Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain (4 page)

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Authors: Matthew Carr

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BOOK: Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain
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Part I
 
Conquest to Conversion
 
Where is Córdoba, the home of the sciences, and many a scholar whose rank was once lofty in it?
Where is Seville and the pleasures it contains, as well as its sweet river overflowing and brimming full?
[They are] capitals which were the pillars of the land, yet when the pillars are gone, it may no longer endure!
The tap of the white ablution fount weeps in despair, like a passionate lover weeping at the departure of the beloved,
Over dwellings emptied of Islam that were first vacated and are now inhabited by unbelief;
In which the mosques have become churches wherein only bells and crosses may be found.
 
—Abu al-Baqa al-Rundi (d.1285),
Lament for the Fall of Seville
(1267), trans. James T. Monroe
1
 
The Iberian Exception
 
The conquest of Granada brought to an end what was in many ways an extraordinary aberration from the bitter religious and geopolitical confrontation between Islam and Christendom. Much of the history of al-Andalus was played out against the background of the Crusades, when Muslim “Saracens” were routinely depicted in Christian war propaganda as an “accursed race,” as depraved infidels, subhuman barbarians, and monsters with dogs’ heads who were worthy only of extermination. The savagery of crusading warfare and the dehumanizing rhetoric of holy war that sustained it was often accompanied by contempt and revulsion toward Islam itself.
To medieval Christians, Islam was not a religion but a delusional “sect,” a “pestilential virus,” and an “insult to God,” whose followers were regarded as pagans, heretics, idol-worshippers, or “stone worshippers”—a reference to the Kaaba stone at Mecca. For Thomas Aquinas, Muslims were “not wise men practiced in things divine and human, but beastlike men who dwelt in the wilds, utterly ignorant of all divine teaching.” In the course of the Middle Ages, Christian hostility was often expressed in anti-Islamic tracts that attacked the supposed falsehoods and inconsistencies in the Koran. Many of these polemics concentrated their attacks on the character of Muhammad himself, who was variously denounced as a “pseudo-prophet,” a “magician,” and a “carnal” and polygamous libertine who had deceived his credulous followers with blasphemous promises of “sex in heaven.” Some ecclesiastical writers refuted Muslim claims that Muhammad had ascended to heaven in the company of angels and declared that his body had been eaten by dogs or swine.
Such polemics also circulated through Iberia, and some of them were specifically produced for a Spanish readership. In 1142 the abbot of Cluny in southern France commissioned a Latin translation of the Koran from Spanish clerics in order to dissect its “errors.” A similar translation was made by Mark of Toledo in 1210, with a preface by the Archbishop of Toledo that explained how Muhammad had “seduced barbarous peoples through fantastic delusions.” Anti-Muslim sentiment in Christian Spain expressed itself in a vocabulary of contempt that referred to the Moors as Saracens, Hagarites (bastard descendants of the biblical concubine Hagar), the “filth of Mohammed,” and “enemies of God.” Though some Spanish Muslims referred to themselves as Moors, the term was generally pejorative when used by Christians, and it acquired a range of negative cultural and religious associations that were often counterposed with the virtuousness and superiority of Christianity.
