by Matthew Carr
This picture of barbaric conquest owes more to the propaganda narratives of the Reconquista than to historical accuracy. In the first centuries of Islamic Spain, Muslims were a minority in the kingdoms they ruled, and it was not in their interests to wreak such havoc even if they had wanted to. Muslim power in Iberia was established through negotiated agreements as well as military force, and local Christian rulers were offered religious autonomy in exchange for their political submission to the new order. A treaty signed between the Muslim ruler Abd al-Aziz and Theodemir the Visigothic ruler of Murcia in 713 specifically states that the local Christians “will not be coerced in matters of religion, their churches will not be burned, nor will sacred objects be taken from the realm,” provided that they swore fealty to their new rulers and paid their taxes.7
With the consolidation of Muslim rule in Iberia, large numbers of Spanish Christians converted to Islam, either out of conviction or convenience, and became known as muwallads. The remaining Christian communities, a subordinate minority in the midst of a dominant Arab/Islamic culture, became known as mozarabes or “Arabized” Catholics. Like all minorities, the Mozarabs faced the risk of the long-term erosion of their distinctive religious and cultural features through continuous contact with the culture of a dominant majority. Though some Muslim rulers included Christians in their courts, social mobility and high office were generally reserved for Muslims and Arabic speakers—a tendency that undoubtedly increased the temptation to convert to Islam. Even Christians who chose not to convert were not immune to the Muslim culture that surrounded them. As their name suggests, many Mozarabs spoke Arabic as well as Latin, and the Mozarabic Church even incorporated Arabic into the liturgy—a development that was not taken well by Christians outside Spain, who regarded the Spanish Church as dangerously heterodox.
To the Spanish Church, therefore, the main threat to the faith stemmed not so much from overt religious repression, but from its prolonged exposure to an Arabic/Islamic secular culture that many ordinary Christians found seductive, appealing, and even liberating. In ninth-century Córdoba, the Christian author Paul Alvarus lamented the popularity of Arab poetry and literature among Christian youth and complained thatThe Christians love to read the poems and romances of the Arabs; they study the Arab theologians and philosophers, not to refute them but to form a correct and elegant Arabic. Where is the layman who now reads the Latin commentaries on the Holy Scriptures, or who studies the Gospels, prophets or Apostles? Alas! All talented Christians read and study with enthusiasm the Arab books; they gather immense libraries at great expense; they despise the Christian literature as unworthy of their attention. They have forgotten their language. For every one who can write a letter in Latin to a friend, there are a thousand who can express themselves in Arabic with elegance, and write better poems in this language than the Arabs themselves.8
To Alvarus and other Christians living under Muslim rule, the loss of Latin cultural identity also carried with it the possibility of religious conversion to Islam. Such concerns led Alvarus’s contemporary, the charismatic Córdoban priest Eulogius, to instigate a cult of martyrdom in an attempt to drive a wedge between the Christian and Muslim communities of ninth-century Córdoba. Yet even Eulogius described the Córdoba of Abd al-Rahman as “elevated with honors, expanded in glory, piled full of riches, and with great energy filled with an abundance of all the delights of the world, more than one can believe or express”—a transformation that only added to his despair at the future of the Church.9 Between 850 and 859, forty-eight of Eulogius’s followers were executed in Córdoba for publicly proclaiming their faith or blaspheming the Prophet. The movement culminated in the execution of Eulogius himself. The “Córdoba martyrs” did not succeed in changing the existing arrangements in the city, where the Christians continued to live according to the same dispensation granted to their co-religionists elsewhere in Spain.
