by Matthew Carr
Muslim women worked as servants, midwives, and wet nurses, some of whom attended Christian women and children despite the prohibitions against such proximity. Even in Granada, where the traditional social structure was largely intact, the majority of the population consisted of peasants, small farmers, and urban artisans. There were exceptions to this proletarian profile. In Granada the landowning nobility had joined the exodus from al-Andalus, but many nobles remained after the conquest and continued to enjoy the wealth and status to which they were accustomed. Elsewhere in Spain, there were wealthy Muslim merchants and landowners who flourished even under Christian rule, some of whom were rich enough to rent land and property to Christians. In Aragon the powerful Belvis clan worked closely with the Christian administration, and its members continued to occupy the important position of qadi general—the chief appellate judge in Muslim Valencia and Aragon—as a dynastic post even in Ferdinand’s time. The Bellvis family were also allowed to trade internationally and had commercial connections in the spice trade that extended to Spain, Italy, and North Africa. But these cases were not common: unlike the Jews, Muslims rarely occupied economic and administrative positions in the upper ranks of Spanish society, nor were they associated with despised professions, such as tax collection.
In a Christian society where manual labor was often seen as unworthy, the lowly socioeconomic status of Spanish Muslims tended to generate disdain rather than hatred. At the same time, their reputation for sobriety, frugality, and industriousness made Muslims extremely attractive to Christian employers and landowners—an appeal that was enshrined in Christian adages such as Quien tiene moro, tiene oro (whoever has a Moor, has gold) and cuanto mas moros, mas ganancia (the more Moors, the more profit). Muslim labor was a particularly prized commodity in Valencia and Aragon, where most Muslims worked as feudal serfs in the service of landowning Christian seigneurs.
These Muslim vassals worked as rent-paying tenant farmers or sharecroppers on seigneurial lands. In addition to providing their lords with labor, rents, and a percentage of their crops, they were often subject to a range of onerous duties that did not generally apply to their Christian counterparts. Muslim vassals might be expected to collect the lord’s firewood, bake his bread, repair and make his family’s clothes, prune his vineyards, and tend his orchards. They might provide animals as gifts for his daughter’s wedding, transport his family and baggage when he traveled, serve in his private army, or deliver his letters—a task that could sometimes take more than a day in the more remote rural estates.
As a result, the nobility in Valencia and Aragon regarded Muslim labor as indispensable to their continued prosperity. The Aragonese Crown also drew substantial revenues from the Muslim vassals, who constituted the “royal treasure” in a variety of ways, including Muslim labor on Crown lands known as realengo, and taxes imposed on a wide range of activities, from Muslim bathhouses and halal butchers to the sale of licenses to local shops, beggars, inns, and brothels. All this had mixed consequences for the Muslims themselves. Though Muslim vassals were often ruthlessly exploited, they received the protection of their lords and benefited from a remarkably relaxed attitude among the Aragonese and Valencian nobility toward their religious practices—an attitude that was often at odds with the more militant sectors of the Church. In Valencia, for example, the ecclesiastical authorities were always keen to curb outward expressions of Islam, such as the call to prayer, where Muslims lived near Christians. Yet Christian barons not only permitted the muezzin to summon the faithful to prayer by voice or by horn, but allowed their vassals to build new mosques on their estates.
Such tolerance may have been driven primarily by self-interest, but it was resented by the Inquisition and also by the Christian lower orders in Valencia, whose anti-Muslim sentiments often overlapped with an equally intense loathing of their feudal masters. Many commoners regarded the Muslim vassals as competitors within the feudal system, while Christian urban craft guilds similarly regarded Muslims—and Jews—as economic rivals. In periods of social crisis, these sentiments could easily explode into violence, such as the 1455 riots in the city of Valencia, when a Christian mob razed the local morería.
