1064, Barbastro

Was the capture of Barbastro, in 1064, an essay of what the Crusades would be or just one more episode of the Reconquest? Spring of 1064, a Christian army crosses the Pyrenees in aid of the young king Sancho Ramírez I of Aragon after the death of his father, Ramiro I, fallen a year earlier in the taking of Graus. It is an "international" army, made up of several thousand men-at-arms from the various duchies and counties of eastern and southern France, and northern Italy. They have formed this army before the call of bishops, abbots such as Cluny and Pope Alexander II himself who see that the Kingdom of Aragon is threatened with the death of Ramiro I, which in turn is a danger to Christianity. United to the hosts of the Kingdom of Aragon, fighting a bloody battle, they take Barbastro in 1064. The unusual cruelty used up to now with the vanquished reminds what the taking of Jerusalem will be in 1099. The reaction is not going to be expected: before This "holy war", the Muslims, despite being divided into kingdoms of taifa after the fall of the Caliphate of Córdoba in 1031, invoking the "jihad" and led by the Emir of Zaragoza, will initiate the counterattack to recover Barbastro. As Georges Duby did in "Bouvines Sunday", the authors use this fact of arms to study the context of the entire era in which it took place, in all its complexity: its political, social, religious and cultural structures, the feudal alliances in which sometimes religion was not an obstacle, the sensibilities of that period. Sometimes contradictory sensibilities in which the feeling of being the bearers of a Christian mission is mixed, in the case of some nobles, and that of the simple spirit of fighting to conquer spoils, in the case of others; while the general population has somewhat vague ideas of what Islam and Muslims are.