With the advance of the Reconquista, these dynamics were reversed as Muslims found themselves living as permanent minorities under Christian rule. The treatment of these mudéjares (those who remained), who became vassals of Christian kings, broadly mirrored the provisions of the dhimma. Its basic principle was defined in the thirteenth-century legal code known as the Siete Partidas (Seven-Part Code) drawn up by the Castilian king Alfonso X, which declared that “the Moor should live among the Christians in the same manner as . . . the Jews, observing their own law and causing no offence to ours.”10 The Siete Partidas emphatically rejected the legitimacy of Islam as a religion or “law,” which it described as an “insult to God.” It prohibited Muslims from building mosques in Christian towns or engaging in public acts of Islamic worship, but they were permitted to follow their religion in their own communities. A similar code drawn up by James I of Aragon for the Mudejars of the Uxó Valley in the thirteenth century went even further:We desire that all Muslims should continue under their sunna [Islamic religious laws] in their marriages and in all other matters. They may give public expression to their sunna in their prayers, and public instruction to their sons in the reading of the Koran, without suffering any prejudice from so doing. They may travel about their business through all the lands of the realm and not be hindered by any man.11
These leyes de moros (laws of the Moors) often went into extraordinary detail in their attempts to regulate the daily interactions between Muslims and Christians and reduce the potential for conflict. A charter granted by James the Conqueror to the Muslims of Valencia in 1242 designated where they were allowed to travel, the tithes they were expected to pay on wheat, barley, and other agricultural products, their access to water, and the lands and possessions they were allowed to keep. The same charter also prohibited Christians from trespassing on Muslim lands, from preventing Muslims from traveling, and from any attempt to restrict their religious practices. Other legal codes established rights of property inheritance in Muslim communities or aljamas, the taxes and tithes to be paid by Muslim butchers, brothels, and prostitutes, and the different punishments for sexual relationships between Muslim men and Christian women or between Christian men and Muslim women, or for specific crimes such as robbery and murder in which Moors and Christians were involved either as victims or perpetrators.
Such agreements varied between different parts of Spain, but they nevertheless formed the basis for a delicate coexistence that was always subject to fluctuations in the political and social climate. Iberian tolerance did not mean mutual respect or the celebration of religious and cultural diversity as a positive achievement in itself. In both Muslim and Christian Spain, coexistence was often accompanied by separation and segregation, which the religious authorities of all three faiths were often keen to maintain. Muslims and Jews in medieval Christian kingdoms usually lived apart from Christians in separate neighbourhoods called morerías and juderías respectively. Both groups were subject to periodic sumptuary laws regarding their dress and appearance in an attempt to distinguish them from Christians. In 1332, Muslims in Castile were ordered to grow beards or cut their hair in a round wheel shape, while Muslims and Jews in fourteenth-century Aragon were forbidden to wear certain colors, or rings made from gold or precious stones.
These marks of distinction were intended to ensure that all three faiths remained constantly recognizable and reduce the risk of theological contagion that stemmed from their enforced proximity. But they were also intended to reduce the possibility of sexual relations across the religious divide. Such relationships were considered taboo by all three faiths, and could be subject to harsh punishments. In some Jewish communities, local rabbis recommended disfiguring Jewish women who slept with Christians or Moors so that they would no longer be attractive to their lovers and would deter others from following their example. In fourteenth-century Aragon, Muslim men who slept with Christian women could be drawn and quartered and the women burned alive, while Christian men who slept with Muslim women were forced to run naked through the streets. Muslim women who had sex with Christians were also liable
to be flogged or stoned to death according to their own religious laws. Nevertheless, such relationships inevitably occurred, and they were often tolerated, however grudgingly.
Whatever their religious authorities decreed, local communities also forged their own arrangements that did not always reflect the priorities of their rulers. In 1382, the municipal authorities in the Valencian town of Vallbana were obliged to prohibit Muslims and Christians from living under the same roof in order to prevent the “occasion of many evils and of danger of death and of violation of the Catholic faith.” In 1436, church officials in the town of Brihuega, near Toledo, complained that “Jews and Moors publicly have Christian servants, men and women, in their houses and eat and drink with them continually” and banned such contacts. In fifteenth-century Aragon, the archbishop of Zaragoza criticized Christians in Teruel who “cheapen the Catholic faith” by buying meat from Muslim butchers. The Christian rulers of Navarre even permitted the establishment of a gambling casino in the local Muslim aljama in order to circumvent the religious prohibition on such activity.
