by Matthew Carr
The last ruler of al-Andalus then rode away to exile on his estates in the Alpujarras Mountains, pausing only for the legendary “last sigh” of regret for his lost kingdom that has found its way into so many accounts of the fall of Granada, from Washington Irving to Salman Rushdie. Behind him, his defeated subjects had withdrawn into their homes, and the city appeared to be abandoned “like a plague city,” as one chronicler later described it. Not a single Muslim was seen on the streets of Granada that day as the jubilant Christian troops took possession of the city. Ferdinand and Isabella went directly to the Alhambra, where they remained for the rest of the day. In the late afternoon, they descended into the city to receive the acclaim of their soldiers before returning to Santa Fe while the Alhambra was made ready to receive the court.
Thus ended what one contemporary called “the most distinguished and blessed day there has ever been in Spain.” To the priest and royal chronicler Andrés Bernáldez, the fall of Granada marked the glorious conclusion to a “holy and laudable conquest,” which proved that both Spain and its rulers were divinely blessed.5 To Peter Martyr of Anghieri, an Italian scholar at the Castilian court, the end of Iberian Islam signified “the end of Spain’s calamities,” which had begun when “this barbarous people . . . came from Mauritania some 800 years ago and inflicted its cruel and arrogant oppression on conquered Spain.”6 Across Spain, news of the surrender was celebrated with popular feasts, religious processions, and special masses. In some cities, the festivities and games went on for days.
The conquest of Granada was greeted with equal enthusiasm throughout Europe. At a time when Christian victories against the infidels were few and far between, and church bells in Austria and Germany tolled three times daily to remind their populations of the existential threat from the “terrible Turk,” Ferdinand and Isabella were hailed as the heroes of Christendom and rewarded by the pope with the title los reyes católicos—the Catholic Monarchs. In England, Henry VII summoned the court to a special service at Saint Paul’s Cathedral, where the congregation was exhorted “to sing unto God a new song” and honor the “prowess and devotion of Fernandino and Isabella, Kings of Spain.”
The consequences of the fall of Granada in Spanish history have become the stuff of cliché: how a Genoese adventurer named Christopher Columbus, finally obtained permission from Ferdinand and Isabella to undertake his voyages of exploration that provided Spain with its vast overseas empire; how the military energies accumulated during centuries of holy war against the infidel were channeled into new conquests on behalf of the faith; how the impoverished Kingdom of Castile emerged from centuries of obscurity to become a world empire. But for both the victors and the defeated Muslims who now became their subjects in a unified Christian Spain, the end of the War of Granada ushered in a new kind of confrontation that neither of them had really expected or prepared for. And in order to understand how that struggle unfolded, we need to look further back at the world that came to an end on that momentous winter’s day in 1492.
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 ele
ments 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 y
ears as vizier to the ruler of Granada.
Such tolerance was not constant or universal. In 1066 as many as three thousand Jews may have been massacred in Granada in a popular pogrom whose causes have never been clear. There was a great difference between the way Jews were treated in tenth-century Córdoba and their subsequent treatment under the stricter and more conservative Almoravids and Almohads during the taifa period, when they were discriminated against and sometimes obliged to wear yellow badges as a mark of their second-class status. But even under the most repressive Muslim rulers, there was no systematic attempt to eradicate Judaism or Christianity from Iberia. Nor was the Iberian Church subjected to the destructive onslaught described by the anonymous authors of the thirteenth-century chronicle Estoria de España (Chronicle of Spain):The sanctuaries were destroyed, the churches demolished, the places where God was praised with joy now blasphemed and mistreated. They expelled the crosses and altars from the churches. The chrism, the books, and all those things that were for the honor of Christianity were broken and trampled upon. The holidays and celebrations were all forgotten. The honor of the saints and the beauty of the church were turned into ugliness and vileness. The churches and towers where they used to praise God, now in the same places they called upon Mahomat.6
