work for local officers, and the
justice system demonstrated "a certain stagnation in judicial conception
and practice" and lacked the modernization occurring in the cities (280).
Far from a money-making seigniorial operation, Garcia- Oliver calculates that
the local court spent more on its operations than it earned from fines. It had
to maintain a larger staff due to its accommodation of two parallel systems of
justice: for cases involving Muslim and Christian plaintiffs and defendants,
the court had to involve Christian notaries and experts knowledgeable about the
“Furs” as well as “qadis” and “faqihs” capable of upholding Islamic laws. The
harshness sometimes displayed by the court in its verdicts, the author
contends, was "rather a sign of impotence." Ultimately the officials
could not find the "correct antidotes" to the violence endemic to the
peasant society of the valley (288).
Because this is a book without a dominant argument, it did not require a
traditional conclusion to weave together its sub-points and reinforce its
thesis. Instead, an epilogue that presents timeless vignettes from "An
Ordinary Day" a passerby might have been privy to had he visited the
valley during the fourteenth or fifteenth century serves as a satisfying and
elegant end to the study. Building on the foundations laid by the previous six
chapters, Garcia-Oliver takes this opportunity to paint for the reader a final
set of scintillating, highly personalized images from this landscape with his
evocative prose. By this point, after three hundred pages of story-telling, the
reader feels that he has become a fly on many walls throughout medieval
Valldigna, gotten to know its rhythms and local
personalities, and, almost as with a good novel, is morose to have to
bid them goodbye.
No history book can be all things, and it is understandable that
Garcia-Oliver had to let go of features common to monographs in order to
breathe such life into a potentially dry topic. Most notably, despite the
author's gratitude to Paul Freedman and Isabel Alfonso for their "purely
historiographical meditations" (ix), the book does not relate its
discoveries to the considerable volume of secondary research on rural society
and coexistence within the Crown of Aragon, greater Iberia, or Western Europe.
Aside from a fruitful nod to
Braudel (93), the main text and notes are devoid of references to other
scholarship. How do we integrate this case study into the broader picture?
Garcia-Oliver surely has complex, illuminating answers to this question but
divulges nothing specific throughout the study. Given the extensiveness of the
primary-source quotations in the footnotes, space could not have been the limitation.
Given the author's stated objective of reaching out to an international
audience in his new preface, it seems he could have made more of an effort to
engage with other work on rural society and coexistence and thereby
rendered his monograph all the more useful to scholars without decreasing its
readability. Indeed, at this price point there was no chance this version would
be the bestseller it was among “Catalanoparlants” and therefore little risk of
scaring off history enthusiasts with some orientative historiography.
In spite of this forgivable deficiency, this study certainly accomplishes
much more than reminding us that "Europe was, and is, more than a
Christian club" (viii). It transports us to a lost world through vibrant
glimpses of the fiercely competitive and complicated lives of late medieval
peasants by using unparalleled and largely neglected archival resources from
the Crown of Aragon. Both serious scholars and general readers interested in
life in the medieval countryside should treat themselves to this impressive
journey through “The Valley of the Six Mosques”.