15. Cited ibid., vol. I, pp. 26–9.
16. See Angus MacKay, “Ritual and Propaganda in Fifteenth-Century Castile,” Past and Present 107 (May 1985), pp. 3–43.
17. Ana Echevarria rightly observes that fifteenth-century Castilians showed a special identification with their ancestors, and evidently a knowledge of the epics that portrayed them. See Echevarria, Fortress of Faith, p. 121. The events at Simancas are outlined in W. D. Phillips, Enrique IV and the Crisis of Fifteenth-Century Castile, Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1978.
18. See also the explanation for the instrumentality of the Muslims offered by Juan Manuel in the Libro de los estados; Smith, Christians, vol. 2, pp. 94–5. This same theme emerged in the letter written by Alfonso VIII to Innocent III lamenting that so few Christians had died in the triumph over the Muslims at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212: “There is one cause for regret here: that so few in such a vast army went to Christ as martyrs”; ibid., p. 23.
19. The periods of central Muslim authority in Al-Andalus were as follows: Governors of Al-Andalus: 711–55
Umayyad Emirate: 756–912
Umayyad Caliphate: 912–1031
Almoravid Caliphate: 1086–1145
Almohad Caliphate: 1145–1224
I have followed the periodization given in Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal.
20. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. 5, p. 479.
21. It was also known as the battle of Poitiers.
22. Isidore of Beja, Chronicle, cited in William Stearns Davis (ed.), Readings in Ancient History, Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 1912–13, vol. 2, pp. 362–4.
23. See Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain, citing Elías Téres, “Textos poéticos Arabes sobre Valencia,” Al-Andalus 30 (1965), pp. 292–5.
24. The number of converts is still a matter of controversy. The best calculation, by Richard Bulliet, has been questioned but not overturned. But it is clear that the immigrants from North Africa, even allowing a high rate of natural growth, still could have formed only a minority of the Muslim population. See Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain.
25. The language issue is even more hotly disputed than the issue of conversion. The degree to which Berber remained a language of the hearth cannot conclusively be established. Whether Romance as spoken by the Mozarabes became a lingua franca is also in dispute. Popular oral practice is harder to establish than written textual practice, but even the latter is uncertain. But there is some evidence: by 1085, for example, when the Christians captured Toledo, the large Mozarabic population in the city all spoke Arabic. On trade languages and lingua franca, like Sabir, see J. E. Wansbrough, Lingua Franca in the Mediterranean, Richmond: Curzon Press, 1996.
26. See Chejne, Muslim Spain, pp. 110–20.
27. See Barkai, Cristianos y Musulmanes.
28. See Ross Brann, Power in the Portrayal: Representation of Jews and Muslims in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Islamic Spain, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.
29. See Guichard, Al-Andalus, pp. 171–2.
30. The Jews were expelled in 1492 from Castile and Aragon, and from Portugal and Navarre in the sixteenth century. Muslims were converted by decree in 1499, and those who adhered to their faith were forced to leave. The Christianized descendants of former Muslims were deported between 1609 and 1614.
31. From al-Wansharishi, Abul Abbas Ahmad, Kitab al-mi’yar al-mugrib, Rabat: 1981, p. 141. Translated from the Arabic in Harvey, Islamic Spain, pp. 58–9.
32. See Ibn Abdun, Hisba manual [market codes], translated in Olivia Remie Constable, Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim and Jewish Sources, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997, p. 178.
33. Ibid., p. 179.
34. Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 41.
35. First, in his Manual de gramática histórica Española elemental (Madrid: Suarez, 1904), but the idea of a culture built up from many different intertwined sources suffuses Menéndez Pidal’s later work, especially Orígenes del Español, estado lingüístico de la península Ibérica hasta el siglo xi, Madrid: Editorial Hernando, 1926. The extended concept of caste, casticismo, meaning purity of essence, has a powerful and somewhat malign meaning in Spanish history. This was in part the topic of Miguel de Unamuno’s volume of essays En torno al casticismo (1895). Hence the use of the idea of caste in the Spanish context has a strong resonance. Américo Castro took Menéndez Pidal’s notion and translated it into a theory of Spanish particularism; see Castro, Structure, pp. 607–15.
