Samuel was succeeded by his son Joseph, who tried to maintain the legacy of the father but could not. The Berber princes of Granada were never secure for long. Rivals from within and marauders from outside were a constant challenge, and court life was precarious. Joseph attracted enemies not just because he was a Jew, but because he had influence. He was targeted, just as the prince he served was targeted. Factions that were on the out used whatever weapons they could find, and the fact that Joseph was Jewish was adroitly exploited by his enemies. If he had not been Jewish, his rivals would have tried to defame him in other ways. They would have whispered to the prince that he had a secret agenda, or ill-gotten gains, or designs on one of the prince’s wives. Instead, they seized on the fact that he was Jewish and used it to their advantage.
The most effective and vicious of his enemies was Abu Ishaq, who had fallen out of favor and got his revenge by bringing Joseph down. According to Abu Ishaq, the prince had made a mistake because he had
chosen an infidel as his secretary, when he could, had he wished, have chosen a Believer. Through him the Jews have become great and proud and arrogant—they, who were among the most abject…. And how many a worthy Muslim humbly obeys the vilest ape among these miscreants. And this did not happen through their own efforts but through one of our own people who rose as their accomplice. Oh why did he not deal with them, following the example set by worthy and pious leaders? Put them back where they belong and reduce them to the lowest of the low, roaming among us, with their little bags, with contempt, degradation and scorn as their lot, scrabbling in the dunghills for colored rags to shroud their dead for burial.
As for Joseph, Abu Ishaq concluded,
He laughs at us and at our religion and we return to our God. Hasten to slaughter him as an offering, sacrifice him, for he is a fat ram and do not spare his people for they have amassed every precious thing. Break loose their grip and take their money…. They have violated our covenant with them so how can you be held guilty against violators. How can they have any pact when we are obscure and they are prominent?
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The result of this campaign was disastrous. Joseph’s palace was raided by a mob. He was dragged out, beaten, and crucified. Hundreds of other Jews in positions of prominence in Granada were then subject to days of terror and death.
It is almost impossible to revisit the massacre of the Jews of Granada in 1066 without seeing it as evidence of the inherent animosity between Muslims and Jews. It sorely tests the idea that there is any substance to the Quranic injunction about fair and tolerant treatment of the People of the Book, and for later generations, it has been easy enough to draw a line from Muhammad and the destruction of the three Jewish tribes of Medina through Granada in 1066 to the conflict between Muslims and Jews in the twentieth century.
Doing this, however, distorts the past. It is a lens formed by the bitterness and hatred of our present. It is easy to scour the past and find examples of conflict—if that is what one wants to find. Granada happened in 1066; the massacre of the Banu Qurayza happened in 627. But many other things also happened, and those episodes of extreme violence perpetrated by Muslims against Jews were few and far between. Four hundred years separated Muhammad and the massacre of Granada, and it would be hundreds of years more before another such event. There was nothing common about this type of treatment, not when compared to the routine persecution of Jews in Europe during these centuries and not when contrasted with the centuries during which Jews flourished commercially and culturally, often working with Muslims and for Muslims, and in the case of Samuel the Nagid, even ruling Muslims.
THE SHIFTING SANDS
RELATIONS
between the People of the Book in general, and between Muslims and Jews in particular, comprised a matrix. One quadrant was defined by violence and yes, hatred. But there were others, ranging from
disdain to grudging respect to active cooperation for a common goal. Usually, that common goal involved the pursuit of knowledge and the task of translating the philosophy and wisdom of the ancient world. But there was also pedestrian cooperation between Christian and Muslim farmers in Andalusia, who often celebrated each other’s holidays and prayed side by side. Everyone needed to have good harvests, and a Christian saying the prayers of a Muslim or a Muslim intoning the liturgy of the Christians would help guarantee that the rain would fall, the lands would be irrigated, and the grain would be reaped.
To identify moments of violence and call those more true and more representative warps the past beyond recognition. History becomes polemic. It would be just as egregious to portray the golden age of Córdoba as typical of how Muslims and the People of the Book interacted, but that distortion is less common, either in the contemporary West or in the Muslim world.
