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The effect of the Spanish Reconquest on Iberian cities

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Abstract

This paper studies the effect of the Spanish Reconquest, a military campaign against the Muslims in the medieval Iberian Peninsula that ended up with the expulsion or extermination of most of the Muslim population from this territory. We use this major historical event to study the persistence of population shocks at the city level. We find that the Reconquest had an average significant negative effect on the relative and log-scale population of the main Iberian cities even after controlling for a large set of country- and city-specific geographical and economic indicators, as well as city-specific time trends. Nevertheless, our results show that this negative shock was relatively short-lived, vanishing on average within the first one hundred years after the onset of the Reconquest. These results suggest that the locational fundamentals that determined the size of Iberian cities before the Reconquest were more important determinants of the fate of these cities than the direct negative impact that the Reconquest may have had on their population. Our findings can also be interpreted as weak evidence on the negative effect that war and conflict can have on urban population.

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Fig. 1

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Sources a Data estimated by Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten van Zanden based on Bairoch et al. (1988). Available at: http://socialhistory.org/en/projects/global-historical-bibliometrics. b McEvedy and Jones (1978)

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Notes

  1. The Moors were the medieval Muslim inhabitants of Morocco, Western Algeria, Western Sahara, Mauritania, Septimania, Sicily and Malta. While many members of the army were Berbers, the invasion of the Iberian Peninsula was carried out by the Arab Umayyad dynasty which was based in Damascus.

  2. The medieval Muslim state occupying at its peak in most of today’s Spain, Portugal, Andorra and part of Southern France.

  3. Following the convention used by historians, throughout the paper we refer to the Spanish Reconquest, although Spain as such did not formally exist until the year 1479 when the crowns of kingdoms of Aragon and Castile united.

  4. For most of the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries the Christians were at the mercy of the Muslims and could only make weak and ineffectual efforts to oppose their intrusions. In the twelfth century, however, given changing political conditions, the possibility of a Reconquest became very real and from that point on the Reconquest ideology filled the pages of the Christian chronicles (O’Callaghan 2003, p. 18).

  5. Pope Innocent IV (1242–1254) in particular was instrumental in financing Fernando III, king of Castile-León, in his crusade against the Muslims.

  6. This is a similar evolution as the one observed in Fig. 2 in Bosker et al. (2013) for the European Muslim urban population from 800 to 1800.

  7. See also González-Val and Pueyo (2010) and Picard and Zeng (2010) for more recent references.

  8. See, for example, Bleakley and Lin (2012), Fernihough and O’Rourke (2014) and Rappaport and Sachs (2003).

  9. Some relevant papers are Eaton and Eckstein (1997), Ehrlich and Gyourko (2000), Beeson et al. (2001), Beeson and DeJong (2002), Ioannides and Overman (2003), Kim (2007), González-Val (2010), Cuberes (2011) and Desmet and Rappaport (2016).

  10. It is out of the scope of this paper to review this voluminous strand of the literature. Some of the related natural experiments not discussed here are Kline and Moretti (2014), Redding and Sturm (2008), Redding et al. (2011), Ahlfeldt et al. (2015) and Liu (2015).

  11. Another paper that exploits an armed conflict is Miguel and Roland (2011) who analyse the long-run impact of bombing Vietnamese cities during the Vietnam War. In particular, by comparing heavily bombed districts with other districts they are able to isolate the impact of the attacks on several socioeconomic variables. One of their findings is that population density in 2002—about five decades after the bombings—did not change much with respect to the pre-war period, suggesting that initial conditions or locational fundamentals were crucial to understand the evolution of population in these cities.

  12. Álvarez-Nogal and de la Escosura (2013) study Spain’s comparative performance during 1270–1850, but they do not emphasize the evolution of cities population.

  13. Sheppard (2009) uses data on land use and terrorist attacks and also concludes that there exists a large negative impact of terrorism on the development of land for urban purposes.

  14. The Umayyad was the second of the four major Islamic caliphates established after the death of Muhammad in 632 CE.

  15. Sample size is lower in column 3 because in some cases population data the period before the Reconquest is not available.

  16. The local polynomial provides a smoother fit for Reconquest date to a polynomial form of each explanatory variable (population, latitude and longitude) via locally weighted least squares. We used the lpolyci command in STATA with the following options: local mean smoothing, a Gaussian kernel function to calculate the locally weighted polynomial regression, and a bandwidth determined using Silverman’s rule-of-thumb.

  17. Historical sources and our results suggest the Christians moved south in a zigzag-type pattern.

  18. Census data appeared for the first time in Spain in the second half of the eighteenth century. Chaney and Hornbeck (2016) use data from the historical tithing districts recorded by the Archbishopric of Valencia on the number of Christians and Moriscos—Muslims who converted to Christianity rather than leave Spain and Portugal in the early 1500s—from 1527 to 1786. However, to our knowledge, these data are only available for the region of Valencia.

  19. Lisbon was the largest city in Portugal in all periods but 1200, when Coimbra was the most populated one.

  20. Out of 50 cities, 29 of them lack population data available around their Reconquest year. We include these cities in our main regressions but in some of the robustness checks we exclude them to test whether their inclusion simply adds noise to our estimation. The main results hold; see the robustness checks in Sect. 6.3.

  21. The 5000 cutoff to define urban population is a standard used in historical data; see, for example, Bairoch et al. (1988). Our results are qualitatively the same using the population living in cities with more than 2,000 inhabitants.

