The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Medieval Iberia: Unity in Diversity 2020052387, 2020052388, 9781138629325, 9781315210483, 9780367771744
The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Medieval Iberia: Unity in Diversity draws together the innovative work of re
542 36 37MB
English Pages [669] Year 2021
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Preface
Part I The environment
Chapter 1 Humans and the environment in medieval Iberia
Part II Societies, polities, and governments
Chapter 2 Fragmentation and centralization: The emergent political culture of the medieval Crown of Aragon
Chapter 3 Mudéjares and Moriscos
Chapter 4 Otherness, identities, and cultures in contact
Chapter 5 The Visigothic and Suevic kingdoms: The road to unity in post-Roman Hispania
Chapter 6 Power and politics in Iberian societies, ca. 1035–1516
Chapter 7 The law
Chapter 8 Sefarad
Part III Histories
Chapter 9 Re-reading the conquest of Iberia: The dynamism of a medieval tradition
Chapter 10 ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III and the caliphate of Cordoba
Chapter 11 Writing the past, ordering the world: Alfonso the Wise’s Estorias within his political and cultural agenda
Chapter 12 From Islamic to Christian conquest: Fatḥ invasion and Reconquista in medieval Iberia1
Chapter 13 Islamogothic Iberia: The Tārīkh of Ibn al-Qūṭīyah
Part IV Philosophy and spirituality
Chapter 14 Corporeality and soteriology in medieval Spanish hagiography: The body as signifier in the Libre dels tres reys d’Orient
Chapter 15 Contested martyrdom: Voluntary death and blessed cursing in the works of Eulogius and Paulus Alvarus of Córdoba
Chapter 16 Ramon Llull and Lullism
Chapter 17 Toledo and beyond: Bishops and Jews in medieval Iberia
Chapter 18 Turning and returning: Religious conversion and personal testimony in Iberian societies
Part V Gender
Chapter 19 Medieval Iberian women and gender
Chapter 20 Iberian queenship: Theory and practice
Part VI Languages and literatures
Chapter 21 Digital humanities and the Iberian Middle Ages
Chapter 22 The Galician-Portuguese cantigas, the history of emotion, and lyric as genre
Chapter 23 Arabic alongside and into Hebrew: Andalusi Hebrew literary culture in meta-critical perspective
Chapter 24 From heroes to courtly knights: The rise and development of chivalric narrative in medieval Iberia
Chapter 25 Reflections OF the long thirteenth century: Curiosity, the politics of knowledge, and imperial power in the Libro de Alexandre
Chapter 26 Medieval Iberian travel literature
Chapter 27 Inscription, authorship, iteration: The textuality of medieval Catalan literature
Chapter 28 The Ḥadīth de YÚçuf: Reimagining a prophet in a world of “others’ words”
Chapter 29 Extemporizing a translation of the Arabic into Castilian: Translation and the raciolinguistic logic of medieval Iberia
Chapter 30 Clerical soundscapes
Chapter 31 Rapture and horror: Reading Celestina in sixteenth-century Spain
Chapter 32 Framing intercultural encounters in three Iberian translations of Kalila wa-Dimna
Chapter 33 Evidence for an underlying Ibero–Romance vernacular: The Nodicia de kesos vis-à-vis its corresponding notarial act
Chapter 34 Epic texts in medieval Iberia: The cultural battlefield between Christians and Muslims
Part VII Visual culture
Chapter 35 Mudejar Teruel: Decoding an art-historical mystery
Chapter 36 Coloring words: New perspectives on visual culture in León and Castile (thirteenth through fourteenth centuries)
Chapter 37 Performing authority through iconography: On Iberian visionary women and images
Index
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THE ROUTLEDGE HISPANIC STUDIES COMPANION TO MEDIEVAL IBERIA
The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Medieval Iberia: Unity in Diversity draws together the innovative work of renowned scholars as well as several thought-provoking essays from emergent academics, in order to provide broad-range, in-depth coverage of the major aspects of the Iberian medieval world. Exploring the social, political, cultural, religious, and economic history of the Iberian Peninsula, the volume includes 37 original essays grouped around fundamental themes such as Languages and Literatures, Spiritualities, and Visual Culture. This interdisciplinary volume is an excellent introduction and reference work for students and scholars in Iberian Studies and Medieval Studies. E. Michael Gerli is Commonwealth Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Virginia, USA. Ryan D. Giles is Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA.
Routledge Companions to Hispanic and Latin American Studies Routledge Companions to Hispanic and Latin American Studies are state-of-the-art surveys of the key areas within Hispanic and Latin American Studies, providing accessible yet thorough assessments of key problems, themes, and recent developments in research. Series Editor: Brad Epps, University of Cambridge The Routledge Companion to the Hispanic Enlightenment Edited by Elizabeth Franklin Lewis, Mónica Bolufer Peruga, and Catherine M. Jaffe The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spain Edited by Elisa Martí-López The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492–1898) Edited by Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Medieval Iberia Unity in Diversity Edited by E. Michael Gerli and Ryan D. Giles For more information about this series please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge -Companions-to-Hispanic-and-Latin-American-Studies/book-series/RCHLAS
THE ROUTLEDGE HISPANIC STUDIES COMPANION TO MEDIEVAL IBERIA Unity in Diversity
Edited by E. Michael Gerli and Ryan D. Giles
SERIES EDITOR: BRAD EPPS SPANISH LIST ADVISOR: JAVIER MUÑOZ-BASOLS
First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park,Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, E. Michael Gerli and Ryan D. Giles; individual chapters, the contributors The right of E. Michael Gerli and Ryan D. Giles to be identifed as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gerli, E. Michael, editor. | Giles, Ryan D. (Ryan Dennis), editor. Title:The Routledge Hispanic studies companion to medieval Iberia: unity in diversity/edited by E. Michael Gerli and Ryan D. Giles. Description: London; New York, NY: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2021. | Series: Routledge companions to Hispanic and Latin American studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifers: LCCN 2020052387 (print) | LCCN 2020052388 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138629325 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315210483 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Iberian Peninsula–Civilization. | Spain–Civilization–711-1516. | Portugal–Civilization–To 1500. Classifcation: LCC DP99.R77 2021 (print) | LCC DP99 (ebook) | DDC 946.0009/02–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020052387 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020052388 ISBN: 978-1-138-62932-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-36777-174-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-21048-3 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
To our students.
CONTENTS
List of contributors Acknowledgments Preface
xi xix xx
PART I
The environment
1
1 Humans and the environment in medieval Iberia Abigail Agresta
3
PART II
Societies, polities, and governments
19
2 Fragmentation and centralization:The emergent political culture of the medieval Crown of Aragon Thomas W. Barton
21
3 Mudéjares and Moriscos Brian A. Catlos
35
4 Otherness, identities, and cultures in contact Jean Dangler
52
5 The Visigothic and Suevic kingdoms:The road to unity in post-Roman Hispania Alberto Ferreiro
vii
67
Contents
6 Power and politics in Iberian societies, ca. 1035–1516 Teoflo F. Ruiz
86
7 The law Jesús R.Velasco
101
8 Sefarad David Wacks
119
PART III
Histories
135
9 Re-reading the conquest of Iberia:The dynamism of a medieval tradition Nicola Clarke 10 ‘Abd al-Raḥma¯n III and the caliphat˙e of Cordoba Maribel Fierro
137 152
11 Writing the past, ordering the world:Alfonso the Wise’s Estorias within his political and cultural agenda Leonardo Funes
167
12 From Islamic to Christian conquest: Fatḥ invasion and Reconquista in medieval Iberia Alejandro García-Sanjuán
185
13 Islamogothic Iberia: The Ta¯rı¯kh of Ibn al-Qu ¯ ṭ¯ıyah Nasser Meerkhan
197
PART IV
Philosophy and spirituality
213
14 Corporeality and soteriology in medieval Spanish hagiography:The body as signifer in the Libre dels tres reys d’Orient Andrew M. Beresford
215
15 Contested martyrdom:Voluntary death and blessed cursing in the works of Eulogius and Paulus Alvarus of Córdoba Ryan D. Giles
233
16 Ramon Llull and Lullism Mark D. Johnston
244
viii
Contents
17 Toledo and beyond: Bishops and Jews in medieval Iberia Lucy K. Pick 18 Turning and returning: Religious conversion and personal testimony in Iberian societies Ryan Szpiech
256
268
PART V
Gender
285
19 Medieval Iberian women and gender Marie A. Kelleher
287
20 Iberian queenship:Theory and practice Núria Silleras-Fernández
303
PART VI
Languages and literatures
325
21 Digital humanities and the Iberian Middle Ages Susanna Allés-Torrent
327
22 The Galician-Portuguese cantigas, the history of emotion, and lyric as genre Henry Berlin
345
23 Arabic alongside and into Hebrew:Andalusi Hebrew literary culture in meta-critical perspective Ross Brann
363
24 From heroes to courtly knights:The rise and development of chivalric narrative in medieval Iberia Axayácatl Campos García Rojas
375
25 Refections of the long thirteenth century: Curiosity, the politics of knowledge, and imperial power in the Libro de Alexandre E. Michael Gerli
391
26 Medieval Iberian travel literature Michael Harney
408
27 Inscription, authorship, iteration:The textuality of medieval Catalan literature Albert Lloret ix
421
Contents
28 The Ḥ adı¯th de Yúçuf: Reimagining a prophet in a world of “others’ words” Andrea Pauw 29 Extemporizing a translation of the Arabic into Castilian:Translation and the raciolinguistic logic of medieval Iberia S.J. Pearce
439
457
30 Clerical soundscapes Simone Pinet
475
31 Rapture and horror: Reading Celestina in sixteenth-century Spain Loreto Romero
491
32 Framing intercultural encounters in three Iberian translations of Kalila wa-Dimna Rachel Scott
508
33 Evidence for an underlying Ibero–Romance vernacular:The Nodicia de kesos vis-à-vis its corresponding notarial act Omar Velázquez-Mendoza
528
34 Epic texts in medieval Iberia:The cultural battlefeld between Christians and Muslims Irene Zaderenko
546
PART VII
Visual culture
563
35 Mudejar Teruel: Decoding an art-historical mystery Marianne David
565
36 Coloring words: New perspectives on visual culture in León and Castile (thirteenth through fourteenth centuries) Marina Aurora Garzón Fernández and Francisco Prado-Vilar
581
37 Performing authority through iconography: On Iberian visionary women and images Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida
600
Index
621
x
CONTRIBUTORS
Abigail Agresta is Assistant Professor of History at George Washington University,Washington, D.C., USA. She specializes in medieval European and Mediterranean history, with an emphasis on environmental history, urban history, and history of public health. Her current book project, God, Humans, and Nature in Late Medieval Valencia, investigates how the rulers of a religiously mixed society—the city of Valencia, Spain—understood the relationship between God, human beings, and the natural world. Susanna Allés-Torrent is Assistant Professor of Medieval Iberian Studies and Digital Humanities (DH) at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida, USA. She holds a PhD from the University of Barcelona in Romance Philology, and an MA from the École Nationale des Chartres. Her research addresses ffteenth-century Iberia and its cultural connections with Italian humanism, life writing, translation studies, textual scholarship, digital editing, and the history and present of digital methods in Peninsular Studies and the Spanish-speaking world. These interests inform several of her publications, as well as her current book project and digital Archive of Biographical Writings in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia. She has also published widely on the intersection of digital scholarly editions and textual criticism.At the University of Miami she teaches Spanish Cultural Topics, Medieval and Early Modern Literature, and several DH courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Thomas W. Barton is Professor of History at the University of San Diego, San Diego, California, USA. He is the author of two monographs, Contested Treasure: Jews and Authority in the Crown of Aragon (Penn State) and Victory’s Shadow: Conquest and Governance in Medieval Catalonia (Cornell), and is currently completing a third book entitled Community over Kingdom:The Local Roots of Ethno-Religious Violence in Late-Medieval Iberia. Andrew M. Beresford is Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Durham, Durham, United Kingdom. He has published widely on Spanish art and literature, focusing particularly on the lives of the saints and the role and function of the body. His most recent books include Spanish Art in County Durham (edited with Clare Baron, 2014), Jonathan Parker: Familiarity and Mystery (2017), Christ, Mary, and the Saints: Reading Religious Subjects in Medieval and Renaissance Spain (edited with Lesley Twomey, 2018), and Sacred Skin:The Legend of St. Bartholomew in Spanish Art and Literature (2020). He is currently preparing a theoretical xi
Contributors
appraisal of the centrality of the martyred body to constructions of identity in ffteenth-century Spain. Henry Berlin is Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, University at Buffalo, SUNY, Buffalo, New York, USA. His research and teaching focus on questions of emotion and poetics in medieval and early modern literature in Portuguese, Castilian, and Catalan. He is also interested in philosophical poetry and the relationships among literature, philosophy, and theology more broadly; apocalyptic literature, prophecy, and modern reworkings of medieval lyric; and the Majorcan mystic and polymath Ramon Llull. His scholarship has appeared in publications such as La corónica, Medieval Encounters, the Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, Hispanic Review, and Hispanic Issues on Line. Ross Brann is Milton R. Konvitz Professor of Judeo-Islamic Studies and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA. Brann studied at the University of California, Berkeley, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, New York University, and the American University in Cairo. He has taught at Cornell since 1986 and served 20 years as Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Studies. Brann is the author or editor of seven volumes and many essays on the intersection of Jewish and Islamic culture, including The Compunctious Poet: Cultural Ambiguity and Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain (Johns Hopkins U Press, 1991), Power in the Portrayal: Representations of Muslims and Jews in Eleventh- and Twelfth Century Islamic Spain (Princeton U Press, 2002) Iberian Moorings: al-Andalus and Sefarad and the Tropes of Exceptionalism (U Penn Press, 2020). He is currently working on Maimonides: A Very Short Introduction for Oxford University Press. Axayácatl Campos García Rojas has over 20 years of experience in teaching and developing research on medieval Hispanic literature, with special interest in Medieval and Golden Age Castilian romances of chivalry. He earned his PhD in Hispanic Studies from the University of London (Queen Mary and Westfeld College), where Professor Alan Deyermond was his supervisor and mentor. Since 2000 he has taught Medieval Hispanic Literature at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), México City, Mexico. In 2005, he founded the Seminar of Studies on Chivalric Narrative, an internationally recognized center for research and study on chivalric matters. He has published numerous articles and papers in specialized journals, and also chapters in books. He is also the academic leader of several research projects on narrative and chivalry at the UNAM. Brian A. Catlos, PhD in Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, 2000, is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, USA, and Research Associate in Humanities at UC Santa Cruz, where he co-directs The Mediterranean Seminar, a forum with over 1,600 affliates worldwide. He works on Muslim–Christian–Jewish relations in medieval Europe and the Islamic world, and the history of the pre-modern Mediterranean. His monographs—The Victors and the Vanquished: Christians and Muslims in Catalonia and Aragon, 1050– 1300; Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c. 1050–1614; Infdel Kings and Unholy Warriors: Faith, Power, and Violence in the Age of Crusade and Jihad; and Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain—have been translated into seven languages and have won prizes from the Medieval Academy, the AHA, MESA, and others.A co-written textbook and reader, The Sea in the Middle: The Mediterranean World, 650-1650 will be out in winter 2022. Nicola Clarke is Lecturer in the History of the Islamic World in the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology at Newcastle University, Newcastle, United Kingdom. An historian of medieval Islamic Iberia (al-Andalus), she focuses on Andalusí historiography and social history. Her xii
Contributors
teaching, however, ranges across the Islamic world, from the time of the Prophet Muhammad down to the early seventeenth century. Jean Dangler specializes in medieval Iberian studies as Professor of Spanish at Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses. She is the author of Mediating Fictions: Literature,Women Healers and the Go-Between in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Bucknell UP, 2001), Making Difference in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (U of Notre Dame P, 2005), and Edging Toward Iberia (U of Toronto P, 2017). She is currently writing a book about what the early print copies of Jaume Roig’s Espill and Isabel de Villena’s Vita Christi can tell us about how the books were interpreted and read. Marianne David is an independent scholar with a PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University, who lives in New York, New York, USA. A painter and Guggenheim gallery educator, as well as a teacher with many years of experience teaching French and Spanish Language, Literature and Culture in New York’s Trinity School, she has authored and co-authored various articles and books on language learning. She has also written and given numerous presentations at international conferences on cultural and artistic themes: diaspora, cultural symbiosis, Iberia’s pluralist legacy, the Sarajevo Haggadah. During a visit to Teruel in 2012, she became fascinated with the iconography on the Cathedral of Santa Maria de Mediavilla’s painted ceiling, and its illumination of Iberia’s thirteenth-century convivencia. Alberto Ferreiro is Professor of European History at Seattle Pacifc University, Seattle,Washinton, USA. He has published some 115 articles in patristics and medieval studies in prestigious journals such as Church History, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Harvard Theological Review, Vigiliae Christianae, Studia monastica, Hagiographica, and Zeitschrift für Antikes und Christentum. Among his 12 books are Simon Magus in Patristic, Medieval and Early Modern Traditions (Brill, 2005) and Epistolae Plenae: The Correspondence of the Bishops of Hispania with the Bishops of Rome (Brill, 2020). Maribel Fierro is Research Professor at the Institute of Languages and Cultures of the Mediterranean (CSIC, Madrid, Spain). She has worked and published on the political, religious, and intellectual history of al-Andalus and the Islamic West, on Islamic law, on the construction of orthodoxy, and on violence and its representation in Medieval Arabic sources. Among her publications: Abd al-Rahman III:The First Cordoban Caliph (2005),The Almohad Revolution: Politics and Religion in the Islamic West during the Twelfth-Thirteenth Centuries (2012), and Abd al-Mu’min: The First Almohad Caliph (forthcoming). She is the editor of volume two of The Western Islamic World, Eleventh to Eighteenth Centuries of The New Cambridge History of Islam (2010), Orthodoxy and Heresy in Islam: Critical Concepts in Religious Studies (2013), and the Routledge Handbook of Muslim Iberia (2020). She has co-editedThe Legal Status of Ḏ imm¯ı-s in the Islamic West (2013) and Accusations of Unbelief in Islam:A Diachronic Perspective on Takfı¯r (2015). Leonardo Funes is Professor of Medieval Spanish Literature at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Director of the Institute of Bibliographical Research and Textual Criticism (National Council of Technology and Scientifc Research of Argentina). He specializes in historiography, epic poetry, and early medieval Castilian narrative. He has published editions of Mocedades de Rodrigo (2004), Poema de Mio Cid (2007), and El Conde Lucanor (2020); and two monographs, El modelo historiográfco alfonsí: una caracterización (1997) and Investigación literaria de textos medievales: objeto y práctica (2009). Alejandro García-Sanjuán is currently Professor Titular (Associate Professor) of Medieval History at the University of Huelva, Huelva, Spain. His major publications include Yihad: La regulación de la guerra en la doctrina islámica clásica (Marcial Pons, 2020), La conquista islámica de la xiii
Contributors
península ibérica y la tergiversación del pasado (Marcial Pons, 2019, 2nd edition), Estudios críticos de historia de al-Andalus (Peripecia Libros, 2018), Coexistencia y confictos: Minorías religiosas en la pennínsula ibérica durante la Edad Media (University of Granada, 2015), and Till God Inherits the Earth: Islamic Pious Endowments in al-Andalus (9th–15th century) (Brill, 2007). Marina Aurora Garzón Fernández received her PhD from the University of Santiago de Compostela, Santiago, Spain, in 2019 with a thesis titled “Santa María la Mayor de Toro: iglesia y ciudad (1157–1312)”. Her research focuses on the visual culture in León and Castile with an emphasis on thirteenth-century sculpture. She has also delved into the study of the aesthetics of writing with an investigation on medieval paper-cut calligraphy through the works of Shem Tov. Most recently she has worked on medieval Galician literature at the Centro Ramón Piñeiro para Investigación en Humanidades where she contributed to the Guía para o estudo da prosa galega medieval (2020). E. Michael Gerli is Commonwealth Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA. His research interests include the social, intellectual, and cultural history of the western Mediterranean from the Middle Ages through early modernity. He has published widely in the feld, and is the General Editor of Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia (Routledge, 2003), one of 18 books he has authored or edited. During a 50-year career of university teaching and research he has been the recipient of numerous grants, fellowships, and awards, including the Hispanic Review’s Edwin B.Williams Prize (1981), the Modern Language Association’s Division of Medieval Spanish Language and Literature’s John K. Walsh Prize (1997), and the Modern Language Association of America’s twenty-second annual Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for an outstanding book published in English or Spanish in the feld of Latin American and Spanish literatures and cultures. Ryan D. Giles is Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA. His research centers on medieval and early modern Iberian works— and in particular parody and satire, picaresque writing, and expressions of sanctity and popular devotion. He is the author of The Laughter of the Saints: Parodies of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain (University of Toronto Press, 2009) and Inscribed Power: Amulets and Magic in Early Spanish Literature (University of Toronto Press, 2017). He is the co-editor (with Matthew Bailey) of Charlemagne and his Legend in Early Spanish Literature and Historiography (Boydell and Brewer, 2016); and (with Steven Wagschal) Beyond Sight: Engaging the Senses in Iberian Literatures and Cultures, 1200–1700 (University of Toronto Press, 2018). He won the John K.Walsh Prize for an outstanding essay in 2008 and 2016. Michael Harney is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas,Austin. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley in 1975. Harney’s interests lie pimarily in Medieval and Renaissance Spanish Literature, comparative literature, literary theory, and cultural theory. In addition to numerous scholarly articles and reviews, his publications include a translation of Cervantes’s Exemplary Novellas (Hackett, 2016); Race, Caste, and Indigeneity in Medieval Spanish Travel Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); The Epic of the Cid, translation and edition (Hackett, 2011); Kinship & Marriage in Medieval Hispanic Chivalric Romance (Brepols, 2001); and Kinship & Polity in the “Poema de Mio Cid” (Purdue University Press, 1993). Mark D. Johnston is Professor Emeritus of Modern Languages at DePaul University in Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA. He earned his PhD from John Hopkins University in 1978. His publications include numerous studies, editions, and translations of Ramon Llull, as well as xiv
Contributors
other major works on medieval conduct literature, medieval lay spirituality, and the cultures, literatures, and history of the Iberian Middle Ages. Marie A. Kelleher is Professor of Medieval History at California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, California, USA. Her frst book, The Measure of Woman: Law and Female Identity in the Crown of Aragon, was awarded the American Historical Association’s 2012 “Premio del Rey” for best book in early Iberian history. Since then, she has published articles on women and gender, procedural law, piracy, and the history of Barcelona. Her current book project is a biography of medieval Barcelona, structured as a series of interlocking micro-historical essays that focus on aspects of the city’s overlapping local, regional, and Mediterranean identities through the lens of the famine year of 1333–1334. Albert Lloret is Associate Professor of Spanish and Catalan at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, Massachusetts, USA, where he directs the Spanish and Portuguese Studies Unit. He has a PhD from John Hopkins University. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Arkansas, Mount Holyoke College, and Amherst College. He specializes in the literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, with an emphasis on textual and translation studies. He is the author of Printing Ausiàs March and co-author of The Classical Tradition in Medieval Catalan, 1300-1500, among other publications. He is a general editor of Translat Library and a founding editor of Digital Philology:A Journal of Medieval Cultures. Nasser Meerkhan holds a joint appointment as Assistant Professor in the departments of Spanish and Portuguese and Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, USA. He received his BA in Spanish Literature from Damascus University, Syria, in 2011; his MA in Hispanic Studies from Villanova University in 2013; and his PhD in Spanish Literature from the University of Virginia in 2017. His research interests include medieval and early modern Iberian literature, historiography, women writers, aljamiado studies, and the picaresque. His publications include translations of novels from Spanish and English into Arabic, an article titled “False Hope and Flawed Sainthood in Don Quixote: Khiḍr, al-Mahdı¯, and the Knight of the Green Coat” in the Hispanic Review (2019), and an upcoming book chapter titled “El pasado como antídoto contra la incertidumbre: La leyenda Morisca de Alí ibn Abi Talib y el Alcázar de Oro” on myths and legends of crypto-Muslims in early modern Iberia. Andrea Pauw completed her PhD at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville,Virginia, USA. Her research examines aljamiado (Spanish written with Arabic script) poetry through the lens of linguistic anthropology. In addition to ffteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscripts, her work analyzes nineteenth-century historiographical and artistic representations of Iberian Muslims. A Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship enabled her to conduct research for the chapter included in this book. S.J. Pearce is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University, New York, New York, USA, where her teaching and research focus on the intellectual history and literature of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in medieval Spain. Her recently published frst book, The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition: The Role of Arabic in Judah ibn Tibbon’s Ethical Will (Indiana UP, 2017) examines the ways in which Jewish intellectuals in thirteenth-century Spain and France understood Arabic to be a language of cultural prestige. The monograph was awarded the 2019 La corónica International Book Award. Lucy K. Pick is a historian of medieval thought and culture who has taught at the University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA. Her research interests include the relationships between gender, power, and religion; the translation movement of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and its xv
Contributors
impact on relations between religious groups; and the development of monastic thought and practice. Her frst book, Confict and Coexistence: Archbishop Rodrigo and the Muslims and Jews of Thirteenth-Century Spain (University of Michigan, 2004), discusses Jewish, Christian, and Muslim relations in thirteenth-century Toledo. Her second monograph, Father’s Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in Early the Spanish Kingdoms (Cornell UP, 2017) examines the careers of royal women in early medieval Spain, especially their role as consecrated virgins, to discover in what their power consisted, from where it was derived, and how it was represented. She is also the author of the novel, Pilgrimage (Cuidono, 2014), a story about the Middle Ages that explores betrayal, friendship, illness, miracles, healing, and redemption on the road to Compostela. Simone Pinet is Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA. She received her doctoral degree in Hispanic Studies from Harvard University. Her recent publications include The Task of the Cleric (Toronto UP, 2016), and “For Love of Money: Rhetorical Economics in the Libro de buen amor”, a chapter in the New Companion to the Libro de Buen Amor (forthcoming, Brill). Her current research interests include the history of economic metaphors in medieval and early modern literature. Francisco Prado-Vilar is the Director of Art and Cultural Projects at Harvard’s Real Colegio Complutense (RCC), Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. His research focuses on diverse aspects of the arts and cultures of medieval Iberia, covering topics of wide chronological, thematic, and methodological range. His most recent publications include The Superstes: Resurrection, the Survival of Antiquity, and the Poetics of the Body in Romanesque Sculpture (2017), The Awakening of Endymion: Beauty,Time, and Eternity in Romanesque Sculpture, and Its Photographic Afterlife (2019), The Marble Tempest: Material Imagination, the Echoes of Nostos and the Transfguration of Myth in Medieval Sculpture (2020), and the edited volume The Portal of Glory: Architecture, Matter, and Vision (2021), which is the frst publication of the A. W. Mellon Program for Research and Conservation of the Portal of Glory of Santiago Cathedral. Loreto Romero is a member of the General Faculty at the University ofVirginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, where she received her PhD in 2019 from the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. Her current scholarship aims to disclose the different layers of meaning that comprise Fernando de Rojas’s Celestina in order to come to a deeper understanding of its vast popularity. In her research, she situates the go-between Celestina and her world in dialogue, on the one hand with the living, material, and sociohistorical conditions in which Rojas’s work was both composed and received, and on the other with its literary forebears and offspring uncovering the role that literary, ideological, gender, and ethnic mediation play in the work’s reception and lasting allure. Her research has been supported by grants from The Bibliographical Society of America, The Clay Endowment for the Humanities, and The Rare Book School, among others. Teofilo F. Ruiz is a student of Joseph R. Strayer at Princeton and a scholar of the social and popular cultures of late medieval and early modern Spain and the Western Mediterranean. He joined the history department at UCLA in 1998, received the University’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2008, and was selected the Faculty Research lecturer for 2011–2012. Prior to this appointment, he taught at Brooklyn College, the CUNY Graduate Center, the University of Michigan, the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris), and at Princeton, as the 250th Anniversary Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching. He received a National Humanities Medal for 2011 in 2012 from President Obama for his “inspired teaching and writing”, and he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013. In 1994, CASE and the Carnegie Foundation selected Ruiz as one of four U.S. Professors of the Year. He is the recipixvi
Contributors
ent of fellowships from the NEH, the Mellon Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), the ACLS, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida is Full Professor at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain. Sanmartín has written on the performativity of ffteenth-century literature (Teatralidad y textualidad en el “Arcipreste de Talavera”, 2003; El arte de morir, 2006), and nineteenthcentury medievalism (Imágenes de la Edad Media, 2002). In recent years, Sanmartín has focused her research on female mysticism (La representación de las místicas, 2012; Las “Revelaciones” de María de Santo Domingo, 2014, with M. Luengo; La comida visionaria, 2015; El “Libro de la oración” de María de Santo Domingo, 2019, with V. Curto); on the latter subject she has directed two international research projects and is presently leading a third. Sanmartín has worked at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científcas (1996–2004), the University of Manchester (2001–2003), and has been Visiting Professor at Queen Mary University, London (2008), Nottingham (2014),Trento (2016) and Universidade Nova de Lisboa (2019). Rachel Scott is Lecturer in World and Comparative Literatures (Hispanic) at Royal Holloway University of London, London, United Kingdom. She was previously Postdoctoral Research Associate on Language Acts and Worldmaking, a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Open World Research Initiative, and Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at Queen Mary University of London. She completed her PhD at King’s College London in 2015. Her frst monograph, Celestina and the Human Condition in Early Modern Spain and Italy, was published with Tamesis in 2017. She has articles and reviews published in the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Renaissance Quarterly, and Studia Aurea, and chapters in edited volumes including Transnational Modern Languages:A Handbook (2021). Her current project and second book-length study traces the medieval and early modern European reception of Kalila wa-Dimna. Núria Silleras-Fernández is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, USA. Her research focuses on medieval and early modern Iberian and Mediterranean studies, cultural and intellectual history, Iberian literatures, and gender. She has published two scholarly books, Power, Piety, and Patronage in Late Medieval Queenship: Maria de Luna (Palgrave, 2008) and Chariots of Ladies: Francesc Eiximenis and the Court Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Cornell UP, 2015). She has also co-edited: In and Of the Mediterranean: Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Studies (Vanderbilt UP, 2015), Teaching Gender Through Latin American, Latino, and Iberian Texts and Cultures (Sense Publishing, 2015), and Iberian Babel:Translation and Multilingualism in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean (under review). She is currently working on two book projects; one relates to gender, grief, and the emotions, and the other to multilingualism and cultural exchange in the Mediterranean. Ryan Szpiech is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. He has published numerous articles on medieval polemics, translation, and religious conversion, as well as Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic (University of Pennsylvania P, 2013), which won the “La Corónica International Book Award” in 2015. He is also the editor of Medieval Exegesis and Religious Difference: Commentary, Confict, and Community in the Premodern Mediterranean (Fordham University P, 2015), co-editor (with Mercedes García-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers) of Interreligious Encounters in Polemics between Christians, Jews, and Muslims in Iberia and Beyond (Brill, 2018), co-editor (with Charles Burnett, Josefna Rodríguez-Arribas, and Silke Ackermann) of Astrolabes in Medieval Culture (Brill, 2019), and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Medieval Encounters. He recently completed the documentary flm The Birth of Spanish in 3D, about the infuence of King Alfonso X on the spread of Castilian (available online at https://birth-of-spanish.rll.lsa.umich.edu/). xvii
Contributors
Jesús R. Velasco studies medieval and early modern legal cultures across the Mediterranean Basin and Europe within and outside the legal professions, from the perspective of contemporary critical thought.He teaches at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA, and is the author of Dead Voice: Law, Philosophy, and Fiction in the Iberian Middle Ages (University of Pennsylvania P, 2020), Plebeyos Márgenes: Ficción, Industria del Derecho y Ciencia Literaria (SEMYR), or Order and Chivalry: Knighthood and Citizenship in Late Medieval Castile (University of Pennsylvania P., 2009). He is currently writing a new book, Science de l’âme et corps du droit, and fnishing his project on Microliteratures:The Margins of the Law. His articles on legal culture, chivalry, Occitan poetry, political theory, and other subjects have appeared in English, Spanish, French, and Catalan in journals such as MLN, La corónica, Studi Ispanici, and many others. Omar Velázquez-Mendoza is Associate Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville,Virginia, USA. He specializes in the history of Ibero-Romance and the acquisition of advanced literacy in frst and second languages. Professor Velázquez-Mendoza is Assistant Researcher for Madrid’s Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científcas, as well as for the US-Mexico project entitled Corpus del Lenguaje Académico en Español. His most recent publications center upon linguistic variation in Late Latin and Early Romance, the consolidation of verb-object in Hispano-Romance, and the sociolinguistic milieu pertaining to the writing practices of the Iberian notaries of the High Middle Ages. He is the author of Estudio de morfosintaxis histórica: orígenes primitivos y desarrollo del complemento directo preposicional en iberorromance centronorteño y lusitano (Diachronica Hispanica Monograph Series—Valencia: Tirant lo Blanch, 2019). Professor Velázquez-Mendoza’s work has appeared in publications such as Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, and Romance Philology. David Wacks is Head of the Department of Romance Languages and Professor of Spanish at the University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, USA. He earned his PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from UC Berkeley in 2003. In 2006 he was Harry Starr Fellow in Judaica at the Harvard Center for Jewish Studies. He is the author of Framing Iberia: Maqa¯ma¯t and Frametale Narratives in Medieval Spain, (Brill, 2007) (winner of the 2009 La Corónica award), Double Diaspora in Sephardic Literature: Jewish Cultural Production before and after 1492 (Indiana UP, 2015) (winner of the 2015 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Sephardic Culture) and Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World (U of Toronto Press, 2019). He blogs on his current research at http://davidwacks.uoregon.edu Irene Zaderenko was Professor of Spanish Literature at Boston University (1995–2016), Boston, Massachusetts, USA. She specializes in Spanish epic poetry and her publications include Problemas de autoría, de estructura y de fuentes en el “Poema de Mio Cid” (Universidad de Alcalá, 1998); El monasterio de Cardeña y el inicio de la épica cidiana (Universidad de Alcalá, 2013); and A Companion to the “Poema de Mio Cid”, co-edited with Alberto Montaner (Brill, 2018). She is presently co-editing El mester de clerecía de los siglos XIII y XIV: Nuevo panorama crítico (Universidad de Salamanca, forthcoming) in collaboration with Alberto Montaner. She has also published numerous chapters in books as well as articles in La corónica, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Revista de Filología Española, Incipit, Romance Quarterly, Letras, Olivar, Filología, and Revista de Literatura Medieval.
