As to the influence of mystical and religious texts on Christian writing, in 1919, the renowned Spanish Arabist Miguel Asín Palacios set off a firestorm by showing how Arabic texts, especially the miraj—the ascent of Mohammad to heaven from Jerusalem—were almost certainly a source for Dante when he organized The Divine Comedy. And it turns out that Dante’s teacher, Brunetto Latini, spent two years in Al-Andalus, in the court of Alphonso the Wise, the very place where texts about the miraj were translated. It is certain Lattini read them. Today, after nearly one hundred years of polemic, Dante scholarship has come round to the idea that a number of important Arabic texts were available to Dante when he composed his Christian epic.
And one last word on mysticism: I pray that some scholar some day may tell us what on earth happened during the visit of one luminous gentleman to Al-Andalus: Francis of Assisi, who was there in the years 1213–15. One of the most bold and independent of saints was present in the country which, more than any other in Europe of the period, was awash in heady currents of mystical insight and practice. What might he have learned?
And if we may, before we leave our brief account of the spiritual and practical genius of Al-Andalus, let us touch on one last domain: color. Contemporary accounts of the life of the period mention the brilliant colors of clothing seen on the streets, so that against the whitewashed houses figures moved brilliantly, like flowers in the wind. It is yet another example of the Andalusian genius of collecting and refining the best of their cultural heritage, whatever the region or language where it was found, and whatever the religion of the people in possession of such knowledge. So from knowledge gathered from Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin sources, they learned how to dye cotton, flax, palm fiber, hemp, wool, and leather. On the Iberian peninsula, they lived in the fine slanting light of the Mediterranean and put on clothes of indigo, gold, tropical green, crimson, lapis lazuli, all using both mineral and vegetable dyes. Most valuable of all was the uncanny byssus, a silken material obtained from a mollusk, close in appearance to the pearl oyster, but found off the coast of Tunisia and southern Iberia. The filaments are golden, unforgettably soft, and were woven into garments so precious that they were forbidden to leave the country. Seen in full sunlight, the cloth changed color subtly but continuously, its lusters in strange harmony with the weather and the angle and intensity of the light. It is a fabric that could stand in for Al-Andalus itself, which offered over the centuries so rare and various a range of beauties in response to the changing lights of time and chance and opportunity.
PEACE AND CROSSFIRE OF THE CONVIVENCIA
The history of Al-Andalus is now more open to us than ever before, as a result of the labors of scholars, principally the work of the last forty years. There were many superb scholars who wrote previously, but the more recent work, seen as a whole, is extraordinary. To the lay reader, it is like watching the excavation of buried treasure, lost under layers of confusion, ideology, propaganda, ignorance, religious animosity, indifference, and hot debate. But treasure it is, and with every further investigation, the facts of convivencia become more intricate and complex. Two things are clear: the convivencia was no utopia and was subject to breakdown, violence, rivalries, suspicion, and stalemate, and second, its accomplishments were magnificent, undeniable, and transformative of European life. As to Al-Andalus itself, we are still learning how interfaith relations played out in political, professional, and domestic life. One way to gain the flavor of it is to consider a spectrum of facts through the region, and throughout the centuries of Al-Andalus. Consider, for example, the partnership in diplomacy during the reign of Abd Rahman III: a Muslim, he appointed a Christian ambassador to the courts of Byzantium and Syria and to the court of Otto I of Germany, and he appointed, as well, a Jewish ambassador, the formidable Hasday ibn Shaprut, to the Christian courts of Navarre and León. In the time of Shaprut, such was the willingness to exchange ideas and the facility with languages that we learn a Jewish scholar went so far as to expound the Talmud, in Arabic, to the caliph himself. And we have seen how, in the twelfth-century school of translators of the Christian Alphonso the Wise, the work was done by teams of men of all three faiths, working in Arabic, Latin, and Spanish. In commerce, Muslim traders, with silks and timber, saffron and paper, roamed all over the Mediterranean but traded also with the Christian north. Christian prelates complained that the young of their faith were too enthusiastically speaking Arabic. And they were criticized, as well, for fasting with Jews on the Jewish religious ceremony of the Day of Atonement. Be that as it may, anyone who could would seek out an Arab or a Jewish physician, such was their reputation during many of the centuries of Al-Andalus. Not only did they serve as physicians to caliphs and emirs, but we know of one Jewish doctor who tended to the privileged and powerful nuns in the cloister of Las Huelgas, owner of rich farmlands, refuge to royal widows, and center of local Christian power.
