Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam

by Andrew Wheatcroft

  Compostela was, Spanish Christians argued, the holiest site in Europe. Many north of the Pyrenees agreed with them. For at Santiago, in about 818, the remains of St. James had been miraculously discovered.7 Moreover, these bones turned out not to be those of the apostle James, as was first thought, but of another James: the brother of Christ himself. Thus, on Spanish soil, at the heart of the Asturian kingdom, constantly assailed by the infidel Muslims, was a saint’s body intimately related to the person of Christ himself. This was a relic more precious than any sliver of the true cross or one of the holy nails.8 Already in 822, at the battle of Clavijo, St. James had intervened when King Ramiro of the Asturias was losing against the Moors. Suddenly, a figure on a white horse appeared, and turned the struggle in favor of the Christians. He told the king that Christ himself “gave Spain for me to watch over her and protect her from the hands of the enemies of the faith.” This was the first appearance of Santiago Matamoros, St. James Moor Slayer. Thereafter he returned time and again to save Christian Spain from disaster.

  Thus for the Muslims to capture the saint’s remains would be an act of great audacity. In August 997, Al-Mansur and the army of Cordoba fought their way north to the city of Compostela, and the Christians were powerless to resist them. The shrine was deserted except for a single monk. Al-Mansur asked him why he had remained when all the others had fled. The monk said, “I am praying to Saint James.” The commander told him to pray in peace and set his own guard around him for protection. On the following day, Al-Mansur had the tomb razed “so effectively that on the morrow no one would have supposed that it had ever existed.”9 Yet the bones of the saint were left unmolested. “In due time Al-Mansur made his entry into Cordoba accompanied by a multitude of Christian captives, bearing on their shoulders the gates of Santiago’s shrine and the bells of the church. The doors were placed in the roof of the unfinished mosque and the bells were suspended in the same edifice to serve as lamps.”10

  Why had Al-Mansur left the bones of the saint undisturbed? In one sense the objects he had carried back with him in triumph were the symbols of Santiago’s power. The sound of Christian church bells, louder than the muezzin’s call to prayer, was deeply offensive to Muslims. In Islamic states, Christians were usually prohibited from using church bells. Thus, by taking the bells he had silenced the voice of the saint and stifled the summons to his shrine. The doors were symbolic of the sanctity and power of the church, and by hanging them in the mosque he neutralized the power of the saint.11 In a later generation, a ruler of Granada similarly debased a Castilian prince’s status: he had the skin of the prince, who had been killed in battle, stuffed with straw and suspended before the great gate of his palace, before consigning it to hang in perpetuity in the city’s largest mosque. Yet Al-Mansur did not attempt to disturb the remains of Santiago, and Christians said that such was the holiness of James and the power of his bones that even Al-Mansur had not dared interfere with them. The efficacy of the saint and his relics was proclaimed as even greater than before. This was all the more remarkable given that at Al-Mansur’s hands, according to an anonymous Christian author, “in Spain divine worship perished; all the glory of the Christian people was destroyed; the treasures stored up in the churches were plundered.” Al-Mansur himself “was seized … by the demon which had possessed him while he was alive, and he was buried in hell.”12

  Was it respect, or superstition, that had moved the “accursed” Al-Mansur at Santiago de Compostela? There is a case for preferring the former. Despite the Christian polemic, Al-Mansur was not a zealot. On the whole it was only fanatics among both Muslims and Christians who desecrated the shrines of the other castes.13 Muslims recognized both Jesus as a prophet and his mother, Mary, as a holy virgin. In some cases, Muslims and Christians used a shrine that attracted worshipers from both faiths. It was therefore quite consistent with Muslim practice not to disturb the bones of the brother of the prophet Isa (Jesus) while destroying the shrine above them. Indeed, during both the Emirate and the Caliphate of Cordoba, as already discussed, the instinctive practice of convivencia meant that Muslims, Jews, and Christians drew back from gratuitous insults to the other castes. The episode of the martyrs of Cordoba is the one striking example to the contrary.

