Though Alfonso took part in the conquest of Seville by his father, Ferdinand, in 1248, he insisted that the inscriptions on Ferdinand’s tomb should be written in Latin, Arabic, Castilian, and Hebrew. The “emperor of culture” also commissioned a team of researchers and scientists to translate some of the major works of Iberian Islam into Castilian. Jews, Muslims, and Christians all contributed to the extraordinary intellectual adventure of the Toledo “translation school” in a community of scholars for whom the quest for knowledge transcended religious divisions. For centuries, Iberia constituted the frontier zone between Islam and Christendom, and as in many frontier regions, physical proximity and familiarity allowed for cultural transmissions, influences, and exchanges that were not always possible elsewhere.
This cross-fertilization can be found in the fusion of Mozarab and Mudejar architectural styles and motifs, in the fashion for Moorish silks and kaftans among the Castilian nobility, in the Arabic recipes compiled for the kings of Valencia, and in the popularity of Moorish music in Christian society. Christian rulers often employed Moorish musicians and dancers to entertain their courts, and Muslim musicians were also invited to Christian churches to enliven long Easter vigils, to the horror of the ecclesiastical authorities. The Moorish and Christian musicians joyously playing music together in the beautiful illustrated song cycle
The Canticles of Holy Mary
of Alfonso the Learned testify to a blurring of cultural boundaries that often shocked medieval Christian travelers to Spain. In 1466, León of Rosmithal, the Baron of Bohemia, described a visit to a Castilian count at Burgos where he and his entourage were entertained by “beautiful damsels and ladies richly adorned in the Moorish fashion, who in their whole appearance and in their eating and drinking followed that fashion. Some of them danced very lovely dances in the Moorish style, and all were dark, with black eyes.” The Czech traveler found a similar Moorish influence at the Castilian court itself, whose king Enrique IV he reported indignantly “eats and drinks and is clothed in the heathen manner and is an enemy of Christians.”
15
Enrique was criticized for his pro-Moorish sentiments by Spanish chroniclers, such as Alonso de Palencia, who called him an “enemy of the faith, passionate toward the Moors.” But the blurring of the cultural boundaries between Moorish and Christian Spain that bewildered foreign visitors did not necessarily mean that conflict and animosity were absent. Castilian nobles who liked Moorish silk or commissioned Moorish musicians to entertain them were perfectly able to fight the Muslim enemy on behalf of the faith. But if Muslims, Christians, and Jews regarded each other with hostility, incomprehension, and even revulsion, they were also obliged for long periods to live, work, and worship alongside each other and to accept each other’s presence as a permanent fact of Iberian life. At certain times, they were able to interact with each other in ways that may still have positive lessons for the present. And if such coexistence fell short of the premodern arcadia of religious and cultural pluralism that some historians have imagined, it was considerably more tolerant than the new order that followed its final collapse.
2
The Victors
León of Rosmithal’s confusion and disgust at the “heathen” influences on the Castilian court reflected a wider suspicion among European Christians of the complicated and ambiguous relationships established between Muslims and Christians in Iberia. In a medieval world that was increasingly obsessed with establishing clear lines of demarcation between faiths and absolute conformity within the Church itself, the proximity of Christians and Saracens in Spain and the blurring of the external boundaries between culture and religion that sometimes resulted from it in terms of dress, language, and behavior was not viewed favorably. These relationships were to some extent made possible by Spain’s geographical and political isolation from the rest of Europe. Even at the height of Muslim power, Spanish Catholicism always maintained its spiritual connections to the Roman Church, but these ties were often frayed, and Spanish churchmen were obliged by their situation to make compromises that were unimaginable elsewhere.