xviii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The editors wish to extend their thanks frst to the contributors for their patience during the three years it took to develop and publish this volume. Additionally, they wish to express their gratitude to Brad Epps, Javier Muñoz-Basols, and the editors at Routledge, especially Commissioning Editors Laura Sanford and SamanthaVale Noya, Rosie McEwan,Anna Callender, and Deanta Publishing Project Manager Lillian Woodall, as well as to Jason Begy, Master Indexer, and our editorial assistants David Korfhagen, Marisa Giles, and Giovanni Molina, who aided with the fnal formal editing of the contributions prior to their inclusion in the fnal typescript. We are also grateful to John Dagenais,Teo Ruiz, Paul Freedman, Julian Weiss, Amaia Arizaleta, María Rodríguez Porto, and the late Simon Barton and Peter Linehan for their early advice and good counsel. Finally, we wish to thank Pamela A. Patton, Director of the Index for Medieval Art at Princeton, for permission to use her images of the Tudela Judas and the Tudela Conspiracy (Figures 17.1 and 17.2).
xix
PREFACE
The Routledge Companion to Medieval Iberia: Unity in Diversity is conceived as a single-volume, English-language scholarly platform that serves as a far-reaching introduction and reference work for scholars, students, and the general public seeking reliable knowledge and research on subjects concerning the Iberian Peninsula, the geographic area comprised by present-day Spain and Portugal, from approximately 470 to 1550 CE.Although this volume is by no means comprehensive in its treatment of medieval Iberia, it is our hope that these studies will kindle a new interest and deeper recognition of this time and place, as something far greater than the sum of its parts. Our collection is designed to stimulate greater critical engagement with the pluralistic nature of the Iberian social, historical, literary, and cultural context. The 37 chapters of the Companion address issues across a broad chronological and geographical range and are loosely linked around certain fundamental subjects: ethnicities, religions, identities, and language; beliefs, social values, and the symbolic order; power and power structures; elites and less privileged classes, civic organizations, and social groups; institutions, and topics that have a particular relevance to all of medieval Iberia—Muslim, Jewish, and Christian alike. The chapters that comprise the book are all written by expert contributors from around the world, and seek to provide a basic orientation on the various areas for in-depth knowledge as well as for ready reference. In addition, each chapter offers a selected bibliography, in English whenever possible.Although the scope of the work is broad, it is not intended to be comprehensive, but rather seeks to provoke interest in a plurality of new possibilities. Its emphasis falls upon discrete issues in history, literature, language, religion, science, and the arts, including selected Jewish and Muslim topics.To complement its content and facilitate its use, the book offers an all-inclusive subject and onomastic index. Covering social, political, cultural, religious, and economic history, and crossing disciplines, The Companion offers a wide variety of different scholarly perspectives and approaches to medieval Iberia in order to depict and problematize an historical and cultural universe far different from the rest of Europe during this period.This was a time of fundamental transformation and the emergence of a world order which by circumstance provides a touchstone for thinking about notions of multiculturalism, cultures in contact, and the need for a new openness in imagining human interactions in the past and in the present. Engaging with this historical context, our volume embraces a multidisciplinary survey of the current state of research in the feld of Iberian Medieval Studies through concrete examples of it. Medieval Iberia is an area of inquiry xx
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and scholarship that has become increasingly important as we have come to decenter traditional historical and cultural paradigms and perspectives, recognizing the crucial role played by multicultural and multiconfessional societies in the medieval world, but especially in Europe and the medieval Mediterranean, Iberia in particular. In this volume the editors have drawn together the innovative work of a broad set of renowned scholars, as well as a number of ground-breaking, thought-provoking essays from younger, emergent academics, in order to provide a wide-ranging and in-depth coverage of some of the major aspects, and subtle complexities, of the Iberian medieval world. The Companion to Medieval Iberia sets itself apart from traditional collections of essays on the Iberian Middle Ages by offering a more extensively comparative and interpretive space for the linguistic, cultural, and ethnic diversity of the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages.As such it avoids narrow, anachronistic political and explanative taxonomies and advocates a more innovative approach to Iberian Studies—one that rearticulates and emphasizes cross-cultural, and multicultural interpretations and analyses. For the most part, past approaches have considered many subjects of the period in terms of narrow individual classifcations, describing things and events in terms of preconceived categorizations, or as belonging characteristically to a certain period, according to their form or their place in a time-based teleology. Seeking a more critical understanding and wishing consciously to avoid the conventional privileging of Castilian history and culture in its presentation of the Iberian Middle Ages, the studies collected in this volume are primarily investigative, interdisciplinary, and contextualizing in their approach.The contributors seek, as well, to highlight the ways in which their scholarship has responded to changing approaches that have more recently begun to establish themselves within the feld.The volume in this way circumvents the distorting unicultural, monolingual, “nationalist” perspectives—that is, from the vantage point of the modern nation-states of Spain and Portugal—and inward-looking themes that have prevailed in the study of cultural history since the nineteenth century. Areas and subjects like al-Andalus, Moriscos, the Sephardim, the Crown of Aragon, Portugal, and Catalonia are all represented in its chapters, and are shown to be crucial contributors to the cultural diversity of the Peninsula during the Middle Ages, as well as critical for understanding Iberia as a uniquely distinctive, collective cultural space.The Companion thus portrays a world far less isolated and self-referential than the medieval Iberia of traditional cultural histories. Far from the trans-Pyrenean no-man’s-land portrayed in outdated volumes, Medieval Iberia emerges in the book as a complex frontier space between east and west in terms of the fuidity of its cultures and institutions and as a vital threshold leading to modernity. At the same time, the Companion introduces a vast array of disciplinary crossings and modulations in its interpretive perspectives and the methodologies it engages with: the history of women, the environment, digital philology, travel, visual arts, among many others.The purpose of this diverse arrangement is to introduce a counterpoint to the established, more narrowly circumscribed forms for approaching and understanding the history, literature, and cultural institutions of the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages. The volume, as a whole, attempts to underscore the profound richness of Iberian Studies as a feld of still largely unfulflled possibilities—an effort that is even more pressing at a time when historical, humanistic disciplines are so often being threatened in the academy by an overemphasis on felds of study that are disengaged from the past. In this way, the collection seeks to serve as a strong advocate for broader studies of the humanities through which we can appreciate particularities of the past and learn from its relevance and resonance in the present. This kind of advocacy refects a shift in academic consciousness in recent years, as scholars and teachers increasingly recognize the importance of exploring how legacies and lessons from centuries past can shed light on and inform our understanding of the problematics of our current moment. xxi
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Of course, there are several ways to justify medieval studies didactically as an important, central, and consistently relevant subject in education and culture. First, in a more traditional context, medieval heritage continues to exert its infuence today in a prominent set of ideas and institutions, such as the Catholic Church, the university, law, government, romantic love, heroism, war, expressions of spirituality among different segments of society, and the prominent legacy of classical literatures and languages.That our knowledge of this heritage ought to be consciously passed on, cultivated, and refned to respond to changing times is commonly asserted. In approaching the Iberian Middle Ages in particular, we have sought to reexamine the period for the present and the future by opening up the feld to a diversity of nuanced, analytical, and complex methodologies that extend beyond the Peninsula.Through an awareness of the larger critical history of the Middle Ages, our volume provides avenues for readers to uncover the signifcance, differences, and resemblances of this vibrant period in Iberia. A less conventional way of learning from medieval civilization is to study the way it stands in relation to contemporary culture as a kind of conjunctive “other”, as the intriguing shadow of the past being cast on modernity, like a marginally distinctive double, the secret sharer of our dreams and anxieties.This view means that while aspects of the Middle Ages can closely resemble the culture of today, the period at the same time exhibits a suffcient number of crucial variations to decenter and compel us to question some of our own values and behaviors, allowing us both to perceive and propose alternatives and modifcations to received truths and habits of thinking about human experience in time. Even small differences in medieval culture as compared to our own experience in the world can be highly provocative and insightful.Accordingly, our aim is to make the most of contextual cultural information about medieval society in order to explore its intellectual and existential pertinence to the present time, as well as to the past in which it was produced.This approach arises out of dissatisfaction with traditional history, philology, and the sociology of literature, conventionally the prevailing methodologies in the feld and in the classroom, combined with a desire to refocus the art and literature of the distant past in relation to the larger issues that continue to affect our lives in the present. In this way, we seek both to read into and away from specifc texts to uncover a larger poetics, fashioning, or making of the medieval world vis-à-vis its diachronic and synchronic cultural matrix; to uncover the negotiations between texts and events in their larger institutional and human contexts, both in the past and in the present. Although this introduction would extend well beyond what our publishers would allow if we were to illustrate in detail the nature of each of the chapters in this book, the thematic divisions under which they can be found provide a broad overview of the kind of studies the volume encompasses. Since one of the main objectives of this collection has been to capture the heterogeneous, pluralistic nature of the Iberian Middle Ages, we have organized the essays according to numerous categories that refect the variety of that plurality: languages and literatures; histories; societies; spiritualities; politics; visual culture; genders; and governments. None of these groups, however, has a sharp defnition. Rather, each one of them embraces chapters that in themselves often blur their discrete disciplinary subjects, boundaries, and defnitions, and that may often fow one into the other.They may share thematic overlaps that speak to the diverse nature of the particular group under which they are organized.This is the case, for example with the thematic rubric “Histories”, in which the essays by Fierro, Clarke, Funes, García-Sanjuan, and Meerkhan, could easily ft into other thematic categories like “Societies”, “Polities”, and “Government”, or the piece on authority and iconography by Sanmartín Bastida under “Visual culture”, which could easily fall under “Spiritualities”. Similarly, some of the essays transcend temporal categories, or periodicities, reaching beyond what one might consider the Middle Ages. This is the situation with the chapters on Mudéjares and Moriscos, language and race, xxii
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and the reception of Celestina in the frst part of the sixteenth century. In short, the reader will encounter both overlaps and divergences in the internal headings, themes, and categories that the book embodies. To conclude, The Routledge Companion to Medieval Iberia seeks to provide an innovative platform with fresh points of departure for the study in the scholarly landscape by bringing together a compelling collection of essays that refect the evolving ways in which we think and write about the Iberian Peninsula. By drawing on the Peninsula’s broad cultural and linguistic base without obscuring its diversity or fragmenting it into blunt isolated compartments, and by offering in the range and scope of its chapters a pluralist, comparative, and speculative approach to the cultures, languages, and histories of the Peninsula, the Companion expresses its engagement with the new contours, dimensions, and possibilities for the feld. It seeks to suggest and establish new perspectives and methodologies which will not only be fruitful to Medieval Studies in general, but which can also promote a more analytical and comparative perspective in Hispanism in particular, which arguably has remained insular far too long, and in some instances even solipsistic, still having to come to terms with the multicultural, multiconfessional, and multilingual spaces and histories that actually comprise it.
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PART I
The environment
1 HUMANS AND THE ENVIRONMENT IN MEDIEVAL IBERIA Abigail Agresta
Introduction Hispania was frst named “Iberia” after the river Iberus [Ebro]…It is situated between Africa and Gaul, closed off by the Pyrenees mountains to the north and everywhere else shut in by the sea. It is temperate in its healthy climate, abundant in all types of produce, and very rich in its abundance of precious stones and metals. Isidore of Seville, Etymologies XIV.iv.28 Muslim and Christian writers alike in medieval Iberia tended to follow Isidore of Seville’s example in extolling the abundance of their homeland (Glick 2005, 45). Modern historians, however, have not always agreed. Those writing about the Christian kingdoms, particularly Castile, have stressed the “meager resources” of this “dry, barren, impoverished land” (Phillips and Phillips 1997, 8–9; Elliott 1963, 3). Historians of al-Andalus, by contrast, have observed that the region was “famed for its verdant landscapes”, gardens, and agricultural wealth (Ruggles 2000, xiii).Although Islamic and Christian Iberia occupied much of the same ground, different historiographical traditions have seen that ground very differently. This is partly because, as has been often observed, the geography of the Iberian Peninsula is so profoundly varied. Iberia is divided both geographically and climatically; the mountains and high plains cut the interior off from the moderating effects of both Atlantic and Mediterranean, so that a true Mediterranean climate can be found only in a narrow belt around the east, south, and west coasts.The northwest, from Galicia to the Basque country, is mountainous, rainy, and green, with plentiful forest cover. The Meseta Central, a high tableland which rises across much of the center of the peninsula, is arid, with hot summers and hard winters. In the south and east, from the Catalan coast to Seville, dry mountains contrast with the rich, irrigated felds (huertas) that cover the valleys and the coastal plains (Ruiz 2007, 6–13; Way 1962). Each of these regions could be further subdivided into an almost infnite variety of landscapes. Transport between them was also diffcult in the premodern period; mountain ranges crisscross the peninsula, and most of its rivers are navigable for only a short part of their length (Wing 2015, 9–13). The different Iberias of medieval historiography, therefore, are to some extent a result of real geographic fragmentation. They are also a matter of perspective; the peninsula looks harsher 3
Abigail Agresta
and drier from Burgos or Toledo than from Valencia or Granada. But this focus itself bleeds into myth; the rich Andalusi landscape is as much cultural narrative as dispassionate observation, as is the austerity of the central Meseta. Furthermore (and here we come to the central subject of this chapter), humans have not simply wandered about Iberia’s landscapes like actors on an impressive array of sets.The landscapes of medieval Iberia were in large part the creation of the humans who lived in them, just as human environments are today. That human beings and their activities can have a profound impact on their environments is obvious in the modern world, but less so in the Middle Ages. Scholars have just begun to write medieval history “as if nature mattered”. In order to do so, they have asked not only how medieval humans altered their environments over time, but also how those environments, and the species that lived in them, shaped the culture and history of the medieval period.Although medieval people have long been thought helpless, fearful, and ignorant in their environments, this new work has made clear that the opposite was true. All across Europe, medieval people managed and cleared forests, channeled water, drained marshes, and constructed habitats for a variety of economically valuable plants and animals (Hoffman 2014; Arnold 2013; Squatriti 2013). While they, like moderns, had a tendency to view the natural world as a metaphor for human society or faith, these lenses did not preclude keen observation. They approached natural disasters as calculated risks rather than terrifying mysteries, and they sought to mitigate those risks by means both religious and material (Gerrard and Petley 2013).To the scant harvest of environmental histories of medieval Iberia, this chapter will add the insights of agrarian history and the history of technology, and the fruits of related felds like archeology and paleoclimatology, which have revealed features of Iberian landscapes not visible in surviving documents.1 All of these sources are marshaled to shed light on one complex question: how did the successive conquests of the Iberian Peninsula shape the relationships between humans and the peninsula’s environments? Although this question barely scratches the surface of possibilities for medieval environmental history, in Iberia it serves as the logical starting place. Medieval Iberian history is in large part defned by the shifting borders of Islamic and Christian rule. Only recently, however, have scholars begun to ask how these successive regimes affected the environment, and the answers to those questions remain very preliminary. It is clear that both Muslims and Christians in Iberia modifed the landscapes in which they lived and that they did so in the context of a changing climate. Under Islamic rule, the creation of new irrigation networks transformed the human relationship with the land. The Christian conquest transformed this relationship again, both within and beyond the irrigated space.These successive transformations are still visible in Iberia today, in “cultural landscapes” such as the UNESCO-recognized Serra de Tramuntana in Mallorca.
Background Although this chapter is concerned with the period from the Arab conquest of 711 to the fall of Granada in 1492, the history of human infuence on the Iberian environment goes back millennia. Human land use has been shaping Iberian ecosystems since at least the Bronze Age, when pastoralists began to clear the forest and human industries frst raised lead levels in the Iberian environment (Carrión et al. 2010; García-Alix et al. 2013). As Iberia was incorporated into the Roman Empire during the frst two centuries BCE, the population grew, leading to overgrazing and deforestation in some places, as well as an increase in mining activity (Carrión et al. 2003; Kulikowski 2004; García-Latorre et al. 2001; López-Merino et al. 2011). To mine the gold-bearing areas of the northwest, the Romans developed an elaborate hydraulic system, 4
Humans and the environment
as well as other systems throughout the peninsula to supply water to cities and to irrigate felds (Ruiz del Árbol Moro et al. 2014; Sánchez 2015). As the empire disintegrated, population pressure on the marginal mountain areas eased, and the population overall may have diminished (García-Latorre et al. 2001, 78). Paleoecological evidence suggests that herding and salt production decreased in the Visigothic period, and forest cover increased (Corella et al. 2013, 565). Agriculture and other economic activities likewise became more limited in scope, and irrigation systems seem to have fallen out of use (Glick 2005, 16–18). From 400 to 800 CE, known as the Dark Ages Cold Period, the climate was cooler than before or after. Iberia, however, saw a great deal of regional variability in both temperature and humidity (Sánchez-López et al. 2016, 143). Storms became more frequent along both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic coasts (Degeai et al. 2015; Costas et al. 2012), and chronicles from the late seventh and early eighth centuries record a string of disasters on the peninsula, including plague, famine, and locust swarms (Glick 2005, 16–17). Here, however, we must be cautious; a chronicler reporting disaster may have been as intent on narrative aims as on weather-reporting (Squatriti 2010). Modern readers, like medieval ones, fnd the confuence of natural and political turmoil satisfying, even if climate and history do not always track so neatly.
The landscape of al-Andalus The surviving histories of the Arab conquest of the Iberian Peninsula were written after the event, as records of memory shading into myth. In these histories, many written in the eastern Mediterranean, the landscape takes on the marvelous qualities of a place on the edge of the world (Hernández Juberías 1996). In the ninth-century history of ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Habı¯b, as Janina Safran has observed, the land that the conquerors encounter is described as alien, forbidding, and remote (2002, 138–140). Some features remain recognizable; two early stories describe the ruins of Roman fountains, canals, cisterns, and aqueducts (Hernández Juberías 1996, 260– 65).A later tenth-century historian, by contrast, described a landscape defned by the toponyms of the conquerors; most famously,Tariq gathered his men on a promontory (jabal) that later bore his name (Jabal Tariq, or Gibraltar) (Safran 2002, 142).
Irrigation The conquerors soon made their mark on the land, with agricultural innovations that transformed the cultivated landscape of al-Andalus. The new settlers introduced a variety of new crops imported from Syria and points east, watered with irrigation systems constructed across the peninsula’s valley foors. The innovative nature of Andalusi agricultural practices has been clear to scholars only since the 1970s. For much of the twentieth century, Islamic agriculture was caught up in larger debates about the place of al-Andalus in Spanish history. Scholars who followed Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz in rejecting Islamic infuence tended to presume that Iberian irrigation must have been Roman in origin. In the 1970s, however,Thomas Glick demonstrated that these systems were Islamic, not Roman, and that they had been constructed by decentralized communities of irrigators rather than by the state. Glick built on the work of Pierre Guichard, who mapped the settlement patterns of Syrian and Berber groups, to show that irrigation technologies had spread along the same migration patterns (Glick 1969).2 These arguments were based on textual sources, but by the later 1980s the work of archeologists, chief among them Miquel Barceló, confrmed and elaborated this picture of Andalusi agriculture and its transformation of the Iberian cultivated space (Barceló and Kirchner 1996). 5
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When selecting sites for farming, the Arab and Berber settlers of al-Andalus prioritized land suited for irrigation. Settlements in al-Andalus were entirely designed around the water fow, and rights to the water were initially embedded in a kin-based property system, although this became less important over time (Trillo San José and Carmen 2005, 170; 2012, 268–69). They built their villages (Arabic al-qarya, rendered into Spanish as alquería and Portuguese as alcaria) above and outside the felds, out of the way of the hydraulic systems (Trillo San José and Carmen 2005, 167–68). For the irrigated felds they chose fat areas, often valley foors, but stayed well back from riverbanks, so that their crops would not, as in Egypt, be dependent on an annual inundation of the foodplain.The earliest irrigation canals were fed not by rivers, but by wells, springs, or qanats—underground galleries that passed through a water table, into which the water fltered and was carried to the desired site (Glick and Kirchner 2000, 305). Later, larger irrigation networks (huertas) usually took their water from the river by means of diversion dams, which raised the water level to fow into subsidiary channels. Sometimes the water sources were some distance from the felds, meaning that water would be lost to evaporation.The goal was not to maximize the area irrigated by a given water source, but rather to select the best, sunniest, and most fertile felds and bring the water to them (Puy 2014). The technologies necessary to construct these systems were fairly simple, and the work was probably carried out by the farmers themselves. Nonetheless, as Barceló’s pioneering work established, these systems were planned. Powered only by gravity, canals must be designed so that the water fows through to all parts of the system. If it runs too fast, it will erode the canal banks, but if it runs too slowly, it will pool and stagnate. Because of these considerations, a system that has already been constructed is not easy to modify; any changes must remain within the parameters set by the original design. Modifcations were extremely rare prior to the Christian conquest (Puy 2014; Kirchner 2009). Climate changes around the eighth-century conquest may have prompted the shift toward irrigated agriculture in the Islamic period. As noted above, the conquerors may have arrived in the midst of a string of droughts. In 750, another drought struck the northwest of the peninsula, as a result of which the Berbers who had settled Galicia returned to North Africa (Glick 2005, 16–18, 26–27).The early years of Islamic rule saw a transition from the Dark Ages Cold Period to what is known as the Medieval Climate Anomaly (or sometimes the Medieval Warm Period). This period, which lasted roughly from 900 to 1300, was, in Iberia, distinctly warmer than the periods before or after. It was also drier (except in the northwest), with aridity most pronounced in the southern half of the peninsula (Sánchez-López et al. 2016, 143–45; Moreno et al. 2012). The irrigation systems of al-Andalus were therefore constructed in a climate in which irrigation was increasingly necessary. Irrigation was not, however, simply a result of climate; it was embedded in other choices and practices of land use, which together formed relationships between humans and environments.That it was the peasant cultivators themselves making these choices seems beyond doubt. Andalusi peasants were not subject to the same feudal burdens as their neighbors to the north.While the Andalusi state probably exercised signifcant infuence near its urban palace complexes, it was probably not a factor in more distant zones, like the well-studied Balearic Islands (settled from the early tenth century) (Manzano Moreno 2006, 298, 457).There, the peasants would have been able to do more or less as they pleased. What they pleased, for the most part, was to create small irrigated spaces that they cultivated intensively, using irrigation and soil management to improve crop yields.Although autonomous peasants sometimes seek to minimize labor, Andalusi cultivators consistently chose intensive rather than extensive agriculture. This included labor-intensive methods of feld construction, like terracing or qanat structures, when the landscape was thought to require it (Retamero 2008, 137). Much of the arable land remained unirrigated but was dry-farmed only intermittently; 6
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it was so much less productive that it was not often worth the effort. An eighteenth-century inhabitant of Itrabo (Granada), reported that the best quality irrigated lands produce two harvests a year…and those [irrigated lands] that are of lower quality produce only one harvest a year, without intermission or rest…[but] the dry-farmed lands are small in number and all mountainous, rocky, and almost useless…and need four years fallow for each planting.3 As Felix Retamero has argued, the Andalusi approach to agriculture was intended to mitigate risk by allowing the most comfortable margin for environmental disaster. The irrigated felds produced a wide variety of crops, extended over two annual harvests, which spread the risk of crop failure. The stable structure of the irrigation system, moreover, placed limits on growth. The original settlers constructed irrigation systems that never hit the limits of the available water sources, and subsequent generations remained within those limits. The Andalusi model was thus a small cluster of intensively cultivated felds surrounded by large areas of uncultivated land, which yielded food, fuel, and other vital resources in times of scarcity (Retamero 2008; Kirchner and Retamero 2016). On the whole, pastoralism had little importance in Andalusi (or later Nasrid) agriculture. Common pastures existed throughout the kingdom of Granada, according to the Prophet’s teaching that water, grass, and fre were common to all Muslims, but they were secondary to the maintenance of the irrigated landscape (Trillo San José and Carmen 1999, 149). Outside the cultivated felds, al-Andalus was one of the most heavily forested regions of the dar al-Islam and exported its timber throughout the Islamic Mediterranean (Wing 2015, 53).The forest was, as elsewhere in the medieval world, used for both peasant subsistence and aristocratic recreation. Aristocrats on both sides of the frontier understood hunting as a performance of dominance over the land (Dodds 2008).
“Second nature” Over the centuries, the irrigated spaces of al-Andalus acquired the characteristics of what environmental historian William Cronon famously termed “second nature”: a constructed infrastructure overlaid on the landscape that came to infuence its destiny in much the same way that “natural” advantages would have done (Cronon 1991, 14–15, 56–57). Arabic writers consistently described al-Andalus as “endowed with excellent cultivable areas, very good sun, fertile soils…[and] further watered by abundant streams and springs of sweet water” (Lévi-Provencal 1953, 59). The southeast in particular was known as a region of nearly miraculous fertility (Hernández Juberías 1996, 292–94).As Ruggles noted, these descriptions should be read in the context of the conquest itself, which allowed the landscape to become fruitful and abundant under Islamic rule (2000, 9–14).The fertile landscape of al-Andalus was created through human intervention, and those who observed this landscape in the Middle Ages understood it to be so. In al-Andalus, interest in agricultural matters ran all the way up the social scale. Ruggles argued that the forms of Andalusi palace gardens refect not an archetypal paradise but rather the rich agricultural landscape that surrounded them: ornament imitating practicality (2000, xiii, 6–7). For the Umayyad caliphs, the stability and prosperity of this constructed agriculture was a refection of the stability and prosperity of the state; the former had allowed the latter to fourish. The caliphs and, following them, the taifa kings, took a keen interest in matters of hydrology and agronomy, and a number of texts on these subjects survive. Palace gardens were sites of botanical experimentation.The caliphs imported exotic plant species from the eastern Mediterranean, including the Syrian pomegranate, which was disseminated from the Cordoba palace garden 7
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throughout al-Andalus and the Maghreb (Kirchner and Retamero 2016).While the writers of agronomic texts do seem to have had practical knowledge of the techniques that they described, their purpose was to put “wise and ordered rules” to existing practices they observed among farmers near the court (Retamero 1998). By a certain logic, the compact Andalusi agricultural systems were less environmentally destructive than what came after the Christian conquest.The Andalusi huertas tended to return the water to the river at the end of the irrigation canals, rather than allowing it to be totally consumed by the felds (Torró 2009, 107). Since Andalusi farmers preferred the intensive cultivation of a small amount of land and left the lands around the irrigated felds as zones for pasture and forage, the overall “footprint” may have been lower than under Christian rule.The differences between Islamic and Christian Iberia cannot, however, be drawn so broadly. On the southern Meseta and in the Alentejo, where irrigation was not possible, settlers in the later Andalusi period caused deforestation and erosion, probably related to farming and clearing pasture land. In the Alentejo, the erosion was so bad that it led to widespread abandonment of settlements, well before the Christian conquest (Uribelarrea and Benito 2008, 29). The activities of Christians in the north of the peninsula may not have been so different in these years from those of their counterparts to the south. Hydraulics in the Christian kingdoms have been very little studied before the twelfth century. Preliminary work suggests, however, that tenth- and eleventh-century Catalan peasants also built complex irrigation networks in valley foors. Differences between north and south only appeared in the twelfth century as the peasants, the canals, and particularly the mills began to fall under seigneurial control. Later Catalan projects tended to be designed around mills rather than irrigation, although topography sometimes limited changes (Kirchner 2012; Gerrard 2011). In general, peasants who are dependent for their subsistence on the produce of their land prefer to minimize risk rather than maximize proft. Andalusi social structure allowed peasants greater self-determination than their counterparts enjoyed under feudal lordship. Before the feudal revolution, however, their strategies may have looked very much alike.
The Christian conquest Starting in the eleventh century, the Christian kings of the northern Iberian Peninsula began to expand their territory: a process that continued, with many interruptions, until the fall of Granada in 1492. The fghting itself may have had an impact on frontier vegetation; armies burned undergrowth to prevent ambush and used a great deal of timber and frewood (Wing 2015, 53).Where an unsettled frontier led to depopulation, this too would have had an impact on the local environment.The major effects of the conquest, however, came not from war but from regime change.The Christian conquest of Iberia, it has long been argued, was a process of colonization, although the methods that the colonizers employed proved very different across the peninsula (Burns 1975; Fernandez-Armesto 1987).As was the case in later colonial ventures, the landscape played a major role in structuring this enterprise and was one of the major features with which the would-be colonizers had to contend (Pluskowski et al. 2011). In adapting Andalusi landscapes to Christian rule, settlers altered existing relationships between humans and environments, often to the detriment of the ecosystems involved.At the same time, Iberia’s chronically low population, itself due to the dynamics of the Christian conquest, forestalled serious pressure on the peninsula’s resources until the early modern period. As the kings of Aragon, Castile, and Portugal fought their way south, they encountered landscapes that had been shaped to the demands of human societies. Although it was these irrigated landscapes that made the southern regions’ prizes worth conquering, they initially
8
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presented a hazard to conquest. In his Llibre dels Feyts, Jaume I of Aragon described how, during his army’s approach to the city of Valencia, his men had to be cautious, for if they attacked too eagerly “the knights would have to return through the felds and they would have to enter through the irrigation channels, and some might fall there and do themselves great harm”. He and his army soon set about turning this landscape against the enemy, “ravag[ing] their lands and [breaking] up their dams and their mills…[for] we knew what great harm it would do…if we took away the water they needed to irrigate, and for the mills” (Smith and Buffery 2003, 217, 250–52). The conquest of these landscapes proceeded differently in different kingdoms, but in all cases involved massive human displacement. In Valencia and later Granada, similarly, Muslim populations were initially maintained in order to preserve the integrity of the irrigation system. Ultimately, as more Christian settlers arrived, Muslims were dispossessed of nearly all the irrigated lands, and relegated to dry farming in the mountain regions (Guinot 2007, 73–74). In Andalusia, the Alentejo, and the Algarve, the Muslim population either abandoned their homes before the conquest, or were driven from them afterward, leaving an underpopulated landscape (Boone and Worman 2007, 120–22).The environmental transformations that followed the conquest can, very broadly, be divided into two categories: the expansion of Andalusi irrigation systems, and the growth of transhumant pastoralism. In the areas where the conquerors maintained the irrigation systems, they adopted a far more maximalist approach than the original designers, attempting to irrigate more land and to increase the areas under cultivation. In unirrigated areas, pastoralism came to be the center of the rural economy, which brought its own changes to the landscape. In the years immediately following the conquest, as the new rulers redistributed land among their followers, they sought to force a corresponding redistribution of irrigation expertise. In 1244, for example, the former Muslim irrigation offcials of Gandia, on the Valencian coast, were commanded to appear before the new Christian lord and detail the irrigation customs for each part of the system, so that Christian offcials might effectively replace them. These offcials continued to use a rhetoric of continuity, describing a system unchanged since “the time of the Moors” (temps de moros or temps de sarrahins) (Glick 1969, 233–38). The rhetoric of conquest, as Enric Guinot has observed, simultaneously posited a complete replacement of the Muslim population with Christian settlers and perfect continuity in irrigation practices. In reality, assertions of continuity masked profound changes in the administration of the irrigation system (2007, 73–74). Despite events like Gandia in 1244, the large-scale displacement of Muslim farmers would have made any real continuity in irrigation practice extremely diffcult. During the resettlement (repartimiento) Christian surveyors mapped out a grid of plots according to Christian units of measurement, completely reconfguring property rights over the irrigated space (Torró 2009, 83). The boundaries of newly established feudal lordships also cut across the irrigation system and caused further disruption (Torró and Guinot 2012, 12). These lords understood the irrigation systems quite differently than the original builders (Torró and Guinot 2012, 13). As their forebears had done in Catalonia, Christian lords prioritized milling over irrigation, because milling was a more immediate source of feudal revenue (Glick and Kirchner 2000, 324). Lords sometimes changed the schedule of water distribution to favor mills, and some irrigated lands were even abandoned in favor of milling. The use of irrigation water also changed. Rather than growing crops that required irrigation, farmers after the conquest tended to use irrigated land to improve the yields of dry-farmed crops: particularly wheat, in which rents were paid (Furió 2001, 84–85).
