Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam
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Moors are the sort of people who believe that Mahomet was the prophet or messenger of God. Because the works or actions he performed do not demonstrate any great holiness on his part, such as might justify according to him such a holy status, their law is like an insult to God … And so we say that the Moors should live among the Christians in the same manner as … the Jews, observing their own law and causing no offence to ours. But in the Christian towns the Moors may not have mosques, nor may they make public sacrifices before men, and the mosques which were formerly theirs must belong to the king, who may grant them to anybody he wishes. And even though the Moors do not have a good law, nevertheless, as long as they live among the Christians under their protection, they ought not to have their property stolen from them by force.29
Under Islam, Jews and Christians had also been “protected,” as the “People of the Book,” since they venerated Abraham and the other precursors to the Prophet Mohammed. In practice, this had not prevented them coming under extreme pressure from the Almorávides and the Almohades. In the Christian kingdoms, the idea of the Moors as a necessary evil gained strength. The Infante Don Juan Manuel of Castile in his Libro de los Estados (“The Book of the Estates”) expressed a view common throughout Christian Spain:
Long after Jesus Christ was crucified, there arose a false man named Muhammad. He preached in Arabia, convincing certain ignorant people that he was a prophet sent by God. As part of his teaching he offered them wholesale indulgences in order that they could gratify their whims with excessive lust and to an unreasonable extent … They had seized lands belonging to Christians. That is why there is war between Christians and Moors [moros], and there will be until the Christians have recovered the lands that the Moors took from them by force; but there is no other reason either because of their faith or the [false] sect [secta] they belong to that there should be war between them. Jesus Christ never ordered anyone to be killed nor that anyone should be pressured to accept the Christian faith, for He does not wish any forced service.30
From the time that the Christian kingdoms acquired a large Muslim population with the capture of Toledo in 1085, their rulers attempted to preserve a clear separation between Christians, Jews, and those Muslims now living under Christian rule, and known as Mudéjares, or “those left behind.” Each district and region varied in the precise arrangements, but both minorities clustered around their own districts or settlements, especially since there they could have synagogues or mosques, which were not permitted in Christian areas. Repeated statutes were issued to require minorities to wear distinctive hats, badges, clothes, or in the case of Moors, a “Moorish haircut.”31 But plainly they often did not work. One ribald instance concerned a Christian prostitute called Alicsand de Tolba in the winter of 1304, when she was looking for business in an outlying shepherds’ camp in Aragon. She asked the shepherds whether there was anyone else who needed her services, and was told, “Only a Moor.” But one of the Christian shepherds went to the Muslim, Aytola “the Saracen,” and asked if he wanted to sleep with Alicsand. He said this was not possible since he was a Muslim and, moreover, he had no money. The shepherd, Lorenc, said he would give him the money, and as to the other, he should say his name was Johan and that he came from the port, and was presumably a foreigner. All was well until suddenly she cried out as she discovered at a certain point that her customer was circumcised and hence either a Muslim or a Jew.
This tale tells us several things: that Muslims and Christians worked together; that they could have the easy, bantering relationship that this tale implied; that it was not easy to tell a Muslim from a Christian by outward appearance. And finally, if even a rough joke like this became known to the authorities, the consequences could be dire. Aytola the Saracen wisely fled before the law could catch up with him, for the penalties for flouting the sexual boundaries between Christians and Moors could be savage, even for congress with a prostitute.32 He was in the Kingdom of Aragon but in Castile the law said, “If a Moor has intercourse with a common woman who abandons herself to everyone, for the first offence, they shall be scourged together through all the town, and for the second, they shall be put to death.”33
The more we know of the situation of the Mudéjares in the aftermath of the Christian Reconquest of the thirteenth century, the less it becomes possible to talk of the situation of Muslims in Spain with any overall or general perspective.34 Gabriel Martinez-Gros makes the point that there were many varieties of Muslim experience under Christian rule, partly because each kingdom or locality operated on its own lines. The long-established Mudejars in the communities of the north, like Toledo, were in a different situation to the “new” Mudejars of the south. But even in Toledo, often presented as a model of “pluralism and tolerance,” there were two very dissimilar categories of Muslims: free and slave.35 The slaves were those taken in war or by right of conquest, but also it was easy for Muslims who fell foul of the many laws governing their subservient status to cross the boundary between free and slave status.
