Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam
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The story of the Visigothic king echoed the biblical King David brought low by his passion for Bathsheba.10 The downfall of David in the second book of Samuel began with a prophecy: “The sword shall never depart from thy house; because thou hast despised me and taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be thy wife.” The Hebrew king’s lust brought down punishment upon himself and upon his people. In Spain, all the participants in the catastrophe were equally deep in sin. But the sins of the Christians had allowed an even greater evil—the Muslim invasion—to triumph. The conquest became an elaborate metaphor.
Spain … Her songs were forgotten and her language is changed into foreign and strange words. The Moors of the host wore silks and colourful cloths which they had taken as booty, their horses’ reins were like fire, their faces were as black as pitch, the handsomest among them was as black as the cooking-pot, and their eyes blazed like fire; their horses were as swift as leopards, their horsemen more cruel and hurtful than the wolf that comes by night to the flock of sheep.11
The chronicler’s commination grew more intense and dramatic as he warmed to his task. This physical, moral, and intellectual obliteration of a whole nation, he declared, grew from the inherent evil of Islam. The chronicler was specific: no depravity was beyond these enemies of Christ.12
This was also a history confected to provide a pedigree for the future monarchs of Christian Spain.13 Within these narratives the inborn depravity of the Moors elided with the moral failures of the Visigoths, and they become as one. King Roderick was no longer a true Christian, but became like a Moor in his uncontrollable lust.14 The supreme villain was Bishop Oppa, of the tainted royal line. Oppa had allied himself with the infidels, and sought to persuade a Christian hero leading a small band of patriots—King Pelayo—to submit to the Islamic horde. In the Chronicle of Alfonso III of the Asturias, written in the late ninth century, Oppa came to Pelayo in an icy cave at Covadonga, high in the northwestern mountains. The bishop tried to persuade him to yield. To this Pelayo replied scornfully.
“Have you not read in holy scripture that the church of God can become as small as a grain of mustard and can then, by the grace of God, be made to grow again larger?” The bishop answered: “It is so written.” Pelayo said: “Christ is our hope, that by this tiny hillock which you see, Spain may be saved and the army of the Gothic people restored. I trust therefore that the promise of the Lord may be fulfilled in us as it was announced through David … In the battle with which you have threatened us, we have our Lord Jesus Christ as our advocate before the Father, and He is powerful enough to save us few from them.”15
Pelayo’s contempt for the offer, his noble resistance, and his ultimate triumph led directly to the foundation of the Kingdom of the Asturias, and thence to the royal house of Castile. In this dreamworld of good and evil, Castile exemplified the true heritage of the “good” Visigoths. Roderick and Oppa shared the same blood, but they had lost their inherited virtue and honor through their depravity. They had become crypto-Moors. It was the kings of Castile who carried the honorable heritage of the Visigoths in their veins and it was invariably the Moors or Arabs who were the agency of evil. There were Muslims in these histories who behaved honorably, but these exceptions were used to throw Christian wickedness into a starker relief.
Often these connections between the mythic past and the domain of history are mere conjecture. But in the case of Bishop Oppa we know the popular resonance of the myth. Centuries after the conquest, in 1465, during a civil war in Castile, King Enrique IV was symbolically deposed at Avila by a group of dissident nobles. An effigy of the king was sat upon a chair. The act of deposition had been carried out by Archbishop Carrillo, who took the crown from the head of the king’s effigy; another noble took away the sword from its hand; and a third knocked the effigy headlong from the mock throne.16 The news of this event spread quickly throughout Castile. A few months later Enrique’s own soldiers were besieging the fortress of Simancas, and they put on a pageant to lampoon the events at Avila. But they did not give Carrillo his own name and title, but rather called him Oppa, eliding him with the archtraitor to Pelayo more than seven centuries before.17 By this analogy they made clear the depth of Carrillo’s treachery.
The running thread of evil in these narratives, sometimes on the surface but as often below, was the Moors. They were the trial and test set by God for his people, and they would be destroyed only by a virtuous and godly Christian king, a new Pelayo.18 Like the Jews, who were often seen as their surrogates and accessories, as they had been in the accounts of the fall of Jerusalem, the Muslims were evil incarnate. God used the Moors like a heavy flail to beat his people back to virtue.