Historians have gathered, as they can, the facts of the ground from the nearly eight centuries of the commingling of faiths. There were interfaith marriages. In some settlements, the faiths lived together; in others, in separate sections of town. But they certainly traded together. Muslims cultivated vineyards, which were undoubtedly used to supply wine to Christians. And Muslims are known to have visited monasteries to sample the latest vintage, and even to be arrested with their Christian drinking partners for disturbing the peace after too enthusiastic a tippling together. Muslims might work for Christians as grooms or muleteers. Muslim women might visit churches, though they were advised against it because they might “fornicate with the clergy.” A Christian could come from a Jewish family. A Muslim might hail from a Christian family. And some families might have more than one faith in their ancestry. It is recorded that one Alphonso Fernández Samuel instructed that he be buried with the Torah beside his head, the Koran on his breast, and the Cross at his feet—a kind of one-coffin show of convivencia. Jewish prayers were intoned to the music of popular Muslim songs. In Murcia, gifted Muslim musicians and jugglers were invited to participate in Christian religious festivals. Muslims brought Christian food and customs into their religious festivals, where men and women celebrated together. They even liked the churros, a long fried sugary donut that the reader may buy today in the Albayzín, in say, Plaza Larga, any day of the week. Try it with a café con leche.
Muslims and Christians were in business together, in one case owning an inn in a Jewish quarter of the town of Borja. A Muslim and a Jew might come together in an enterprise to lend money, a kind of interfaith private banking. And if we consider the irrepressible energies of commerce in Al-Andalus, and the remarkable scope of talents offered, we can easily imagine any one worker wanting to sell his products to anyone who might have an interest, whatever their faith. Are we really to believe that the baker and the blacksmith, the silk weaver and the paper merchant, the carpenter and the spice peddler, the vendor of vegetables and the maker of painted ceramics or metal pots, all working in the rambunctious markets throughout Iberia, sought to restrict their clients exclusively to those of their own faith? It is absurd to think so. Commerce, the daily and necessary trading that all of us count on, is a unifier, a leveler, a maker of community and understanding. It is what we do together. A crowded market, singing with energy, is a thing of practical and cultural genius. The roles of buyer and seller have no faith but the faith that in a market, we have the chance to offer our work and knowledge to one another, the faith that our lives can be of mutual enrichment. The regulated commerce of Al-Andalus, with its market inspectors of weights and measures, regulations for cooked food and thread count in textiles, and supervision of craft guilds, provided so superb a model that it was adopted by Christian municipal governments in later centuries. Even today in the Albayzín’s Plaza Larga, over the beautiful gate called the Arco de las Pesas, you can see upon the walls the measures and weights overseen by the inspectors. From this careful, efficient regulation come the Arabic roots of so many market terms: almacén (large market,
warehouse), almotacén (market inspector), alcaicería (silk market), and almoneda (auction sale). And supporting all this rough-and-tumble commerce was the strictly regulated currency, the famous gold dinar and dirhams, with their fixed weights of gold. It served as the currency for Iberia and the Maghreb (the North African coastline), used by Christians in the north, Muslims and Christians, and by everyone in Al-Andalus.
