Spain: A Unique History (13 page)

Culturally, the ethnic group that at first benefited from Islamic dominion were the Spanish Jews, who enjoyed both greater tolerance and greater opportunities than under the Visigoths, so that Al-Andalus witnessed a flowering of Jewish culture. As early as the late tenth century, however, intolerance and oppression began to mount. By the late eleventh century, Jewish attitudes were changing from a preference for Muslim rule to an equidistant attitude toward Christians and Jews, and by the second half of the twelfth century had begun to swing toward a pro-Christian orientation, by that point finding greater tolerance and opportunity under Christian rule.
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From that time stemmed the pronounced Hispanization of peninsular Jewry.

The frontier conflict with Islam did not end with the conquest of Granada in 1492. Compared with the fifteenth century, the struggles of the first seven decades of the sixteenth century were equally or sometimes even more intense. The Testament of Isabel la Católica commended the crusade and the continuation of the Reconquest into North Africa to the Castilians, something initiated nearly three centuries earlier by Fernando III el Santo. The most difficult battles of the sixteenth century were those fought with the Turks in the Mediterranean, where the Habsburg forces gained their most famous victory (Lepanto), but also suffered their worst and most costly defeats, indeed the only notable reverses suffered by Spanish arms during that period. It is calculated that during the early modern period as many as 150,000 Spaniards were taken prisoner by Muslim pirates.
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The historical literature is full of accounts of English, Dutch, and French pirates attacking Spanish shipping in the Atlantic, but overall the most costly piracy was the continuous Muslim assaults of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Through the eighteenth century the Spanish crown retained not only its Moroccan plazas but also the key city of Oran as well, but the most notable defeat suffered under Carlos III, when the Spanish empire reached its greatest geographical extent overseas, was the effort to seize Algiers and put an end to its slave raiding.
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The long confrontation with Islam was in some ways the major formative factor, as well as the major de-formative factor, in Spanish history. The Muslim conquest of the eastern and southern Mediterranean was a world-historical disaster, removing much of the ancient Greco-Roman world from the eventual course of civilization, largely destroying the original languages and culture of these regions, and thus consigning them to an oriental civilization that after five centuries became stagnant. It destroyed the possibility of any organic evolution of the original Hispano-Visigothic culture, which was, as we have seen, as advanced as any in western Europe. Spanish society then formed itself around a new militant culture that, though remarkably open to international influences in the Middle Ages, also developed aspects of a caste culture, partially peripheral to the European core of which it formed a part. The strongly orthodox Catholicism of the medieval Spanish guaranteed their place in the new Western culture of Latin Christendom, and they would not undergo the fate of other Christian societies to the south and east. This frontier culture, however, focused on military and, later, imperial priorities, failed to develop fully all the institutions that would become common to the Western core, and the consequences helped to set Spanish society on the differential path it trod during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Spanish society has been criticized for not fully reciprocating Islamic "tolerance," but that in fact is exactly what it did. The Spanish did not respond to the fanatical intolerance of Almoravids and Almohads in equivalent terms, but throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and after, maintained the traditional system of discriminatory toleration. In that period they were more, not less, tolerant than the Muslims, and occasionally even allowed public prayers from Mudéjar minarets. In Castilian law, oaths sworn by members of all three religions at one time had equal legal value, and in early Castilian law the death penalty for killing a Jew was equivalent to that for killing a Christian, even though the long-term trend was for increasing judicial discrimination. It was precisely this situation of having maintained the system of partial toleration that placed Spanish society in a historically unparalleled situation, a situation that by the fifteenth century, faced with the European drive toward unified polities combined with the continued danger from the Islamic frontier, had become a peculiar kind of predicament.

In this regard it is interesting to compare the policy of France during the early modern period. The French crown at one time formed an official alliance with the Ottoman Empire, abetting Muslim piracy against the Spanish and Italians (a policy that in fact went much further than the provision of sanctuary to ETA terrorists in the late twentieth century). Generally sheltered from Islamic assault, the French were the first Western society to develop a sort of Islamophilia among the intelligentsia, beginning as early as the seventeenth century (dissonantly co-existing with the policy of the French monarchy to consider itself a kind of heir of Spain as sword of Catholicism and leader of Europe), leading to a series of admired, uninformed, and uncritical writings during the century that followed.

Some tendency toward sentimentalization could be seen in Spanish attitudes during the later Middle Ages, particularly in literature, with expressions of "maurofilia" versus "maurofobia" (admiration for vs. dislike of Moorish culture) in the sixteenth century, but the modern tendency toward idealization originated in the eighteenth century, with the Enlightenment critique of traditional Western Christian society. Such criticism was itself absolutely unique, with no real equivalent in any prior civilization in human history. Enlightenment attitudes were themselves profoundly contradictory, a pronounced racism co-existing with a proclaimed universalism. This marked the beginning of the concept of the idealized Other in Western culture, together with that of the Noble Savage, as supposedly enlightened oriental viewpoints were invoked to criticize Western institutions, beginning with Montesquieu's
Lettres persanes
, the Spanish equivalent being Cadalso's
Cartas marruecas
, though Cadalso revealed no particular knowledge of Morocco.

"Eurabian" concepts were later formed by some Spaniards in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some — not all — of the Spanish Arabists whose work began with Francisco Codera in the nineteenth century showed a tendency to idealize Muslims, preferring to call them "Españoles," rather than "andalusíes." This represented an attempted "Hispanization" of a non-Western culture, motivated in part perhaps to give greater prestige to that field of study. Conversely, in the Arab world from the nineteenth century on there developed a pronounced idealization of Al-Andalus as a lost paradise, and most recently Al-Qaeda has announced its recovery as a major priority.