WE NEED TO SET THE REALITY OF MUSLIM SPAIN AGAINST THIS ARTFULLY contrived Castilian propaganda. For almost 500 years—from roughly 720 to 1200—Muslims dominated most of the Iberian peninsula. They called it “Al-Andalus,” the land of the Vandals, and their numbers were reinforced at intervals by new waves of conquest from North Africa. But the Muslim conquerors were few in number—no more than 20,000 in the first waves—and thereafter provided only a thin veneer, rather like the Visigothic ruling class, set atop a large Catholic Christian population. But this Muslim layer was itself divided, between Berbers and Arabs. The Berbers were the native inhabitants of the mountain regions of North Africa, whose stubborn resistance had held up the Arab armies advancing from the east. The Berbers’ conversion to Islam was very recent, and many of their pre-Islamic customs were carried forward into their new faith. The Arabs, who traced their connections back to the ancient tribes of the Arabian peninsula, looked down upon the Berbers. It was no accident that the best land and the richest cities in Spain were allocated to Arabs, while the mountain zones and the poorest land were peopled by the Berber clans. This division, although obscured by the outward success of the Muslim governing institutions, was a constant and destabilizing force within the Islamic culture of Spain.
Islamic Spain appeared a strong and unified power, but this was only partly true. There were many fracture lines within the structure. Some were tribal, for the Arabs were always prone to quarreling among themselves. The Berbers were restive and often rebelled against Arab pretensions. And as soon as central authority diminished, the political units fragmented. Thus, over those five centuries there were only three periods of enforced unity and each was of relatively limited duration. The first was under the Emirate, which became the Caliphate of Cordoba in the tenth century. The second and third periods were under the domination of the Moroccan dynasties of the Almorávides and the Almohades during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.19 But these episodes were surrounded by long years of disunity and civil war. In this the Muslim state resembled the Christian kingdoms to the north, which were as prone to fighting against one another as against their putative common enemy.
Although the Muslim states called the entire peninsula “Al-Andalus,” the northern rivers Ebro and Duero soon formed the effective dividing line between Christian and Islamic rule. Faced with the impetuous advance of the Muslims, Pelayo’s small independent Christian statelet survived in the high mountains of northwest Spain. Myth traced an unbroken tradition of Christian rule from these Asturian mountains, where, as Edward Gibbon put it, “A vital spark was still alive; some invincible fugitives preferred a life of poverty and freedom in the Asturian valleys; the hardy mountaineers repulsed the slaves of the caliph.”20 In reality, the Arab columns had been more concerned to push forward across the Pyrenees into France than fight in the mountains. By 717, the Arabs were well established around the city of Narbonne, which they captured in 719. From their southern base, they sent out large-scale raids ever deeper into France until, at the battle of Tours in 732, a Muslim raiding army from Spain was thrown back by the Franks led by Charles Martel.21 In the history of France this event loomed large: “The men of the north stood as motionless as a wall; they were like a belt of ice frozen together, and not to be dissolved, as they slew the Arabs with the sword.”22 The victo
ry over Islam at Tours became in Western eyes an archetypal triumph, charged like the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 or Lepanto in 1571 with a deep symbolic meaning. But in reality, although these northern raids continued for some years after the conquest, the Muslims were content to consolidate their rule farther south. Much of the terrain north of the river line was barren and unproductive. It quickly became a no-man’s-land, dotted with towns and castles—some owing notional allegiance to a Christian king, others to the emir or caliph in Cordoba.
In these northern Spanish lands, the small nucleus in the Asturian mountains expanded eastward to become the Kingdom of Leon, with its capital at Oviedo. The border between Leon and the Muslim south was nicknamed “the land of the castles”—Castile—because it was an area where towers and fortresses populated the landscape. Eventually Castile became larger and more powerful than its parent, Leon. To the east of Castile was the Kingdom of Aragon, which began in the foothills of the Pyrenees and slowly expanded south and east toward the Mediterranean. There it confronted the Frankish County of Barcelona and the border Muslim Kingdom of Valencia. Over time these were incorporated into the patrimony of Aragon. By the mid–fourteenth century, Christian Spain consisted of five kingdoms: Portugal, in the west; Leon-Castile, straddling the center; the tiny Kingdom of Navarre, in part north of the Pyrenees and in part south; Aragon, including Catalonia; and formerly Muslim Valencia (conquered by King James I of Aragon in 1238), which occupied most of the Mediterranean littoral.
