Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines. Simon Barton
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since the twelfth century, was an uncomfortable fact that was largely overlooked.
However, the primacy of this patriotic interpretation of the Spanish past, which viewed the relationship between Christianity and Islam exclusively in terms of military, ideological, and sociocultural conflict, was soon to be challenged. Indeed, only a year after Menéndez Pidal’s meditation on Spain and the Spaniards was published to great acclaim, one of his former disciples, Américo Castro, set a cat among the pigeons with his own startlingly original take on the Peninsula’s medieval past. Jettisoning the intellectual baggage of National-Catholic Reconquista and the “eternal Spain” altogether, Castro argued that, far from being the product of intercredal conflict, Spain and the Spanish psyche were born of eight long centuries of convivencia, or “living together,” between Christians, Muslims, and Jews. According to this analysis, rather than being uncontaminated by the Islamic conquest, Christian society was profoundly affected in culture and outlook.28 This vision of a hybrid Spain born of coexistence and cultural symbiosis was rejected in many quarters and triggered a particularly furious riposte from another of Menéndez Pidal’s pupils, Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, who clove to the view that the essential nature of Hispania and the homo hispanus, the ur-Spaniard, was essentially unaffected by the Islamic “occupation.”29 Instead, he averred, the Reconquista was the forge in which the modern Spanish nation had been wrought.30 In 1969, Ignacio Olagüe created a stir when he went so far as to deny that the Arabs had ever invaded Spain at all.31
During the course of the past four decades, however, as modern Spain has made the journey from military dictatorship to full-fledged democracy, academic perspectives on the Peninsula’s medieval past have changed beyond all recognition. For one thing, the rhetoric of Reconquista has fallen decidedly out of fashion. Instead, influenced in particular by the approaches of the French Annales School and by the decentralization of political power in Spain, academic emphasis has been on the importance of socioeconomic forces rather than the power of ideology, on diversity rather than unity.32 At the same time, Castro’s vision of peaceful interfaith coexistence has been embraced anew in some quarters, albeit with some modification.33 Some scholars have gone so far as to argue that the dynamic cultural hybridity that was supposedly the norm in the Peninsula until at least the advent of the Berber Almoravids in the late eleventh century or the pogroms of the late fourteenth century in some way prefigures modern aspirations toward multicultural dialogue and provides the present with some lessons from the past.34
Yet the idealizing aspects of convivencia, and the tendency among at least some of its proponents toward romanticized broad-brush generalization, have made the concept increasingly unsatisfactory to a number of scholars, not least because it is frustratingly elastic. Maya Soifer, in a recent bracing critique of the term, has put her finger on the nub of the problem:
Having appeared under the guises of “peaceful coexistence,” “acculturation,” and “daily interaction,” convivencia has become a byword that one can employ in any number of ways. Convivencia can be anything and everything: a rhetorical flourish, a nostalgic nod to a rich historiographical tradition, as well as an ambitiously construed notion that aspires to summarize the entire range of religious minorities’ experiences in medieval Spain.35
As Soifer has observed, convivencia survives, but “it remains on life support.”36 The problem is not so much that interfaith social and cultural hybridity was a chimera in a medieval Iberian context—the valuable work of art historians and literary critics, in particular, provides ample evidence that such cross-fertilization could and did take place across religious frontiers37—but rather that the permissive use of the catch-all label convivencia runs the risk of oversimplifying the sheer complexity of interfaith relations in this period, and, what is worse, if it is framed according to modern multicultural sensibilities, of indulging in anachronism.38
It is for this very reason that a number of scholars have largely eschewed terms like convivencia, just as they have also given the cold shoulder to the National-Catholic rhetoric of Reconquista, preferring to establish new analytical categories in their stead. Brian Catlos, for example, has argued that interfaith relations in the Peninsula were above all marked by what he has dubbed conveniencia, an overwhelmingly utilitarian dynamic which was sustained by a complex system of reciprocal interests.39 Some scholars have embraced socio-anthropological techniques in order to better understand the realities of interfaith interaction in medieval Iberia.40 Yet others have promoted postcolonial theory as an important methodological tool with which to rethink such cultural contact.41 The latter approach seeks to give voice to those marginalized peoples, the “subaltern,” who have been overlooked by previous dominating ideologies, and focuses on the cultural contacts, collaborations, and resistance that arose as a result of the colonial encounter, as well as the legacies that it bequeathed. The proponents of postcolonial analysis view it as an antidote to dyed-in-the-wool historicism, by emphasizing the connectivity of the past with the present. According to Nadia R. Altschul, for example, such approaches “foster nuanced recognition of the live connection that our scholarship and medieval Iberia have with the world at large, and prepare us to better understand and challenge the inequalities of our postcolonial present.”42
Another conceptual tool that has been much at the forefront of recent historiography on Christian-Muslim interaction in the Peninsula is that of the frontier. Numerous studies have emphasized the key role played by the militarized Christian frontier with Islam in shaping the society, economy, and culture of Central and Southern Iberia from the late eleventh century on.43 Yet the very word “frontier” defies easy definition and is replete with ambiguity.44 At one level, we should be aware that what passed for a frontier in the medieval world had little in common with modern concepts of hard and fast linear state borders, but is better characterized as a permeable zone of contact and typically “a complex abode of mixed loyalties,” as Eduardo Manzano Moreno has put it.45 In medieval Iberia, for example, the borderlands that separated Islamic and Christian areas of authority were regularly criss-crossed by merchants, diplomats, transhumant shepherds, political exiles, and mercenaries, to name only a few of those who made the journey.46 Besides, it would be a mistake to conceive of the frontier purely in geopolitical terms. There were other frontiers in existence—linguistic, artistic, economic, and cultural—all highly permeable. As Benita Sampedro and Simon Doubleday have put it, “frontiers are … fluid, porous, and multifaceted spaces of transition. Needless to say, frontier and fluidity are not contradictory and opposed, but complementary concepts.”47 At the same time, if we over-privilege the “frontier phenomenon” as the primary form of political-military interaction in medieval Iberia, we also run the risk of oversimplifying the political dynamic of the region to a straightforward struggle between Christendom and Islam. The reality was that there were always multiple political players in the Peninsula, whose geopolitical agendas shifted over time and who did not hesitate to forge bonds of amity across the religious frontier if circumstances warranted it. A notable case in point was Alfonso IX of León (1188–1230), who allied himself with the Berber Almohads in 1196 against Christian Castile as a means to further his own territorial ambitions in the contested Tierra de Campos region, and was excommunicated by Pope Celestine III as a consequence. Medieval Iberia was always a region of multiple frontiers, never of one.
Of all the frontiers—physical or psychological—that existed in the Peninsula, religious boundaries were without a doubt among the most actively policed and, as a consequence, were probably the most difficult to cross. These religious boundaries were manifold and complex, but in general they were shaped by an overriding fear of excessive social interaction or assimilation among the three faiths that coexisted within the region. Very broadly, it is fair to say that two chief anxieties weighed heavily on the minds of the religious and secular authorities of the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities that dwelled on either side of the frontier between al-Andalus and the Christian-ruled realms of the North. One was their steely determination to prevent their coreligionists from renouncing their faith and embracing another; the second was their concern to prevent—or in some cases regulate—sexual relations between members of different religious faiths. This book might therefore be