  AFTER THE DEATH OF AL-MANSUR, IN 1002, THE CALIPHATE OF CORDOBA had less than thirty years to run, and its increasing failure presaged military revolt and a succession of short-lived rulers. One caliph lasted no more than forty-seven days. The caliphal palace at Madinat al-Zahra was sacked and pillaged by rebellious Berber mercenaries, while the even larger palace complex built by Al-Mansur for himself and his family, and called (confusingly) Madinat al-Zahira, was torn down stone by stone so that nothing survived. By 1031, the entire valley of the Guadalquivir had been laid waste; trees were uprooted and the fields were left unplanted.14 Local Muslim chieftains set themselves up as petty kings, known as reyes de taifas. Some of the largest kingdoms were centered on cities such as Seville, Granada, Badajoz, and Saragossa, but others were little more than a castle and its surrounding lands. Many of those close to the frontier with the Christian states of the north began to pay protection money (parias) to the rulers of Castile and Aragon in order to survive.

  For a little over fifty years, no central rule existed in Al-Andalus. Several of the petty kings sought to enjoy, albeit on a more limited scale, the good living that had formerly existed in Cordoba. The period of the taifas was an era of artistic efflorescence and rising consumption of luxury goods. Each little court vied with the next. Many of the statelets did not survive, their lands and palaces taken by their more powerful neighbors, their rulers quietly murdered. The Christian states exacted huge payments of protection money from the Muslim kingdoms, but in 1085 the king of Castile, Alfonso VI, instead of taking the bribes offered by the ruler of Toledo, took his city. However, he continued to exact payment in gold from more distant monarchs, such as the king of Granada. But Alfonso’s intent was clear. His envoy to Abd Allah, the ruler of Granada, was unambiguous: “Al-Andalus belongs to the Christians from the beginning until they were conquered by the Arabs. When you no longer have money or soldiers, we will seize the country without the least effort.”15 The Muslim kings, fearful of attack from the north after the capture of Toledo, sent messengers over the straits to North Africa to ask for help from the old Saharan warrior Yusef bin Tashfin, the Almoravid ruler of Morocco.

  The human flow back and forth across the straits had been ceaseless since the first conquest of 711. Berber traders, settlers, and mercenaries had always regarded Al-Andalus as a promised land. The Almorávides, however, were not like the stream of earlier arrivals.16 They emerged among the tribes of the Saharan fringe, where many of the men were veiled and women went barefaced.17 One of their common names was “the Wearers of the Veil.”18 Like other reform movements refined in the harsh conditions of the desert, they saw the world in a stark perspective, and dedicated their lives first to purifying themselves, and thereafter, Islam. As with the tribal Muslim armies of the first Arab advance in the seventh century, they proved a strong, flexible, and cohesive military force. By 1061, armies led by Yusef bin Tashfin had conquered the coastline from the Kabyle mountains in what is now Algeria to the Atlantic. In 1062 he founded a new capital at Marrakech, and united the lands from the great bend of the river Niger south of Timbuktu to the Atlantic in the west and the Mediterranean in the north. This was a powerful empire, dominating the trade routes into Africa, with large resources of manpower, and controlling the ports of the North African littoral.

  In 1085, while Toledo was under siege by the Castilians, the ruler of Seville, Al-Mutamid, appealed to Yusef bin Tashfin, who now styled himself “commander of the faithful”:

  He [the ruler of Castile, Alfonso VI] has come to us demanding pulpits, minarets, mihrabs, and mosques, so that crosses may be erected in them, and so that monks may ruin them … God has given you a kingdom because of your Holy War and the defence of His right, because of your endeavour … A
nd you now have many soldiers of God who through their fighting may win paradise in their own lifetime.19

  Although Yusef did enter Spain with troops, and defeated the army of Alfonso at Sagrajas, close to Badajoz, in October 1086, he had little desire to embroil himself in the affairs of Al-Andalus. He went back across the straits, and it was not until 1091 that he finally returned at full strength, after many appeals from the Muslim rulers, to resist the advance of Christian power. Thereafter until 1145, Al-Andalus was ruled from Marrakech as a province of the Almorávides.