The cities and the most productive terrain were in the south and held by the Muslims: Cordoba and later Seville in the flat, fertile land around the river Guadalquivir, Granada with its Vega, growing almost every type of fruit, and the rich orchards and gardens (huerta) around Valencia, described by one writer as paradise.23 The Christian writers also praised their own lands as paradise, but with much less reason, for they possessed little of the superabundance of the Muslim south. Where nature required assistance, the southerners created elaborate systems of irrigation, much like those found in Syria or Egypt. Sun and flowing water made southern Spain one of the best agricultural areas of the known world. The focus of this wealth was the capital city, Cordoba, although all the urban centers, from Saragossa in the north, through Toledo in the heart of the peninsula, to the cities of the east and south, were filled with new buildings and rich possessions.
Much of this “Moorish,” or Islamic, building was created by Christians living under Muslim rule who were known as Mozarabes, meaning “Arabized.” In the first century of the conquest they formed a large majority in the Muslim cities, and in some parts of the countryside. Thus the population of Al-Andalus in the ninth century had four main elements: the Muslim conquerors, Arab or Berber; the Christian Mozarabes; and the Jews. The Mozarabes were descendants of the inhabitants of Roman Spain and the Visigoth invaders who had crossed the Pyrenees in the fifth century. When the Jews first came to Spain is shrouded in mystery. Some claimed that they first arrived at the time of Babylonian captivity in the sixth century B.C., others that they had migrated west after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. The first physical evidence of their presence is a Jewish woman’s tomb at Adra from the third century. The Jewish population suffered severe persecution under the Visigothic kings, so the Muslim conquest represented a release from oppression.
For the most part, apart from the occasional outburst of mutual antagonism, all managed to live side by side. Over the first three centuries of Islamic rule, many Christians converted to Islam and the cultures acquired characteristics in common, while still maintaining their distinct and separate identities.24 As in the Levant, where the Arab Christians became outwardly indistinguishable from the larger Muslim population, so too in Al-Andalus the superficial differences between the different groups diminished. Mozarabes and Jews often adopted Arabic, while the Berbers also abandoned their native dialects for it (apparently, though, retaining a Berber accent).25 Yet the communities remained distinct: they preserved their customs and observed their own laws.26 This was the unique and paradoxical Spanish accommodation to which Américo Castro later gave the name convivencia, “living together.”
Many of the varying interrelationships between Islam and Christendom (as well as Judaism) that played out later elsewhere first appeared in Spain. Yet because of the peninsula’s isolation below the Pyrenees, much of this experience has gone largely unnoticed. However, if we read the experience of Spain against the experience of the Balkans or the Levant, connections, parallels, and analogies begin to surface. Throughout the long history of Al-Andalus, there was a consistent quality that Ron Barkai has called the “enemy in the mirror.”27 For more than 300 years Andalusi Muslims lived with Christians and Jews in their midst.28 Then, during the Moroccan reconquest of Spain under the militantly Islamic Almorávides and Almohades tribesmen, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Christian and Jewish elements in Muslim Spain diminished rapidly. Andalusi Christians either converted to Islam or were forced to migrate north to the Christian lands.29 During those early centuries the model for living together worked well, except for those who wished to accentuate religious differences. But by the thirteenth century, when the principal Christian kingdom, Castile, pushed south to Cordoba, conquering the bulk of the once-Muslim states, convivencia was already moribund, or in many areas of Andalusia had ceased altogether. When the Christians returned to the south, they came as rulers, as the dominant rather than subordinate group. Granada to the east became the last wholly Muslim kingdom in Spain, and a refuge for all Muslims who did not wish to live under a Christian ruler. It quickly extinguished most of the traits of convivencia. But only in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries did a triumphalist Christian Spain move steadily toward expunging the non-Christian elements in her population.30
Nonetheless, regardless of Muslim or Christian dominance, the medieval peninsula comprised more than one culture. The fact of three communities, literate and cultivated, existing side by side within the same state was an accident of conquest, and caused infinite problems for both Islamic and Christian scholars, who consistently postulated an unbridgeable gulf between the two worlds. A late-fifteenth-century Muslim scholar from North Africa, al-Wansharishi, described the dangers his coreligionists in Spain faced living in a Christian land, among unbelievers:
One has to beware of the pervasive effect of their way of life, their language, their dress, their objectionable habits, and influence on people living with them over a long period of time, as has occurred with the people of Avila and other places. They have lost their Arabic, and when the Arabic language dies out, so does devotion in it and there is consequential neglect of worship as expressed in words in all its richness and outstanding virtues … Living with unbelievers is not permissible, not so much as for one hour a day, because of all the dirt and filth involved, and the religious as well as secular corruption, which continues all the time.31
Christian scholars expressed similar disgust for Muslims. If so much antagonism was expressed in both directions, how did convivencia once exist (and flourish) over so many centuries, and by extension, what caused it to end?