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The conquerors also undertook new construction, both within and beyond the original irrigated area.They extended and modifed existing canals to irrigate all the space within the huerta and dug new ones to extend its boundaries. Only a few decades after the conquest of Valencia, Jaume I initiated two major canal projects—the Séquia Nova d’Alzira (1258) and the Séquia Major de Vila-Real—and royal and municipal authorities continued to sponsor similar projects thereafter. In their zeal to put new areas under cultivation, post-conquest irrigators focused particularly on the draining of wetland areas.While this process ultimately led to the disappearance of many coastal marshlands, draining proceeded slowly in the medieval period, often with signifcant setbacks (Torró 2009, 97;Torró and Guinot 2012, 13, 17). As a result of these projects, more areas were put under cultivation, and the hydrology of irrigated areas was further disrupted. While Andalusi irrigation works tended to return water to streams and rivers at the end of the canal, irrigation in the Christian period was extended such that the felds consumed all of the water in the canals.This not only disrupted the courses of stream and rivers, it swamped the felds in times of heavy rain (Torró 2009, 100, 105–106). Looking more broadly, however, similar expansions of arable land occurred all over Europe in the high medieval period, part of a larger process of colonization that involved not only conquest, but also assarting and marsh-draining (Torró and Guinot 2012, 13).
Pastoralism In the sparsely populated and unirrigated areas of the southwest, the dynamics of conquest encouraged the development of wooded pasture or dehesa (montado in Portuguese): a landscape of evergreen oaks interspersed with grasses. Such wooded pastures are common throughout the western Mediterranean, but particularly in southwestern Iberia: western Andalusia, Extremadura, and the Alentejo. Although they are now considered characteristic of these regions, dehesas are constructed landscapes. Humans cut down forest trees (apart from selected holm oaks) and clear the shrubs to encourage grass growth (Plieninger 2007, 31–33). Dehesas have existed in Iberia since pre-Roman times but spread rapidly as a result of the Christian conquest.After the conquest, large swathes of land in the depopulated southwest were granted to aristocrats, particularly to military orders like the Order of Santiago. These lands were meant to be flled with Christians, but settlement remained sparse; the new inhabitants were mostly young, single men who were expected to be soldiers as well as farmers (Díaz-Sierra 2018).The low population allowed transhumance, or migratory herding, to develop as a major economic endeavor. Flocks of sheep had long lived on both sides of the border, but, as mentioned above, herding was not terribly important in Andalusi agriculture. It did prove popular on the Christian side, where an increasing number of safe pastures appeared as the frontier expanded southward. Transhumance has been considered an adaptation to the inhospitable landscapes of the southwest and the Meseta (Phillips and Phillips 1997, 7–9).As a survival strategy, however, it was neither poor nor primitive. Like irrigation, transhumance is an intensifcation of agricultural production (Horden and Purcell 2000, 198, 83–85). By moving the focks from the summer pastures in the Pyrenees to winter in the south, the shepherds were able take advantage of rich grasses all year round. Transhumance required organization; a network of north–south routes (sheepwalks or cañadas) began to be established at least from the thirteenth century on. This network of routes strung together pasture lands, including monte (dry upland forest) and dehesa, to provide a path along which a fock could be driven.The word dehesa derives from the Latin pratum defensum, or enclosed pasture; it was initially a legal term that distinguished these pastures from common land. Some were under royal control, others were held by towns or military 10
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orders that collected grazing taxes from the herders. In the late thirteenth-century,Alfonso X of Castile established the Honrado Consejo de la Mesta to regulate transhumance. Although all fock owners were members, the Mesta’s policies favored the most powerful, particularly the military orders (Phillips and Phillips 1997, 37, 39–42, 97–101). Transhumance was not only an adaptation to an existing landscape; it created the dehesa landscape in which it would thrive. Herders required pastures for transhumant livestock and towns also enclosed pastures for local animals, whose owners felt threatened by the great migratory focks.As both sheep and human populations grew, good pasture became more diffcult to come by. Humans continued to clear the monte to create more dehesas (Trillo San José and Carmen 1999, 146–47; Morales-Molino et al. 2017; López-Blanco et al. 2012, 558). The power of the Mesta maintained the dehesas as pasture lands even as the population rose in the early modern period, and many survive even today (Clément 2008, 67). Scholars disagree about the environmental effect of transhumant pastoralism (Trillo San José and Carmen 1999; López Rider 2018).The very stability of the dehesa landscape in Extremadura and the Alentejo has been taken by some as a positive example of human intervention (Clément 2008). Pastoralism limited the plowing of new felds, and thus could be seen as a check on human expansion, and these landscapes seem to have maintained a wide diversity of species through the end of the ffteenth century (Phillips and Phillips 1997, 8; López Rider 2018). Elsewhere in the peninsula, the story is different. Juan Garcia Latorre and others have argued that the introduction of transhumant focks to post-conquest Granada, along with the expansion of dry farming under Christian rule, damaged the fragile, arid environment there. The southeastern region of Almería, known in the medieval period for its forests, had by the modern period become “a man-made desert”. In the process, the region lost a number of native species, including the ençebra, a wild equine for which the African zebra was named (García-Latorre et al. 2001). Much of this destruction, however, took place in the seventeenth century; the evidence for the medieval period is less clear.
Climate change and natural disaster Human beings were not the only variable in the Iberian landscape.The climate was also shifting in the later Middle Ages, from the Medieval Climate Anomaly to the Little Ice Age. In Iberia, the Little Ice Age began between 1300 and 1400, and was characterized by colder temperatures and an increase in storms, extreme rain, and fooding (Balbo et al. 2018, 1266). Some of these effects, however, were not seen until the ffteenth century or later (Benito et al. 2008, 68, 73). Precision in dating is a challenge with most paleoclimatic evidence; it is often diffcult to link established sequences to historical dates. Historical records of natural disaster are much more easily dated, but they present a different problem.“Disasters” are very much in the eye of the beholder, and no disaster is ever truly “natural” (Juneha and Mauelshagen 2007). A food, for example, is not defned historically as a particular volume or speed of water, but rather by whether and how that water affects human settlement and human activities. If humans have settled densely in a foodplain, foods will occur more frequently for them than if they live on higher ground (Squatriti 2010, 815–16).The visibility of a food in the historical record will depend on how much damage it does to human life and property, and how much that society values the lives and property that are damaged. Evidence of human response to natural disaster is sporadic but survives in greater abundance from the fourteenth century on. The irrigation networks were of course designed to alleviate drought, the most common disaster in much of the peninsula. Irrigation customs included systems for rationing when water was scarce.When harvests failed, cities moved to secure grain 11
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supplies through their extensive trading networks. City governments also built barriers to protect against foods and kept the irrigation and sewer systems clear to handle unusual water fows (Agresta 2016, 169–214, 273–306). When locust swarms descended on the felds, men went out with nets to kill them (Rubio Vela 1997). Perhaps the most severe natural disaster of the fourteenth century was the arrival of the second pandemic of bubonic plague, beginning with the Black Death of 1347–1351.As elsewhere in the Mediterranean, however, this disease struck Iberian cities that had long been practicing public health measures. These measures largely focused on preventing miasmas, by removing from the city any putrefying matter or stagnant water that could spread its corruption to the air (Agresta forthcoming). To this toolkit of material measures, medieval Iberians added appeals to God, as divine anger was thought to be the ultimate cause of natural phenomena. In both Muslim and Christian regions, these could include processions, prayers, and pilgrimages to local shrines (Safran 2002, 87–89). In some places in Christian-ruled Iberia, members of Jewish and Muslim communities participated in these appeals, while in others such participation was forbidden. Iberian Christians seem to have disagreed about whether the prayers of their Muslim and Jewish neighbors would help or hurt their status with God (Devaney 2015, 4–5, 154–55). The relationship between environment, conquest, and religious status, although clearly important to Iberian Christians, has been little studied thus far in most areas of the peninsula. Human action should not only be understood in opposition to natural disaster; sometimes human activities may have exacerbated the effects of climate change. For example, soil erosion increased in a number of places during the Little Ice Age as the rain and foodwaters washed downhill to settle as sediment on valley foors. The onset of the Little Ice Age coincided in the southern half of the peninsula with the onset of Christian rule. A few studies suggest that Christian conquest and its accompanying upheaval worsened erosion. Shifts in land use, like the introduction of grazing on steep slopes, may have compounded the effects of a changing climate (Balbo et al. 2018; Martín-Puertas et al. 2008; Bellin et al. 2013). In the absence of climate change, however, the conquest seems to have had little effect on sedimentary patterns (LópezBlanco et al. 2012; Moreno et al. 2008; Gil García et al. 2007). The question of the impact of the Christian conquest on the Iberian landscape is thus a very complex one indeed; some types of environmental change may have resulted primarily from the feedback between human and climatic events, rather than from either in isolation.
Conclusion While the traditional end of the Christian conquest is Ferdinand and Isabella’s capture of Granada in 1492, the ambitions of Iberian monarchs extended well beyond the peninsula, to Africa and into the Atlantic. Of the Atlantic archipelagoes, only the Canaries were inhabited before European sailors began exploring their waters in the fourteenth century. The Canary Islanders, called Guanches, had up to that point lived without contact with the European or African mainland, and with a fairly limited set of species.The Spanish conquests of these islands between 1402 and 1496 proved a prologue for later experiences in the Americas. In this bloody venture, Spaniards were, as later, assisted by the various deadly diseases that they brought along, which wreaked havoc on the Guanches. In the aftermath of conquest, moreover, the import of Mediterranean species, both animals and plants, transformed the ecology of the islands: a process that was repeated on Madeira, the Azores, and the Cape Verde Islands, and shortly after in the Americas (Fernández-Armesto 1987; Crosby 2013). Encounters with, and transformations of, new and strange landscapes become a key feature of Iberian relationships with the environment in the early modern period. Spain’s new position 12
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at the heart of a vast empire made it a center of information about the worlds beyond the sea (Barrera-Osorio 2010). Demand for resources to power that empire, and particularly timber for the imperial navy, led the central government to assume greater control over the peninsula’s resources.The growing power of what became the Spanish state ushered in a new era of human relationships with the Iberian environment (Wing 2015). Only with massive population growth in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, however, did the environment come under really severe stress, which would be multiplied with further growth in the nineteenth century (García-Latorre et al. 2001, 85–86). Thus far the medieval period has interested environmental historians primarily as the prologue to these changes. It is now clear, however, that the environmental histories of the Iberian Middle Ages deserve study in their own right. Innumerable questions remain to be answered, of which this chapter has addressed only the most basic.The climate and ecology of the medieval period have begun to be mapped but have yet to be integrated into Iberian historiography.The history of the seas that surrounded the peninsula, and the species that lived in them, has just begun to be studied (Brito 2011). Religious attitudes to the natural world have as yet received very little attention on either the Islamic or the Christian side (Christian 1981; on religion and disease, see Stearns 2011 and Agresta forthcoming). Both medieval conquests of the Iberian Peninsula produced profound transformations in the relationships between humans and their environments. Islamic and Christian rule over the environment in Iberia were different in their objectives and their effects. But both cultures also shared a tradition of landscape creation and intervention. Both shared experiences of malleable, human-constructed environments and of coping with environmental risk. Medieval Iberians not only encountered the landscapes of the peninsula; they made and remade their environments, just as Iberians continue to do today.
Notes 1 Due to the bias both of the existing literature and of the author’s own expertise, this chapter will have more to say about the south and east of the peninsula than about the north and west. 2 Around the same time,Andrew Watson proposed that the Arabs imported a number of new crops to the Mediterranean, including rice, durum wheat, cotton, sugar cane, artichokes, and citrus fruits (Watson 1974, 1983). More recent research, however, has suggested that many of these crops, including durum wheat, were cultivated in the pre-Islamic Mediterranean (Decker 2009; Peña-Chocarro et al. 2017). 3 “que las (tierras) de mejor calidad de regadío produzen dos cosechas al año…Y las otras que no son de la misma calidad produzen solo una cosecha al año sin yntermision ni descanso…que las tierras de sembradura de secano son de corta cantidad y todas montuosas y pedregosas y casi ynutiles para las siembras…y que necesitan de quatro años de yntermedio para cada siembra”. A. Malpica Cuello and T. May, 1997. “La prospección y los recursos naturales. El paisaje vegetal de la zona de Salobreña”, II Encuentros de Arqueología Patrimonio, Granada: 212. Quoted in Trillo San José 1999, 137–38.
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Abigail Agresta Barceló, Miquel, Helena Kirchner, and Carmen Navarro. 1996. El agua que no duerme: fundamentos de la arqueología hidráulica andalusí. Granada: Sierra Nevada 95. Barney, Stephen A.W.J., J.A. Lewis, and Oliver Berghof Beach, eds. and trans. 2006. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barrera-Osorio, Antonio. 2010. Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientifc Revolution.Austin: University of Texas Press. Bellin, Nicolas, Veerle Vanacker, and Sarah De Baets. 2013. “Anthropogenic and Climatic Impact on Holocene Sediment Dynamics in SE Spain: A Review”. Quaternary International 308–309: 112–129. doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2013.03.015. Benito, G.,V.R.Thorndycraft, M. Rico,Y. Sánchez-Moya, and A. Sopeña. 2008.“Palaeofood and Floodplain Records from Spain: Evidence for Long-Term Climate Variability and Environmental Changes”. Geomorphology 101 (1): 68–77. doi:10.1016/j.geomorph.2008.05.020 Boone, James L., and F. Scott Worman. 2007. “Rural Settlement and Soil Erosion from the Late Roman Period through the Medieval Islamic Period in the Lower Alentejo of Portugal”. Journal of Field Archaeology 32 (2): 115–132. doi:10.1179/009346907791071665. Brito, Cristina. 2011. “Medieval and Early Modern Whaling in Portugal”. Anthrozoös: A Multidisciplinary Journal of the Interactions of People and Animals 24 (3):287–300.doi:10.2752/175303711X13045914865303. Burns, Robert I. 1975. Medieval Colonialism: Postcrusade Exploitation of Islamic Valencia. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Carrión, José S., Pedro Sánchez-Gómez, Juan F. Mota, Riker Yll, and Celia Chaín. 2003. “Holocene Vegetation Dynamics, Fire and Grazing in the Sierra de Gádor, Southern Spain”. The Holocene 13 (6): 839–849. doi:10.1191/0959683603hl662rp. Carrión, José S., Santiago Fernández, Penélope González-Sampériz, Graciela Gil-Romera, Ernestina Badal,Yolanda Carrión-Marco, Lourdes López-Merino, José A. López-Sáez, Elena Fierro, and Francesc Burjachs. 2010. “Expected Trends and Surprises in the Lateglacial and Holocene Vegetation History of the Iberian Peninsula and Balearic Islands”. Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology 162 (3): 458–475. doi:10.1016/j.revpalbo.2009.12.007 Christian, William. 1981. Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Clément,Vincent. 2008.“Spanish Wood Pasture: Origin and Durability of an Historical Wooded Landscape in Mediterranean Europe”. Environment and History 14 (1): 67–87. doi:10.3197/096734008X271869. Corella, Juan Pablo, Vania Stefanova, Adel El Anjoumi, Eugenio Rico, Santiago Giralt, Ana Moreno, Alberto Plata-Montero, and Blas L.Valero-Garcés. 2013.“A 2500-year Multi-Proxy Reconstruction of Climate Change and Human Activities in Northern Spain: The Lake Arreo Record”. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 386: 555–568. doi:10.1016/j.palaeo.2013.06.022. Costas, Susana, Sonia Jerez, Ricardo M.Trigo, Ronald Goble, and Luís Rebêlo. 2012.“Sand Invasion Along the Portuguese Coast Forced by Westerly Shifts During Cold Climate Events”. Quaternary Science Reviews 42: 15–28. doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2012.03.008 Cronon,William. 1991. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York:W.W. Norton and Company. Crosby,Alfred W. 2013.“An Ecohistory of the Canary Islands:A Precursor of European Colonialization in the New World and Australasia”. In Spain, Portugal and the Atlantic Frontier of Medieval Europe, ed. JoséJuan López-Portillo, 214–235. Farnham:Ashgate. Decker, Michael. 2009. “Plants and Progress: Rethinking the Islamic Agricultural Revolution”. Journal of World History 20: 187–206. doi:10.1353/jwh.0.0058. Degeai, Jean-Philippe, Benoît Devilliers, Laurent Dezileau, Hamza Oueslati, and Guénaëlle Bony. 2015. “Major Storm Periods and Climate Forcing in the Western Mediterranean During the Late Holocene”. Quaternary Science Reviews 129: 37–56. doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2015.10.009. Devaney, Thomas. 2015. Enemies in the Plaza: Urban Spectacle and the End of Spanish Frontier Culture 1460– 1492. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Díaz-Sierra, Ignacio. 2018. “Guarding the Frontier: Castilian Settlers on the Border with Granada in the Fifteenth Century”. Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 10: 1–18. doi:10.1080/17546559.2018.1464200. Dodds, Jerrilynn D. 2008.“Hunting in the Borderlands”. Medieval Encounters 14 (2–3): 267–302. doi:10.11 63/157006708X366272. Elliott, J.H. 1963. Imperial Spain: 1469–1716. London: Edward Arnold Publishers. Fernández-Armesto, Felipe. 1987. Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic 1229–1492. London: Macmillan Education. Furió, Antoni. 2001. “La domesticación del medio natural: agricultura, ecología y economía en el País Valenciano en la Baja Edad Media”. In El medio natural en la España medieval: actas del I Congreso sobre
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Humans and the environment Stearns, Justin. 2011. Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Premodern Islamic and Christian Thought in the Western Mediterranean. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Torró, Josep. 2009.“Field and Canal Building after the Conquest: Modifcations to the Cultivated Ecosystem in the Kingdom of Valencia, ca. 1250-ca. 1350”. In Worlds of History and Economics: Essays in Honour of Andrew M.Watson, ed. Brian Catlos, 77–108.Valencia: University of Valencia. Torró, Josep, and Enric Guinot Rodríguez, eds. 2012. Hidraúlica Agraria y Sociedad Feudal: Prácticas, Técnicas, Espacios.Valencia: Universitat de Valencia. Torró, Josep, and Enric Guinot Rodríguez. 2012. “Introducción. ¿Existe una hidráulica agraria ‘feudal’?” In Torró and Guinot, Hidraúlica Agraria, 9–20. Trillo, San José, and María Carmen. 1999.“El paisaje vegetal en al Granada islámica y sus transformaciones tras la conquista castellana”. Historia agraria. Revista de agricultura e historia rural 17: 131–152. Trillo, San José, and María Carmen. 2005. “A Social Analysis of Irrigation in Al-Andalus: Nazari Granada (13th–15th Centuries)”. Journal of Medieval History 31 (2): 163–183. doi:10.1016/j.jmedhist.2005.03.001 Trillo, San José, and María Carmen. 2012.“El agua en el reino de Granada: herencia islámica y transformaciones castellanas”. In Torró and Guinot, Hidraúlica Agraria, 261–285. Uribelarrea, David, and Gerardo Benito. 2008. “Fluvial Changes of the Guadalquivir River during the Holocene in Córdoba (Southern Spain)”. Geomorphology 100 (1): 14–31. doi:10.1016/j. geomorph.2007.04.037 Watson, Andrew. 1974. “The Arab Agricultural Revolution and Its Diffusion, 700–1100”. The Journal of Economic History 34 (1): 8–35. Watson, Andrew. 1983. Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World:The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques, 700–1100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Way, Ruth. 1962. A Geography of Spain and Portugal. Assisted by Margaret Simmons. London: Methuen & Co. Wing, John T. 2015. Roots of Empire: Forests and State Power in Early Modern Spain, c. 1500–1750. Leiden: Brill.
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PART II
Societies, polities, and governments
2 FRAGMENTATION AND CENTRALIZATION The emergent political culture of the medieval Crown of Aragon Thomas W. Barton
Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society. M. Foucault1 Recent research has emphasized that jurisdictional fragmentation and decentralization remained the rule rather than the exception within the composite monarchy known as the Crown of Aragon.2 Indeed, as Flocel Sabaté has written, despite the superiority assumed by and publicly pronounced by the count-kings of Barcelona, “[p]owerful jurisdictional fragmentation converted the land into a veritable mosaic of diverse spaces, mutually impenetrable and to a great extent alien to royal representatives” (Sabaté 1995a, 619; see also Sabaté 1996). Contrary to the monarchy’s often confdent rhetoric regarding its supremacy and exclusive prerogatives, its overarching authority and the effcacy of its mandates often ultimately hinged on the degree to which independent entities could be enticed or forced to adhere to them.3 Even as they continue to explore the origins of the modern state, historians have grown uncomfortable with the implicit teleology of that framework (see Cheyette 1978). As Frederic Cheyette has counseled concerning the expansion of royal justice, we should avoid “the better mousetrap theory of human nature”, which he defned as the concept that “the world will beat a path to the court that is more just…whose decisions are more ‘rational’ and conform more closely to established objective norms of behavior”.“Neutral, objective order”, he concluded,“is very much a learned value” (Cheyette 1970, 289–290). It is not clear that royal courts were necessarily more just or that litigants sought out the most rational judicial bodies, however (see Clanchy 1974; Capua 1983). A growing body of evidence in fact suggests that certain subjects valued and benefted from the availability of multiple forums of justice and that under some circumstances, depending on their interests and how they saw best to fulfll them, that they could prefer seigniorial to royal jurisdiction.4 The initial causes of fragmentation and early initiatives by the counts and early countkings to centralize governance under their control between the later tenth and early thirteenth 21
Thomas W. Barton
centuries have received considerable attention from researchers on both sides of the Atlantic (see, e.g., Salrach 1998; Jarrett 2010; Bensch 2002). Although scholars continue to debate the extent and rapidity of the decline in public authority in Catalonia following Thomas Bisson’s controversial “Feudal Revolution” thesis,5 they have attained greater agreement with research regarding the activity of the comital-royal government to recover from this crisis of authority from the eleventh century onward, leading up to and following the merger between the county of Barcelona and the kingdom of Aragon. Within Catalonia, the Usatges de Barcelona promulgated under Ramon Berenguer IV (1131–62) and the successive peace constitutions elaborated under Alfons I (1164–96) and Pere I (1196–1213) were ambitious and set important precedents for future generations of administration-building and centralization, but ultimately failed to garner suffcient baronial support to force through their desired changes to the governmental framework (see, e.g., Bisson 2009, 499–514). Exemplifying this mixed track record, scholars have pointed to the limited application of the Usatges beyond comital domains, the degradation of formerly free peasant tenures at the hands of assertive independent lords, the mixed success experienced by the count-kings in defending their principle of exclusive protection of ethno-religious minorities, and the general scaling back of the protections enumerated by the count-kings in their periodic peace constitutions (see Kosto 2001a; Freedman 1991, 112–14; Bisson 1978, 466; Barton 2015, esp. ch. 2 and ch. 4). Within Aragon, from the mid-twelfthcentury merger of the realms onward, insubordinate nobles and urban collectives clung to their ingrained legal traditions and resisted attempts by the monarchy to centralize governance at the expense of their autonomy (see González Antón 1975;Wilman 1987; Kagay 1988). Aragon’s precocious organized opposition to the monarchy may have encouraged similar behavior in the conquered domains of the kingdom of Valencia, and later Mallorca (for an overview, see Baydal 2017).Targeted engagement eventually culminated in the formation of a league of nobles, cities, and towns in the mid-fourteenth century in opposition of the designation of the infanta Constança as the heir to the realms of Pere III “El Cerimoniós” (1336–87). In comparison to the Aragonese unions, these political collectives and the resulting “War of the Valencian Union” have received scant attention from scholars, despite the existence of extensive related archival records, and deserve serious study.6 In Catalonia, certain comital-royal prerogatives, from levying rights such as the bovatge to service prerogatives such as the king’s ability to issue an obligatory call to arms known as the Princeps Namque, developed into hot-button issues that were litigated repeatedly throughout the thirteenth, fourteenth, and ffteenth centuries as the monarchy struggled to develop tentative twelfth-century claims contained within the Usatges de Barcelona and various statutes and peace constitutions into universally accepted prerogatives.7 Historians have made progress in developing a more nuanced understanding of the Crown’s efforts to increase its authority by means of fscal reforms, feudal agreements, and the extension of royal justice and application of Roman law. Much work remains, however, in unraveling how royal “power”, in the Foucauldian sense evoked above, and the enablement of different constituencies committed to impeding such centralization, operated within the diverse political culture of the medieval Crown of Aragon (See Font y Rius 1963; Giménez Soler 1901; Bisson 1984, 1985;Van Landingham 2002, 83–100; Ferro 1987). The most pressing question that continues to confront scholarship remains: by what means did royal jurisdiction come to dominate in the Crown of Aragon over the course of the high and late Middle Ages? As a way of demonstrating the prospects for future research on this core topic, this brief chapter will explore three previously overlooked cases of confrontation that took place within Catalonia, which was situated at the core of this confederated monarchy. Our aim will be to illustrate how the monarchy and the diverse individuals and collectives that stood in opposi22
Fragmentation and centralization
tion used an array of legal, political, economic, and military strategies to seek to expand or limit, respectively, the extent of governmental centralization within the realms during these centuries.
A blocked inquest in Juneda In the chilly early months of 1302, the small Catalonian settlement of Juneda experienced a small-scale invasion.A resident of the nearby town of Lleida named Bernat Piquer and two men from the village of Maldà armed themselves and entered the seigniorial domains belonging to the Cervera family, some 20 kilometers away.Witnesses from the subsequent court records differed on what transpired next, but it appears that Bernat and these associates entered Juneda at night and seized two men and prepared to take them back to Maldà.The acting lords of these domains, Alamanda de Cervera and her son, Guillem, quickly responded by directing men from her nearby fortifcation of Castelldans, led by Bernat de Montpalau, to engage with the intruders. They soon did, outside the walls of Juneda near Torregrossa, and Bernat Piquer was mortally wounded in the encounter. Before long, his widow was cooperating with the vicar of Lleida in pursuit of justice for her husband’s alleged murderers. The vicar viewed his death as a premeditated act that violated the king’s peace and truce (royal legal provisions guaranteeing public safety that outlawed private warfare).8 Juneda’s lords moved quickly to block Vicar Bernat’s efforts to investigate the incident.When he sent a notary from Lleida to record testimony from witnesses in Juneda,Alamanda refused to grant him a license to mount the inquiry. In a strongly worded letter that was hand-delivered to Alamanda in Juneda, Bernat denounced her family’s illegitimate, and, in his view, illegal, obstruction of a murder investigation that he felt authorized to perform as the king’s delegate.9 He ordered Alamanda or a representative to appear before his court in Lleida within two weeks to answer for this misconduct. If she failed to do so, he threatened to initiate legal proceedings against her and all of the people within her domains. A week later, Alamanda’s procurator, Bernat Brescha, appeared in the vicar’s court. He furnished a written statement that defended his lord’s right to block the vicar’s investigation into this alleged crime.The Cerveras rejected outright the vicar’s understanding that royal prerogatives and the king’s peace and truce entitled him to prosecute a crime perpetrated on seigniorial lands. Bernat noted that the Cervera family had possessed the castle and town of Juneda “peacefully and quietly as a free and enfranchised allod” as well as “all jurisdiction” including merum et mixtum imperium, i.e., the right to judge capital (merum) and lesser (mixtum) crimes on his lands. He added that these judicial prerogatives were recognized publicly throughout the land.10 The family did indeed have deep roots in the lordship that dated back to when Ramon Berenguer III prospectively infeudated Muslim-held Castelldans to Guillem Dalmau de Cervera in 1119.11 Yet, unlike many other lords who fell into confict with the monarchy, the Cerveras apparently lacked hard evidence that they had received these prerogatives from the king.12 Accordingly, Bernat Brescha advanced the circumstantial argument that his clients had exercised merum imperium within their domains without any complaint or objection from the monarchy or anyone else for as long as anyone could remember.13 He added that the very constitutions promulgated and confrmed in the meetings of the general court held by the king and his predecessors in Barcelona and elsewhere supported the legality of these prerogatives. These laws, along with the law codes known as the Usatges de Barcelona and the Constitucions de Catalunya, the lords’ procurator alleged, dictated that the vicar and other royal offcers not “molest or perturb” anyone on non-royal domains without express consent.14 It initially seems surprising that Alamanda’s procurator would appeal to this legal material to support seigniorial autonomy.Together, the twelfth-century Usatges and the thirteenth-century 23
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Constitucions sought to establish the count-king as the superior lord (dominus superior) at the top of the administrative chain-of-command who ultimately controlled all jurisdictions within his realms.15 As “prince of the land” (princeps terre), the count-king exercised authority over all cases (i.e., the aforementioned merum et mixtum imperium) and was qualifed to defend public safety with his special “protection” (Ferran i Planas 2006, 222–231). Indeed, these were precisely the arguments made by the vicar of Lleida in response to Bernat Brescha’s defense. While fully admitting that the Cerveras held Juneda as a free allod, the vicar rejected the notion that allodial possession entitled the family to absolute jurisdiction over all of its domains.The “two-hundredyear-old” Usatges as well as the common law (ius commune) that had informed the Constitucions, he reiterated, upheld the principle that the count-kings had an exclusive right to merum et mixtum imperium.16 A straightforward reading of these codes does lend support to this stance. Usatge 73, for example, barred even great lords (grans homes) from punishing “bad men” and Usatge 78 bound all powers in the land to uphold the comital-royal peace and truce (Bastardas i Parera 1984, 110–13, 116–17). In a similar vein, Constitucion 39 established that all men, even those who are not vassals of the count-king, are under the “power of the king owing to the general jurisdiction that he has in his kingdom”. It further clarifed that the king “has mer imperi over all men in his kingdom” and that “all things that are in the kingdom belong to the king in so far as jurisdiction” (Rovira i Ermengol 1933, 184–85). Although legal support for the vicar’s claim thus seemed exceedingly strong, most lords of the realm disputed the validity of these claims or even considered them to be legal fctions. Those lords who were forced to defend their claimed prerogatives in court but who lacked conclusive evidence for support, such as the Cerveras, had the option to focus attention on the laws that supported their goals and ignore the more controversial ones or subject them to an interpretation that favored baronial independence. Numerous of the Usatges de Barcelona, in fact, supported seigniorial jurisdictional and judicial prerogatives. Usatges 20, 21, 22, and 25, for example, established the rights of lords to judge cases with their men and vassals and otherwise regulated their interactions without reserving any overarching jurisdictional entitlements for the counts of Barcelona (Bastardas i Parera 1984, 66–69, 72–73). Certain laws that were apparently intended to profle and safeguard comital authority were, in fact, vulnerable to a seigniorial interpretation (Riera i Sans 2006, 27). Usatge 40, for instance, outlines how a man should exonerate himself if accused of perjury by his lord “before the prince” in comital court (Bastardas i Parera 1984, 82–83).As with numerous other regulations regarding lords, the law implies that the prince’s involvement was extraordinary and conditional on the accusation being made at his court. The Constitutions de Catalunya offered similar opportunities to lords seeking to mount legal defenses against perceived royal encroachment. Constitutions 10 and 43, for example, enumerated the expansive prerogatives, including jurisdictional rights, exercised by lords over their vassals, without any provisions for princely authority. Numerous other laws in the code safeguarded the controls lords exercised over their castles and domains without clear language indicating when the king could override them: e.g., numbers 12, 14, 15, 16, 18, 44, and 45.17 When Bernat Brescha noted that these limitations had been reconfrmed by King Pere II at the Corts of Barcelona, he was likely referring to the 1283 constitutions that dramatically curtailed the extent to which the Crown could impose on seigniorial lands and jurisdiction.18 According to the case record, neither the vicar nor Alamanda’s procurator alluded to any specifc laws or language within these codes, but there are nevertheless signs he engaged in such selective, one-sided readings. Throughout the court proceedings, for example, Bernat Brescha stressed that Bernat de Montpalau fell under the Cervera family’s exclusive jurisdiction not 24
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only because the incident occurred on the family’s domains but also because he was Guillem de Cervera’s vassal.As a citizen of Lleida and as vassal of the king, Bernat Piquer should have been the vicar’s responsibility.Yet, Bernat Pons had not intervened to prevent Bernat Piquer’s aggressive invasion of the Cerveras’s domains, obliging the lords to take matters into their own hands.19 Even this vassalage to the king, the procurator added, was questionable, however, because Bernat Piquer had allegedly taken another man as his liege lord, thereby invalidating his bond with the king.20 Bernat Piquer, the procurator concluded, was an invader and an aggressor whose death at the hands of Bernat Montpalau was fully justifed. Even though the vicar manifested considerable confdence that the Usatges and Constitucions supported the king’s case, he did not rely exclusively on this legal support. He also tried to poke holes in aspects of the Cerveras’s argumentation. He noted, for example, that even though Bernat de Montpalau was Guillem de Cervera’s vassal, he nevertheless was not subject to his jurisdiction in this incident because he resided in another locality, not Juneda, where the violence took place.Vicar Bernat also made the case that seigniorial jurisdiction was limited to the intramural district of each locality and not to the entire landed domains. Thus, since the alleged murder transpired outside of Juneda’s walls, jurisdiction naturally fell to the king rather than to the Cerveras. These points were admittedly quite weak because they undercut Bernat Pons’ main argument that the king enjoyed exclusive jurisdiction over these sorts of cases. In the end, the parties agreed to disagree. The vicar threatened to organize troops against the Cerveras if they did not permit him to proceed with the investigation and hold Bernat de Montpalau accountable for the murder of Bernat Piquer.Bernat Brescha stressed confdently that the vicar could not legally arrest or otherwise proceed against the Cerveras.21 Documentation recording the resolution of the case has not yet come to light. This was not the frst time that the vicar of Lleida had intervened in this lordship’s affairs on the king’s behalf.About a decade earlier, for instance, when the sitting lord, Ramon de Cervera, had gotten into a dispute with his mother over rights to the salt produced in Juneda, the king had interceded and ordered the vicar of Lleida to defend her possession.22 Such engagements between the crown and independent lords are exceedingly common in the chancery documents and court records from the thirteenth through the ffteenth century housed in the Archive of the Crown of Aragon.Although no document identifes any premeditated strategy, it is possible that a good share of these disputes was manufactured or at least intensifed by the monarchy as a means to broadcast royal claims to supremacy while challenging the independence of non-royal authorities in the Crown of Aragon’s fragmented political landscape. Within Catalonia, following the hard-fought campaigns by Ramon Berenguer IV, Alfons I, and Pere I from the mid-twelfth through the early thirteenth century to increase the accountability of their offce-holders, vicars like Bernat Pons stood at the front lines of the monarchy’s campaign to make its jurisdiction more pervasive (see Bisson 1984, vol. 1, 28–49, 86–101, 112–16).Van Landingham (2002, 97) has characterized this engagement as “the frontal assault on the traditionalist judicial systems, so protective of individual and corporate power, through the medium of the royal courts”. In Aragon, roughly analogous offcers known as junteros played a similar role (see Laliena Corbera 2010). As part of the enhancement of the royal bureaucracy and attendant boost in its administrative capacity over the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, monarchs revamped these existing administrative units and organized them to be more systematic and comprehensive (see, e.g., Tatjer Prat 2009; Montagut Estragués 1987; Ladero Quesada 1996, vol. 2, 71–140).Alongside the ingrained bailiffs and vicars who had long served the comital-royal government at the local levels, the most prominent urban centers in Aragon and Catalonia came to feature higher-level administrators known as sobrejunteros and 25
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supraveguers who facilitated the extension of royal justice into exempted zones governed by non-royal authorities.23 From the later thirteenth century onward, royal administrators intensifed their efforts to centralize governance and thereby standardize legal environments throughout the realms. This offensive targeted the extensive independent lordships within the Terra Alta and Ribera d’Ebre regions, many of which had been established following the mid-twelfth-century conquests of the Ebro River valley. Domains here fell target to Aragonese sobrejunteros with jurisdictions that extended to the boundary with Catalonia.24 With the full support of the king, these royal agents took advantage of the ambiguity of that contested border between Aragon and Catalonia to undermine the jurisdictional autonomy of these seigniorial domains and subject them to royal taxation from which their lords had long claimed exemption. In 1280, for instance, King Pere collaborated with the sobrejuntero of Zaragoza to collect a levy known as the quinta to be paid on mules within the Templar order’s domains of Miravet and Ascó.25 The monarchy made an equally concerted effort to impinge upon the ingrained jurisdictional of these lordships. In July of 1282, this same king informed the Templar lordship of Ascó that the sobrejuntero of Zaragoza had appointed the Muslim alcaydus of Tortosa to investigate and judge the dispute that Ascó’s commander had lodged against a local Muslim resident. Pere warned the Templar offcial sternly not to take justice into his own hands.26 A year later, the sobrejunteros of Zaragoza and Horta received orders from the king to investigate a case of dead Muslims found at Miravet.27 Although these Aragonese administrators ultimately failed in their attempts to shift their boundary with Catalonia in these and other instances of engagement, their efforts did facilitate the monarchy’s efforts to compromise the jurisdictional autonomy of some of the most important lordships in the region.
