THE WESTERN MEDITERR~t\EA.N KJNCDOMS 1200-l:JOO
condition.' In the same period the Catalans made striking
advances, taking Tarragona at the end of the eleventh cen-
tury, though having to wait another quarter century before
it was really secure; the defence of the region was the work
of such diverse groups as Robert Burdet and his Norman
knights, who established a Norman principality in the region,
and Olguer or Oldeguer, archbishop of Tarragona in the
1120s.H Yet thus work would perhaps have proceeded much
more slowly without the support of the papacy; this was
the period in which the ideology of holy war against the
infidel was being more clearly articulated. From the siege of
Barbastro in 1063-64 to the Catalan and Pisan invasion of
M~jorca and Ibiza in 1113-15, the papacy began to formu-
late the spiritual rewards that were available to those who died
for the faith, even to those who fought for it, within Spain.
The First Crusade, launched in 1095, attracted the strong
interest of Spanish knights; but the response of Pope Urban
II was unequivocal: such work as the defence of Tarragona
against the infidel earned the same merit as participation in
the liberation of the Holy Land from the Muslims.''
The sense that the war in Spain was itself a holy struggle
against unbelievers was thus something that arrived late, and
that was in many respects a foreign import from the papacy
and from foreign knights - Normans, Poitevins and others
- who had come to earn their spurs on Iberian soil. Pushing
south beyond Saragossa to Daroca, Calatayud and other Mus-
lim centres, Alfonso the Battler showed an especially acute
awareness of this dimension to the war in Spain; in his will
of 1134 he left his kingdom (because he was childless) to the
newly founded Order of Knights of the Temple, based in
Jerusalem, to the Hospital of StJohn ofJerusalem, and to the
canons of the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. It
is generally conceded that there were sound enough political
motives behind this act: he was afraid that his neighbour
- C. Stalls, Posstssing lht Land. Aragon\ Pxjmnsion into Islam's t'bm jivnlin
under Alfonso the Battin, 1104-1134 (Leidcn, 1995): also C. Lalicna and
P. Scnac, l'v!.usulmans et Chrhirns dans le haul A1oym ,~ge: aux ori1.,rines de
la rtronquetP amgrmaise (Paris, 1991).
- L. McCrank, 'Norman crusaders in the Catalan reconquest: Robert
Burdet and the principality ofTarragona. 1129-55',.foumal o(Mnlieval
History, 7 (1981), pp. 67-82.
- J. Riley-Smith, Tht Cmsades. A. short histon (London. 1987), p. 6.
