ISLAMIC AND CHRISTIAN SPAIN IN THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES Thomas F. Glick

1. Traveling the Cultural Frontier

HISTORY seems scarcely distinguishable from myth. Historians, whether critical or not, at one point or another in their work, embody in the past values which seem to them to be the most significant or enduring of a given peoples' experience. Since values are culturally or socially defined, historians, from this perspective, engage in a process of myth-building. This is a proper role for historians, although not the only role, and I do not mean to disparage the part played by myth in all cultures, particularly as a context which makes the past something worth preserving and something intelligible to the present.

Yet certain national schools of historiography -- the Spanish is the case in point -- seem less able than others to disentangle present myths from past ones or to deal effectively and realistically with those aspects of the past which have been particularly productive of conflict or anxiety. I believe that the historian's role as interpreter of culture is analogous to that of the psychologist as interpreter of the individual psyche. In the middle ages conflict with the Muslims provided a very realistic basis for the fear of Spanish Christians, which became internalized both in individual psychologies and in collective norms regulating social distance among religious groups, and which finally were institutionalized in discriminatory laws and apparatus for enforcing them. To explain such phenomena as the Inquisition in terms of generalities like "intolerance" or "religious exclusivity," let alone such constructs as "nationalism," "capitalism," or the rise of the "modern" state, does not do justice to the social-psychological dimensions of the problem. For, long after the enemy was vanquished, the Jews expelled, and the Inquisition disbanded, the image of the "Moor" remained as the quintessential stranger, an object to be feared. Case histories in recent Spanish clinical psychology bear out this contention.⁽¹⁾

Transposed into the historiographical field, subconscious fears became transferred into bias that underlies historical interpretation and contributes to misinterpretation. Unless purged of such bias, the historian cannot play a valid role either as interpreter of the past or as a creator of myth [4] for the present and future, no more than (and to the same extent as) a neurotic individual can interpret the strands of his own past conflicts that have brought him to his present state, or fashion functional guidelines for future adjustment.

Although, like most historians trained in the positivist tradition, I strive to be objective, I nevertheless know that my own values play a formative role in the picture that I present of medieval Spanish history. I believe that ethnocentrism is the bane of peoples and of history; that contact of cultures is inevitably creative, however conflictive; and that the mettle of a culture is manifested in its ability to adjust to other cultures without destroying them..

For all of my scholarly career I have traveled the interface between two cultures, Islamic and Spanish, able to identify strongly with both, but still feeling not quite at home with either. I was trained as an Islamist; my research has largely fallen on the Spanish side. For these reasons, possibly, my notion about what is distinctive or even normative about medieval society may differ considerably from those of either the Islamist or the Hispanist. Only by identifying with both cultures, and with one no more than the other, can the historian entertain any reasonable hopes of filtering out some of the more flagrant biases that have so persistently plagued this area of investigation.

This book is not intended as a general survey of the high middle ages in Spain, but rather as an analysis of central issues and phenomena that contributed to the formation of Islamic and Spanish cultures in the Iberian peninsula and that guided the interaction among both peoples.⁽²⁾

Underlying the narrative which follows is a concern for the processes whereby distinctive cultures and societies are formed. The two cultures here described had vastly different histories but were nonetheless caught up in a situation where old cultural and social patterns had been broken and new ones were forming. The Muslims, who quickly established themselves, through conquest, as the dominant group, represented a new religious and social order which had not yet, in the eighth century, elaborated firm norms. That solid body of religious law which characterized mature Islamic society had not yet evolved, and the conquest created a body of culturally heterogeneous believers. The Christians had suffered the total destruction, by conquest, of their society and institutions and had to restructure them completely. Given the balance of power favoring the Muslims, the emergence of new patterns of social organization and cultural expression in Christian Spain had to reflect adaptation to the Muslim presence. [5] The processes of social and cultural formation are analogous ones and are referred to in this book as crystallization (social, in Chapter 6, sections 1 and 2; cultural, in Chapter 9, section 2). While the patterns of crystallization, both social and cultural, conform to general frameworks devised bv sociologists and anthropologists, the case of medieval Iberia is doubly interesting because of the constant interchange between the two societies during the period of crystallization. Culture contact is a normal ingredient in the formation of cultures, but the length and variability of contact in medieval Spain lend the case unusual complexity.

2. Comparison and Diffusion

The comparative approach adopted in this book is in part a reaction to the general contrastive bias of medieval Spanish history, to view the two opposing blocs as radically dissimilar in religion, if not always in culture, and as therefore leading to assumptions of difference, rather than similarity, when in doubt. The adoption of this approach, an experiment at best, was suggested by a geographical intuition: the settlement of a unified geographical area by peoples of different cultures. From this perspective, the method works optimally in investigating the organization of formerly Muslim-held lands after they were conquered by Christians, an epoch beginning only in the late eleventh century. Nevertheless, in comparative perspective, there is some truth in the traditionally held view of the history of Christiin Spain from the eighth century on as a preparation for the occupation of the entire peninsula which, when disengaged from the teleological overlay usually given it, further suggests the relevance of a comparative approach.

Because this book is cast in a civilizational perspective, the contact of cultures and the diffusion of discrete elements among them must play a major part in my narrative. But since the flow of elements from one culture to another and the processes by which such elements may have been adopted or rejected are to a great extent dependent on the structures of the societies involved, the comparative study of the two groups -- Muslim and Christian -- perforce presupposes making judgments of comparative or contrastive nature. Behind the constant recurrence of cultural diffusion as a theme of medieval Spanish history is more than a prurient interest in tracking the impact of Islamic upon Christian culture. There is the recognition that in the communication between two societies of unequal levels of socioeconomic integration, the difference in structure of the two [6] societies sets in motion processes that are systemic in nature and exceed in impact the sum of the individual elements (techniques, ideas, institutions) transferred.

From the middle of the ninth century to the end of the period covered in this book (around 1300), the contact was between peoples not only of different cultures, but of different socioeconomic systems. One bloc, the Islamic, dominant until the eleventh century, was an expanding, "urban-artisanal" society, fully implanted in a larger economic network (the Mediterranean, in the first place, and beyond that the Islamic world as a whole). The other bloc, the Christian, was for most of the same period a heavily ruralized region which for the present we can characterize as "static-agrarian."⁽³⁾

In each, therefore, all major social features were organized according to very different processes. In Islamic Spain, embedded in an international monetary economy, the cities were able to attract, mobilize, and direct agricultural production and thus to divert natural resources into burgeoning urban-craft industries which in turn required specific instruments of control.⁽⁴⁾ In Christian Spain (except for Barcelona, and this rather late in our period) the nature of state and society were shaped by the more rigid structure of the agrarian economy whose surpluses tended to flow, not to the cities, but to rural centers, organized by lay or ecclesiastic lords.

It follows from this dichotomy that the diffusion of any cultural element, whether technological, economic, or institutional, involves its adaptation to a sharply different socio-economic context and may therefore cause ripples throughout the entire system. Here again, comparative analysis is called for; because if cultural diffusion between two societies of unequal socio-economic organization leads to structural changes in the reciplent culture, the structures of both must be understood in order to gauge the impact of diffusion. Thus we shall argue, for example, that contact between al-Andalus and Christian Spain, particularly Castile and Aragón, had the effect of inducing, stimulating, and determining specific forms of urbanization, which cannot be explained adequately without reference to the structure of the urbanized Islamic society.

3. Culture Contact and the Polemic of Spanish Historiography

Spaniards have, of course, been aware since the middle ages that many traits of their culture were acquired from the Muslims. They knew this [7] because of the formalized continuity of certain customary arrangements, exemplified in repeated legal strictures that these were to continue "as was the custom in the time of the Moors." A large number of words in the peninsular Romance tongues were easily recognized as Arabisms, and popular diffusionist notions attributed a "Moorish" origin to a wide variety of objects that looked ancient or different.⁽⁵⁾

In the past century, the English Hispanist Richard Ford was the first to compare the two cultures systematically, and although the literary genre in which he articulated most of his findings -- a tourists' guidebook -- tended to discourage scholars from taking his work seriously, he was nevertheless correctly able to identify as of Islamic provenance a vast range of customs and techniques that he personally observed in Spain during the 1830's.⁽⁶⁾ At the turn of the century, the Spanish Arabist Julián Ribera made a significant advance: he argued cohesively, on the basis of theoretical suppositions regarding the nature of cultural diffusion, and by using comparative methodology, that generalized systematic borrowing by Christians of discrete elements of Islamic culture had taken place. To account for similarities between the medieval Aragonese justiciar, or appeals judge, and the Islamic mazâlim, Ribera developed a theory of imitation, whereby two contacting cultures exchange elements, according to the kinds of communication that take place between them, the presence or absence of geographical or cultural barriers to such communication, and social and psychological factors influencing the receiving culture's receptivity to innovation.⁽⁷⁾ Ribera was the first, and the last, to attempt a behaviorist, social science approach to the problem of cultural borrowing in medieval Spain.

The present polemic began in 1948 with the publication by Américo Castro, a philologist and literary historian, of a book entitled España en su historia, since revised numerous times.⁽⁸⁾ His thesis, as it is generally argued, is that the culture we know as Spanish did not exist before, and came into being as a result of, the interaction of Muslims, Christians, and Jews (the "three castes," he calls them) in the eighth through the thirteenth centuries, and that the resultant culture bore the mark of that interactive process. He was answered in 1956 by Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, dean of Spanish medieval historians, in a massive refutation entitled España: Un enigma histórico.⁽⁹⁾ Sánchez-Albornoz replied that Castro had exaggerated both the extent and nature of the contact between Muslims and Christians, which was conflictive and therefore not conducive to creative [8] cultural interchange, and that most of the components of "Spanish" culture are either idiosyncratic or consist of Roman, Gothic, or elements of other than Semitic provenance.

I cannot here give an extended critique of these two positions, but will simply outline the main issues as I perceive them, discuss briefly how each of these two scholars has resolved the issue, and then point out the limitations of the debate and the effects it has had on recent historiography. At issue are three related problems:

(1) The nature of cultural substrates. To what extent do enough cultural elements persist over very long periods of time so that one can point to a recognizably "Spanish" or Hispanic culture extending from Iberian times, through the Roman, Visigothic, and medieval periods into modernity?

(2) The process of cultural change. What phenomena stimulate cultural change and govern its rate and direction and, in connection with the previous point, to what extent do prior cultural substrates place limits on the extent of such change?

(3) The impact of cultural contact. Given that contact produces changes in one or both of the contacting societies, what areas of culture are affected and what are the processes governing the selection of those areas?

It is interesting to observe that both Castro and Sánchez-Albornoz resolve these problems within the context of models of cultural evolution prevalent in Spanish intellectual circles during the period of their intellectual formation. Castro, heavily influenced by German philosophers of history, took a Hegelian position on social evolution, according to which literacy was a crucial stage in the advancement of the species. Thus Castro believed, in a direct echo of Spengler, that primitive (that is, non-literate) peoples had no history, and -- the opposite side of the coin -- that the decisive processes of cultural change took place on the level of "literary" creation (which he understood broadly as comprising all of high culture). Thus for Castro "before becoming perceptible and ascendant as a fit subject for history, the Spaniard did not exist."⁽¹⁰⁾

In Sánchez-Albornoz's reasoning, the biological model is explicit, but decidedly anti-evolutionary. He cites Ortega y Gasset on the indemonstrability of the transformation of species (e.g., a tiger is always a tiger) and accepts the monophyletic origin of human races. Modal personality is determined by herencia temperamental, a constellation of characteristics, genetically transmitted, which remain quite constant over the long run, [9] changing only very slowly, if at all. When he admits change, it is phenotypic, not genotypic: "Temperamental inheritance is an operative potential which offers possibilities and sets limits to the action of human communities and individuals, but within the cultural and existential environment in which their history and life transpire; a climate which has never remained static, which continually changes."⁽¹¹⁾ Social and cultural environments may change, elicting different expressions from the peoples in question who, however, always retain the same "temperamental inheritance." Thus Hispano-Romans, Goths, "Hispano-Muslims," and Castillans, while having distinctive characteristics, were all, nonetheless, Hispanic in their temperamental inheritance. All of this is very much in line with moderate Catholic evolutionism of the late nineteenth century, which admitted change up to, but not beyond, the species level.⁽¹²⁾