Isolating and highlighting moments of interfaith violence also distorts in other ways. Relations between
all
adversaries—regardless of religion—were ugly and violent. Muslims fighting other Muslims were no less brutal with one another than Muslims such as Abu Ishaq were toward the Jews of Granada. The warring states of Andalusia in the eleventh century were frequently ruled by Berbers who had built up centuries of resentment against the Arab elites. Their armies, in turn, were often staffed by a mix of Arabs, Berbers, and Christian mercenaries, and when they took a rival city, especially after a long siege or difficult fighting, they could be merciless and wanton. The Muslim Berber prince who sacked Córdoba at the beginning of the eleventh century allowed his troops to expiate the rage and shame of having been treated as uncivilized men of limited intelligence by an arrogant Arab aristocracy. They burnt the palace; they destroyed the library; and they massacred the city’s inhabitants. Such treatment of conquered peoples did not happen frequently. It was more typical to terrorize, loot, and rape. But the behavior of the Berbers was not beyond the pale.
Muslims and Christians were rarely more charitable with each other. While massacre was atypical, it did happen. The shifting border between the Christian kingdoms of León and Aragon in the north and the Muslim city-states of Andalusia in the central and southern portions of the peninsula meant that at any given time after the tenth century, some Christian king was fighting some Muslim prince. The reason that massacre
was the exception and not the norm had little to do with morality. Massacre as a policy was impractical and would have been the medieval equivalent of nuclear war. Soon enough, each side would have decimated the other. There would have been no one left to conduct trade or grow crops. Instead, Christians and Muslims in Spain worked out a system of organized slavery and equally organized ransom procedures. This was one way of making the loser pay, literally, while avoiding the depopulating effects of killing one another in large numbers.
At times, these conflicts were cast in religious terms, but that doesn’t mean that they were fought because of religious differences. A Muslim prince would occasionally declare that his struggle against the Christians was akin to the early conquests of the companions of Muhammad, and that the cause was a holy war. For their part, Christians sometimes framed the reconquest of Spain and Portugal as a war spurred by the church and demanded by fealty to the cross. But because alliances often transcended religion, and because the political landscape shifted so frequently, it was more common for wars to be fought without clear religious ideology. Berbers from North Africa competed with Berbers who had lived in Spain for centuries, who in turn fought with Arabs, and in their efforts to unseat one another, they allied with Christian rulers who could provide money and soldiers. No one seems to have thought that such alliances violated an unwritten boundary between the faiths.
The kaleidoscope of coalitions could be dizzying. In the middle of the eleventh century, for instance, the Muslim ruler of Toledo signed a treaty with the Christian prince of Navarre for help against the Muslim city of Guadalajara. The price was steep, and included a large payment of gold. In turn, the Navarre Christians were given the right to harvest a portion of the crop of Guadalajara, if the city was captured. In response, the Muslim elites of Guadalajara concluded a treaty with the Christian king of León-Castile, and those soldiers then sacked Toledo. The Muslims of Toledo responded by sending emissaries of their own to the king of León, who demanded a large sum of gold from them in return for breaking his initial treaty and switching sides.
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During these battles, both Christians and Muslims prayed to God for aid. The irony that they were praying to the same God surely escaped them. However, the cosmopolitan Muslims of Andalusia, as opposed to their Berber allies in North Africa, were usually uncomfortable describing conflict with Christians as a holy war. That must have been a deliberate
choice. In the other parts of the Muslim world, the Shi’ite conquerors of Egypt and Tunisia claimed that their wars against the Sunni Abbasids were a manifestation of God’s will, and the Berber tribes of North Africa and Morocco united behind the banner of Islam. In contrast, the Muslims of Andalusia rarely used doctrinal differences to justify war against Christian enemies. Aggressive Christian princes wanted to remove Muslims from Spain and annihilate them; that was reason enough to fight.
