The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History. Maria Rosa Menocal
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political ties of what are now southern France and northern Spain (the latter far from completely reconquered or Christianized) shows clearly the extent to which the citizens of the area of Languedoc were in intimate contact with and tied to the fronterizo and the still strongly Arabized world of the late eleventh century. During the lifetime of William of Aquitaine the two societies were contiguous, and the interrelations between the two worlds, which we are scarcely justified in seeing as fundamentally separate, were remarkable. A rough sketch of their political history alone tells a story that reveals much. The county of Barcelona, which remained largely in Arab hands until well after the period of the first troubadours, spanned the western Pyrenees to include areas that in modern times separate France from Spain. Saragossa, for example, was not captured until 1118. The kingdom of Aragon was nominally Christian at the turn of the twelfth century, but many of its cities remained Muslim for some time. Even those that were in Christian hands had been so only for a very short period of time. Huesca, for example, had only been recaptured in 1096.
William was thus born and raised in Christian territory more than just randomly or sporadically involved with its Andalusian and semi-Andalusian neighbors. And the record of William’s direct ties with the culture of the muwashshaḥas and of his own society’s life in the limelight of al-Andalus leaves little or no doubt that the birth of Provençal troubadour poetry occurred at a time and place when the Arabic world and its culture were of immediate fascination and importance. Toledo, already an important seat of learning and translation, was conquered in 1085, and what followed in the wake of that Christian military victory was a victory of far greater proportions for Arabic learning, the virtual explosion of cultural material from al-Andalus to all points north.
In 1094, two years before the Aragonese city of Huesca was captured, William had married Philippa of Aragon, and his fascination with the most distinctly Arabized, polyglot and culturally polymorphous society of the reconquered territories was well noted at home—and little to be wondered at, given the tastes and proclivities nurtured earlier in life. It was not the first, nor would it be the last, occasion on which he would enjoy the considerable benefits of the rich court life, the learning, the music and singing that had already made Córdoba a byword for an unimaginable abundance of such wealth and were soon to make Toledo the best-known gateway to at least certain parts of that wealth. William, like his fellow Aquitainian Gerbert before him, had many advantages and previews of what was to come, since his personal ties with the fronterizo world were already intimately established when he married the Aragonese princess. One of his sisters had married Pedro I of Aragon, and yet another had married none other than Alfonso VI of Castile, the same Alfonso who had not only captured Toledo but had proclaimed himself “Emperor of Spain and the Two Faiths.”
In 1095, the year after his marriage, the First Crusade began. William followed it to the Holy Land in 1100, when Jerusalem had already fallen. He remained there for several years (the years for which there is the clearest documentation of the virtually complete acculturation of the crusaders to Arab ways, though few of them, of course, had the advantages William had had). Back in Europe, a William who is described by his contemporaries as both restless and bored with traditional Christian society, who was twice excommunicated by the Church for ambiguous departures from orthodox Christian behavior, who was reviled by contemporary Christian chroniclers as an enemy of “modesty and goodness,” and who was by now as familiar with the prodigious cultural wealth of both Palestinian and Andalusian court life as any Christian monarch of his lifetime could hope to be, this same William began to write the courtly lyric poetry that was to make him the father of the courtly vernacular lyric of Europe.
William interspersed this period of cultural fertility and innovation with a number of crusading excursions to Spain, including one, in 1119, as part of a broad-based alliance that attempted to turn back the fundamentalist Almoravids, who had invaded al-Andalus in 1091. While that campaign was successful (William himself was apparently present in 1120 at the defeat of the Almoravids at Cutanda), the war was ultimately lost and the magnificent library of Córdoba burned.
Such circumstances witnessed the birth, or at least the definitive molding, of the Provençal lyric that was to become the focal point, from a Europeanist’s perspective, of the courtly and lyric culture of medieval Europe. And for the next several generations of troubadours, the cultural ambience would be far from removed from the kind of knowledge of Andalusian culture William had had. The courts of Barcelona, Aragon, and Castile maintained their wealth of Andalusian trappings, reinforced by refugees seeking havens from the fundamentalist reforms taking place in al-Andalus, and these same courts were the often-visited havens of some of the best-remembered troubadours: Guiraut de Borneil, Arnaut Daniel, Peire Vidal, Marcabru, Raimbaut d’Orange, and Peire d’Auvergne. Perhaps, in part, they appealed so to these men for the same reasons that such a world of cultural symbiosis and richness, of artistic diversity and promise, had appealed to the first of their school, William. It was a world described succinctly and affectionately by Raimon Vidal:
Totas genz, Cristians, Jusievas e Sarasinas, meton totz jorns lor entendiment en trobar et en chantar. (Frank 1955:186)
One of the first and most basic problems encountered in an attempt to reimagine the cultural texture of this period is that many of the terms we must and do use can often be quite misleading. Foremost among these is the term “Islam” when it is used to denote the cultural entity that flourished principally in Spain and Sicily but that was also a significant force far beyond the geographical and temporal limits of its political boundaries. The term Islam has most commonly been used to denote that entity because it is the name of the religion under whose impetus military expansion initially brought it from the Middle East to Europe. It is also used in opposition to the term “Christian,” which in Robertsonian and neo- or pre-Robertsonian views of the Middle Ages is assumed to be the cultural and intellectual force that strictly dictated and delineated the parameters and texture of both intellectual and artistic activities. As such, both terms are part of the general terminological apparatus that denotes an insurmountable separation between the two entities and that relegates to the category of non-European most of what is Islamic.
Such a perspective can be seriously misleading, however, because among other things it implies an identity between the religion and the cultural entity that, in terms of the way al-Andalus interacted with the Latin-Romance culture of the rest of Europe, was very often not perceived or was not the primary identification made. Its analogy would be of failing to distinguish, when dealing with the Middle Ages, between what is Latin (or Romance) and what is Christian, with the resulting misapprehension of the non-Christian cultural and intellectual strains and texts that are written in Latin (or in a Romance language).
But the problem is neither merely terminological nor due exclusively to the relative lack of sophisticated knowledge we tend to have about Islam and the Arabs in medieval Europe. It is also the case that there is much debate among scholars who are specialists (as well as among Arabs and Muslims who may not be scholars) on the question of the relationship between what is Arabic and what is Islamic. In any area of research where the distinction is potentially relevant, conflicting opinions on the nature of the relationship between these two terms almost invariably surface. All that one can say without much fear of contradiction is that Islam and Arabic culture are not necessarily identical and that at different times and in different places, the nature of the relationship has varied. At least this much can and should be said about their relationship in the Middle Ages in Europe: On the one hand, many different racial and ethnic groups were and became Spanish Muslims; on the other, the Arabic language became the prestige language for many who were not.
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