Search for a command to run...
This chapter traces the changing relationships between medieval Iberians and their environments, with particular attention to the effect of conquest and colonization on the peninsular landscape. Environmental history of medieval Iberia is still new, but rests on an older foundation of agricultural and technological history. While basic questions about medieval environments have been at least partially answered, the relationship between conquest and environment in the Iberian Peninsula has only begun to be explored. Recent scholarship has made clear that both Muslims and Christians in Iberia (like their counterparts across the medieval world) modified the landscape in which they lived. They did so, moreover, in the context of a changing climate: first warmer and drier during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (900–1300), and then colder and more variable during the Little Ice Age, (1300–1800). Under Andalusi rule, the creation of new irrigation networks transformed the human relationship with the land. The Christian conquest transformed this relationship again as it moved south, both within and beyond the irrigated space. Although Islamic and Christian rule over Iberian landscapes differed in its objectives and its effects, both cultures shared a tradition of environmental intervention and of coping with environmental risk. Medieval Iberians made and remade their environments, just as Iberians continue to do today.