Most approaches to the history of Mozarabs (Christians with lineal roots in Muslim-ruled Iberia) in Castilian Toledo are framed within linear narratives of assimilation, treating the fates of their communal linguistic, legal, and liturgical traits--that is, the use of Arabic, the enjoyment of communal-specific juridical privileges, and the adherence to the traditional Spanish rite--as a metric for gauging the vitality of their identities.

Having examined Arabic, Latin, and Romance documentary and narrative sources from the eleventh century through the fifteenth century, I argue against such teleological trajectories and ethnic marker assumptions and instead examine the shifting medieval concerns and contexts which shaped the fluid perceptions and definitions of Mozarabs during the centuries following Toledo's sudden shift from Muslim to Latinate control.

My conclusions are greatly strengthened by devoting substantial comparative analyses to native Christians in Norman through Aragonese Sicily and the Crusader States. This hitherto unexplored examination of the Arabic, Greek, Latin, and Romance sources related to medieval Christian communities in the formerly Islamic world not only moves beyond traditional historiographical insularity but also facilitates the reevaluation of ethnic identifications in the medieval Arabo-Latinate and Greco-Latinate frontiers under Latinate Christian rule.

My dissertation offers a case study on the relationship between language and power during a period when a series of institutions, ideas, and practices surfaced that transformed European society and significantly altered the manner in which rulers governed. The growth of bureaucracies within increasingly centralized monarchies, a gradual process of laicization, and the rapid spread of vernacular writing represent three of these major changes as well as the primary focus of this survey. In it, I analyze systematically what drove the thirteenth-century kings of the Crown of Aragon to begin writing in their realms' spoken vernaculars (Catalan and Aragonese), what these motivations reveal about contemporary mentalities and language ideologies, and how codeswitching (shifting from Latin to the romance and back) figured into the crown's overall governing practices. Using a multi-disciplinary approach that combines historical methodologies with theoretical frameworks from linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and literary criticism, I conclude that the kings appropriated codeswitching strategies as diplomatic instruments in the administration of their realms. The practical impulse to reach a larger, Latin-illiterate audience influenced all vernacular writing at some level during the Middle Ages, including within the royal chancery. Yet, in the vast majority of cases the kings appropriated vernacular writing strategically as a symbolic instrument. In these instances, the switch from Latin to a vernacular language alone signaled a change in tone, usually denoting displeasure or urgency. Employing language as a political tool betrayed the kings' weakness rather than their strength. Like their contemporaries throughout Western Europe, the kings of the Crown of Aragon were in the initial stages of consolidating and expanding their power over a recalcitrant nobility through a combination of violence, better organized bureaucracies, and the support of urban elites. Language choice between writing in Latin and the romance offered the kings an effective and simple means to communicate more forcefully with their subjects, and, in doing so, better exert their relatively fragile authority.

From the thirteenth century onward, Italian merchants were ubiquitous in the economic activities of the Iberian Peninsula, largely underwriting the success of Iberian expansion and imperial ambitions. They took part in the incursions into North Africa and contributed to the conquest of the Canary Islands and the Caribbean. Italian merchants also became enmeshed in the administration of empire, serving as aldermen and notaries in the Spanish bureaucracy, which necessitated proving their nobility (hidalgu�a) and purity of blood (limpieza de sangre). They participated in civic and religious processions, joined and established confraternities, supported and requested burial in local religious institutions through generous bequests. All of this contributed to their integration into Iberian communities while reinforcing Genoese identity.

Historians, sociologists, and anthropologists have studied the hybrid identities of foreign merchants for decades. Much of this scholarship has demonstrated Genoese ability to integrate into their host communities but has described this as a process of assimilation that displaced Genoese identity. The cases in this dissertation contribute nuance to these long-standing debates about hybridity and the extension of multiple identities and communal membership across time and space. Looking outward from the Iberian Peninsula, these cases played out across larger Mediterranean and Atlantic contexts, since these merchants were extensively involved in the processes of medieval and early modern European expansions, from North Africa to the Canary Islands, the Caribbean, Mexico, and beyond.