36. The definition is that of David Crystal in The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 38.
37. The “oppositional” statements predominated from the mid–eleventh century, at a point when the confrontation between Islam and its Christian enemies became acute.
38. Nirenberg, Communities, p. 127.
39. See Geertz, Meaning, pp. 141–2.
40. The code envisaged that even after such a punishment, the woman might not be able to resist temptation a second time. “For the second offence, she shall lose all her property and … she shall be put to death.”
41. Jeffrey Richards, Sex, Dissidence and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1991, p. 139.
42. Ibid., pp. 139–40. Peter Damian referred specifically to clerical acts of sodomy, but the tone is analogous to the general abhorrence of transgressive acts. The Seville market regulation of Ibn Abdun, for example, declared that catamites were “debauchees accursed by God and man alike”; see Olivia Remie Constable, Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim and Jewish Sources, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997, p. 179.
43. The great Castilian law codes created by Alfonso X, the Siete Partidas, for example, were never promulgated at the time of their creation. They were not so much law codes as a representation of an ideal state.
44. Mark R. Cohen cites the study by A. L. Udovitch and Lucette Valensi on the modern Jewish community of Djerba (Jerbi) in Tunisia, to the effect that “although the ethnic and religious boundaries separating Muslims and Jews are by no means absent or obliterated in the market place, it is here that the lines of demarcation are most fluid and permeable.” See Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross, p. 118.
45. Francisco Benet, “Explosive Markets: The Berber Highlands,” in Louise E. Sweet (ed.), Peoples and Cultures of the Middle East, Garden City, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970, pp. 171–203. Benet is writing principally of modern Berber culture, but Islamic Spain was predominantly Berber in culture, and the parallels drawn seem appropriate.
46. David Nirenberg has pointed out that in Spain, where the three castes lived side by side, meat (which had to be slaughtered to prescribed standards for Jews and Muslims) became a focus for violence and dispute; see Nirenberg, Communities, pp. 168–72. At times attempts were made to produce shared but segregated facilities, but this was rarely successful in the long term, unless they could be divided by time, as in the case of access to the communal bathhouses in ninth-century Cordoba, at least in the view of Janina Safran; see her “Identity and Differentiation.”
47. “If I give the name integralism to certain features that are common to Spanish and Moorish existence … In spite of the similarities between Spaniards and Moslems, the two people were differently situated inside the vital whole wherein are integrated the activity of the mind and the awareness of the objective and subjective—the ‘dwelling places’ of their lives were different.” See Castro, Structure, p. 239.
48. It is curious that he uses “Spaniards,” rather than “Christians,” as the parallel term to “Muslims.”
49. Castro, Structure, pp. 248–50.
50. Spanish has retained a rich vocabulary of locality, which perhaps echoes this tradition of segmentation: barrio (neighborhood), rincón (quarter), querencia (favorite place; now usually a bullfighting term).
51. See Dana Reynolds, “The African Heritage and Ethnohistory of the Moors,” in Van Sertima
, Golden Age, pp. 93–150.
52. This is Derrida’s dissémination. Typically, he denies its meaning: “In the last analysis, dissemination means nothing, and cannot be reassembled into a definition.” But the word “dissemination” is a Derridean pun, filled with multiple connotations. It embodies the sexual act of in-semination, and no one can tell as a consequence how heritable qualities will change or transmute down the generations. However, dissemination is itself the act of spreading, and not knowing where the seed will fall or where it will implant and grow. Thus there has to be a common framework of meaning if communication is to take place at all, but the consequences of dissemination mean that this transfer of meaning is always subject to distortion. See Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981, pp. 44–5. I am grateful to Professor Nick Royle for drawing my attention to this relatively clear statement of a Derridean position.
53. Américo Castro observed that “nothing is more revealing than language.” But equally, nothing is more confusing and uncertain. Anwar Chejne, who has written a useful history in English of the Arabic language, also presents a picture of the particular development of Arabic in Al-Andalus; see Chejne, Muslim Spain, pp. 182–95. But even Chejne’s presentation is uncertain about the exact interconnection between the languages. The linguistic mélange of Al-Andalus included a great variety of spoken dialects—Arabic, Berber, and Romance—and written Arabic and Latin, the former advancing and the latter declining. There is later evidence that many northerners had some knowledge of spoken Arabic. There is no real support in Spain for Norman Daniel’s suggestion, in respect of Norman Sicily, that the “continued use of three languages” created a multicultural or tolerant society. See Daniel, The Arabs, p. 146, and Buxó, “Bilingualismo y biculturalismo,” pp. 177–92.