The boundaries between cultures and civilizations are often more porous than they appear, and medieval Spain contained numerous examples of everyday interactions among all three faiths that defied their mutual antagonism. Christians, Muslims, and Jews mingled in local markets and bought and sold property to one another. In fourteenth-century Teruel, Christian monks sold land to local Muslims who guaranteed these transactions by swearing “there is no God but Allah”—an oath that was accepted by both parties.12 The Church might prohibit Christians from buying meat from Muslim butchers, but such meat was sometimes cheaper, and Christians bought it anyway. Muslim builders and craftsmen built churches and cathedrals, and Muslim and Jewish doctors tended Christian patients. Muslims gambled and got drunk with Christians in taverns. They worked alongside each other in the fields and sometimes in the urban workplace. Muslim and Christian merchants formed joint business ventures.
There are also glimpses of a shared Iberian reality in which all three faiths participated on an equal basis. In 1322–1323 church councils in Valladolid and Toledo complained that there were Christians, Jews, and Muslims who were attending each others’ marriages and funerals and that Christian women were inviting their Jewish and Muslim friends to mass. In the drought-afflicted town of Valés in 1470, Jews, Muslims, and Christians all prayed together for water. As late as 1486, Ferdinand prohibited Christians in the town of Tortosa from allowing Muslims to worship in their local church on Islamic holy days, where they were heard “to ululate and venerate the festivals and things required of them by their Mahometan sect and diabolical custom.”13
In a famous poem, Ibn Arabi, the great Sufi mystic of al-Andalus, expressed what many have taken to represent the essence of Andalusian tolerance:My heart can take on any form; it is a pasture for
Gazelles and a monastery for Christian monks.
A temple for idols, and for the Kaaba of the
Pilgrims, and for the tables of the Torah, and for the book
Of the Koran. 14
For much of the history of al-Andalus, this ideal was not even an aspiration, yet nor was it entirely absent. The spirit that Ibn Arabi expressed can be seen in the tombs of Christian rulers and ordinary Christians inscribed in Arabic and Latin, in the Jewish poets of Córdoba, in the mysterious Mozarabic verses known as kharjas, written in Latin and attached to the ends of longer Hebrew or Arabic poems. In 1137, after Alfonso VII’s return to Toledo from the battle of Aurelia, a Latin chronicle records that Muslims, Jews, and Christians all participated in musical processions and celebrated the Christian victory “each one singing praise to God . . . in his own language.” In the “book of games” compiled by King Alfonso the Learned, the great thirteenth-century king of Castile, a Christian and Muslim knight can be seen playing chess—an Arab import that was hugely popular with the Christian upper classes—with their lances outside the tent.
Though Alfonso took part in the conquest of Seville by his father, Ferdinand, in 1248, he insisted that the inscriptions on Ferdinand’s tomb should be written in Latin, Arabic, Castilian, and Hebrew. The “emperor of culture” also commissioned a team of researchers and scientists to translate some of the major works of Iberian Islam into Castilian. Jews, Muslims, and Christians all contributed to the extraordinary intellectual adventure of the Toledo “translation school” in a community of scholars for whom the quest for knowledge transcended religious divisions. For centuries, Iberia constituted the frontier zone between Islam and Christendom, and as in many frontier regions, physical proximity and familiarity allowed for cultural transmissions, influences, and exchanges that were not always possible elsewhere.
