Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain Read Online Free PDF

layman who now reads the Latin commentaries on the Holy Scriptures, or who studies the Gospels, prophets or Apostles? Alas! All talented Christians read and study with enthusiasm the Arab books; they gather immense libraries at great expense; they despise the Christian literature as unworthy of their attention. They have forgotten their language. For every one who can write a letter in Latin to a friend, there are a thousand who can express themselves in Arabic with elegance, and write better poems in this language than the Arabs themselves. 8
     
    To Alvarus and other Christians living under Muslim rule, the loss of Latin cultural identity also carried with it the possibility of religious conversion to Islam. Such concerns led Alvarus’s contemporary, the charismatic Córdoban priest Eulogius, to instigate a cult of martyrdom in an attempt to drive a wedge between the Christian and Muslim communities of ninth-century Córdoba. Yet even Eulogius described the Córdoba of Abd al-Rahman as “elevated with honors, expanded in glory, piled full of riches, and with great energy filled with an abundance of all the delights of the world, more than one can believe or express”—a transformation that only added to his despair at the future of the Church. 9 Between 850 and 859, forty-eight of Eulogius’s followers were executed in Córdoba for publicly proclaiming their faith or blaspheming the Prophet. The movement culminated in the execution of Eulogius himself. The “Córdoba martyrs” did not succeed in changing the existing arrangements in the city, where the Christians continued to live according to the same dispensation granted to their co-religionists elsewhere in Spain.
     
    With the advance of the Reconquista, these dynamics were reversed as Muslims found themselves living as permanent minorities under Christian rule. The treatment of these mudéjares (those who remained), who became vassals of Christian kings, broadly mirrored the provisions of the dhimma . Its basic principle was defined in the thirteenth-century legal code known as the Siete Partidas (Seven-Part Code) drawn up by the Castilian king Alfonso X, which declared that “the Moor should live among the Christians in the same manner as . . . the Jews, observing their own law and causing no offence to ours.” 10 The Siete Partidas emphatically rejected the legitimacy of Islam as a religion or “law,” which it described as an “insult to God.” It prohibited Muslims from building mosques in Christian towns or engaging in public acts of Islamic worship, but they were permitted to follow their religion in their own communities. A similar code drawn up by James I of Aragon for the Mudejars of the Uxó Valley in the thirteenth century went even further:
    We desire that all Muslims should continue under their sunna [Islamic religious laws] in their marriages and in all other matters. They may give public expression to their sunna in their prayers, and public instruction to their sons in the reading of the Koran, without suffering any prejudice from so doing. They may travel about their business through all the lands of the realm and not be hindered by any man. 11
     
    These leyes de moros (laws of the Moors) often went into extraordinary detail in their attempts to regulate the daily interactions between Muslims and Christians and reduce the potential for conflict. A charter granted by James the Conqueror to the Muslims of Valencia in 1242 designated where they were allowed to travel, the tithes they were expected to pay on wheat, barley, and other agricultural products, their access to water, and the lands and possessions they were allowed to keep. The same charter also prohibited Christians from trespassing on Muslim lands, from preventing Muslims from traveling, and from any attempt to restrict their religious practices. Other legal codes established rights of property inheritance in Muslim communities or aljamas , the taxes and tithes to be paid by Muslim