54. Alvarus wrote profusely. His main works were his letters (Epistulae), Memoriale sanctorum, Vita Eulogii, and Liber apologeticus martyrum, all contemporary with the events he described. On the effect of martyrs in Cordoba, see Dozy, Spanish Islam, pp. 268–9.
55. Jessica Coope, in her excellent account of the martyrs movement and of Perfectus, draws rather different conclusions. She notes that the Church of St. Acisclus was a center of “radical” Christianity, and that the Muslims sought deliberately to entrap Perfectus. However, rather than resisting their entrapment, he participated in it with fatal results. The same body of evidence (and that provided by partisans, Eulogius and Alvarus) is capable of a number of interpretations. But all the sources tend toward the volatility of the religious situation in Cordoba at the time. See Coope, Martyrs, pp. 18–19.
56. Ibid.
57. The material for this section is drawn from Dozy, Spanish Islam, pp. 268–307.
58. Wolf, Christian Martyrs, analyzes the movement in depth. He makes the case that the movement was not masterminded by Eulogius but, rather, that he portrayed the events in a way that would make their message more powerful. In particular, he countered the arguments that they were not true martyrs because they performed no miracles, and that they brought their deaths upon themselves, as indeed the authorities in Cordoba, both Christian and Muslim, clearly believed.
59. Eulogius, Epistula ad Alvarusum, 1, cited and translated in Coope, Martyrs.
60. R. A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 24.
61. Coope, Martyrs, p. 52.
62. Ibid., p. 69.
63. Alvarus, Indiculus luminosus, cited and translated ibid., p. 49.
64. Ibid.
65. Cited in Safran, “Identity and Differentiation,” p. 583.
66. Ibid. Abu Abdullah, Malik bin Anas, was born in Medina in 715. He produced the Kitab-al-Muwatta, the earliest surviving book of Islamic law, and made an important collection of hadith, oral traditions of the Prophet. The Malikite legal tradition followed in Al-Andalus “disliked marriage with dhimmi women but did not forbid it. He [Malik] disliked it because the dhimmi wife eats pork and drinks wine and the Muslim husband kisses her and has intercourse with her. When she has children, she nourishes them according to her religion; she feeds them food that is forbidden and gives them wine to drink. Malik disapproved of intermarriage out of concern for purity and also because he feared for the religion of the children.”
67. Dozy, Spanish Islam, pp. 445–6.
68. See Las Andalucías de Damasco a Córdoba, Paris: Editorial Hazan, 2000.
CHAPTER 4: “THE JEWEL OF THE WORLD”
1. See Dodds, Architecture, pp. 94–6.
2. In much the same way that the Ottoman Turks centuries later adapted the architectural traditions of the Byzantines in building their state mosques. See Godfrey Goodwin, A History of Ottoman Architecture, London: Thames and Hudson, 1971.
3. From a Spanish translation of Ibn Idhari, Al Bayan al Mughrib.
4. Excavations have now extended to some ten hectares, less than 10 percent of the 112 hectares that comprised the whole palace. The palace was built on rising ground overlooking the river Guadalquivir, with the caliph’s personal quarters like a mirador looking out over the countryside. See Las Andalucías de Damasco a Córdoba, Paris: Editorial Hazan, 2000, pp. 64–5.
5. For Abd al-Rahman’s palace reception and its impact, see Dozy, Spanish Islam, pp. 446–7. The entry of Caliph Omar into Jerusalem and, specifically, whether he was riding upon an ass, a horse, or a camel has its own hotly disputed symbolism; see http://answering-islam.org/Responses/Al-Kadhi/ro6.14.html. The significance of his riding an ass is that it would have echoed the prophecy of Zechariah 9:9—“Behold, thy King cometh unto thee; he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.” It was widely known that Christ had entered the city on an ass, in fulfillment of that prediction. Another echo was that of al-Buraq, a magical beast that had carried the Prophet Mohammed to Jerusalem on his night journey, and which was often depicted as part winged ass and part mule. These complex resonances also have a more modern context. In 1918 General Allenby, followed by his staff, had deliberately dismounted from his horse so as to enter Jerusalem respectfully on foot, unlike the German Kaiser Wilhelm II, who on his visit ten years before had been driven through the Jaffa Gate in great state. Allenby’s Christian humility was ordered by the Foreign Office to contrast with the emperor’s apparent Teutonic arrogance.