Abusive customary legal practices in L’Espluga de Francolí Well-endowed, highly independent lords such as the Hospitaller and Templar military orders also fell subject to litigation launched by the monarchy beginning in this same period. Notwithstanding their ecclesiastical orientation, these foundations faced confrontations with the monarchy that were similar in many ways to those waged by lay lords such as the Cerveras. In these environments, royal offcials sought to impose on the jurisdictional autonomy of extensive military-order domains using a range of legal strategies. In the example that we will consider here, the monarchy and its agents sought to undermine the autonomy of the Hospitaller lordship of L’Espluga de Francolí, about 50 kilometers to the north of Tarragona. In November of 1306, the royal vicar of Montblanc,Albert de Vernet, presented a complaint in that town’s vicarial court from King Jaume II (1291–1327). The complaint took issue with the manner in which the Hospitaller order managed its lordship over the nearby castral district of L’Espluga de Francolí, which fell within the jurisdictional boundaries of Albert’s vicariate.28 Vicar Albert, as a representative of the monarchy’s interest, took a two-pronged approach to undermining the order’s claimed entitlement to jurisdiction within its lordship. First of all, similar to what we have seen in the case with the Cerveras and Juneda, the vicar presented the Hospitaller commander’s exercise of merum imperium as entirely unjustifed and illegitimate.29 Albert depicted this phenomenon as a dangerous usurpation of the monarchy’s well-established prerogatives that had been safeguarded by the Usatges de Barcelona for over 200 years.30 Although the ancient customary laws enforced by the lords, prohoms, and universitas in L’Espluga were supposed to be limited to minor offenses (leve crimen, an analog of the aforementioned mixtum imperium), these local authorities had enlarged these rights to include serious crimes (merum imperium).31 Second, the vicar made the case that the manner of enforcement of these ancient 26
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legal customs in L’Espluga was itself abusive because it used methods that had not been sanctioned by the king or the vicar.32 Thus, rather than simply considering the question of whether the monarchy had, in fact, delegated judicial authority to these non-royal agents, Albert de Vernet delved into the town’s administrative track-record to claim that the local government had been abusive in its exercise of justice within L’Espluga and therefore had lost any entitlement to them. On specifc occasions that were recounted in detail by numerous witnesses in the ensuing trial record, the Hospitaller commander and town universitas were accused of imposing a range of local customary practices that the monarchy presented as highly improper and unbecoming of a delegate of royal judicial authority. Most egregiously, the vicar accused L’Espluga’s Hospitaller commander (“with the counsel of the universitas and his Hospitaller brethren”) of ordering that criminals be publicly whipped and paraded disgracefully through the town “in great contempt and disrespect of the Lord King and mockery and diminution and prejudice of the donation of right by the Lord King and his vicar”.33 The proceedings of the trial were, to a great extent, devoted to the prosecution’s search for evidence of such abusive administrative behavior. It became clear from the witnesses that these public whippings and shamings were not common occurrences, but rather had transpired exceptionally several decades earlier. Many local residents of the lower and upper parts of L’Espluga de Francolí testifed about the handling of both women and men accused of serious crimes at least 20 years earlier.They noted that one of the women had been found guilty of adultery, while the other was punished for poisoning a local man.These witnesses confrmed that L’Espluga’s Hospitaller castellan at that time, Arbert de Vilalta, had upheld the sentence and ordered the saig (bailiff ’s deputy) to publicly whip these criminals multiple times during the day and night before running them through the town while banging a copper pot.34 While witnesses recounted a consistent picture of the customary legal practices in place at L’Espluga for dealing with residents found guilty of serious crimes, very few professed to understand the legal issues under scrutiny. When asked about the signifcance of merum imperium by the interrogators, for instance, the vast majority of the witnesses admitted that they could not defne the term.35 They also generally could not distinguish between merum imperium and leve crimen.36 This line of questioning may have been intended to illustrate that these residents, while equipped to report on the exercise of justice within L’Espluga, did not have the knowledge or sophistication to assess these nuanced aspects of their town’s political culture or, moreover, to determine whether the Hospitallers were administering the town judiciously. This distinction was potentially signifcant because the witnesses generally seemed comfortable with the punishments that had been meted out; although the fact that they remembered these incidents so vividly decades later does underscore their rarity in the administrative history of the town. Once again, the sides agreed to disagree.Also reminiscent of the Juneda case, in this situation neither side offered detailed legal support or documentation in support of its claims. Without clear documentation awarding it the jurisdictional autonomy it professed to have entitlement to within its lordship of L’Espluga, the Hospitaller order’s situation was far less defensible and it was arguably only a matter of time before L’Espluga’s autonomy would succumb in one form or another to the growing pressure from the royal government.
Conflict over exemptions from military service Many lordships and other entities, including municipalities, possessed the evidence to mount a more formidable defense, thereby preventing the crown from encroaching on their autonomy 27
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and eroding their traditional exemptions. More numerous than the two examples we have considered thus far, these interactions are more revealing of the specifc legal material that was used to justify the monarchy’s efforts to eliminate exemptions and promote centralization and standardization. Both of the cases we have already examined featured prominent, yet vague and general, appeals by the monarchy to the Usatges de Barcelona to support its claims to universal jurisdiction. Like the major legal compilations for Aragon and Valencia, the Vidal Mayor and the Furs de València, respectively, the Usatges served as the basis for many of the monarchy’s prerogatives within Catalonia and provided a framework for future regalian legal works, such as the Constitucions de Catalunya (see Morales Arizabalaga 2007, 32–48; Barton 2015, 72–73).The political culture of the high and late medieval Crown of Aragon featured frequent disputes between the monarchy and entitled stakeholders over claimed exemptions to specifc prerogatives. Many of these confrontations have left behind extensive archival records that have received scant attention from scholars. One of the more controversial prerogatives established in the Usatges that generated numerous protracted disputes between the monarchy and enfranchised groups was the law known by its incipit Princeps namque.37 This famous statute mandated that any and all subjects respond to the king’s call to arms to defend the safety of the realms against foreign invaders. Those who ignored or otherwise shirked this obligation would face property loss in addition to other penalties.38 Over time, the monarchy increasingly sought redemption payments in lieu of actual military service (Kagay 2008, 198–99; Escartín 1998; Sánchez Martínez 2001, 101–104). Numerous individuals and entities throughout the Crown of Aragon professed to hold exemptions from this burdensome responsibility.The nobleman, Bernat de Cabrera, for example, fell into confict with King Pere III in 1361 when he refused to respond to the king’s invocation of the Princeps namque. Pere accused Bernat of failing to fulfll his owed feudal service and sought to recuperate all of the fefs that he held from him.39 The legal tribunal that later judged the dispute sided with the monarchy and upheld Pere’s punishment.The judges argued that the king’s ability to maintain national defense would be undermined if individuals could opt out on a case-by-case basis. Shortly thereafter, Pere III sought to use a meeting of the general court to transform this notable precedent into a binding obligation upheld by standing law for the “prelates and clerics”, the “cities and towns and royal places”, and the aristocracy of Catalonia (Bofarull y Máscaro et al. 1847–1910, vol. 34, 70–71). Bernat de Cabrera lost his challenge to the overall validity of this royal prerogative, but exemptions that were claimed on the basis of prior royal franchises were considerably more diffcult for the monarchy to combat. The town of Tortosa, situated to the south of Tarragona along the Ebro Delta, for example, claimed to possess an exemption from the royal call to arms dating back to its initial settlement following its capture from Muslim control in the mid-twelfth century.The origins of Tortosa’s exempt status were murky, and this ambiguity may ultimately have facilitated the town’s resistance to the monarchy’s demands for cooperation, as we will see. Tortosa’s settlement charter did not mention military service obligations, commonly known as host et cavalgada, but, by the early 1180s, when Alfons I established Tortosa under the jurisdiction of the Templar order, he confrmed its exemption from these services.40 When the monarchy regained control of the town after it had fallen under independent rule as a marquisate between 1329 and 1364, Pere III signed an expansive jurisdictional agreement with the municipal regime in 1370 that weakened but apparently did not eliminate this exemption.41 By the early 1380s, when Pere III was seeking to secure support to resist an invasion by French troops, both the monarchy and Tortosa’s local leadership nonetheless remained convinced of the town’s freedom from the Princeps namque.42 As a result, rather than demanding 28
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cooperation, the king directed his local offcers in the fall of 1384 to encourage voluntary participation by emphasizing the dire need for military support through carefully staged dramatic processions through the town. The mounted vicar, bearing Catalonia’s standard, progressed through the town streets making the traditional call to arms, “Viafors, Viafors! Princeps Namque!”43 Unfortunately for the monarchy, not a single resident responded to the voluntary call. By 1385, the king shifted his tactic and began demanding redemption payments from Tortosa’s populace. He threatened residents who failed to comply with fnes and other penalties.44 Another invasion by French troops that spring led Pere to issue sterner warnings to Tortosa’s residents as well as to the lords and residents of domains in the Lower Ebro region such as Templar comandas of Miravet, Orta, and Ascó and the Hospitaller lordships of Ulldecona and Amposta to satisfy his demands for contributions to his military costs for the past months.45 Tension between the monarchy and Tortosa persisted into the reigns of Pere’s successors. When Castilian troops invaded Catalonia during the frst year of his reign in 1387, Joan I (1387– 96) sought to sidestep the issue of exemption altogether. He focused on the seemingly less controversial goal of serving locally and directed Tortosa’s vicar to gather together all of the town’s able-bodied men in the strongholds to prevent the enemy invaders from obtaining “refreshment or assistance” there.46 Other monarchs, however, fell into similar patterns. In 1413, for example, Ferran I (1412–16) ordered several of Tortosa’s saigs to gather with other local royal offcials to make a similar performance.They were to perambulate the town at night with torches chanting repeatedly, “in loud voices”, the familiar war-cry: “Viafora, Princeps Namque!”47 The persistence of this problem further underscores that the crown continued to struggle against these ingrained exemptions.
Conclusion Numerous other bouts of litigation regarding jurisdiction and claimed royal prerogatives such as the Princeps Namque that have received little attention from scholars pepper the archives throughout the former Crown of Aragon. Given the nearly unparalleled riches of this region of Europe, this unmined evidence represents one of the most signifcant and potentially fruitful frontiers for research on medieval political culture. Whereas previous generations of historians have tended to overestimate the extent and pervasiveness of royal authority, more recent work has begun to question the monarchy’s claims regarding its authority and normative legal conditions by delving more deeply into these long-overlooked resources. In place of increasing standardization and untrammeled centralization, trending toward “absolute authority”, scholars are fnding that the political culture of the Crown of Aragon, like other purportedly absolutist environments within the medieval world, was differentiated by the legal realities dictated by non-royal authorities that complicated or impeded movement toward standardization. In some cases, these counter-narratives could borrow from or consciously deviate from “normative” royal centralization in order to compete for residents.48 Often, however, as we have seen with our frst two examples, these lordships had different customary legal traditions or distinct goals that recommended deviation from the norms witnessed within domains under the monarchy’s direction. To return to Foucault’s enlightened notion of political power cited at the outset of this essay, historians would be well advised to continue to investigate the ways in which authority emerged within these highly differentiated and ever-changing strategical situations that defned the sociopolitical contexts affecting so many of the phenomena of interest to scholarship today, from ethno-religious relations to ecclesiastical development to constitutional history. 29
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Notes 1 Foucault (1990, 93). 2 Compare, e.g., Boswell (1978, 31), concerning Aragonese royal jurisdiction in the fourteenth century: “A welter of conficting claims and jurisdictions resulted, and there was no static reality at any moment which can be accurately described. Instead, there was a variegated pattern of constantly shifting authority and jurisdiction, in which the fgure of the Crown assumed more or less importance as royal power waxed or waned, but which ultimately resolved by the development of absolute monarchical power” (emphasis added). 3 See, e.g., Cawsey (2002, especially ch. 6). On the uncertain distinction between private and public in the medieval context, see Rigaudière (2000, 25–26),Van Caenegem (1988, 179), and Kosto (2001b, 14). 4 See, e.g., O’Connor (2005). Women benefted from multiple jurisdictions and legal identities. See Hawkes (2003, 161). Kelleher (2010) discusses similar behavior by women in their use of the ius comune in the fourteenth-century Crown of Aragon. In ffteenth-century Valencia, e.g., Muslim residents often preferred to remain on rural seigniorial domains with higher rents than migrate to the royal urban aljamas, likely because they preferred the increased social and culture distance the seigniorial lands afforded them (see Meyerson 1991, 18–33). 5 See Bisson (1994), with responses by Barthélemy (1996) and White (1996). See also Bisson’s (1997) rebuttal, and a comment by Wickham’s (1997) submission to the debate. For an updated picture, see the synthesis by Benito (2003, 102–111), which integrates much work specifc to Catalonia, as well as Bisson (2009, 57). 6 Rodrigo Lizondo (1975) remains the seminal study. For a selection of sources, see Rodrigo Lizondo (2013).The Archive of the Crown of Aragon in Barcelona holds numerous overlooked court records in its Procesos en folio section: e.g., nos. 120, 121, 125, 128, 132. 7 For the bovatge, see Ortí Gost (2001), Kagay (1999, 2007), and Barton (2017). 8 Archivo de la Corona de Aragón [=ACA], Cancillería Real [=C], Procesos en cuarto no. 106 (1302H, 30 Jul – 6 Sept 1302), f. 6r–7r (vicar’s letter) and 10v–12r (seigniorial rendition). 9 ACA, C, Procesos en cuarto no. 106 (1302H), f. 6v:“Unde cum tanta enorme crime quale homicidium predictum existit romanere non debeat impenitu eius cognitio inquisicio et punitio ad prefatum dominum regem et ad nos eius loco spectet et espectare debeat ut superius est pretactum nisi aliquam tamen obstaret iusta causa quam vos habere non credimus in hoc casu”. 10 ACA, C, Procesos en cuarto no. 106 (1302H), f. 8v–9v:“pacifce et quiete pro libero et francho alodio et ad ipsum Guillelmum pertinet pleno iure cum mero et mixto imperio et omni iurisdiccione…maxime cum predicta omnia sint vobis notoria ac etiam manifesta et toti etiam huic terre”. For historical background, see Lalinde Abadía (1966, 93–99). See also Pons i Guri (2006). 11 Miquel Rosell (1945–47, vol. 1, doc. 186 [5 June 1119]). Alfons I later invested Guillem Dalmau’s descendants with both Castelldans and Gebut, possibly in fulfllment of that original pledge. (Miquel Rosell 1945–47, vol. 1, doc. 188 [1 Jan 1179]). 12 Compare, e.g., the case regarding the merum imperium claimed by the lords of the Valencian monastic domain of Valldigna in 1377, as described in Barton (2015, 1–4), that was upheld because the monastery conserved an explicitly worded royal donation awarding these rights. 13 ACA, C, Procesos en cuarto no. 106 (1302H), f. 9r: “sit servatum et usaticum per dictum G. et de anteçessores suos longis temporibus pacifce et quiete et de predictis sunt et fuerint inquieta et pacifca possessione vel quasi tanto tempore quod memoria hominum in contrarium non existit”. 14 ACA, C, Procesos en cuarto no. 106 (1302H), f. 10r: “constituciones editas in celebribus curiis celebratis per dictum regem et predecessores suos sed quod permitatis dictum nobilem Guillelmum eius turticem uti iurisdicione sua et omni mero et mixto imperio pacifce et quiete in loco de Juneta et terminis eius. Et quod super predictis eos ulterius non molestetis nec etiam perturbetis”. 15 On the Constitucions, see Pons i Guri (1989). 16 ACA, C, Procesos en cuarto no. 106 (1302H), f. 12v:“licet villa de Juneda esset dicti Guillelmi flii sui et francho aladio nichilominus tamen merum inperium et mixtum et congnicio et punitio eorundem malefcorum comissorum maxime extra muros spectet et espectare debet ad dominum regem et de iuri comuni et secundum usaticos Barchinone et non ad dominum de Juneta”. 17 E.g., Commemoracions de Pere Albert (Costums de Catalunya entre Senyors i Vassalls), ed. Rovira i Ermengol. 18 ACA, C, Procesos en cuarto no. 106 (1302H), f. 14r: “quo merum et mixtum imperium et iurisdiccione fuerunt per dictum dominum regem Petrum restituta prelatis baronis et militibus in generali curia Barchinone non sunt possidentes predicta in Catalonia super eorum exercitio impediendi vel
30
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19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
32 33 34 35 36 37 38
39 40 41
42 43 44 45
etiam molestandi nec cogentur sue possessionis titulum hostendere vel probare” (Real Academia de la Historia 1896–1922, vol. 1, doc. 22). ACA, C, Procesos en cuarto no. 106 (1302H), f. 9r and 11r. ACA, C, Procesos en cuarto no. 106 (1302H), f. 13v. ACA, C, Procesos en cuarto no. 106 (1302H), f. 15v:“Item dictus Bernardus Brescha dixit quod si dictus vicarius velit procedere de facto cum de iure non posset posuit Guillelmi de Cervaria in comanda et custodia domini regis et sub protectione eiusdem”. ACA, C, Reg. 85, f. 94r (24 Jan 1291). See Lalinde Abadía (1967, 218). See also Sabaté (1995b). On the development of vicarial governance, see Sabaté (1997, 166–198). For a discussion of bailiffs and bailiwicks, see Sabaté (1997, 198–202) and Bisson (1984, vol. 1, 66–71). On this general trend, see Bisson (1996). ACA, C, Reg. 48, f. 3r (20 Apr 1280). ACA, C, Reg. 59, f. 28r (12 Jul 1282). ACA, C, Reg. 62, f. 2r (15 Aug 1283). ACA, C, Procesos en cuarto no. 162 (1306–11), part 2, f. 46v:“specialiter in loco de Speluncha qui est in vicaria et de vicaria Montis Albi”. ACA, C, Procesos en cuarto no. 162 (1306–11), part 2, f. 13v:“preiudicium et diminucionem domini Regis et sui vicarii Montis Albi”) and f. 46v (“de mero imperio quod ius est domini regis et vicarii sui Montis Albi in vicaria Montis Albi”. ACA, C, Procesos en cuarto no. 162 (1306–11), part 2, f. 39r:“contra potestatem et principem est spacio .CC. annorum ut in usatiche Barchinone”. ACA, C, Procesos en cuarto no. 162 (1306–11), part 2, f. 38v:“quod consuetudo et antiqua observantia est in loco de Speluncha quod antecessores hospitalis cum alia donacione faciebat et fecerunt currere homines delinquentes in ipsa villa et per dictam villam eos fustigando pro furto et aliis levibus delictis cum furtum et adulterium et dare malas pociones non sint levia crimina nec esset iustum quod solum fustigacionibus ofcerent cum talia crimina fore digna gravioribus pro eis”. ACA, C, Procesos en cuarto no. 162 (1306–11), part 2, f. 46v. ACA, C, Procesos en cuarto no. 162 (1306–11), part 2, f. 14v:“in maximum contemptum et despectum domini Regis et elusionem et diminucionem atque preiudicium donacionis iuris domini Regis et sui vicarii”. ACA, C, Procesos en cuarto no. 162 (1306–11), part 1, f. 1v–2r, 6v–7v. See, e.g., ACA, C, Procesos en cuarto no. 162 (1306–11), part 1, f. 8v, 10r, and 12r. Compare the testimony of Ramon Tach (f. 9v), who defned merum imperium as “facere iusticiam corporalem”. ACA, C, Procesos en cuarto no. 162 (1306–11), part 1, f. 10v (Pere Joan): “dixit se nescire quod est merum imperium quid est leve crimen”. For a more detailed analysis of exemptions to the Princeps namque, see Barton (2017). Bastardas i Parera (1984, no. 64 [us. 68]): “Princeps namque si quolibet casu obsessus fuerit, vel ipse idem suos inimicos obsessos tenuerit vel audierit quemlibet regem vel principem contra se venire ad debellandum, et terram suam ad succurrendum sibi monuerit, tam per litteras quam per nuncios vel per consuetudines quibus solet amoneri terra, videlicet per fars, omnes homines, tam milites quam pedites, qui habeant etatem et posse pugnandi, statim ut hec audierint vel viderint, quam cicius poterint ei succurrant. Et si quis ei fallerit de iuvamine quod in hoc sibi facere poterit, perdere debet in perpetuum cuncta que per illum habet; et qui honorem per eum non tenuerit emendet ei fallimentum et deshonorem quem ei fecerit, cum avere et sacramento manibus propriis iurando, quoniam nemo debet fallere ad principem ad tantum opus vel necessitatem”. For a translation, see Kagay (1994, 80). Bofarull y Máscaro et al. (1847–1910, vol. 34, 38–39). For further on this episode, see Kagay (2007, 76–77). Cartas de población, ed. by Font i Rius, vol 1:i, doc. 75 (30 Nov 1149).ACA, C, pergs.A I, no. 326 (Mar 1182); Sánchez Casabón (1995, doc. 339). Arxiu Històric Comarcal de les Terres de l’Ebre [=AHCTE], Paper no. 400 (12 Feb 1329) and Pergamins no. 492 (6 Apr 1370): “Item omnium que respiciant usaticum quod princeps namque… seu alias regalias que in terris baronum ac aliorum virorum hominum Cathalonie merum imperium habentium comiatur ad dictum regem pertineant quavis causa”. See Bayerri (1933–60), vol. 7, 653–658. For a more detailed examination of this case, see Barton (2017, 34–38). AHCTE, Paper no. 1165 contains a detailed record of the episode. AHCTE, Paper no. 1166, f. 23r (5 Apr 1385). AHCTE, Paper no. 1627, unnumbered folios (27 Apr, 8 May, and 17 May 1385).
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Thomas W. Barton 46 AHCTE, Paper no. 1190 (20 Aug 1387): “sia de necessitat que tots les vuires sien levats e recollits en los lochs forts per tal quels anamichs no puxen haver refreschament ne socors algu manera”. 47 AHCTE, Paper no. 1121, f. 35v–40v (Oct 1413), describing in detail the itinerary and performance. 48 Consider, for example, the case of the independent county of Empúries and its Jewish policy, as discussed in Bensch (2008, 42). See also Barton (2015), which considers how Tortosa’s seigniorial regime crafted an administrative environment that variously continued, innovated upon, competed with royal policies in neighboring domains that had the potential to attract residents from Tortosa.
References Archival sources Archivo de la Corona de Aragón (Barcelona) [ACA]:
Cancillería Real [C] Registros Procesos en cuarto Procesos en folio Arxiu Històric Comarcal de les Terres de l’Ebre (Tortosa) [AHCTE], which has recently been renamed the Arxiu Comarcal del Baix Ebre:
Books and articles Barthélemy, D. 1996.“Debate:The Feudal Revolution”. Past & Present 152: 196–205. Barton, Thomas W. 2015. Contested Treasure: Jews and Authority in the Crown of Aragon. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Barton, Thomas W. 2017. “Resisting the Call to Arms in Medieval Catalonia: The Case of Tortosa”. In Boundaries in the Medieval and Wider World: Festschrift in Honour of Paul Freedman, edited by Thomas Barton, Susan McDonough, Sara McDougall and Matthew Wranovix, 17–36.Turnhout: Brepols. Bastardas i Parera, J., ed. 1984. Usatges de Barcelona: El codi a mitjan segle XII. Establiment del texi llatí i edició de la versió catalana del manuscript del segle XIII de l’Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó de Barcelona. Barcelona: Fundació Noguera. Baydal,V. 2017.“El poder polític al regne de València durant el segle XIV. Descomposició o desenvolupament?” Catalan Historical Review 10: 147–160. Benito, Pere. 2003. Senyoria de la terra i tinença pagesa al comtat de Barcelona (segles XI-XIII). Barcelona: Consell Superior d’Investigacions Científques. Bensch, S. 2002. Barcelona and Its Rulers, 1096–1291. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bensch, S. 2008.“A Baronial Aljama:The Jews of Empúries in the Thirteenth Century”. Jewish History 22: 19–51. Bisson, Thomas N. 1978. “The Problem of Feudal Monarchy: Aragon, Catalonia, and France”. Speculum 53: 460–478. Bisson, Thomas N. 1984. Fiscal Accounts of Catalonia under the Early Count-Kings (1151–1213). 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bisson,Thomas N. 1985. “Prelude to Power: Kingship and Constitution in the Realms of Aragon, 1175– 1250”. In The Worlds of Alfonso the Learned and James the Conqueror: Intellect and Force in the Middle Ages, edited by Robert I. Burns, 3–22. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bisson,Thomas N. 1994.“The ‘Feudal Revolution’”. Past & Present 142: 6–42. Bisson,Thomas N. 1996.“‘Statebuilding’ in the Medieval Crown of Aragón”. In Actas del XVo Congreso de Historia de la Corona de Aragón, vol. 1, pt. 1, 141–158. Zaragoza: Gobierno de Aragón. Bisson,Thomas N. 1997 “Reply”. Past & Present 155: 208–225. Bisson, Thomas N. 2009. The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship, and the Origins of European Government. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bofarull y Mascaró, Próspero de, Bofarull y de Sartorio, Manuel de, Bofarull y Sans, Francisco de, eds. 1847–1910. Colección de documentos inéditos del Archivo General de la Corona de Aragón. 41 vols. Barcelona: J. E. Montfort.
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Fragmentation and centralization Boswell, J. 1978. The Royal Treasure: Muslim Communities under the Crown of Aragon in the Fourteenth Century. New Haven:Yale University Press. Capua, J.V. 1983. “Feudal and Royal Justice in Thirteenth-Century England: The Forms and Impact of Royal Review”. The American Journal of Legal History 27: 54–84. Cawsey, S. 2002. Kingship and Propaganda: Royal Eloquence and the Crown of Aragon, c. 1200–1450. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cheyette, Frederic. 1970.“Suum cuique tribuere”. French Historical Studies 6 (3): 287–299. Cheyette, Frederic. 1978.“The Invention of the State”. In Essays on Medieval Civilization, edited by Bede K. Lackner and Kenneth R. Philip, 143–178.Arlington: University of Texas. Clanchy, M.T. 1974.“Law, Government and Society in Medieval England”. History 59: 73–78. Escartín, Eduard. 1998.“El Usatge ‘Princeps Namque’ en la Edad Moderna”. In Profesor Nazario González: una historia abierta, 103–110. Barcelona: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Servei de Publicacions. Ferran i Planas, E. 2006. El jurista Pere Albert i les “Commemoracions”. Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans. Ferro,V. 1987. El dret públic català. Les institucions a Catalunya fns al Decret de Nova Planta.Vic: Eumo. Font Rius, José María. 1963.“El desarrollo general del derecho en los territorios de la corona de Aragón (siglos xii-xiv)”. In VII Congreso de historia de la Corona de Aragón, vol. 1, 289–326. Barcelona: F. Rodríguez Ferran. Font i Rius, José María, ed. Cartas de población, vol 1:i, doc. 75 (30 Nov 1149). Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality. vol. 1. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York:Vintage Books. Freedman, P. 1991. The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giménez Soler, A. 1901. “El poder judicial en la Corona de Aragón”. Memorias de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona 8: 37–112. González Antón, L. 1975. Las uniones aragoneses y las Cortes del reino (1283–1301). 2 vols. Zaragoza: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científcas, Escuela de Estudios Medievales. Hawkes, E. 2003.“‘[S]he will … Protect and Defend Her Rights Boldly by Law and Reason …’:Women’s Knowledge of Common Law and Equity Courts in Late-Medieval England”. In Medieval Women and the Law, edited by Noël J. Menuge, 145–162. Suffolk: Boydell Press. Jarrett, J. 2010. Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia, 880–1010: Pathways of Power. Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society and Boydell Press. Kagay, Donald J. 1988. “Structures of Baronial Dissent and Revolt under James I (1213–76)”. Mediaevistik 1: 61–85. Kagay, Donald J., ed. and trans. 1994. The Usatges of Barcelona:The Fundamental Law of Catalonia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kagay, Donald J. 1999. “Princeps namque: Defense of the Crown and the Birth of the Catalan State”. Mediterranean Studies 8: 55–87. Kagay, Donald J. 2007. “The National Defense Clause and the Emergence of the Catalan State: Princeps Namque Revisited”. Chap. 1 in War, Government, and Society in the Medieval Crown of Aragon. Aldershot: Ashgate. Kagay, Donald J. 2008. “The Defense of the Crown of Aragon during the War of the Two Pedros (1356– 1366)”. In The Hundred Years War (Part II): Different Vistas, edited by L.J. Andrew Villalon and Donald J. Kagay, 185–210. Leiden: Brill. Kelleher, Marie. 2010. The Measure of Woman: Law and Female Identity in Medieval Spain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kosto, A. 2001a. “The Limited Impact of the Usatges de Barcelona in Twelfth-Century Catalonia”. Traditio 56: 53–88. Kosto, A. 2001b. Making Agreements in Medieval Catalonia: Power, Order, and the Written Word, 1000–1200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ladero Quesada, M.Á. 1996.“El ejercicio del poder real: instituciones e instrumentos de gobierno”. In El poder real de la Corona de Aragón (siglos XIV-XVI), Actas del XVo Congreso de Historia de la Corona de Aragón, vol. 1, pt. 1, 71–140. Zaragoza: Gobierno de Aragón. Laliena Corbera, C. 2010.“La metamorfosis del estado feudal. Las estructuras institucionales de la Corona de Aragón en el periodo de expansión (1208–1283)”. In La Corona de Aragón en el centro de su historia, 1208–1458. La monarquía aragonesa y los reinos de la Corona, edited by José Ángel Sesma Muñoz, 67–98. Zaragoza: Gobierno de Aragón and Grupo CEMA. Lalinde Abadía, J. 1966.La jurisdicción real inferior en Cataluña (“corts, veguers, batlles”).Barcelona:Ayuntamiento de Barcelona.