Notarial and inquisition records, petitions for nobility (hidalgu�a) and purity of blood (limpieza de sangre), literary narratives, polemical treatises, and funerary monuments demonstrate how Genoese merchant families integrated themselves into Iberian communities while maintaining their foreign connections. Examining both merchants residing in Seville and their relatives across the Atlantic, this dissertation shows how they capitalized on an approach that mobilized their diasporic identity and ties to carve a space within Iberian society. This is what I call ambiguous integration. Their approach to integration had many parallels in the culture of the Mediterranean and Atlantic, but over time it became increasingly difficult to mobilize as a sixteenth-century anti-foreigner discourse associated these merchants with greed, deception, and an effeminacy not unrelated to their identification as “white moors” (moros blancos). As a result, many families dissimulated and even renounced this foreign identity and ties from the end of the sixteenth century forward.

The dramatic arrival of horses to the American continents on Columbus's second voyage in 1493 also introduced a historical set of practices, ideals, and institutional hierarchies from the Iberian Peninsula surrounding the horse and rider. Using new archival material from more than a dozen national and municipal archives in Spain, Mexico and Peru, I demonstrate how the management of horse populations affected the social order maintained by municipal, regional, and vice-regal governments, and the negotiated limits of centralized power in the developing early modern Spanish empire. Initially, structural elements of horse husbandry in Spain directly influenced conquest and settlement strategies in the Americas, as concern about the scarcity and supply of horses influenced acquisition of social status, access to governing positions, and legal regulations. Some environments naturally suited horse populations and others, far more challenging, required strategic intervention to support Spanish military and economic interests. Subsequently, the rapid growth of equine livestock under colonial rule shaped local indigenous adoption of horses, as well as newly developing typologies to categorize horses. Under constraints of local environment and practices of animal husbandry, governing strategies illustrated an increasing focus on regulating the physical type of the horse well into the sixteenth century. In turn, experience in Spanish America influenced horse breeding in Spain during the reign of Philip II. By focusing on the practices that defined social interactions between horses and humans, this dissertation contributes a new derivation for the complex terminology of race and caste that informed the development of controlled breeding programs in early modern Spain and colonial Spanish America. The story of the horse in Spain and Spanish America reveals the special imprint of the horse on forms of governance, social hierarchies, and the reach of empire.

Around the year 1300, after over three hundred years of sustained economic growth, Europe entered a period of prolonged crisis and recession. This thesis examines the economic development of a Pyrenean town, Puigcerd�, and the surrounding valley, Cerdanya, between 1260 and 1360, during this transition. I examine the economic role this valley played in southern Europe and show that Puigcerd� experienced an unusually profound transition from growth to contraction beginning in the 1340s. I begin, in Part 1, with an extended methodological analysis of the notarial institution of medieval Puigcerd�, to demonstrate that notarial sources may be used as accurate proxies for understanding economic and demographic trends. Part 2 examines the population and economy of Puigcerd� in one year, based on in-depth analysis of over 7,800 notarial entries surviving from the year 1321/2. I introduce a new method for estimating population using notarial registers and show that the town had a likely population of around 8,500 people in 1321/2. I also examine the structure of the valley’s economy, revealing that industrial and commercial activity were dominated by the cloth industry, while much of the local agricultural activity centered on sheepherding.

In Part 3, I examine how the town’s economy rose and fell, and the shifts in the valley’s connections to other regions and broader trade networks between 1260 and 1360. Using sampled acts from decade-long intervals, I show that the town’s economy rose during the late-thirteenth century led largely by the early growth of a local cloth industry. The economy stagnated in the early fourteenth century, even as the town began to become increasing connected, through the cloth trade, to distant regions. Finally, the town faced a profound economic and demographic collapse that began in the 1340s around the time of Cerdanya’s reincorporation into the Crown of Aragon. Many wealthier members of Puigcerdan society, often from mercantile families who had begun exporting Puigcerdan cloth, particularly in Aragon, Navarre and Castile, relocated to Lleida and Barcelona shortly after reincorporation into the Crown of Aragon, undoubtedly contributing to the decline. My findings highlight the need for greater attention to regional and sub-regional differences in studying medieval economic growth and decline and suggest that late-medieval regional integration benefited central cities, at the expense of peripheral towns like Puigcerd�.