Robert Ignatius Burns – författare

This fourth volume in Robert Burns''s celebrated series on the warrior King Jaume the Conqueror''s Kingdom of Valencia describes the crucial years of 1270 to 1273, a period during which Jaume continued his consolidation of political power for future territorial expansion. Here in the colonial kingdom that he carved out from the Islamic Mediterranean regions of coastal Spain, Jaume presided over a society more complex than any in Christendom. This lively frontier was home to semiautonomous communities of Muslims, Jews, and Christian settlers. Jaume''s pioneering exploitation of Valencia''s Islamic paper mills left behind thousands of charters--records in the king''s registers--that provide a wealth of detailed information about every aspect of these parallel cultures. Burns''s Diplomatarium volumes represent the first systematic exploration of this massive deployment of paper in the West. They open up to readers the rich humanistic panorama of medieval life as seen from the traveling court of a conqueror king. The 500 charters collected in this book cover a kaleidoscope of topics, including public baths, castles, the renaissance of law, irrigation, mosques and monasteries, hospitals and banks, even exotic women. There are records on crossbow manufacture, riot and fire control, ship launchers, dogs of war, crime, slavery, prisons, and pardons. This critical edition includes reconstructions of each charter in its original Latin or Romance language with a corresponding translation in English, making it invaluable for students and scholars alike.

In this volume, a panoramic history of medieval Valencia continues to unfold, as the noted scholar Robert Burns presents a new set of documents from the registers of Jaume the Conqueror at the Crown Archives in Barcelona. Here Burns focuses on 500 government charters covering the years 1264 to 1270, the culmination of the king''s warrior fame in Christendom, and places these documents within the context of Jaumes''s pan-Mediterranean military and political exploits. The most impressive archives of its kind outside the papal series, this collection is invaluable to medievalists as well as to historians interested in topics ranging from colonialism to rhetoric to economics during the Crusade period. Together the five Diplomatarium volumes will reconstruct the thousands of charters describing the daily business of Jaumes''s kingdom and will provide detailed paraphrases of each document to aid scholars with little or no Latin. The third volume describes Jaume distributing public baths and taverns and artisans'' quarters, constructing irrigation networks and castles, licensing butchers and physicians, noticing even dovecotes and beehives and oranges, operating on credit and on charismatic itinerant presence, interacting with his many Jewish and Muslim communities, and leading his armies to battle. Meanwhile, Jaumes''s bureaucrats are at work elaborating a Roman law framework, shaping an institutional and commercial system, and defining the kingdom''s religious identity. In a kaleidoscope of human detail, these documents open a window on an exotic past that medievalists and all historians can enjoy.