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Thomas W. Barton Lalinde Abadía, J. 1967.“El ‘curia’ o ‘cort’ (Una magistratura medieval mediterránea)”. Anuario de Estudios Medievales 4: 169–300. Meyerson, M. 1991. The Muslims of Valencia in the Age of Fernando and Isabel: Between Coexistence and Crusade. Berkeley: University of California Press. Miquel Rosell, F. 1945–47. Liber Feudorum Maior. Cartulario real que se conserve en el Archivo de la Corona de Aragón. 2 vols. Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científcas. Montagut Estragués,T. de. 1987. El Mestre racional a la Corona de Aragó (1283–1419). Barcelona: Fundació Noguera. Morales Arizabalaga, J. 2007. Fueros y libertades del Reino de Aragón: De su formación medieval a la crisis preconstitucional (1076–1800). Zaragoza: Gobierno de Aragón. O’Connor, I. 2005.“The Mudejars and the Local Courts: Justice in Action”. Journal of Islamic Studies 16 (3): 332–356. Ortí Gost, P. 2001.“La primera articulación del estado feudal en Cataluña a través de un impuesto: el bovaje (ss. XII-XIII)”. Hispania 61: 967–998. Pons i Guri, Josep M. 1989.“Constitucions de Catalunya”. In Recull d’estudis d’història jurídica catalana, vol. 3, 55–76. Barcelona: Fundació Noguera. Pons i Guri, Josep M. 2006. “La potestas, el merum i el mixtum imperium: estat de la qüestió”. In Recull d’Estudis d’història jurídica catalana, vol. 3, edited by Josep M. Pons i Guri, 133–142. Barcelona: Fundació Noguera. Real Academia de la Historia. 1896–1922. Cortes de los antiguos reinos de Aragón y de Valencia y Principado de Cataluña. 27 vols. Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia. Riera i Sans, J. 2006. Els poders públics i les sinagogues: Segles XIII-XV. Girona:Ajuntament de Girona. Rigaudière, A. 2000. “The Theory and Practice of Government in Western Europe in the Fourteenth Century”. In The New Cambridge Medieval History, Volume 6, c. 1300-c. 1415, edited by Michael Jones et al., 17–41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rodrigo Lizondo, M. 1975. La unión valenciana y sus protagonistas.Valencia: Departamento de Historia. Rodrigo Lizondo, M. 2013. Diplomatari de la unió del Regne de València (1347–1349).Valencia: Universitat de València,Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua. Rovira i Ermengol, J. 1933. Usatges de Barcelona i Commemoracions de Pere Albert. Barcelona: Editorial Barcino. Sabaté, Flocel. 1995a.“Discurs i estratègies del poder reial a la Catalunya al segle XIV”.Anuario de Estudios Medievales 25: 617–646. Sabaté, Flocel. 1995b.“El veguer a Catalunya:Anàlisi del funcionament de la jurisdicció reial al segle XIV”. Butlletí de la Societat Catalana d'Estudis Històrics 6: 147–152. Sabaté, Flocel. 1996. “El poder reial entre el poder municipal i el poder baronial a la Catalunya del segle XIV”. In El poder real de la Corona de Aragón (siglos XIV-XVI). Actas del XVo Congreso de Historia de la Corona de Aragón, vol. 1, pt. 2, 327–342. Zaragoza: Gobierno de Aragón. Sabaté, Flocel. 1997. El territori de la Catalunya medieval: percepció de l’espai i divisió territorial al llarg de l’Edat Mitjana. Barcelona: Fundació Salvador Vives i Casajuana. Salrach, J. 1998. El procès de feudalització: segles III-XII. Barcelona: Barcelona 62. Sánchez Casabón, A.I., ed. 1995. Alfonso II Rey de Aragón, Conde de Barcelona y Marqués de Provenza: Documentos (1162–1196). Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico. Sánchez Martínez, M. 2001.“La convocatoria del usatge Princeps namque en 1368 y sus repercusiones en la ciudad de Barcelona”. Barcelona Quaderns d’Història 4: 79–107. Tatjer Prat, M.T. 2009. La Audencia Real en la Corona de Aragón: orígenes y primera etapa de su actuación: s. XIII y XIV. Barcelona: Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Van Caenegem, R. 1988. “Government, Law, and Society”. In The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350-c. 1450, edited by James H. Burns, 174–210. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van Landingham, Marta. 2002. Transforming the State: King, Court, and Political Culture in the Realms of Aragon (1213–1387). Leiden: Brill. White, S. 1996.“Debate:The Feudal Revolution”. Past & Present 152: 205–223. Wickham, C. 1997.“Debate:The Feudal Revolution”. Past & Present 155: 196–208. Wilman, J.C. 1987. Jaime I “El Conquistador” and the Barons of Aragon, 1244–1267:The Struggle for Power. Ann Arbor: University Microflms International.
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3 MUDÉJARES AND MORISCOS Brian A. Catlos
Introduction Mudéjar (pl. mudéjares) is the term in Spanish, and now widely used in English, that refers to a free Muslim living under Christian rule in the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages. It also refers to the distinctive architectural and decorative styles produced by Muslims in Christian Iberia.The word is a corruption from the Arabic mudajjan, attested in the thirteenth century but used rarely. It is related to the term ahl al-dajn, meaning, roughly “people who stayed behind”, but the root d-j-n also can carry a sense of domestication or habituation. Ahl al-dajn was frst used in al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) by jurists in the ninth century to refer to those Muslims who were subjects of the apostate rebel, cUmar ibn Hafs¯ụ n. Signifcant numbers of free Muslims lived under Christian rule from the eleventh century onward, until a series of forced conversions and expulsions between 1496 and 1526 eliminated or transformed these communities. Although there had been some settlement of Arabs and Berbers in al-Andalus, the overwhelming majority of Andalusi Muslims were the descendants of Christians (and some Jews) who converted to Islam in the centuries following the Arabo-Islamic conquest of the peninsula which began in 711. As al-Andalus was conquered between roughly 1065 (the conquest of Coimbra) and 1492 (the fall of Granada), Christian princes typically offered incentives for the Muslim population to stay in their lands and live as legitimate if subordinate subjects under Christian rule.After their conversion to Christianity at or soon after the turn of the sixteenth century, many former mudéjares and their descendants continued to secretly or openly practice Islam.These were referred to either as Cristianos nuevos (“New Christians”) or Moriscos. The Moriscos were ultimately expelled from Spain between 1609 and 1614 although it is now suggested that perhaps signifcant numbers either escaped expulsion or surreptitiously returned to the peninsula soon after.
Christian expansion (1050–1200) The collapse of the Caliphate of Córdoba in 1009 and the generation-long civil war that followed it fragmented a once-united al-Andalus into more than a dozen petty principalities known as the Taifa Kingdoms (from the Arabic, mulu¯k al-tawa ̣ ¯’if, or “splinter kingdoms”).This coincided with a period of political and economic dynamism and population growth in both Christian 35
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Iberia and western Europe, which helped drive a process of expansion and colonization into the territories of the weak and divided Taifa Kingdoms. This was also the era which saw the birth of the Crusade phenomena, and the conviction among certain Church ideologues and institutions that Christendom was engaged in a divinely sanctioned struggle against Islam. However, centuries of confict and collaboration between Christian and Muslims in Iberia had fomented a culture of integration within the peninsula that tempered Muslim–Christian relations. The ideology of Reconquista, the notion that the Leonese Empire was the successor dynasty of the pre-Islamic Visigothic kingdom of Hispania and was engaged in a process of “reconquest”, began to develop in the twelfth century, but was limited to certain circles and contexts, and in any event was conceived of as a process of political domination, not of the expulsion of the Muslim population. In this period, the rulers of León presented themselves as “Emperors of the Three Religions” (i.e., Christianity, Islam, and Judaism), “of the Two Religious Communities (i.e., Christianity and Islam), or “of All the Spains” (e.g., including Islamic and Christian Iberia). In order to maintain the productivity of their territories and to hold them against local insurgencies and rival princes, Christian rulers who conquered Muslim territory generally tried to induce the vanquished population to remain in their lands, and extended broad privileges of personal security, religious freedom, and autonomous communal self-government in order to ensure their willing submission.
Castile-Leon and Portugal In the previous centuries, rebellious Muslim grandees and their followers had occasionally taken refuge in Christian Galicia and Asturias, and there was a strip of territory along the southern banks of the lower River Douro in which settlements of Muslims as well as Christians had sometimes come under the control of the kings of Asturias, and their successors in León. Fernando I, ruler of León and Castile frst as king (1037–65) and then as emperor (from 1056), forced nearly all of the Taifa kingdoms to become his tributaries in exchange for military aid and protection. In 1065 he pushed the frontier of his realms southward, conquering Muslim Coimbra. His son, Alfonso VI, having neutralized his brothers and taken the thrones of Castile, León, and Galicia (reigning as emperor, 1077–1109), continued this policy of playing the Taifa kings off of each other and extracting parias (tribute payments) from them. He besieged Toledo, leading both the populace and its nominal king,Yahya ̣ ¯ al-Qa¯ dir (1075– 85), to offer surrender in 1085. Alfonso installed Yaḥy¯a as king of Muslim Valencia, and granted generous terms to the Muslim population of Toledo, granting them legal autonomy, including their own fuero (“law code”), and promising to allow them to retain their congregational mosque. However, his queen and regent in the city, Constance of Burgundy, and her confessor, Bernard of Sahagún, soon reneged on these promises.Although a few Muslims remained in the city and the surrounding countryside, it seems most converted to Christianity or emigrated, either south to Muslim-held al-Andalus or north to Old Castile, where they settled in towns and villages along the length of the Duero and as far north as Burgos. The following year Alfonso suffered a major defeat at Zallaqa at the hands of the North African Almoravids, who quickly conquered almost all of al-Andalus, and brought his conquests to a halt. Some Muslims had fed the Almoravid advance in the south to Castile, including Zaida, a noblewoman of Córdoba, who became Alfonso VI’s lover and fathered his only son, Sancho (d. 1108). In 1094, Alfonso’s out-law liegeman, the soldier-of-fortune Rodrigo Díaz del Vivar (known as “El Cid”) forced the surrender of Islamic Valencia, which he would tenuously rule over until his death in 1099. In 1102 Alfonso VI ordered the Christians to withdraw from the city and it reverted to the Almoravids. Rodrigo’s rule over Valencia was characterized by a laissez-faire 36
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approach. Muslim sensibilities and law were respected, and Rodrigo may have overseen the administration of justice himself. By the 1140s, Almoravid imperium was disintegrating and Portugal had been established as an independent kingdom ruled by Alfonso VI’s grandson,Afonso Henriques (1139–85). In 1147 Afonso recruited English, Flemish, and other northerners who were en route to the Holy Land to fght in the Second Crusade to besiege Lisbon.The city fell, and many inhabitants, Muslim and Christian, were massacred. In the aftermath,Afonso managed to extend his dominions south of the Tagus River, in lands that remained populated largely by Muslims, including a signifcant community at Lisbon. In 1170 they received their own fouro. In the same year, a joint Castilian-Genoese mission captured the major port of Almería, but the Muslim population either fed or was massacred. By this time the Almoravid empire in North Africa had been conquered by the rival Almohads, who extended their dominion into al-Andalus, eventually dealing Castile a signifcant defeat at Alarcos (1195).Through the twelfth century, substantial numbers of Muslims lived in the area around Cuenca (conquered in 1178) and to the north, but we know very little about them, apart from the evidence in the fuero of Cuenca (granted in 1189).
Navarre, Aragon, and Catalonia In 1066, Norman, Occitan, and Catalan warriors briefy seized Barbastro in the foothills of the central Pyrenees, killing the men and enslaving the women in violation of a truce they had agreed to. But the town was held for only two years before the occupiers were defeated. From the 1080s, the rulers of the fedgling Kingdom of Aragon began to systematically attack the Taifa kingdom of Zaragoza, conquering the towns of the foothills, including Huesca (1096) and Barbastro (1100), inducing many of the native Muslims to stay in their lands as subjects. Over the course of his long reign,Alfonso I “the Battler” (1104–34) conquered what remained of the Taifa kingdom, including the capital (1118),Tudela (1115), and pushing as far east as Calatayud (1119) on the Jalón River, and south along the Jiloca to Daroca (1120). He was killed while besieging Muslim Fraga. Having broken the Taifa’s military capacity and eager to prevent Castile from claiming this territory, Alfonso granted extremely generous formal terms of surrender to the kingdom’s Muslims, the majority of whom (except for the military and religious elite) seems to have stayed in their lands. Meanwhile, the Catalan counts of Urgell, Pallars, and Barcelona were staking their claim on territory in eastern al-Andalus, following the same general approach. After Alfonso I’s death, the new military orders, notably the Templars and Hospitallers, became major seigniorial powers in the Kingdom of Aragon, where they ruled over vast stretches of territory inhabited largely by Muslims.A similar process occurred in the other Christian principalities, including Catalonia, and later, Castile-León and Portugal, particularly in territories along the frontier with al-Andalus. In northern Aragon, in Castile north of the Duero, and in the middle and lower Ebro region, monasteries, particularly Cistercian houses, became lords over signifcant communities of mudéjares. By his betrothal in 1137 to princess Petronila, Count Ramon Berenguer IV of Barcelona (1131–62) became ruler of Aragon and Catalonia, which his son Alfons II (1285–91) would rule as the “Crown of Aragon”. In 1148 with Templar and Genoese aid, the count besieged Tortosa, inducing the inhabitants to surrender and stay in their lands by offering the same terms Alfonso I had offered Zaragoza.The following year, Lleida fell, completing the conquest of the lower Ebro and lower Cinco Rivers, both zones where a heavy Muslim population remained. Numerous Muslims remained also in the Conca de Barberà and Priorat (near Tarragona), and around Teruel (1171) and Alcañiz (1157 and 1179) in the Aragonese “Extremadura”. 37
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Tributaries Prior to the Almoravid conquest of al-Andalus in the 1090s, virtually all of the Taifa kingdoms were paying tribute to at least one Christian prince (and sometimes, several). The parias functioned like “protection money”, guaranteeing not only that the Christian prince who received them would not attack, but that he would aid the payee against any enemies, whether Christian or Muslim. Thus, they served to integrate the Taifa and Christian kingdoms militarily, as their soldiers frequently fought side-by-side against enemies of both faiths.According to some Islamic legal scholars, this tributary relationship would have made the Taifa kings mudéjares on the rationale that they were living under Christian authority, although neither they nor their subjects considered themselves as such. Some, such as al-Qa¯ dir, who briefy ruled Valencia under the authority of Alfonso VI, were clearly puppets, while others, like the Banu ¯ Ḥ ¯ud of Zaragoza, attempted to play off rival Christian powers against each other. After the arrival of the Almoravids, some Andalusi magnates bent on resisting them became clients of Christian rulers. Foremost among these were the Banu ¯ Ḥ ¯ud, the Taifa rulers of Zaragoza, who were expelled from the capital in favor of the Almoravids by their own subjects in 1111. First taking refuge at Rueda de Jalón, the Banu ¯ Ḥ ¯ud entered the service of Alfonso VII of Castile (1111–57), who rewarded them with a notional kingdom near Toledo.The last of the line, Sayf al-Dawla (“Zafadola”), served Alfonso VII until his death in battle in 1148. Soon after the Almohad invasion a former Almoravid commander named Muḥammad ibn Mardanı¯sh, and known as El Rey Lobo (“The Wolf-King”), took over much of eastern and southern al-Andalus with the support of Castile and Barcelona.
Society and economy The increase in population in the mountainous Christian north of the peninsula and in western Europe as a whole, which came as a consequence of the warming trend referred to as the Medieval Optimum, provided a base for Christian colonization, particularly north of the Tajo/Tejo and Ebro rivers. Here Christians settled in substantial numbers and soon constituted the majority, although Muslims remained an important presence in both town and country, working as farmers, local and longer-distance merchants, and in a whole range of craft professions. Mudéjares were particularly important in building, engineering, and decorative crafts.The majority of the many churches built in this period across the middle and north of the peninsula were constructed and/or decorated by Muslim artisans. Towns, even further south, also attracted Christian colonists, thanks to the attractive privileges kings offered to settlers, including a pardon from any criminal warrants (once they had lived one year and a day in the town), and the chance to rise socially and to gain riches and glory by fghting in the towns’ urban militias. Military Orders and monastic foundations also offered incentives to prospective tenants, both Christian and Muslim, with little regard to their identity and without any missionizing agenda vis-à-vis the mudéjares. Many ecclesiastical foundations depended to a signifcant extent on Muslim labor and rents. In some areas, pre-conquest land tenancy patterns were effaced by the establishment of large seigniorial estates oriented toward dry cereal production. However, in lands where substantial Muslim populations remained and where intensively irrigated market gardening was practiced, Christians who bought or were granted agricultural land were inserted into existing property systems, which fostered integration with local Muslims. Likewise, the integration of mudéjares into networks of production and distribution of agricultural and craft goods, and their roles as tenants, vassals, and land-owners helped to stabilize mudéjar–Christian relations and foment a sense of cross-faith solidarity. 38
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But aside from such economic links, little evidence survives of broader integration, and reading the legal sources it would seem the two communities existed in most locales as two self-contained and independent parallel societies. Indeed, for many rural mudéjares little may have seemed to have changed as a consequence of Christian rule in the frst generations after the conquest. However, legal sources present only a partial picture; there was undoubtedly much bilingualism and some shared cultural practices among Iberian Christians and Muslims, as well as signifcant social and economic integration at less formal and lower levels. Nor is there evidence of communal tension or violence, whether in the form of Christian oppression or mudéjar resistance, even though the frontier between al-Andalus remained dangerous, and inhabitants on both sides were subject to raiding and capture.
Law and administration With central power in the Andalusi frontier having collapsed, the kings, noblemen, and military commanders who conquered Muslim territory typically negotiated bilateral treaties of surrender and tribute with local leaders in an effort to induce townsfolk and farmers to remain in their lands.The extant treaties generally guaranteed rights of property and person, and freedom of movement, but required that Muslims move to extramural suburbs within one year. All religious properties reverted to the Church and most mosques were converted into churches, although rebuilding took many decades or longer. A rate of tribute was established, and local legal authorities and religious leaders were confrmed in their positions. Sometimes other rights, such as to pasturage, or limitations on Christians’ rights to search Muslim homes for escaped slaves, were added.These agreements were eventually supplemented or superseded by local fueros promulgated in the decades following.The treaties were analogous to the cartas-pueblas (settlement charters) granted to Christian communities, which also received their own separate fueros, alongside those of local Muslims. Some cartas-pueblas were promulgated explicitly to attract both Muslim and Christian settlers. Mudéjares, for their part, saw themselves as having become like dhimmis (a protected nonMuslim minority under Islamic law) of the Christians. By the late twelfth century more elaborate municipal fueros were being promulgated (e.g., at Calatayud, Cuenca, Salamanca, and Teruel), which detailed the rights and relations of Christians, Muslims, and Jews, refecting increasing social and economic engagement between these communities, and refecting a trend toward the subordination of minority communities, both Jewish and mudéjar. The use of public baths by non-Christians was often restricted to certain days.Although the principle that in civil cases the legal system of the plaintiff should apply, mudéjares tended to come increasingly under the jurisdiction of Christian courts in cases involving Christians. In such cases, the testamentary power of Muslims was sometimes denied or reduced (for example, with two Muslim witnesses considered as equal to one Christian witness). Regulations regarding the swearing of oaths (e.g., on the Qur’an) in court and in contracts refect increasing economic and legal engagement among Muslims and Christians. In this period, the aljama (from the Arabic al-ja¯mica, or “community”) took shape as the institutional manifestation of the local mudéjar population. Ruled over by a headman or magistrate (e.g., alcadi, çaualquen), either elected by the community or appointed by a Christian overlord, or at times run by a council of elders (shuyu¯kh), the aljama governed and represented the local community, collected taxes and tribute, and administered justice according to Islamic principles. Each was independent. In areas with few mudéjares, Muslims came under the Christian administration of the town.A general principle was established that exempted mudéjar landholders from the obligation to pay annual ecclesiastical tithes on lands that had remained in Muslim hands 39
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since the conquest—a privilege which both mudéjares and their Christian lords sometimes conspired to extend and abuse. Most aljamas were dependent on the kings, but others were ruled by noblemen, military orders, and church institutions, each of which also established new mudéjar communities through the promulgation of settlement charters and local fueros.
The age of conquest (1200–1350) In the early thirteenth century the decline of Almohad power coincided with the consolidation of Christian power, with a united Castile and León, a powerful Crown of Aragón, and robust monarchies in Navarre and Portugal. Thus, all of the remaining territory of al-Andalus would be conquered by the 1250s, with the exception of the southern tip of the peninsula, which was ruled from Granada by the newly established Nasrid sultanate.As an incentive to Christian colonists, kings sometimes evacuated conquered cities and then shared out the various properties among their warriors, noblemen, and clerics, recording these grants in “books of distribution” (libros de repartimiento in Castilian or llibres de repartiment in Catalan and Valencian). In this period Church institutions continued to mature, and the papacy entered its imperial phase. Cistercian and Carthusian monastic foundations continued to thrive, and new houses were founded often in formerly Muslim territories which retained substantial numbers of mudéjares. The Military Orders, including the Templars and Hospitallers, as well as local orders like Calatrava and Santiago, also expanded in the peninsula. As the pool of Christian settlers diminished, the Military Orders and monasteries were granted vast territories to govern in newly conquered lands, some of which were inhabited almost entirely by Muslims. Pastoral institutions consolidated, including parishes and confraternities, together with the new Mendicant Orders, the Franciscans and Dominicans, which contributed to a heightened Christian consciousness. Until the 1320s, this continued to be a period of abundance, in which the population continued to grow, and the Christian Spains moved toward more cash-driven economies in which credit played an increasing role even among lower social strata.With Christian military advances, large numbers of captives were taken, both at land and sea, fueling a robust trade in Muslim slaves.
Andalucía, Murcia, and the Algarve In the 1230s (Saint) Fernando III of Castile (1214–52) and León (1230–52) moved decisively on southern Spain, using his knights, the Military Orders, municipal militias, foreign Crusaders, and his own Muslim tributaries. In 1236 Córdoba was taken. In 1248 he captured Seville, and demanded that the entire Muslim population leave the city. Over the previous decades the Guadalquivir valley had been the scene of heavy fghting and continuous raiding; in order to press the conquest, Christian forces often massacred or expelled native Muslims, who were pushed out of the larger cities and towns and either emigrated to Islamic land or settled in the countryside. In the 1240s, Fernando’s son and eventual successor Alfonso X (1252–84) conquered Murcia and its surroundings, allowing the Muslim king to continue ruling as his vassal. Next, he set out to eliminate the remaining tributary principalities in the south, including Niebla, the king of which was granted exile in Seville, and Jeréz, which put up ferce resistance. In 1264, however, the Muslims of the south rose up in revolt in conjunction with Granada and Murcia, and the aid of North African forces, seizing many major towns and nearly killing the king. The repression of the revolt provoked the expulsion or fight of many mudéjares to Islamic lands, and further ruptured the social and economic fabric of southern al-Andalus. Murcia was recovered by Alfonso’s cousin, Jaume I of Aragon (1213–76), who through a com40
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bination of force and largesse convinced the rebels here to surrender in 1266. Jaume returned most of the Murcian territory to Castile-León, in accordance with treaties the two realms had signed.The Banu ¯ Ḥ ¯ud were deprived of Murcia but were allowed to remain as rulers of a tiny rump kingdom of Arrixaca. They remained here until 1295, when they sold their holdings to the king to Castile and moved to North Africa. By this point much of the Muslim population of Murcia had moved south to Granada. Here, the Nasrid dynasty would continue to rule. Although Castile considered the family to be vassals of the crown, the Nasrids frequently defed their Christian overlords, and through 1350 Castile continued to conquer cities and towns of the sultanate, frequently demanding the defeated Muslim inhabitants evacuate and depart or resettle elsewhere. By the mid-thirteenth century the Algarve (from al-Gharb,“the West”) had been conquered by Portugal, with Faro falling in 1250. In this region local Muslims were offered incentives to stay in their lands similar to those that had been offered in Aragon, while Muslim warriors were specifcally invited by Afonso III (1248–79) to serve in his military forces.
The Balearic Islands and Valencia In 1229, Jaume I of Aragon landed at Mallorca with a combined feet of Catalans, Pisans, and Genoans, and after a month or so of heavy fghting took the capital Madı¯na Mayu ¯ rqa (modern Palma). After taking several weeks to mop up resistance, he demanded the entire Muslim population depart the island. At the same time, he bluffed the ruler of Menorca into becoming a tributary. This arrangement would last until 1287, when Alfons the Liberal (1287–91) conquered the island and enslaved the population en masse, allowing those who could ransom themselves to settle in his lands as free Muslims. In the late thirteenth century, a small population of mudéjares would reestablish itself on Mallorca and Menorca, together with signifcant numbers of Muslim slaves. After taking Mallorca, Jaume I began the conquest of Sharq al-Andalus (eastern al-Andalus), a campaign modeled on that of his predecessors, including Alfonso I. Between pitched battles, Jaume pressured each town to surrender willingly and receive his peace or face destruction. Many opted to surrender.The capital,Valencia, withstood a siege of many months, but after it became clear no relief would come, the city leaders surrendered in September 1238, promising that all Muslims would abandon the city in exchange for safe conduct. The city was emptied, but soon after a Muslim aljama would be established here. By now, Jaume had few Christian or Jewish colonists to settle new territory. Nevertheless, he pushed on south of the Xúquer River, bullying Muslim towns and local lords into surrendering or becoming tributaries, and granting large estates and fortresses to the Military Orders.A handful of local Muslim seigneurs were allowed to keep their lordly status as Jaume’s vassals, some of whose families remained in power locally until the early fourteenth century.With the submission of Xàtiva, Jaume’s Crown of Aragon gained an important center of paper production, enabling the royal chancery to develop sophisticated record-keeping practices modeled on the papal court, and sparking the early growth of a robust notary culture in the Crown. The new Kingdom of Valencia that Jaume founded had a population of which the overwhelming majority (perhaps 90%) was Muslim, and which was dotted by tiny urban Christian and Jewish colonies and the fortresses of Templars and Hospitallers. Generally, Christian–mudéjar relations tended to be more contentious and fraught here. This was as a consequence of the military insecurity of the region, but also was a result of the maturing of Church institutions, particularly at the parish level, which encouraged a popular ideology of religious confrontation and emphasized religious community as a primary mode of social cohesion. Occasional raiding, 41
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either by cavalry from Granada or ships from the Maghrib, helped to paint the mudéjar population as a “ffth column” for many Christians here. In the northern parts of the kingdom Muslims were pushed out of the best agricultural lands and away from the coasts, in part because lords converted these lands from irrigated market-gardening and toward dry cereal cultivation, but also out of concern for potential mudéjar disloyalty, and as a means of appropriating better lands for Christians. In 1247 a tributary Muslim lord, Muḥammad ibn Hudhayl, who went by the nom de guerre “al-Azraq”, raised a revolt against Jaume in southern Valencia with uneven support from this fellow mudéjar lords, some of whom aided the Christian king.The revolt failed in 1258 and alAzraq accepted exile in North Africa.Two other small revolts followed in 1262. Al-Azraq himself would return in 1275, to be killed in a subsequent uprising. Known as the “Muslims’War” (guerra Saracenorum), this broader revolt broke out in that year as a consequence of Christian settlers’ attacks on Muslim communities. It was largely suppressed by 1277, but outbreaks continued as late as 1304. Jaume I had been so frustrated by the rebellion, which he viewed as a personal betrayal by his Muslim subjects, that he counseled his eldest son and heir, Pere the Great (1276–85), to simply expel the mudéjares of Valencia—a measure that was unfeasible, given that the economy of the kingdom depended on Muslim manpower. Over the course of the early fourteenth century, the Christian population in Valencia continued to increase, particularly in the capital and the southern part of the kingdom. Although social and economic integration took place, Christian–Muslim relations remained more polarized here than elsewhere, and mudéjares were subject to marginalization and discrimination to a degree not experienced in the regions conquered in the twelfth century.
The established mudéjar communities Christian–mudéjar relations remained stable and constructive across the broad swathe of territory that had been conquered prior to the thirteenth century, with virtually no incidents of uprisings or popular violence. Substantial aljamas could be found in Portugal at Lisbon, Evora, Avís, and along the coast and throughout the south. In Castile, the most important community was that of Ávila, but most major towns in the Castile and León as well as many villages had an aljama, and there were numerous communities in Extremadura and along the Guadalquivír, as well as in Murcia. In Navarre, settlement was heaviest in and around Tudela, whereas in Aragón there were many communities large and small, not only in the main cities but all along the Ebro and its tributaries, the Aragon, Gallego, Jalón, and Jiloca, as well as around Teruel. In Catalonia, settlement was heaviest around Lleida and Tortosa, along the Cinca, and around Tarragona and in the Conca de Barbéra, with scatterings in Barcelona and further north. In the Kingdom of Valencia, settlement was heaviest south of the capital, but there were considerable numbers also to the north, although most Muslims lived inland (Figure 3.1).
