Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain (2 page)

Read Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain Online

Authors: Matthew Carr

Tags: #History, #Europe, #Spain & Portugal, #Religion, #Christianity, #General, #Christian Church, #Social Science, #Emigration & Immigration, #Discrimination & Race Relations, #Islamic Studies

BOOK: Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain
3.55Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
These debates about the meaning of al-Andalus—and their insertion into contemporary debates—have tended to ignore or overshadow the traumatic purge that brought it to an end. Among the general public, there is a tendency to conflate the end of Muslim Spain with the momentous year of 1492, when Spain was unified under Christian rule, and the fact that more than half a million Muslims remained in the country afterward is often forgotten or overlooked. I first came across the story of the Moriscos in 1992, when I was living in Spain during the quincentennial anniversary of the fall of Granada and Columbus’s voyages. Amid the media-driven commemorations and national self-congratulation, the darker episodes of Spain’s imperial past were often forgotten or neutralized by platitudes and euphemisms, and the expulsion of the Moriscos received little attention. It was difficult not to be moved by the predicament of these Muslims-turned-Christians, who spoke Spanish and wrote in Arabic, who were regarded as bad Christians by Spanish Catholics and bad Muslims by their co-religionists, who even after their expulsion were torn by their conflicting attachments to their Islamic faith and their Spanish homeland.
Since then, the expulsion has become painfully relevant to our own era. In Europe the September 11 attacks and the subsequent international terrorist emergency have generated a toxic climate of fear and xenophobia, which has focused on immigrants in general and particularly on European Muslims. At a time when many European politicians are replacing “failed” multicultural notions of citizenship with an increasingly rigid and monolithic conception of national identity that regards cultural diversity as threatening, the story of the Moriscos is a grim example of the disastrous consequences that can ensue when assimilation is pursued by force. At a time when conservative intellectuals invoke tendentious notions of a “clash of civilizations”—a concept generally imagined as a clash between Islam and the “Judeo-Christian” West—the ruthless destruction of al-Andalus is a reminder of how fluid these categories actually are. At first sight, there may not seem to be much in common between the politicians of liberal-democratic Europe who call for Muslims to conform to European notions of secular tolerance or leave and a sixteenth-century Catholic monarchy that demanded that Jews and Muslims become Christians and burned them at the stake if they refused, but the underlying dynamics and assumptions of the two periods are not as remote from each other as they might appear.
There is a vast scholarly literature on the Moriscos, which has analyzed the period from a range of perspectives—historical, linguistic, cultural, religious, literary, and anthropological. This book is not intended to contribute to their efforts or break new scholarly ground. My aim is more humble: to bring the story of the Moriscos to readers who may never have heard of it. It is a complex and dramatic story of religious and cultural oppression, rebellion, prejudice, and hatred. It is also a story of missed opportunities, poor decisions and bad policies, and perspectives and possibilities that were ignored or not acted upon. And today, in the year of the four-hundredth anniversary of the expulsion, I would like to offer this dark chapter of Spanish history to the general reader and see what lessons, if any, can be drawn for our current predicament.
Prologue: “The End of Spain’s Calamities”
 