  22. We consider three different dependent variables: the share of city population over the Iberian urban population, the city’s population (log scale) and the city’s population growth. Population growth is the first difference of city’s population, so it should be a stationary series. Regarding the share and the log-population, both variables should be stationary series if city population growth is independent of initial size, i.e. if Gibrat law holds for cities. Some studies (Dittmar 2011; González-Val 2016) using this same historical data set by Bairoch et al. (1988) of European city populations conclude that, although there could be convergent growth for the smallest cities, from 1500 forwards Gibrat law holds, at least for the largest cities. A casual look at the figures in Appendix, showing the evolution of population in the cities in our sample by year, reveals that the series are quite stable, at least until the last period, when there was a significant increase in urbanization in all European countries. However, if we drop this last period from the analysis our main results hold; see the robustness checks in Sect. 6.3.

  23. Our pre-Reconquest dummy is defined allowing for anticipated effects only up to two periods before. A wider temporal horizon generates problems of multicollinearity. Nevertheless, we consider all the periods before the Reconquest when we estimate the dynamic effect of the Reconquest; see Sect. 4.3.

  24. Bilateral distances calculated using the haversine distance measure based on geographical latitude–longitude coordinates.

  25. This means that, in terms of the dummies included to control whether the city was surrounded by other cities affected by the conflict, we state that neighbouring cities were involved in the Reconquest if \(pre\_d_{1it} =1\) for at least one city within each circle.

  26. This methodology has been recently used by Sánchez-Vidal et al. (2014) to study the effect of city age on US urban growth.

  27. Appendix shows the evolution of the population for all the Iberian cities in our panel for which we have data on population around the years of the city’s Reconquest. A causal glance at these plots suggests that in most cases there is a marked decline in population in the years around the Reconquest (e.g. in Almería, Palma, Seville and Valencia).

  28. We exclude two relatively large Northern cities (Vigo, Coruña) because there is ample historical evidence that Muslim influence was very limited there. Moreover, data for these cities are only available for the last periods of our sample.

  29. Following Bairoch et al. (1988), we consider constant boundaries over time, because some of our variables (road density, GDP, waterways, etc.) are defined according to these boundaries. Furthermore, if we allow country boundaries to change over time there could be spurious changes in the urban share.

  30. Since Bairoch et al. (1988) do not provide population estimates for 1100, for this century we use the interpolated values provided by Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten van Zanden on their webpage (http://socialhistory.org/en/projects/global-historical-bibliometrics).

  31. Maddison’s data set provides information for 1000 and from 1500 to 2000. We fill the gaps using linearly interpolated values.

  32. There are two independent projects that provide geocoded data based on Talbert (2000): DARMC (Harvard, http://darmc.harvard.edu) and OmnesViae (http://omnesviae.org/). We acknowledge René Voorburg from the OmnesViae project for kindly providing his data.

  33. As a preliminary analysis, we explored the presence of structural breaks for some cities in our data using the Perron and Vogelsang (1992) test. Although these results cannot be considered robust because of the short number of temporal observations (a maximum of 13 periods), the structural breaks detected coincide or are located very close to the Reconquest dates in most of the cities. These results are available from the authors on request.

  34. The qualitative results remain unchanged when the regressions are run without population weights. These results are available from the authors upon request.

  35. We display here only robustness checks associated with the regressions on the average effect of the Reconquest. The results with the dynamic regressions are harder to interpret since many observations are lost and so several time dummies are eliminated from the estimation. The results are, however, consistent with those presented here and are available from the authors upon request.

  36. These cities include Wien from Austria, Antwerpen, Brugge, Gent and Ieper from Belgium, Laon and Paris from France, Augsburg, Berlin, Hamburg, Koeln and Regensburg from Germany, Napoli, Palermo, Roma and Venezia from Italy, Amsterdam, Utrecht and Zwolle from the Netherlands, Basel, Geneve and Zuerich from Switzerland, and London from the UK.

  37. Using 1200–1500 as the treatment period leads to very similar results.

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Acknowledgements

Rafael González-Val acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (ECO2013-45969-P and ECO2016-75941-R projects), the DGA (ADETRE research group) and FEDER. We thank Daniel Da Mata, António Henriques, William Kerr, Kate Lang, Volker Nitsch, Nuno Palma, Leandro Prados de la Escosura, Nicolai Wendland, and seminar participants at the Annual North American Meetings of the Regional Science Association International 2012 (Ottawa), Royal Economic Society 2013 (Royal Holloway), Darmstadt University, Annual Conference of the European Society for Population Economics 2013 (Aarhus), Meeting of the Urban Economics Association at the Congress of the European Regional Science Association 2013 (Palermo), Symposium of Economic Analysis 2013 (Santander), Applied Economics Meeting 2014 (Gran Canaria), Meeting of the Urban Economics Association at the Annual North American Meetings of the Regional Science Association International 2014 (Washington), Seventh Iberian Economic History Conference (Porto) and Jan Tinbergen European Peace Science Conference 2015 (University of Warwick) for their helpful comments. Suggestions and observations received from one anonymous referee have significantly improved the version originally submitted. All remaining errors are ours. This paper was previously circulated under the title “History and Urban Primacy: The Effect of the Spanish Reconquista on Muslim Cities”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, Clark University, Worcester, MA, 01610-1477, USA

    David Cuberes

  2. Departamento de Análisis Económico, Facultad de Economía y Empresa, Universidad de Zaragoza, Gran Vía 2, 50005, Zaragoza, Spain

    Rafael González-Val

  3. Institut d’Economia de Barcelona (IEB), Facultat d’Economia i Empresa, Universitat de Barcelona, c/ John M. Keynes, 1-11, 08034, Barcelona, Spain

    Rafael González-Val

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Correspondence to Rafael González-Val.

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Cuberes, D., González-Val, R. The effect of the Spanish Reconquest on Iberian cities. Ann Reg Sci 58, 375–416 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00168-017-0810-0

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