Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines. Simon Barton
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The silence of the sources in this regard can be explained in various ways. At a most basic level, one might conjecture that the population of Jews and Muslims living in proximity to Christian communities in the northern realms prior to the late eleventh century was so insignificant that interfaith sex was simply not deemed a sufficiently serious risk to warrant legislation. For example, Jewish enclaves are recorded in the environs of the city of León prior to the twelfth century, but not within the urban space itself, while the Muslim population, drawn largely from slaves, was probably very small indeed.6 We should also bear in mind that since religious minorities living under Christian rule were customarily allowed a good deal of judicial autonomy, there may have been no apparent need to incorporate these communities within Christian law, even in areas where substantial enclaves of non-Christians are known to have existed.7 Yet we should also take account of other realities. For one thing, it might simply have been the case that a heightened sense of ethnic and religious difference, which was shortly to become a striking feature of political and cultural discourse in most parts of the Latin West, had yet to make itself felt among the Christians of the Northern Iberian realms. For another, the drive toward cultural unity and orthodoxy, which was to be a central feature of papal policy from the mid-eleventh century, and which was to see Rome ready to ride roughshod over local traditions and practices if necessary, had not yet had an impact on the north of the Peninsula. We shall return to explore these realities later in this chapter.
The dramatic military expansion of the Christian states at the expense of al-Andalus from the second half of the eleventh century onward marked a watershed moment insofar as interfaith relations were concerned. As Christian armies began to push southward, into the valleys of the Tagus and the Ebro between the 1080s and the 1140s, and then much further south toward the Guadiana, the Guadalquivir, and the Júcar a century and more later, they paved the way for an extensive program of resettlement that was designed to reinforce their control over the newly conquered territories and peoples. Kings and other lords took steps to establish the legal framework by which these Christian-ruled settlements would be governed and, with manpower at a premium, offered a variety of eye-catching inducements—including grants of property, tax breaks, and immunity from prosecution for criminals on the run—in order to attract colonists to the exposed lands that lay along the southern frontier. A case in point was the charter that Alfonso VII of León-Castile (1126–57) granted to the settlers of Oreja near Toledo in 1139 “in order to prevent the Moors from retaking it.”8 Some of the documents—known in Castilian as fueros (Catalan furs) or cartas pueblas—that were issued as part of this program of colonization were relatively brief statements of the obligations and privileges that would apply to settlers in the town or village in question; others were substantial compilations of municipal law and custom.9
Among the most striking features of this large body of customary law that was set down in writing between c.1050 and 1300 was the fact that numerous charters deemed it prudent and necessary to set out in detail the legal rights and obligations of the Jewish and Muslim communities who lived in the vicinity. On one level, this legislative initiative may be interpreted as an entirely pragmatic response to the fact that significant enclaves of religious minorities had been allowed to remain in situ in the aftermath of the Christian conquest, with a particularly high density of population in parts of Navarre, Aragon, and Valencia. With manpower scarce, there was an evident desire on the part of many Christian lords to avoid an exodus of Muslim and Jewish workers by guaranteeing their rights. In many cases fueros stipulated the religious, legal, and economic privileges Muslims and Jews would enjoy in a particular municipality or region, any additional taxes they might be liable to, their right in some cases to elect their own officials, or the prohibition on their holding certain posts in the local administration. A good example was the fuero Alfonso I of Aragon (1104–34) granted to Calatayud, south of the Ebro, in 1131, some eleven years after its conquest, in which he catalogued the various economic freedoms and legal protections that Muslims and Jews in the town would henceforth enjoy.10
By the late twelfth century, as economic and social interaction between the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities increased, laws designed to regulate intercommunal relations grew ever more detailed. Among this plethora of legislation, the monumental collections of municipal law promulgated in the towns of Teruel and Cuenca particularly stand out. Teruel, located in the Eastern Iberian Cordillera, was conquered by Alfonso II of Aragon (1164–96) in 1171, and its substantial Latin fuero (the Forum Turoli) was promulgated five years later.11 Cuenca, about 150 kilometers to the west, was captured by Alfonso VIII of Castile (1158–1214)—with the assistance of the Aragonese king—in 1177 and probably received its code (the Forum Conche) around 1190.12 Scholars have debated at length the exact relationship between the Teruel and Cuenca codes, since there are numerous areas of convergence and similarity between the two. However, it is now considered improbable that the authorities in Cuenca directly modeled their code on the Teruel text; the likelihood, rather, is that both fueros drew on a common body of customary law—oral and written—then already in existence in the frontier lands under Castilian and Aragonese rule by the second half of the twelfth century.13 Unlike the relatively limited statements of rights and responsibilities that had characterized many charters of settlement hitherto, however, the Cuenca and Teruel fueros set out in exhaustive detail the legal procedure that was to be followed in these towns and the system of municipal government that was to operate. Furthermore, they addressed numerous other aspects of urban life, such as the organization of the local militias whose responsibility it was to defend these communities against attack or to undertake offensive operations, regulations regarding economic activity, labor rights, the role and status of women, and so on.14
In common with numerous other charters of settlement of this period, the Teruel and Cuenca codes also addressed the question of interfaith relations. Muslims and Jews were welcome to settle in both towns—indeed a significant number probably remained in residence after the Christian conquest—and they shared many of the same rights and legal protections as their Christian counterparts. Yet this was no interfaith utopia. The municipal authorities in both towns were careful to draw clear lines of demarcation between the faiths in order to prevent excessive social interaction. The unvoiced fear was that social and cultural assimilation might prove a stepping-stone toward apostasy. With this in mind, Muslims and Jews at Teruel were warned not to frequent local bathhouses at the same times as Christians, with those who infringed the law facing a fine.15 At Cuenca, the same prohibition was laid on Jews, but there is no mention of Muslims, which might suggest that apart from slaves they no longer resided in large numbers in the town.16 Similar regulations regarding access to bathhouses were laid down in numerous other collections of frontier municipal law at this time, while the Church also added its voice to such injunctions: in 1280, at a synod in Lleida, the local bishop declared that any Christians who bathed with Muslims were to suffer excommunication.17
Perhaps more striking still, however, both the Teruel and the Cuenca codes contained a draconian prohibition on interfaith sex, at any rate as far as Christian women were concerned. The Teruel fuero has a section titled “Of the woman who sleeps with a Moor,” which baldly states: “If a Christian woman is discovered with a Moor or a Jew and they can be captured, they are to be burned together.”18 The Cuenca code was equally brief and to the point: “If a woman is surprised with a Moor or a Jew, both should be burned alive.”19 These are the earliest known legal enactments from any of the northern Christian realms to regulate interfaith intimacy in this way. Their prohibition on sexual mixing was to be echoed elsewhere in the succeeding decades, as the Cuenca legal corpus came to be adopted, either partially or wholly, by dozens of other municipalities across the center of the Peninsula, from Cáceres in the west, to Soria on the Duero in the north and Baeza and Iznatoraf near the Guadalquivir in the south.20 A good example of the legal-cultural transformation that took place in the Castilian heartlands is provided by the town of Sepúlveda, situated just south of the Duero. It is striking that when Alfonso VI granted a short fuero to the settlers of Sepúlveda in 1076 he made no attempt to regulate interfaith relations, let alone to target sexual mixing.21 Yet two centuries later, when the civic authorities compiled an extensive fuero, which was also