Where the Moors were cruel, barbaric, and savage, Christians were rational and civilized. Where Christians venerated chastity and celibacy, the Moors were promiscuous, lascivious, and incapable of controlling their sexual appetites. Where Christians were peaceful and kept their word and observed their treaties, their Moorish counterparts were warlike and aggressive, devious and untrustworthy. To Sancho IV of Castile “The Moor is nothing but a dog. . . . Those things which Christians consider evil and sinful, he considers goodly and beneficial, and what we think beneficial for salvation, he considers sinful.”
1
There were some exceptions to this negative iconography, such as the idealized Moorish warriors who often featured in the medieval Christian balladry of the Granadan frontier. The figure of the “noble Moor” was an enduring stereotype in medieval and early modern Spanish literature that many Christians found exotic and appealing. These literary Moors were invariably knights or aristocrats, whose chivalry in love and battle mirrored that of their Christian counterparts, and they were often depicted with a respect and even admiration that to some extent belied the animosity that characterized Christian attitudes toward the Moorish enemy. The romanticized Christian depictions of the Moor in late medieval poetic ballads such as the anonymous
Abenamar, Abenamar
even allowed for a certain symmetry between the two sides and anticipated the tendency toward idealization and nostalgia, which the French scholar Georges Cirot has called “literary Maurophilia.”
2
Christian troubadours often lauded the beauty of the
mora
(Mooress), from enigmatic veiled princesses to the humble Arabic-speaking women of the Muslim ghetto celebrated in numerous poems and popular ballads.
These elements of fascination and desire in Christian cultural representations were never enough to diminish the religious hostility toward an infidel enemy that was regarded throughout Christendom as a usurper and intruder in Christian lands. The vilification of the Moor was not racialized in the modern sense, however. Though some medieval Christian chronicles cite the blackness of Moorish warriors to enhance their representations of the Muslims as alien and barbaric, the illustrations in the
Book of Chess
by Alfonso the Learned showing black Moors playing chess with Christians suggest that skin color was not stigmatized in medieval Spain.
Iberian Christian hostility was driven primarily by a sense of religious and cultural superiority, both of which were sharpened by the experience of conquest and subjugation. But if religious hatred remained constant, at least in theory, cultural chauvinism was often difficult to sustain. Christian chroniclers might depict the Moors as primitive barbarians, yet these assumptions were frequently challenged by the proximity of an Islamic civilization whose achievements surpassed their own. In his description of the conquest of Seville by Ferdinand III of Castile in 1248, the author of the thirteenth-century
Primera crónica general de España
(First General Chronicle of Spain) could not restrain his admiration at its wonders, claiming that “there is no such well-situated and harmonious city in the world.”
With the consolidation of the Reconquista, both the power and the achievements of Moorish Spain were forgotten, and the once-feared Moorish enemy was more likely to be seen as weak, effete, and contemptible rather than threatening. In the late Middle Ages, many Spanish towns and villages staged pageants and festival-dances known as Moors and Christians in which local Christians dressed up as Moors were defeated by Christians in mock battles. In some cases, the Christians celebrated their victory by destroying an effigy of Muhammad or dunking an impersonator in the local well.
3
 
