ABSTRACT

ABBEY OF POBLET Royal abbey and the premier Cistercian house in the Iberian Peninsula. Ramo´n Berenguer IV, Count of Barcelona (1131-1162) and Prince of Arago´n (1137-1162) in 1149, founded Poblet twenty miles northeast of Tarragona with monks from Fontfroide (near Narbonne), a daughter-house of Clairvaux. Royal and noble gifts of vast lands acquired from the reconquest; the strategy of using loans and tax exemptions to attract peasant tenants for the exploitation of these estates; sheep farming on a vast scale; the earlyadopted policy of accepting mortgaged land protected by royal privilege from the claims of creditors; the acquisition of a monopoly of the milling industry along the upper Francal River; and the expectation of landed or cash dowries-these economic practices yielded prodigious wealth. By 1297 the abbey possessed 55,000 acres divided into granges, twenty-nine villages, thirty-eight castles, and other properties.