Conclusion

Summary

The year 1000 has exercised such influence on historians of the society and politics of the western early Middle Ages that the ninth and tenth centuries have commonly been seen, at best, as little more than a period of transition after Carolingian decline; that is, as centuries destined to prepare the ground for the major changes that would arrive with the turn of the millennium. This book has sought to reconsider this vision of European development by returning to the study of rich and still underused sources – the charters pertaining to the great collections of the two regions here under study. Using these documents to build an alternative interpretation, this book argues that in the period and places examined here, northern Spain did not witness the fracture of public authority, nor the increasingly arbitrary and violent imposition of lordly power over peasants. This book in fact offers rather different conclusions, proposing that the workings of politics and the development of local society were subject to significant regional differences which only partially correspond with the prevailing paradigms attached to the study of the period.

The eighth century saw the emergence of a new political power in Asturias. According to the later chronicles, both the Liébana and Galicia were constituent parts of the Asturian political framework before the year 800. Yet throughout this book we have seen that the documents that describe the growth of the kingdom paint an impressionistic picture of a more complex reality. Political power was a complicated and fraught phenomenon in early medieval Spain, dependent in large measure on the success or otherwise with which kings won and consolidated magnate support; at no stage in the period studied here, however, were kings merely the pawns of magnates. The tenth-century fragmentation of the state that occurred elsewhere in western Europe was not matched in Spain, where kings presided over a kingdom in which royal power, although varying in effectiveness from region to region, was never completely deserted by significant factional support; an upstart class of castle-dwelling hoodlums, so crucial to changes thought to have occurred in France, did not materialise.