By the twenty-first century, Al-Andalus has become one of the parts of the historically Islamic world that has been thoroughly studied, if not indeed the most thoroughly studied of them all. Many texts have been translated, and there is a sizable volume of scholarly literature, though writing for the broader public remains deficient. Serafín Fanjul counted 822 books published in Spain between 1970 and 1990 that in whole or in part were dedicated to Al-Andalus, ranging from folletos to multivolume works, but not including an even larger number of articles.
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The weak Spanish imperialism in northwest Africa during the first half of the twentieth century developed its own distinctive tropes, though in this regard it is important to distinguish between what was common to many European imperialisms and what was specific to Spain. French imperialism in North Africa and the Middle East often posited a special French relationship with the Islamic world, for whom France bore a special role of protection and mission civilisatrice, yet earlier French contacts had been modest compared with those of Spain. The "Moroccanism" that developed among some Spanish imperialists between 1910 and 1945 was distinctive, for its most extreme proponents presented the bizarre notion that the Spanish and Moroccans were not merely historically but also socially and culturally closely related. The most categorical even insisted that they were the northern and southern branches of the same people, but the Spanish were more advanced, which gave them the right and the duty of tutelage over Morocco. Versions of this concept were part of official diplomatic discourse during 1940-41 when Sir Samuel Hoare, the new British ambassador to Madrid in June 1940, was taken aback, to say the least, when Col. Juan Beigbeder, the foreign minister, assured him that "Spaniards and Moors are the same people." A somewhat different longwinded version of this trope by Franco bored Hitler almost to tears at Hendaye.
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Spanish claims on Morocco, and the peculiar terms in which they were often justified, represented an interesting example of the way in which romantic myths can be made reality in the imagination of political actors. Ultimately, however, the only thing particularly Spanish about this was the specific form of the myth.

The real influence of Islam on Spain was rather different from the way in which it has usually been portrayed. The most important consequence was to confer on Spain a historical role of frontier and periphery, which was different from what the peninsula had experienced prior to the eighth century. Under Rome and its Visigothic successors, the peninsula had been part of the core of late Roman civilization. In the new Western civilization of Latin Christendom, which was just emerging at the time that the kingdom of Asturias was being formed, the Spanish principalities would at first be more marginal and would require half a millennium to assume full participation in the core. For centuries a somewhat marginal and highly militarized periphery, the Spanish principalities would for a long time be unable to achieve the full cultural, educational, and economic level of the core areas of the West, something that they approximated only after a lengthy historical evolution. This harsh history helped to form and to fertilize the great expansion of energy and creativity that took place at the end of the Middle Ages, but it was probably not unrelated to the frustrations that followed.

The Spanish Reconquest was a process unique in European and in world history. In no other case was the greater share of a sizable kingdom conquered by Islam or any other foreign civilization, then not merely subjected but thoroughly transformed and acculturated into the alien civilization. Only centuries later was it fully regained by the remnants of the conquered kingdom, which not merely conquered the invaders but reacculturated the entire territory, subjecting and eventually extirpating the invading civilization. In the nearest parallels, found in eastern and in southeastern Europe, the Mongol and Ottoman empires exercised military and fiscal control over the conquered Christian peoples but did not inhabit their territories to any large degree and made no attempt to replace their religion and culture. The eventual throwing off of the Mongol and Ottoman yokes was not complicated by having to confront a large alien new population and culture in the originally conquered territory.
¹
In no other part of the Islamic world has a significant Muslim society been completely replaced by a portion of the previously conquered population. The nearest equivalent in western Europe was the reconquest of Sicily in the eleventh century, but that differed in being carried out by external forces and involved a much smaller territory that had been Islamic for scarcely two centuries.
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As stated in chapter 2, the history of Spain for this reason would have been absolutely unique even if the Spanish had never accomplished anything else.

The Hispanic Peninsula in 1300

The Reconquest as the defining feature of the history of Spain has enjoyed a place of honor in both versions of the Grand Narrative — the Catholic and the liberal — that developed during the nineteenth century but suffered severely at the hands of the critical deconstruction of the following era. The most famous comment was Ortega's observation that something that went on for eight centuries could not simply be called a "reconquest," though he failed to explain convincingly just why that should be the case. Various objections have been advanced: the absence of documentation for any "reconquest" doctrine or policy in the eighth century, the lack of continuing commitment on the part of Spanish rulers in the later Middle Ages, the willingness of the latter on various occasions to make alliances with Muslims against other Christian rulers, and so on. Specific objections are often well taken, though some have been laid open to question by the most recent research, as in the case of Barbero and Vigil's thesis concerning the lack of acculturation and Christianity in the Cantabrian north prior to the eighth century (see chap. 1). There is no evidence of a specific "reconquest" policy during the first century of Asturian resistance, other than a reflexive disposition of the initial Asturian rulers to take advantage of any opportunity or slackening of Muslim power to extend their frontiers. In its early stages the first medieval kingdom was so weak that any grand design was unrealistic. More ambition for reconquest might be found on the part of the Frankish monarchy when it intervened against the Muslims late in the eighth and early in the ninth centuries. Muslim raiding expeditions had crossed the Pyrenees on numerous occasions in earlier years, and Charlemagne was logically concerned to roll back the Islamic menace.