Francisco García Fitz - War in the Iberian Peninsula, 700-1600

Antonio Jos Rodrguez Hernndez (National Distance Education University, Spain)

Carlos de Ayala Martnez (Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain)

Fernando Arias Guilln (University of Vallodolid, Spain)

Francisco Garca Fitz (University of Extremadura, Spain)

Javier Albarrn (Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain)

Joo Gouveia Monteiro (University of Coimbra, Portugal)

Jon Andoni Fernndez de Larrea Rojas (University of the Basque Country, Spain)

Jos Varandas (University of Lisbon, Portugal)

Lus Costa e Sousa (CHAM/FCSH Nova University, Lisbon, University of Azores, Portugal)

Mario Lafuente Gmez (University of Zaragoza, Spain)

Martn Alvira Cabrer (Complutense University of Madrid, Spain)

Miguel Gomes Martins (Instituto de Estudos Medievais/FCSH Nova University, Lisbon, Portugal)

Vtor Lus Gaspar Rodrigues (History Centre, Faculty of Arts, University of Lisbon Portugal)

Over the last three decades, historiography on medieval war has grown rapidly in Spain and Portugal, experiencing a methodological renewal which has helped to produce a body of first rate studies on the topic. In universities and other research centres dozens of master and doctoral theses have been submitted, various research projects have been carried out, a large number of conferences and seminars have been organized, and hundreds of academic papers and monographs have been published on specific topics, as well as some collective works summarizing Portuguese and Spanish military history.

Institutions such as the Comisso Portuguesa de Histria Militar, founded in 1989, or the Instituto de Historia y Cultura Militar in Spain, created in 1997, have systematically organized conferences, awarded research prizes, edited specialized journals and published books on the subject. But it has been in Portuguese and Spanish universities that research on the military history of the Iberian Middle Ages has been more intensely developed and has benefited from institutional support. Even though in the late 1960s Miguel ngel Ladero Quesada had already published some pioneering work on the Granada War (Ladero 19671969), it was not until the 1990s that doctoral theses and other research material began to be produced and published in a more consistent and continuous fashion.

All the Iberian medieval kingdoms have been thoroughly covered: in terms of the kingdom of Castile and Leon, the studies of Francisco Garca Fitz on military strategy and tactics against Islam during the High Middle Ages and Martn Alvira Cabrers work on the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa have deepened our knowledge about war during this key period in the military expansion of the northern kingdoms (Garca Fitz 1998; Alvira 2012). The reality of war in Castile in the Late Middle Ages was analysed in the theses of Manuel Rojas Gabriel and Fernando Arias Guilln (Rojas Gabriel 1996; Arias Guilln 2012). The dissertations by Alvira Cabrer on Muret, Siz Serrano on the kingdom of Valencia and Mario Lafuente Gmez on Aragon have added significant detail to our knowledge of the military history of the Aragonese crown during the last three centuries of the Middle Ages (Alvira Cabrer 2008; Siz 2008; Lafuente 2011 and 2014), and these have already been investigated, with an emphasis on Catalonia, in the pioneering work of Mara Teresa Ferrer (Ferrer 2001). War in the kingdom of Navarre, particularly during the late medieval period, has been studied mainly by Jon Andoni Fernndez de Larrea (Fernndez de Larrea 1992 and 2013). As for Portugal, Joo Gouveia Monteiros thesis soon became a seminal work for the knowledge of Portuguese military history during the Late Middle Ages, later complemented by Miguel Gomes Martins study of the previous period (Monteiro 1998; Martins 2014). Vtor Rodrigues, Rui Bebiano, Lus Sousa, Gonalo Couceiro Feio and Francisco Contente Domingues made invaluable contributions to the study of the Portuguese 16th century (Rodrigues 1999; Bebiano 2000; Sousa 2016; Feio 2013; Domingues 2017), and those writing about the Spanish Crown during the same period such as Geoffrey Parker and Ren Quatrefages have engendered a line of continuity in the more recent work of Martnez Ruiz and Rodrguez Hernndez (Parker 1991; Quatrefages 1996; Martnez Ruiz 2008; Rodrguez Hernndez 2011, 2013 and 2015).