Reviews of Books
1434
the work of a collaborative Franco-Iberian research
team. The articles range from regional syntheses to
close studies of the methods and mechanisms of
taxation in individual towns in the Crown of Castile,
the Aragonese realms, southern France, and (in one
synthetic essay) northern Italy. In order to pursue a
common as well as a comparative research objective,
editors Denis Menjot and Manuel Sánchez Martfnez
have admirably kept a tight reign on the participants.
Two basic questions frame the individual contributions: What part did direct taxation (on property and
rents) and indirect taxation (on consumption) play in
municipal finances? And how were municipal taxes
assessed?
Throughout the western Mediterranean, municipal
governments first relied on direct taxation to provide
for their financial needs, particularly defense and the
demands of their lords. The complex interplay between
the goals of urban magistrates and the financial requirements of sovereigns emerges as one of the major
findings of these investigations. By the second half of
the twelfth century, the precociously independent Italian communes had begun to assess taxes based on
households, but even there the earliest urban taxes
derived from the fodrum, an imperial exaction. During
the thirteenth century, municipalities from Castile to
Provence asserted the prerogative of direct taxation. In
the colonial societies of Valencia, Murcia, and Andalucia, monarchs quickly endowed municipalities with
fiscal systems that became the foundation for autonomous urban taxation, while towns in older Christian
regions crafted their fiscal systems independently in
order to meet the growing fiscal pressures of their
sovereigns. In both cases, the exigencies of local
communities and princes stimulated the growth of
increasingly complex urban tax systems. At first occasional and improvised, levies on property and rents
rapidly became regularized and promoted financial
institutions endowed with elaborate rules, records, and
personnel. Yet with heightened financial pressures
from kings and princes as well as from their own
growing populations, towns began to experiment with
taxes on the consumption of wine, grain, meat, fish,
and a wide range of craft products by the late thirteenth century. The imposicions at Barcelona and
Girona, the rèves and gabelles in Provence, and the
almojarifazgo and almotacenazgo at Seville represent a
remarkably elaborate set of impositions on consumption. By the fifteenth century, indirect taxation far
outstripped revenues from direct taxation in larger
towns. The tension between the two systems takes us to
the heart of urban polities, for the shift to indirect
taxation often benefited the wealthiest citizens as it
weighed more heavily on basic consumptive needs than
on capital. Even within a broadly comparable evolution, local nuances of fiscal administration proved a
highly charged issue in urban polities.
Despite local variations, the overall movement toward indirect taxation in the largest towns can clearly
be seen during the late Middle Ages from northern
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
Italy to Castile. Yet from the early fourteenth century
the major towns in the Crown of Aragon and northern
Italy, unlike their neighbors in the Midi and Castile,
came to rely heavily on funded municipal debt. The
heavy fiscal burden of these towns led to a voracious
need for indirect taxation, which transformed municipal finances and promoted the formation of complex
institutions to sustain a heavy level of debt. The
contributions to this well-conceived volume bring out
as never before both the common challenges and the
diverse destinies of urban fiscal regimes. Through a
tightly organized research effort, it has proven possible
in roughly a decade to trace out a comparative theme
that had appeared only incidentally in urban studies in
the Midi and was virtually ignored in Castile and the
Crown of Aragon. One can only applaud the results of
such a coordinated and truly cooperative research
venture.
STEPHEN BENSCH
Swarthmore College
ROBERT CHAZAN. God, Humanity, and Histoty: The
Hebrew First Crusade Narratives. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press. 2000. Pp. xi,
270. $40.00.
This is the third book that Robert Chazan has written
on the lethal attacks launched against Rhineland Jewish communities by Christian warriors near the beginning of the First Crusade. European Jewty and the First
Crusade (1987) was a historical overview, surveying the
sources and what they reveal about the varieties of
violence, the patterns of Jewish response (prayer,
resistance, conversion, martyrdom), and subsequent
interpretation and memorialization of the traumatic
events. A substantial appendix to that book presented
the major Hebrew chronicles in translation. In the Year
1096: The First Crusade and the Jews (1996), published
in the anniversary year, covered much the same material for a general, nonacademic audience. As revealed
by its subtitle, the scope of the current book is
narrower. The many Christian chronicles of the First
Crusade have relatively little to say about the bloodshed in the Rhineland; their focus is, understandably,
the Middle East. It was not until the Hebrew chronicies were published in 1892 that the full story of the
preliminary massacres became accessible to most medievalists, and not until after World War II that this
account became integrated into the authoritative general Crusade histories.
The relationship among the three Hebrew chronicies, which cover much the same subject matter, has
been a subject of ongoing scholarly debate since their
publication. How are they to be dated, both in time
removed from the events and in relation to each other?
