19
Antoni Furió
Irrigation has played a major role in the history of mankind. Not only has it decisively contributed to the development of agriculture in poor soil areas, but it has also made life possible in the most arid conditions. A good example of this is the well-known region of the so-called Fertile Crescent, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and of Pharaonic, Roman and Muslim Egypt, whose population depended on the periodic overflow of the Nile River for its subsistence. But it has also been the case in other regions, such as East and South Asia (China, India), North Africa and in many areas of Mediterranean Europe. Historians of medieval Europe are prone to applying a perspective informed by conditions in the north-west of the continent (i.e., a region of mainly Atlantic climate and rich soils due to high rainfall). Here, as Georges Duby pointed out in his vigorous synthesis on the initial, early medieval European economy, the struggle against nature was fundamentally a struggle against trees.1 In order to clear land and facilitate agricultural production, forests had to be cut and removed. This had to be done continuously and persistently, or trees would otherwise recover their former domains and reign in the rural landscape again, as it happened in the Early Middle Ages, and once again, after the demographic collapse and the abandonment of cultivated fields after the Black Death.
In southern Europe, on the contrary, the problem was water: its scarcity and also its excess, because if the former made it difficult or even prevented the cultivation of land, torrential rains and floods could destroy crops and even agricultural infrastructures. Additionally, water could also be a source of deadly diseases like malaria. As the old Italian proverb recollected by Fernand Braudel, the great historian of the Mediterranean, says: Acqua, ora vita, ora morte (‘Water, now life, now death’).2 Water is everything in Mediterranean Europe, the difference often between life and death, between settlement and depopulation. And peasants have had to learn from ancient, even pre-Roman times to tame and control water, to channel it in ditches and to use it for irrigation and thus to make agriculture possible and to obtain fruitful harvests.
In contrast to the average rainfall in Atlantic Europe, which is between 700 and 850 millimetres per year (1,220 millimetres in UK), in southern Europe it rains very little, between 400 and 800 millimetres in general and even between 200 and 400 millimetres in the drier regions.3 However, these average figures hide strong regional variations (e.g., between western and eastern Iberia, between northern and southern Italy) and because the rains are not staggered throughout the year, but concentrated in certain seasons, from autumn to spring, where it rains torrentially. In contrast, it hardly rains in summer, which generates significant water stress, which, in turn, confers on the territory a high vulnerability to droughts. In addition, despite regional differences, the whole Mediterranean region has in common strong summer aridity and a rainfall regime with a high index of irregularity and marked seasonality. The serious summer drought, specifically ‘Mediterranean’ in character, is masked in the annual totals, and so, while Paris receives 620 millimetres per year spread over 160 days, Barcelona totals 595 millimetres, but in three times fewer days (i.e., about fifty-five to sixty).4
This means that the rainfall deficit in summer is amply compensated by the strongly concentrated precipitations of the equinoxes and especially of the autumn: storms that surprise by their copiousness, amplitude and, frequently, violence. Daily rains exceeding one-hundred millimetres – in fact, the maximum rains that can be registered in twenty-four hours, of 100, 200, 300 millimetres and more, can reach and exceed half of the annual average rainfall – are frequent throughout the Mediterranean region, causing heavy soil losses and sudden and violent floods, with an important environmental, economic and social impact.
However, in the most arid areas rainfall does not even reach 300 millimetres per year, as in south-eastern Iberia, especially the south of the Valencia region and the provinces of Almeria and Murcia, and in south-eastern Italy, southern Sardinia and southern Sicily.5 Notwithstanding the arid nature of these areas, they are still affected by important torrential rain events, with daily precipitation values exceeding 200 millimetres, capable of destroying crops, infrastructures and human lives in a few moments and causing soil erosion. In fact, these dry lands – in spite of the sudden and catastrophic eruption of torrential rains – constitute delicate and complex spaces where interactions between climate–natural resources–human interventions maintain a precarious balance, very sensitive to the effects of soil erosion, desertification processes and climate change. Out of all Earth’s resources, López Bermúdez sums up, the lack of fresh water, the soil degradation and loss of biological diversity, expressed in desertification, constitute the most implacable threats for humanity.6 It has thus been for millennia and still is in the Mediterranean world today.
In the Mediterranean, therefore, agriculture and human survival itself have historically depended on water, on the control of both its scarcity and its excess. This fact has resulted in human interventions and material agreements such as taking advantage of water from sources and springs, digging wells or raising dams to divert water from rivers, building ditches to irrigate fields, cooperating collectively within the community or between diverse communities to carry out such construction work, establishing irrigation turns between users of the same river or of the same ditch, judging and penalizing violations or placing the sites of dwellings in elevated areas both to avoid floods and to dedicate the greater part of the lowlands to irrigated fields. These ‘politics of water’, as Jamie Linton and Yrjö Haila call them, were not new in the Middle Ages, but they already had a long tradition – with existing material and institutional structures – that in some areas went as far back as Roman or pre-Roman times.7
This does not mean the great achievements of Mediterranean irrigation, such as the large huertas (extensive irrigation areas characteristic of the eastern Iberia) or other smaller managed spaces in medieval times, had necessarily Roman or earlier origins. The study of Mediterranean irrigation has been tainted by the question of origins.8 Since the beginning of the twentieth century, many historians refused to admit that, for example, the Valencian system of irrigation had been built by the Arabs in the Middle Ages.9 They preferred the idea that such systems stemmed from ancient, Roman origins, debasing the role of Arabs – who, according to these authors, lacked the technical and engineering skills to build it – to its maintenance or expansion. Others, reacting against this view, have overemphasized the Arab-Muslim lead, instead minimizing the role of Roman irrigation or arguing its abandonment and destruction in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages, or, accepting it, have been divided over the urban/state or peasant character of the initiative, as will be discussed below.
Certainly, Mediterranean peasants have not had to wait for Romans or Arabs or for the intervention of cities or states to implement and develop irrigation techniques and systems and to design, build, maintain, protect and expand more or less large irrigated spaces. The similarities that we find between Valencian irrigation systems – and even the plot division – and those of North Africa, the Near (Syria, Palestine) and the Middle East (Iraq, Iran) are not only explained by migration or by cultural diffusion, which undoubtedly it was, but also by the similarity of the local responses to the same problems: the geological aridity of soils. The Roman and Muslim empires contributed to spreading the techniques of irrigation inside the worlds they ruled, the former around the Mediterranean and the latter from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, and hence, certain material and institutional resemblances. Other elements in the regulation of water such as collective organization, submission to ‘moral’ and legal norms that regulate cooperation and settle conflict over water, or the ways to take advantage of water resources seem to have developed autonomously and similarly everywhere in the face of comparable problems. The specific forms differ, geographically and historically, but they coincide in the background, both whether implemented by polygenesis (independent invention) or by cultural diffusion. This continues to be a controversial topic among historians, but it is not necessary to prioritize one factor or the other, since Mediterranean irrigation was the result over the long term of both external stimuli – namely diffusion or migration – and internal adaptation.10
In order to reevaluate the different contribution of Hispano-Romans and Muslims to the creation and development of the Iberian irrigation agrosystems and also their continuity and change in the long term, the geographer and archaeologist Karl W. Butzer and his team identified three types of irrigation systems according to scale. At the most elementary level, the micro-scale, one or several cultivators, often from an extended family, operate a small number of irrigation ditches fed by a cistern or small spring, while irrigation covers substantially less than a hectare. In the meso-scale, a single corporate community, consisting of one or more villages and hamlets, regulates water allocation from one or more major springs or productive wells, involving up to several hundred cultivators and a network of small distribution canals that carry water mainly intermittently – and so, temporarily stored in large tanks (bassa) – for fixed times during the key summer growing season; little maintenance is required and the irrigation land rarely exceeds hundred hectares or so. Finally, the largest and most complex level, the macro-scale, corresponds to irrigation networks covering some fifty to hundred square kilometres, in which several corporate communities, either villages or towns, jointly manage water distribution, involving several thousand cultivators and a complex canal system, requiring construction of diversion dams (assuts) and considerable, long-term maintenance; the best example of this macro-scale irrigation is the large floodplain huertas of southern and eastern Iberia, covering several thousand hectares.11
These three systems relate not only to different environmental contexts and opportunities and entail substantially different levels of technology and cooperation, but also, their original design and construction, to different historical moments and civilizations. The first two systems do not present problems and can be found everywhere at different times, including Muslim Iberia, otherwise known as al-Andalus. Instead, the discussion is still alive with respect to the third one. Conventional wisdom and traditional historiography have always referred to the great irrigation ditches and large huertas that have survived until today as obra de moros (‘work by Moors’). Muslim geographers and travelers, such as al-Idrisi in the twelfth century, before the great Christian expansion of the following century that culminated in the occupation of most of the peninsula, describe and praise the beauty and fecundity of these vast irrigated spaces, which extend from the Ebro river, in the south of Catalonia, to Andalusia. Conversely, based on toponymy and archeology of pottery and masonry, Butzer et al. question this attribution and conclude that these large hydraulic systems predate the Muslim conquest (i.e., that they have pre-Islamic origins).