Thus Castro is able to admit a far greater potentiality for cultural change than is Sánchez-Albornoz in the three areas outlined above, which each resolves as follows:

(1) Castro is insistent that cultures, with language the primary parameter, change radically over time, creating diachronic boundaries between one another. Therefore German-speaking Visigoths of the eighth century and Castilian speakers of the eleventh cannot both be called "Spanish." For Sánchez-Albornoz, the temperamental inheritance was a permanent substrate that controlled the limits of cultural differentiation; he once boasted that he had "been able to follow the curve of Hispanicity from Seneca to Unamuno."⁽¹³⁾

(2) For Castro, the interchange between one culture, predominantly Arabic-speaking and Islamic (together with a differentiated Jewish element) and another, Romance-speaking and Christian throughout centuries of intimate contact (which he calls convivencia -- literally, "living together") induced changes in Christian culture which clearly differentiated it over time from its Hispano-Roman and Gothic progenitors. These changes were both reactive and imitative in nature. For Sánchez-Albornoz the substratum, however defined, is taken as representing the core of the modal personality, the equivalent of a genotype. One species cannot become another, no matter how many "mimetic trappings" it may take on. Whenever he admits some cultural change, he is then able to deny its significance by alluding to a concept of latency: the Spanish temperamental inheritance may be submerged, but, provide it with a propitious environmeiit, and it will emerge again.⁽¹⁴⁾

[10] 

(3) Although Castro cites a stock list of Arabisms in many fields, particularly economic (agriculture, urban crafts), such pursuits do not play a large part in his explanation. He is primarily interested in the processes of cultural differentiation and self-ascription whereby Spaniards began consciously to perceive their ethnic distinctiveness (as Christians, first and foremost, in contradistinction to Muslims). Therefore, Castro is at his best when tracing literary, philosophical, or religious themes. In the latter category, he points out that Christians institutionalized Islamic notions of militant religion, but otherwise he is not interested in institutional history. The doings of common folk, unless reflected (that is, made conscious or perceptible) in literature or art are not "historifiable," not proper objects of historical inquiry. Sánchez-Albornoz, an institutional historian, is naturally more concerned with institutional interchange, which he believes to have been minimal; such Islamic elements as appear are, at best, "mimetic trappings." In his polemical writings he seems generally to accept Castro's definition of what aspects of culture were most "historifiable": religious values, honor, and so forth. Cultural elements not encompassed in the scope of the dominant value-system, or the broad social and economic processes underlying them, are mundanidades and of no interest to the historian.⁽¹⁵⁾

Sánchez-Albornoz's view of the whole process is conditioned by his perception of Islamic culture in Spain. In his view, no Eastern Islamic elements could have reached the Christian kingdoms (at least before the conquests of the late eleventh century resulted in the ingestion of a large Muslim minority) because the culture of al-Andalus was idiosyncratic, within the bounds of the temperamental inheritance of the Neo-Muslims, the converted Hispano-Romans who formed the majority of the population.⁽¹⁶⁾ Such a view of Islamic culture in al-Andalus is simply and clearly wrong.

It is unfortunate that the focus of the polemic has not been the definition of mechanisms and processes governing culture contact and cultural diffusion but, rather, the issue of modal personality ("national character"). Since both Castro and Sánchez-Albornoz were political liberals, exiled after the trauma of. the Spanish Civil War, they were obsessed with explaining what had made modern Spaniards the way they are; both professed to have found the answer in the Christian-Muslim confrontation of the middle ages. It is unfortunate that the debate centers here because it invites all kinds of unsubstantiated and unprovable generalizations. (I [11] be-lieve that modal personalities exist and can be described meaningfully, but only if the characteristics that constitute them can be directly related to social structure. Thus aggressivity or honor may well have characterized Numantines, Visigoths, and medieval Castilians alike, but any connections between them would have to be proved at the level of family structure, the socialization of children, and the like.) It is at this point where history and myth become hopelessly entangled.

