Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam
Page 48
26. All these appear in E. Saavedra, “Discurso,” Memorial de la Real Academia de la Historia 6 (1889), p. 159.
27. See Document 14.
28. See Lea, Moriscos, p. 263.
29. Ibid., citing Relazioni Venete, serie 1, tom VI, p. 408.
30. The Moriscos in the capital itself had already been expelled in June 1569.
31. Lapeyre, Géographie, p. 125.
32. Domínguez Ortiz and Vincent, Historia, p. 58.
33. Ibid., p. 62.
34. He gave some thought to the problem of limpieza and concluded it was not an obstacle.
35. See Boronat y Barrachina, Moriscos, vol. 1, p. 634. The bishop proposed that these people without a land should be taken to a land without people: “Este gente se puede llevar a las costas … de Terranova, que son amplissimas y sin ninguna población.” That would finish them off and, to make sure (specialmente), there would be “capando [gelding] los masculos grandes y pequeños y las mugeres [the adult males and boys and the women].” This could be done in sequence, taking those from Valencia to one place, those from Aragon to another, those from Castile to another. These solutions have remarkably close echoes to book IV of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), where the Houyhnhnms debate the respective merits of exterminating or castrating the Yahoos. See Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, London: Folio Society, 1965, pp. 215 and 240.
36. “Informe de Don Alonso Gutiérrez acerca la cuestión Morisca, Sevilla 5 Sept. 1588,” cited in Boronat y Barrachina, Moriscos, vol. 1. p. 346.
37. Ibid., p. 627.
38. AHN Inq. Leg. 2603 I. Cited in Cardaillac, Moriscos, p. 62.
39. See ibid., p. 60.
40. See Maria Soledad Carrasco, El Moro de Granada en la literatura del siglo XV al XX, Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1956. The bulk of this was first published in English as “The Moor of Granada in Spanish Literature of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, NY, 1954.
41. See Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The Dialogue of the Dogs in Exemplary Novels, Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1992.
42. For a clear parallel, see Caro Baroja, Formas, p. 459.
43. Pedro Azanar Cardona, Expulsión justificada de los Moriscos Españoles y suma de las excelencias Cristianas de nuestro rey D. Felipe el Católico tercero deste nombre (Huesca, 1612), translated in Chejne, Islam and the West, pp. 177–8.
44. Boranat y Barrachina, Moriscos, vol. 2, p. 172.
45. Ibid., p. 189.
46. Ibid., pp. 192–3; expulsion decree, clauses 9–12.
47. See Lea, Moriscos, p. 391. Others suggest that these were not Moriscos but Muslim slaves or servants.
48. Sanchez-Albornóz, Spain, vol. 2, p. 1245.
49. “Popular imagination was so horrorstruck at these terrible events [the Ottoman successes in the Mediterranean and Balkans] that thereafter the word ‘Turk’ was substituted [in traditional village plays] for the old terms used to designate evil-doers and bandits who had formerly been termed the ‘Saracens’ or ‘Moors.’ ” See Georges Hérelle, Les pastorales à sujets tragiques considerées littérairement, Paris: Librairie Champion, 1926, pp. 108–9.
50. Marlène Albert-Llorca, “Le Maure dans les fêtes Valenciennes de Moros y Christianos,” in Musée de la Corse, Moresca, p. 341.
51. Harold Lopez Mendez, España desconocida: La Alpujarra, rincón misterioso, Madrid: n.p., 1967, p. 90.
52. I am very grateful to David Nirenberg for introducing this whole area to me. In a private communication, he contrasted the performances in the Spanish Holy Week celebrations with Moros y Cristianos. In Spain, certainly, Moros y Cristianos was a performance of the established and public order, reenacting ancient triumphs, and legitimating the nature of the victory. However, in my view, once outside the controlling dialogue in Spain, and where the traditional subject—or alien Other—had been removed, they could acquire a different, and subversive, potency.
53. See Harris, Aztecs, passim.
54. Calling for “thick description”? See Geertz, Interpretation, pp. 6–30.
Part Three
CHAPTER 7: TO THE HOLY LAND
1. This is different from the “national” history common to many societies. In Spain, two conflicting interpretations competed for the same native land. See Glick, Islamic, pp. 3–15, and Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. There is also a good chapter by Béatrice Caseau, “Sacred Landscapes,” in Glenn Bowersock, Peter Brown, and Oleg Grabar (eds.), Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 21–59.