Moreover, besides wheat, barley, linseed, figs, almonds and vineyards (for raisins), these irrigated spaces also produced small quantities of pomegranates, peaches, apricots, pears, cherries, plums, carbos, various citrus trees, apples and mulberry trees (for silkworms); that is, on the one hand, typically ‘Mediterranean’ staples and, on the other, an additional but minor element of exotic, ‘eastern’ tree crops, generally thought to be of Islamic import. However, according to Butzer, except the apricot, citrus and silkworms, all they and even saffron and other plants believed of Eastern provenance, were part of a late Roman inventory compiled c. 630 A.D. in Seville by Isidore. All the more, the basic social organization of the macro-irrigation systems and the institutional schema regulating them – the public character of water, the allocation of this in proportion to landholdings, the rotational system based on fixed time units, the priority according to use type for times of shortage and the responsibility of the individual in local canal maintenance – were all basic to Mediterranean irrigation practices as embodied in Roman law.12 In short, according to Butzer, the large irrigation networks of Mediterranean Spain predate the Islamic invasion, while not precluding refurbishment, reconstruction or local expansion during the Islamic Middle Ages, including some technical (sènia, qanat, explained later) and institutional innovations and a fundamental imprint on the organizational structures of irrigation. This imprint is greater, on the contrary, in the meso- and micro-scale networks in the adjacent mountains, which were not superimposed on pre-Islamic layouts and represented a significant expansion of irrigation into new ecohabitats.
This vision – which in fact relegates the Muslim contribution to the creation of medium (meso-scale) irrigated spaces, by insisting on the romanity of the great networks (macro-scale) and the universality of the small ones (micro-scale) – has been severely contested by Miquel Barceló, who finds in it three important flaws. In the first place, the continuity of sophisticated irrigation systems requires a continuity of settlement and of an agrarian system that makes a very intensive use of the soil, which did not occur; on the contrary, they collapsed at the end of the Roman period, long before the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. In the second place, the Arab contribution in agronomic matters and in the importation of new crops cannot be underestimated because classic Roman authors mentioned them in their works; that would show the erudition of such authors, not the diffusion and cultivation of these crops. And, finally, because the social system that creates and uses the hydraulic network is not considered (i.e., that a distinction is not made between the technological unit and the social unit that uses, manages and maintains the former): slave labor in large late Roman estates is not the same as peasant labor within structured communities around lineage, like those that would have characterized the Muslim rural world, whose logic was not so much maximizing profit as meeting communities needs and ensuring the social and territorial stability of the group. For this author, irrigation systems cannot be understood if the social groups that created and used them are not known and understood. Barceló even disregards the distinction between large and small irrigated spaces, because, after all, the principles that govern them are the same.13
In reality, the distinction is clear and immediately imposes itself on historians and archaeologists.14 Size matters, and a large huerta of thousands of hectares is not the same as a small irrigated space of a few hectares. The latter can be built by a tiny number of growers or a small rural community, but the former requires greater collective effort and, above all, great coordination, either by the same cultivators at an intercommunity level or by an external power, the city or the state. Therefore, the discussion has not affected small and medium hydraulics, but has focused mainly on the large ones. Who, when, how and why built the great huertas that characterize Mediterranean Spain?
As said before, Iberia presents a strong contrast between its wet, Atlantic part and the arid, Mediterranean one. Even a third part could be distinguished, the vast, remote, water-poor interior, which remained a thinly settled world of dry-farming, pastoralism and widely spaced, smaller cities, while irrigation agriculture had been and remains anchored in the river plains and coastal regions of subhumid and semiarid Spain and Portugal.15 And on the Mediterranean coast, the large huertas of several thousand hectares stand out, generally located around a large city, such as those of Valencia (7,000–8,000 hectares), Oriola (5,000 hectares) or Murcia (4,000–6,000 hectares), and thus up to a total of between fifteen and twenty large peri-urban huertas. Some of them had clearly Islamic origins, such as that of Murcia, since this city was not founded until 825, but doubts persist about the chronology of the others. It is true that until very recently very little was known, to say nothing, of the Roman irrigation, whose existence was even questioned. Water, in the Roman world, would have had a preferably urban use, for the consumption of the population and the supply of thermal baths and gardens; only in the regions of arid condition like Numidia and Mauritania the Romans would have applied hydraulic techniques to agriculture. Much more problematic was, therefore, its continuity in medieval times. Ignoring almost all of the pre-Islamic irrigation, it is not strange that T. F. Glick claimed fifty years ago that ‘any claim concerning institutional continuity between Roman and medieval Spain would be conjecture’.16
But if ancient irrigation has been neglected by historians and archaeologists, this is mainly due to factors ranging from the relative scarcity of written evidence, to the fact that ‘scholarly attention has fundamentally focused on water-lifting devices and on the monumental aqueducts and dams built for urban supply, somewhat neglecting more modest irrigation infrastructures’, and to the vulnerability of the material remains of the hydraulic landscape. Yet, to the extent that archaeologists have begun to study these remains seriously, impressive water management systems have begun to emerge, from Greece to central-western Italy, southern Italy or Roman North Africa (i.e., all the Roman Mediterranean).17 In addition, according to Horden and Purcell, the ideal conditions for irrigation agriculture are present in Egypt and the eastern regions of Hispania more than elsewhere in the Mediterranean: insufficient pluviometry and rivers with a substantial and permanent water flow.18 In a recent contribution on the typology, financing and management of irrigations infrastructures in the Roman West, Francisco Beltrán distinguishes between three types of systems – those of a private nature, built and exploited by a single owner; those of a collective nature, built and managed by Imperial or Municipal authority; and those equally collective, built by the emperor, the municipalities or users themselves, and managed by irrigation communities, sometimes populated by farmers from different municipalities – and points out some examples in Italy, North Africa and Hispania.19 He also notes evidence suggesting occasional irrigation to compensate for the arid conditions and to maintain the productivity of dryland crops, which can also be observed in the late Middle Ages. Focusing more specifically on Iberia, irrigation was much more widespread in Roman times than previously thought, and many examples and works attest to this pre-Islamic irrigation – Roman or earlier.20 There are indeed numerous remains of Roman era canals found throughout the Valencian region, from the plains of the rivers Millars, Palancia and Túria to the huertas of Xativa and Gandia, the Alicante coast or the valley of Vinalopó.21 With regard to the other large irrigated area of the Iberian Southeast, the fertile plain of Granada, the dam of Deifontes or the ancient boundaries of the decurations that have been preserved in the plot structure on the left bank of the river Cubillas, near Pinos Puente, are equally significant testimonies (Guzmán Álvarez, 2010), as well as the dam of La Degollada (Calahorra), whose purpose was to irrigate about 2,000 hectares, or that of Almonacid de la Cuba (Belchite), able to water about 7,000 hectares.22 All these works show that the topic is still alive and will be the subject of new contributions and reconsiderations in the upcoming years.
