Twelfth- and thirteenth-century Spain is one of the crucibles of history. The philosophical glories of Ibn Arabi confronted the puritan Almohad reaction, and the puritans won. The multicultural Islam of Andalusia confronted the renaissance of Christian power and lost. While the philosophical tradition never disappeared, it became less significant, and while the puritan tradition never fully triumphed, it became more dominant. Throughout the Muslim world, similar developments took
place. There had always been considerable pockets of intolerance and animosity, whether toward the People of the Book or toward new ideas, but these had only occasionally had the upper hand. If the balance had been in favor of openness and inquiry before the twelfth century, it shifted the other way after. The inclusiveness of medieval Baghdad and Andalusia gave way to exclusivity. Flexibility was replaced by rigidity. And champions of orthodoxy, who had never had much success in the Muslim world, were increasingly able to silence dissent.
the cycles of history and
the christian reconquest
TO A CONSIDERABLE DEGREE
, these reactions went hand in hand with a change of political fortunes. In Iberia, the Christian kings of Castile, Aragon, and Portugal were becoming more powerful at the expense of Muslims. In the Near East, the Crusaders had shown just how easy it would be to conquer weak and divided Muslim city-states. Then, in the thirteenth century, wide swaths of Iran and Iraq were conquered by the Mongols. The Abbasid caliphate was swept away, and the last caliph was executed. In Turkey, the Seljuk Turks were decimated by another central Asian invader, Timur the Lame, more commonly known in the west as Tamerlane.
For the first five centuries of Muslim history, the story had been one of military, political, and cultural dominance. Suddenly, the tide was reversing, and Muslims suffered defeat upon defeat. Before, the only time Muslim states were overthrown was by other Muslims. Now, pagans, animists, and Christians seemed to be crushing one Muslim dynasty after another.
One response was to close ranks and try to recapture the formula that had brought Muslims their success. This was not nearly as self-conscious or systematic as the reaction to Western power that gave rise to the fundamentalist movements of the twentieth century. But the pattern is similar: Muslims responded to the challenges by looking back and turning inward, hoping against hope to reclaim the early glories of Islam’s past.
This pattern did not go unnoticed by at least one astute contemporary observer. Writing in the fourteenth century, Ibn Khaldun was a North African version of Gibbon and Herodotus who attempted to
describe the forces of history that had resulted in the world as he knew it. His theory of Muslim history was that success had always been the product of a tight-knit tribal culture. The first example was the Arab tribes of Mecca and Medina, led by Muhammad. They were bound by strong ties that created what Ibn Khaldun called
asabiyya
, which translates as “group cohesion” or “communal spirit.” The cohesion of the Arab tribes was the product of ethnicity and ideology. The rigors of desert life hardened them, and the intense faith of early Islam bound them. As a result, they were able to erupt from the desert and obliterate what should have been two formidable adversaries—the Byzantines and the Persians. By the second and third generation, the piety and discipline that had generated such strength began to dissipate. The new conquerors moved to cities. The Umayyads became a dynasty and built palaces in Damascus. They took on the airs of royalty. No longer hardened by the desert, they became soft and corrupt. By the third generation, they were ripe for defeat, and were in turn supplanted by another group whose
asabiyya
was strong, the Abbasids. And then the cycle started again.
Ibn Khaldun believed that this pattern explained Muslim history. A tribe bound by ties of family and faith is forged on a desert anvil and then sweeps away an established empire. That tribe then creates a state, and decay sets in. Soon, cohesion gives way to selfishness, greed, and hierarchy, which leads to decadence and makes the group weak. Ibn Khaldun saw the emergence of the Almohads and Almoravids as the latest example of a pattern that had been occurring for centuries, and they did indeed fit his thesis. But later critics of Ibn Khaldun noted that they may have fit it too well. Reared in what is now Tunisia, Ibn Khaldun was acutely aware of the tension between desert tribes like the Berbers and the more settled cities along the Mediterranean coast. He knew how frequently tribes had emerged either from the mountains or the fringe of the Sahara to overthrow the established dynasties centered in cities such as Marrakesh and Tunis. But however well that described the history of North Africa, it was less true of the Near East and beyond. For Ibn Khaldun, however, the theory explained not just Muslim North Africa, but the entire history of Islam.