  The capture of Toledo (plus the other advances by Alfonso VI, who raided as far as the walls of Seville) and the arrival of the zealot armies of the Almorávides were linked. After attacking Seville, Alfonso had ridden on to Tarifa, where the first Muslims had landed, and strode out into the surf. “This is the very end of Spain,” he declared, “and I have set foot upon it.” He wanted to make good his claim to be “emperor of all the nations of Spain.” The Christian “holy war” that began with Pope Urban II’s appeal for the First Crusade to the Holy Land in 1095 had its antecedents in Spain. Likewise, jihad—internal spiritual reform and external wars to advance the faith—which was the motive force of the Almorávides, was now echoed by parallel and contemporary developments within Christendom.20 Urban’s predecessor, Gregory VII, had encouraged Christians to fight in Spain on behalf of the papacy, which was seeking to extend its rights over lands once Christian but now held by infidels. Alfonso declined the opportunity to act as the agent of the papacy, and rejected the papal claims to power over Spain. He began to call himself emperor of all Spain (imperator totius Hispaniae). The reconquest of Toledo, the capital of the Visigoths, was a powerful restatement of the ancient claim of the Leonese and Castilian kings, the heirs of the Visigoths, to rule the whole peninsula.

  Toledo surrendered to Alfonso VI on May 6, 1085. The Muslims who remained in the city were allowed to keep all their property and to exercise their faith freely. Like Christians under Muslim rule in Al-Andalus, they paid a poll tax. There was much disquiet when the new bishop of Toledo and the queen, both French in origin, while the king was absent on campaign, ordered that Toledo’s main mosque should become the city’s new cathedral. But that mosque in turn had been built above an ancient Visigothic church, as had the mosque in Cordoba. Nonetheless, in the years after the Christian reconquest of Toledo, as in the first centuries of Muslim Spain, the Muslims who now came under Christian rule established a form of convivencia.21 Many scholars have seen this spirit expressed in the intellectual production that emanated from Toledo, much as Cordoba was earlier celebrated as a center of culture. Toledo also became home to many Mozarabic Christians fleeing from the harsher environment of Al-Andalus under Almoravid rule.

  A counterpoint to the image of this scholarly tolerance under Alfonso VI lies in the career of Rodrigo Diáz de Vivar, known as El Cid Campeador, or more simply as El Cid (the Lord). Rodrigo straddled two worlds. He grew up in the equivocal and ambiguous border terrain of the taifas kingdoms, and ended up in the new epoch of Crusade and jihad. He died in July 1099, within a week of the final Crusader assault and capture of Jerusalem, in the city of Valencia, which he had conquered. Even before his death, his valorous deeds had been written of in a Historia Roderici. The Poem of the Cid was composed at the beginning of the thirteenth century. “Cid” is a version of the Arabic sidi, a title of respect, and Rodrigo was honored by both Muslim and Christian alike. He and his men killed “the Moors” with gusto, calling on their patron saint, St. James Moor Slayer, as they did so. But the killing was a matter of business and not hatred.

  The Cid’s vassals dealt pitiless blows and in a short time they killed three hundred Moors. While the Moors in the trap uttered loud cries … the ever fortunate Cid spoke these words: “Thanks be to God in heaven and to all his saints. Now we shall have better lodgings for the horses and their masters … Listen to me, Alvar Fañez and all my knights. We have gained great wealth in capturing this stronghold; this many Moors lie dead and few remain alive. We shall not be able to sell our captives, whether men or women. We would gain nothing by cutting off their heads. Let us allow them to return to the town, for we are masters here. We shall occupy their houses and make them serve us.”22

  When finally the Cid retreated from this stronghold (after selling it to the Muslims from the neighboring towns for 3,000 gold pieces), “all the Moors were sad to see him go: ‘You are going, Cid,’ they said. ‘May our prayers go before you! We are well satisfied with the way you have treated us.’ ”23

  The Cid was presented as an ambivalent figure, who fought the Christian count of Barcelona, a Frank, with the same robust delight as he fought the Moors. In the poem, the Muslims are described simply as moros, without additional pejorative attributes. In battle, there is an equivalence between the adversaries: the “Moors called upon Mohammed, the Christians on St James.” Some Moors were craven, but so too were many Christians. The bulk of the poem deals with the treachery and spite directed at the Cid by his fellow Christians. The Cid described the Muslim governor of Molina as a friend with whom he lived in peace; and the governor gave the Cid’s men “a joyous welcome, saying, ‘Here are you, vassals of my good friend [mio amigo natural].’ ”24 Two generations after the poem was written down, elsewhere in Castile the Estoria de España, as we have seen, presented the relationship between Moor and Christian in terms that denied any possibility of amity.