For Muslims and Christians alike the experience of living in close proximity to unbelievers was disquieting. The social customs of each group invariably sought to minimize contact with the people of other faiths. Each often spoke of the other in terms of fear and sometimes disgust. The regulations in twelfth-century Seville, under the influence of the austere North African Almorávides, stated that Muslim women
shall be prevented from entering their abominable churches, for the priests are evil-doers, fornicators, and sodomites. Frankish women must be forbidden to enter the church except on days of religious services or festivals, for it is their habit to eat and drink and fornicate with the priests, among whom there is not one who has not two or more women with whom he sleeps. This has become a custom among them, for they have permitted what is forbidden and forbidden what is permitted.32
While Christians
and Jews might be tolerated in Muslim lands, they were nonetheless to be shunned. The same regulations expressly stated that “a Muslim must not massage a Jew or a Christian nor throw away his refuse nor clean his latrines. The Jew and the Christian are better fitted for such trades, since they are the trades of those who are vile.” Moreover, “a garment belonging to a sick man [probably a leper], a Jew or a Christian must not be sold without indicating its origin; likewise the garment of a debauchee.”33 The reason for this restriction, as with all the others, was practical. All these contacts could cause defilement, all these physical encounters could cross the limit between what was permitted and what was forbidden.
Fears grew out of proximity, but not necessarily from direct experience. Fornicating priests (and Ibn Abdun, who wrote the Seville regulations, improbably insisted that all priests were fornicators) were a metaphor of what would happen when the social boundaries were breached, becoming a threat to Muslim and Christian women alike. Or worse still, a danger to the social order in general, for Muslim, Jewish, and Christian men all regarded women as a point of weakness and a source of peril. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas, writing of the proscriptions in the Jewish Pentateuch, observed,
Defilement is never an isolated event. It cannot occur except in view of a systematic ordering of ideas. Hence any piecemeal interpretation of the pollution rules of another culture is bound to fail. For the only way in which pollution ideas make sense is in reference to a total structure, whose keystone, boundaries, margins and internal lines are held in relation by rituals of separation.34
In this structure, religious designations—Jew, Muslim, Christian—delineated the boundaries. Without effective separation there was an uncontrollable risk to communal stability. Without prohibition there was a fear among Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike that the pollution barrier would be crossed. As in many societies, sexual transgression was both the most emotively charged and also the most immediate danger. The Muslim men of the law (ulema) observed the weakness of their own gender when confronted by women, and blamed women for the temptation. The desire for separation was found in each community, which saw the others as potentially dangerous. Yet the desire to keep apart was not necessarily an actively antagonistic or hostile attitude. The communities belonged to distinct and separate castes. The word “caste” is nowadays associated with Indian Hinduism. It was taken by the Portuguese to India in the sixteenth century and they used it to communicate—imperfectly—the complex social structure that they found there. But in the Iberian languages the word means “bloodline” or “clan”: sharing a common connection but also displaying profound differences. The pioneering Spanish philologist Ramón Menéndez Pidal, in his early-twentieth-century study of the development of the Spanish language, found that the concept provided a useful analogy to describe the many different elements which made up the linguistic culture of Iberia. Often nothing linked them in terms of ethnicity, but he saw them as separate “castes” within a common cultural framework, interconnected but also separate.35 This accords with more modern definitions of “caste”: a form of social division based solely on lineage that totally constrains a person’s way of life.36 For all these reasons, I have adopted the usage here.