In addition, for both Christians and Muslims passions could dissipate as quickly as they formed. At the end of the eleventh century, the Muslims of Toledo might have described their war against Christian León as a holy one, but then they might have been attacked from the south by another Muslim principality, looked to León for help, and quickly dropped the holy war concept. It has always taken some effort to get men to kill one another, and shouting holy war was one way to motivate soldiers; ordering them to bang their shields with their swords was another. The goal in either case was pre-battle frenzy. Holy war was more often a tactic rather than a strategy, and it would be a mistake to apply to the Muslims and Christians of eleventh-century Spain the ideological passions we associate with the early twenty-first century.
It wasn’t long, however, before something happened that shifted the balance in Spain and led Christians to think in terms of holy war. The principalities of what would later become France and Germany had regular contact with the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain, and as the eleventh century progressed, they became more involved in the contest between the Christian north and the Muslim south of the peninsula. As Andalusia fragmented, the Christian states of Aragon and of León and Castile became more powerful, winning battle after battle and acquiring territory. They developed closer relations with princes in southern France, and in the process, fell under the influence of a monastic order centered in Cluny
The Benedictine order of Cluny was founded early in the tenth century. At a time when the organization of the church could be charitably described as anarchic, the monks of Cluny were disciplined, focused, and intent on imposing order. The array of fiefdoms in France, northern Italy, and Christian Spain had always been chaotic, but with the breakdown of the Carolingian system, established by Charlemagne, the situation became much worse. It may be a cliché that nature abhors a
vacuum, but it is also true. And in that wilderness of the late tenth and eleventh centuries, the Cluniacs filled the void.
Acting as a mini state, Cluny sent envoys to the kings of León and Castile and funded the establishment of satellite monasteries in northern Spain. As the wealth of the Cluniacs grew, so did their power. Bishops were appointed from their ranks, and these bishops looked to the order for guidance. The order, in turn, favored rulers who at least gave lip service to the church. That meant framing battles and campaigns against the Muslims as divine acts, sanctioned not just by the church but by God. Alfonso VI, king of León, was particularly adept at fusing his family’s dynastic ambitions to expand into Muslim Iberia with the rhetoric of a holy warrior, and he established close relations with the Cluniacs.
The rise of Christian power in Spain corresponded with the decline of Muslim unity, but victors rarely credit their foes’ weaknesses as a reason for success. Both the church and the state interpreted their hard-won victories as a sign of divine favor, and as a testament to their skill as warriors and rulers.
Had it been left to the inhabitants of the peninsula alone, the Christian reconquest probably would have been completed by the end of the eleventh century rather than dragging on until 1492. But the vigor and zeal of the combined kingdom of León-Castile provoked a counterreac-tion. Since the Muslim conquest, Berbers who had settled in Spain had maintained close contact with their brethren across the Strait of Gibraltar. At the same time that Cordoban power disintegrated, a dynasty emerged in the Atlas Mountains of present-day Morocco. Called the Almoravids, they established a base at the new city of Marrakesh, and fanned out north and west until they reached Ceuta on the Mediterranean. Then, sometime after 1085, they crossed into Spain and confronted not just the forces of León’s Alfonso VI, but also Muslim rulers in cities such as Seville. Though the Almoravids suffered the occasional setback, challenged not just by the tenacity of Alfonso but by the quirky brilliance of the mercenary warrior known as El Cid, before the end of the century they had created a new dynasty stretching from Marrakesh to the middle of Spain.
The only problem, at least for those Muslims, Christians, and Jews that fell under their rule, was that the Almoravids abhorred the cosmopolitan
live-and-let-live attitudes that had characterized much of Cor-doban history. They were puritans intent on restoring what they believed was the lost piety of early Islam. They roused their followers to fight against injustice and for righteousness in the path of Islam, and they viewed the decline and collapse of the Muslims of Spain as a sign of divine displeasure. Muslims had strayed, and God had punished them by giving the Christians the upper hand. It was the duty of the Almoravids, and of all Muslims in Spain, to cleanse the community, rid it of impurities, and reverse the tide.
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