These differences figured strongly in the language with which Muslims described Christians, and vice versa. The Spanish Arabist Eva Lapiedra Gutiérrez has painstakingly traced the sixteen terms used to describe Christians in Arab histories of Iberia written between the ninth and fourteenth centuries. Her conclusions are ambiguous, which no doubt reflects the reality. Enmity had its gradations. There were degrees and different types of hostility expressed in the words that were used. For example, she describes aduwallah, “enemy of God,” the most commonly used term, as aggressive. But the next most common term, Nasrani (“follower of the Nazarene,” Jesus of Nazareth), was neutral by comparison. Rumi, which technically meant a Byzantine but was haphazardly applied to Spanish Christians, fell somewhere between the two, but was less often used. Kafir, or “infidel,” was also used less frequently. So even in the context of Spain, with its ever-advancing war front in the north, sometimes Christians were spoken of as hated enemies, but on other occasions they were described in terms that contained no strong sense of hostility. Muslim Arabic speakers gradually created an expanding repertoire of terms to describe Christians and Jews. Frenk, Frenj, Ferinj, applied to Christians in Spain and the Holy Land, literally meant Frank or Frenchman. In the East, however, only Western Christians were described in this way. Local Orthodox or Syriac Christians were Nasrani, never Frenj.36
Gutiérrez has discovered the presence of a changing, adaptive syntax to encompass the increasingly dominant Christians. All save two of the terms were traditional, derived from the Holy Qu’ran, composed in the seventh century. But Muslims needed a new framework of language to describe the experience of Christian power. When Muslims wanted to extend their repertoire of insult they more and more departed from this hallowed traditional lexicon. Non-Muslims were increasingly called ily, “uncivilized.”37 It was, suggests Gutiérrez, “the most complex of all the terms used in the Arabic-Muslim chronicles to define the Christians.” It had the sense of someone bloated and crude, but also with the wildness and sexual proclivities of a wild ass.38
Using this vocabulary, Muslims could present Western Christians as inherently morally defective, condemned by their environment and the corrupting effects of their culture. The Franks’ misfortune was to come from bitter northern climes. Writer after writer stressed that this had determined their character: “Excessive cold … ruined their manners and hardened their hearts … Their colour is, of course, white and they, like beasts, care only for war, combat and hunting.”39 Even their manner of writing was against nature, being from left to right and thus “away from the heart and not towards it.” Christians came to be described in zoomorphic terms: as dogs (especially despised in Islam) or, worse still, as pigs. This then brought the terms of condemnation back within the Qur’anic system of what was permitted and what forbidden.
Infidels were unclean, in the same way that semen, urine, menstrual blood, and feces were filthy and contaminating.40 If Muslims wanted to make the taint of being infidel
even stronger, they then associated it with other ritually and fundamentally unclean objects. Terms like “wild beast,” “dog,” or “pig” referred to inalienable characteristics.41 A pig was always a pig.42 To bestialize any human being, to give them the character of a despised animal, carried a huge metaphoric potential, and their animal qualities by exchange emphasized the speaker’s humanity and Muslim cleanliness. But the curse of infidelity would be lifted at the moment that the infidel made the profession of faith and began to lead a truly Islamic life.