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The strength of his analysis far outweighed the weaknesses. He did what all great historians have done: he identified a pattern that shed light
on why things happened as they did. The tribal element fused with a strong faith did give groups such as the Mecca-Medina Arabs, the Seljuk Turks, the Almohads, and others a unique strength. It also characterized a new force then emerging in the Muslim world, a Turkish tribe named after its putative founder, Osman, that became known as the Ottomans.
Much as Ibn Khaldun would have predicted, the zealous North African dynasties who conquered Andalusia began to run out of steam. Challenged in Morocco by Berber tribes and in Andalusia by the Christian kings of Aragon and Castile, they at first held their ground and then rapidly lost it. Córdoba fell to King Fernando III in 1236; Valencia (which had once seen Muslims and Christians serving together in its army) fell in 1238; and Seville surrendered after a siege that lasted from the end of 1247 until November 1248. By the middle of the thirteenth century, all that remained of the once-powerful Muslim kingdoms of Spain was the small enclave of Granada in the southeast, guarded by a ring of mountains on one side and the sea on the other. The kingdom of Granada would survive for two centuries, the last, lonely bastion of Andalusian Islam. In return for a hefty annual tribute to the Christians, Granada remained a Muslim state, but it was isolated. Its rulers turned their palace complex into a monument to past glories, and just before it fell at the end of the fifteenth century, the Alhambra was completed. It was a testament to what Muslim Spain had been—an architectural marvel combining the most sophisticated elements of Christian and Muslim art and engineering, its walls a mass of inlay, its courtyards hushed and cool even in the heat of summer, with only the soft melody of fountains breaking the stillness.
Where Ibn Khaldun dispassionately wrote of the natural rise and fall of dynasties, the capture of Seville and Córdoba in the thirteenth century was interpreted by the Christians of Spain as a validation of their faith. The crusading spirit animated the royalty of Castile, León, and Aragon, and the resounding defeat of the Muslim kingdoms ushered in a new era of Christian triumphalism on the Iberian Peninsula. The Muslims recognized that the shift was significant, and the capture of Seville, in particular, was seen as a catastrophe. Assessing the change in fortunes, one Muslim poet described the collapse as the inevitable decay of all human endeavors, and though he may have strived for detachment, his pain was all too evident. “Everything declines after reaching perfection,”
he wrote, “therefore let no man be beguiled by the sweetness of a pleasant life.” All past empires had fallen, and the fate of Seville was no different, except that for him, it was.
Where is Cordoba, the home of the sciences?
Where is Seville and the pleasures it contains, as well as its sweet river overflowing and brimming full?
They are capitals which were pillars of the land, yet when the pillars are gone, it may no longer endure!
[We]… weep in despair, like a passionate lover weeping at the departure of the beloved, over dwellings emptied of Islam that were first vacated and are now inhabited by unbelief
In which mosques have become churches wherein only the bells and crosses may be found.
O you who remain heedless though you have warning in Fate; if you are asleep, Fate is always awake.
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Outside of Spain, the conquest of Andalusia save for Granada did not shake the Muslim world in the same way that the fall of Jerusalem had. The Iberian Peninsula had always been at the outermost edge of the community of believers, and had been the scene of back-and-forth wars for almost half a millennium. But to the Muslims of Spain, the reversal of the thirteenth century was a calamity from which they never recovered. Unlike the fall of Jerusalem, the surrender of Seville and Córdoba did not spur other Muslim states to organize and launch a counterattack. The Christian triumph was not only decisive; it was permanent.
