Harca probably comes from the Arabic Harka. The strict meaning of harca refers to a group of people who meet to make noise and outcry. And this is what we are. We are effectively a group of young historians dedicated to Medievalism who make noise and break the rules, constituting a research group devoted to the investigation and reflection about the Medieval history of the Valencian Country.

Nevertheless, Harca is not a common research group, due to the fact that it does not have an official relationship with any academic institution and, consequently, it does not receive any kind of financing. Harca is a way that we have created in order to collaborate among us combining our different and diverse researches. Beyond the fact that unity makes strength, we consider that this way is a good opportunity to take advantage of our studies.

Today, none of us have our PhDs nor are we professors. We are just PhD students, most of us on scholarships, with diverse but complementary interests. We are eager to do things together and to put our common knowledge together. All in all, we want to collaborate and work amongst ourselves in order to provide a critical and solid theoretical base to our research, so far we have discussed together the following topics:

Uses of natural resources (2010)

In the last years the subject of the uses of natural sources has raised the interest of medievalists, although the analysis has not been deep and systematic in order to understand its importance in the peasant economy. During all the 20th Century the European historiography has analyzed the peasant economy from the perspective of subsistence and, consequently, from the monopoly of grain agriculture. At the same time, this historiography insisted on the progressive control of lords over the forest and the restrictive access imposed by them to peasantry in all Europe. All these premises have generated a monolithic vision of rural society focused on the grain production and consumption.

For all this, we pretend analyze the uses of natural resources in a specific area such as the kingdom of Valencia in the latter middle ages. One the one hand, exploitation of forest and marshy lands (F. Aparisi) became an important recourse in the economic strategies of peasantry, not only for familiar consumption but also for the local market. On the other, the wood extraction, its circulation through the large Valencian rivers and the processes of transformation of raw material (I. Martínez Araque) generated important industrial activities in all small towns that demanded the intervention of lords. This control of lords –and among them the king- can be detected in the extraction and commercialization of the salt (V. Baydal- F. Esquilache) an essential product in the human and animal nutrition. Finally, the importance of sheep livestock in the north of the kingdom (V. Royo) generated an intensive livestock specialization but, at the same time, the transformation in the organization of agrarian landscape. All in all, the case of the kingdom of Valencia is a fitting observatory to study the different uses of natural resources and the conflicts that derived from them between 13th and 15th Centuries.

The colonisation of the Kingdom of Valencia (2009)

Currently the members of Harca are focusing their research on different characteristics of the society developed during the last Medieval centuries in a specific historical land: the Kingdom of Valencia, delimited in 1238 after the Catalan-Aragonese conquest of a portion of the Eastern lands of al-Andalus. Thus, it is a frontier society where, as Robert Barlett showed, a process of conquest and colonisation was developed much like other regions in Europe.

In the Kingdom of Valencia the feudal colonisers drove out the majority of the native population. After the feudal landslide victory over two great uprisings during the 13th century, in the early 14th century, the Christian Latin population became the majority in this land. However, the specifying of the Valencian case inside the European context was the permanence of a large mass of Muslims who represented one third of the demographical volume of this land until their expulsion in the 17th century.

The subversion of the previous Andalusi order, the use of it under feudal parameters, and furthermore, the exploitation of an important remaining native population, all had a big influence on the creation of a new coloniser society, fully integrated in the Medieval Western World. The hydraulic systems built by the Andalusins were taken advantage of by the feudal colonisers, settled in the new urban hierarchy where the social process was developed during the last centuries of the Middle Ages.

According to this, the research lines of the members of Harca are focused on the study of the use of these hydraulic systems (F. Esquilache), of the beginnings of the rural industry (I. Martínez Araque), of the rural elites (F. Aparisi and V. Royo) and of the development of the Crown's fiscal system (V. Baydal). Our objective is to make European history from or throughout local researches as in Alain Guerreau’s words:

Last Updated: 25 Apr 2010