Regardless of the degree of continuity that could have existed between Roman and Muslim irrigation, which in the current state of our knowledge is problematic and in any case, faces the question of population breakdown in Late Antiquity and the establishment of a new social and political order after the Islamic conquest, the development of irrigation knew a strong impulse in Early Middle Ages, with the consolidation of Muslim rule.23 It was then, between the nineth and eleventh centuries, in the times of the caliphate and the taifas (political and administrative decentralization of al-Andalus in many small kingdoms known as taifas, in Arabic ‘side’ or ‘faction’), when, according to most historians, the large huertas were constructed (or reconstructed). Not everyone agrees, however, on who built them.
Barceló and his team have generally worked on small and medium irrigated spaces, linked to the peasant communities that had built them, in order to fundamentally ensure their own survival, as well as the fiscal demands by the state, and that they consider characteristic of the Andalusian irrigation. It would generally be very small irrigated spaces, like the 161 studied in the Balearic Islands, whose average size is of 1.2 hectares and where in any case, and despite the presence of some larger spaces, 85% of the systems had an area of less than two hectares.24 Conversely, they see the large urban river huertas of the peninsula as unique, isolated cases, not properly characteristic and whose existence is even questioned for both Roman and Muslim times. In any case, both the small and medium irrigated areas and also those larger and located in the periurban area, owed their morphology to the constructive action of groups of peasants, without the state having much or no influence in their origin.25 Far from any intervention by an external and superior power that could remind Wittfogel and his ‘oriental despotism’ – the idea of economic necessity of supporting irrigation systems as the foundation of a model of society and government whose main characteristic was the absolute power of a central bureaucracy – the irrigated spaces, no matter their size, small or large, share the same principles and would have been created, one another, by small peasant clan groups that would have developed a vast mosaic of small huertas under their autonomous control.26 In actual fact, the large huertas near the cities, such as that of Valencia, would not be such (i.e., vast spaces irrigated by a complex network and integrated into the same system, which would require coordination by a superior instance or authority), but a juxtaposition of small peasant huertas, whose immediacy one with the other could give, altogether, a false vision of unity and compactness.27
Other authors emphasize the distinction between the rural and the urban world, differentiating between more modest irrigation systems linked to small rural farms and others of greater size and complexity located around the city and built and supervised by the state or by the city. These works have in common, in addition to being based, as their opponents, also on a solid archaeological fieldwork, to focus on the large periurban huertas and relate the creation of these to the foundation or development of large cities, either ex novo or integrating various small agricultural spaces into a single large irrigation system. Such would be the case of the huertas of Tortosa, in Catalonia; Sogorb, Elx, Alacant and Oriola, in the kingdom of Valencia; and Murcia and also, perhaps, in my opinion, of that of Valencia, the largest of all, with about 7,500 hectares in the thirteenth century.28 They also coincide chronologically; locating the creation of these large and complex irrigation systems between the ninth and eleventh centuries, particularly during the caliphate and the taifas, and in linking their construction and management directly to the state or city in whose territory it was deployed. This relationship is clear and documentarily attested in the case of the huerta of Murcia, whose construction was ordered by direct mandate of the emir ‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Awsaṭ between 825 and 831.29 While the early Islamic period would have been characterized by small irrigated spaces linked to small peasant communities, the increasing technical and social control of the rural environment, especially from the caliphate, would have allowed later on to develop new and more complex infrastructures linked to the creation of large urban huertas.30 With the establishment of the caliphate, and especially since the midtenth century, the cities grew, while increasing their control over the adjacent countryside, necessary to ensure the supply of the urban population and also the development of nonagrarian economic activities (crafts, commerce) and new social collectives. This interdependence seems very clear: the city made the huerta and the huerta made the city, at least in its origins, in a process that will continue after the Christian conquest and that will only be broken when the huerta was insufficient to ensure urban development and the city had to turn to imports to ensure its supply.31 Nevertheless, it is not necessary to confront ‘tribality’ or ‘segmentarity’ of the rural communities to the cities, since the former could also contribute effectively to the construction of large irrigation systems, such as the Sèquia de Favara, in Valencia.32
Other authors, finally, relate the development of irrigation in al-Andalus to the so-called ‘agricultural’ or ‘green revolution’, produced by the diffusion of new plants and techniques from Mesopotamia and the Near East to the western end of the Mediterranean. For some, the role of the peasant emigration was decisive in the transmission of these new agricultural practices, first in the peninsula (between the eighth and the tenth centuries, laying the foundations on which the states of the Umayyad and taifa dynasties were built) and then in the Balearics (from the tenth century).33 For others, on the contrary, state intervention would have been decisive, not only in the promotion of large hydraulic works, but also in the transmission of plant varieties and techniques within a vast Islamic empire, whose very existence would have created the communication networks conducive to this transmission.34 For her part, Lucie Bolens, also relating the development of irrigation to the political power, but nuancing more the chronology and actors, puts the ‘agricultural revolution’ not during the caliphate, but during its disintegration and the decentralization of the state in taifas in the eleventh century, when there was also a proliferation of ‘Books of Agriculture’ and other agronomic treaties, as well as economic and urban development.35 Ultimately, Mohammed El Faïz, who sees in these agronomic texts an example of an effort to rationalize agriculture according to a productivist logic, highlights the interest of state power to stimulate the peasant communities’ initiatives to achieve a more efficient management of the hydraulic network.36 The same author has also pointed out the existence of large and complex irrigation systems not only in al-Andalus, but also in the rest of the Muslim world, as the cases of Marrakesh, Fez and Damascus show. The large huertas would therefore not be unique or isolated cases and, regardless of the role played by the peasant communities in small-scale irrigation, the role of the state and, in particular, of the cities would be decisive in the promotion of great works, in the commercial orientation of agriculture and in the provision of a legal framework and judicial authority to regulate irrigation rights and solve potential conflicts.37 Antonio Malpica stresses similarly the agricultural intensification carried out by the new Almohad state from the twelfth century, which would be concretized in the construction of new irrigated agricultural spaces, with large water receptacles for agricultural use (buhayra), and that it would extend from Marrakesh (whose huerta surpassed the 5,000 hectares already in Almoravid time) to Seville, Granada and other cities of al-Andalus.38 All these different historiographical positions summarize and highlight the intricate interrelationship between urban and rural settlements and economic activities, differing where to place the emphasis, whether on the peasants, the city or the central power.
The sociopolitical equilibrium of the Iberian Peninsula would undergo a strong turnaround in the High Middle Ages with the great Christian conquests of the twelfth and, above all, thirteenth centuries, which reduced al-Andalus (i.e., the independent Muslim domain) practically to the redoubt of the kingdom of Granada. If in the second half of the twelfth century Lower Aragon and Old Catalonia were occupied, and left with an important conquered Muslim population, in the span of less than two decades, in the 1230s and 1240s, Mallorca, Valencia, Murcia, Cordoba, Seville and the Algarve were taken, respectively, by the Christian kings of Aragon, Castile and Portugal. These conquests, along with the subsequent processes of colonization and population replacement – higher in the Balearic Islands, lower in Valencia and Murcia – had important consequences for pre-existing irrigation systems. Some irrigated spaces were abandoned, partly due to the deportation and extermination of the native population, and partly due to the failure of the installation of new settlers. It is not strange that in the areas of lower human densities, such as Mallorca and, above all, Menorca, irrigated agriculture was replaced by a priority dedication to livestock. In other cases, the alteration consisted of the inclusion of new mills in the hydraulic circuits, either lengthening the path of the ditch, or – as some researchers argue, after Barceló – subjecting the agricultural crop to milling, or what is the same, subjecting the fertilizing capacity of the water to the driving force.39 In others, the Andalusian irrigation system was completely denatured by fragmenting the water collection and distribution systems, which until then had been collective; feudal lords believed that they could open a water intake in any river or canal that crossed their territory in order to irrigate it, without taking into account that this could affect the lordships and peasants downstream.40 And in others, finally, irrigated spaces and irrigation systems inherited from Muslims were considerably enlarged, with the construction of new dams and canals.
