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The assaults and aggressions that road and trail users suffered from alleged bandits and outlaws have been a historical constant. As a result, the social perception of the bandit as a road robber. However, one might ask: To what extent is this image true and accurate? Was this always indiscriminate and fortuitous violence exercised by simple robbers and the ragged? Or, on the contrary, was there some premeditation? Did the assailants know, or not, the identity of their victim? Were the aggressor and the victim part of a faction or not? In this paper, I analyze a case of assault and aggression that occurred in 1536 on the royal road, near Carcaixent, a small village in the Kingdom of Valencia (Crown of Aragon). On that occasion, the Cosme brothers, Damià and Vicent Colomer, inhabitants of the present day Valldigna, assaulted the farmer Bertomeu Garrigues, stealing some of his belongings and causing serious injuries. What looks as a paradigmatic case of assault and aggression on the road by common criminals, proves to be a much more complex case when we go deeper into the identity and life trajectories of the protagonists and their respective families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the second half of the 20th century, many Spanish Mediterranean areas have undergone important land use changes as a result of socioeconomic development (industrialization, urbanization, intensification of agriculture and livestock, dry crops abandonment). This paper describes, maps and quantifies the main transformations that have occurred in the middle Túria basin, an example of a medium Mediterranean mountain situated in the transition between the inner highlands and the coastal plain affected by the expansion of the Valencia metropolitan area. Photo-interpretation techniques and the analysis of series of the NDVI vegetation index obtained from satellite images have been used. The dynamic cartography of land use changes between 1956 to 2010 has let us identify the type and magnitude of the changes in order to be able to establish in the future the environmental implications in the hydrological response of the basin. Changes have been observed in 60 % of the basin, mainly the expansion in forest cover (scrub and forest) on the mountain areas and changes from dry to irrigated crops (citrus), showing a greening landscape which is in agreement with the process observed in other areas of Spain by other authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Modern Age, intensive agriculture with a high demographic potential and a high productive differential was consolidated in the Valencian coastal plains. This caused a certain imbalance between farmland and pasture land, which generated the need to complement territories at the regional level. The indications of this complementation between territories are observed between the Sierra de Enguera and some orchards of the Ribera, included in the municipality of Xàtiva, in the case of Farta Valley or Càrcer Valley. This paper explains a case study, based on the documentation preserved in the National Historical Archive, which suggests the practice of complementarity between territories at the regional level in Valencia during the Modern Age. Specifically, it is about the relationship maintained between livestock areas, the Enguera mountain, and intensive irrigated agriculture, the Càrcer Valley, in the Ribera del Xúquer. The reason why the Sierra de Enguera was used for livestock from Càrcer and Sumacàrcer can be understood for two reasons: the agrarian and demographic progress of the 16th century, which pushed livestock farming from the orchards to the wilderness, and the continuity of an earlier model of land use, due to the permanence of the Moorish population, although heavily conditioned and degraded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the process of revitalisation of Diplomatic there is an area that has hardly been dealt with, although it is known and studied from other perspectives. It is the set of gestures and signs that used to be reflected some documentary typologies, rarely analysed in relation to the document itself, to which they are associated: touching with the hands, the ceremonial of taking possession; some relevant signs, such as the key, the book or the tree; privileged spaces; cutting the document to indicate multiple originals or their cancellation, and the materiality of the details. In this paper we seek to examine some of these gestures in the medieval documentation of the kingdom of Valencia. The reading of these gestures, together with the documents they accompany, allows us to improve the understanding of the meaning of the document in a specific society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lesser nobility in the Kingdom of Valencia in the Late Middle Ages is a topic that offer vast possibilities to research, which would enable us to further an better understand the political evolution and relations of power in the aforesaid kingdom during the 14th and 15th centuries. Therefore, in this paper we'll try to examinate the origins and familiar composition of the city of Valencia lesser nobility at the end of the 14th century and to recognize the problematics of feud and elite unrest in this period through questions such as the wealth management and kinship or affinity relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]