The everyday Christian perceptions of the Moor were correspondingly fearful. The border ballads romanticized the Moorish warriors of the frontiers with Granada, but they were still figures of fear and danger. Christians rarely made a direct equation between Muslims and the other (and more prosperous) minority, the Jews, but distaste for one group also seemed to spill over onto the other, and Jews and Moors were linked together in the minds of many Christians. Rulers and popular opinion alike regarded them as enemies, existing only by the benevolence of the Christian community. The Jews suffered attacks more regularly and more severely than the Moors. An outburst of popular rage, which led to savage massacres of Jews, began in Seville in June 1391 but soon spread to many parts of Spain. It was the product of many different causes, mostly purely local. But running as a common thread through all the killings, in Andalucia, in the rest of Castile, in Aragon, and especially in the Balearic Islands, was a sense of revulsion against all those who were not Christian.
In 1378 Archdeacon Ferrán Martinez, of Ecija near Seville, began to deliver a series of popular sermons directed against the Jews. They were well attended. In 1391, he encouraged the Seville mob to attack the Jewish quarter and raze “the houses of the devil,” the synagogues. It is hard to find any direct cause for new animosity toward the Jews, but the eminent Castilian statesman Perez Lopez de Ayala reflected a general prejudice when he wrote of the Jews as “ready to drink the blood of the oppressed … The Jews divide up the people, who die undefended.”43 In 1412 the Valencian Dominican preacher Vincent Ferrer castigated the Jews, but he also made explicit their connection with the Muslims. Both Jews and Moors should be isolated from contact with Christians. As he put it, “Just as prostitutes should live apart, so should Jews.” Muslims should be confined to their morerias, where they could not contaminate Christian Spain.44
Increasingly vicious attacks prompted many Jews to accept baptism. As “New Christians,” or conversos, there was nothing in law to prevent their intermarriage with other, “Old Christian” families, and both among the “Old Christians” and among Jews who had kept their faith, old fears of consanguinity and sexual mingling across the boundaries of the castes once more came to the fore. A sixteenth-century Jewish writer blamed the persecutions themselves on this cause: “These sufferings were a just punishment of divine wrath. For many had taken Gentile women into their homes; children were born of these illicit unions and they later killed their own fathers.”45 The process of mass conversion, however, also changed the whole pattern of relationships between Christians, Jews, and Muslims. During the fifteenth century, the dominant Christian states in Spain began to develop a new theory of the infidel. In this view, Judaism and, by extension, Islam carried a genetic taint and thus no convert of Jewish or Muslim stock could ever carry the true faith purely, as could someone of “untainted” Christian descent.
No doubt these views had long been embedded in Christian society within the peninsula, where sexual deviance could carry a stigma that extended down the generations (“son of a whore,” hijo de puta was and is a classic Castilian imprecation, but one that was once upon a time severely punished if uttered publicly). This latent tendency within Hispanic society was elaborated into a body of law from the mid–fifteenth century, but emerging from below rather than by royal decree. The first instance was in 1449, when Pero Sarmiento—the leader of a rebellion in Toledo against royal support for Jewish converts—issued a declaration that no one except an Old Christian of untainted blood could ever hold public office. In front of a large gathering in the city hall of Toledo, Sarmiento catalogued all the evil deeds that the Jews were said to have committed. The first was that the Jews of Toledo had opened the gates of the city to Tariq’s Moors in 711, thereby ensuring centuries of Muslim domination; and their descendants, the “New Christians,” were continuing their “intrigues” against true Christians.46 Within living memory, they had conspired with the enemies of Toledo to “wage a cruel war with armed force, with blood and fire, inflicting theft and damage as if they were Moors, enemies of the Christian faith.”47 Even when the rebellion was suppressed in 1451, Sarmiento’s decree continued to be observed. Over the next forty years, more and more institutions adopted requirements that “purity of blood” (limpieza de sangre) should be a prerequisite for membership of a guild or any similar body. The vocabulary that was used is particularly significant: the “Old Christians” described themselves as the “pure” (limpios); they were “fine Christians,” and the assumption was that the converts were impure and coarse.
