Thomas Barton's Contested Treasure traces the struggles between royal and seigniorial authorities for jurisdiction over the Jewish community of Tortosa from the middle of the twelfth century to the beginning of the fourteenth. Barton focuses on two main processes: first, the establishment of an independent lordship in Tortosa and the development over the thirteenth century of a distinctive local administrative system; and, second, the successive attempts by the kings of the Crown of Aragon to reestablish their regalian rights over the Jews of Tortosa. Concerning the latter, Barton narrates how the crown devised new strategies for establishing jurisdiction over the Tortosa community, which he sets in the context of an overall drive for increased centralization and standardization of Jewish privileges and obligations throughout the realm. But the local circumstances proved highly resistant to change. Decades of royal and local attempts to challenge seigniorial authority over the Jews proved only minimally successful; in 1294, the crown finally purchased the town outright.
Barton's account begins with the establishment of royal control over the Jews of Tortosa in a charter offered to the community by Count-Prince Ramon Berenguer IV (r. 1131–1162), who conquered the town in 1148. Because the initial charter left many issues vague or altogether unmentioned, it ultimately, Barton argues, permitted “the development of enduring localized institutional structures and customs” (26). By the time of Ramon Berenguer's immediate successors, Tortosa was a faltering frontier settlement, apparently holding little interest for the already overextended crown. Turning therefore to indirect control, the crown handed over the town's administration to the Templar Order and the Montcada family as unequal co-lords, first tacitly and then, in 1182, officially. Thereafter, for most of the thirteenth century, the crown made sporadic attempts to resume certain aspects of its authority either over the town as a whole or, on occasion, over individual Jews. Yet for the most part Tortosa's Jews remained under seigniorial control. This circumstance allows Barton to explore the tension between evolving royal claims to sole authority over the Jews and the actual jurisdictional situation in Tortosa.
During this same period, the two unequal co-lords, of whom the Templars were dominant and the Montacadas secondary, disagreed frequently with each other over the distribution of local offices and the management of the town's inhabitants; ultimately, these disputes were resolved by revisions in Tortosa's customary laws. According to Barton, it was the inability of the crown to standardize its relations with the Jews of Tortosa that allowed them to collaborate with the lords in enacting regulations that served their immediate purposes, and to avoid royal authority when doing so met their needs.
It was then left for a series of later kings—Jaume I (r. 1213–1276), Pere II (r. 1276–85), Alfons II (r. 1285–91), and Jaume II (r. 1291–1327)—to try and reestablish royal jurisdiction over Tortosa's Jews. The first of these, Jaume I, though evidently interested in wresting some degree of authority from the lords, was hampered by financial considerations and the recalcitrance of the local population, both Jewish and Christian. In the 1260s and 1270s, Jaume I resorted to direct financial impositions on the Jewish community, but still the local lords resisted. Trying a different approach, his successor, Pere II, sought to establish a common, standardized set of privileges (and obligations) for all of the Jewish aljamas of Catalonia; in Tortosa, they seem to have been simply ignored.
Exploring the different—and ultimately only partially successful—strategies used by the crown to intervene in Tortosa, Barton emphasizes the degree to which local constituencies, including the Jewish community, were not mere passive players but could actively shape the outcome of events. In 1282, Tortosa's Jews joined together with the seigniorial regime to argue that a large tax demanded by the king should be paid by a different Jewish community. In general, the presence of two conflicting authorities, the crown and the Templar/Montcadas, afforded the Jewish community some room for maneuver and even the ability to avoid incurring financial obligations. In the end, the crown's failure to reestablish royal control over the Jewish community of Tortosa led to its ceding the castles and towns of Penyíscola, Ares, and Coves de Vinromà in Valencia in exchange for direct jurisdiction in Tortosa.
The rich extant archives in Spain, still not exhausted by scholars, offer a window onto the rise and development of Jewish communities over the thirteenth century, and the intricate web of local and royal interests that shaped their maturation. The archival material at Barton's disposal includes negotiations between the king and the Templars over placing a royal bailiff in the town, statistics on royal visits, regulations of Jewish rights and moneylending, charters offered to the Jewish communities of other Catalonian towns, customary law (the Consuetudines Dertuse civitatis, codified in the early 1270s and revised in 1279 as the Costums de Tortosa), records of legal disputes of all sorts, and other administrative documentation.
Barton sees these documents as a series of knots to unravel—knots whose threads are made up of the competing concerns of the Jewish community, the crown, and the local seigniorial powers, all vying to manipulate the laws in pursuit of their own best interests. Determining what those interests might be and how bald legal arguments function within these complicated networks of intersecting power is a fascinating and at times frustrating task. Often the documentation is sparse or one-sided; actual outcomes of legal cases can be frequently unknown, legislation might be met with absolute noncompliance, and the motivation behind a charter and its particular wording can only be guessed at. Taking these ambiguities as a challenge, Barton doggedly follows the trail of possible implications and motives.
For example, in 1247 the Templars agreed to the presence of a royal bailiff whose writ would be limited to managing royal property but who would be permitted to collect rents and some levies and also to be involved in relevant legal cases and treaties. Jaume I's first bailiff, a Jew, was named in the 1260s but by 1275 had left Tortosa for Valencia. Barton suggests that the bailiff's active fidelity to Jaume I is what alienated him from his fellow Jews and ultimately made his work less efficacious, thus forcing his departure. This is an intriguing thought, if necessarily speculative.
Although careful to emphasize that Tortosa was unique in its history and administrative circumstances, Barton holds that, in general, heterogeneity was itself a characteristic of the entire Crown of Aragon. As one independent lordship among many, Tortosa may have exhibited its own unique version of “micro-convivencia” (Barton's term), but analogous instances, each operating according to its “local dynamics of coexistence,” arose throughout the thirteenth century. This, too, is an intriguing thought, and one meriting further investigation and documentation.
