This inquiry into the economic exploitation of a subject people by the victors, specifically the surviving Mudejar community of Muslim Valencia after that kingdom’s fall in the mid-thirteenth century to the Arago-Catalan warriors and colonists of James the Conqueror, examines in depth a major example of medieval Hispano-Christian rule over an alien people and faith. For Ibero-Americanists it will illumine at many points the methods and institutions employed in more developed form two centuries later to convert Indian communities into permanent sources of royal and seigneurial income. From this standpoint the book constitutes another substantial addition to the impressive series of books and articles through which Professor Burns, on the basis of his extraordinary command of the voluminous materials he has unearthed in the Archivo de la Corona de Aragón in Barcelona, is vividly reconstructing the post-conquest Valencian world and contributing notably to a more authentic understanding of the structures of Iberian plural societies as these stretch from the later Middle Ages into early modern times on both sides of the Atlantic.
The immediate predecessor of the present volume, Islam under the Crusaders (1973), focused upon the broad terms of survival within the new Christian Valencia of the indigenous Mudejars with their tolerated religion, paying particular attention to the fate and activities of the literate and noble classes. In contrast, this work is aimed primarily at the middle and lower layers of the Mudejar population, since its concern is with the manifold types of taxation and monetary extraction imposed upon the whole subordinated community by the Arago-Catalan crown. Burns scrutinizes in turn the monarchy’s financial controls over such public utilities and monopolies as taverns, butcheries, mills, baths and fonduks; the formidable array of imposts on households, tributary lands and water use; commutations of military obligations; levies on salt, money and livestock; governmental sequestration of treasure trove, the ecclesiastical tithe, and much else that contributed to making the Valencian Mudejars a lucrative supplier to the royal fisc. Concluding chapters describe the mechanism for harvesting these revenues: the use of collectors of traditional Islamic type; the farming of taxes to Muslim, Christian or Jewish concessionaires; and the penalties imposed on tax dodgers and other delinquents.
A principal merit of these lucidly organized and beautifully written pages is that, as a chiefly monetary study of a religio-ethnic minority, it enables us to advance beyond the noisy polemics of the Américo Castro and Sánchez Albornoz schools of historical interpretation into the sober realities and effective structures of aljama life. To be sure, as the author sagely warns regarding use of his tax and other monetary data, if money talks its conversation tends to be limited in scope. The fact is, however, that he manages to throw a great deal of fresh tight upon many non-economic aspects of the Christian-Mudejar symbiosis—social, religious, political, intercultural—while at the same time making clear how urgently in need of reappraisal are so many of our long current credulities and prejudices regarding Christian-Muslim-Jewish association in medieval Iberia.
It is hardly necessary to note that in comparison with post-Columbian Ibero-America, Mudejar Valencia shows important differences as well as similarities. Yet Burns’ analysis of the patterns of household taxation, community tribute and compulsory labor services will interest students of encomienda and mita, of Indian tribute lists and tax records. So will his techniques for compelling his somewhat taciturn rent and excise texts to disclose not only the extractive methods of the conquerors, but also the underlying framework and many secondary features of the native society that endured them.
In short, this able study, although specifically medieval in content, contributes richly to clarifying the whole Iberian dilemma of how to operate a pluralist society—a dilemma not solved even in the Middle Ages, since in 1609 many of the descendants of Burns’ Mudejars were to be expelled, still undigested.