Law and administration This was a period of legal and administrative innovations. The kings promulgated new, comprehensive legal codes based on Roman principles, including Jaume I’s Fueros de Aragón, and Furs de Valencia, Alfonso X’s Siete Partidas, the Fuero de Navarre, and the Ordenações Afonsinas, each of which reiterated mudéjares’ legitimate but subordinate status and the king’s direct fscal and juridical jurisdiction over them (as was the case with Jews). In the Crown of Aragon, they were referred to as “a royal treasure”. These law-codes were aspirational documents and not necessarily applied widely. Municipal law codes became increasingly elaborate at this time, and more inclusive in terms of mudéjares, but tended to reinforce their subordinate status. Muslims 42
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Figure 3.1 Muslim settlement in the Iberian Peninsula, ca. 1320.
generally continued to enjoy freedom of movement and of the sale of property (although selling to Christians required payment of penalty). Bath houses were increasingly segregated. Following the canons of Lateran IV (1215), in some areas Muslims were required to wear distinctive clothing, badges, or haircuts. Exemptions could often be purchased. Likewise, prohibitions on mosque building and on the call to prayer, formalized at the Council of Vienne (1311–12), went largely ignored. Laws against miscegenation, and sexual contact, even with Christian prostitutes, were promulgated, but enforced unevenly—sometimes, not at all. Muslims’ special royal status gave them protections from seigniorial abuses, including judicial dismemberment and execution, but Muslims convicted of serious crimes were subject to judicial enslavement. Aljama administration was formalized; typically, in addition to the magistrate/royal liaison, each had a notary scribe (scriptor) and a religious offcial (e.g., alfaqui, sabasala), positions which tended to become hereditary and were frequently dominated by a single individual or family. A loose patrician elite developed, which was frequently corrupt and abusive. Many aljamas also had elected offcials (e.g., adelantados, alamini) who represented the community and collected taxes. Taxes were generally assessed on the community as a whole. This could be a source of solidarity or confict, both within the Muslim communities and with local Christians and Jews. Muslim offcials and tenants of Military Orders often claimed immunity from taxation, provoking multi-generational legal battles as well as violence. Christian lords, including Military Orders, supported their mudéjar tenants and vassals in these disputes. Factionalism within mudéjar communities often ran parallel to that among local Christians and cross-communal alliances were not uncommon. Such was the case with resistance to royal taxation and to (normally, Jewish) lenders. Incidences of communal violence between Muslims and Christians or Muslims and Jews were extremely rare. In Castile, and to a lesser extent in Navarre and Aragon, royal authorities endeavored to centralize mudéjar judicial administration under an alcaydus Sarracenorum, or Alcalde Mayor de Moros, but communities remained for the most part independent. 43
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Society and economy Social and economic integration with Christians continued in this period. In most areas (with the exception of Valencia) spoken Arabic diminished, although it continued to be used in certain religious contexts and among the educated elite, as mudéjares spoke increasingly in local Romance vernaculars. Members of the administrative and economic elite also spoke or read some Latin. Mudéjares, particularly men, began to dress in the same fashions as Christian subjects. Fraternization in the street, taverns, brothels, and gambling houses encouraged solidarity but was also a source of volatility. Although few Muslims converted to Christianity, some did, further blurring communal lines with blended families. Either by royal order (typically as a means of fscal control and surveillance) or out of choice, Muslims began to live increasingly in their own neighborhoods, known as morerías; but maintaining segregation was challenging, and these frequently became mixed neighborhoods. Christians and Muslims engaged in all sorts of joint ventures, and economic partnerships, and were integrated in common chains of supply and production, which helped to insulate mudéjares from popular violence or economic discrimination. Generally, the mudéjar economy was diverse and robust. However, in areas where they were seen as competitors for land or resources, as in Valencia, Muslims were subject to aggressive discrimination. Mudéjares continued to dominate professions relating to building and engineering, and were particularly active in such crafts as carpentry, ceramics, shoemaking, tailoring, weapons-manufacture, veterinary care and husbandry, and decorative arts. Despite increasing regulation and prohibitions, some continued to work as physicians and midwives, often catering to the Christian elite. Learned mudéjares participated in the translation of Arabic works into Latin at Toledo and other centers; for a short time, a madrasa was established in Christian Murcia under the aegis of Alfonso X. Muslims served in both local militias and royal armies.Valencian mudéjares were renowned as crossbowmen, while Navarrese Muslims served as combat engineers, and were even lent out to France. North African and Granadan mercenaries and soldiers-of-fortune also fought in Christian armies around the peninsula. Freedom of movement was essential to maintaining the vitality of mudéjar society. Whereas few Muslims emigrated from Christian lands, except in times of crisis, Muslims continued to immigrate either from other Christian kingdoms in the peninsula or from dar al-Islam. A regular infux of slaves, who came as prisoners of war and captives taken at sea or on raids on the Maghrib and Granada, helped to revitalize mudéjar society and culture and maintain connections with the larger Muslim world. Large infuxes of slaves resulted both from the conquest of Mallorca and particularly of Menorca, the entire population of which was enslaved in 1287. Those who could ransom themselves were given leave to settle in any lands of the Crown of Aragon. Mudéjares continued to travel also, whether as traders to North Africa or the Islamic East, or on hajj.Through this period, with the exception of fgures like Ramon Llull or occasional Franciscan or Dominican preachers, the Church tended to ignore mudéjares, except in so far as they served as tenants on Church lands, in which case bishops and abbots either defended or exploited them as they would any other vassals, as opportunity presented.
A time of crisis (1350–1525) By the mid-fourteenth century the Iberian Peninsula and the wider West was in the grip of a major crisis characterized by a cooling climate, crop failures and famine, and the devastation of the Black Death. The plague not only altered the social and economic fabric as a consequence of massive mortality, but by provoking wars, social unrest, and reactionary repression. 44
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Confict between Castile and Aragon fared up in 1356, culminating in a dynastic coup that provoked a peninsula-wide struggle that lasted into the 1380s. The effect on mudéjar society was limited but signifcant. In some areas Muslims suffered disproportionately in war, and they were victims of the general economic contraction, but the defning development in this era was a shift in the relationship between the monarchs and their Muslim subjects.Whereas previously kings had protected mudéjar liberties, the post-plague labor shortage induced them to limit mudéjar rights of movement, and drew Muslims into closer collaboration with their seigneurs, both lay and ecclesiastic. Anti-Muslim rhetoric also intensifed, particularly in the sermonizing of infuential clerics such as the political theorist Francesc Eiximenis, and the charismatic preacher (Saint) Vicent Ferrer. The growing power of the Ottomans, and the increase in piratical attacks from North Africa on the Mediterranean coasts, served to intensive popular suspicion of mudéjares. Soon after the fall of Granada in 1492, the rulers of Castile and Portugal would decide for political reasons to convert or expel their Muslim populations. The more substantial and better-integrated communities of Navarre and Aragon would persist until the early sixteenth century.
Navarre and the Crown of Aragon The experiences of Muslims in the eastern regions of the Iberian Peninsula varied over the course of the late fourteenth and ffteenth centuries. Navarre was largely insulated from the effects of war and suffered relatively lightly as a consequence of the plague, and the situation of mudéjares here remained stable. Aragonese mudéjares suffered during the “War of the Two Peters” from 1356 to 1369—between Pedro the Cruel (1350–86) of Castile and Pere the Ceremonious (1336–87) of Aragon—particularly due to the Castilian occupation of towns along the Jalón River, but it was Valencian Muslims who felt the greatest effects as Castilian forces penetrated the kingdom as far north as Sagunto (Morviedro).The war provided cover for increasing Christian aggression and displacement of mudéjares, driven in part by Castile’s use of Muslim troops from Nasrid Granada. From 1360 to 1362 a certain “Çilim” led a mudéjar revolt in the hills north of Xàtiva. In 1386 the aljama of Xàtiva was attacked by Christians and in 1390 and 1391 the morería of Valencia was assaulted.The most serious attack came in 1455, when the morería of the capital was attacked once more by mobs determined to convert the Muslims by force. However, free and bonded Muslims also maintained strong ties with Christian families in Valencia, and as a consequence were sometimes swept up in the factional violence that characterized the kingdom in this era.
Castile-León and Portugal By contrast, in Portugal and most of the Crown of Castile the situation of Muslims remained stable. Nasrid Granada and Castile remained deeply embroiled politically. During the reign of Pedro the Cruel in particular, Nasrid troops could be found fghting on behalf of Castile through much of the peninsula. In the early ffteenth century, the Castilian kings established the Guardia morisca—a cavalry corps made of both foreign Muslims and mudéjares. It was in this period that Castile began the long and intermittent process of conquering the Nasrid sultanate—a process that was delayed by conficts among the Castilian nobility and with Portugal and Aragon, and which established a broad and porous frontier, which Muslims and Christians moved across as captives, warriors, mercenaries, herders, and merchants. In 1369 Enrique Trastámara overthrew and killed his half-brother, Pedro the Cruel, establishing a new dynasty. In 1410 Fernando, coregent of Juan II (1406–54) and future king of Aragon, conquered Antequera, a major victory, 45
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and over the course of the following 70 years other major towns of the Nasrid sultanate gradually fell. It was after the marriage of Fernando II of Aragon (1497–1516) and Isabel of Castile (1474– 1504) in 1469, that the offensive began in earnest. Capitalizing on divisions within the Nasrid dynasty and seizing the tactical advantage provided by new advances in gunpowder artillery, the “Catholic Kings” conquered the major towns of the sultanate, absorbing large new populations of Muslim subjects, before arriving at Granada. Faced with inevitable conquest, both the urban elite and the sultan, ‘Abd Allah (“Boabdil”; 1482–83; 1487–92) negotiated their surrender. On 1 January 1492, Fernando and Isabel entered Granada in triumph, having given assurances to the Muslim population that their rights would be respected. Many members of the Muslim elite converted to Christianity and were integrated into the Castilian elite, but large numbers retained their faith.
Conversions and expulsions However, tensions in the capital and the new kingdom soon rose, as aggressive churchmen, notably Archbishop Cardinal Cisneros, and Christian settlers trampled on Muslims’ rights. In 1499 the mudéjares of the capital and the surrounding region rose up in a revolt that was soon crushed by Castilian forces. In the aftermath, many converted to Christianity to take advantage of an amnesty that had been offered, and only three years later, in 1502, Isabel ordered all of the Muslims of the lands of the Crown of Castile, including Granada, to convert to Christianity. By this time there were virtually no Muslims left in Portugal. No edict of expulsion survives from this kingdom, but it seems that Manuel I (1495–1521) expelled them, possibly as a precondition to his marriage to the Castilian princess, Isabel of Aragon. The Castilian edict of conversion did not affect Muslims in Navarre or the Crown of Aragon, and mudéjar populations here increased, as some Castilian Muslims immigrated. However, in 1512, when Fernando conquered Navarre, this kingdom came under the jurisdiction of Castile and the edict was immediately put into effect. Many Muslims converted, while some moved south into the Crown of Aragon. In Valencia, tensions continued to grow, particularly after Fernando’s death and the ascent of the Hapsburg dynasty, and because of the increasing threat posed by the Ottomans in the western Mediterranean. In 1519 the artisans of the capital and the surrounding area rose up in the “Revolt of the Brotherhoods”, and attacked and forcibly baptized mudéjares, who were seen to be allied with the landed aristocracy.The emperor Charles V (Carlos I in Spain; 1516–56) sent troops to suppress the revolt, and in the aftermath ordered all of the Muslims of the Crown of Aragon to convert to Christianity on 5 January 1526.
Law and administration The crisis of the mid-fourteenth century had a profound impact on Muslim, Christian, and Jewish society in the Christian Spains, including popular revolts (and the attendant repression), plague, warfare, and a reordering of the economy. In much of the peninsula, Muslims, whose labor was in increasing demand, faced tighter restrictions on their ability to move, to change lordship or residence, and alienate property, but were mostly immune from the type of popular violence that was so devastating to the Jewish communities of Spain. Generally, mudéjar peasants were drawn into closer collaboration with their lords, whether secular or religious. Laws limiting public worship and the building of mosques and mandating the wearing of special clothes or hairstyles were enforced more frequently, but still unevenly, and subject to the will of local authorities. In 1408 and 1412, the regent of Castile, Catherine of Lancaster, passed a 46
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series of stringent laws intended to segregate mudéjares from Christian society, and Enrique IV (1454–74) promulgated a similar decree in 1465, but neither were enforced to any signifcant degree. As a consequence of the increasing role played by Christian offcials in mudéjar administration, and perhaps due to the decline of spoken Arabic, two compendiums of mudéjar law were composed at this time: the brief Llibre de la Suna e Xara was written in Valencia in the fourteenth century, whereas the lengthier Castilian Brevario Sunni dates from 1465. Both the Church and secular authorities continued to regard Muslims as legitimate members of Christian society, but each attempted to erode their rights and privileges.When the decision came to expel or forcibly convert Muslims at the turn of the sixteenth century, this was justifed on political, rather than religious grounds.
Society and economy Through this period mudéjar society remained diverse, consisting of farmers, craftsmen, artisans, and professionals. In each kingdom a few elite families managed to link their fortunes to the royal court or leading noblemen. Some medical doctors, engineers, and veterinarians/horsegrooms enjoyed particular infuence and fortune both within and beyond their own kingdoms. Muslim craftsmen, engineers, and architects remained important, and worked in mudéjar, Nasrid, and Latinate styles. Links were maintained with the larger Islamic world by merchants, royal agents, and hajj pilgrims. Islamic legal authorities outside of the peninsula remained generally ill-disposed to the idea of Muslims living under Christian rule, and promulgated fatwas to that effect. But this was not uniform, and mudéjar delegations sometimes sought advice and found sympathy from religious authorities in Granada and North Africa. The rise of the Ottomans provided mudéjares with some respite. In times of distress they appealed to them for either diplomatic aid or military relief; however, this contributed to a growing perception among Christians that Muslims were disloyal ffth-columnists. Aside from Granada and Valencia, and apart from the educated elite, Arabic continued to decline as a written and spoken language, displaced by Romance vernaculars as a consequence of economic integration and social contact with Christians. By the ffteenth century Muslims were producing works in aljamiado—Romance written in Arabic characters.Women, who typically moved less in public than their male coreligionists, acculturated at a slower rate, and played a key role in maintaining traditional modes of dress, religious and folk traditions, and Arabic language. Music and dance traditions remained robust among mudéjares, who found themselves in high demand at both secular and religious Christian festivals. Acculturation was particularly intense along the porous frontier with Granada, while the Christian elite in the ffteenth century—particularly those of Castile—embraced a cultural Maurophilia that extended from building and decorative styles, to clothing, music, dance, and chivalry. Overall, it is important to stress that the mudéjar experience was highly localized: relations and integration with Christian society, degrees of acculturation, economic opportunities, and cultural and religious life varied not only from kingdom to kingdom, and region to region, but also among different towns and lordships. The situation of Muslims in a specifc locale could also vary greatly over time, with local agendas converging at times to present them with greater opportunity and others to put them in situations of great disadvantage. Class was also a factor; upper-class mudéjares tended to experience fewer restrictions, and could use their infuence or cash to buy themselves out of diffcult situations. In any event, religious identity was only one mode of identity; Muslims found themselves in all sorts of relationships of solidarity with Christians and Jews, often in opposition to other Muslims.The scourge of corrupt offcials, and 47
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of factionalism and competition, sometimes violent, was no less common among mudéjar communities than it was among Christian or Jews in this era.
The Moriscos (1502–1614) The edicts of forced conversion promulgated between 1502 and 1526 created an immense population that was offcially Christian but for the most part remained Muslim by conviction. The Church, the monarchy, and society as a whole was unwilling to integrate these Moriscos (“Muslim-ish Christians”) into Christian society.They remained the subject of discriminatory tax laws, were discouraged from marrying into Christian families, and were neglected by the Church, which did not effectively missionize them. The previous century’s Maurophilia was replaced by a rejection of Arabo-Islamic culture, and popular hostility grew. In the countryside, many Moriscos continued to practice Islam—often openly and sometimes with the collusion of their lords. Urban environments called for greater discretion—here Muslims practiced taqiyya (“dissimulation”), living outwardly as Christians, while secretly maintaining the faith. This brought them into the sights of the Inquisition, which hunted down crypto-Muslims.The institution was often abused by “Old Christians” seeking to settle personal scores or gain new advantage over their formerly Muslim neighbors. In this period the notion of racial identity and principle of “blood purity” were coalescing, foreclosing any real possibility for integration. Facing increasing offcial and popular discrimination, some Moriscos turned to armed revolt or courted foreign allies, thus seeming to confrm their fundamental disloyalty to the crown.Together, these various factors culminated in the decision by Felipe III (1598–1621) to deport the entire Morisco population from Spain, a policy which was carried out with impressive effectiveness between 1609 and 1614.
Morisco society and culture Morisco society was strongly marked by class. At the upper level, former Nasrid nobility were able to integrate with the Christian elite, as were many local authorities in the Kingdom of Granada. Some educated Moriscos found work as courtiers and royal functionaries—notably as translators of Arabic. These elite groups maintained a strong commitment to Christianity and advocated for Morisco integration.The urban artisans and merchants were necessarily more circumspect and undoubtedly clung more tenaciously to their faith. Islam persisted most strongly among rural populations—particularly in Aragon and Valencia—who largely escaped surveillance and were aided by the indifference of the Church and the collusion of their lords. A robust clandestine Islamic religious culture survived, supported by informal religious authorities (some of whom were women) and itinerant holy men, who served as guardians of tradition and orthodoxy even as they incorporated and adopted religious trends popular in Christian Europe (such as Marianism and Modern Devotion) into their Islam. Clandestine scriptoria produced works in aljamiado, both religious and secular, for Morisco readers. In 1526 a conclave of clergy proposed to effectively outlaw Morisco culture, including the use of Arabic, traditional clothes, folk customs, and names, and to prohibit Moriscos from certain professions. A large bribe to the crown bought a 40-year respite, but in 1567 these measures passed into law. Decrees were also promulgated aimed at disarming Moriscos.The Morisco elite reacted by reiterating their loyalty to Christ and the crown, lobbying for their acceptance as “good Spaniards”, and going so far as to forge a series of relics and artifacts (“the Lead Books of Sacromonte”), intended to show that Arabic had been a Christian language in Spain since the time of the Apostles. 48
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Resistance and revolts In reaction to the edict of conversion of 1526, Muslims in the Espadan mountains north of Valencia rose up in revolt, but were crushed by Hapsburg forces. In the decades that followed, faced with continuing persecution and marginalization, many Moriscos resisted, either passively or actively. Passive resistance took the form of clandestine or open worship, the maintenance of religious rites and folk traditions (including local pilgrimages), and the production and circulation of books in Arabic, including Qur’ans. Active resistance took two forms: rebellion and sedition.The anti-Morisco laws of 1576 provoked two revolts. In 1568 Moriscos in the Espadan mountains rebelled again, and in 1568 a major insurrection broke out in the Alpujarras, south of Granada. It took until 1571 for Hapsburg forces to crush the rebellion in the south. In the aftermath the Granadan Moriscos were expelled to other parts of Spain, but the effect of this was merely to raise Morisco-consciousness. By the late 1500s some Moriscos were turning to foreign powers for aid, including the Ottomans, the Sa’adis of Morocco, England, and France— intrigues which only further served to fuel Christian fears.
The expulsions and aftermath By the second half of the sixteenth century a clique of hardline clerics began lobbying the monarchy to rid Spain of its Morisco population, who they regarded as disloyal, incorrigible, and of impure blood. However, given that the Moriscos were formally Christian, there were no legal or religious precedents for such a policy. Moreover, Moriscos’ considerable role in regional economies and their ties to local religious and secular authorities, together with the threat of reprisal from foreign Muslim powers, rendered these plans impractical.Various options were proposed, including outright extermination, fatal exile to Labrador, and simple expulsion. By the early 1600s, from the point of view of the monarchy the balance of cost–beneft had tilted toward expulsion, and on the orders of Felipe III plans were secretly laid out to expel the Moriscos (with exceptions made for small children) from Spanish territory. Beginning in 1609 the plan was put in effect on a region-by-region basis with little warning given to the Moriscos, who were forced to sell off their property in haste, and to pay signifcant duties on moneys and property taken out of Hapsburg territory. By 1614 the process was complete, with some 350,000 Moriscos having been deported, with most heading to the Maghrib and Ifriqiya, and some to Ottoman lands. Here, they were regarded for the most part as foreign apostates, and far from being welcomed as returning coreligionists, most were greeted with suspicion, marginalization, and even violence. In Tunis, an established Andalusi population in exile provided some support. Some resettled as communities. The Moriscos of Hornachos served the Sa’adi dynasty as soldiers, before establishing themselves in Salé from where they waged piracy as jihad on Spanish shipping. Generally, within a few generations Moriscos in the Islamic world had been absorbed into existing populations. Some upper-class Moriscos and a few rural communities escaped expulsion, and recent research indicates there may have been far more returnees than previously believed. However, whether Moriscos remained in Spain after 1614 or not, and however some may have secretly clung to their identity and traditions, the expulsion effectively marked the end of Islam in the Iberian Peninsula until the modern period.
Conveniencia and mudéjarismo Altogether, the mudéjar and Morisco periods spanned nearly six centuries, and impacted almost the entire Iberian Peninsula. Their historical infuence was profound and broad: leaving an 49
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imprint on cuisine, music, folk traditions, poetry and literature, Castilian language (with over 1,000 Arabisms), architecture, and decorative arts.Their survival as a minority community varied markedly from that of the other minority in Christian Spain, the Jews. This is due in part to the distinct place Jews occupy in the Christian theological tradition, and to the particular and rather narrow roles that Jews played in medieval Spanish societies and economies. Muslims were far more numerous than Jews in the peninsula, their mere existence as a community was not seen as an affront to Christianity, and Muslim communities here were highly diverse and better integrated politically and economically than Jewish communities. Consequently, mudéjares and Moriscos were able to fnd patrons and allies among a broad cross-section of Christian society. They were less vulnerable as a community to broad changes in the economic landscape than Jews, and less likely to be targeted by reactionary clerics. Thus, although Muslims remained a legally distinct, vulnerable, and subordinate social group in Christian Spain, the dynamic of conveniencia (“convenience”), or perceived beneft which linked them symbiotically to their neighbors and their lords, served to protect and sustain them as a community. As much as an ideological or cultural shift that took place in the sixteenth century, it was the progressive narrowing of Christian–Muslim interactions that sparked the declining fortunes of the mudéjares. In a dynamic reminiscent of race relations and the backlash against equal rights in the present-day United States, the edicts of conversion, in removing the religious rationale for their subordinate status, left Moriscos vulnerable to the violent reaction of Old Christians.This, together with the shift toward conceiving of identity in terms of race rather than religion, and the fraught political situation of late sixteenth-century Spain, effectively sealed their fate.
Bibliography Mudéjares produced very little literature that has survived to this day.There is considerable documentation referring to them in church, royal, and municipal archives, particularly in the Crown of Aragon from the twelfth century forward, in Navarre from the fourteenth, and in Castile and Portugal from the ffteenth. Very little Arabic material from the mudéjar period survives, and most of the extant literature in aljamiado was produced by Moriscos. In addition, Morisco voices can be heard as testimony in Inquisition records, and in Castilian literature and documents they left behind. In addition to the general works listed below, there are many book- and article-length studies of local aljamas. See Colominas Aparicio, below, for a comprehensive and recent bibliography. One of the best resources for the latest scholarship on mudéjares are the proceedings of the biennial Mudéjar studies conferences held in Teruel, and published as Actas del Simposio Internacional de Mudejarismo (Teruel: Instituto de Estudios Turolenses: 1981–2017), with 13 volumes to date.There is no dedicated journal to Morisco studies, but a good starting point for recent work is al-Qantara, published by the CSIC in Spain. Barceló Torres, Carmen, ed. Un tratado catalán medieval de derecho islámico: El Llibre de la çuna e xara dels Moros. Córdoba: Universidad de Córdoba, 1989. Barros, Maria Filomena Lopes de. Tempos e espaços de Mouros.A minoria muçulmana no reino português (séculos XII a XV). Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2008. Bernabé Pons, Luis Fernando. Los Moriscos: conficto, expulsión y diáspora. Madrid: Catarata, 2009. Boswell, John. The Royal Treasure. Muslim Communities Under the Crown of Aragon in the Fourteenth Century. New Haven:Yale University Press, 1977. Burns, Robert I. Islam Under the Crusaders: Colonial Survival in the Thirteenth Century Kingdom of Valencia. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973. Catlos, Brian A. The Victors and the Vanquished: Christians and Muslims of Catalonia and Aragon, 1050–1300. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Catlos, Brian A. Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, ca. 1050–1614. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Colominas Aparicio, Mónica.“Estudios Mudéjares En El Siglo Veintiuno: Una Bibliografía Seleccionada”. ‘Ilu. Revista de Ciencias de las Religiones 23 (2018): 317–341.
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Mudéjares and Moriscos Echevarría Arsuaga, Ana, ed. Biografías mudéjares o la experiencia de ser minoría: biografías islámicas en la España cristiana. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científcas, 2008. Ferrer i Mallol, Maria Teresa. Els sarraïns de la corona catalano-aragonesa en el segle XIV. Barcelona: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científcas, 1985. Galán Sánchez, Ángel. Los mudéjares del reino de Granada. Granada: Universidad de Granada/ Diputación Provincial de Granada, 1991. García Arenal, Mercedes. Los Moriscos. Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1996 García Arenal, Mercedes, and Béatrice Leroy. Moros y Judíos en Navarra en la Baja Edad Media. Madrid: Hiperion, 1984. García Arenal, Mercedes, and Gerard Albert Wiegers. The Expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain:A Mediterranean Diaspora. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Gayangos, Pascual de, ed. Las leyes de los Moros.Tratados de legislación musulmana. Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1853. Glick, Thomas F. From Muslim Fortress to Christian Castle. Social and Cultural Change in Medieval Spain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Guichard, Pierre. Les musulmans de Valence et la reconquête (XIe-XIIIe siécles). 2 vols. Damascus: Institut Français de Damas, 1990. Hinojosa Montalvo, José. Los mudéjares: la voz del Islam en la España cristiana. Teruel: Centro de Estudios Mudéjares/ Instituto de Estudios Turolenses, 2002. Ingram, Kevin, and Juan Ignacio Pulido Serrano, eds. The Conversos and Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain and Beyond. 3 Vols. Leiden: Brill, 2009–15. Lourie, Elena.“Free Moslems in the Balearics Under Christian Rule in the Thirteenth Century”. Speculum 45 (1970): 624–649. Lourie, Elena. “Anatomy of Ambivalence. Muslims Under the Crown of Aragón in the Late Thirteenth Century”. In Crusader Colonization: Muslims, Christians and Jews in Medieval Aragon,VII, 1–77. Aldershot: Variorum, 1990. Meyerson, Mark D. The Muslims of Valencia in the Age of Fernando and Isabel: Between Coexistence and Crusade. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Romero Sáiz, Miguel. Mudéjares y moriscos en Castilla-La Mancha: aproximación a su estudio. Piedrabuena: Llanura, 2007. Torró Abad, Josep. El naixement d’una colònia. Dominació i resisténcia a la frontera valenciana (1238–1276). València: Universitat de València, 1999. Vincent, Bernard. El Río Morisco.Valencia: Universitat de València, 2006. Wiegers, Gerard Albert. Islamic Literature in Spanish and Aljamiado:Yça of Segovia (f. 1450), his Antecendents and Successors. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994.
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4 OTHERNESS, IDENTITIES, AND CULTURES IN CONTACT Jean Dangler
Scholarly discussions of otherness, identities, and cultures in contact in non-modern Iberia have come a long way from the polarizing debate between Américo Castro and Claudio SánchezAlbornoz in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, which centered on divergent understandings of medieval Iberia’s composition of Muslims, Christians, and Jews, and the role those groups played in the forging of modern Spanish identity. Castro focused on integrating Andalusi history and cultural contributions into larger narratives about Spain and Spanish identity, while Sánchez-Albornoz maintained that modern Spanish identity was constructed through the continuity of HispanoRomans, Hispano-Visigoths, and Hispanicate kingdoms in antagonistic response to Andalusi and Muslim cultures (Castro 1983 [1948], 1966 [1954]; Sánchez-Albornoz 1956).1 Castro’s and Sánchez-Albornoz’s arguments continue to be assessed critically today, with Castro’s concept of convivencia (coexistence or cohabitation) receiving special attention with regard to its ramifcations for the interpretation of identity, historiography, and literary and cultural production (Gómez Martínez 1972; Glick 2005, xix–xx, 341–48; Ray 2005, 2; Nirenberg 2009, 243–47; Soifer 2009; Scarborough 2014; García Sanjuán 2017). Approaches to our three themes often begin with reassessments of convivencia and the critique of the simplistic notion of coexistence between Iberia’s “three cultures” of Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Scholars revile fawed assumptions about the homogeneity of religious or cultural groups, and instead underscore vast diversity among Iberian peoples, along with complicated rather than straightforward modes of identifcation in non-modern periods (Catlos 2001; Ray 2005, 3; Gerli 2007;Wacks 2007, 5;Altschul 2009, 7–9; Soifer 2009; Szpiech 2013; Scarborough 2014).2 Reassessments of convivencia, such as David Nirenberg’s arguments about the simultaneous antagonism toward and acceptance of Jews in late medieval Castile (Nirenberg 1996), have yielded insights into our cultural themes, including the diffculties involved in categorizing Jews, Muslims, and other groups as cultural or religious “others”. In fact, scholars have called into question the universal application of “otherness” to non-modern Iberia, insofar as the term is understood in accord with the modern binary defnition of marginalized people subordinated to dominant individuals or groups. Mark D. Meyerson denounced the application of the term to Jews in non-modern Iberia, who were not always inferior to more powerful groups, and concluded that in many cases “the ‘other’ was not ‘other’ at all” (Meyerson 1999, xii–xiii). Scholars today have moved well beyond dualistic, simple interpretations of identities and cultures, and have engaged instead with their intricacy and thorniness. In a recent brief refection on Spanish 52
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historiography and its relation to Andalusi history, Maribel Fierro offered the following conclusion: Para el caso de al-Andalus, disponemos de hilos de distinto tipo y color que nos permiten tejer visiones complejas de lo que fueron las experiencias de sus habitantes sin caer en la apología ni en la descalifcación. (Fierro, 2017, 181)3 Researchers have extended this complex interpretation of peoples’ experiences in al-Andalus to the entire non-modern Peninsula, leading them to continue to devise and refne frameworks and methods for the study of cultural themes in literature and history. In the decades following the Castro/Sánchez-Albornoz debate, three main conceptual and theoretical shifts in non-modern Iberian studies have generated revised treatments of otherness, identities, and cultures in contact, beginning most fundamentally with what John Dagenais aptly termed the disruption of “the old European order of monolingual and monocultural nation-states” (Dagenais 2005, 39–40).The model of the nation-state produced the separation of non-modern literatures by national language, a practice that largely dominated in the twentieth century to the 1990s, while the breakdown of the model led to reassessments of that division in the feld of “medieval Spanish literature” (Dagenais 2005). There is no doubt that the critique of the nation-state further played a role in reevaluations of our cultural themes, especially insofar as it coincided with the emergence of postcolonial studies and its focus on questions of power and oppression.The rise of postcolonial studies is a subfeld of the larger second shift that has taken place in the last several decades with the explosion of critical and cultural theory by renowned intellectuals such as Homi Bhabha, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak. Critical approaches to language, gender, race, and other topics have been signifcant factors in revised understandings of our themes. Familiarity with theoretical notions, such as the power relations inherent in the modern idea of “otherness” or the idea of gender as a fuid and variable performance, rather than as biologically determined, is now commonplace. And lastly, the third recent change was the loosening in the 1990s of rigidly imagined disciplinary limits between literature, history, and other felds, leading historians and literary critics to concurrently rebuke the reliance on modern assumptions about religious, linguistic, and political differences in facile divisions between non-modern Iberian individuals, kingdoms, and cultural groups. Interdisciplinarity has become de rigueur, prompting many scholars to explore topics from a variety of points of view and with sources from different felds. Copious explorations of non-modern Iberian history through the lens of political interaction and multicultural alliance have been produced in the last several decades by historians including Michael Brett, Olivia Remie Constable, Maribel Fierro, Mercedes García Arenal, Alejandro García Sanjuán,Thomas F. Glick, Emilio González Ferrín, L.P. Harvey, Peter Linehan, Eduardo Manzano Moreno, Manuela Marín, Cynthia Robinson, Janina M. Safran, Philippe Sénac, and María Jesús Viguera Molins. In addition, literary scholars such as Samuel G.Armistead, Ross Brann, Luce López Baralt, Michelle M. Hamilton, Consuelo López Morillas, Francisco Márquez Villanueva, María Rosa Menocal, James T. Monroe, Leyla Rouhi, Raymond P. Scheindlin,Viguera Molins, and David Wacks have examined Iberian literatures as culturally integrated, rather than as separated along impermeable linguistic, cultural, or modern national divisions. Many scholars have explored identity, otherness, and cultures in contact in studies about specifc topics, such as the Mozarabs (Aillet 2008, 2010; Hitchcock 2008; Marín 2014; BealeRivaya 2010; Jiménez Pedrajas 2013), the moriscos (Amelang 2011; Bernabé Pons 2012; García Arenal 2014, 2016; García Arenal and Wiegers 2013, 2018), Jews and Jewish culture (Alfonso 53
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2002; Caballero Navas and Alfonso 2010; Alfonso and Decter 2014), kinship and identifcation (for instance, Glick 2005; Zorgati 2012; Barbero and Vigil 2015 [1978]), women in kinship networks (Marín 2014), and race, gender, and the other, which include all manner of historical and literary studies (see discussions on race below, along with Hamilton 2007; Salvatierra Ossorio 2013; Delbrugge 2015, among others). Furthermore, academic journals including eHumanista, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, and Medieval Encounters address these topics from time to time. Together with this work, a number of approaches provide future directions for inquiry into our interrelated themes. The remainder of this article will examine fve such theories and methodologies—parallels between cultures in contact; postcolonial studies; translation; network and system principles; ecocriticism, the environment, and the Anthropocene—and propose further avenues of exploration.
