Towns on the Edge: Twelfth-Century Municipal War Policy in LeÓn-Castile and France

Since Charles Julian Bishko’s seminal address at the American Historical Association meeting in 1955, the field of medieval frontier history has developed widely. ¹ My own research has examined the manner in which the monarchs of LeÓn-Castile, along with those of Navarre, Aragon and Portugal, exploited towns as a resource for frontier expansion. Their strategies included granting liberal freedoms for settlers, aiding those settlers in site fortification, and urging the maintenance of well-organized militia forces for both territorial defense and offensive raiding. A similar pattern can be observed in the competition of the Angevin and Capetian monarchs for the control of Western France. This paper explores the possibility that these rulers north of the Pyrenees indeed may have been influenced by the Iberian frontier model.