2. See Anzulović, Heavenly Serbia, p. 22.
3. Many of the cities of the Levant and Anatolia had sites associated with the heroic early days of Christianity and were accordingly treated with reverence.
4. Recueil des chartes de l’abbaye de Cluny, cited in Dupront, Mythe, vol. 3, p. 1361.
5. The common Arabic term for the city, Al-Quds, refers to its sanctity. Later the sacred terrain was extended to the area immediately around the city to become the Holy Land, al-ard al-muqaddasa. After Saladin’s reconquest this latter term was used to include the whole “Holy Land,” roughly as Christians conceived it. See Hillenbrand, Crusades, pp. 301–2.
6. See Gil, History, pp. 622–6.
7. Jerome, Epistle 46:9: “Time forbids me to survey the period which has passed since the Lord’s ascension, or to recount the bishops, the martyrs, the divines, who have come to Jerusalem from a feeling that their devotion and knowledge would be incomplete and their virtue without the finishing touch, unless they adored Christ in the very spot where the gospel first flashed from the gibbet.”
8. Jerome, Epistle 108, which is the longest of his letters and where he describes Paula’s journey through the Holy Land.
9. Cited in Gil, History, pp. 285–7.
10. It has been estimated that it cost a year’s income or more to undertake a pilgrimage. See J. Sumption, Pilgrimage, London: Faber, 1975, pp. 169, 205–6.
11. R. Röhricht, Die Deutschen im Heiligen Lande: Chronologisches Verzeichnis derjenigen Deutschen, welche als Jerusalempilger und Kreuzfahrer sicher nachzuweisen oder wahrscheinlich anzusehen sind c. 650–1291, Aalen: Scientia-Verlag, 1968 (new edition of 1894 edition), cited in Gil, History, p. 483.
12. This is Sir John Keegan’s image, in our joint book Zones of Conflict, and I am grateful to him for it.
13. The Fatimid rulers of Cairo were Shia Muslims, but Al-Azhar always attracted students and teachers from the entire Muslim world.
14. There is a huge literature on the various patterns of belief in Islam, and I do not propose to define the differences here. I would suggest that they represented different tendencies in belief, political and social practice, within the overall framework of Islam that altered over time, sometimes leading to further divisions and subdivisions. Modern historians of Islam also emphasize the traditions of Sufi practitioners, the various dervish traditions, and “folk Islam,” which bonded local cults and practices into the faith. In addition, there were later ascetic traditions such as the Wahabis in eighteenth-century Arabia. For a clear outline see Lapidus, History.
15. Although sectarian issues played some part, Sunni rulers fought Sunni rulers with the same verve that they confronted the Shia ones.
16. This is from the fifteenth-century Kitat by Al-Maqrizi, cited in Elizabeth Hallam (ed.), Chronicles of the Crusades: Eyewitness Accounts of the Wars Between Christianity and Islam, Godalming: Bramley Books, 1996, pp. 22–5.
17. Gil, History, pp. 379–80. He notes that Al-Hakim may have regarded himself as the mahdi, “redeemer,” who had come to save and rescue Islam. Others simply considered him insane.
18. The history of this document is checkered. Carl Erdmann considered that it was contemporary with the destruction wrought by Al-Hakim. Later scholars, like Gieysztor, suggested that it was confected by the monks of
Moissac at the time that Urban II was promoting the First Crusade. However, more recently Schaller has reinterpreted the whole issue and considers it authentic. Regardless of its date, it indicates the horror with which the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre was greeted. See Erdmann, Origin, pp. 113–17; A. Gieysztor, “The Genesis of the Crusades: The Encyclical of Sergius IV (1009–1012),” Medievalia et Humanistica 5 (1948), pp. 3–23, and 6 (1950), pp. 3–34; H. M. Schaller, “Zur Kreuzzugsenzyklika Papst Sergius IV,” in H. Mordek (ed.), Papsttum, Kirche und Recht im Mittelalter: Festschrift für Horst Fuhrmann zum 65 Geburtstag, Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1991, pp. 135–53.
19. Marshall W. Baldwin, A History of the Crusades: The First Hundred Years, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1958, pp. 76–7.