Animosity and hostility were not restricted to Christians. Islamic Spain had its own lexicon of vilification to describe Christians: enemies of God, Nazrani (followers of the Nazarene), dogs, swine, and Franks—a generic term for all European Christians that was synonymous with barbarism, belligerence, and a lack of culture. The Andalusi geographer Ibrahim ben Yacub described Galicians as “treacherous, dirty, and they bathe once or twice a year, then with cold water. They never wash their clothes until they are worn out because they claim that the dirt accumulated as the result of their sweat softens their body.”
4
This image of Christians as uncultured and unwashed primitives was often accompanied by religious hostility that was no less visceral than its Christian counterpart. Though Muslims accepted some aspects of Christian doctrine, they rejected what they regarded as blasphemous precepts, such as the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, and the virginity of Mary, and Muslim religious scholars sometimes wrote their own anti-Christian polemics that derided the “errors” and inconsistencies of the scriptures.
Not surprisingly, armed conflict between Christian and Muslim states in Iberia was frequent and often characterized by the kind of slaughter depicted in the medieval epic
Poem of the Cid
, in which the Christian knight Minaya looks forward to taking the field against the Moors, “handling the lance and taking up the sword / With the blood running to above my elbow.” Throughout the history of Nasrid Granada, Christian and Muslim warriors engaged in semiritualized cattle rustling and mutual raiding, in which both sides displayed the heads and ears of their slain enemies as war trophies.
Throughout Christians and Muslims both committed numerous atrocities and outrages that confirmed and reinforced their mutual hostility; not all wars fought between Christians and Muslims in Iberia were motivated by religion, even if the rhetoric of holy war was often invoked by both sides as a rallying cry and a justification for conquest. Nor were Iberian wars fought exclusively between Christians and Muslims. Muslim and Christian rulers also cooperated with each other and formed temporary military alliances. Christians sometimes fought with Muslim troops against Muslims, and the same process worked in reverse. The great hero of the Reconquista, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, or El Cid, fought alongside Muslims as well as against them. In the twelfth century, Christian mercenaries fought on behalf of Muslim rulers in Morocco, while the Castilian conquest of Seville in 1248 that prompted the poet al-Rundi’s plaintive lament was achieved with the help of Moorish troops from Granada.
Between these wars, there were also long periods of relative stability, in which Christians and Muslims acted in accordance with their specific political or territorial interests rather than as representatives of their respective faiths. From the very beginning of the Islamic conquest of Spain, Moors and Christians were also obliged to live alongside each other
within
the same territory. In the first centuries of al-Andalus, Christians lived under Muslim rule. With the Christian resurgence from the eleventh century onward, this process was reversed, and Muslims found themselves living under Christian rulers. And it was here, in the course of these centuries of enforced intimacy, that Muslims and Christians were sometimes able to detach themselves from the bruising confrontation that was unfolding elsewhere.
The nature of this relationship remains one of the most disputed aspects of the history of al-Andalus. In the early nineteenth century, foreign writers and travelers such as Chateaubriand and Washington Irving popularized an exotic view of Moorish Spain as a dreamy oriental idyll at the foot of Europe and a premodern arcadia of religious tolerance, where Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived together on the basis of mutual respect and equality. Liberal and Protestant historians in the nineteenth century, such as the English historian Stanley Lane-Toole, often depicted Moorish Spain in similar terms.
Some Spanish historians have propagated the same view of al-Andalus, without the purple prose. In
The Spaniards: An Introduction to their History
(1948), the great Spanish philologist Américo Castro coined the term
convivencia
, “living together,” to describe the harmonious coexistence among all three faiths that he regarded as the essence of al-Andalus. A liberal exile under the Franco dictatorship, Castro saw such coexistence as a more cosmopolitan and attractive alternative to the cultural and national chauvinism embodied by Francoism. Castro’s ideas were vigorously disputed by his arch-critic Claudio Sanchez Albornoz and have since been challenged by Spanish and foreign historians such as Richard Fletcher, who has described Iberian tolerance as a “myth of the modern liberal imagination.”
5
These debates are difficult to resolve, partly because the historical evidence is patchy and contradictory, and also because modern notions of tolerance and multiculturalism are disputed concepts in themselves, whose contemporary meanings and expectations are not always useful in assessing the relationships that prevailed in Muslim or Christian Iberia.
From the earliest period of the Islamic conquest, the treatment of Christians and Jews in Muslim Iberia was determined by the Koranic dispensation known as the
dhimma
, or Covenant, according to which the “Peoples of the Book” became protected but subordinate minorities within the Islamic state. Jews and Christians were allowed to worship and administer their communities according to their own religious laws, but such autonomy was always circumscribed. Neither religion was allowed to proselytize. In theory, at least, they were not allowed to build new churches or synagogues, to hold public religious processions, or ring church bells. Both Jews and Christians were also subject to a special poll tax known as the
jizra
, from which Muslims were exempt.
The main beneficiaries of these arrangements in the early period of al-Andalus were Jews, for whom the Muslim conquests brought release from near-pariah status under the Visigoths. Under the Córdoban Caliphate, a number of Jews achieved high positions with Muslim courts as counselors, physicians, statesmen, diplomats. Chasdai Ibn Schaprut, the personal physician to Abd al-Rahman III, performed a number of diplomatic services for the caliph and patronized a circle of Jewish poets and intellectuals whose writings forged one of the most creative epochs in the history of Jewish Spain. The poet and statesman Samuel ha-Nagid (993–1056) enjoyed an illustrious career for more than thirty years as vizier to the ruler of Granada.

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