Parallels between cultures in contact Historians and literary scholars have demonstrated parallels between cultures in contact, often in an effort to move beyond arguments about mere “infuence” or subsuming domination of one culture over another. Thomas F. Glick’s idea of the “Andalusi cultural polarity”, proposed in 1979, continues to yield insights into this approach, especially if the polarity is regarded as a yielding cultural paradigm that changed over time. Glick argued that Andalusi cultural norms and models dominated in Hispanicate kingdoms until the eleventh century, when monks at Cluny and Cîteaux embarked on a series of important ventures in Castile and León, including the construction of monasteries and churches, the establishment of Gregorian reforms, the shift from the Mozarabic to the Roman liturgy, and the increased number of bishops and bishoprics by approximately the year 1150, in order to increase political, economic, and territorial power. Hispanicate kingdoms were in effect recast to better ft European norms and models (Glick 2005, 363; Manzano Moreno 2010, 340–44). Fierro (2009) and Ana M. Montero (2006) suggest a reformulation of Glick’s idea in their proposal of a direct link between the Almohads’ political and cultural models and Alfonso X’s (ruled 1252–1284) goals (Dangler 2017, 110–11).4 The parallel relationship between the Almohad context and Alfonso X’s cultural and political projects makes an explicit contribution to the oft-cited topic of “Arab-Islamic infuence” during Alfonso X’s reign, hence resolving the troubling frequent absence in that discussion of a specifc Islamicate milieu (Fierro 2009, 193). However, Fierro’s and Montero’s analyses make a further impact on a broader scale: the fact that Andalusi cultural models continued to hold sway in the endeavors of Alfonso X, at the same time that Andalusi political power was seriously curtailed, implicitly calls into question an interpretation of the idea of the Andalusi cultural polarity both as utterly separate from Hispanicate models or as a cultural mode that effectively disappeared. In fact, Ross Brann has described the historical process that led to the thirteenth-century heterogeneity as “a singularly Iberian pluralism whose patterns of extensive social interaction and cultural interpenetration proved to have lasting power when they were transferred from alAndalus to Castile and nurtured and maintained in thirteenth-century Toledo” (2009, 309). Brann identifes the nurturing and maintenance of social interaction and cultural interpenetration in the thirteenth century, and Fierro and Montero specify the nature of that contact at the court of Alfonso X. Cynthia Robinson provides both a slightly different claim and an earlier example of parallels between cultures in contact in her study of eleventh-century Andalusi and Provençal courtly lyric production. Robinson maintains that the court cultures in Zaragoza and Provence were largely identical and exhibited mutual permeation through the early part of the twelfth century (Robinson 2002). It was not that one culture adapted or assumed the 54
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cultural practices of the other, but rather, that both cultures were essentially the same. Rosa María Rodríguez Porto argues similarly with regard to the fourteenth-century cultures of Castile and Granada. She contends that artistic exchanges between the two courts were so prevalent that they resulted in shared iconography and imagery in manuscripts and architectural spaces, such as the Alhambra’s Hall of Justice (Rodríguez Porto 2008). Instead of trying to prove that one dominant culture “infuenced” or shaped another, Robinson and Rodríguez Porto suggest mutual fuidity between cultures.5 David A.Wacks offers a related argument in his examination of medieval Peninsular frametales and maqa¯ma¯t (sing. maqa¯ma) as constitutive of an intercultural, multilingual narrative tradition produced in Andalusi realms in Hebrew and Arabic, and in later Castilian and Catalan literature of the fourteenth and ffteenth centuries. The maqa¯ma¯t are short episodic narratives in rhymed prose, in which a narrator recounts the usually cheating activities of a roguish hero. The maqa¯ma has often been linked to the Spanish picaresque tradition of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but Wacks explored the genre’s earlier links to the medieval Calila e Dimna, Juan Manuel’s Conde Lucanor, the Archpriest of Hita’s Libro de buen amor, and Jaume Roig’s Espill (Drory 2000a; Monroe 2002, 1–18; Wacks 2007). And fnally, the possible parallels between Islamicate travel routes and the Iberian Camino de Santiago serve as a further example of this critical mode, while at the same time pointing to future research possibilities in this vein (Dangler 2017). In a chapter published in 2014, I argued that Hispanicate religious and political rulers may have actively supported and introduced policies, procedures, and architectural and cultural projects along the Camino that were learned from Islamicate and Andalusi sovereigns. In the same way that Almohad erudition constituted the model of learned cultural sophistication for Alfonso X as discussed above, it is possible that the development of the Camino in the twelfth and thirteenth century was an “honorifc imitation” of Islamicate models intended to create the conditions that would grant Hispanicate authorities the same prestige as their Andalusi and Maghrebi neighbors, ultimately allowing them to surpass their Islamicate rivals.6
Postcolonial studies The second approach for further exploration of our themes is represented by the feld of postcolonial studies, which has produced some of the most relevant, incisive literary and cultural theory and criticism in recent decades, as evidenced by the vast contributions collected more than 20 years ago in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (1995).Though the feld is largely focused on postcolonial politics, literatures, and cultures of the modern era, scholars of non-modern Iberia, including John Dagenais and Margaret R. Greer (2000), and Nadia Altschul (2009, 2012), along with colleagues in English and French studies, such as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (2000), Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle Warren (2003),Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams (2005), Sharon Kinoshita (2006), Geraldine Heng (2011a, 2011b, 2015), and Lynn Tarte-Ramey (2014), have defended the application of its methods and theoretical tenets to non-modern literatures. Simon Gaunt’s comparative review of 2009 cites further material and offers germane refection on the topic, as does Julian Weiss’s critical review of 2012, which mainly focuses on medieval Iberia to highlight the ways in which postcolonial studies has challenged European hegemony. Postcolonial theory has produced commentary and analysis on a wide range of topics, including the creative arts such as literature, social categories of identity such as race, ethnicity, otherness, and gender, and larger themes of nationalism, language, and education. Critics argue that postcolonial studies can be readily applied to the medieval past if time is understood in nonlinear ways, and if medieval and modern events and phenomena are evaluated as similar and different 55
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depending on discrete contexts. Many scholars draw attention to the artifcial division of the medieval and the modern. For instance, Cohen decries periodization and linear conceptions of time and rejects charges of anachronism when applying postcolonial theory to the non-modern past, contending that such an objection depends on the construction of rigid alterity between the past and the present. Instead, he argues for the understanding of the relationship between present and past through the idea of “temporal interlacement”, greater fuidity in conceiving of nonlinear concepts of time, and an engagement with the past and present according to differences and sameness (Cohen 2000, 3–5). Cohen further advises that imagining a postcolonial Middle Ages is another way to decolonize what has been until recently the critical insistence on Europe as preeminent (7).The postcolonial Middle Ages decolonizes the delimited time (years 500–1500) and space (Europe) signifed traditionally with reference to the Middle Ages. For their part, Altschul and Kathleen Davis condemn the persistent separation of the Middle Ages from “modernity and colonial expansion” (2009, 4). Altschul has been a consistent advocate of postcolonial theory’s application to non-modern Iberian studies. In her monograph published in 2012, instead of directly applying theoretical principles to medieval texts, Altschul examined a case of colonization of the Middle Ages in the use of medieval materials by the nineteenth-century Latin American politician and intellectual Andrés Bello, a phenomenon dubbed as medievalism.Altschul argued that Bello employed these materials in order to consolidate and promote the era’s national project. Her book explored the ways in which the meeting of non-modern matters and postcolonial theories and themes could be extended to modern Latin American independence and nation-state formation, and to greater study of the complexities of geopolitical identity in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Altschul examined related topics in an article about the adoption of medievalism by the nineteenth-century Argentine writer and statesman, Domingo F. Sarmiento (2013b). Altschul’s recent book, just published in 2020 and unavailable for this writing, promises new analysis on the idea of coexisting temporalities as it focuses on medievalism in nineteenth-century South American literature. Altschul’s suggestive article from 2009 continues to serve as a germane proposal and provocation for the incorporation of postcolonial arguments and topics in debates in non-modern Iberian studies. She convincingly maintains that merely recognizing medieval Iberia’s multicultural conditions is not equivalent to grappling with the theories and discussions occurring in postcolonial studies (2009, 9). Instead, Altschul offers a number of ways to begin a deeper exploration of the link, including the production of a well-organized thematic volume, and the examination of the relationship between Castro’s concept of convivencia and more recent notions of hybridity, syncretism, and mestizaje. In comments about how to effectively treat cultures in contact, she further advocates for the mutual infuence of cultures, as understood by the term transculturation, rather than the one-way impact of a dominant colonial culture over a supposedly submissive colonized society, as denoted by acculturation.The application of transculturation would avoid the creation of cultural hierarchies and the ostensible suffocation of one culture by another, such as what might be interpreted as the acculturation of Iberian Muslims by colonizing Iberian Christians (10–11). In a further suggestion,Altschul pointedly challenges scholars to reconsider the current wisdom that “the (biological) concept of race as skin color did not exist in the Middle Ages” (2009, 10), citing medieval examples that seem to contradict the statement.7 Pivotal topics in postcolonial studies, race and racism have also been explored recently by non-modern scholars in two volumes, The Origins of Racism in the West (2009) and Envisioning Others: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America (2015). Essays in The Origins of Racism raise fundamental questions about the complexity involved in studying race and racism in the past, although contributors 56
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do not specifcally invoke postcolonial theory or center on race per se. For instance, David Goldenberg makes many pertinent arguments about race as skin color while also focusing on proto-racism against blacks in classical sources. Goldenberg maintains that proto-racism existed before both the modern construction of race in biology and other scientifc discourse and the inclusion of race in mechanisms of structural inequality (2009, 91). Also useful are the editors’ refections on terminology in the introduction, such as their expressed rejection of discussions of identity, understood as the ways that groups self-identify under the category of ethnic identifcation (Eliav-Feldon, Isaac, and Ziegler, 2009, 6). David Nirenberg does not focus on race as skin color in his chapter, although he examines the clear emergence of racism against Iberia’s Jews in the ffteenth century, drawing on vocabulary of the period—raza, casta, and linaje—in his analysis.8 Several contributors employ postcolonial race theory in Envisioning Others, which focuses on the visual arts and artists’ attempts in non-modern periods to use skin color to “classify and distinguish between discrete groups of human beings within a society”. However, the book’s editor, Pamela Patton, recognizes that race and raza were not used as classifcatory terms until the eighteenth century, nor were they connected to biology in medical and scientifc discourse until the 1800s (Patton 2015, 5–6).Two contributors invoke Homi Bhabha’s concept of mimicry, which denotes the efforts of a colonized subject to replicate the habits and manners of colonizers, despite the inevitable failure of exactitude in the production. For Bhabha, mimicry is an ambivalent fgure that becomes the site of confict and contestation, exposing the failure of the subject’s assimilation and the incomplete authority of colonial rule over the colonized subject (Bhabha 1994, 86). Contributors to Envisioning Others explore the term only in Latin American colonial contexts (Patton 2015, 217, 314), although Altschul encourages its exploration as well in medieval times, especially with regard to Mozarabs and Arabized Jews (Altschul 2009, 12–13).9 Nevertheless, research into this connection would seem to require more specifc delimitations of people and communities, instead of references to ambiguously defned Mozarabs more generally. Scholars have demonstrated that Mozarab does not denote a unifed collective identity, but is instead a fraught term that signifes a variety of likely referents (for instance, Aillet 2008; Hitchcock 2008; Marín 2014; Beale-Rivaya 2010).With this in mind, the extent to which mimicry would apply to all Mozarabs in non-modern Iberia, whoever they may be, is unclear and requires more refection.10 Scholars in French and English also serve as beacons of further exploration of postcolonial race theory in non-modern Iberia. For instance, Lynn Tarte-Ramey observes thematic and discursive continuities on race between the Middle Ages and the present, and contends that medieval society was in the process of creating a race-based social system (2014, 2, 127n3). Additionally, Geraldine Heng has studied the application of postcolonial race theory to medieval England, arguing that scholars can glean deeper knowledge about race in the present by investigating its invention in medieval Europe (2011a, 2011b, 2015). Heng maintains that invoking a capacious temporal lens underscores the urgency of race today, especially the non-modern emergence of what she dubs “religious race” and its repercussions in the othering of Muslims, Jews, and others (2015, 362). Calling England “the frst racial state in the history of the West” (2015, 361), Heng does not address race as skin color, but instead centers on pejorative descriptions of Jews as powerful participants in Europe’s economic system. Goldenberg (1999, 2003, 2009), Nirenberg (2009), Ramey (2014), and Heng (2015) have addressed the effcacy of the application of postcolonial race theory to the medieval past, while also scrutinizing the temporal gap between modern inventions of race and non-modern constructions of difference. Heng maintains that colonization and racial tactics of oppression emerged and reemerged in history over the longue durée (2015, 360), a temporal relationship of 57
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past and present that Cohen characterized as simultaneously different and continuous (2000, 5). Nirenberg concludes that more work needs to be done in order to develop analyses beyond partial critical agreement about premodern racial constructions of difference (2009, 260–64). Heng’s recent The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (2018) offers vast yet incisive analysis on race from a variety of critical models, including postcolonial and critical race theory. Heng follows contemporary theorists who defne race as a structural relation of capitalism, persuasively basing her study on race’s non-modern invention for the purpose of creating a sociopolitical hierarchy that would be used to treat people in disparate ways. Heng’s book promises to be an enduring guide for scholars and students in the future. In sum, these researchers demonstrate that postcolonial race theory provides fertile ground for future contributions to our themes in non-modern Iberian studies. Applications of other postcolonial topics to our feld merit further examination, however, such as the feasibility of the ideas of conquest, colonization, and colonialism in the past. According to Heng, the connection lies in the transhistorical nature of modernity itself, which she claims repeats over time “à la longue durée” (2015, 362). Heng links descriptions of the First Crusade to capture Jerusalem in 1099, successive invasions in Syria and Palestine a few years later, and modern colonial occupations, calling the former “twelfth-century colonial experiments in extraterritoriality”, which were ostensibly built upon in the modern era (2015, 358– 360). Despite the loss of control over territories in Syria and Palestine two centuries later, Heng argues that the fghting campaigns were a “hinge” to the eventual economic dominance of the Latin West toward the end of the Middle Ages (359). Heng’s analysis rightly suggests that modern understandings of colonialism and colonization as dominance and oppression only apply to the past in particular circumstances at specifc times. Heng’s contention about a direct correlation between early Crusades and colonial experiments by European emperors and governors from the late ffteenth century onward compels greater scrutiny, despite the fact that medieval and early modern colonial parallels can be made in the alliances of power between religious institutions and secular governing forces. If the papal Crusades represented a more marauding, combative form of occupation than the process suggested by acculturation, and if Heng’s historical analysis is accurate, the Crusades should not be understood as typical of sociopolitical change more generally in the medieval period. Concomitantly, a focus on the Crusades as a cipher of modern colonialism should not obscure more prevailing models of occupation at the time. Historians of the Middle Ages have demonstrated that other models of sociopolitical change were more prevalent than bellicose conquest. For instance, acculturation was a common model for characterizing sociopolitical change in the medieval Mediterranean with related parallels in Byzantine and Islamicate realms outside al-Andalus.11 This model of acculturation or absorption suggests the possibility that new rulers in recently captured lands at times effected changes in manner rather than in kind, although Robert I. Burns interprets the cultural experience of mudéjares in thirteenth-century AragoCatalan Valencia as disorienting and altered (1975, 11–12). Historical analysis of political occupation in medieval Iberia draws a distinction to the comprehensive applicability of conquest and colonization to the feld.The extent to which domination and subjugation defned sociopolitical relations in medieval Iberia were complex and differed across particular historical contexts. In thirteenth-century Iberia, Pope Clement IV expressed concern about “the reluctance of Christian kings [in Iberia] to eliminate” non-Christians from their midst (Linehan 2001, 39), a sentiment that represents a more than 100-year gap after Heng’s late eleventh- and twelfth-century examples of the frst Crusades. Critical attention to the relationship between non-modern Crusades and conquest, and modern colonization and colonialism should fgure into our considerations of the use of postcolonial theory as a tool to 58
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generate greater knowledge about otherness, identities, and cultures in contact in non-modern Iberia.
Translation Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams contend that medieval and postcolonial studies are connected by translation, which represents both “a mechanism of and a metaphor for cultures in contact, confrontation, and competition” (2005, 10). Kabir and Williams point out the analogy between the uneven coexistence of the medieval and the modern, and the complex relationship between a “translation” and its “original” (8). Instead of interpreting the medieval/ modern relationship as a distant temporal separation, or of envisioning the superiority of an original text over an inferior translation, Kabir and Williams indicate that each pair of terms is connected in an irregular, fuctuating dialectic.12 Anthony Pym’s approach to translation studies is important as well. He focuses on translators as intercultural agents and mediators whose work involves transferring culture in intersectional, rather than monocultural, spaces through processes of negotiation. Pym does not deny the role of self-interest in medieval translation, but also underscores notions of mutual, negotiated understanding inevitable in the translation projects of the times (Pym 2000).13 Michelle R.Warren (2019) has recently described four modern theories by Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Lawrence Venuti, and Itamar Even-Zohar that serve as “signposts” for continued applications to medieval translation. Scholars have arrived at an array of different conclusions about the nature of cultural contact with regard to specifc translated works or genres. Not surprisingly, studies of late medieval works frequently emphasize greater cultural antagonism than literature from previous times. For instance, Maria Joana Gomes explores the complex cultural interaction and linguistic transference involved in the translation of a tenth-century historical work by the Cordoban Aḥmad al-Ra ¯ zı¯ to the fourteenth-century Galician-Portuguese Cronica do Mouro Rasis (2017). Gomes focuses on the interventions of the translators of the Cronica do Mouro Rasis who, faced with a work from a different linguistic and cultural milieu, were motivated by the political interests of their audience, rather than by a desire to closely follow the meaning of the older Arabic work (71–72). Generic differences further play a part in assessments of cultures in contact, as demonstrated by Julio César Santoyo’s analysis of practical, sometimes secretarial documents translated during the Middle Ages.14 Santoyo shows that translators were entirely uninterested in cultural questions, but instead sought to render a practical understanding of a given document (2014, 249). More recently, Michelle M. Hamilton delves into translation and adaptation as cultural production in the genre of medieval polemic. Taking her cue from the work of Sarah Stroumsa (2012) and others on the fundamental cultural interactions between Muslims and Jews in the Mediterranean, Hamilton argues that the free exchange of ideas about religious belief was pivotal to Iberian cultural production in both Andalusi and Hispanicate domains (2017, 50–51). Principles of debate and exchange were part of non-modern Iberia’s intellectual life, leading to well-known translation projects, along with a robust commercial book trade, workshops for manuscript production, and the establishment of libraries (51).15 Due to the assiduous work with manuscripts, language, and translation by intellectuals in non-modern Iberia, Hamilton shows that authors from Jewish, Muslim, and Christian faith communities, including Ibn Tufayl, Ibn Rushd, Maimonides, Ramón Llull, and Alfonso de la Torre, employed and commented on each other’s ideas without having to label them as “Jewish”, “Muslim”, or “Christian”. Her analysis of Alfonso de la Torre’s Visión Deleytable (1442) is a case in point, with its rootedness in concepts from Judeo-Andalusi tradition and its demonstrated model of 59
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cultural interaction characterized by connection and participation, rather than belligerence and antagonism (57–58). Hamilton further comments on the extension of this Andalusi philosophical tradition into the ffteenth century, in contrast to the more pugnacious and aggressive heroes of late medieval chivalric fction, such as Tirant and Amadís, who were compelled to confront “the infdel” (58). Ross Brann concurs with this assessment in an earlier period and with regard to literary composition in general in al-Andalus. He argues that Jewish poets and others were completely integrated into the pluralistic Andalusi scene, aside from their religious practices and beliefs (2002, 22).The cooperative assessment of translation for the sake of polemics was not universal, according to Ana Echevarría’s study of the translations of works on Muhammad’s life and their use by Christians. Echevarría does not consider the objectives of interfaith translation and adaptation as conciliatory and amenable. Instead, she concludes that translations of Arabic for polemics were not intended for Christians’ edifcation, but in some cases aimed to debase Islam and convince Muslims of the need for their conversion (2005, 151–52).The array of studies and conclusions about medieval Iberian translation pave the way for further explorations.
Network and system principles Scholars regularly invoke networks and systems to describe literary connections and cultural and sociopolitical processes and phenomena such as medieval pilgrimage and trade, although networks and systems themselves only recently have been examined critically (LaBianca and Arnold Scham 2006; Dangler 2017). Network and system principles, including fuid connection across geographic space, shifting relations of power, and realignments between centers and peripheries, signal future paths of examination of our themes. Scholars such as Drory (2000b) and Wacks (2007) have adopted system principles in studies of literature, while also invoking Itamar Even-Zohar’s (1990) concept of the polysystem as a way to analyze works in different languages produced in the same literary network. Wacks drew on the concept because of its application to a variety of linked texts, and to multiple activities related to literary invention, such as translation, production, and consumption. He argued that the thirteenth-century Castilian work, Calila e Dimna, was not “a textual artifact, a translated text”, but constituted “an act of translation and reception within a literary system” that included works in Arabic, as well as literary production in Castile and al-Andalus (87–88). Wacks’s focus on the literary system, rather than on selected works permitted the analysis of medieval Iberian literatures in Arabic, Castilian, Catalan, and Hebrew through their interaction rather than division. Bernabé Pons (2012) employs the concept of the network to explore morisco communities before and after expulsions in 1609. His work demonstrates how issues of collectivization often represent a key organizing pattern that outweighs a concentration on individual identities in the historical record, a topic also addressed in a volume about the network theory of Manuel Castells and its resonance with nonmodern periods (LaBianca and Arnold Scham 2006). The postcolonial critic Edward Kamau Brathwaite (1995) provides guidance on individual identity versus collectivization as well, albeit in a twentieth-century context in his study of the shifting focus of writers of the “West Indian jazz novel”.As their stories were received by a wider audience, Brathwaite noted that Caribbean novelists moved from a concentration on community and collective to the individual: “The Faustian individuals have emerged to make their world” (1995, 331). Scholars could explore the extent to which such a dynamic of power and infuence was at work in non-modern Iberian literature, causing a shift in perspective, presentation, and framing of literary fragments and other texts. Studies such as this suggest further possible applications of network and system principles to medieval Iberian literatures, including the 60
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comparison and contrast of collective and individual roles in the Cantar de mio Cid, especially in light of concepts such as ‘aṣabiyya, or the collective identifcation of a cohesive group (Oliver Pérez 2008, 16).The CmC is a well-known example, but the topic could be extended to many literary texts and genres of the Iberian middle ages. In addition to collectivization versus individual identity, considering discrete yet fuid categories, such as morisco, Muslim, Mozarab, or converso, as part of the same Iberian identity system would continue to illuminate their mutual interconnection and defnition (Dangler 2017, 104–106). Furthermore, attention to the entwined connections between Andalusi and Hispanicate cultures emphasizes their relation rather than separation, as in the examination of Iberian pilgrimage “as a multicultural, Iberian system”, and not as disconnected “Muslim”. “Jewish”, or “Christian” phenomena (Dangler 2017, 110–13). And fnally, one of the most meaningful ways that network and system tenets could be used in future research about our themes is through a focus on overlapping macro and micro levels of phenomena: economic, political, and social. Interwoven analysis of political or economic networks with modes of identifcation through kinship, for instance, would continue to directly apply to literature in our feld and yield capacious results about conditions in Islamicate and Hispanicate domains.
Ecocriticism, the environment, and the Anthropocene Ecocriticism suggests ways of addressing identity and the other by integrating nature and the environment into critical analysis of human agency. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (2015, 2017a, 2017b) has been a prolifc proponent of this approach in work that argues for greater attention to the agential role of the nonhuman, whether animals, rocks, stones, water, fre, or sounds, in history and literature. One among many possible medieval examples of such a proposal is the equivalence between “a posthuman ecology” and the “open, feshly system” of the non-modern humoral body, where elements such as the moon’s gravity and atmospheric humidity interlace materially through the humors. Cohen maintains that this dynamic construction of the human body further underscores human embodiment as specifc phenomena, whether gendered or racialized, in particular places and under certain conditions, rather than an “abstract universal” (2017a, 38). Ideas such as this dovetail with questions of race and power discussed above and expand them to include considerations of environmental and geological factors. Connie Scarborough (2013) analyzes the varied roles that natural phenomena and the environment play in different medieval genres and texts, pointing to further applications of this approach to nonmodern Iberian studies in hagiography, epic, love poetry, and other literatures. Cohen’s ideas further intersect with recent attention to the Anthropocene, an intricate concept defned in part as the division of history into stages in which the technological innovation of human beings was so consequential that it created new pathways for the direction of society and the Earth. In addition, the term must be understood as the mutual interaction of social and Earth systems in the production of new courses in history (Meneley and Oak Taylor 2017, 2–5).16 Cohen maintains, however, that the Anthropocene marks a focal point for understanding history and the world, rather than a new way of describing periodization (2017b). His recent refection on the Anthropocene is instructive for establishing a framework within which to investigate our themes in non-modern Iberian literatures. His ideas conspire with network and system principles to argue for an understanding of history and time as ebbing, fowing, and overlapping, rather than as linear, progressive, and teleologic. Similarly, investigations into identity, otherness, and cultures in contact as intersecting, fuid, and mutually constructed by way of multiple scales of social and environmental phenomena would continue to yield expansive analyses capable of approaching the complexity of the themes themselves. 61
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Notes 1 Alejandro García-Sanjuán maintains that Sánchez-Albornoz, in a refnement to his argument presented in Estudios polémicos published in 1979, viewed al-Andalus as the Muslim “historical expression of an eternal Spanish identity” and consequently defended the Spanishness of Andalusi writers and intellectuals (García-Sanjuán 2018, 131). 2 For alternatives to the meaning of convivencia as mere toleration or coexistence, see Catlos (2001) and Wacks (2007, 5). 3 Translation:“In the case of al-Andalus, we have threads of a different type and color that permit us to weave complex visions of what were the experiences of its inhabitants without falling into apology or disqualifcation”. 4 Márquez Villanueva made a similar argument in 1994 with the resemblance between Alfonso X and the Arab model of kingship, specifcally its emphasis on cultural projects and production (Márquez Villanueva 2004 [1994], 28–30). Fierro notes, however, that Márquez Villanueva failed to acknowledge the Almohad context of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries and focused instead on parallels with the Umayyad period, which ended in 1031, over 200 years before the reign of Alfonso X beginning in 1252 (Fierro 2009, 176–77). Hence, Fierro identifed a more contemporaneous parallel to Alfonso X in her focus on the Almohads. 5 Modern cultural theory offers further analytical terms for analyzing cultures in contact, such as transculturation and acculturation. Altschul defnes transculturation similarly as a process of reciprocal effect on all parties in contact with one another, preferring it to the more common acculturation (Altschul 2009, 10–11).The general mode of inquiry on parallels discussed here serves as a complement to critical discussions of more popular terms for describing cultures in contact, such as acculturation, and does not necessarily forestall or surpass them (Glick 2005, 184–86, 365; Altschul 2009, 10–11; Soifer 2009, 21). 6 Further examination of material conditions of pilgrimage and travel in manuscripts and documents of the period is needed to corroborate these hypotheses. 7 Altschul explores the topic further in 2013a. See Salvatierra Ossorio 2013 for an interesting contribution to skin color in relation to ugliness in non-modern Iberian literature, though she does not employ postcolonial theory. 8 For more on the development of raza and race in the transatlantic Iberian world, see Nirenberg’s coedited volume on race and blood (Hering Torres et al. 2012). 9 It is unclear how mimicry would apply to Arabized Jews if we were to follow Ross Brann’s hypothesis about their “limited cultural convergence” within the multiethnic and multireligious environs of al-Andalus, rather than their assimilation or their passive reception of the infuence of Andalusi Muslims (2002, 20). 10 For a related application, Tarte-Ramey links Bhabha’s concept of mimicry to medieval contexts in French literature (2015, 31). 11 Robert I. Burns argues that the thirteenth-century annexation of Valencia by Jaume I of Aragon (ruled Valencia 1239–1276) was achieved through processes of absorption and administration, rather than by might, force, or conversion. Mudéjares lived parallel lives to Christians and Jews, while Muslim elites relocated over a long period and of their own accord to Granada and Tunis (1975, 9, 11). 12 Lemarchand 1995 further discusses the relationship between the original text and its translation, along with the medieval idea of translation as translatio. 13 Julio César Santoyo’s history of medieval Iberian translation (2009) provides a vast inventory of translators from a range of backgrounds, and of works about a variety of topics. 14 Santoyo further notes the dichotomy of kind made by David Romano (1991–1992, 217), who distinguished between translations with a utilitarian purpose and cultural texts, such as science, literature, and philosophy (Santoyo 2014, 238). 15 Translation work was common in Tarazona, Barcelona, León, Limia (Orense), Burgos, Segovia,Toledo, and other locales (Santoyo 2009, 59). 16 Meneley and Oak Taylor 2017 provide further explanation and detail.
References Aillet, Cyrille. 2008. “Introducción”. In ¿Existe una identidad mozárabe? Historia, lengua y cultura de los cristianos de al-Andalus (IX-XII), edited by Cyrille Aillet, Mayte Penelas, and Philippe Roisse, ix–xvi. Madrid: Casa de Velázquez.
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Jean Dangler Drory, Rina. 2000a. “The Maqama”. In The Literature of al-Andalus, edited by María Rosa Menocal, Raymond P. Scheindlin, and Michael Sells, 190–210. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Drory, Rina. 2000b. Models and Contacts:Arabic Literature and Its Impact on Jewish Culture. Leiden: Brill. Echevarría, Ana. 2005. “Eschatology or Biography? Alfonso X, Muhammad’s Ladder and a Jewish Go-Between”. In Under the Infuence: Questioning the Comparative in Medieval Castile, edited by Cynthia Robinson and Leyla Rouhi, 133–152. Leiden: Brill. Eliav-Feldon, Miriam, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler. 2009. “Introduction”. In The Origins of Racism in the West, edited by Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler, 1–31. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Even-Zohar, Itamar. 1990.“The ‘Literary System’”. Poetics Today 11.1: 27–44. Fierro, Maribel. 2009.“Alfonso X ‘the Wise:’The Last Almohad Caliph?” Medieval Encounters 15: 175–198. Fierro, Maribel. 2017.“Qué hacer con al-Andalus”. eHumanista 37: 177–184. García Arenal, Mercedes. 2014. “The Converted Muslims of Spain: Morisco Cultural Resistance and Engagement with Islamic Knowledge”. In Routledge Handbook of Islam in the West, edited by Roberto Tottoli, 38–54. New York: Routledge. García Arenal, Mercedes. 2016. “Mi padre moro, yo moro: The Inheritance of Belief in Early Modern Iberia”. In After Conversion, edited by Mercedes García-Arenal, 304–445. Leiden: Brill. García Arenal, Mercedes and Gerard Wiegers, eds. 2013. Los moriscos: expulsión y diáspora: una perspectiva internacional.Valencia: Universitat de València; Granada: Universidad de Granada; Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza. García Arenal, Mercedes and Gerard Wiegers. 2018. “Interreligious Encounters in Polemics between Christians, Jews, and Muslims in Iberia and Beyond”. Medieval Encounters 24.1–3: 1–13. García Sanjuán, Alejandro. 2017. “Al-Andalus en la historiografía nacionalcatólica española: Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz”. eHumanista 37: 305–328. García Sanjuán, Alejandro. 2018. “Rejecting al-Andalus, Exalting the Reconquista: Historical Memory in Contemporary Spain”. Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 10.1: 127–145. Gaunt, Simon.2009.“Can the Middle Ages Be Postcolonial?” Comparative Literature 61.2: 160–176. Gerli, E. Michael. 2007. “The Converso Condition: New Approaches to an Old Question”. In Medieval Iberia: Changing Societies and Cultures in Contact and Translation, edited by Ivy A. Corfs and Ray HarrisNorthall, 3–15. London:Támesis. Glick,Thomas F. 2005 [1979]. Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages. Leiden: Brill. Goldenberg, David M. 1999. “The Development of the Idea of Race”. International Journal of the Classical Tradition 5.4: 561–570. Goldenberg, David M. 2003. The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Goldenberg, David M. 2009. “Racism, Color Symbolism, and Color Prejudice”. In The Origins of Racism in the West, edited by Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler, 88–108. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gomes, Maria Joana. 2017. “From Aḥmad ibn Muhammad ̣ ibn Mu ¯ sa al-Ra ¯ zı¯ to Mouro Rasis: Translation and Cultural Dialogue in Medieval Iberia”. Philological Encounters 2: 52–75. Gómez Martínez, José L. 1972.“Américo Castro y Sánchez-Albornoz: dos posiciones ante el origen de los españoles”. Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 21.2: 301–319. Hamilton, Michelle M. 2007. Representing Others in Medieval Iberian Literature. New York: Palgrave. Hamilton, Michelle M. 2017. “Medieval Iberian Cultures in Contact: Iberian Cultural Production as Translation and Adaptation”. In The Routledge Companion to Iberian Studies, edited by Javier MuñozBasols, Laura Lonsdale, and Manuel Delgado, 50–61. New York: Routledge. Heng, Geraldine. 2011a.“The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages 1: Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages”. Literature Compass 8.5: 315–331. Heng, Geraldine. 2011b. “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages 2: Locations of Medieval Race”. Literature Compass 8.5: 332–350. Heng, Geraldine. 2015.“Reinventing Race, Colonization, and Globalisms across Deep Time: Lessons from the Longue Durée”. PMLA 130.2: 358–366. Heng, Geraldine. 2018. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hering Torres, Max S., María Elena Martínez, and David Nirenberg, eds. 2012. Race and Blood in the Iberian World. Zürich and Berlin: LIT Verlag.
