150Chapter 8subsistence agriculture supplemented by hunting and
gathering. Because they produced no surplus and were
prohibited by geography from engaging in large-scale
monoculture, they tempted neither the raiders nor the
lords. They were also easily defended. Mounted
knights were at a disadvantage in a largely vertical land-
scape, and narrow gorges were ideal sites for an am-
bush. Peasants of the high valleys found retaining their
ancient freedoms relatively easy.
A rugged landscape also protected the remnants of
Christian Spain. The situation in Cantabria and on the
southern slopes of the Pyrenees was unique. The tiny
states that survived the Muslim advance found them-
selves on a turbulent military frontier. Frankish influ-
ence brought feudalism to Cataluña, but the system
that evolved in the northwest reflects a society that had
begun, however tentatively, to take the offensive
against al Islam.In the ninth and tenth centuries the
kingdoms of Asturias, León, and Castile began to ex-
pand slowly at the expense of their Muslim neighbors,
drawing back if the opposition became too intense,
moving forward when a target of opportunity arose.
Virtually the entire male population was militarized
because warfare against the Muslims involved infantry
and light cavalry as well as armored knights.
Advances were often achieved by individual nobles
who were then free to keep the territory they con-
quered and rule it as they saw fit. Kings, however, re-
served the right to grant and revoke titles at will. Feudal
tenures were unknown, and private jurisdiction was
strictly limited. Nobles placed themselves in encomienda,
or commendation, to the crown, a term that was to
have a different meaning in later centuries. Small land-
holders, who in this frontier society were usually free
men and fighters, placed themselves in a similar rela-
tionship to the nobles. It was an exchange of military
service for protection that might or might not involve a
grant of land. More commonly it involved dues and ser-
vices that created a de factomanor without the surrender
of allodial property or of personal freedom. The señorios
or lordships created by these arrangements were often
vast. They were based upon a legal and political system
unlike that of feudal Europe.
Spanish towns also played an important role in ter-
ritorial expansion. Urban militias were established in
the early ninth century and had become an important
component of the Christian military effort by the tenth
century. Whether they fought on their own behalf or
under the direct orders of the king, towns were re-
warded with booty and with royal grants whose provi-
sions resembled those of the señorios.Large tracts of land
and many villages came under their control as peasants
commended themselves to towns instead of to secular
or ecclesiastical lords.
In northern Italy, towns were more effective as a
barrier to feudal institutions, but for different reasons.
Larger and richer than their Spanish counterparts, they
could offer credible protection to their neighbors from
the beginning of the feudal age. A patchwork of tenures
developed in which allods, feudal manors, and urban ju-
risdictions might exist side by side in a relatively re-
stricted space. The situation in some ways resembled
that of southern France. The feudal component
remained smaller, in part because the region was gener-
ally immune to large-scale raids. The south had been a
region of large estates since Roman times. When Nor-
man rulers imposed feudalism at the end of the eleventh
century they substituted one set of lords for another
while changing the legal basis of their holdings.The Feudal Monarchies
This rapid survey of nonfeudal Europe reveals that,
though feudalism was not universal, the disorders of the
ninth and tenth centuries led to the growth of manori-
alism or other systems of collective security in all but
the most isolated sections of Europe. A majority of Eu-
ropeans were forced to renounce personal and eco-
nomic freedom as the price of survival. Peasants who
had formerly been free, slave, or colonishared a com-
mon servility.
The impact of this change on everyday life should
not be exaggerated. The correlation between personal
freedom and political or social influence has always
been inexact. The free Anglo-Saxon or Frankish peas-
ant had often been subordinated as effectively by debt
and by the threat of personal force as his descendants
were by the custom of the manor, and he was subjected
to taxes and demands for military service that could be
as onerous as the feudal dues of a later period. Women
had never been free in the sense that they remained the
legal subjects of their fathers or husbands.
Moreover, the world that emerged from the after-
math of the great raids retained many distinctions of
wealth and status, even among peasants. Servility was
not incompatible with a secure and even comfortable
life, while freedom could mean a hardscrabble existence
on marginal lands. Those who remained free often did
so because they inhabited malarial swamps or mountain
crags unwanted by either knights or Vikings.