This produced neither cultural apartheid nor an Eden of multicultural harmony. As elsewhere under Islamic rulers, Jews and Christians were afforded subordinate status as people of the Book, liable to the habitual poll tax. They lived side by side with Muslim neighbours and adopted the customs and language of their masters, Arabic-speaking Christians being known as Mozarabs. Early medieval Spain under the Ummayyads of Cordoba was a land of diversity as well as convivencia (literally ‘living together’), but not always harmony. Central authority was often patchy, cultural identity frequently confused by conversion, intermarriage and ambition. Claiming Arab ancestry, even if ersatz, was almost a sine qua non for political success under the Cordoba caliphate. The peninsula was crossed by a series of political, social and cultural frontiers to match its intractably divisive physical geography. Such frontiers produced synthesis and contact alongside competition and hostility. The independence of the northern Christian enclaves centred initially around Orviedo in the Asturias largely depended on the early Muslim withdrawal from the region rather than any resilience of their own. Only by the early tenth century had this principality expanded southwards into the wide frontier zone south of the Cantabrian mountains to incorporate a new capital, León, as well as the county of Castile around Burgos and the headwaters of the Ebro. By this time another murkily identifiable lordship had coalesced around Pamplona in the western Pyrenees, later known as Navarre. South-east of Navarre, the valley of the river Aragon, a tributary of the Ebro, also became a focus of power that grew into a separate kingdom in the eleventh century. At the eastern end of the Pyrenees, Catalonia, a political and cultural link with the Christian shores of the Mediterranean and conduit for people and ideas from southern France, had been established by Louis the Pious, Charlemagne’s son, in the early years of the ninth century. Charlemagne’s own attempts to create a Frankish march further south around Zaragoza on the Ebro failed dismally in 778, a campaign made famous by the defeat of its rearguard at Roncevalles.
With the exception of Catalonia, whose counts remained in the orbit of trans-Pyrenean Frankish politics, these tiny Christian principalities remained insular, locked in a close dependency on rivalries between each other and raiding across the long and wide frontier with the caliphate of Cordoba, bandits and rustlers, not warriors of God. The transformation in the Song of Roland of the disastrous massacre of a Frankish regiment by Pyrenean Basques in 778 into an epic contest pitting Christian chivalry against the massed exotic malignity of Spanish and north African Islam owed everything to religious rhetoric, social values, cultural experiences and imaginative constructions north of the Pyrenees. The development of the Song of Roland, its earliest written version only surviving from the early twelfth century, after the First Crusade, in no way reflected Iberian realities. However, the idea of the immediate Iberian military frontier with Islam played its part in the formation of Urban II’s world-view. In the second half of the eleventh century, Spanish frontier wars attracted recruits from southern France and, possibly, even papal indulgences a generation before the Council of Clermont, signs, at the least, of greater interest from outside the region. When and how far these wars of survival, profit and conquest were regarded by those engaged in them as possessing any transcendent religious purpose or spiritual value remains both unclear and controversial.
Most national identities rest in part on a series of shared pseudo-historical myths. Christian Spain, that of Ferdinand and Isabella, Philip II or General Franco, defined itself in the context of the Recon-quest from the Moors (literally people from the old Roman province of Mauretania, i.e. Berbers from what are now coastal Morocco and Algeria), a process begun with the eighth-century Asturian resistance to the Muslim conquerors and finding its culmination in the capture of Granada in 1492. This construct gave shape to an otherwise messy political history; it explained and justified the elements of religious, even racial exclusivity in early modern and modern Spanish culture; it provided a link between late medieval Christian rule and its remote Visigothic predecessor; and it lent to Spanish history the aura of providential destiny. Holy war operated at the centre of the Reconquest myth. The leading patron saint of Spain, St James, became an archetype of holy warrior. In war as in peace, church marched in militant step with state. It was no coincidence that Spanish bula de la cruzada, papally sanctioned grants of spiritual privileges in return for cash payments to secular or ecclesiastical authorities, a direct legacy of medieval crusade instruments, resisted many attempts at their abolition from the sixteenth century onwards. Only with the Second Vatican Council (1962–5) were these crusading remnants finally laid to rest.5
However closely associated, the Reconquest and crusading were not synonyms. The conquest of Muslim Spain by Christian princes was a long political process; regarding it as a re-conquest, a state of mind. A crusade was an event, Spanish crusades punctuating the larger narrative of conquest and settlement. Crusaders conquered but if subsequently they settled in these newly acquired lands, they did so not as crusaders per se. Frontier settlements may have been established by warriors of the cross but they were not ‘crusading communities’, with the possible exception of those areas and castles controlled by the military orders. Some historians have designated certain regions in terms of the ideology of conquest, as in the thirteenth-century ‘Crusader Kingdom of Valencia’.6 This may appear something of a misnomer. The ideology of penitential warfare lent an edge to pre-existing reconquest mentalities, but it is notable that the development of communal and religious intolerance and the rise of a new biological racism that marked the persecution of Jews, Muslims and Muslim converts (moriscos) in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries post-dated the period when crusades were a regular feature of Iberian politics.
