Priestly Provision at the Periphery: Building the Church in Tenth-Century Catalonia

In standard accounts of Christian expansion into the frontier with Islam in early medieval Iberia, if the church plays a role, it is the monastic church, operating as frontier land developer. Alternatively, this action is left to a pioneer peasantry or to acquisitive warlords, with the church only following. A close-up study of the activities of priests around the Catalan frontier town of Manresa, however, shows a collegiate secular church structure building up frontier infrastructure well in advance of developing monasticism. These peripheral priests wove neighbourhoods into larger church networks which were the first institutional structures to develop in this area. Such a pattern may also be characteristic in similar areas elsewhere.