These riots were fueled partly by recurring fears of a Muslim uprising, a possibility that haunted a kingdom where Muslims made up more than a quarter of the population. The belief that Valencia’s Muslims were waiting with “ears up and lances sharpened” was exacerbated by fear of the corsairs who raided Valencia from North Africa in search of slaves, booty, and captives for ransom. The Spanish expression for “the coast is clear,” no hay moros en la costa, literally “no Moors on the coast” derives directly from the long centuries in which Barbary corsairs terrorized Christian communities near the sea. With North Africa only twenty miles away from its extended and undefended coastline, Valencia was particularly susceptible to these raids, which were so common that some coastal Christian towns maintained permanent funds to pay the ransom of captives taken to Barbary. This vulnerability and insecurity could rebound with devastating consequences on the Muslim population of Valencia, and it was to prove a decisive factor in shaping official policy toward them in the century that followed the fall of Granada.
All Spain’s Muslims inhabited an Islamic cultural and religious world whose basis was the Koran and the Hadith—the sayings and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad. Their lives were based around four of the five pillars of Islam, the shahada (testament of faith), fasting, daily prayer, and almsgiving—few could undertake the hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca. In addition to the festivals and holidays in the Islamic calendar, Spanish Muslims had their own sites of religious pilgrimage, hermitages, cults of saints, festivals, and traditions. In parts of Granada, Muslims celebrated Ramadan with street processions of dancers and musicians, who showered each other with fruit and colored water. In Valencia, Muslim women marked the New Year with visits to the local cemetery, where they adorned themselves with henna and wove flaxen shrouds to cover the dead. In rural Murcia, Muslim farmers and peasants celebrated the harvest with festivals of music, singing, and dancing in their vineyards and orchards.
The introduction to the Muslim community began seven days after birth with the namegiving ceremony known as the fada, in which newborn infants were anointed with henna and given amulets with Koranic verses to wear around their neck. In the case of male children, circumcision was followed by festive celebrations to which relatives and neighbors were invited. The lives of Spanish Muslims ended with burial in the prescribed Islamic manner, washing and dressing the body in clean linen and laying the corpse in virgin soil, turned on its side to face Mecca. Many Muslims buried their relatives with raisins and food and a “letter of introduction” that identified the deceased to the angels of death as true believers and helped them find their way to paradise.
Other features of Iberian Islam were less obviously religious. Like Christians, Spanish Muslims were great believers in astrology and numerology. They consulted horoscopes and almanacs and recorded propitious or unlucky dates in the calendar that might indicate bad or good harvests, rain or drought, peace or war. Like Spanish Christians also, they were often superstitious, to the dismay of their religious leaders. They wore amulets and bracelets with Koranic quotations to bring good luck or ward off the evil eye. They conjured spells and made potions that could hurt their enemies, cause individuals to fall in and out of love, cure jealousy, arouse sexual desire, or prevent evil spirits from entering a new house. There were potions that could make people invisible, enable them to travel vast distances quickly, or make it possible to see spirits by mixing the skin of a black and the fat of a white chicken and rubbing the mixture in the eyes.
Some of these potions and spells served a medicinal function. Medicine had once been one of the most important fields of study in al-Andalus, but by the end of the fifteenth century the hospitals and medical schools of Islamic Spain had mostly disappeared, and the treatment of illnesses increasingly fell to herbalists and curanderos (folk hea
lers), many of whom were women, who often used practices that would once have been regarded as superstitious or unscientific.
Despite their reputation for sobriety, music, song, and dance were ubiquitous features in the lives of Spanish Muslims. Their most common instrument was the oud, the forerunner of the Renaissance lute and the guitar. Other instruments included horns, flutes, trumpets, psalteries, and a wide array of percussion devices, all of which were employed to accompany singing and dancing at parties, circumcision feasts, weddings, and other occasions. The most popular Muslim dances were the nocturnal dance known as the leila and the zambra (meaning “group of musicians”)—a dance that was unique to Spain and later became the basis for the “Moorish dance” that became popular in Renaissance Europe, which some claim evolved into English Morris (“Moorish”) dancing. Muslim wedding celebrations were particularly raucous occasions, which invariably spilled out into the streets, as the bride was led on a white mule to the nuptial chamber, accompanied by musicians, singers and dancers, and families and well-wishers throwing sweets.
