ERNEST E.

JENKINS, The Mediterranean World of Alfonso II and Peter II of Aragon

(1162-1213). New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012. Pp. xiv, 263. ISBN: 978-1-349-

29065-9.

This was a unique work in many ways as it highlighted a new historiographical field of

discussion: how early Aragonese regional networks were formed by Alfonso II and his son

Peter II. A relatively new kingdom during this monograph’s timeframe of 1162-1213, Jenkins

also successfully added valuable source material and discussion to the notion of why Aragon

became involved in the Albigensian Crusade. Themes of existing regional family networks

and the broader societal (but explicitly Christian) structures within Aragon make up the first

two chapters as Alfonso II’s initial connections with southern France became important.

Moving between the importance of pilgrimages and the ethics of royal enactments, Jenkins

then moved towards Peter II and his ties to southern France which formed the chapters of

greatest importance for scholars. Marriage contracts in Montpellier offset narrative accounts

of fighting in Iberia and in the Albigensian Crusade as Jenkins finally tied Aragon to the

Mediterranean in a final concluding chapter involving Pope Innocent III. These chapters

successfully became part of the wider picture portrayed by Jenkins that monarchical socio-

political decisions were consciously made by father and son to expand Aragon’s regional

community.

Themes of connectivity and controlling alliances ran throughout the monograph. The

clarity of Jenkins’s analysis became an analytical asset as utilizing an in-depth focus on the

monarchy allowed for sources such as marriage certificates, charters, and saints's lives to

indicate the success of their policies. Jenkins argued that the achievement of matrimonial ties

in France enabled Alfonso II to forge a regional community across the Pyrenees and establish

a Mediterranean basis of future exploration and control. However, Jenkins’s Mediterranean

remained almost explicitly narrow and seemed to include only southern France and
Aragonese territory until the final chapter. Chronologically shifting to Peter II, Jenkins

liberally shifted the focus from the pilgrimage attempts of Alfonso to Peter’s movements

from peace to war alongside marital attempts to expand the regional Aragonese community.

Jenkins treated Peter’s decision to fight crusading forces in France with a keen administrative

eye the following year in 1213. The crusaders had taken the Aragonese vassal county of

Toulouse from the Count of Toulouse and this social desire was seen as reason enough,

according to Jenkins, to march into France and lose his own life in the ensuing battle with the

crusaders. Indeed, The Mediterranean World remained explicitly diplomatic and political in

analytical approach, concerning wedding affairs and the extensive alliance systems forged

with French counties, and the kings continually sought opportunities to enhance their social

and political connectivity (173). Even a significant amount of Christian texts such as

Augustine’s City of God transpire to construct a methodology that revolved around the

political rather than religious considerations of the monarch. The decisions taken by the

crusader Peter II when joining the battles against a crusading force were interesting and

worthy of more discussion. The Jewish and Muslim influence on Aragonese politics was not

mentioned in his analysis or even, troublingly, in his bibliography despite the key concurrent

events of the Reconquista. The author intended to place the socio-political motivations of the

Christian Aragonese crown at the forefront of the monograph, that much was clear, but the

extensive analysis of marriage agreements in place of religious motivations in a diverse

peninsula felt too limited.

This monograph was explicit in highlighting the major land claims that Aragon had in

Montpellier and the Languedoc region as well as revealing the Albigensian Crusade for the

political land grab it was becoming in historiographical discussion. Preceding publications

such as Lawrence Marvin’s The Occitan War: A military and  political history of

the Albigensian Crusade, 1209–1218 (2008) had begun to implicate the political rather than
religious goals of the Crusade and Jenkins successfully incorporated an external case study of

Aragon to this discussion. Despite the clear naval interests of the Aragonese sphere of

influence within a highly multicultural Iberian area, Jenkins highlighted the expansion of

intangible social networks and political control through vassalage. The chronological

approach of the father-son dynasty undertaken in this monograph forced Jenkins to approach

the idea of regional expansion being tied to crusading. However, the important moment of

religious conflict in Spain for the Reconquista, the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212) was

considered as little more than a political expansion to the south of Aragonese territory.

Indeed, the marriage alliance with Montpellier was seen as more important for Peter II as

Jenkins continually returned to social and diplomatic analysis to further his aim for showing

the monarchs creating a peaceful community (37). With this, it can feel like an older social

work such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324 (1975)

which focused specifically on one location. Nonetheless, the Aragonese concentration here

also straddled social themes over a longer time period. The chapters in particular promised a

line of analysis that was notably avoided by the author. ‘Mediterranean Communities in

Competition and Conflict’ explicitly focused on Peter II’s internal Iberian conflict and the

two-part chapters concerning ‘Fracturing a Regional Community’ more accurately reflected

this approach where the expanded region of Aragon was threatened by the Albigensian

Crusade. Jenkins most strongly achieved his intention when concentrating on the Albigensian

Crusade case study in southern France. He clearly avoided Mediterranean analysis despite the

promises in the first chapter and title of a wider expanding Mediterranean influence and

settled instead for wider regional political discussion involving a relatively small European

community as it sought to expand its grounded sphere of influence.

That this was a short work of only 174 pages indicated the introductory nature of this

work for scholars to consider. There was an abundance of explicitly Christian source material
in the eighty pages of notes and bibliography at the end, but these only serve the socio-

political focus of the analyzed monarchy. Jenkins did successfully achieve his aim of raising

the importance of social connectivity and monarchical determination of Alfonso II and Peter

II to expand their regional community. Certainly, his monograph should be considered as an

important contribution to the limited historiography surrounding the reigns of the two

Aragonese kings. All but the last chapter that exposed the role of Innocent III in Peter II’s

expansion missed vital opportunities to incorporate the Mediterranean into his analysis.

However, this work introduced scholars persuasively through an illumination of intangible

social networks in a north-eastern Spanish region and connections to south-western France in

the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

JONATHAN WRIGHT, University of New Mexico