  The Cid was a man of the frontier who, rejected by his king, could take other service, with Muslim or Christian. In the first third of the thirteenth century, this was still just possible along the frontier, but it was much harder for a man to live, like Rodrigo, in both worlds. In The Poem of the Cid, Rodrigo was presented more as a Christian knight and less as the frontier mercenary of history. Later still he became the epitome of Spanish manhood, a human avatar of Santiago.25 As Eduardo Manzano Moreno observed, relationships between Muslims and Christians across the frontier were very different from either the theories of Christian scholars and canonists or the prescriptions of Islamic jurists. Nothing should

  deny the existence of a difference, of an antagonism or a confrontation between the realms of Christianity and Islam in the Iberian peninsula. More or less continuously, more or less apparently, conflict did exist, and took a variety of forms throughout the eight centuries of Muslim rule. It is obvious that this strife produced frontiers, but it seems clear that these frontiers cannot be assessed by projecting present-day notions of borders on to the Middle Ages.26

  However, the life of the border in the era of the crusade in Spain, or the “Reconquest” as it came to be called, was different from what it had been in the era of the Cid, and in the centuries before.

  The capture of Toledo effectively began the Reconquest. The fall of Saragossa to the crusading army of Alfonso I of Aragon on December 18, 1118, meant the loss of Islam’s northern outpost. But the capture of Cordoba on June 29, 1236, was a decisive symbolic moment in the shifting pattern of Iberian history. Before Ferdinand III of Castile entered the walls of the city, he ordered that any who wished to leave were free to go, carrying all their possessions with them. Those who remained, it was also agreed, were free to practice their faith, but under Christian and not Muslim rule. For devout Muslims such a proposal was an abomination, and no doubt they formed the bulk of the refugees, some traveling south toward the coast to take ship for North Africa, and others southeast across the Guadalquivir and along the road to Granada. When the king entered the city, he went first to the Great Mosque, where he saw the bells of Santiago. In the words of the Castilian Primera Crónica General,

  On the feast day of the apostles Peter and Paul, the city of Cordoba … was cleansed of all filthiness of Muhammad and given up and surrendered to King Ferdinand. King Ferdinand then ordered a cross to be put upon the chief tower where the name of the false Muhammad was wont to be called upon and praised, and then the Christians all began to shout with happiness and joy, “God, help us!, and he [the
king] found there the bells of the church of St James the Apostle in Galicia, which had been brought there by Almanzor [Al-Mansur] … and placed in the mosque of Cordoba to the shame of the Christians; and there the bells remained until this conquest by King Ferdinand of the city of Cordoba … King Ferdinand then had these same bells taken and returned to the Church of Santiago of Galicia. Thus, the church of Santiago was once more happily adorned.27

  Moorish prisoners carried the great bells back to Compostela, where in the church rebuilt after Al-Mansur’s assault a space had been left for them. Once they were rehung, the deep voice of the bells sounded again to announce that St. James had again triumphed over the enemies of Christ.

  THAT MOMENT MARKED THE BEGINNING OF A NEW PHASE IN THE HISTORY of the peninsula. As we have seen, for most of the period from 711 until the late eleventh century Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived together mostly under Muslim rule. There were then few Muslims in the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain. But by the early thirteenth century, the bulk of Muslims and Jews were living predominantly under Christian dominion; this situation persisted until this second period of convivencia ended with the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, and the conversion by decree of the Muslims eight years later. The concept of living together characterizes both eras, but it unfolded under very different terms. By the mid–thirteenth century, Ferdinand III of Castile had occupied Seville and the whole valley of the Guadalquivir, and James I of Aragon had conquered the Balearic Islands, Valencia, and the little kingdoms to the south. Only the Kingdom of Granada remained a solid and coherent bloc of territory in Muslim hands.

  The majority of Muslims now lived under Christian rule, a situation that the laws and practices of Islam had never envisaged.28 For the purist, good Muslims could fulfill their duty to God only within a Muslim-ruled community. Yet from the thirteenth century Muslims lived permanently in all the five Christian Spanish kingdoms. Each state had its own approach to its Muslim and Jewish subjects, and each kingdom, and every local community within each kingdom, had its own framework of regulations and customs governing the relationship. The theoretical position advanced by Alfonso X of Castile in his ideal law codes, the Siete Partidas, encompassed the double nature of the Christian attitudes to the Muslims: