Peace Be Upon You (26 page)

During the three decades of his reign, Alfonso was rarely popular, but he achieved his cultural goals. The teams he assembled produced a comprehensive history of Spain, illuminated manuscripts charting the stars, complicated musical scores, love poems, legal codes, and even a book dedicated to games, their rules, origins, and the best strategy for playing
them. These achievements earned Alfonso the sobriquet
el Sabio
, the Learned. His lust for learning won him the lasting admiration of scholars and academics, and they have repaid him with a favorable historical verdict. He cherished the arts, and his dedication to culture was extraordinary even compared with the later patrons of Renaissance Italy. But it was not just personal passion that motivated him. He was certain that the success of the new kingdom that his father had cemented depended on its unique fusion of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish history. If no effort were made to preserve and record that legacy, it would inevitably be forgotten. Alfonso believed that this would be more than a cultural loss. He feared that unless these elements were purposely woven into the fabric of Castile and Spain, the kingdom would decay. Detached from its history, it would wither and fade.

Alfonso turned the city of Toledo into the hub of his kingdom. In addition to being his birthplace, the town was blessed with an old and established intellectual community, including a considerable number of Jews. Like many of his predecessors, Alfonso employed Jews as his court physicians, and they also served as translators for a number of the works compiled at his behest. Jewish doctors tended to know the major languages needed to complete the project, and they were able to render Hebrew and Arabic into either Latin or Castilian. Usually, they worked as leaders of translation teams. That in itself had been standard practice in Spain for centuries, but the scale of Alfonso’s enterprise was much larger and required both more people and more organization.

Among the translations were a catalog of the known stars, Arabic books on the construction of clocks and on the proper manufacturing of measuring devices like the astrolabe, and a description of Muhammad’s night journey to heaven. No one seems to have objected that the man appointed to render the Arabic version of this sacred Muslim story into Spanish happened to be a Jew named Abraham of Toledo. Nor was it seen as odd that Abraham oversaw several other translations, including one in Latin and one in Castilian. Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Spain were both separate from one another and entwined with one another. They shared a common heritage, and no one, the Castilian king least of all, would have denied that.

Alfonso was intent on translating both Jewish and Muslim religious texts in addition to scientific treatises. Though he was not the first Christian in Europe to create a Latin version of the Quran—Peter the Venerable,
the twelfth-century abbot of Cluny had already accomplished that—he was almost certainly the only one to insist on translations of the Talmud as well. His motives here were decidedly mixed. He wanted to preserve the heritage of the Iberian Peninsula, but he also wanted to establish the superiority of Christianity. According to his nephew, he “ordered the translation of the whole law of the Jews, and even their Talmud, and other knowledge which is called the
qabbalah
and which the Jews keep closely secret. And he did this so it might be manifest that it is a mere representation of that Law which we Christians have, and that they, like the Moors, are in grave error and in peril of losing their souls.”
⁸

This ecumenical translation project was a prime example of cooperation, but there was competition and hostility as well. An implicit recognition of common roots and the undeniable reality of a shared culture was offset by animosity that occasionally flared into outright aggression. Jews served as advisers to Christian and Muslim rulers, and as their physicians were entrusted with their lives and bodies, yet laws limited how intimate contact could be. Each community had strict prohibitions against intermarriage, as well as harsh penalties for sexual contact. It is a truism that no community ever passes laws designed to prevent something that isn’t happening, and the intensity of these prohibitions is a sign of just how easy and how tempting it was to transgress. Even though each group lived in its own quarter, towns like Toledo or even cities like Seville had a small number of inhabitants by modern standards and people could not avoid interaction. The fact that so many people from each major group knew the languages of the others is itself an indication of how close relations actually were, even if sex was a line that was crossed only at great personal peril.

Alfonso’s reign, unfortunately, did not herald a new era of cooperation in Spain. Instead, it marked the apex of Spanish Christian tolerance. Religious freedoms and coexistence gradually gave way to intolerance. Laws restricting the activities of both Muslims and Jews became more common, even though they were erratically enforced. Jews were permitted to worship, provided that they did so quietly and without “speaking ill of the faith of Our Lord Jesus Christ” and without attempting to preach to Christians or challenge their beliefs. That presented a problem for Jews when they were summoned to local courts to engage in theological debates designed to show the superiority of Christianity. These debates were a cultural pastime, much as they had been in Baghdad centuries
before. The Jewish invitee, often a rabbi, had to tread the line between capitulating, which might anger the audience, and winning the argument, which might not only displease the audience but lead to legal jeopardy. Jews were rarely compelled to convert, because they were supposed to recognize their errors and come to God of their own free will. Until then, however, they were to be constrained in what they could do and how openly they could worship.

Muslims were treated in much the same way, but unlike the Jews, they were a majority of the population in the south, and remained so into the early fifteenth century. Converting the Moors became a preoccupation of the Spanish church, and as more land was redistributed and more Christians settled in what used to be Muslim Spain, Muslims began to convert or depart. Some Muslims, as well as Jews, hid their religion and after public conversion celebrated their old rites in secret. Scholars have long debated just how many Muslims and Jews went underground and practiced their religion in private even as they acted as Christians in public. But one result was widespread suspicion, even paranoia, in the Spanish church that Muslim and Jewish conversions were false. Beginning in the fourteenth century and gaining force in the fifteenth, this paranoia was enflamed by the office of the Spanish Inquisition.

The achievements of Alfonso notwithstanding, the contrast between Muslim and Christian Spain is startling. Muslim Spain saw long centuries of coexistence, interrupted by sporadic episodes of violence and brief periods of discrimination, much of which was not the result of tensions between Muslims, Christians, and Jews per se, but was simply an unremarkable aspect of medieval society. That Muslims sometimes punished or attacked the People of the Book is less significant than the fact that eruptions of violence between groups or between rival states were common and were as likely to occur within religious communities as they were between them. Christian violence toward other Christians and Muslim aggression against Muslims was ubiquitous. True, Jewish violence against Jews, except at an individual level, was rare, as was Jewish retaliation against Muslims or Christians—but that was because Spanish Jews never controlled the state and were always a small proportion of the population.

Christian Spain, however, did not cherish tolerance and coexistence. Instead, there was a culture of discrimination against Muslims and Jews, with only intermittent periods of harmony and cooperation. Under the
rule of Castile, Muslims were marginalized, disdained, and then targeted as aliens and enemies. Within a few generations after the fall of Córdoba and Seville in the thirteenth century, the tolerance that marked Alfonso’s realm and that had been a central element of Muslim Andalusia evaporated and was replaced by a zealous intolerance that demanded conversion and was often not satisfied even with that.

The hostility of Christian Spain to the Muslims and Jews grew even as the power of Castile increased. It cannot be explained as reaction born of insecurity. It wasn’t as though Castile and Christian Spain was attacked by a foreign power or was disintegrating within. Quite the opposite. The contrast with Islam is stark. Muslim society, from the outset, had been forced to think about the balance between Muslims and the People of the Book. Christian Spain followed a different path, as did Western Europe. Crusades against Muslims had gone hand in hand with the consolidation of Christian power. The success of Spanish Christianity, at least in the political sense, cannot be separated from war with Muslims.

The stronger Christian Spain became, the more intolerant it grew. Muslim Granada had been allowed to remain independent and then proved difficult to eliminate. Its conquest became a national fixation, and the monarchs of Castile and Aragon launched a crusade to capture it once and for all. By the time Granada finally fell in 1492, antagonism toward Muslims and Jews had reached a new peak. Secure in the recon-quest, the king and queen of Castile and Aragon, Ferdinand and Isabella, ordered the Moors and the Jews of Spain to convert or depart. While it took many decades to fulfill the edict, Spain became almost entirely Christian. Only the art and architecture that graced its cities remained as reminders of what once was.

What we are left with, then, is two very different histories. One is of a Muslim Spain that with notable exceptions rested on a foundation of coexistence and cooperation between the three faiths. The other is a Christian Spain that with few exceptions thrived because of a crusading ideology that rejected Muslims and Jews. The Spanish monarchs of the fifteenth century were convinced that both were a threat, and the campaign against them was given added urgency by what was happening on the other side of the Mediterranean.

In 1453, with a suddenness that shook Christian Europe, the last Christian empire in the Near East, the once great city of Constantinople, fell. Just as the Christian monarchs of Spain were achieving their
goal of cleansing the peninsula of Jews and Christians, a new Muslim empire emerged that had the will and the power to threaten the very existence of Christian Europe. Had that not occurred, the subsequent relationship between Muslims, Christians, and Jews might have taken a different path. Instead, it reinforced a belief, already prevalent in the Christian West, that Muslims were the enemy.

W
HEN THE END
finally came, it was a calamity. It was also meaningless. After more than a thousand years, the city of Constan-tine, the seat of the greatest empire Christendom had ever known, was occupied by a Muslim army. But by the time that Sultan Mehmed II, ever after known as the Conqueror, marched into the Church of Hagia Sophia, in the heart of Constantinople, Byzantium had long since ceased to be an empire in anything but name.

Mehmed came to power burdened with a substantial Oedipal complex. His father, Murad, had significantly enlarged the scope of Ottoman rule, and when Murad died in 1451, Mehmed succeeded him—for a second time. After victories over the Hungarians and the Serbs, Murad had abdicated in 1444, only to be recalled by the court when the teenage Mehmed, obstinate and disdainful of his father’s advisers, proved unable to govern effectively and unwilling to work with the vizier appointed by Murad to guide the young prince. Though there are no records recording what Mehmed felt at being installed and then abruptly shunted aside by his commanding father, it’s unlikely that he took it in stride. In portraits, his face defined by the long, sharp nose and the classic beard of an Ottoman prince, it is difficult to discern his character. But his later behavior suggests that he never forgave or forgot what his father had done, and Constantinople paid the steep and fatal price.

His father had won almost every confrontation with almost every adversary that the Ottomans faced, but one prize eluded him. Constantinople had been taken exactly once, in 1204, but not by Muslims. The Venetians had done what no other power had accomplished—not the
Slavs, not the Huns, not the first wave of Arab armies to emerge in the seventh and eighth centuries, and not the Seljuk Turks in the eleventh. For fifty years after the brutal sack of Constantinople in 1204, the Latins ruled the imperial city, and the Byzantine emperor sat in exile. In the middle of the thirteenth century, the imperial family returned, but hardly in triumph. For the next two hundred years, Byzantium was more a name and a legend than a real power capable of determining what went on in the eastern Mediterranean or the Balkans. Controlling only a few thousand square miles of land, the latter-day rulers of a once-mighty empire watched helplessly as the Ottomans sealed them in their city.

Though Byzantium had shrunk and its emperor was reduced to a man in robes barely able to raise five thousand men to defend the city’s ramparts, it remained a potent symbol as the last relic of Rome. For that reason alone, it was a target worthy of young Mehmed’s ambitions. And even with a handful of defenders, the walls of the city and its strategic placement between the waters of the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus represented a formidable challenge to any adversary that wanted to take it. Siege technology was not advanced enough to breach the ramparts. From the heights along the water’s edge, a few defenders could destroy ships that attempted a landing. Some of Mehmed’s predecessors had tried to take the city and had failed, even with numbers on their side. Constantinople was weak, but it could still defend itself.