Even with the advent of the Reconquista, when the Church began to recover its political power and its dominant position in the peninsula, the clergy had to take into account an Iberian reality whose requirements were not necessarily in accordance with what was taking place beyond Spain’s borders. Crusading popes might call on Christians to drive the Saracens from the Holy Land, but it was not always possible to carry out a similar policy in Spain itself, where Muslims were often essential to the local economy within Christian kingdoms, and Christians who lived outside them were at risk of similar treatment. The Christian rulers of Spain always presented the Reconquista as a sacred enterprise on behalf of Christendom as a whole, but there was often a gap between rhetoric and practice. When James the Conqueror completed the Christian conquest of Valencia and Murcia, he was urged by the pope and by some of his own bishops to “exterminate the Saracens” in his newly acquired territories. “Exterminate” did not necessarily mean killing, since the Latin word
exterminare
also included the notion of expulsion, but the Aragonese king was not able to comply with these demands without losing the population that tilled and harvested the fields and provided essential revenue to the Crown itself.
The treatment of Jews was often subject to similar constraints. Even when Jews were being subjected to increasing persecution elsewhere in Europe, Christian rulers in Spain continued to extend official protection to their Jewish subjects—with the reluctant approval of the Church. But Iberian tolerance was always more fragile and conditional than it seemed. And as Spain became more closely integrated into the rest of Christendom, its treatment of Jews and Muslims was increasingly susceptible to developments beyond the Pyrenees.
From the eleventh century onward, the Latin Church entered a prolonged period of political and spiritual crisis, in which the fear of internal schism and the loss of papal authority was accompanied by an increasingly ferocious obsession with heresy. The medievalist historian R.I. Moore has described the evolution of Western Christendom in this period into a “persecuting society” in which “deliberate and socially sanctioned violence began to be directed, through established governmental, judicial, and social institutions, against groups of people defined by general characteristics such as race, religion, or way of life: and that membership of such groups in itself came to be regarded as justifying these attacks.”
1
In 1209, the Papacy unleashed a savage internal crusade against the Albigensian (Catharist) heresy in southern France that bordered on a war of extermination. Following the elimination of the last Cathar strongholds in 1229, a papal Inquisition was established in Toulouse to eliminate its survivors, and its activities spilled over into northern Spain and Catalonia, where some Cathars had fled persecution. The Papacy’s obsession with schism and the internal “defilement” of heresy was matched by a renewed determination to establish clear boundaries between Christians and non-Christians. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council ordered Jews and Muslims throughout Christendom to wear distinguishing clothing in order to eliminate the possibility of “damnable mixing” with them. These regulations were applied in Iberia, though as was often the case, they were not universally enforced or observed.
Spain was also drawn more closely into the orbit of Latin Christendom through the establishment of the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and the emerging cult of Saint James Matamoros (Slayer of Moors) from the eleventh century onward. The pilgrimage route brought increasing numbers of Christians into Spain even as it enhanced the spiritual importance of Spain itself within Christendom. The promotion of the cult of Saint James owed much to the efforts of the Benedictine abbey of Cluny in southern France, whose twelfth-century abbot Peter the Venerable authored two influential tracts on the “Saracen heresy” that were specifically intended for a Spanish readership. The powerful Cluniac abbots were fervent advocates of the Crusades, and their close links to the Christian rulers of the Reconquista, as well as their key role in organizing and facilitating the hugely popular Santiago pilgrimage route, provided another conduit through which European hostility toward the Saracens entered Spain.
The militancy of the Latin Church in the later Middle Ages coincided with a period in which Iberian Christian rulers achieved a series of spectacular conquests over the Moors, and the momentum of the Reconquista appeared unstoppable. Unlike Islam, the Christian treatment of Muslims and Jews was always a pragmatic concession rather than a permanent religious obligation; it was driven primarily by the desire to ensure reciprocal treatment for Christians living in Muslim territory and by the economic benefits that both Muslims and Jews brought to Spain’s underpopulated kingdoms. As Christian power became effectively unassailable and the Christian population once again became a majority in Iberia as a whole, the situation of the Muslims who lived under Christian rule became more precarious. In the second half of the thirteenth century Mudejar rebellions in Andalusia and Valencia were bloodily suppressed and followed by sporadic but vicious anti-Muslim pogroms.
