Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines. Simon Barton
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have to lower his head on account of the smallness of the door. She was in a [hidden] spot watching the people, and when she saw this, she said to ‘Abd al-Azīz, “Now you are a great king!” The people heard, however, that he had constructed the door for this purpose, and some believed that she had made him a Christian.17
Alarmed by this behavior, a group of prominent Arab conspirators led by Ḥabīb b. Abī ‘Ubayda al-Fihrī, who was ‘Abd al-Azīz’s right-hand man, and Ziyad b. al-Nābigha al-Tamīmī, assassinated the governor while he was at prayer, perhaps with the connivance of the caliph Sulayman (715–17).18 Later authors, including the Andalusi chronicler Aḥmad al-Rāzī (d. 955), embellished this episode even farther, claiming that Roderic’s widow had encouraged ‘Abd al-Azīz to wear a crown studded with precious stones in order to further project his authority. It is also reported by some that the “royal couple” lived together in the church of Santa Rufina in Seville.19
Interfaith marriage brought with it two clear advantages for the Muslim élite that sought to consolidate its power in Iberia in the immediate aftermath of the conquest. First, it provided a means to legitimize the imposition of new lords over the Hispano-Gothic population, at a time when the pacification of the Peninsula was still precarious in the extreme and the number of Muslim settlers was relatively small. In this way, the Christian women of al-Andalus could be regarded as potential “peace-weavers” in the consolidation of Islamic rule, in the same way that intermarriage between Norman lords and local heiresses was later to provide a means to bind conquerors and conquered more closely together in the wake of the Norman conquest of England, Southern Italy, and Ireland.20 In the case of ‘Abd al-Azīz, however, the Arab governor is reported to have gone even farther, using his marriage to a member of the Visigothic ruling class as a means to associate himself with indigenous traditions of government, including perhaps crown-wearing, as part of an ambitious if ultimately doomed attempt to create a personal monarchy for himself in Iberia that might command support from the local population.21 In short, ‘Abd al-Azīz’s downfall was brought about by his political ambitions, which sought to deny the caliph’s authority over al-Andalus, and not by his decision to take for himself a Christian bride, as some authors would later imply. After all, Ziyād ibn al-Nābigha al-Tamīmī, one of the chief conspirators against the governor, is also said to have married a Christian noblewoman.22
The second advantage offered by marriage alliances between Muslim lords and Christian noblewomen was that they represented a means through which much of the landed wealth of the Visigothic magnate class could legitimately be channeled into Muslim ownership. Whereas property conquered by force of arms (‘anwatan) would have passed automatically into the hands of the invaders, there were large swathes of the country—like Theodemir’s power base in the southeast, for example—where Islamic authority had been recognized through a pact, and where the invaders had no such rights of ownership over these lands (called sulḥan).23 Interfaith marriage offered a solution to that problem, in that the children born to such mixed faith alliances, who were to be raised as Muslims, stood to inherit the property of their Visigothic grandfathers, through their mothers, as well as the lands that their Muslim fathers might have won as the fruits of conquest.
