The Custom of Conquest: Twelfth-Century Tortosa and the Frontiers of Iberian Law

Medieval frontiers are often perceived as a zones of legal informality and lawlessness, and as such sit uncomfortably in standard accounts of legal change. Focusing on the concept of jurisdiction can provide a different perspective of how law operated during the twelfth century outside of conventional state-centric models of legal development. The following article discusses the history of the frontier town of Tortosa, in eastern Iberia, and of the local statutes of customary law produced in the aftermath of the Catalan conquest in November 1148. It examines the law produced during and after the transition from Islamic to Christian rule, to trace how norms were claimed and used in jurisdictional negotiations out of the presence of consolidated forms of state-centred 'power'. Through Tortosa's early history under Catalan rule, this article demonstrates that medieval frontiers could sometimes characterized by an abundance of rules and jurisdictions rather than the absence of them.