20. See Gil, History, p. 487.
21. “The centrality of the bare scriptural word in liturgy, catechism and sermon receded before the elaboration of the church liturgical tradition. Thus the Word was available to the rank and file mainly through the evolved forms of the liturgy, biblical storytelling, or biblically inspired art, and much less, if at all, through substantial reading, recitation and study of the holy words themselves.” See Graham, Beyond, p. 120.
22. The only parable that lacks a sense of precise topography is where Jesus was tempted by the devil.
23. I am grateful to the Reverend David Batson for explaining the issue of relics to me.
24. See Cohn, Pursuit, pp. 64–5.
25. This is taken from the account of Urban’s Clermont speech by Robert the Monk from a work called the Historia Hierosolymitana. He was present at Clermont, but the text was written much later. I have used the online version, www.norton.com/nael/nto/middle/crusade/clermontfrm.htm.
26. Robert the Monk claimed to have been present on the day although he composed his version about a quarter of a century after Clermont, and with the Gesta Francorum (The Deeds of the Franks, written about 1100, an account of the First Crusade) before him. But the details unconsciously reveal Urban’s rhetorical skill and are thus convincing. See August C. Krey, The First Crusade: The Accounts of Eyewitnesses and Participants, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1921, pp. 33–6.
27. “This, made of any kind of cloth, he ordered to be sewn upon the shirts, cloaks, and byrra of those who were about to go.” See ibid., pp. 36–40.
28. According to Robert the Monk, when Urban heard his call to arms greeted with cries of “God wills it, it is the will of God,” he “gave thanks to God and commanding silence with his hand, said, ‘Unless God had been present in your spirits, all of you would not have uttered the same cry; since although the cry issued from many mouths, yet the origin of the cry is as one. Therefore I say to you that God, who implanted it in your breast, has drawn it forth from you. Let that then be your war cry in combat because it is given to you by God. When an armed attack is made upon the enemy, this one cry be raised by all the soldiers of God: “It is the will of God! It is the will of God!” ’ ”
29. Curiously, the anthropologist Roy Wagner, who coined the phrase “symbols that stand for themselves,” bypassed the cross when searching for the core symbol of the West. In fact it meets his needs much better than the Eucharist, which he selected. See Wagner, Symbols.
30. Cited by Dana C. Munro, Urban and the Crusaders: Translations and Reprints from the Original Sources of European History, vol. 1:2, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1895, p. 20.
31. They had conjured up the image of an infidel enemy who had to be defeated and destroyed whatever the cost. The first to suffer from this effusion of ferocious enmity were the Jews of the Rhineland towns. The pilgrims’ prime motives were theft and pillage, but underlying the savagery of their attack, which emerges in all the sources, Latin and Hebrew, was a hatred for a people who, like the infidels occupying Jerusalem, had denied Christ. More than a thousand Jews, men, women, and children, were killed in Mainz and many more in cities as far away as Prague which opened their gates to the pilgrims. When they passed on into Hungary on the road to the East, the pilgrims treated the local inhabitants as they had the Jews. In one village they impaled a young Hungarian boy who could not tell them where they could find food. See Runciman, History, vol. 1, p. 116.
32. See Runciman, History, vol. 1, pp. 106–7.
33. There were many foreigners in Byzantine service, most notably the Varangian Guard, composed first of Norsemen, and later of Normans. After 1066, many Anglo-Saxons left England and made a new life in the East.
34. Nor did the church approve of the massacres of Jews in the Rhineland by the popular Crusade. See Jacob R. Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World: A Source Book 315–1791, New York: Harper & Row, 1965, pp. 115–20.
35. Lyons, “Crusading Stratum,” pp. 147–61.
36. An Arab-Syrian Gentleman and Warrior in the Period of the Crusades: Memoirs of Us-amah ibn Munqidh, trans. Philip K. Hitti, New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, pp. 120–21.
37. Gesta Francorum, cited in France, Victory, p. 277.
38. The Church of St. Peter was being reconsecrated after its use as a mosque. Some doubted the authenticity of the relic but kept silent, because this manifest token of divine favor suddenly restored the spirits of the Crusaders.