In any case, and with the exception of the latter, Christian conquests did not turn out as much in a modification of the designs of the Andalusian hydraulic systems – one of whose main characteristics was the durability of the initial designs (Barceló, 1989) – as in the ‘general conception of its operation’.41 Only in part, in the case of local or supralocal irrigation users communities, for example, the existing collective water management systems were maintained, while in others such systems were split and appropriated individually by the lords. However, the continuity of many of the medieval communities of irrigation users, up to the present day, confirms both the durability of the initial designs, in case they were not destroyed or replaced, and of the collective rights and uses of water, including the management and resolution of conflicts.
Regional differences are, once again, very important. While, for example, in the three Balearic Islands (Mallorca, Menorca and Ibiza) no major changes were made to the system of irrigation inherited from the Muslims until at least four centuries after the Christian conquest, in the large huertas of the Peninsula, especially in those of the new kingdom of Valencia, there were profound modifications, with the construction of large ditches and the considerable expansion of the irrigated space, to the extent that some authors consider that, actually, the Valencian irrigation is not so much a product of the Muslim legacy as of the new creations of the late Middle Ages.42 Many of these new constructions were of royal initiative and were not necessarily intended to expand irrigation, such as the grand canal ordered by King Alfons the Chaste in Tortosa, in the second half of the twelfth century (i.e., shortly after the conquest of the city, in order to bring water to royal mills).43 Other examples of large public works promoted by the crown are the Sèquia Reial d’Alzira (Royal Canal of Alzira), begun in 1258, just fifteen years after the capture of the city from the Muslims, and the Sèquia Reial de Vila-real (Royal Canal of Vila-real), started in 1272. Only in the region of the Ribera del Xúquer, to the aforementioned canal of Alzira those of Cullera (1415), Sueca (1506), Corbera (1516), Escalona (1593), Carcaixent (1654), Múzquiz (1761) and the extension of the Sèquia Reial (1771) must be added. All these new hydraulic constructions transformed deeply the landscape of the area, increasing the space irrigated from a few thousand hectares in the thirteenth century to about 6,250 hectares at the end of the fifteenth century and almost 30,000 at the beginning of the nineteenth century.44 Similarly, the huerta of Murcia spread, according to the Repartimiento (Land Survey) Book, about 4,300 hectares at the time of the conquest, in the second half of the thirteenth century, to rise to 5,844 hectares in 1480, 8,210 hectares in 1621, 9,666 hectares in 1713, 11,667 hectares in 1803, 17,297 hectares in 1953 and 21,559 hectares in 1970: a sustained growth over the centuries that, after having duplicated the inherited surface of the Arabs as early as the seventeenth century, today quadruples it.45
Behind these great works were the crown, lords, cities and rural communities that agreed in the common goal of expanding and improving the irrigated area. For the former, the investment, or at least the incentives to increase irrigation would have been produced, with the increase in yields and population density, by the multiplication of their revenues. For the peasants, the interest was in the possibility of supporting an increasingly higher population without having to turn to major enlargements of the cultivated area and, above all, to be able to keep their small family holdings with an increasingly reduced agrarian estate. On the other hand, local communities did not hesitate to appeal to public debt to finance these great works that were considered for the benefit of all inhabitants. As Tomàs Peris observes, the lands irrigated in the kingdom of Valencia tripled during the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Times, so that only less than a third of the irrigated area, on the eve of the bourgeois revolution, in the nineteenth century, enjoyed irrigation from the time of taifas. For him, ‘the so much vaunted Islamic legacy is valid only if taken as a cultural reference, to consider within the organization of the new systems that were rising’.46
According to the same author, Christians built great canals – or widened the existing ones – derived from rivers, taking advantage of the favorable conditions of the physical environment (particularly warm microclimates in the coast, horizontal terrain, relative regularity of the flow of the main rivers, soil fertility renewed by deposits left during floods). Not always, however, the construction of new channels had as a purpose the expansion of the irrigated area but the increase of security and frequency of irrigation in areas that enjoyed of an influx of waters more precarious for centuries. Indeed, irrigation reduced uncertainty and risk, and regularity in supply of water could guarantee to obtain annual crops. So, the reconstruction of irrigated lands hide very different realities, because they include types that range from improved drylands – that is, irrigated once or twice a year when rains caused run-off in streams and small watercourses – to continuous irrigation of ricefields.47
Also in Granada, the Castilian conquest had a significant impact on the rural landscape. On the one hand, the secano (dryland) was expanded for the development of large-scale vineyard and cereal growing; on the other hand, the irrigated area was also increased, sometimes reaching the limit of the amount of water available.48 It is true, however, that the huertas of the Andalusian coast remained more stable and came to the twentieth century almost with the same perimeter of the fifteenth century, while those of Valencia and Murcia had been considerably expanded, up to triple or more, as we have seen, in the Valencian case.
This extension and improvement of irrigation systems, but also the new use that was made of the older ones, has to do with the preferably commercial, speculative orientation that the new social order assigned to agrarian production, against the primary objective of ensuring the subsistence of population they had had in the past. Hence, the impulse given to cereals cultivation and vineyard, to mills and, in the case of Menorca, to sheep, in a general tendency, still slow and with setbacks, toward varying and growing specializations that reflected the political domination exercised on peasant production.49 That is to say – and this is a key point in the interpretation of Barceló, Retamero and others –, that the small size of Andalusian hydraulic constructions – with an average size of 1.2 hectares, as we have seen, for the Balearic Islands – was in correspondence to the forecasts that peasants linked to these spaces had made about their survival, while the extensions and new later constructions, from the thirteenth century, had nothing to do with population volume or the survival of the peasants that cultivated them, but with a marked speculative motive on the part of the nobles, ecclesiastics and urban landowners who owned the agrarian spaces and used irrigation to cultivate cash crops and increase yields.
Irrigation was neither residual nor limited to vegetables and horticultural and fruit crops, but was fundamentally applied to the same crops that were dominant in the dryland (i.e., the so-called Mediterranean triad, based on cereals, vineyards and olive trees, which significantly improved their yields when watered). Thus, whereas in medieval Europe the average yields of cereals were 1:4 (i.e., four grains collected for each one planted), in the irrigated lands of the Middle East and Egypt they rose to ten for one, and even to twenty or forty for one in lower Mesopotamia and in the Valencian region).50 Watering the cereals, then, multiplied dryland yields by two (1:9 in cases attested for late Middle Ages), by five and even by ten. It is also necessary to consider that irrigation represented above all, for the peasant, the security of a crop every year (two in the case of the horta of Valencia), regardless of the rainfall and without having to leave half or a third of the field uncultivated: irrigated land always produced. On the other hand, these were not subsistence but commercial crops, mainly intended to supply cities. This was, therefore, the main purpose of irrigation: to increase the yields of traditional crops, which were also the most sought after. The same word huerta (horta in Catalan) cannot be translated as a vegetable garden or orchard, restricted to small spaces inside or immediately outside the walls, but rather named large irrigated areas of cereals and vineyards. Later, it was also applied to other equally commercial crops, such as linen and hemp and, above all, from the midfourteenth and early-fifteenth centuries, to rice, sugar and mulberry (for silkworms), cultivated in the huertas of Valencia (in that of the capital and in those of other cities of the kingdom), Murcia and Granada. And of course, to the wide variety of vegetables and fruit trees grown in small urban and suburban gardens, often closed, which gave a great and colorful look to the agrarian landscape that surrounded the cities.
In fact, many of these ‘new’ crops were already present in the region since Islamic times; they are part of what is known as the agricultural or green revolution of the tenth to eleventh centuries. They are cited in the agronomic treatises of these centuries and also in thirteenth century customs records, subsequent to the Christian conquest. But it was the increase in international commercial demand, with the arrival and the establishment of foreign merchants – mostly Italian, but also French, German, Flemish and from other countries – which encouraged the expansion of these crops until that moment more or less exotic and even the productive specialization of some regions. Rice was exported in large quantities to Italy and Germany, from the second half of the fourteenth century; then, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, it was the turn of sugar, another highly water-demanding crop; and later, toward the end of this same century, that of mulberry; to which linen, hemp, oranges, saffron, etc. It was this diversity of crops, but also the orderly and homogeneous disposition of some plantations and the beauty that all produced together, which aroused the admiration of residents and foreigners, like the German physician Jerome Münzer, who visited Iberia at the end of the fifteenth century and, after the detailed description of the many products of the Valencian horta, summarizes its great interest in two lines: ‘Valencia’s countryside is very fertile, as it produces a huge variety of fruits, which are exported to other countries and from which enormous profits are obtained’.51
The commercial nature of this agriculture and the high profits that it gave explain the interest of public and lordly powers, from the crown and cities to the nobles and ecclesiastics, but also of well-off peasants, to keep in good condition, protect, improve and expand irrigation systems and watered spaces. Again, the discussion among scholars arises here about the continuity and durability of these systems over time and on the connection between technical, material, institutional and social aspects. Some authors, like Thomas Glick, have emphasized the persistence of Muslim irrigation practices in Valencia after the Christian conquest. In 1244, an inquest was held in Gandia, where Muslim irrigators stipulated to the customary partition of stream flow between two villages. By contrast, Arab influence on the horta of Valencia is only thinly documented, based mainly on the Arabic names of the officials responsible for monitoring irrigation: the ‘sequier’ and ‘savasèquies’ (from Arabic ‘sāḥ iḅ al-sāqiya’ [master of the canal]). Both before and after the conquest, moreover, along with public officials in charge of water management in urban areas, there were also autonomous communities, especially in those systems built and managed by the communities themselves.52 Other authors, on the contrary, dispute this continuity. The Christian conquest and colonization of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries would have distorted the irrigation systems inherited from Muslims because the feudal logic governing the new social order was different from that presiding the Andalusian society, as was the one introduced by the bourgeois revolution in the nineteenth century. In spite of their similarities, and in particular their relative autonomy with respect to the state, the communities of irrigation users in the Muslim society, in that medieval or feudal and in that capitalist, are not the same neither in their composition nor in their functions. There is no institutional continuity from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries, even less so before, from the Islamic period.53
The technical, material perdurability is less discussed, but not entirely. Archaeologists and historians have insisted on the rigidity of hydraulic systems, in the fact that these, and in particular their material elements, once designed, acquire a great stability and become barely modifiable artefacts no matter how profound the transformations experienced by the societies that successively use them.54 However, this does not in any case constitute a definitive obstacle to their evolution.55 Especially, with regard to the legal and institutional framework and the forms of water management, which, in turn, could also affect the technical and material aspects. However, if we examine the most basic elements, such as property and distribution of water, we find remarkable continuity through the successive social systems, although, obviously, their institutional organization and the legal framework are different. It has long been that Thomas F. Glick, referring to the Valencian case, distinguished between those areas where the right to water is associated with land ownership and therefore is transferred from one owner to another when land changes hands by sale, donation, exchange or inheritance, and those where water and land are separated and sold independently of each other.56 Broadly speaking, the first system was found mainly in the large huertas irrigated by big canals derived from rivers and where water is relatively abundant, and Glick associates it with what he calls the Syrian model, while the second one is generally located in small spaces, in the so-called oasis-huertas, associated with the Yemeni model. Regardless of these attributions, the truth is that both systems are quite generalized and not only survived the Christian conquest and medieval times, but are still in use to this day. Indeed, in some regions water is privatized today, land ownership and the right to water are disassociated and the latter can be sold separately.57
On the other hand, in an area poor on hydric resources, it is necessary to ration their use depending on the number of users and their applications, which are multiple (irrigation, grinding, etc.) In principle, water was distributed in proportion to the amount of land each user possessed, but it was not a fixed amount per unit of surface but varied in proportion to the flow of the river. When the amount of available water was abundant, it was not necessary to ration it, but when it was scarce the user could not irrigate at will but following a rotation or a turn. In the first case, each user (regant) or group of users were assigned a few hours or a few days a week, in order to equitably distribute the available water, while in the second, the amount of water allocated was measured in ‘threads’ (fila), representing a share of the total amount of water in a given river, spring, or canal.58 The flow of the fila is variable and, consequently, an equivalence cannot be given in units of the international system. It depends on the river, on the number of users and on the flow that carries the river in every moment. The flow of the Túria river, for example, was divided into 138 files that, in turn, were distributed between the different sèquies that were fed by it: forty-eight files for that of Montcada, fourteen for that of Quart, ten for that of Tormos, ten for that of Mislata, fourteen for that of Mestalla, fourteen for that of Favara, fourteen for that of Rascanya and fourteen for that of Rovella.
The available flow depended on the point and the way in which water was collected. This could be taken from a spring or a fountain, or derived from a river by a dam (assut/azud) and channeled through major ditches (Sèquia Major or Sèquia Mare) that, in turn, fed other small dykes that led it to the fields. It could be raised from the subsoil by means of elevation mechanisms like wells and wheels (noria, sènia), moved by animals. Or it could be extracted from an underground aquifer without the need of lifting mechanisms, through a drainage gallery (qanat). Similar to a mine, the qanat is connected to atmosphere through wells, separated between five and twenty metres, which serve to aerate the system. This form of water collection is more typical of areas where surface water is scarce, but which have important underground hydric reserves. Both the construction and maintenance of these systems, more expensive when larger and more complex, required great collective effort. If we leave aside the smallest and simplest ones, those fed by a source or spring and that watered a few hectares and that benefited only one or a few users, the others required the collaboration of large groups of users, organized in local or supralocal communities (called comunitats de regants in Catalan, comunidad de regantes in Spanish), or the intervention of public authorities, whether the municipality or the monarchy.
In the late Middle Ages three types of water management can be identified according to the main actor that bear certain resemblance to those we have seen that Beltrán (2014) distinguished for the Roman world and to those of Islamic times, but without necessarily any continuity, since these are very generic types. In the first place, there were the systems or networks created and administered by the monarchy, as for example, in the case of Valencia, the great canals (Montcada, Alzira, Vila-real) built or appropriated in the second half of the thirteenth century, during the process of colonization after the Christian conquest, and administered directly by the king, who appointed the officers responsible for its management (sequier); this system did not continue beyond the fourteenth century and it was readjusted to the other two. The second one is what could be called a municipal model, since the ditches usually flow within a single municipal territory and were administered by the municipality, which appointed the sequier and other irrigation officers. Finally, the third one is represented by the irrigation channels managed by user communities (i.e., by regants who used a major ditch that crossed several territories and involved users of different municipalities). In fact, there were not so many differences, in practical terms, between the three types, since, on the one hand, despite the autonomy of user communities, the city – in the case, for example, of Valencia and its horta – was constantly meddling in issues related to irrigation and water use in the rural space around the city – the same oligarchy controlled both the user communities and the city council – and, on the other hand, in the villages and rural communities the municipality acted as a community of regants, since the members of one and the other were the same, extracted from the same social group of prosperous or middle-class peasants.59
This close relationship between municipal institutions and those of irrigation, or rather, the fact that the members of the ones and the others were the same, is also seen in urban and rural statutes and bylaws and, particularly, those that concerned the care and protection of the huerta. In these statutes, the irrigated space, the huerta, was perfectly delineated and separated from the areas of dryland, pasture or uncultivated land; the passage and the pasture of the flocks was prohibited or detailed very meticulously and heavy fines were imposed on the abusers.60 The municipal councils also appointed guardians (guardes or veedors) to watch the fields just sown or planted and the agricultural infrastructures (bridges, roads) and to punish robberies and damages. In addition to these, there were infractions or offences directly related to irrigation, such as stealing or losing water, not respecting rotations or turns, damaging hydraulic installations, etc., which were judged by the sequier. Over the centuries, indirect system management and justice administration through a professional such as the sequier became directly managed by the community itself via a representative, the síndic. In the case of Valencia, the sindics of the nine irrigation channels of the horta would be united in a single institution, the Water Tribunal (Tribunal de les Aigües), which still meets today, every Thursday, at the door of the cathedral, to settle disputes arising from the use of irrigation water in the different communities.
