Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines. Simon Barton
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lacked a clause outlawing interfaith sex, they wrote to Ferdinand IV of Castile (1295–1312), who allowed them to borrow sections from the fuero of nearby Jerez de la Frontera for the purpose.40 The authorities of Murcia came up against a similar problem. That much is clear from the letter that the Infante Peter, son of Sancho IV of Castile (1284–95), dispatched to the alcaldes of that city from Burgos on 5 August 1315.41 The letter records that a local Muslim, Mahomat Abollexa, had been accused of having sex with a Christian woman called María Fernández, and that his Christian companion Juan de Dios (perhaps, given his name, a convert) had supposedly tricked the woman by telling her that Mahomat was a Christian. Whether María was a prostitute is not made clear, but the circumstances of her case, in particular the role of a Christian go-between who arranged the encounter with the Muslim, suggest that she may well have been. The officials duly launched an investigation into the matter and, once they had satisfied themselves of the two men’s guilt, contacted the Infante to request guidance on how to proceed, since the local fuero did not include provision for such cases. Having considered their report and discussed it with various learned officials of the king, the Infante ruled that both men should be burned at the stake, in the case of Juan de Dios because he had played a key role in arranging the interfaith liaison and was condemned as a “besmircher of our law” (ensuziador de nuestra ley). The Infante further commanded that, since it appeared that María Fernández had been ensnared by Juan de Dios and was unaware that Mahomat was not a Christian, she should be released from prison. Finally, he noted that in any similar cases in the future the local authorities should proceed in the same manner.
The majority of the Christian women who were cited in the cases of sexual mixing that came before the courts appear to have been prostitutes, as in the cases from Arándiga and Vall d’Uxó mentioned above. This is not in itself terribly surprising given the nature of their profession and the fact that such women, whether they worked independently or in licensed brothels, tended to frequent areas where the faiths intermingled. The Christian authorities were well aware that prostitutes ran a particular risk of engaging in sexual relations with men of other faiths, while Muslim community leaders also protested at their presence in their midst for fear that excessive contact between the faiths might in turn lead their coreligionists to apostatize.42 In 1304 James II of Aragon instructed his legal officials in Valencia to command the Christian prostitutes and their pimps who resided in the Muslim quarter of the city to leave, for fear they would incur “horrible sins.”43 In 1346 Peter IV of Aragon (1336–87) declared that it had come to his attention that Christian prostitutes and others had purchased houses in the Muslim quarter of the same city and warned of the danger this posed to Christians and Muslims alike; those who did so would be liable to a fine of 100 gold pieces.44 Yet the proclamation does not appear to have had the desired effect: in 1351 the king reiterated his command that Christians were not to buy or rent houses in the Muslim quarter; yet fully 33 years later he found it necessary to return to the same theme.45 It is striking, nonetheless, that during the final third of the fourteenth century only three cases of interfaith sex involving minority men and Christian prostitutes from licensed brothels are known to have come before the courts of Valencia. That suggests either that the harsh penalties prescribed by the law had the desired effect of dissuading Christians and Muslims from engaging in sexual mixing, or else that the authorities did not pursue malefactors with any particular sense of urgency. However, it is worthy of note that the converso Gil García was burned at the stake for having facilitated and covered up sexual encounters between Christian prostitutes and Muslim men, “out of great scorn for the Christian faith,” as the judicial sentence put it.46
The readiness of the authorities to punish interfaith sex between Christian prostitutes and minority men is writ large in the legal registers of the period. If a prostitute were arrested on charges of engaging in interfaith sex, her life might depend on her being able to convince the judges that she had been unaware that her client was not a Christian. The experience of the prostitute Alicsén de Tolba, which is recorded in a detailed judicial summary drawn up on 27 November 1304, is a notable case in point.47 Alicsén declared before the judge that when she and one of her companions had visited a shepherds’ camp near Xivert (Valencia) a Muslim called Aytola was persuaded by one of his fellow shepherds, Lorenç, to sleep with her, but was told to pretend that he was a Christian named John, to speak in the accent of the mountains, and to say that he came from the port. However, when the couple slept together and Alicsén saw that Aytola had been circumcised, she realised that he was not a Christian and promptly raised the alarm, denouncing both Aytola and Lorenç to the lieutenant of the Commander of the Temple in Xivert for deceiving her to “the dishonour of God and of the Catholic faith and of Christianity.” Fearing the consequences if he were brought to book, Aytola promptly skipped town; the Christian Lorenç, who had introduced his Muslim companion to Alicsén in the first place, was arrested, but later acquitted of the charge of abetting illegal interfaith sex.
To sum up thus far, the fact that Christian prostitutes were far more likely to come into sexual contact with men of another faith meant that they became a locus for collective anxiety about interfaith sex from the thirteenth century onward; they have even been portrayed as the sentinels who policed the boundaries between the faiths.48 It was not that contemporaries were unconcerned about the sexual honor of other women, but the fact of the matter was that relationships between Christian women who were of good standing in the community and a minority male appear to have reached the courts only rarely.49 The social space such women inhabited was far more closely controlled, with the result that the danger that interfaith sexual liaisons might occur was correspondingly diminished. In 1366, King Peter I of Portugal (1357–67) declared that since he had heard that some Christian women, deceived by the Devil, had maintained sexual relations with “men of another law,” he commanded that henceforth, on pain of death, a Christian woman should only enter the Muslim and Jewish quarters of Lisbon if accompanied by a Christian man if she were a spinster or widow, or two if she were married. What is more, the king prescribed two itineraries such women were to follow.50
Moreover, when such cases did come before authorities, a cuckolded husband may sometimes have preferred not to press charges, for fear he would be dishonored if he did so. In 1344, a Muslim blacksmith from Lleida in Catalonia, Çalema Abinhumen, who had been accused of conducting an affair with the Christian woman, Arnaldona, was acquitted when her husband Ramon d’Aguilar flatly denied that any such relationship had taken place.51 It is conceivable that Ramon did so to avoid public shame, although it is equally possible that in this, as in numerous other cases, the accusation of illegal sexual mixing had been brandished against a minority male not because such a relationship had actually occurred, but because it was viewed as an effective mechanism for ensuring that the accused would feel the full weight of the law.52 Such false accusations could have devastating consequences for those implicated. In 1304, the same year as Alicsén de Tolba brought her case against the Muslim Aytola, a young Christian woman of the Aragonese town of Daroca, Prima Garsón, was accused of having pursued an affair with a local Muslim, Ali de Matero, and given birth to a child. Prima fled the town before her accusers could have her arrested, but the hapless Ali was seized and burned at the stake in her absence. When Prima was later captured and delivered into the hands of the authorities, a medical examination demonstrated that she was still a virgin and therefore innocent of the charges that had been laid against her.53 The case demonstrates most powerfully that a determination to prevent interfaith sex was by no means the abstract preoccupation of lawgivers; it could give rise to fierce passions at the grass-roots level too.
Double Standards
If we turn our attention back to the legal prohibitions placed on sexual mixing, it is apparent that it was the conduct of Christian women and minority men that was consistently targeted. Did the same rules apply to Christian men who had sexual relations with Muslim or Jewish women? In the crusading kingdoms of the Near East, where similar multicultural realities prevailed, royal and ecclesiastical authorities took a firm line against such liaisons. The Council of Nablus of 1120, apparently inspired by Byzantine legal precedent, ruled that a Latin or Muslim man found guilty of having sex with a female of the other religion—be it voluntary or forced—should be castrated, while the woman’s nose was to be cut off; Latin women who had relations with