Early versions of the Reconquest myth emerged among propagandists associated with the royal court of the Asturias in the late ninth century. Their object lay in asserting a legitimate continuity for Asturian kingship from the Visigothic past, the purging of the former sins that had lost Spain to Christendom and the providential mission to restore Christian rule and liberty to the peninsula. Ninth-century concerns fashioned accounts of the creation of the Asturian kingdom by a King Pelayo, ostensibly of Visigothic royal blood, after a victory over the Moors in 722. In this triumph against the odds, so the myth insisted, the inevitable recovery of Christian Spain was born. Although such claims were fictive, this fashioning of perceptions established important and lasting traditions. Wars of defence and conquest against the Moors were projected as possessing a fundamental religious purpose, the salvation (salus) of Spain.7 Aggression, portrayed as recapturing territory lost by Visigothic predecessors, was intrinsically just. The struggle with Muslim neighbours became elevated into a sort of Manichaean contest of religions and cultures which bore very little actual relation to the nature of frontier competition and exchange, still less to the continuous internecine conflicts between the Christian lordlings of the north. As elsewhere in western Europe, the church, its bishops and its saints became intensely involved in promoting political identity. The permanent presence of the infidel aided the development of religious warfare, in ways parallel to contemporary war rhetoric in Alfredian Wessex or late Carolingian Francia. Religious symbolism and church liturgy had long been incorporated into the rituals of war. There was an elaborate liturgy blessing a departing warrior king in the Visigothic Liber ordinum, and it is possible that the tradition of bearing into battle a cross, or a relic of the True Cross, survived in the Christian kingdoms.8
However, warfare framed by religious language is hardly the same as a self-conscious religiously backed Reconquest or even religious war. Religious approval of war was a commonplace to inspire loyalty, establish united purpose, salve consciences and assuage doubts on both sides of the Iberian frontier. The great Cordoban vizier al-Mansur (i.e. ‘the Victorious’, 976–1002) attacked churches and monasteries during his devastating raids into Christian territory (985–1102), in which he plundered from Barcelona and Pampl
ona to León, the Duero valley and Coimbra. In 997, he carried off the bells of the basilica of St James at Compostela to adorn the mosque at Cordoba. Al-Mansur made a public virtue of his piety, allegedly carrying his own autograph fair copy of the Koran on campaigns, which he publicized as jihad. This did not prevent him from employing Christians as mercenaries and guides or being remembered by his own people as ‘our provider of slaves’.9 All Iberian rulers conducted aggressive warfare for profit. Although by 1000 much of this was conducted across the frontier region around the Duero valley stretching north-east towards the Upper Ebro and the foothills of the Pyrenees, there existed many petty frontiers in early eleventh-century Iberia, those caused by religion only the most obvious. The political authority and material resources of the Cordoban caliphate rather than its religious complexion made it a threat and a target for its Christian neighbours. Competition for resources and power pitted Christian against Christian and induced political alliances across religious divides. This was not how it looked to later observers and some foreign contemporaries, such as the Burgundian monk Ralph Glaber (c.980–1046), who wrote of resistance to al-Mansur in terms of faith and heavenly reward.10 However, recourse to the encouragement of religion in an idealized vision of a conflict of faiths ignored the realities of eleventh-century Spain.