The Tribunal of Waters, an emblematic institution of the Valencian irrigation system and chosen in 2009 along with the Council of Wise Men of the plain of Murcia as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity by UNESCO, is not, as nineteenth-century romantic scholars pretended and some still claim today, a millenarian institution whose foundation goes back to the time of the caliphate or taifas. Neither can it be said that the similarly idealized irrigation communities were equitable and democratic institutions run by peasants.61 But this should not lead us to underestimate their efficiency, as well as in general that of the medieval irrigation systems, and, above all, their resilience over the centuries, despite changes and adaptations. It should be considered that they were fragile and complex systems under severe stress. In addition to the need to keep them constantly in good condition, they were subjected to the double and very strong pressure of extension and intensification. Not only were new ditches opened in the rivers, affecting their water flow and, consequently, downstream users, but small channels were also opened in the main ditches in order to irrigate the interstices. Lords and urban owners wanted more water to irrigate more territory and also obtain higher yields of dryland crops. Moreover, some of the new crops, especially rice, required huge amounts of water. And despite all this, despite the construction of new canals, especially from the fifteenth century, conflicts between communities or between regants and millers and many other risks, the irrigation systems of the Iberian Southeast have shown their endurance far beyond medieval times. In a good measure, due to their systemic and integrated nature, which permitted the combination of various uses of water and committed all users to the maintenance of the infrastructures and the irrigation system in general.62 They were robust systems run according to rules and procedures established collectively by local farmers themselves, rather than by government bureaucracies, work-intensive, based on peasant (owner or tenant) labour, which, in spite of this, facilitated technical innovation and economic growth, the introduction of new crops and new agricultural practices.63 They were, in short, and despite their limitations and the excessive praise of some scholars, efficient, resilient and relatively equitable systems, a particular ‘common-pool’ resource, whose significance is better understood in the context of the debate on commons and whose management is better explained by the physical constraints of the natural environment as well as by the technical and institutional inventiveness, the social organization and the moral principles and commitments that some authors call ‘the moral economy of water’.64
Notes
1. Duby, G. (1974). The Early Growth of the European Economy. Warriors and Peasants from the Seventh to the Twelfth Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
2. Braudel, F. (1972 and 1973). The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. London: Collins.
3. Grove, A.T. and Rackhman, O. (2001), The Nature of Mediterranean Europe. An Ecological History. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press.
4. López Bermúdez, F. (2001). Cambio climático y desertificación, amenazas para la sostenibilidad de las tierras del Arco Mediterráneo: situación y perspectiva. Revista Valenciana d’Estudis Autonòmics, 36(extra), p. 99.
5. Peñarrocha, D., Estrela, M.J. and Millán, M. (2002). Classification of daily rainfall patterns in a Mediterranean area with extreme intensity levels: the Valencia region. International Journal of Climatology, 22, pp. 677–95; Martín-Vide, J. and López-Bustins, J.A. (2006). The Western Mediterranean oscillation and rainfall in the Iberian Peninsula. International Journal of Climatology, 26, pp. 1455–75.
6. López Bermúdez, F. (2001). Cambio climático y desertificación, amenazas para la sostenibilidad de las tierras del Arco Mediterráneo: situación y perspectiva. Revista Valenciana d’Estudis Autonòmics, 36(extra), p. 94.
7. Linton, J. (2010). What Is Water? The History of a Modern Abstraction. Vancouver: UBC Press; Haila, Y. (2017). Securing water: ambiguities of control vs. coexistence. In: J. Costlow, Y. Haila and A. Rosenholm, ed., Water in Social Imagination: From Technological Optimism to Contemporary Environmentalism. Leiden: Brill, pp. 255–76.
8. Glick, T.F. (1970). Irrigation and Society in Medieval Valencia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; Barceló, M. (1986). La qüestió de l’hidraulisme andalusí. In: M. Barceló, ed., Les aigües cercades: els qanat(s) de l’illa de Mallorca. Palma: Institut d’Estudis Baleàrics, pp. 9–36; Guichard, P. (1989). Otra vez sobre un viejo problema: orientalismo y occidentalismo en la civilización de la España musulmana. In: En torno al 750 aniversario: antecedentes y consecuencias de la conquista de Valencia. Valencia: Consell Valencià de Cultura, I, pp. 73–96; Guichard, P. (2009). Al-Andalus vu de Valence. In: M. Marín, ed., Al-Andalus/España. Historiografías en contraste. Siglos XVII-XXI. Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, pp. 183–94.
9. Ribera, J. (1908). El sistema de riegos en la huerta valenciana no fue obra de los árabes. In: Almanaque de Las Provincias. Valencia: Las Provincias; collected later (1928) In: J. Ribera, ed., Disertaciones y opúsculos II. Madrid: Imprenta de Estanislao Maestre, pp. 309–23.
10. Butzer, K.W., Mateu, J.F., Butzer, E.K. and Strauss, P. (1985). Irrigation agrosystems in eastern Spain: Roman or Islamic origins? Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 75(4), pp. 479–509.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Barceló, M. (1986). La qüestió de l’hidraulisme andalusí. In: M. Barceló, ed., Les aigües cercades: els qanat(s) de l’illa de Mallorca. Palma: Institut d’Estudis Baleàrics, pp. 9–36; Barceló, M. (1989). El diseño de espacios irrigados en al-Andalus: un enunciado de principios generales. In: L. Cara, ed., El agua en las zonas áridas. Arqueología e historia. I Coloquio de Historia y Medio Físico. Almería: Instituto de Estudios Almerienses, pp. XV–L.
14. Sabovik, P. (1973). Spanish Irrigation and Its Control, Ph.D. thesis, Yale University; Glick, T.F. (1979 and rev. ed., 2005). Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, and Leiden: Brill; Bazzana, A. and Guichard, P. (1981). Irrigation et société dans l’Espagne orientale au Moyen Age. In: J. Métral and P. Sanlaville, ed., L’homme et l’eau en Méditerranée et au Proche-Orient. Lyon: Maison de l’Orient et de la Méditerranée, pp. 115–40; N. Bouderbala, J. Chiche, A. Herzenni and P. Pascon, eds. (1984). La question hydraulique. I. Petite et moyenne hydraulique au Maroc. Rabat: Graphitec.
15. Butzer, K.W., Mateu, J.F., Butzer, E.K. and Strauss, P. (1985). Irrigation agrosystems in eastern Spain: Roman or Islamic origins? Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 75(4), pp. 479–509.
16. Glick, T.F. (1970). Irrigation and Society in Medieval Valencia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, p. 195.
17. Bowman, A. and Wilson, A. (2013). The Roman Agricultural Economy. Organization, Investment, and Production. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Donald Hughes, J. (2014). Environmental Problems of the Greeks and Romans. Ecology in the Ancient Mediterranean. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.
18. Horden, P. and Purcell, N. (2002). The Corrupting Sea: A Study in Mediterranean History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
19. Beltrán Lloris, F. (2014). Irrigation infrastructures in the Roman west: typology, financing, management. In: A. Kolb, ed., Infrastruktur und Herrschaftorganisation in Imperium Romanum. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 121–36.