Though Spanish Muslims remained symbolically connected to the wider ummah (Islamic community) with its center in the Arab world, these connections had often become frayed during centuries of Christian rule. Granada retained most of the trappings of an independent Islamic society, with its traditional social hierarchy, religious institutions, and cultural elite and its trade and cultural links to North Africa. Here most Muslims still spoke Arabic, although those who lived closer to the frontier often spoke castellano (Spanish) as well, while the educated classes retained the classical Arabic that was the traditional language of high culture and learning.
Arabic was also widely spoken in Valencia, with its geographical proximity to North Africa and Granada. In Castile, on the other hand, there were Mudejar populations that had lived under Christian rule for the best part of three hundred years, many of whom spoke only Castilian or a bastardized street Arabic. Cut off from the wellsprings of Islamic religion and culture, without books or calligraphers, schools, and opportunities for further study, the continued survival of Islam was largely due to the indefatigable efforts of local imams and alfaquis (religious teachers), who assumed responsibility for the religious and cultural education of their communities in their local mosques. It was a difficult task that often demanded improvisation and compromise, in which preachers were forced to write and preach in Spanish to transmit Islamic religious doctrine to an audience that could not speak the sacred language of the Koran.
Some Muslim religious scholars questioned whether Muslims should even remain in the lands of Christians, known as the dar al-harb, the “zone of hostility,” and called upon them to return to the dar al-Islam, or “zone of Islam.” “There can be no excuse in the eyes of God for a Muslim to stay in any infidel country, save when passing through it, while the way lies clear in Muslim lands,” wrote the thirteenth-century Spanish Muslim scholar Ibn Jubayr. In a fatwa (religious injunction) issued in the late fifteenth century, the mufti of Oran, al-Wansharishi, ordered his co-religionists to leave Spain and declared unequivocally that “living among unbelievers was not permissible, even for a single day, because of the dirt and filth involved.”4
Many Spanish Muslims may not have been aware of this specific fatwa, but they would nevertheless have been familiar with the religious injunction to live in Muslim lands. Why did they not leave? Many were too poor to uproot themselves and undertake such a journey, while others were forbidden to leave by their Christian rulers. Some Muslims may have rationalized their continued presence in the dar al-harb through the belief that Christian rule would not be permanent. But many, perhaps the majority, probably made the same compromises between their religious obligations and their immediate circumstances that Muslims living in contemporary Europe are often obliged to make in a very different context. Not all Spanish Muslims were equally devout, but even the most ardent believers had other obligations. If they were Muslims, they were also subjects of Christian rulers, vassals of Christian lords, members of their communities, neighbors, and family members, whose horizons were often limited to the immediate world in which they lived. Even today, the Spanish often show an attachment to their own particular regions that surprises visitors from countries with more transient populations. These local attachments were even more clearly defined in the medieval world—for both Muslims and Christians.
Even in the midst of a Christian society that generally regarded them with hostility and grudging tolerance, it was still possible for Muslims to inhabit microcosms of the wider Islamic world as long as they were allowed to practice their faith. In the great cities of Seville, Córdoba, Zaragoza, and Toledo, they lived in their own neighborhoods, with their characteristic culs-de-sac and inward-facing streets built round an interior courtyard, their mosques and bathhouses, and the cemeteries where their ancestors were buried. In Christian baronies and dukedoms of Aragon and Valencia, they tilled and cultivated the same lands and served the same lords as their parents and grandparents.
