in Spain. A new wave of reconquest, under vigorous monarchs, went most of the way to completing the process begun in the thirteenth century. In 1212 a vast Christian army destroyed the Almohad forces at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, a crucial entry point to the Guadalquivir valley. King Ferdinand III of Castile ( 1217-52) resumed the campaign in the 1230s after the definitive reunification of the crowns of Castile and León ( 1230), and in 1236 inflicted a great psychological blow by taking Cordoba, the former capital of the caliphate. In 1243 Murcia accepted his overlordship, in 1246 Jaen, and finally in 1248 Seville capitulated under siege. The no less dynamic James I--'the Conqueror'--of Aragon ( 1213-76) had in 1229 taken Majorca (and subsequently obtained Minorca and Ibiza) in the first step towards the creation of an Aragonese empire in the Mediterranean, and in 1238 he took the town, and by 1245 had the whole region, of Valencia. Parallel to all this the Portuguese were pushing southwards, subjugating the last towns along the south coast in 1249. The reconquest of Iberia was all but complete. Only the southernmost mountainous region of Granada remained under Muslim rule.
The Spanish reconquest is also differentiated from the enterprises in the eastern Mediterranean by the extent and solidity of administrative control achieved, though here Castile and Aragon differed considerably in the methods they adopted. In the territories acquired by Castile, Muslims tended to be stripped of their land and forcibly removed from cities as a security measure; often they fled to Granada. The conquerors followed the usual pattern of rewarding the combatants with land; but the expertise that was needed to continue the economic sophistication, urban and rural, of the Muslims was lacking. Much land was transferred from agrarian to pasture farming, and many landowners, after a few years of desultory farming, returned to the north, selling their property to the military order which soon came to predominate. Southern Castile took on the traditional complexion of a frontier state; a sparsely populated ranching economy with a subject-caste for labour, powerful barons holding large latifundia, and little economic progress. It was very much the system that would later be adopted by the same Castile in the New World. The
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