But the most dramatic indication of Spain’s transformation was its changing treatment of Spanish Jews. In the early Middle Ages, Jews had been so favored by Christian rulers in Iberia that many European Jews came to regard Sefarad—the Hebrew word for Spain—as their natural homeland. Spain was never entirely immune to the outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence and official repression that spread throughout Europe in the aftermath of the First Crusade, but conditions for Jews in Christian Iberia were nevertheless sufficiently benign to attract Jewish immigrants from Europe and also from the more discriminatory rule of the Almoravid and Almohad
taifa
states. In theory at least, Jews were protected from persecution by Christian rulers, who valued their administrative and financial prowess, and Jews within Christian courts were sometimes able to rise to high positions that were unimaginable elsewhere in Europe. By the late Middle Ages, Spain became the home for the largest Jewish population on the continent, and Iberian Jews had more reason to feel optimistic about their future than many of their European co-religionists.
All this began to change from the late thirteenth century onward, as Spain was affected by the militant Catholicism spreading through Europe and the hatred that converged on the “Christ-killing” Jew. Where the early medieval Church had once been prepared to engage with Judaism to some extent, theologians and preaching friars increasingly denounced the “perfidious Jew” and demanded that Jews convert to Christianity or be excluded from Christian society. In Spain, as elsewhere in Europe, these calls found a receptive audience amid the catastrophic plagues, famines, and civil wars that ravaged the country during the fourteenth century, culminating in the horrors of the Black Death. Jews were often selected as scapegoats for these disasters and accused of poisoning Christians while remaining immune themselves. Popular anti-Semitism was sharpened by resentment at the positions achieved by some Jews at the upper levels of Christian society. And in the last decade of the fourteenth century, these sentiments produced an outpouring of hatred and violence that was to transform the relationship among all three faiths.
In 1391, these emotions burst brutally to the surface of Iberian society when an Andalusian priest named Ferrán Martínez delivered a series of vicious anti-Jewish sermons in Seville. Roused by Martínez’s rantings, a Christian mob descended on the Jewish quarter and slaughtered many of its inhabitants. This pogrom unleashed a firestorm of violence across Spain, as Christian mobs burned Jewish houses and synagogues, and thousands of Jews were killed or forced to become Christians in order to save their lives and property. “Wail, holy and glorious Torah, and put on black raiment, for the expounders of your lucid words perished in the flames,” lamented one survivor of these massacres, who wrote in his father’s Torah scroll how “For three months the conflagration spread through the holy congregations of the exile of Israel in Sepharad. . . . The sword, slaughter, destruction, forced conversions, captivity and spoliation were the order of the day.”
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During the next two decades, tens of thousands more Jews chose to convert to Christianity to avoid persecution and threats of further violence. These converts became known as
conversos
,
judeoconversos
, or “New Christians” to distinguish them from “Old” Spanish Christians who were neither of Jewish or Muslim ancestry. Though the ecclesiastical and secular authorities condemned the violence, they were unable to hold back the hot tide of hatred that coursed through many Spanish towns and cities in those years. Nor were they willing to reverse its consequences. After much debate over the theological validity of conversions imposed through violence and coercion, the Church declared these baptisms legitimate and effectively gave its retrospective sanction to what the mob had begun. The Christian authorities also made their own contribution to the conversion process. In 1412, Isabella’s English mother, Catherine of Lancaster, the regent of Castile and León, ordered Jews and Muslims to cease all economic and social contact with Christian society and confine themselves to their specified ghettoes on pain of death or the confiscation of their property. These “laws of Catalina” followed pressure from the Avignon Papacy and the fiery Valencian monk Saint Vicente Ferrer (1350–1419), a member of the Dominican “dogs of God,” who called for converted Jews to be separated from their co-religionists in order to ensure that they did not waver from their new faith.