My current research project seeks recover the histories of early medieval migrants and diverse communities at a crucial moment of cultural interaction and change. The different peoples that encountered one another during a period of intense cultural transformation in the eighth through tenth centuries reshaped the former Roman province and Visigothic kingdom of Gallia Narbonensis into the Marca Hispanica, the border region between the Frankish Empire and the Umayyad Andalusi caliphate. The question that animates my work is how both migrants and locals used legal, economic, and religious tools to create new communities in a territory that shifted between the political authority of Visigothic kings, to Andalusi emirs, to a Frankish regnum during the early medieval period. These relatively rapid political changes led to a transformation in not only royal and comital authority, but also at the level local communities.

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