Lines Traced on Mountains: Delimitations and Territorial Disputes in the Western Pyrenees between the Ninth and Eleventh Centuries

Abstract

The oldest archival records from Navarre and Aragon come from several monasteries that were founded in the ninth century in the Pyrenean valleys. These documents contain a considerable amount of information about how boundaries were drawn, as well as about the settlement of disputes and other land transactions between the monks and peasants. This chapter focuses, firstly, on the role played by dispute settlement in building local political structures and on the legitimating discourse for such structures constructed by the monks. Secondly, it analyses the economic and spatial logic of these conflicts and suggests that two main contending principles lie behind the mechanisms of land appropriation that are deployed in these disputes: appropriation by drawing boundaries and appropriation through the actual use of the land. Finally, it considers the social background of each of these mechanisms and adds some comparative remarks about other regions in western Europe during the early Middle Ages.