Port structures and cargo handling in Asturias and Galicia, 13th- 16th centuries.

Abstract

Asturias and Galicia in the Medieval Atlantic Koiné: The Organisation of the Northwestern Cantabrian Port Space

Historiography has long addressed the study of small port towns in the northern Peninsula and their impact on local economies on account of documentary evidence of their economic influence in the late Middle Ages. All evidence appears to verify the leading role of these minor northern ports in the maritime development of the Cantabrian façade from their foundation in the mid-thirteenth century. The foundational text, Las polas asturianas en la Edad Media, published in 1981, was the first serious methodological attempt to consider not just coastal communities but also the medieval Asturian urban phenomenon as a whole. In the wake of this work, several revised analyses of the new coastal towns, both general and based on specific case studies, have endeavoured to gradually build a fuller historiographical survey; however, even today, rigorous research and comparative proposals for many Asturian towns is lacking, leaving a wide and untouched field of study.

Hence, at least in the Asturian case, the present historiographical challenge involves the reinterpretation of an old historiographic theme in the light of new sources, the confirmation of hypotheses, the reconsideration of hitherto confirmed certainties, and the formulation of new inquiries, such as the type of contacts established between the different port towns, the economic consequences of such exchanges, the characteristic traits of the societies that generated them, the creation of regional networks, the hierarchy of ports and their possible function as ports of call on the Atlantic trade corridor.