Did the authors rely on their own experience, oral
reports, or written accounts? Was one of these texts
available as a source to the other authors? Was there
an Ur-text no longer extant? Chazan reviews the
earlier literature in an appendix and revisits these
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Europe: Ancient and Medieval
issues in the first part of his book. His argument is that
the three chronicles reflect five documents with different authorial voices; the longest of the chronicles is a
composite text that incorporates two originally independent narratives in addition to the author's own
report. The various texts reveal different degrees of
preoccupation with what he calls the "time-bound"
and the "timeless" issues raised by the violence. From
all of the chronicles, there emerges a "new sense of the
importante of contemporary events and contemporary
human heroes" (p. 211), expressed in a vibrant narrative style that was soon lost to subsequent Hebrew
literature.
Beyond the technical questions of dating and interdependence, Chazan addresses larger issues pertaining
to the worldviews of the respective authors and their
approach to historical writing. He devotes a chapter to
the hotly contested issue of the "facticity" of the
chronicles, arguing—against the position that these
texts reveal only an imaginative reconstruction by their
authors, not the actual events of 1096—that the data
provided in the narratives are on the whole fairly
reliable. The most innovative section is the two final
chapters, which make the case that the chronicles
share much more with contemporary Christian historiographical narrative than with Jewish precursors.
It is here that the rather grandiose title is invoked,
for the argument is that the Hebrew accounts share
with the anonymous Gesta Francorum "fundamental
assumptions about God, humanity, and the workings
of history" (p. 201). In both, although theoretically in
sovereign control of history, God is all but absent as an
active agent. In both, human initiative, valor, and
heroic self-sacrifice of martyrdom dominate. Both
depict their own generation as exalted in stature even
over the spiritual giants of the biblical past.
This argument situates the author in a significant
trend of recent Jewish historiography that portrays
medieval European Jews not just as victims of persecution but as confronting and responding to many of
the same cultural and spiritual issues that preoccupied
their Christian neighbors. Here, unfortunately, the
book is weakest in substantiation. Comparison is made
with only one of the Christian chronicles of the First
Crusade. The similarities, particularly on "the workings of history," are sketchy; there is no evaluation of
the significant differences between the Hebrew and
Latin works in style, scope, and methodology. Parallels
are noted without any explanation or suggestion of
whether the author considers them to be the product
of infiuence: were the Hebrew authors even aware of
the works of their Christian analogues, or was it simply
a case of contemporary authors drawing from the same
nebulous cultural climate or responding to similar
events? Despite Chazan's stimulating and provocative
contribution, the claim of a fundamental convergence
between the two sets of twelfth-century chronicles begs
for a fuller and more complete elucidation.
MARC SAPERSTEIN
George Washington University
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
1435
BARBARA H. ROSENWEIN. Negotiating Space: Power,
Restraint, and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval
Europe. (Cornell Paperbacks.) Ithaca: Cornell Univer-
sity Press. 1998. Pp. xxii, 267. Cloth $55.00, paper
$18.95.
Barbara H. Rosenwein has written a history of monastic privileges from their first appearance in the seventh
century to the dawn of European jurisprudence in the
eleventh. As the authority of the hierarchical church
evolved, church councils began to define the legal
relationship of monasteries and local bishops. In the
fifth and sixth centuries, various councils in the eastern
and the western parts of Christendom promulgated
canons that gave bishops considerable authority and
jurisdiction over monastic foundations within their
territories. Monasteries were considered sacred places.
Since the monastic, contemplative life was thought to
be superior to life in both the secular world and the
rest of the church, from earliest times abbots sought to
limit episcopal control over their affairs. Traces of this
tension can be found in early conciliar canons regulating monastic life.
The Council of Chalcedon in 451 promulgated several canons that subjected monasteries to bishops.
These canons established a norm for episcopal jurisdiction over monasteries for the entire medieval period. Although Rosenwein discusses these canons, she
does not explain how the Greek canons promulgated
in the East became normative in the West and how and
in what form they circulated. She could have found the
answer to that fundamental question in the early
medieval canonical collections containing these canons. I give an illustration at the end of this review why
such evidence is important. Since Rosenwein pays
much attention to the context of individual privileges—a great strength of the book—her neglect of this
part of the story is regretable.
The norm in Christendom was episcopal control
over monasteries. The exceptions to the norm were
privileges in which episcopal rights were circumscribed. Rosenwein illustrates how bishops, secular
lords, and, finally, popes began to issue privileges to
monasteries that exempted them from episcopal jurisdictional rights. She argues that, in the Merovingian
period, many monasteries received privileges that curtailed episcopal rights (a "heyday"). In the Carolingian
period, bishops regained control over monasteries in
their dioceses ("singing a new tune"). She ends her
story with the beginnings of large-scale papal privileges to monasteries in the tenth and eleventh centuries, an area to which she had devoted earlier studies.
From the evidence that Rosenwein presents, I was
not convinced that the Carolingians restored episcopal
control over monasteries as a policy. She uses one
privilege granted to Groze in 757 to make her point.
Because it did not limit episcopal rights as much as
other privileges, she calls it an "anti-exemption." The
terminology is unfortunate. The privilege did limit
episcopal rights over Groze. To call it an "anti-
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