6. Ibid., p. 447.
7. See R. A. Fletcher, Saint James’s Catapult: The Life and Times of Diego Gelmírez of Santiago de Compostela, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 56–8.
8. Castro, Structure, pp. 130–45.
9. See Dozy, Spanish Islam, p. 519.
10. Ibid., p. 520. Castro, Structure, says that the bells were melted down to make lamps for the mosque.
11. Bruce Lincoln gives some sense as to what was intended in attacking the symbolic aspects of the shrine when describing the attack on the emblems of the church at the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936: “It is their [the enemies of the church’s] intent to demonstrate dramatically and in public the powerlessness of the image and thereby inflict a double disgrace on its champions, first by exposing the bankruptcy of their vaunted symbols and second, their impotence in the face of attack.” See Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Social Boundaries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 120–21.
12. Historia Silense, written in Leon in about 1115.
13. In the case of the Wahabis of Arabia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they desecrated even Muslim sites, proclaiming them idolatrous.
14. This was against the law and practice of Islam.
15. E. Lévi-Provençal, “Les mémoires de Abd Allah,” Al-Andalus 4 (1936), pp. 35–6.
16. Their name is a version in Spanish of Al-Murabitun, meaning those who came from the ribat. These were closed encampments where the chosen warriors of Islam could lead pure lives. The first military towns of the Arab armies, such as Kufa or Cairouan, had served much the same function, as did the Wa
habi settlements in Arabia in more modern times.
17. Like their modern descendants, the Tuareg.
18. See Chejne, Muslim Spain, pp. 69–72.
19. Ibn Idhari, Al Bayan al Mughrib, cited in Chejne, Muslim Spain, p. 72.
20. Few terms are more confused or misused than jihad. Not all wars fought by Muslim armies were holy wars, nor was the term applied only to warfare, for the “struggle” could be interior and moral as well as military. Similarly, the Christian conflict of “crusade” was replete with ambiguities: there were crusades against secular enemies of the papacy or the church hierarchy, against heretics, as well as against Muslims. But the concept of jihad could be invoked by a ruler, and once this was done the nature of any conflict altered. There is a large literature on this topic, but for a broad perspective see Johnson and Kelsay, Just War.
21. María Jesús Rubiera Mata has pointed out that the “tolerance” of Toledo is a misnomer, being much more an accommodation between Muslims and Christians. Against that should be set regular attacks on the Jews of the city. See “Les premiers Mores convertis ou les prémices de la tolérance,” in Cardaillac, Tolède, pp. 102–11.
22. The Poem of the Cid (anonymous), trans. Rita Hamilton and Janet Perry, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975, p. 55.
23. Ibid., p. 71. (Corneille produced his own version of the heroic deeds of Rodrigo in his play Le Cid of 1637.)
24. Ibid., p. 98.
25. For this transition see Fletcher, Quest, pp. 193–205. Plainly, at this distance in time, the boundary between the history and legend is blurred and subject to interpretation. But the desire to construct an ideal type of Hispanity, through the Cid or even Don Quixote, who has also been made to serve a similar typological purpose, is a persistent characteristic of the Spanish past.
26. See Eduardo Manzano Moreno, “The Creation of a Mediaeval Frontier: Islam and Christianity in the Iberian Peninsula, Eighth to Eleventh Centuries,” in Power and Standen, Frontiers, p. 52.
27. Cited in O’Callaghan, History, pp. 344–5.
28. Many Muslims had lived in Old and New Castile and the Kingdom of Aragon for several generations, and though in a minority, were a settled part of the population. They were very different from the newly conquered communities in the south. See Harvey, Islamic Spain, pp. 51–2.
Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam Page 46