The fresh attack against “New Christians” that began in the 1460s was inflamed by sermons, and by influential polemical publications such as the Fortress of Faith (Fortalitium fidei contra Christianos hostes) by Alonso de Espina. The Holy Inquisition, established in Castile in 1478, led the charge. Albert Sicroff, the principal scholar of the early history of limpieza de sangre, makes the point that Muslims were not the main target or the subject of these restrictions.48 However, the language used almost always embraced both “Jews and Moors,” as in the case of Toledo in 1449. In the fifteenth century, the limpieza de sangre laws were constructed to constrain the converted Jews. But after 1500, and especially after their revolt in the Alpujarras in 1568, the (forcibly) converted Muslims, or Moriscos, were increasingly seen as the more dangerous of the enemies within the lands of Spain. There was a deep ambiguity in the laws of purity of blood. In Christian belief, baptism purged all sins, and sincere repentance meant that nothing remained from the former life. Yet could baptism and repentance obliterate the popular perception of Jewish guilt for the death of Jesus Christ? For theologians knowledgeable in the biblical sources, conversion indeed wiped clean the past through the sacrificial blood of the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ.49 But this was too intricate an idea to resonate with the unlearned. Thus, the complex messages of Espina and his fellow polemicists were simply received as a call to protect Christian society from its assailants, the Jews and the Muslims.
The number of Moors (Mudéjares) exceeded the number of Jews in Christian Spain, yet paradoxically it was the Jews and Jewish converts to Christianity who throughout the fifteenth century, and afterward, were the primary target of the purity legislation, and later, of the Holy Inquisition. This is explained by the fact that the two communities were very different in their distribution and function. The bulk of the Muslims labored on the land, while the Jews were concentrated in the towns, where tensions, especially over trade and business, could easily spill into violence. They also performed roles, such as tax gathering, that roused hostility.50
Moreover, although Islam was the menacing external enemy, the relationships between Judaism and Christianity (born out of Judaism) had become a ritualized antagonism. The ritual could all too often become reality. In many places, the Holy Week celebrations required the portrayal of the Jews in an enactment of the crucifixion. This was frequently a time of heightened feelings that might be carried into symbolic attacks on Jewish houses and synagogues. Whether these emblematic acts of hatred triggered real violence is not clear, but there were numerous assaults, often accompanied by gratuitous acts of savagery, on Jews in Castile. The attacks in 1391 were the most notorious, but these assaults recurred on many occasions during the fifteenth century: in Toledo in 1449 and 1467, in Vallodolid in 1470, and in Cordoba in 1473. None of these was officially sanctioned, but from the 1480s official policy toward non-Christians, both Jews and Mudejars, began to harden. Ancient edicts concerning dress, res
trictions on trade, and living apart from Christians were enforced. Isolated ghettos and morerias were constructed outside towns or by blocking off streets and filling in doors and windows.
It is not surprising that most scholars have focused on the Christian obsession with newly converted Jews. These false converts were said to make constant attempts to undermine the Christian kingdoms. Crudely forged texts were produced, like the concoction in 1492 of the letter of Yusef, chief of the Jews of Constantinople, who was supposed to have laid out a plan of infiltration and subversion of Christian Spain. Its content strongly suggested the main elements of Christian paranoia. Asked by the Jews of Spain how they could resist the king of Spain, who was forcing them to convert or even killing them, Yusef is supposed to have replied:
Where you say that the King of Spain would convert you to Christianity, do it because you have no alternative. Where you say that they deprive you of your property, make your sons merchants so that little by little you can take theirs. Where you say that they are robbing you of your lives, make your sons doctors and apothecaries so that you can end theirs. Where you say that they are destroying your synagogues, make your sons clerics and theologians, so you can destroy their churches. And as far as your other troubles are concerned, make your sons advocates, administrators, lawyers, and advisors, and let them take part in affairs of state so that you can gain land.51