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Baldwin, M. W. (ed.) / The first hundred years
(1969)
II: Conflict in the Mediterranean Before the First Crusade, pp. [30]-[79]
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Page 31
II CONFLICT IN THE MEDITERRANEAN BEFORE THE FIRST CRUSADE A. The Recon quest of Spain before 1095 Before the northward advance of the Moslem forces had run its full course at least one center of Christian resistance had made its appearance at the northern edge of the Hispanic peninsula. By the middle of the ninth century the princes of Asturias-Leon had extended their holdings southward across the Cantabrian mountains for a distance of some sixty miles from the coast of the Bay of Biscay. On the eastern coast of the peninsula, to the immediate south of the eastern Pyrenees, lay the Catalan counties of the Spanish March, Barcelona chief among them. In the western Pyrenees Navarre and immediately to her east Aragon were in a rudimentary stage of development. Within a century after the completion of the Moslem conquest, the centers of resistance from which the Christian reconquest of the peninsula was to emanate had all made their beginnings, but it was to be another two centuries before any semblance of concerted and continuing Christian aggression against the Moslem conquerors would be discernible. Excellent guides to source materials and the modern literature are: P. Aguado Bleye, Manual de historia de Espana (9th ed., 3 vols., Madrid, 1963—), I, chapters 25—35, and L. G. de Valdeavellano, Historia de Espana (3rd ed., Madrid, 1963—), I, i (pp. 359— 509) and ii (pp. 9—3 86). A. Ballesteros y Beretta, Historia de España (and ed., rev., 11 vols., Barcelona, 1943—1956), I-II, is helpful but dated. The long standard work of A. Herculano, Histdria de Portugal (9th ed., Lisbon, n. d.), I, should be supplemented by L. Gonzaga de Azevedo, História de Portugal (6 vols., Lisbon, 1935—1944), II-III. Cf. also D. Peres, Como nasceu Portugal (5th ed., Porto, 1959); E. Levi-Provençal, Histoire de l'Espagne musulmane (3 vols., Paris, 1950—1953); J. Perez de Urbel, Sancho el Mayor de Navarra (Madrid, 1950); R. Menéndez Pidal, La España del Cid (4th ed., 2 vols., Madrid, 1947), and English translation by H. Sunderland from 1st ed., The Cid and His Spain (London, 1934). H. Livermore's History of Spain (London and New York, 1958) and History of Portugal (Cambridge, England, 1947) provide introductory surveys. 31
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