| Summary: | Rulers and Ruled takes a new approach to the sources for medieval social history. Examining charters in order to establish social networks and connections between persons and groups, Jonathan Jarrett builds up a picture of how power was mediated from ruler to subject in what was to become Catalonia between the late ninth and the early eleventh centuries. A frontier between Christianity and Islam and between developing French and Spanish polities, this edge of the Carolingian Empire was at the forefront of Christian Europe's demographic and cultural expansion, and those in power there had to maintain their position in a situation of continual change. Jonathan Jarrett shows how they laid down pathways of power by making personal connections and recruiting intermediaries, thus circumventing their opponents and securing networks of friendship and clientage. Webs of association encompassed counts, ecclesiastics, and even distant kings as well as the ambitious, the locally-powerful, the humble and pioneering, and the standing populations in areas newly brought under government. Jarrett's interest throughout is in the small histories of ordinary medieval men and women as much as those of the powerful. Rulers and Ruled brings dozens such people to life within the limits of surviving evidence. In doing so, Jarrett opens up an under-studied area and period for English-language readers by synthesising a lively local scholarship and by offering a nuanced model for others interested in frontier societies to follow.
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