Nor was Christian rule universally oppressive. In the fifteenth century, the taxes levied on Muslims in Granada were actually higher than those exacted on Muslims in Christian kingdoms, which was one reason why Boabdil and his family were so unpopular with their own subjects. In some parts of Spain, Christian laws could be more lenient than the sharia code for particular offenses, so that Muslims sometimes tried to have their cases transferred to Christian courts in order to obtain lighter punishments. Though Muslims generally formed a marginalized group on the fringes of Christian society, they were not entirely segregated. Muslim craftsmen and builders worked on Christian churches. Farmers and peasants brought their produce to Christian markets. In the Aragonese city of Teruel in the fourteenth century, Muslims, Christians, and Jews were so closely integrated that the local historian and archivist Antonio Floriano has commented on the “cordial, almost fraternal” relations among members of all three faiths in this period.5
However nostalgic some Muslims may have felt toward the lost world of al-Andalus, serious resistance to Christian rule had all but ceased following the Mudejar rebellions of the late thirteenth century. Even during the Granada war, when Christians from all over Europe enlisted in Ferdinand and Isabella’s armies, there was no comparable rush of Muslim volunteers to fight for the last independent Iberian Muslim kingdom, either from inside or outside Spain. Pan-Muslim solidarity was not entirely absent, and some Valencian Muslims did raise money to help the Nasrids, but for the most part, Spain’s Muslim communities were too fragmented to challenge their conquerors and survived by remaining as unobtrusive as possible in a country that remained their homeland, regardless of its rulers.
Toleration always implies a degree of aversion to what is being tolerated, and fifteenth-century Spain was no exception. Spanish Muslims were distinguishable from Christians not only in their forms of worship, but in the rules and taboos that their religious and cultural traditions imposed upon them. Unlike Christians, they were forbidden to drink alcohol, though many did, so much so that Muslim drunkenness was regarded as a serious social problem in parts of Christian Spain. They were forbidden to eat pork and other specified animals, which Christians could eat. They slaughtered their meat in accordance with Islamic custom. They cooked with olive oil rather than the lard that Christians used, and their houses gave off a different smell. Where Christians ate at tables, Muslims generally ate their food on the ground. They spoke Arabic—or algarabía (gibberish), as Christians called it, a language that few Christians spoke or understood. They gave their children Muslim names, which Christians often had difficulty pronouncing.
In terms of skin color and physiognomy, there was no obvious difference between Christians and Muslims. There were many black Africans in fifteenth-century Spain, some of whom were slaves or former slaves of Muslims and Christians, but the frequent Christian references to “white Moors” and “tawny Moors” suggest that skin color was not a key factor in determining the differences between the
m. The most obvious visual difference between Muslims and Christians was their clothing, but even here the separation was not hard and fast. In preconquest Granada, men were more likely to wear traditional Moorish clothing, such as flowing robes, turbans, and hooded cloaks, but Christian fashions were also popular among the Muslim upper classes. In 1529, the German illustrator Christoph Weiditz published a Trachtenbuch or “costume book” of Spain, which included one striking portrait of Moorish musicians and a dancer performing a zambra, all of whom are wearing Christian doublets and hose. In 1482, Ferdinand was sufficiently concerned at the absence of clearly visible distinctions between the two populations in Valencia that he ordered Muslims to wear only blue clothing. Yet four years later he complained that Muslims were still dressing “like Christians, and many of them in silk doublets and fine clothing.”
Muslim women were more recognizably Moorish than men in their appearance, and their clothing was a source of constant fascination and wonder to the European travelers who visited Spain during the sixteenth century, including Weiditz and the Flemish illustrator Georg Hoefnagel. Weiditz’s engravings show barefoot Moorish women wearing loose pleated trousers and long tunics, together with the white almalafa, or veil, that could cover their heads and faces in public. Spanish Christians were often struck by the contrast between the more humble attire of Muslim men and the jewelry and the brightly colored clothing of their women, which contrasted with the more sombre appearance expected of Christian women. Many Moorish women were fond of personal adornment, like the Algerian beauty Zoraida described by the Christian narrator of the “Captive’s Tale” in Don Quixote:I will only say that more pearls hung from her lovely neck, her ears, and her hair than she had hairs on her head. On her ankles, which, in the Moorish fashion, were bare, she had two carcajes—that is the Moorish word for rings and bracelets for the feet—of purest gold, set with so many diamonds that she told me afterwards, her father valued them at ten thousand dollars; and those she wore on her wrists were worth as much.6