Writing about the situation in Seville before the first anti-Jewish riot broke out in June of 1391, the Castilian courtier and chronicler Pero López de Ayala reported that “the people were very aroused, and did not fear anybody, and their eagerness to rob the Jews grew with each passing day.” From his vantage point as a member of the regency council, López de Ayala could see firsthand the underlying causes of the turmoil enveloping his kingdom. The people and the city councils, he lamented, lacked respect for the underage king and for the nobles scrambling to control the regency, and paid no attention to the royal letters ordering them to contain the violence. Indeed, in the summer of 1391, the Castilian monarchy's hold on power was precarious: King Juan I had died the previous year, and his heir, Enrique III, was only eleven years old. After the Jews were assaulted in Seville on June 6, the attacks spread to Córdoba, Toledo, and other cities of the kingdom. By the end of June, the news of the anti-Jewish riots in Castile had reached the royal court in the neighbouring Kingdom of Aragon, and its ruler, Joan I, was making preparations to shield his “royal treasure” (as the Jews were known because of their significant contributions to royal finances) from the fury of the Christian attackers. By all appearances, he had a much better chance of success in suppressing the riots than did his Castilian counterpart. Forty years old in the summer of 1391 and seemingly experienced in royal governance, Joan also had three capable members of the royal family to assist him: his wife, Queen Iolant; his brother, the infant Martí, Duke of Montblanc; and his sister-in-law, the Duchess Maria.

How did it happen, then, that by the time the conflagration finally abated after reaching the remote town of Jaca near the Pyrenees in April of 1392, thousands of Jews lay dead and many more were forcibly converted to Christianity in the lands of the Crown of Aragon? Why did the royal family fail to protect their patrimony? That is the question at the heart of Benjamin Gampel's new, groundbreaking study of the anti-Jewish riots of 1391–92. Gampel's short answer is that the Aragonese rulers cared about the Jews' safety, but not enough to put aside their other concerns (King Joan's love of hunting, the queen's pregnancy, Duke Martí’s Sicilian expedition) and focus their full attention on suppressing the riots. However, as Gampel is careful to note, the feebleness of the Aragonese royal response cannot explain the rapid spread of the violence (8). It cannot account for thousands of Christians from all walks of life—artisans and craftsmen, mendicants, peasants, members of military orders, sailors, vagabonds, nobles, and even members of the royal court—who killed and robbed the Jews in more than fifty towns and cities in Valencia, Catalonia, Aragon, Majorca, and Sardinia over the course of ten months. The story that Gampel painstakingly lays out based on his examination of hundreds of documents from the Aragonese royal and municipal archives shows, for the first time in such meticulous detail, the staggering magnitude of the anti-Jewish riots, and the insurmountable obstacles even the most dedicated of royal governments would face in putting down a movement that most of its subjects supported—tacitly or overtly.

The first of the book's two parts (chapters 1–7) follows the course of the 1391–92 riots from the initial outbreak in the city of Valencia, to other Valencian towns, to the island of Majorca, to Barcelona, Girona, and elsewhere in Catalonia, and finally to the towns in Aragon. Largely avoiding interpretations and general statements, Gampel leads the reader from one devastating episode to the next with the steady hand of a dispassionate chronicler. Most of the individual riots have been extensively studied before, and Gampel makes a good use of this secondary literature in English, Spanish, and Catalan, supplementing it with archival documentation. His characterization of these chapters as “the first comprehensive treatment of [the] peninsular riots” (6) is not an overstatement: such a detailed scholarly narrative of the events did not exist before Gampel's study. It is easy to predict that part 1 of the book will become the “encyclopedia” of 1391, at least for the Crown of Aragon, and a go-to source for every scholar of late medieval Spanish history. In the short epilogue at the end of part 1, Gampel pauses to consider the motivations of the assailants. His conclusions are cautious and clearly intended to be preliminary, but he comes out strongly against reducing the causes of the violence to any single factor. In his view, disentangling the “religious, economic, and political hatreds, rational and irrational” of a very diverse mass of people is a complex task that may never yield a satisfactory result (188–89).

In the second part of the book (chapters 8–10), Gampel scrutinizes the response to the riots by the Aragonese royal family. He shows that at the start of the disturbances, King Joan's concern for the Jews was expressed through an energetic dispatch of letters to the officials in the affected towns, demanding that they protect the “royal treasure” from destruction. However, as the riots continued to spread, he quickly found out that his epistolary activities were a poor substitute for the royal presence. Duke Martí, the only member of the royal family caught up in the violence, was charged with pacifying the city of Valencia, but showed more concern for protecting the conscripts for his Sicilian expedition than for defending the Jews from their violent attacks. Even so, it took Joan three and a half months to finally leave Saragossa, where he had been ensconced until October 2, and travel to Lleida—not to quell the violence (it was too late for that), but to mete out punishments. In explaining the royal inaction and the king's disengagement from the public responsibilities of his office, Gampel points mainly to Joan's pursuit of life's pleasures, and his anxiety about the pregnant queen's well-being. He also argues that Joan's reputation as a defender of Catholic faith worked against his preferred goal of preserving the Jews in their faith. As heir apparent, Joan had brought the charge of host desecration against Jews. This history, and the king's own ambivalence toward the Jews, created a presumption that he would welcome the Jews' conversion (221).

Gampel's monograph is a fine work and unquestionably a game changer in the scholarship on the riots of 1391. That said, the study's main strength—its intense focus on the contingencies that influenced the royal response—is also its chief limitation. We learn that King Joan once ate four partridges at a meal (200), but are still left with several unanswered or only partially answered questions. Why did the anti-Jewish riots break out in 1391? Gampel points to Castile as the source of the conflagration, but claims that “there is insufficient documentation to explain why the violence erupted” there when it did (189). Why did the riots spread so quickly? Gampel goes no further than a tentative conclusion that royal policies and contingent factors were responsible, as were “religious and economic forces” (352). Why did the people and the local authorities act “as if the Jews had no lord” (5) even before it became evident that the royal response to the riots was going to be halfhearted at best? Although Gampel's book stops short of answering some crucial questions, it is a treasure trove of information for anyone seeking a fuller understanding of the tragedy of 1391.