This cross-fertilization can be found in the fusion of Mozarab and Mudejar architectural styles and motifs, in the fashion for Moorish silks and kaftans among the Castilian nobility, in the Arabic recipes compiled for the kings of Valencia, and in the popularity of Moorish music in Christian society. Christian rulers often employed Moorish musicians and dancers to entertain their courts, and Muslim musicians were also invited to Christian churches to enliven long Easter vigils, to the horror of the ecclesiastical authorities. The Moorish and Christian musicians joyously playing music together in the beautiful illustrated song cycle The Canticles of Holy Mary of Alfonso the Learned testify to a blurring of cultural boundaries that often shocked medieval Christian travelers to Spain. In 1466, León of Rosmithal, the Baron of Bohemia, described a visit to a Castilian count at Burgos where he and his entourage were entertained by “beautiful damsels and ladies richly adorned in the Moorish fashion, who in their whole appearance and in their eating and drinking followed that fashion. Some of them danced very lovely dances in the Moorish style, and all were dark, with black eyes.” The Czech traveler found a similar Moorish influence at the Castilian court itself, whose king Enrique IV he reported indignantly “eats and drinks and is clothed in the heathen manner and is an enemy of Christians.”15
Enrique was criticized for his pro-Moorish sentiments by Spanish chroniclers, such as Alonso de Palencia, who called him an “enemy of the faith, passionate toward the Moors.” But the blurring of the cultural boundaries between Moorish and Christian Spain that bewildered foreign visitors did not necessarily mean that conflict and animosity were absent. Castilian nobles who liked Moorish silk or commissioned Moorish musicians to entertain them were perfectly able to fight the Muslim enemy on behalf of the faith. But if Muslims, Christians, and Jews regarded each other with hostility, incomprehension, and even revulsion, they were also obliged for long periods to live, work, and worship alongside each other and to accept each other’s presence as a permanent fact of Iberian life. At certain times, they were able to interact with each other in ways that may still have positive lessons for the present. And if such coexistence fell short of the premodern arcadia of religious and cultural pluralism that some historians have imagined, it was considerably more tolerant than the new order that followed its final collapse.
2
The Victors
León of Rosmithal’s confusion and disgust at the “heathen” influences on the Castilian court reflected a wider suspicion among European Christians of the complicated and ambiguous relationships established between Muslims and Christians in Iberia. In a medieval world that was increasingly obsessed with establishing clear lines of demarcation between faiths and absolute conformity within the Church itself, the proximity of Christians and Saracens in Spain and the blurring of the external boundaries between culture and religion that sometimes resulted from it in terms of dress, language, and behavior was not viewed favorably. These relationships were to some extent made possible by Spain’s geographical and political isolation from the rest of Europe. Even at the height of Muslim power, Spanish Catholicism always maintained its spiritual connections to the Roman Church, but these ties were often frayed, and Spanish churchmen were obliged by their situation to make compromises that were unimaginable elsewhere.
Even wit
h the advent of the Reconquista, when the Church began to recover its political power and its dominant position in the peninsula, the clergy had to take into account an Iberian reality whose requirements were not necessarily in accordance with what was taking place beyond Spain’s borders. Crusading popes might call on Christians to drive the Saracens from the Holy Land, but it was not always possible to carry out a similar policy in Spain itself, where Muslims were often essential to the local economy within Christian kingdoms, and Christians who lived outside them were at risk of similar treatment. The Christian rulers of Spain always presented the Reconquista as a sacred enterprise on behalf of Christendom as a whole, but there was often a gap between rhetoric and practice. When James the Conqueror completed the Christian conquest of Valencia and Murcia, he was urged by the pope and by some of his own bishops to “exterminate the Saracens” in his newly acquired territories. “Exterminate” did not necessarily mean killing, since the Latin word exterminare also included the notion of expulsion, but the Aragonese king was not able to comply with these demands without losing the population that tilled and harvested the fields and provided essential revenue to the Crown itself.
The treatment of Jews was often subject to similar constraints. Even when Jews were being subjected to increasing persecution elsewhere in Europe, Christian rulers in Spain continued to extend official protection to their Jewish subjects—with the reluctant approval of the Church. But Iberian tolerance was always more fragile and conditional than it seemed. And as Spain became more closely integrated into the rest of Christendom, its treatment of Jews and Muslims was increasingly susceptible to developments beyond the Pyrenees.
From the eleventh century onward, the Latin Church entered a prolonged period of political and spiritual crisis, in which the fear of internal schism and the loss of papal authority was accompanied by an increasingly ferocious obsession with heresy. The medievalist historian R.I. Moore has described the evolution of Western Christendom in this period into a “persecuting society” in which “deliberate and socially sanctioned violence began to be directed, through established governmental, judicial, and social institutions, against groups of people defined by general characteristics such as race, religion, or way of life: and that membership of such groups in itself came to be regarded as justifying these attacks.”1