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Medieval crusades to the Holy Land rarely evoke participants from the Iberian Peninsula (modern-day Spain and Portugal). While pluralist crusade scholars have revealed that crusades occurred on the peninsula, historiography has usually treated the regions as two separate theaters. Despite its great spiritual importance, the earthly city of Jerusalem seemed to hold little value for the political culture of Christian kingdoms in Iberia. According to most scholarship, rulers bolstered their authority and united disparate polities by expanding their frontiers against Islamic al-Andalus within the peninsula and participating in the Reconquista—the supposedly seven-century-long struggle to reunify Iberia under the Christian religion—not crusading in faraway lands across the Mediterranean Sea.
This dissertation, however, argues that Jerusalem powerfully shaped notions of kingship, apocalypticism, and empire in Christian Iberia during the central and late Middle Ages. Members of the courtly and clerical elite, such as Archbishop Diego Gelmírez of Santiago de Compostela, Queen Berengaria of Castile, physicians and Beguins like Arnau de Vilanova, explorers like Christopher Columbus, and kings like Ferdinand II of Aragon, talked a lot about Jerusalem in numerous texts and artworks, such as Beatus manuscripts, chronicles, correspondence, de recuperatione treatises, architecture, portrait medals, romances, and sermons. This dissertation analyzes those produced in Castile-León and Catalonia-Aragon from approximately 940–1516 that claimed Iberian rulers had a special connection or right to the Holy Land—what this project has termed Jerusalemite discourse. The cornerstone of this discourse was the idea of the iter per Hispaniam (“the way through Spain” to Jerusalem), a geographical route that a crusade army, led by an Iberian king, should follow to recover the Holy Land. The specific route often differed between authors, but the most common began with the (re)conquest of al-Andalus, followed by the conquest of the Maghreb and Egypt, and then the recovery of Jerusalem. This Spanish route to Jerusalem has frequently been overshadowed in scholarship by the much more well-known pillar of the Reconquest, the Way of St. James. But this dissertation concludes that another way also permeated the political culture of medieval Iberia’s Christian kingdoms—the way to Jerusalem.