ABSTRACT
The concept of ‘frontier’ as a tool for defining certain sorts of societies has recently been widely applied to the Middle Ages in a collection of essays entitled Medieval Frontier Societies.1 One conclusion which emerges from the volume is that it is impossible to identify general social and institutional developments which can be typified as characteristic of medieval frontier societies. Geographical, cultural and political variables were too diverse for that, though remarkable parallels have been adduced between societies on different frontiers. In Medieval Frontier Societies Robert Bartlett and Angus MacKay identify three broad categories of medieval borderlandsfrontiers with few distinctive correlatives, ones which corresponded with sharp religious and political cleavages, such as the Christian-Muslim frontier in Spain, and a less clearly demarcated sort such as the ‘non-linear, cultural frontier between the indigenous peoples of eastern Europe and the German immigrants who settled among them in the High Middle Ages’. Despite this diversity, there are some features which medieval frontier societies shared to a greater or lesser degree, notably militarization, together with institutional mechanisms and social values flowing from that militarization. These factors were prominent or not according to the group perception of the strength and continuity of the exterior threat they were designed to contain.2