20. Chapman, R.W. (1978). The evidence for prehistoric water control in south-east Spain. Journal of Arid Environments, I, pp. 261–74; Gilman Guillén, A. and Thornes, J.B. (1985). Land-Use and Prehistory in South-East Spain. London: Allen & Unwin; López Medina, M.J. (1998). Algunas cuestiones sobre «El agua en el sureste peninsular durante época romana. Su aprovechamiento para la agricultura». Lucentum, XVII–XVIII, pp. 243–53; Beltrán Lloris, F. and Willi, A. (2011). El regadío en la Hispania romana. Estado de la cuestión. Cuadernos de Prehistoria y Arqueología de la Universidad de Granada, 21, pp. 9–56.
21. Rosselló, V.M. (1995). Geografia del País Valencià. Valencia: Edicions Alfons el Magnànim.
22. Guzmán Álvarez, J. R. (2010). Los regadíos de la Vega de Granada. In: J. R. Guzmán Álvarez and R. M. Navarro, eds., El agua domesticada: los paisajes de los regadíos de montaña en Andalucía. Seville: Junta de Andalucía, pp. 94-101; Beltrán Lloris, F. (2016). La irrigación en la Hispania romana. Continuidad y transformaciones. In: I. Czeguhn, C. Möller, Y. Quesada Morillas and J.A. Pérez Juan, ed., Wasser-Wege-Wissen auf der iberischen Halbinsel. Vom Römischen Imperium bis zur islamischen Herrschaft. Baden-Baden: Nomos, pp. 29–46.
23. See a case of persistence in the exploitation of irrigated areas between the fifth and tenth centuries, though, in Alcañiz: Beltrán Lloris, F. (2016). La irrigación en la Hispania romana. Continuidad y transformaciones. In: I. Czeguhn, C. Möller, Y. Quesada Morillas and J.A. Pérez Juan, ed., Wasser-Wege-Wissen auf der iberischen Halbinsel. Vom Römischen Imperium bis zur islamischen Herrschaft. Baden-Baden: Nomos, pp. 29–46.
24. Sitjes, E. (2006). Inventario y tipología de sistemas hidráulicos de al-Andalus. Arqueología espacial, 26, pp. 263–91.
25. Barceló, M. (1989). El diseño de espacios irrigados en al-Andalus: un enunciado de principios generales. In: L. Cara, ed., El agua en las zonas áridas. Arqueología e historia. I Coloquio de Historia y Medio Físico. Almería: Instituto de Estudios Almerienses, pp. XV–L.
26. Ibid; Retamero, F. (2006). Lo que el tamaño importa. Cuándo y por qué se modificaron los antiguos sistemas hidráulicos andalusíes. Arqueología espacial, 26, pp. 293–310; Retamero, F. (2012). La sombra alargada de Wittfogel: irrigación y poder en al-Andalus. In: M. Marín, ed., Al-Andalus /España: historiografías en contraste: siglos XVII-XXI. Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, pp. 263–93; Glick, T.F. (2007). Paisajes de conquista. Cambio cultural y geográfico en la España medieval. Valencia: PUV.
27. Guinot, E. (2005). L’Horta de València a la baixa Edat Mitjana. De sistema hidràulic andalusí a feudal. Afers: fulls de recerca i pensament, 20(51), pp. 271–300.
28. Negre, J. (2015). Origen y desarrollo de la huerta de Tortosa (siglos IV-XII). Historia agraria, 66, pp. 11–40; Martí, R. and Selma, S. (1995). La huerta de la madīna de Subrub (Segorbe, Castellón). Boletín de Arqueología Medieval, 9, pp. 39–51; Azuar, R. (1998). Espacio hidráulico y ciudad islámica en el Vinalopó. La Huerta de Elche. In: M. C. Rico Navarro, ed., Agua y territorio. I Congreso de Estudios del Vinalopó. Petrer: Ajuntament de Petrer, pp. 11–31; Gutiérrez, S. (1990). La huerta y el alfoz. In F. Moreno, ed., Historia de la ciudad de Alicante. Alicante: Patronato para la conmemoración del Quinto Centenario de la ciudad de Alicante, pp. 152–76; Gutiérrez, S. (1995). El origen de la huerta de Orihuela entre los siglos VII y XI. Una propuesta arqueológica sobre la explotación de las zonas húmedas del Bajo Segura. Arbor, 151, pp. 65–94; Ramírez, J.A. and Martínez, J.A. (1995). Hidráulica urbana de una madina agrícola. Murcia, siglos XI-XIII. In L. Cara and A. Malpica, ed., Agricultura y regadío en al-Andalus, síntesis y problemas. Almería: Instituto de Estudios Almerienses, pp. 133–50; Navarro, J. and Jiménez, P. (2012). La gestión del agua en la ciudad andalusí: el caso de Murcia. In J.M. Gómez and M. Hervás, ed., Patrimonio hidráulico y cultura del agua en el Mediterráneo. Murcia: Fundación Séneca, pp. 105–44; Furió, A. (2015). I paesaggi dell’acqua nella Spagna mediterranea: le huertas e l’agricoltura irrigua. In: I paesaggi agrari d’Europa (secoli XIII-XV). Ventiquattresimo Convegno Internazionale di Studi (Pistoia, 2013). Roma: Viella, pp. 323–84.
29. Ramírez, J.A. and Martínez, J.A. (1995). Hidráulica urbana de una madina agrícola. Murcia, siglos XI-XIII. In L. Cara and A. Malpica, ed., Agricultura y regadío en al-Andalus, síntesis y problemas. Almería: Instituto de Estudios Almerienses, pp. 133–50.
30. Gutiérrez, S. (1995). El origen de la huerta de Orihuela entre los siglos VII y XI. Una propuesta arqueológica sobre la explotación de las zonas húmedas del Bajo Segura. Arbor, 151, pp. 65–94.
31. Furió, A. (2016). València, ‘mare e cap de tot lo regne’. Afers: fulls de recerca i pensament, 30(80–1), pp. 149–79.
32. Bazzana, A. and Guichard, P. (1981). Irrigation et société dans l’Espagne orientale au Moyen Age. In: J. Métral and P. Sanlaville, ed., L’homme et l’eau en Méditerranée et au Proche-Orient. Lyon: Maison de l’Orient et de la Méditerranée, pp. 115–40; Guichard, P. (2000). Quelques remarques sur l’agriculture irriguée dans le centre du Pays Valencien. In: A. Furió and A. Lairón, ed., L’espai de l’aigua. Xarxes i sistemes d’irrigació a la Ribera del Xúquer en la perspectiva històrica. Valencia: PUV, pp. 75–81.
33. Retamero, F. (2012). La sombra alargada de Wittfogel: irrigación y poder en al-Andalus. In: M. Marín, ed., Al-Andalus/España: historiografías en contraste: siglos XVII-XXI. Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, pp. 263–93; Glick, T.F. (1979 and rev. ed., 2005). Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, and Leiden: Brill.
34. Watson, A.M. (1983). Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques, 700-1100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
35. Bolens, L. (1978). La révolution agricole andalouse du XIe siècle. Studia Islamica, 47, pp. 121–41.
36. El Faïz, M. (2005). Les maîtres de l’eau. Histoire de l’hydraulique arabe. Arles: Actes Sud.
37. See Lagardère, V. (1993). Campagnes et paysans d’Al-Andalus VIIIe-XVe s. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, on the supply of legal services by the state to irrigation users in al-Andalus.
38. Malpica, A. (2016). Las formas de gestión del agua en Al-Andalus: la transformación almohade. In: I. Czeguhn, C. Möller, Y. M. Quesada Morillas and J. A. Pérez Juan, ed., Waser, Wege, Wissen auf der iberischen Halbinsel: Vom Römischen Imperium bis zur islamischen Herrschaft. Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, pp. 95–118.