Let us close this rambling exploration of the minutiae of the convivencia with a quote from a writer known as the Blessed Ramon Llull, a Catalan of the thirteenth century. As a young man, his principal interest seems to have been amorous escapades with women of beauty and knowledge. One day, writing a love poem, he had a vision of Jesus and embarked thereafter on a program of self-education whose ferocity can hardly be believed. A Christian, he studied Arabic for nine years. He translated a book of the seminal Muslim theologian Al-Ghazali. He studied the Zohar at length, and to his study of that complex Jewish mysticism he joined a long study among the Sufi poets, whom he credits outright as the inspiration for one of his books about the nature of love. He traveled about Europe trying to convince popes and the powerful to begin schools of Eastern languages in Europe. He was captivated by the science of calculation and tried to devise a thinking machine, whose use would let anyone work with key theological concepts, all arranged in a system of logic with rules of calculation that used algebraic formulas and relied upon combinatorial diagrams. It was meant to be a virtual, practical science of the sacred that a man or woman could use to guide decisions and approach the truth. And on the way to such exalted domains, the Lullian art could solve any other problem that came round the bend. His first work on this calculator of the soul is wonderfully titled On the Brief Art of Finding Truth. If the reader wants to drink deeply of the heady brew of Al-Andalus, she should seek out this arcane labor of a man of genius. Ramon Llull went on to write more than two hundred forty books—translations, poetry, books on medicine, mystical treatises. In his spare time, he was a Franciscan monk who traveled extensively in North Africa seeking conversions. Reading his work, we naturally enough ask: conversion to what, exactly?
One of his books is called The Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men. It concerns a gentile who is a philosopher yet has no belief or knowledge of God. He is facing death, is disconsolate, and sets himself to wander in a beautiful forest, where he meets three wise men: a Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim. They are friends and offer to teach the Gentile the facts of faith and the glory of God. They are ably assisted in this work by a very beautiful woman whom they find drinking from a clear spring in the forest. She, as we might have expected, turns out to be Intelligence, and she helps them use Llull’s theological art in a course of instruction. At the end of the course, the Gentile is to choose one of the three faiths for his own. So do the three wise men argue eloquently and powerfully for their own faith, and after a few hundred pages, the Gentile, having given the closest attention to all three, comes to his moment when he must choose which faith he would take as his own. And he does not choose. And the three wise men, at the end of a long and exhausting exchange, say goodbye to one another in an extraordinary passage that has to be read as a whole to be believed. Here it is:
While the wise man was speaking these words and many others, the three of them arrived at the place where they had first met by the city gates; and there they took leave of one another most amiably and politely, and each asked forgiveness of the other for any disrespectful word he might have spoken against his religion. Each forgave the other, and when they were about to part, one wise man said, “Do you think we have nothing to gain from what happened to us in the forest? Would you like to meet once a day and, by the five trees and the ten conditions signified by their flowers, discuss according to the manner The Lady of Intelligence showed us, and have our discussions last until all three of us have only one faith, one religion, and until we can find some way to honor and serve one another, so that we can be in agreement? For war, turmoil, ill will, injury, and shame prevent man from agreeing on one belief.
Each of the three wise men approved of what the wise man had said, and they decided on a time and place for their discussions, as well as how they should honor and serve one another, and how they should dispute; and that when they had agreed on and chosen one faith, they would go forth into the world giving glory and praise to the name of our Lord God. Each of the three wise men went home and remained faithful to his promise.
Seven hundred years later, reading this, we feel the incorrigible sweetness of it. These are three men who have been engaged for hundreds of pages in a far-reaching debate about the virtues of their own religions. The claim here is that such debate, the open search for truth, can be an occasion for honor; it can itself be a work of knowledge, peaceful and respectful, that we pursue together.
It is a vision of a better world. The convivencia was a dangerous experiment. It proceeded by fits and starts, setbacks and abominations, strange alliances, unexpected advances, and practical ingenuities. Its achievements, only recently come into focus, were without precedent in Europe. It is a schoolroom where we might learn, we who even now are failing disastrously to live together at a time with much more dangerous weapons and with billions of lives at stake. And we might start by learning from its fate, when in the fifteenth century, Al-Andalus, with all its accumulated knowledge and accomplishments, met King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel. The two monarchs brought to the Iberian peninsula a will to power, a formidable union, a sense of messianic destiny, and, in 1480, their own specially designed government agency: the Holy Inquisition.