An account of how such arrangements might have worked out in practice is provided by Ibn al-Qūṭīya. Ibn al-Qūṭīya’s proud boast was that he was descended from Sara, grand-daughter of King Wittiza (694–710), whose sons had reportedly conspired against King Roderic at the time of the invasion and offered their allegiance to the Muslims. In return for this support, they had been confirmed in possession of their father’s estates, totaling some 3,000 properties spread across the Peninsula, or so it was claimed.24 Ibn al-Qūṭīya goes on to recount that when the eldest of Wittiza’s sons, Almund, later died, his lands in and around Seville were seized by his brother Artabas, prompting Almund’s daughter, Sara, and her younger brothers to travel to the court of the caliph Hishām I (724–43) in Damascus in search of restitution. The caliph ruled that Artabas’s usurpation of Almund’s legacy had been unlawful, and he also arranged for Sara to marry one of his clients, ‘Īsā b. Muzāḥim, who accompanied her back to the Peninsula and helped to recover her properties. It was from this marriage that Ibn al-Qūṭīya claimed to be descended. When later widowed in 755, Sara married again, this time to ‘Umayr ibn Sa‘īd al-Lakhmī, a member of one of the Syrian junds (military regiments) that had arrived in the Peninsula in 742 to help prop up Umayyad authority in the wake of a major Berber revolt. It was through this second marriage, which was said to have been arranged by the first independent emir of al-Andalus, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān I, that the family of the Banū Ḥajjāj later came to enjoy extensive wealth and power in the region of Seville.25
How trustworthy is Ibn al-Qūṭīya’s account? Given that his History comprises more a colorful collection of exemplary and fabulous anecdotes than a detailed account of his times, and that even his pupil Ibn al-Faraḍī is said to have disparaged him as a spinner of tales (akhbār) rather than as a purveyor of serious history (ta’rīkh), his reliability as a historian has frequently been called into question. His account of how Sara traveled to Damascus to raise her case with the caliph certainly raises all manner of doubts.26 It has been pointed out, for example, that Wittiza’s sons could only have been young boys at the time of the conquest and that it is difficult to believe that they took the lead in offering to give support to the Muslims, as Ibn al-Qūṭīya alleges.27 On the other hand, the Christian Chronicle of 754 does make mention of the support lent to the Muslims by Wittiza’s brother, Oppa, so the idea that some of Wittiza’s kin—including perhaps his widow, who had briefly held the regency before Roderic seized the throne—were instrumental in negotiating with the Muslims, and that his sons were later beneficiaries of the deal, should not be dismissed out of hand. Whether “Sara the Goth” and her brothers really did journey to the caliphal court in Damascus, as is claimed, is highly doubtful. Such stories served above all to explain to posterity the process of accommodation between conquerors and some of the vanquished that had taken place at the time of the eighth-century Islamic conquest. Yet even if embroidered, the general thrust of Ibn al-Qūṭīya’s story, which illustrates how an interfaith marriage alliance provided the means by which the property of King Wittiza passed into Muslim control, is eminently plausible. As it is, a similar process of property transmission can be glimpsed in the case of a daughter of Theodemir of Murcia, who is reported to have married ‘Abd al-Jabbār b. Khaṭṭāb b. Marwān b. Naḍīr, another member of the Syrian army that arrived in the Peninsula in 742. According to the chronicler al-‘Udhrī, Khaṭṭāb received two villages from his bride by way of dowry, at Tarsa near Elche and at Tall al-Khaṭṭāb near Orihuela.28 It was thanks to this alliance that the family of ‘Abd al-Jabbār was able to establish itself as one of the wealthiest and most influential kin groups in the region, whose power was to endure for centuries.29
Interfaith marriage alliances offered the Visigothic landed aristocracy a number of advantages. Most obviously, for those like the families of Wittiza and Theodemir, who sought and found an accommodation with the Islamic invaders, marriage pacts represented a means for certain kin groups to defend their interests in the localities where they had traditionally held sway and to keep their landed wealth intact. Thus, if we are to believe Ibn al-Qūṭīya, Wittiza’s son Artabas continued to be an influential power broker in the region of Córdoba even after the conquest.30 Likewise, Theodemir’s presumed son Athanagild remained a prominent figure in the southeast of the Peninsula, at any rate until the arrival of the Syrian junds and the appointment of the governor Abū’l-Khaṭṭār during the 740s.31 The price to be paid for that security of tenure was to be the raising of future generations of the family as Muslims, although in the early days of the conquest, barely eighty years after the death of the Prophet Muḥammad, when the doctrines and customs of Islam were still somewhat hazily defined, the differences between the three monotheistic religions were by no means as clear to contemporaries as they would later become.32 In short, for the members of the old Visigothic élite who were willing to collaborate with the invaders, interfaith marriage represented an attractive means to guarantee security of tenure and avoid the traumatic upheaval and loss of wealth, status, and power that had undoubtedly