Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines. Simon Barton
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al-Raḥmān’s plans soon unraveled. Shortly after he reached Toledo he was forced to abort the expedition when bad news reached him from Córdoba: the city had been taken over by a group of Umayyad conspirators on 15 February 1009; the caliph Hishām II (976–1013) had been deposed and replaced by the leader of the rebels, Muḥammad b. ‘Abd al-Jabbār al-Mahdī; and the palace at Madinat al-Zāhira, which had been built by al-Manṣūr, had been sacked. Given these multiple setbacks, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān opted to return south, but support for his cause soon began to crumble, and he was deserted by his Berber mercenaries. Leaving the women of his harem at his palace at Armilāṭ (Guadalmellato), to the north of Córdoba, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān fled with Count Sancho and a force of only 50 horsemen, with the intention of escaping north. However, he was tracked down by supporters of the new caliph Muḥammad and killed, along with the count, at a nearby Christian monastery on 5 March 1009. The women of his harem were sent back to Córdoba.101
It seems clear enough that, like his father and brother before him, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān had sought an early military success against the Christians as a means to win personal prestige and thereby shore up his political authority at home. Whether he further attempted to emphasize his dominance over the Christians by engineering a marriage alliance with a Leonese princess, in this case Teresa Vermúdez, in the same way his father al-Manṣūr had done when he had sought the hand in marriage of Sancho Garcés II’s daughter—‘Abd al-Raḥmān’s mother—is unknown but by no means implausible. ‘Abd al-Raḥmān’s own status as heir to the caliphate and his Christian background on his mother’s side might also have helped to seal a peace deal. According to Ibn ‘Idhārī al-Marrākushī, one of the arguments that had been employed by ‘Abd al-Raḥmān when he persuaded Hishām II to appoint him his heir was to remind him that they were both born to Navarrese mothers.102 This might explain why it was later claimed by Christian writers, such as Lucas of Tuy (d. 1249), that the Muslim king had “pretended to be a Christian” and had sworn to provide military support to Alfonso V.103 Conversely, one of the accusations flung at ‘Abd al-Raḥmān by his enemies within al-Andalus was that he was not a proper Muslim at all.104 It is also noteworthy that Toledo was ‘Abd al-Raḥmān’s main base of operations during the campaign against the Christians in 1009 and that after the Umayyad palace coup, faced by large-scale opposition to his authority, he apparently intended to make the city his power base from which to launch a counterattack against the rebels in Córdoba. The importance that he attached to the city can be seen from the fact that, once he had been forced to suspend the campaign and return south toward Córdoba, he sent a letter to the citizens of Toledo urging them to show loyalty to the caliph Hishām II. Subsequently, Count Sancho is said to have advised ‘Abd al-Raḥmān to escape north and ally himself with Wāḍiḥ, the governor of the Middle March, whose chief city was Toledo.105 All this might explain the otherwise opaque comment by Archbishop Rodrigo Jiménez (d. 1247) in his De rebus Hispanie that the “king of Toledo” sought a political alliance with León against Córdoba.106
We cannot prove categorically that ‘Abd al-Raḥmān “Sanchuelo” was indeed the “pagan king” to whom Teresa Vermúdez was betrothed. Other plausible candidates present themselves, such as the Umayyad pretender Muḥammad b. ‘Abd al-Jabbār al-Mahdī, who, when ousted from Córdoba by Sulaymān b. al-Ḥakam b. Sulaymān in 1010, briefly took refuge in Toledo, or even one of the various notables who sought to establish themselves as independent dynasts in Toledo in the years immediately after the fall of the caliphate.107 What is entirely conceivable, however, is that at some point during the first decade of the eleventh century—at a time when the entire edifice of the Umayyad state was beginning to totter and when the Leonese monarchy’s own grip on power was uncertain—Alfonso V, or the nobles who wielded power on his behalf, might have sought to broker a marriage alliance with a Muslim potentate, just as other hard-pressed Christian kings had done in the past. Equally, one can quite imagine why a leading Muslim with designs on the caliphal throne, like ‘Abd al-Raḥmān “Sanchuelo,” keen to reinforce his own power and prestige, might have embraced such an alliance. Even if Bishop Pelayo’s account clearly contains some fantastical elements, it is unlikely to be a complete fiction.
Be that as it may, one is bound to question why the Christian royal dynasties chose to enter into such interfaith marriage alliances, when the Church had traditionally preached against sexual mixing of this kind. We have seen that at the ecclesiastical council of Córdoba in 839 the assembled clerics had been at pains to denounce interfaith marriage, but if similar edicts were issued at church councils held in the Christian-dominated territories to the north of the Peninsula no record of them has survived.108 It is entirely possible that the Muslim conquest had so utterly disrupted the apparatus of church government in the North that pastoral guidance for the laity, of the kind that had earlier been provided at regular church councils under the Visigoths, was in notably short supply. It was equally the case that prior to the eleventh century papal contacts with the bishops and churches of the Peninsula, as in most of the Latin West at this time, remained limited in the extreme. There is little evidence that any of the popes took an interest in the spiritual welfare of their Iberian flock, let alone that they voiced any concerns about the practice of interfaith marriage.109 As Bishop Arnulf of Orléans pithily declared at the synod of Rheims in 991, “Spain knows nothing of papal decisions.”110
Probably even more important than this, the decidedly weak political and military position in which the Christian monarchs found themselves for much of the tenth century, during which time the North was subjected to a series of devastating raids by Umayyad armies, probably meant that at times they had little room for maneuver when Muslim rulers demanded Christian brides as the price of peace.111 In the circumstances, interfaith marriage alliances may have represented an indispensable means to achieve both peace and dynastic survival. Besides, Christian monarchs were not slow to recognize that kinship ties with the Umayyad dynasty could bring their own advantages. Thus, when Sancho I of León (956–66) was deposed from the throne in or around 958, reputedly because he was too obese to mount a horse and lead his nobles to war, he sought assistance from his grandmother Queen Toda Aznárez of Navarre. The queen promptly led a delegation to Córdoba to the court of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III, to whom she was related through her mother Onneca’s second marriage to the Umayyad emir ‘Abd Allāh. As a result of her intervention, the caliph undertook to provide Sancho with the military reinforcements he desperately needed in order to regain his throne, as well as the services of the caliph’s Jewish physician Ḥasdāi b. Shaprūṭ to help him shed his excess weight.112
By marked contrast, it is notable that very few Muslim women are known to have crossed the frontier in the opposite direction and taken Christian husbands. True, a number of the female members of the Banū Qasī are recorded to have married prominent Christians, such as Urraca, daughter of ‘Abd Allāh b. Muḥammad (d. 915–16), who was married off to King Fruela II of León (924–25).113 But in this the family may have constituted something of a special case, in that it was only relatively recently Islamized—which may have prompted the clan to play fast and loose with the strictures of Islamic law regarding mixed marriages. Moreover, the family’s peculiar geopolitical position, sandwiched between several competing powers, apparently led it to be far more pragmatic in its marriage policy than was the case in other regions of al-Andalus. For the most part, however, it appears that cross-border marriages between Muslim women and Christian men occurred only in exceptional circumstances. Thus, when Maḥmūd b. ‘Abd al-Jabbār of Mérida (d. c.845), a longstanding rebel against Umayyad authority, who had found political asylum in the kingdom of Alfonso II of Asturias (791–842), was killed in the course of a skirmish with the king’s forces, the Christian nobles of the region competed to marry his surviving sister Jamīla “on account of her ancestry, beauty and valor,” according to Ibn Ḥayyān. In the end, the nobles reportedly drew lots to win her hand, whereupon she converted to Christianity and married.114 Another Muslim woman who crossed the frontier in this manner was the princess known in Christian sources as “Zaida,” who after the death of her husband al-Fatḥ al-Ma’mūn during the Almoravid attack on Córdoba on 26 March 1091, and the subsequent deposition of her father-in-law, al-Mu‘tamid b. Abbād, ruler of the kingdom of Seville, fled to the