HATRED ADMINISTRATIVE AND METICULOUS; ARM-WRESTLING THE POPE
Let us visit Toledo, the city of the legendary thirteenth-century school of translators of Alphonso the Wise. The year is 1486, on a Sunday in early February. The Inquisition has identified some seven hundred and fifty Christians from converso families—men and women who have converted from Judaism—who are suspected of backsliding, of maintaining Jewish beliefs or practices of any kind in their daily life. This is the scene, as recorded by a historian of the day, and quoted often in the most authoritative of modern histories of the Inquisition:
On Sunday the twelfth of February of 1486 all the reconciled [of seven parishes] went in procession. They were about 750 in number, men and women. The men were all together, wearing nothing on their heads or feet … They bore unlit candles in their hands. The women were in a group, without any covering on their bodies, their faces and feet bare like those of the men, and with the same unlit candles. In the group of men were many of prominence and high honor. In the terrible cold and the dishonor and disgrace they suffered since such a crowd turned out to watch them (many people from other districts had come to see them), they went along sobbing and howling, and tearing out their hair, more for the dishonor they received than for their offenses against God. In this way they went in tribulation through all the city where the procession of Corpus Christi goes, until they arrived at the cathedral. At the entrance to the cathedral were two chaplains, who made the sign of the cross over each one’s forehead, saying, “Receive the sign of the cross, which you denied, and being deceived, lost.” Then they went through the church until they arrived at a scaffolding put up by the new door, and on it were the official Inquisitors. Nearby was another scaffolding where they said Mass and preached to them. After this a notary rose and began to call out each one by name, saying, “Is so-and-so here?” And that person raised his candle and said, “Yes.” Then the notary read aloud publicly all the ways he had judaized. The same thing was done with the women. When all this was over they announced publicly to them their penance, and ordered them to go in procession for six Fridays, scourging their naked backs with cords of hemp, going without covering for their feet or heads. And they were to fast on each of the six Fridays. And they were ordered also to never, for all their lives, hold public offices such as alcalde, alguacil, regidor, jurado, or be messengers or public scribes, and those of them who held those office
s were to lose them. And they were not ever to be able to work as moneychangers, shopkeepers, spice sellers, or hold any official position whatever. And they could not wear silk, nor clothes colored such as scarlet, nor any gold, silver, pearls, or jewels. And they were unworthy to be witnesses. It was ordered then that if they relapsed into the same error once more, and did again what had been attributed to them, they would be condemned to burn. And when this was finished at two o’clock in the afternoon, they all went away.
This procession went through the middle of Toledo, the city that had been the very university of all Europe. It was a city, not long before this scene, graced by the presence of some of the most beautiful synagogues, churches, and mosques in Spain. In this context, the procession described takes the breath away from any reader: some of the most distinguished citizens of the city, all of them Christians converted from Judaism, men and women, stripped and paraded in bitter cold before their neighbors. They are humiliated, sentenced to further humiliations, deprived of current and future work, forbidden certain clothes and adornments, and informed they would be burned alive for a second offense.
What, pray tell, had they done to merit such punishment?
It is a question that goes to the heart of the Spanish Inquisition, and it is easy to answer: they had done nothing whatever.
We can understand this by looking at the origins of the Inquisition in Spain. First, a review of the facts. The Inquisition, as organized originally by the papacy in 1231, was under the control of the Vatican. The Inquisition’s power was established in a papal bull, which is an official declaration carrying the full weight of the papacy. The bull endorsing the use of torture came in 1252. Ferdinand and Isabel, beginning their own Inquisition in 1480, did something unprecedented: they set out to make the Inquisition a personal, special, strategic royal project. In a bull of 1478, Pope Sixtus IV had given them the crucial authority: Ferdinand and Isabel could appoint all the inquisitors themselves. Now they dominated an institution with uncommon potential that could be shaped into a potent ministry of power and control. The monarchs oversaw the rules of this special new court. They appointed the inquisitors, they set their salaries, and they coordinated their work with the military. It was an extraordinary move, given that the Inquisition was, of course, a strictly Catholic institution meant to identify and punish heresy. But Ferdinand and Isabel, with canny political willfulness, had remade this Catholic Inquisition in their own image. The first burnings were in 1481, and the monarchs, beginning with their supervision of the first inquisitors, had a new and well-funded base of power whose writ extended throughout Spain. It extended, most importantly, into regions where royal power was otherwise weak or suspect.
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