“A rural society of Medieval Mediterranean: the Nazari agricultural world” is a study on the Nazari rural world (centuries 13th-15th) of 218 pages and 19 plates and pictures and includes a glossary of Arab terms used in the text.Up to now –according to the author, Carmen Trillo—the Nazari agricultural field had been studied from the perspective of the Christian inhabitants, particularly of the land distribution among the new occupiers. This point of view allowed to get to know the repopulation but went hardly beyond the Muslim reality on which it was based. This work inverts the objective and Islamic society goes up to the foreground using basically Castilian sources and Arab and Arab-romanced documents too. This analysis reconstructs the land planning of the area of the Alquería, the structure of land ownership, irrigation systems and government organisms”.
The result of this analysis is the verification of a Nazari society deeply rooted on its Andalusi past from several aspects (legal, agricultural, etc.) but clearly different to that of the Castilian conquering society. It is basically a world of small landowners, still linked by strong ties of blood, organized in alquerías (farmhouses), who produced for consumption first of all although afterwards they started to trade in their excess fluidly. It is also a peasant unequal community according to land ownership, but in which the richest land owners still are not completely consolidated. Far-reaching foreign trade is important although the traders mainly foreigners and it has not already changed the rural ambit, which continues its tendency to self-sufficiency.
Definitely, the Nazari rural world is an active agricultural sphere (the paces marked by irrigation are fast and continuous) but commercial too (there are markets everywhere and they are rural, urban, periurban, etc.). “We can recognize –according to the professor of the Universidad de Granada—its Andalusi roots, and we can not distinguish clearly the kingdom of Granada as something different to the rest of the Muslim Spain. At the same time, there is more documentation available to study Muslim Spain which allows to specify many aspects”.
The reader can get to know here the real reasons for the landscape and agriculture around him, as well as that expertise on irrigation so typical of Granada. However, the reader can be surprised when reading these pages about certain fallen myths after the exhaustive analysis of this work.
Further information: Professor Carmen Trillo San José
Department of Medieval History and Historiographic Sciences and Techniques. Universidad de Granada. Phone number: 958 243 653
E-mail: ctrillo@platon.ugr.es