39. Even the fresh horses that had been gathered along the way had mostly expired and been eaten.
40. Kerbogha’s army comprised many different detachments, including infantry spearmen and archers.
41. H. A. R. Gibb, The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades, Extracted and Translated from the Chronicle of Ibn Al-Qalanisi, London: Luzac and Co., 1932, p. 47.
42. Harold S. Fink, Fulcher of Chartres: A History of the Expedition to Jerusalem 1095–1127, Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1969, pp. 112–13.
43. Ibid., p. 106.
44. Cited in Hillenbrand, Crusades, p. 71.
45. For the images of Jerusalem, see Dupront, Mythe, vol. III, pp. 1361–4.
46. There are suggestions that a Crusader embassy was negotiating in Cairo for a Christian protectorate over the city, such as the Byzantines had previously exercised, and as Emperor Frederick II was to conclude in 1229 for a period of ten years.
47. See Runciman, History, vol. 1, pp. 226–7.
48. The often quoted statement that the Crusaders walked “up to their knees in blood” was a metaphor. The similarity between so many of the descriptions of killing and atrocity, notably in the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204 and then by the Ottomans in 1453, suggests that many of these statements are stylistic and not intended to be taken literally. See August C. Krey, The First Crusade: The Accounts of Eyewitnesses and Participants, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1921, pp. 257–62.
49. Gesta Francorum, cited by Elizabeth Hallam (ed.), Chronicles of the Crusades: Eyewitness Accounts of the Wars Between Christianity and Islam, Godalming: Bramley Books, 1996, p. 93.
50. See France, Victory, p. 356.
51. See Runciman, History, vol. 2, pp. 237–64.
52. For a good introduction to this topic, see Christopher Tyerman, The Invention of the Crusades, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. By the late eighteenth century, the future president of the young United States Thomas Jefferson had turned the word into a figure of speech, calling for a “crusade against ignorance.”
53. “A holy war fought against those perceived to be external or internal foes of Christendom for the recovery of Christian property or in defence of the Church or Christian people”; see Riley-Smith, Short History, pp. xxviii–xxix. There were attempts to limit this plenary power, and Marsilio of Padua was only the most notable figure who attacked papal misuse of this right to initiate a Crusade.
54. Meeting of the bishops at Narbonne, 1054, cited in Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. L. A. Manyon, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962, p. 413.
55. It was possible for a nation to be Islamic in belief but not under true and authorized Islamic rule. Thus rebels or Islamic enemies are often char
acterized as “apostates” (ridda) and falling outside the protection of the faith. On this topic see the references cited by Fred M. Donner in his article “The Sources of Islamic Conceptions of War” in Johnson and Kelsay (eds.), Just War, pp. 31–69. In their survey article “The Idea of the Jihad Before the Crusades,” Roy Mottahedeh and Ridwan al-Sayyid present convincing evidence that there was a multiplicity of interpretations for the lesser jihad. See Angeliki E. Laiou and Roy Parviz Mottahedeh (eds.), The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World, Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2001.
56. The concept of war to enforce this peace was criticized by Moulavi Cheragi Ali in A Critical Exposition of the Popular Jihad, Karachi: Karimsons, reprint of 1885 edition, n.d., pp. 157–9: “It is only a theory of our Common Law, in its military and political chapters, which allow waging unprovoked war with non-Muslims … The casuistical sophistry of the canonical legists in deducing these war theories from the Koran is altogether futile … Neither of these verses had anything to do with waging unprovoked war and exacting tributes during Mohammad’s time nor could they be made a law for future military conquest.”
57. That is, al-jihad al-akbar.
58. That is, al-jihad al-asghar.
59. See Peters, Islam, pp. 4–5. He goes on to make the more contemporary point: “Nowadays that image has been replaced by that of the Arab ‘terrorist’ in battledress, armed with a Kalashnikov gun and prepared to murder in cold blood Jewish and Christian women and children.” The popular film The Siege (1998), which depicts the United States traumatized by Arab terrorism in New York, is a powerful example of this tendency; the mass murders at the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, come into the same category as the killings in Jerusalem in 1099 in the history of atrocity.
60. See Johnson, Holy War.
61. The division between the Sunni and Shia branches of Islam in the seventh century had already created major divergences within Islam. Thus Shia scholars never accepted that interpretation was a closed issue.