The Christian victories changed the nature of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish coexistence. For hundreds of years, the three had lived in Spain, but mostly under Muslim rule. The conditions of coexistence had been determined by Muslims, first by the Cordoban caliphate and then by different city-states. While Christians had ruled Muslims and Jews in the north of the peninsula, they had not made much of an effort to develop a governing philosophy. After the fall of Seville and Córdoba, that changed. Christians found themselves in the position of administering a large population of Muslims and a small but economically important community of Jews. In time, the demographics changed, but for most of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Christian overlords
depended on a passive and productive Muslim population for revenue, farming, trade, soldiers, and stability.
At first, the governments of Castile and Aragon treated the conquered Muslims and Jews much as the Muslims had treated the People of the Book. When the coastal port of Valencia fell to the soldiers of Aragon in 1238, its Muslim inhabitants were forced to leave the city with only those possessions they could carry. They had committed the unforgivable sin of resisting, and they paid a steep price—but not the steepest. They were granted safe passage, which was one indication that the Christians were not secure enough or strong enough to depopulate and resettle all of Andalusia.
More common were treaties with the local population guaranteeing the same freedoms of movement and worship that the Muslims had granted the People of the Book. For instance, the king of Aragon promised the Muslims in the vicinity of Valencia that they would be able “to make use of waters just as was custom in the time of the Saracens. And they may pasture their stock in all their districts as was customary in the
time of the pagans [Muslims] Christians may not forbid preaching in
their mosques or prayer being made on Friday… but the Muslims are to carry on according to their religion.” Muslims could still determine local laws, and their own judges could decide all issues of marriage, estates, and contracts. In addition, Muslims were given the right of free passage by land or by sea and were not to be forced to pay extra tariffs or taxes.
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With the change of regimes, there was a considerable amount of land redistribution and new settlement of Christian knights on formerly Muslim estates. Most of that came at the expense of the defeated Muslim nobility and did not take the form of outright seizures from local farmers or peasants. Instead, Christian lords replaced Muslim lords as the recipients of taxes and tithes.
Initially, Christians were humbled by the victory they had achieved. They recognized the Muslims of Andalusia as a worthy adversary, and they shared with them the peculiar intimacy that comes with years of war. Christian writers simultaneously condemned Islam and praised Muslims. “If we wish to consider the nobility of the Muslims,” wrote one, “who can be unaware of the many kings, princes, and noblemen who have arisen from among them?”
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Crusading fervor had helped turn the
tide, but once the goal of reconquest had been achieved, Christian rulers appropriated the system that the Andalusian Muslims had created, and their culture as well.
The first Christian king to rule in peace over this new world was Alfonso X of Castile. Unlike his warrior father, Fernando, who had brought the great cities of Muslim Spain to their knees, Alfonso inherited a stable kingdom that had recently vanquished its enemies. War had defined Castile, but now an administrator was needed. On that score, Alfonso’s record was mixed. He was not a meticulous soul, and he had little enthusiasm for administration. That may be one reason that so much of the existing order was maintained. To do anything different would have required energy and innovation. Alfonso possessed both, but no interest in applying them to either war or bureaucracy. To the joy of scholars and poets, Alfonso had one obsession. He loved literature, music, and history, and he dedicated his court and its considerable resources to their preservation. Over the course of a thirty-two-year reign, beginning in 1252 and ending in 1284, he did his best to rival the cultural output of Baghdad and Córdoba. And his best was very, very good.
An early sign of Alfonso’s predilection was the tomb he erected for his father. Though he had fought by Fernando’s side during the siege of Seville, Alfonso’s design for his father’s sepulcher was more literary than martial. It included inscriptions in Latin, Arabic, Castilian, and Hebrew in honor of the four cultural streams that had converged because of Fernando’s efforts.
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Soon after Alfonso was crowned, he gathered the greatest minds of Spain to his court to work on a plan of breathtaking scope. He wanted to create a written monument to Spanish culture—its history, literature, poetry, astronomy, music, philosophy, law, mathematics, and of course, religion. His intent was to leave a compendium of human knowledge that could be read in Castilian and that would include the seminal texts of Muslims, Jews, and Christians. It was not only an ambitious undertaking; it was an expensive one as well, and not everyone shared his conviction that it was worth the price.