Castro perceives in modern Spaniards a feeling of insecurity, and, in regard to the rest of Europe, inferiority, and associates these with the ambivalent, semi-dependent relationship their ancestors had with Muslims and Jews. Many members of Castro's generation subscribed to this characterization of Spanish modal personality (insecure, inferior) and because they did they were prepared to confirm their suspicions arising from recent social traumas with mythic associations with the medieval past. That is why Castro's impact on his own generation of Spanish intellectuals was enormous and Julián Ribera's, whose views on the dynamics of cultural interchange were more coherently and systematically defined than Castro's, was minimal.

I will summarize the balance of the arguments as they relate to this book: substrates are important to philologists but not so much to historians, who understand that historical processes always involve a mixture of change and continuity. Castro points out, with reason, that Visigothic elements in Spanish culture of the tenth through the twelfth centuries are survivals, while the Arabic elements were contemporaneous and living.⁽¹⁷⁾ I do not accept this proposition quite as stated, but would restate it to the effect that elements can be diffused across diachronic, as well as geographical, frontiers and that their mere presence says nothing of their function. The various prelates and statesmen who throughout the middle ages adopted Visigothic anti-semitic strictures, formulated in the Toletan councils of the seventh century, were not acting within the scope of, or in continuity with, Visigothic culture.

As for the processes of acculturation and culture change, the examination of these are foreclosed structurally from Sánchez-Albornoz's point of view. Castro's conclusions are generally acceptable, as far as they go; but he gives the impression that the cultural processes, lumped together under an umbrella-term, convivencia, took place in a social vacuum and were quite independent of social forces. He says as much: Christians achieved total power and were able to do away with Jews and Muslims because the [12] former aspired "to be more, and the Jews and the Moors ... were a serious obstacle in the way of that goal."⁽¹⁸⁾ In Castro's vision, relationships among persons of the three castes were structured on a basis of parity, as if these groups were of equal demographic weight, political and military force, cultural potency, and in complete disregard of the institutional or legal mechanisms controlling access to power. What counts for Castro is not the material strength of each group, but the relative, conscious will of each to succeed.

In the present book, we shall maintain that cultural interactions among the three groups were very sharply structured, in the period extending approximately from 750 to 1085, when there was a stabilized Islamic-Christian frontier, by the relative disequality in the socio-economic structure of the two sides; and, after that period, when the Christian kingdoms acquired substantial Muslim and Jewish enclaves, by a variety of social conventions, legal norms, and governmental institutions that, in great part, determined the nature of cultural interchanges.

Sánchez-Albornoz, in fact, was quick to point out that the symbiosis which Castro stressed seemed a misrepresentation of social reality and underplayed to the point of serious distortion the conflictive nature of the centuries Of Muslim-Christian contact, which would be better characterized as antibiosis. But this notion he uses to bolster the conclusion that very little cultural borrowing went on, failing to realize that "antibiosis" implies a variety of acculturative processes (reactive adaptation, stimulus diffusion across a barrier), no less than does symbiosis.⁽¹⁹⁾

Because of the excessively valorative judgments concerning what is historically most valuable or worthy, the polemic has had the effect of narrowing the scope of historical investigation considerably. From the point of view of assessing Islamic impact on Christian culture, the best evidence has generally not been used nor recognized for what it was. (I refer, for example, to the pervasive diffusion of eastern craft technologies throughout the entire Mediterranean basin.). In terms of stimulation of research, Castro has mainly influenced literary historians. Sánchez-Albornoz's stimulus to intercultural studies has been so negative as to shut off whole areas of investigation. For example, since he believes that Mozarabs (Arabized Christians who fled Islamic Spain and settled in Christian Spain) were only superficially Arabized and in any case could not transmit elements of eastern culture because there were none in al-Andalus, there has been no research on the social organization of Mozarabs in ninth-century [13] León; no examination of changes that they may have introduced into the dietary regime or agricultural techniques of the country; no examination of their role in the transfer of technology, whether artisanal or agrarian; no study of their impact upon urban institutions and economic life; and a probable playing down of their cultural role in monasteries of Mozarabic foundation. Thus, regrettably, the nineteenth-century view that the Muslims of Iberia exceeded those of the East in culture, has been replaced among Sánchez-Albornoz and his followers by the view, more tendentious if less romantic, that the culture in question was not Eastern at all, but "Spanish."