Politics and cash, not religion, provided the impetus for the Reconquest. The collapse of the Cordoban caliphate through internecine feuding in the generation leading to its extinction in 1031 and its replacement by a patchwork of so-called taifa or ‘party’ kingdoms provided Christian rulers with a chance to intervene in affairs of the south, a reversal of the politics of al-Mansur’s time. Muslim Spain was transformed into competing principalities, many no stronger, some weaker than their Christian counterparts: Badajoz, Seville, Granada, Malaga, Toledo, Murcia, Valencia, Denia, Zaragoza, Lerida and the Balearic Islands. Strong Christian rulers, such as Ferdinand I of León-Castile, his son, Alfonso VI, and Ramon Berenguer I count of Barcelona (1035–76), exploited these divisions by establishing a network of proprietorial protection rackets. Formal treaties were drawn up under which the Christian ruler would agree to defend his taifa client in return for vast quantities of the key commodity that fuelled these relationships, gold. Although the material weakness of taifa emirs allowed for territorial expansion, such as Ferdinand I’s annexation of Coimbra in 1064, intense competition revolved around taifa gold through annual tributes, or protection money, known as parias. Historically, the prosperous urban economy of al-Andalus had been rich in gold that came from the west African Gold Coast across the Sahara to the Mediterranean. Now the Christian kings managed to harness this wealth for themselves. By the 1060s, Ferdinand I, for example, enjoyed parias from Zaragoza, Toledo and Badajoz. Control over Zaragoza had been contested between León-Castile, Navarre and Barcelona. On Ferdinand’s death, it passed briefly to Sancho IV of Navarre. Al-Andalus became the milch-cow for Christian assertiveness. The wider circulation of large quantities of gold, in the rest of western Europe a very scarce commodity, funded the consolidation of royal power, the formation of stable states and the expansion of Christian frontiers. As well as enriching those in military, religious, civilian or commercial royal service, the influx of gold to the Christian realms attracted interest from beyond the Pyrenees, both military adventurers and diplomatic allies. In that indirect fashion, the parias system contributed to opening Spain to ideas of holy war increasingly fashionable north of the Pyrenees.11
Religion was no determinant in these arrangements. In his deal with the emir of Zaragoza for the year 1069, Sancho IV of Navarre explicitly agreed not to assist any ‘people from France or elsewhere’ crossing his kingdom to attack Zaragoza or ally with any Christians or Muslims against the emir, with whom the king would be bound ‘in one brotherhood’. For these promises, the emir agreed to pay 1,000 gold pieces a month.12 These deals rightly assumed an inherent instability that allowed entrepreneurial freebooters to sell their swords and armed following to the highest bidder or even to establish themselves as independent rulers. This occurred across the peninsula, making it, for the first time in centuries, a single, if chaotic political system. One Muslim political entrepreneur from the south, Ibn Ammar (1031–84), had won and lost control of Murcia. After years in exile at the court of Zaragoza, he was murdered by his former boss, the emir of Seville, using an axe given by Alfonso VI of León-Castile. The most famous example of a freelance taking advantage of this fluidity of preferment and power was the Castilian nobleman Rodrigo Diaz, El Cid (c.1045–99). A valued general and diplomat under Ferdinand I, after falling out with Alfonso VI, Rodrigo served the emir of Zaragoza (1081–6), becoming rich from his victories over Catalans and Aragonese. After a brief reconciliation with Alfsonso, from 1089 Rodrigo maintained a private army through successful and lucrative campaigning against Christian as well as Muslim rulers in eastern Spain before establishing his own independent taifa lordship at Valencia (1094–9), which survived until 1102.13 Such were the opportunities of political instability.
