Islamic Iberia & Carolingian Marches

Frankish/Carolingian power and the Holy Roman imperial order in Central Europe.

1 chapter

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The Roman Empire established Caesaraugusta (Zaragoza) as a major colonia on the Ebro — the only Roman city named after Emperor Augustus himself. Walk the Roman theater, forum, and river port, and you walk the infrastructure that shaped every subsequent era: the road network, the municipal institutions, the seasonal calendar of harvest and solstice festivals that later Christian feast dates would absorb. Early Christianity arrived along these same routes; martyr traditions like Santa Engracia date to the 4th century. The Roman calendar left traces in the agricultural rhythm — the vendemia (grape harvest) timing that would later underpin the October 12 Pilar feast.

1035 - 1516

The Kingdom of Aragon, emerging from Pyrenean counties after 1035, expanded through a frontier process that was as much about alliance, tribute, and cultural exchange as about military conquest. The result was Mudéjar coexistence: Muslim craftsmen building churches for Christian patrons in a style that fused Islamic decorative technique with European architectural forms. UNESCO recognizes ten Aragonese Mudéjar buildings as 'an authentic testament to the peaceful co-existence of Christianity and Islam with contributions from Jewish culture' — the towers of Teruel, La Seo's parroquieta in Zaragoza, and the Aljafería's repurposed palace all embody this fusion. The fueros (local laws) guaranteed communal self-governance and shaped a political culture of negotiated autonomy that festival traditions would carry forward even after the institutions were abolished. San Juan de la Peña, the first royal pantheon of Aragon, and Castle of Loarre — one of Europe's finest Romanesque fortresses — anchor the Pyrenean origins of this kingdom.

1516 - 1707

Under the Habsburg monarchy, imperial consolidation and Counter-Reformation Catholicism reshaped Aragon's cultural landscape. The most devastating event was the Morisco expulsion of 1610: approximately 70,000 Moriscos — one-sixth of Aragon's population — were deported from towns across the Ebro valley, including Calanda, Albalate, and Híjar. Entire communities vanished, leaving Arabic-derived place names as the only visible trace of their centuries-long presence. The Pilar devotion, documented from the 12th century as a pious tradition, was amplified by Counter-Reformation energy: the feast was moved from January 2 to October 12 in 1613, probably to coincide with the end of harvests, absorbing an agricultural rhythm into the Marian calendar. The coincidence with Columbus's 1492 landfall would later make October 12 a doubly loaded signifier — harvest celebration and Hispanic-world patronage.

1707 - 1900

The 1707 Nueva Planta decree abolished Aragon's fueros, dissolving the Cortes, the Justicia mayor, and the separate legal system that had defined Aragonese self-governance for centuries. This institutional rupture was real, but community-level traditions — parish festivals, Holy Week practices, oral transmission of agricultural calendars — survived through family and neighborhood networks rather than through institutional preservation. The Carlist Wars of the 19th century made the Maestrazgo and Teruel a battleground between liberal centralism and rural traditionalism: Cantavieja served as the Carlist capital, publishing the Boletín del Real Ejército del Reyno de Aragón. The desamortización of 1835-1836 secularized monasteries like Monasterio de Piedra, dispersing monastic communities and converting sacred sites into private property — a rupture that paradoxically preserved the buildings by giving them new economic functions.