Only thirty-one miles of ocean separate the Moroccan city of Tangiers from Spain, the narrowest point in the Mediterranean barrier between Europe and Africa. It was here that the history of Muslim Spain began one night in the spring of 711, less than a century after the death of Muhammad, when a Muslim general named Tariq ibn Ziyad and seven thousand Berber warriors crossed the narrow strait and landed on the rock that now bears the name Gibraltar, from the Arabic
djebel Tariq
, “rock of Tariq.” The purpose of this expedition has never been clear. For the previous three centuries, the former Roman province of Hispania had been dominated by Visigothic tribes from Germany who had crossed the Pyrenees and occupied Iberia during the breakup of the Roman Empire. In 589, the Gothic ruling caste in Spain had converted from Arian Christianity to Catholicism and established a powerful Iberian Christian kingdom with its capital in Toledo. It is unlikely that Tariq believed he could topple the Visigoths with such a small army, and his aspirations at this stage were probably limited to raiding and plundering.
The Visigothic king Rodrigo was campaigning in the Basque country when he learned of the Muslim presence, and he immediately marched southward at the head of a powerful host whose numbers have been estimated at thirty thousand or more. In July, the two armies clashed on a battlefield somewhere near the Guadalete River in the present-day province of Cádiz. Despite their overwhelming superiority in numbers, the Visigoths were routed and Rodrigo himself was killed, together with most of his leading warriors.
In the wake of this stunning victory, Tariq seized the initiative and launched an audacious two-pronged assault into Andalusia and northward toward the Visigothic capital of Toledo. By the end of the year, Toledo had surrendered without resistance, and Tariq’s forces were able to spend the winter in the capital unmolested. Bolstered by reinforcements from North Africa the following spring, the Muslims rapidly extended their control over the rest of the peninsula. Within three years, the Christian presence south of the Pyrenees had been reduced to a small enclave in the inaccessible mountains of Asturias, and Visigothic Spain had effectively ceased to exist.
The Muslims gave the name
al-Andalus
, the land of the Vandals, to the territories they occupied. To Iberian Christians, their conquerors became known as
moros
, Moors, from the Latin
mauri
, or
maurusci
, as the Romans had called the Berbers of North Africa. From the perspective of Latin Christendom, the conquest of Visigothic Spain by infidels was a barely credible catastrophe. “Even if every limb were transformed into a tongue, it would be beyond human nature to express the ruin of Spain and its many and great evils,” lamented the anonymous Latin Chronicle
Estoria de 754
(Chronicle of 754), written nearly half a century after the events it described.
1
Some Christians saw the collapse of the Visigoths as a divine punishment for the moral depravity of Rodrigo and his court. Others found an explanation in the treachery of the Jews, who were alleged to have opened the gates of Toledo to the invaders. Some Christian chronicles blamed the mysterious Byzantine official Count Julian, the Great Traitor, who was said to have encouraged the Muslims to enter Spain and acted as their guide in revenge for the rape or seduction of his daughter by King Rodrigo. For a brief period, the Muslim advance looked set to continue beyond the Pyrenees, as Arab commanders in northern Spain launched a series of predatory raids into the Rhone Valley and Aquitaine regions of Gaul. Following the defeat of an Arab-Berber raiding expedition in a confused series of battles around Poitiers in 732 by the Frankish king Charles Martel, the Muslims consolidated their control over their territories south of the Pyrenees.
From Edward Gibbon onward, western historians have often cited Poitiers as a decisive what-if moment in European history, in which western civilization was saved for the first time from the Muslim hordes, but the raiders who crossed the Pyrenees were probably more interested in booty than conquest, and the Andalusians showed little interest in the Frankish kingdoms during the coming centuries. Removed from the main centers of Muslim and Christian power, al-Andalus evolved from a remote frontier province of the Islamic empire into a unique Moorish-Iberian civilization whose components included Syrian and Yemeni Arabs, North African Berbers, the Slavic “slave soldiers” known as Saqaliba, who came to Spain as servants of the caliphs and later formed their own fiefdoms, Visigothic and Hispano-Roman Christians, and the largest Jewish population in Europe. As the Muslim population expanded through immigration and conversion, Spain’s Roman and Visigothic cities were gradually orientalized and islamicized, with mosques and minarets, palaces, public bathhouses, gardens with ornamental ponds and palm trees, and the pungent smells and vivid colors of the North African souk.
The Moors also transformed the Iberian landscape. They brought new crops, such as sugar and rice, oranges, lemons, silk, and coffee. Expert farmers and horticulturalists, they introduced new techniques of irrigation and expanded already existing systems, from the fertile plains of the Granada vega and the Guadalquivir River valley to the foothills of the Sierra and the lush coastal littoral of Valencia. Agricultural production and trade links with both the Islamic and Christian worlds laid the economic foundations for a cosmopolitan urban culture that attracted scholars, musicians, and intellectuals from across the Islamic Empire. The most glittering period in the history of al-Andalus began in 755, when an exiled Umayyad aristocrat named Abd al-Rahman made his way from Baghdad to Spain, following the massacre of his family by the rival Abbasid dynasty. Abd al-Rahman founded a new Iberian Caliphate, with its capital in Córdoba, that rivaled Baghdad and Damascus in its opulence and splendor.
At its peak in the tenth century, Córdoba was a metropolis without parallel in the Christian world, boasting paved roads and streetlights, hospitals, schools, public baths, and libraries. At a time when the largest library in Christian Europe had no more than six hundred volumes, a cottage industry of Arabic calligraphers in Córdoba was churning out some sixty thousand handwritten books every year, and the libraries of the bibliophile Umayyad caliph al-Hakam, the “majestic, learned, and administrative,” were said to contain some four hundred thousand manuscripts on a variety of subjects from poetry and theology to philosophy, medicine, and agriculture.
This eclectic range of concerns was reflected in a number of outstanding Andalusian scholars and intellectuals, such as the Jewish philosopher and theologian Maimonides (1138–1204), the polymath Ibn Rushd (1126–1198), or Averroes, as he was more commonly known in Europe, where his commentaries on Aristotle were widely read. Lesser known figures included the fourteenth-century Granadan statesman and author Ibn al-Khatib, the author of more than fifty books on music, poetry, medicine, and travel, and Abbas Ibn Firnas, the ninth-century Córdoban music teacher, mathematician, and astronomer who once jumped off a mosque tower with a makeshift parachute to see if he could fly. The cultural world of al-Andalus drew inspiration from various traditions—Islamic, Jewish and Christian, and Greco-Roman—and the attempts of its principal protagonists to reconcile secular knowledge and philosophy with the rigid parameters of the sacred were not always viewed favorably by the religious authorities of any of its three faiths.
These concerns also had important repercussions outside Spain. Together with Muslim Sicily, al-Andalus became an intellectual conduit between European Christendom and the Arab world, which enabled Europe to reestablish its broken connections with its own classical heritage. Baggage trains from Baghdad and Damascus brought Arabic books and manuscripts from the libraries of Baghdad and Damascus into Spain, together with translations of classical Greek and Latin texts that had largely vanished from Europe since the collapse of Roman power. A succession of Christian scholars, such as Abelard of Bath, Robert of Chester, and Gerald of Cremona, made the arduous journey south of the Pyrenees to visit the libraries and translation schools that sprang up in Moorish and Christian Iberia and translated these texts into Latin, together with translations of Arabic works on chemistry, theology, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. These encounters formed part of what the historian Richard Bulliet has called the “massive transfer of culture, science and technology” from the Islamic world to Europe, a transfer that arguably helped lay the basis for the European Renaissance, even as al-Andalus was undergoing its long and painful decline.
2
 