These opportunities stimulated the ideology of Reconquest, not vice versa. Instead of relying solely on indirect exploitation, racketeers like Alfonso VI, partly to secure their income, looked to run their client states themselves. The strand of Reconquest justification came in useful, particularly, it seems, for Alfonso VI. When gathering parias, his agents talked of the strategy of ultimate recovery of lands that ‘originally belonged to the Christians’. When establishing the new archbishopric at Toledo in 1086, a year after its capture, Alfonso VI talked of restoring the city, after 376 years, ‘under the leadership of Christ… to the devotees of His faith’. Muslim rule was described as usurpation by blasphemers; the conquest of Toledo as a recreation of ‘a holy place’. Sancho I of Aragon echoed this theme, talking of his conquests as ‘the recovery and extension of the Church of Christ’. Both Gregory VII and Urban II, who like many popes of the eleventh and twelfth centuries displayed particular concern for Iberian Christianity, picked up the theme of the liberation of former Christian lands. Toledo, Urban purred, was ‘restored’ by Alfonso VI ‘to the law of the Christians’.14 The Reconquest was not a war of conversion but conquest and, in places, expulsion. Yet, despite the realities of inter-faith political collaboration, the language and symbols of religion came in useful. When Peter I of Aragon attacked Zaragoza in 1101 he was described as bearing a cross (crucifer).15 By then he had a grander model to copy: the expedition to Jerusalem.
THE SPANISH CRUSADES
While the convenient idea of the just political and religious war of Reconquest may be traced to indigenous peninsula origins, the stimulus to the application of holy war was probably a foreign import. In tune with papal policy elsewhere, Alexander II may have offered ‘knights destined to set out for Spain’ remission of penance and confessed sin in 1063, although the authenticity of his bull has been questioned.16 Whether or not Alexander was suggesting that war against the Moors was itself penitential, a Catalan-Aragonese campaign that briefly occupied Barbastro, north-east of Zaragoza, in 1064–5 attracted troops from Burgundy, Normandy, Aquitaine and possibly Norman Sicily who, in their short occupation of the town, committed the sort of atrocity for which western knights became notorious in the Muslim world. The Barbastro expedition, while hardly meriting the title of a ‘crusade before the crusades’,17 showed increased trans-Pyrenean interest in Spanish affairs. In its wake came harsher attitudes towards Muslims based on ignorance, unfamiliarity and the martial spirituality of the reformed papacy. Spain became something of a testing ground for the Roman church’s claims to leadership of Christendom on two fronts: the imposition of a Roman rather than Mozarab liturgy on the Spanish church and the struggle against Islam. In 1073, Gregory VII characteristically asserted that Spain ‘from ancient times belonged to St Peter’. Despite long occupation by the Moors ‘it belongs even now… to no mortal but solely to the Apostolic see’. Small wonder four years later Alfonso VI began to style himself ‘emperor of all Spain’ to
retain freedom of action.18 Ecclesiastical interest was supported by the penetration of Cluniac monasticism into northern Spain during the eleventh century. In another sign of quickening religious and cultural transmission across the Pyrenees, in 1064 Ramon Berenguer I of Barcelona promulgated the Peace and Truce of God.
By the 1080s, foreign military participation in the profitable Iberian wars had become familiar, as had the habit of Spanish princes and princesses seeking spouses north of the Pyrenees. In 1068, Sancho I Ramirez of Navarre married the sister of Count Ebles of Roucy, perhaps as part of a deal to attract the count’s military support against the taifa kings, a scheme still being promoted by the papacy five years later. Alfonso VI managed five wives over an extended and complicated marital career: a daughter of the duke of Aquitaine (William VIII, a veteran of the Barbastro campaign, 1064–5), a sister of the duke of Burgundy as well as two further Frenchwomen and an Italian. His daughters’ husbands (he had no legitimate surviving sons) included two close members of the ducal house of Burgundy and Roger II of Sicily. Of his illegitimate daughters, one married Raymond IV of Toulouse, veteran of Spanish wars and a leader of the First Crusade, another the nephew of the duke of Burgundy. Dynastically, León-Castile had entered the family of western European rulers, even if domestically Alfonso retained local tastes; one of his mistresses, Zaida, was the daughter-in-law of the emir of Seville.19
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