4. A Question of Names

The names found throughout this book describing the geographical hearths of the ethnic groups that have inhabited the Iberian peninsula have been used at different times in different senses. The historical emergence of such names as Spain, Castile, Catalonia responds to discrete processes of cultural differentiation and ethnic ascription and, as Castro indicated, signals diachronic boundaries between different cultures. Because such processes are among the central themes of this discussion, they require meticulousness in the use of geographical terms with ethnic connotations, lest careless usage give rise to anachronistic confusion of people of one culture with those of another.

Spain is meant herein as a geographical term, defining the territory presently occupied by the Spanish state. Referring to all the medieval Christian territories together, I prefer to allude to the "Christian kingdoms," or to specific ones. In the high middle ages, Arab writers referred to all territory south of the Duero (and later any Iberian territory held by Muslims) as al-Andalus, whereas Spain (Isbaniyya) referred to the peninsula at a geographic entity. Regions to the north of the Duero were sometimes lumped together as Qashtalla (Castile) or defined more specifically. Those regions of the Upper Ebro Valley and Old Castile where summer raids were made were called Alaba wa'l-Qilâ' ("Alava and the Castles"); or reference was made to Jilliqiya (Galicia) or Banbalûna (meaning either Pamplona or Navarre, in any case the homeland of the Basques -- al-Bashkûnish). ⁽²⁰⁾ For the Christians, on the other hand, Spain (Spania) was more of a cultural concept, defining broadly the area which had fallen within the Visigothic sphere of influence, sometimes even [14] including the region of Narbonne, on the northern side of the Pyrenees. According to Castro, the Romance form España was first used by those living in Septimania and Provence to refer to Muslim-held territory, the origin of refugees (Hispani) seeking a home in Carolingian lands.⁽²¹⁾

The term universally used by Arabic-speakers for those lands under Islamic control was al-Andalus. The origin of this term has confounded philologists and historians for years and there is no conclusive explanation to date. It has generally been supposed to relate to the Vandals, who passed through the peninsula in the fifth century on their way to North Africa. Thus it is puzzling why the Arabs should have named their lberian Province after people who no longer lived there. One conjecture is that Berbers of North African regions adjacent to the peninsula may still, in the early eighth century, have referred to it as the "land of the Vandals," a hypothetical zamurz Wandalus or tamurt Wandalus. Since many Berber nouns have genitives with a prefixed w-, the Arabs would have translated this as bilad al-Andalus, "land of the Andals." Another theory, less contrived, ascribes the name to a mythical Atlantis, which later Arab geographical writers tried to relate to the Atlantic Ocean. The term al-Andalus appears as early as 716 in bilingual coins, as the translation of Spania.⁽²²⁾

Thus the name of this medieval Islamic province (and then nation) located on the Iberian peninsula is al-Andalus. Its inhabitants were Andalusis; to call them Andaluslans is misleading because that usage connotes the present-day region of Andalusia, whose boundaries are smaller than those of the historical al-Andalus.

Countless books and articles refer to Islamic, Muslim, Arabic, or Moorish Spain. Although the juxtaposition of "Islamic" and "Spain" implies, as Castro has said, a contradiction in terms, it is preferred to the others. The form Muslim can, in correct Arabic usage, modify only a person, not an inanimate object. It is also preferable to the others because it connotes the dominant religion, Islam, as an apposite to "Christian Spain." Arabic Spain is culturally appropriate, since Arabic was the primary language spoken there, but ethnically misleading, since the population was composed mainly of Hispano-Roman converts to Islam and Berbers and there were few Arabs in the population. Moorish Spain, besides being archaic and romantic (conjuring up images from Washington Irving's Tales of the Alhambra), is also misleading on a number of grounds. Strictly speaking, Moors were the Mauri, Berbers who lived in the Roman [15] province of Mauretania; therefore its use stresses, sometimes by design, the Berber contributions to Andalusi culture. In English, Moor has racial connotations (e.g., Othello, a negroid "Moor"; the "black-moor" of the standard English version of Aesop's fables) of blackness, whereas many Berbers are fair-haired and blue-eyed. In Spanish, for reasons already hinted at, the term moro is derogatory.