The cultural achievements of al-Andalus were always built on a fragile political structure that was prone to ethnic and tribal rivalries and eruptions of devastating violence. In the early eleventh century, the Córdoba Caliphate all but imploded following a series of Berber rebellions that reduced the sumptuous Umayyad pleasure palace, the Madinat al-Zahra, to a desolate, overgrown ruin. Successive rulers were unable to prevent the fragmentation of al-Andalus into a patchwork of petty principalities known as the
taifa
or “party” states, even as the independent Christian kingdoms of northern Iberia were becoming more powerful. Throughout the eleventh century, the
taifa
rulers came under increasing pressure from Christian warlords and rulers in Portugal, in the newly merged kingdom of Aragon and Catalonia, and above all in Castile and Leon, whose conquest of Toledo in 1085 under Alfonso VI of Castile, the self-styled Emperor of all Spain, marked a turning point in the process known as the Reconquista.
In the face of these Christian advances, the
taifa
rulers appealed for assistance from the Almoravid Berber empire in northwestern Africa, which ruled Islamic Spain from around 1090 till 1145. Over the next few centuries, Iberia was a complex mosaic of Muslim and Christian kingdoms, whose rulers were often more concerned with pursuing their own dynastic and territorial conflicts with each other than they were with their mutual struggle against the common enemy. Christian Spain was never as consistent or united in its commitment to the Reconquista as subsequent chroniclers would later claim. Long periods went by in which Christian rulers were content to exact tribute from Muslim kingdoms rather than conquer them, and truces were broken by sporadic warfare that had no significant impact on the prevailing balance of forces. Nevertheless the restoration of Christian rule in Iberia remained an aspirational ideal that was laid aside and then picked up again by successive Christian rulers, and the balance of power continued to drain slowly but inexorably away from Muslim Spain.

Other books

Words Heard in Silence by T. Novan, Taylor Rickard
Sanctuary by Ella Price
Cecilian Vespers by Anne Emery
A Crowning Mercy by Bernard Cornwell
Virtual Strangers by Lynne Barrett-Lee
Nantucket Sawbuck by Steven Axelrod
A Bad Day for Scandal by Sophie Littlefield