39. Retamero, F. (2006). Lo que el tamaño importa. Cuándo y por qué se modificaron los antiguos sistemas hidráulicos andalusíes. Arqueología espacial, 26, pp. 293–310.
40. Furió, A. and Martínez Sanmartín, L.P. (2000). De la hidràulica andalusí a la feudal: continuïtat i ruptura. L’Horta del Cent a l’Alzira medieval. In: A. Furió and A. Lairón, ed., L’espai de l’aigua. Xarxes i sistemes d’irrigació a la Ribera del Xúquer en la perspectiva històrica. Valencia: PUV, pp. 19–73.
41. Kirchner, H. (1997). La construcció de l’espai pagès a Mayûrqa: les valls de Bunyola, Orient, Coanegra i Alaró. Palma: Universitat de les Illes Balears; Glick, T.F. and Kirchner, H. (2000). Hydraulic systems and technologies of Islamic Spain: history and archaeology. In: P. Squatriti, ed., Working with Water in Medieval Europe. Leiden: Brill, pp. 267–329; Retamero, F. (2006). Lo que el tamaño importa. Cuándo y por qué se modificaron los antiguos sistemas hidráulicos andalusíes. Arqueología espacial, 26, pp. 293–310.
42. Peris Albentosa, T. (1995). La evolución de la agricultura valenciana entre los siglos XV y XIX: rasgos cualitativos y problemas de cuantificación. Revista de Historia Económica – Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History, 13(3), pp. 473–508.
43. Negre, J. (2015). Origen y desarrollo de la huerta de Tortosa (siglos IV-XII). Historia agraria, 66, pp. 11–40.
44. Peris Albentosa, T. (1995). La evolución de la agricultura valenciana entre los siglos XV y XIX: rasgos cualitativos y problemas de cuantificación. Revista de Historia Económica – Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History, 13(3), pp. 473–508.
45. Calvo, F. (1972). La formación del paisaje agrario de la huerta de Murcia. Revista de Geografía, 6, pp. 5–33.
46. Peris Albentosa, T. (1995). La evolución de la agricultura valenciana entre los siglos XV y XIX: rasgos cualitativos y problemas de cuantificación. Revista de Historia Económica – Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History, 13(3), pp. 473–508.
47. Ibid.
48. Trillo, C. (2010). Paisajes, cultivos y culturas. In: J. R. Guzmán Álvarez and R. M. Navarro, ed., El agua domesticada: los paisajes de los regadíos de montaña en Andalucía. Seville: Junta de Andalucía, pp. 103–19.
49. Retamero, F. (2006). Lo que el tamaño importa. Cuándo y por qué se modificaron los antiguos sistemas hidráulicos andalusíes. Arqueología espacial, 26, pp. 293–310.
50. Furió, A. (2015). I paesaggi dell’acqua nella Spagna mediterranea: le huertas e l’agricoltura irrigua. In: I paesaggi agrari d’Europa (secoli XIII-XV). Ventiquattresimo Convegno Internazionale di Studi (Pistoia, 2013). Roma: Viella, pp. 323–84.
51. Ibid.
52. Glick, T.F. (2003). Regadio y sociedad en la Valencia medieval. Valencia: Generalitat Valenciana, pp. 432-433; and, by the same author (1995), From Muslim Fortress to Christian Castle. New York: Manchester University Press, pp. 151-158; Glick, T. F. and Teixera, S. (2002-03). Azaira, Alhetma: Two Medieval Arabisms Reflecting the Allocation of Irrigation Water. In Suhayl: Journal for the History of the Exact and Natural Sciences in Islamic Civilization, 3, pp. 213–219.
53. Guinot, E. and Esquilache, F. (2017). Not only peasants: the myth of continuity in the irrigation communities of Valencia, Spain, in the medieval and early modern periods. Continuity and Change, 32(2), pp. 129–56.
54. Beltrán Lloris, F. (2016). La irrigación en la Hispania romana. Continuidad y transformaciones. In: I. Czeguhn, C. Möller, Y. Quesada Morillas and J.A. Pérez Juan, ed., Wasser-Wege-Wissen auf der iberischen Halbinsel. Vom Römischen Imperium bis zur islamischen Herrschaft. Baden-Baden: Nomos, pp. 29–46; Barceló, M. (1989). El diseño de espacios irrigados en al-Andalus: un enunciado de principios generales. In: L. Cara, ed., El agua en las zonas áridas. Arqueología e historia. I Coloquio de Historia y Medio Físico. Almería: Instituto de Estudios Almerienses, pp. XV–L.
55. Cressier, P. (2006). Présentation. In: P. Cressier, ed., La maîtrise de l’eau en al-Andalus. Paysages, pratiques et techniques. Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, pp. IX–XIII.
56. Glick, T.F. (1970). Irrigation and Society in Medieval Valencia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
57. Gil Olcina, A (1993). La propiedad de aguas perennes en el Sureste ibérico. Alicante: Universidad de Alicante; Alberola Romá, A. (2015). Propiedad, control y gestión del agua en regadíos deficitarios del Sureste español. La Huerta de Alicante durante la Edad Moderna. Minius, 23, pp. 7–40.
58. Beltrán described a similar organisation for the Roman period, when water was distributed per vicem in dies modulosque certos (i.e., according to a pre-established roster where days and amounts of water were arranged in detail: Beltrán Lloris, F. (2014)). Irrigation infrastructures in the Roman West: typology, financing, management. In: A. Kolb, ed., Infrastruktur und Herrschaftorganisation in Imperium Romanum. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 121–36; Glick, T.F. (1970). Irrigation and Society in Medieval Valencia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
59. Glick, T.F. (1970). Irrigation and Society in Medieval Valencia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Peris Albentosa, T. (2015). El ejercicio de la autonomía local en las acequias de la Huerta de Valencia: la olvidada imbricación municipal (siglos XIII-XIX). Minius, 23, pp. 131–70; Guinot, E. and Esquilache, F. (2017). Not only peasants: the myth of continuity in the irrigation communities of Valencia, Spain, in the medieval and early modern periods. Continuity and Change, 32(2), pp. 129–56.
60. Furió, A. (2001). La domesticación del medio natural. Agricultura, ecología y economía en el País Valenciano en la Baja Edad Media. In: J. Clemente Ramos, ed., El medio natural en la España medieval: actas del I Congreso sobre ecohistoria e historia medieval (Cáceres, 2000). Cáceres: Universidad de Extremadura, pp. 57–103.
61. In fact they were more oligarchical than egalitarian, composed of nobles, merchants, notaries, rich artisans and peasants, see: Guinot, E. and Esquilache, F. (2017). Not only peasants: the myth of continuity in the irrigation communities of Valencia, Spain, in the medieval and early modern periods. Continuity and Change, 32(2), pp. 129–56.
62. Martínez Sanmartín, L.P. (2014). Tecnoexperts, perits i sistemes hidràulics: la Séquia de Mislata i les comunitats de regants de l’Horta de València al segle XV. Recerques: Història, Economia, Cultura, 69, pp. 31–97.
63. Trawick, P., Ortega Reig, M. and Palau Salvador, G. (2014). Encounters with the moral economy of water: convergent evolution in Valencia. WIREs Water, 1, pp. 87–110.
64. Maass, A. and Anderson, R.L. (1978). And the Desert Shall Rejoice: Conflict, Growth, and Justice in Arid Environments. Cambridge: MIT Press; Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons. The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. New York: Cambridge University Press; Ostrom, E. (1992). Crafting Institutions for Self-Governing Irrigation Systems. San Francisco, CA: ICS Press; Trawick, P. (2010). Encounters with the moral economy of water: general principles for successfully managing the commons. In: P. Brown, J.J. Schmidt, eds., Water Ethics: Foundational Reading for Students and Professionals. Washington, DC: Island Press, pp. 155–66; Travick, P., Ortega Reig, M. and Palau Salvador, G. (2014). Encounters with the moral economy of water: convergent evolution in Valencia. WIREs Water, 1, pp. 87–110.