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Otherness, identities, and cultures Hitchcock, Richard. 2008. Mozarabs in Medieval and Early Modern Spain: Identities and Infuences. Cornwall: Ashgate. Ingham, Patricia Claire, and Michelle R.Warren, eds. 2003. Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Jiménez Pedrajas, Rafael. 2013. Historia de los mozárabes en al-Andalus: mozárabes y musulmanes en al-Andalus: ¿relaciones de convivencia?, ¿o de antagonismo y lucha? Córdoba: Almuzara. Kabir, Ananya Jahanara, and Deanne Williams. 2005. “Introduction: A Return to Wonder”. In Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages:Translating Cultures, edited by Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams, 1–21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kinoshita, Sharon. 2006. Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. LaBianca, Oystein S. and Sandra Arnold Scham. 2006. “Introduction: Ancient Network Societies”. In Connectivity in Antiquity: Globalization as Long-Term Historical Process, edited by Oystein S. LaBianca and Sandra Arnold Scham, 1–5. London: Equinox. Lemarchand, Marie-José. 1995. “¿Qué es un ‘texto original’? Apuntes en torno a la historia del concepto”. In Cultura sin fronteras: encuentros en torno a la traducción, edited by Carmen Valero Garcés, 25–33. Alcalá de Henares: Universidad de Alcalá. Linehan, Peter. 2001. “At the Spanish Frontier”. In The Medieval World, edited by Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson, 37–59. New York: Routledge. Manzano Moreno, Eduardo. 2010. Historia de España: épocas medievales.Vol. 2. Barcelona: Crítica/Marcial Pons. Marín, Manuela. 2014. “Women and Kinship in Medieval Moroccan Hagiography: A Study of al-Ba¯ disı¯’s al-Maqsad al-shar¯ıf (eighth/fourteenth century)”. In Family Portraits with Saints: Hagiography, Sanctity, and Family in the Muslim World, edited by Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen and Alexandre Papas, 394–419. Berlin: Klaus Schwarz; Paris: L’Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales. Márquez Villanueva, Francisco. 2004 [1994]. El concepto Cultural alfonsí. Barcelona: Bellaterra. Menely, Tobias, and Jesse Oak Taylor. “Introduction”. In Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times, edited by Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor, 1–24. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Meyerson, Mark D. 1999.“Introduction”. In Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Spain: Interaction and Cultural Exchange, edited by Mark D. Meyerson and Edward D. English, xi–xxi. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Monroe, James T. 2002. “Preliminary Study”. In Al-maqa¯ma¯t al-luzu¯m¯ıyah, by Abu¯ l-Ta¯hir Muhammad ̣ ibn Yu¯suf al-Tam¯ım¯ı al-Saraqust¯ı̣ ibn al-Aštarku¯w¯ı, edited and translated by James T. Monroe, 1–108. Leiden: Brill. Montero Ana M. 2006.“A Possible Connection between the Philosophy of the Castilian King Alfonso X and the Risa¯lat Ḥ ayy ibn Yaqza¯n ̣ by Ibn Ṭufayl”. Al-Masa¯q: Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean 18:1: 1–26. Nirenberg, David. 1996. Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nirenberg, David. 2009. “Was There Race before Modernity? The Example of ‘Jewish’ Blood in Late Medieval Spain”. In The Origins of Racism in the West, edited by Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler, 232–264. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oliver Pérez, Dolores. 2008. El Cantar de mío Cid: génesis y autoría árabe. Almería: Fundación Ibn Tufayl de Estudios Árabes. Patton, Pamela A. 2015. “Introduction: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America”. In Envisioning Others: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America, edited by Pamela A. Patton, 1–17. Leiden: Brill. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. 1995. Edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffths, and Helen Tiffn. New York: Routledge. Pym,Anthony. 2000.“Introduction:Translators, Intercultures, and Hispanic Frontier Society”. In Negotiating the Frontier:Translators and Intercultures in Hispanic History, edited by Anthony Pym, 1–12. Manchester: St. Jerome. Ramey, Lynn Tarte. 2014. Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. Ray, Jonathan. 2005. “Beyond Tolerance and Persecution: Reassessing Our Approach to Medieval Convivencia”. Jewish Social Studies 11.2: 1–18.
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Jean Dangler Robinson, Cynthia. 2002. In Praise of Song:The Making of Courtly Culture in al-Andalus and Provence, 1005– 1134.A.D. Leiden: Brill. Rodríguez Porto, Rosa María. 2008. “Courtliness and its Trujamanes: Manufacturing Chivalric Imagery across the Castilian-Granadine Frontier”. Medieval Encounters 14: 219–266. Romano, David. 1991–1992. “Hispanojudíos traductores del árabe”. Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona 43: 211–232. Salvatierra Ossorio,Aurora. 2013.“‘Negra como el cuervo:’ la estética de la fealdad en textos hebreos de la Iberia medieval”. eHumanista 23: 605–621. Sánchez-Albornoz, Claudio. 1956. España: un enigma histórico. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana. Santoyo, Julio César. 2009. La traducción medieval en la Península Ibérica (siglos III-XV). León: Universidad de León. Santoyo, Julio César. 2014. “Hacia un Corpus Total de traducciones medievales en la Península Ibérica”. eHumanista 28: 536–558. Scarborough, Connie L. 2013. Inscribing the Environment: Ecocritical Approaches to Medieval Spanish Literature. Boston: De Gruyter. Scarborough, Connie L. 2014.“Introduction”. In Revisiting Convivencia in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, edited by Connie L. Scarborough, 9–30. Newark: Juan de la Cuesta. Soifer, Maya. 2009. “Beyond Convivencia: Critical Refections on the Historiography of Interfaith Relations in Christian Spain”. Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 1: 19–35. Stroumsa, Sarah. 2012. “Thinkers of ‘This Peninsula:’ Toward an Integrative Approach to the Study of Philosophy in al-Andalus”. In Beyond Religious Borders: Interaction and Intellectual Exchange in the Medieval Islamic World, edited by David M. Freidenreich and Miriam Goldstein, 44–53. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Szpiech, Ryan. 2013. “The Convivencia Wars: Decoding Historiography’s Polemic with Philology”. In A Sea of Languages: Rethinking the Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, edited by Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Karla Mallette, 135–161.Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Wacks, David A. 2007. Framing Iberia: Maqa¯ma¯t and Frametale Narratives in Medieval Spain. Leiden: Brill. Warren, Michelle R. 2019.“Modern Theoretical Approaches to Medieval Translation”. In A Companion to Medieval Translation, edited by Jeanette Beer, 165–173. Leeds:ARC Humanities Press. Weiss, Julian. 2012. “El postcolonialismo medieval: líneas y pautas en la investigación de un problema histórico”. In Literatura medieval y renacentista en España: líneas y pautas, edited by Natalia Fernández Rodríguez and María Fernández Ferreiro, 177–200. Salamanca: La SEMYR, Sociedad de Estudios Medievales y Renacentistas. Zorgati, Ragnhild Johnsrud. 2012. Pluralism in the Middle Ages: Hybrid Identities, Conversion, and Mixed Marriages in Medieval Iberia. New York: Routledge.
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5 THE VISIGOTHIC AND SUEVIC KINGDOMS The road to unity in post-Roman Hispania Alberto Ferreiro
Invasion, migration, settlement The Germanic invasions in the western part of the Roman Empire, it is agreed by all, had a profound impact in reshaping these provinces of the late Empire. Relations with the tribes on the part of Rome had been, overall, good and uneventful before their entry into the Empire in 376 in the east and in 406 in the West. There had been steady trade along the Danube River region, which meant that the Goths were familiar with the Roman world. A good number of Goths had already been recruited into the Roman legions. One might say that in a sense the Germanic peoples had long experienced a “taste” of Roman civilization and what it had to offer long before their permanent settlement in the Empire.Although some scholars today still cling to a “catastrophic interpretation” of the Germanic migration/invasion into the western provinces, the evidence confrms some disruption, as would be expected; but the collapse of Roman institutions in the west cannot be blamed entirely on the pagan/Arian barbarians.The Empire in the West was already fractured at many levels; the Germanic entry accelerated a deterioration that was already afoot.There is good evidence that the barbarians never intended to destroy the Empire. Archaeology reveals that many Roman roads, aqueducts, mines, and other infrastructure continued to function under the new barbarian rulers. A new monetary system was introduced that indicates that there was not total economic collapse. Contacts, diplomatic and ecclesial, were maintained by the Visigoths with Gallia, North Africa, and vigorously with Byzantium. Impressive new cities such as Reccopolis were founded while the pre-existing major urban centers of Braga, Merida,Toledo, and others continued to fourish. Lastly, a robust literary culture was maintained throughout under Arian and Catholic rule, producing highly infuential scholars such as Isidore of Seville and others (see the section “Intellectual culture”). An important study by Yitzhak Hen, building on Pierre Riche’s foundational study, demonstrates that the new rulers of the barbarian kingdoms had more than just a passing interest in the literature and arts of Greco/Roman antiquity and their efforts were more than just a salvage job; much original work was produced. A number of barbarian rulers were at the forefront in promoting these cultural activities. Of great importance is the case of the Goths, the largest of the tribes that had been converted to Christianity by the renowned missionary Ulflas to Arianism before their westward migration. As they moved into Catholic provinces in the West 67
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there emerged a religious divide between Catholics and Arians that became a source of confict that reached its apogee in Hispania in the sixth century. In their migration westward deeper into the Empire the process of Latinization progressed rapidly as their native Germanic languages gave way to Latin.When the peoples arrived at Hispania they were heavily Latinized; there is no testimony for the need of translators and no bilingual law codes were promulgated in Hispania, as was the case earlier when the Visigoths were in Toulouse. It is believed that Gothic/Suevic survived somewhat longer as a household language while all the business of the kingdoms was conducted in Latin.To date, not a single epigraphic text has been found in the Gothic/Suevic languages in Hispania. We do not have any reference for Hispania of the use of the Gothic Bible as there is for the Ostrogoths in Italy. Even so, the distinction between Hispano-Romans, Visigoths (Goths), and Sueves remained a reality as late as the Third Council of Toledo (589) where they are identifed respectively as distinct peoples. In the ensuing century and beyond the Muslim Invasion, the identity of Goth and Sueve disappeared; for the latter it occurred much sooner.Yet, personal names and families with Visigothic ancestry persisted and the ideal of restoring the unity of the Regnum Gothorum with the capital in Toledo was one of the centerpieces of Reconquest ideology. The westernmost region of Hispania witnessed the most impact and transformation; no less than four tribes vied for hegemony of the Iberian Peninsula.These were Alans,Asding and Siling Vandals, Sueves, and Visigoths; the latter two endured longest and survived the initial struggle for dominance. On 31 December 406, the tribes, excluding the Goths at this time, crossed the frozen Rhine River in the vicinity of Mainz into Gaul. The looting of these migrant peoples was hardly a surprise; they likely had no idea where they would fnally settle. As they pressed southward in September–October of 409 they reached the Pyrenees where they crossed into Hispania. What happened next was confict between the tribes over which areas to settle into and for possible dominance of the whole of Hispania. The rebel Emperor Maximus proposed a treaty whereby the Alans and Siling Vandals settled in the south while the Asding Vandals and Sueves occupied the northwest (Gallaecia). It is believed that in this phase the tribes were in the service of Maximus and thus received provisions and compensation for their services as garrison warriors.The tribes, however, had greater ambitions than to be subordinates of a Roman offcial. Maximus was not considered a legitimate ruler in Hispania by the Imperial authorities who were far away. It is all symptomatic of how fragile the western provinces were as the Empire was crumbling in the West. It made it increasingly diffcult for the regime in Constantinople to sustain and control them. In Hispania, Maximus was a usurper that had to go along with the Germanic peoples that were in his service. The loss of tax revenue was undoubtedly a major factor that aggravated the situation with the authorities in Constantinople. What happened next is well documented. In 416 the Visigoths under Wallia were recruited by the Emperor Honorius (c. 395–423) to deal with the situation. The task was to depose Maximus and drive out the Alans,Vandals, and Sueves in order to restore Imperial authority in Hispania. At this juncture the Imperial court had not given up on controlling the western provinces and the situation there had not yet deteriorated to the point where they would be permanently lost.That loss of control came sooner than expected, however.The Alans were the frst to fall victim; being the smallest of the tribes they were easily defeated.Their time was so brief and their numbers so small in Hispania that they virtually do not exist archaeologically. There are a few disputed Alan artifacts; their authenticity is diffcult to defend.The Siling Vandals were also victims of the frst skirmishes. Honorius and the Visigoths returned to Gaul in 418 when they realized that the remaining Asding Vandals made clear their intention to migrate to North Africa; this they did in 429, surprisingly when they were on the verge of annihilating the Sueves. With their departure, the Sueves became the most powerful and dominant Germanic 68
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tribe in Hispania, except in the northeastern corner in the Pyrenees region. At this stage the capital of Sueves was in Mérida.This near-domination by the Sueves proved to be short lived; the Imperial authorities were not fnished with their intervention in Hispania.Visigothic and Imperial forces in 456 brokered an alliance with plans to launch a second military campaign in Hispania. Flavius Ricimir, believed to be of Visigothic/Suevic descent, led the Germanic forces alongside the Imperial troops. It was Theoderic II (453–466) who annihilated the Sueves’ power in the south thus shattering their ambition to be the sole ruler of the peninsula.Theoderic II’s brother Euric (466–484) carried out the second phase in the 479s by conquering the northeastern areas of Hispania and Gallia.Through a treaty with the Emperor Julius Nepos, he annexed the Auvergne region in 475.When it was all over, the kingdom also stretched through the valleys of the Loire and Rhône. The capital of the Visigoths in Gallia was Toulouse. Eurci issued a very important legal code for all peoples in his kingdom. His son Alaric II (484–507) issued another legal code. The Visigothic city of Toulouse was destroyed by the Franks at the Battle of Vouillé in 507. The Visigoths lost all of their possessions in Gallia except for Septimania. The Sueves were able to avoid all of this confict since it did not reach Gallaecia.The Sueves established Braga (Bracara Augusta) as their new capital and thus began their second major phase in Hispania. This new Sueve kingdom survived well into the late sixth century when the Arian Visigothic King Leovigild destroyed it in 584/585. Until the triumph of 585 the Visigoths faced challenges to their desired hegemony over the Sueves in Gallaecia and the Byzantine conquests of Justinian on the eastern coast. The Visigoths, nevertheless, who started their adventurism in Hispania under Roman leadership and later independently, fnally dominated the entire Iberian Peninsula; it was facilitated by the collapse of Roman rule in the western provinces and the weakness of their main rival, the Sueves (see Figure 5.1).
Figure 5.1 Visigothic provincial divisions.
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Suevic kingdom in Gallaecia Our principal source for events about the Germanic invasions of ancient Gallaecia, (roughly present-day Galicia and Northern Portugal), is Hydatius, Bishop of Aquae Flaviae, who was a frst-hand witness to the entry into his homeland of the Germanic tribes. In the year 409 Gallaecia was the frst province of the Iberian Peninsula to experience the entry of peoples from the Rhine region of northern and southern Germany. According to Hydatius this occurred on 31 December 406 when Sueves,Asding and Siling Vandals, and Alans crossed the Rhine frst into Gallia, thus beginning a journey that would terminate in the Iberian Peninsula. The historian Paulus Orosius is another important writer from Gallaecia who supplemented Hydatius with more details. Orosius blamed the ineptitude of the local Roman governors for making possible the success of the Germanic tribes to move about at will in Gallia and Hispania. In the Fall of 409—scholars debate the precise day and month—the tribes followed the Roman road in the western Pyrenees—near Roscenvalles—where they crossed into the Iberian Peninsula and migrated straightway to Gallaecia. Paulus Orosius and Hydatius report some initial confict between the Hispano-Romans and the newly arrived Germans. In the year 414 Paulus Orosius had to fee his native Braga (the Roman capital of Gallaecia) to Africa, having fallen into disfavor with the new Sueve rulers who eventually made Braga their sedes regia (capital). There is substantial evidence that the settlement overall transpired peacefully and that confict was not as widespread as some scholars believe. Hispano-Romans apparently partitioned territory with the new migrants throughout most of Hispania, the Vandals and Sueves receiving most of the territory. After considerable movement and confict there emerged a new territorial political social order: the Asding Vandals and Sueves in Gallaecia,Alans in Lusitania and western Carthaginensis, and the Siling Vandals in Baetica.The Alans, being a small tribe, were eliminated with ease in the power struggle that ensued.The Roman provinces of Tarraconensis and eastern Carthaginensis remained for the time being fully under Roman control.The rapid settlement of the Germans, however, is testimony of how precarious Roman rule had become in Hispania and it was only a matter of time for the rest of the peninsula to come under German domination.The question pending was: under which tribe or tribes? There was much tribal animosity by the tribal chiefs who aspired to be the sole rulers.The neighboring Visigoths in Gallia had plans of their own and they too had their sights on Hispania.When the Sueves emerged as the most powerful in Hispania it raised concerns for the Romans.The greatly weakened Romans had to strike a deal with the Visigoths to address the Sueve problem; the Visigoths were made foederati.They were given the task of destroying the Sueves and Vandals in Hispania.The Visigoths managed to destroy the Alans and the Siling Vandals, but then retreated without confronting the Sueves.The campaigns of the Visigoths for the Romans did not fully remove the angst over the remaining Sueves and Vandals. In 421 the Asding Vandals left Gallaecia and established an independent kingdom in Baetica; the Romans attempted in 422 to drive them out without any success in the short term. It did have the effect of making the Vandals so insecure in Hispania that under King Gaeseric (428–477) in 429 they vacated Baetica and crossed over into North Africa and began a successful conquest of crucial provinces of the rapidly collapsing Western Roman Empire.This left the peninsula wide open for the Sueves to conquer; immediately they mobilized their forces to establish hegemony. What the Sueves did not calculate is that Gaeseric planned to have an empire that would include North Africa and Baetica. In 430 the Sueves were annihilated by Gaeseric in Mérida. For some unexplained reason the Vandals retreated back to North Africa and did not follow up with a total conquest of the Sueves.The Sueves had a second chance to extend their holdings; they did so by expanding south and west. Under Requila, the Sueves, from 438 to 448, conquered the provinces of Lusitania, Baetica, and Carthaginensia and the important cities of Mérida and Seville. 70
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Under Rechiarius (448–456) several key events transpired that were turning points; above all, the political and social position of the Sueves was secured in Gallaecia. Furthermore, any effort by the Hispano-Romans to gain any intervention from Rome via Gallia was unfruitful. Signifcantly for the Church, in the 440s Rechiarius became the frst Germanic leader anywhere in the West to convert to the Catholic faith. In 452 the Sueves and Romans signed a pact whereby the Sueves agreed to cancel their claim to Carthaginensia, an important coastal region.Things turned for the worst when the Visigoth Theodoric II (453–466) in Italy, with the support of the Roman Senate, set out to annihilate the Suevic kingdom of Hispania. In 469, Rechiarius was unable to defeat the overwhelming Visigothic/Roman forces; he was captured and executed. Notwithstanding the disaster, a remnant of the Sueves re-emerged in Gallaecia, denying the Visigoths full hegemony in Hispania. When the Chronicon of Hydatius ends its coverage in 469 we are faced with an almost absolute silence in the written sources until the Chronica of John of Biclar spoke again of events in Gallaecia, beginning with the year 550. Some, however, forget that it was not an entirely undocumented period: frst, archaeology continues to shed light on this era; second, there is the correspondence of Popes Vigilius, Innocent I, and Leo the Great with the bishops of Gallaecia regarding the ongoing Priscillianist controversy. Sulpicius Severus in Gallia was the major literary source of Priscillianism and the role of Martin of Tours in that scandal. Isidore of Seville in his Historia Suevorum, wrote a brief historical summary of the Sueve kingdom in Gallaecia with special attention to their conversion.We add to this the contributions of Gregory of Tours in his Libri historiarum decem (ch. 31) and De virtutibus sancti Martini (book 1, ch. 11) who recorded crucial information not found in peninsular sources. Also from Gallia,Venantius Fortunatus dedicated a lengthy poem to Martin of Braga where he lauded his piety, missionary zeal, and intellectual erudition. We have adequate historical information for most of the Sueve kings who ruled Gallaecia from their initial entry right up to the destruction and assimilation of the kingdom in 585 at the hands of the Visigoth, King Leovigild. There was major controversy involving Gallaecia before the arrival of Martin of Braga that continued when he was bishop; it was the aforementioned Priscillianism. In the fourth century and well into the late sixth century Priscillianism seemed to dominate the ecclesial affairs in Gallaecia, Gallia, and the rest of Hispania. Martin of Braga was in the thick of it as bishop when the First Council of Braga (561) convened. Surprisingly, Priscillian was never mentioned by name or his sect in Martin’s extant writings and not one of his treatises addressed any of the doctrines and practices associated with the sect. Since he was present at the First Council of Braga, where a point-by-point refutation of Priscillianism was promulgated, as an attending bishop in this way he voiced disapproval of the sect. Priscillian of Avila (340–386) was a highborn Hispano-Roman holy man who was accused of heresy by some bishops in Hispania. He practiced for what was some a controversial ascetic life coupled with alleged heretical teachings. In time he had a following, spanning Hispania and southern Gallia. Among his followers were upper-class men and women, clergy, a few bishops, and laypeople. No member of the monarchy, Sueve or Visigoth, ever professed to be a Priscillianist.The main accusations leveled at the Priscillianists were: Manicheanism, Gnosticism, and Magic. An initial gathering of ten bishops at the Council of Zaragoza I (380) issued very vague and cautious statements that some scholars are not certain were addressed to the sect. When Priscillian was elected Bishop of Avila his detractors declared the ordination illegitimate. A vigorous attack was led by bishops Hydatius of Mérida and Ithacius of Ossonoba who were described by Sulpicius Severus as motivated by personal hate, greed, and jealousy. Priscillian attempted, to no avail, to get a face-to-face meeting with Ambrose of Milan and Pope Damasus; neither of them made time to meet with him. In 383, the usurper Maximus led a revolt in Gallia that had grave consequences for the Priscillianists. Maximus was persuaded by Priscillian’s 71
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enemies led by Ithacius of Ossonoba—who was relentless in his persecution of Priscillian— to convene a Council in Bordeaux (384–385) where the case was argued successfully that Priscillian was indeed a heretic. Priscillian made the fatal mistake of appealing in person to Maximus, which resulted in his arrest, trial, and execution along with six of his followers at Trier in 385. Maximus had been previously persuaded by Ithacius of Ossonoba that Priscillian was guilty of heresy and witchcraft, and this secured the executions. All of Priscillian’s peninsular episcopal opponents were excommunicated by the pope and they earned the condemnation of Ambrose and Augustine. Among other prominent Church Fathers, Jerome and Isidore of Seville expressed approval of the executions.The movement, however, continued to fourish in Gallaecia where Priscillian was declared a martyr. For a time, he was invoked in the liturgy and his shrine in Gallaecia attracted devotees well into the late sixth century. In due course, his cult was suppressed almost to extinction; some are convinced that his shrine was transformed into the cult of Santiago de Compostela beginning in the eighth century. Martin of Braga (c. 520–c. 579) may not have had in his sight specifcally the Priscillianists; his aim was to secure the permanent conversion of the Sueves to the Catholic faith after an inconstant period of lapses. Martin was a native of the Roman province of Pannonia Secunda; his long, fascinating journey from the eastern provinces ended in Gallaecia. We are informed that he spent time with ascetics in the East. He may have passed through Rome, then most likely Tours to venerate the relics of his fellow native Pannonian, Martin of Tours. Departing Tours, he traveled the maritime route to Gallaecia just at the time when relics of Martin of Tours arrived at Braga, intended to obtain a healing for the Sueve King Chararic’s son. Martin of Braga became the main promoter of the cult of Martin of Tours in Gallaecia, beginning at the Sueve capital of Braga. It was there that the frst church was founded dedicated to the Gallic saint in Hispania. His missionary efforts resulted in the successful conversion of the Sueves to CatholicOrthodoxy. Martin cultivated a close relationship with four successive Sueve monarchs spanning from 550 to 579; it secured his position with the Church and enabled him to wield great infuence at the court. His preaching against Arianism and paganism met with positive results overall. Under his guidance he participated in two infuential councils in Braga, as bishop in 561 and as Metropolitan of Braga in 572; in the latter one he determined the agenda. In that second council he introduced into the Gallaecian Church 84 eastern conciliar canons known as the Capitula Martini that were used to further organize the Church and address liturgical issues.They were meant to bring the Gallaecian church and society into greater conformity with the East. In addition, according to Isidore of Seville, Martin founded an extensive network on churches and monasteries throughout Gallaecia.This activity eventually earned him the title of “Apostle” of the Sueves in Venantius Fortunatus’ poem in honor of Martin. Martin’s abundant epistolary correspondence that Isidore spoke about has not survived, however. His few extant works experienced wide circulation in the entire span of the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. One, titled Formula Vitae Honestae, written for King Miro—at the monarch’s request—on the four cardinal virtues, was based loosely on Seneca. It was still being read in the Italian Renaissance as a work of Seneca, until the correct authorship was established. His sermon De correctione rusticorum against paganism—modeled after Augustine’s De Catechizandi Rudibus—was posthumously translated and adapted for missionary work in Iceland, Anglo-Saxon England, and Germany. Two substantive collections of the wisdom of the Desert Fathers—Apothegmata Patrum—that he brought with him from the East were translated from Greek into Latin with a disciple of his, named Paschasius of Dumium. Martin taught him Greek to assist him in the translations.These collections of desert ascetic wisdom had a great infuence on monasticism throughout Hispania. Long after Martin’s death (c. 579) he was remembered at the Tenth Council of Toledo (656) that met under Catholic Visigothic rule. One of the items up for discussion was the testament 72
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of Martin of Braga. Even though the territorial Sueve kingdom was in the past, a Third Council of Braga (675) in Visigothic Gallaecia is testimony of a Church with enduring signs of vitality.
Arianism and the Catholic triumph: Third Council of Toledo (589) The richest collection of documentation in this era are the numerous Visigothic HispanoRoman Councils.They represent regional and national gatherings of bishops that met in every major city of the Iberia Peninsula from c. 300 AD–702 AD. Eighteen councils convened in the city of Toledo beginning in 400 before the Germanic tribes arrived.The decrees of the eighteenth council of Toledo that met in 702 on the eve of the Muslim invasion have not survived. The Toledan councils highlight the importance of that city through its bishop who eventually received pallium and Primatial status in Hispania from Rome. Toledo’s prestige was bolstered by the fact that it was the sedes regia of the Visigoths. The canons of the councils are a unique resource to deepen our understanding of the life of the Church and society.The canons address: the sacraments, liturgy, Holy Orders, ecclesiology, the monarchy, morality, sexuality, canon law, celibacy, monetary issues, marriage, and much more. What makes the Toledan councils most important is that because they were in most cases national assemblies, the decisions agreed upon applied to the entire church in Hispania. The frst two councils of Toledo (400) and (527) were provincial and met before Toledo was a Metropolitan See. The frst truly national assembly was the Third Council of Toledo of 589 that was convened to celebrate the offcial conversion from Arianism to the Catholic Nicaean confession by Reccared and the people. He was the frst Visigothic Catholic king to rule in Toledo.Two other provincial councils of Toledo were the ninth (655) and eleventh (675) while the fourteenth (684) lies somewhere between a provincial and a national assembly. In all, 12 councils of Toledo were national assemblies: third (589), fourth (633), ffth (636), sixth (638), seventh (646), eighth (653), tenth (656), twelfth (681), thirteenth (683), ffteenth (688), sixteenth (693), and seventeenth (694). Some of the councils distinguished themselves more than others in terms of the deep impact they had in the short and long term. A good example is the First Council of Toledo (400) where a detailed condemnation of the Priscillianist heresy was promulgated; its condemnation of the sect had repercussions in Hispania and Gallia. Of great signifcance was the addition of the flioque clause to the Nicaean/Constantinopolitan Creed; it was introduced in Hispania somewhere between 589 and 633.There are still those who defend that it was at the Third Council of Toledo (589).The Fourth Council of Toledo (633) under the leadership of Isidore of Seville made the liturgy in Hispania uniform; it became known later as the Mozarabic Rite during the long Muslim occupation of Hispania.The bishops also passed a series of canons intended to established protocols and rules of deliberation of any future council. The remaining councils were witness oftentimes to cooperation between the bishops and the Visigothic monarchy that was sometimes strained. An important aspect of the councils is that many demonstrate that there was a consistent correspondence between the bishops of Hispania and the See of Rome.The former was always seeking counsel and at times a decisive intervention on a wide array of issues. Another contribution of the councils of Toledo is in canon law as refected in the Liber Iudiciorum. This legal code became a signifcant part of the canon law collection known as the Hispana that subsequently shaped Carolingian codes of canon law and even infuenced the Decretum of Gratian in the Middle Ages. In addition to the Toledo councils many more met in various cities all across Hispania; included are two from the Suevic kingdoms before their assimilation by the Visigoths.The earliest of these met in Elvira (present-day Granada) c. 300–306; some scholars have cast doubt on whether this council ever met, as the canons, they argue, were later assembled into a collection. 73
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Not everyone, however, is ready to follow this line of reasoning about Elvira.There is no question about the councils that followed beginning with Zaragoza I (380) and Toledo I c. 397–400; both predate the emergence of the Suevic and Visigothic kingdoms in Hispania. Zaragoza I has been the object of much discussion in relation to the Priscillianist controversy. Some see it as the frst condemnation of that heresy by a gathering of bishops. I and others have serious reservations; the founder, Priscillian, and the sect are never mentioned explicitly and some of the canons could apply to a variety of groups; none of the canons are clearly anti-Priscillianist. Toledo I is the frst council to specifcally promulgate a list of alleged heretical doctrines of the Priscillianists; some of the accusations are doubtful and seemed to be based on rumor-mongering, disinformation, distortion, and downright ignorance about the sect. Prior to the assimilation of the Suevic kingdom in Gallaecia in 585 by the Visigoths, two signifcant councils met respectively in the Metropolitan See of Braga in 561 and 572; the latter under the watch of the renowned missionary Martin of Braga.The other councils are: Tarragona (516), Gerona (517), Barcelona I and II (540 and 599), Lérida (546),Valencia (549), Narbonne (589), Seville I and II (590 and 619), Zaragoza II and III (592 and 691), Huesca (598), Egara (614), Mérida (666), and Braga III (675), this last one under Visigothic rule.Together all of the councils are indicative that the Church was an important institution in society.Throughout the entire period it proved to be more resilient and stable than the inconstant Visigothic monarchy that made possible the Muslim invasion and conquest of Hispania in 711. Of all the councils, the Third Council of Toledo (589) was the most signifcant; it marks an important demarcation line of church and society. One area that was always a source of great friction was the Arian–Catholic division between Catholic Sueves, Arian Visigoths ruling in Toledo, and the Catholic Hispano-Roman majority. Hermenegild, older brother of Reccared, became Catholic and led a rebellion against his father, the Arian Visigothic King Leovigild. Hermenegild even attempted to get aid from the Byzantines to overthrow Leovigild; the alliance never materialized. Hermenegild was killed by some of Leovigild’s men in 586; contemporary writers John of Biclar and Isidore of Seville describe the rebellious son as “usurper” or “tyrant”, notwithstanding being Catholic. Pope Gregory the Great, however, hailed him a martyr in the Dialogues; Hermenegild was later canonized a saint. Leovigild was now left with his son Reccared (586–601), who at this point was Arian like his father. Leovigild honored Reccared by founding a city that he named Reccopolis (near present-day Alcalá de Henares) in 578. A planned marriage with the Frankish princess Rigunth to solidify political ties with the north never came to fruition. Events suddenly took a different direction; in 586 Leovigild died and Reccared inherited the throne.All the while, Leander of Seville, who had been instrumental in converting Hermenegild to the Catholic faith, had also been working to accomplish the same with Reccared.Around 587, Reccared became Catholic privately; he also ordered a meeting of Arian and Catholic bishops to debate, so he could decide who had the true faith. Gregory of Tours, who is our source, said that the argument that swayed Reccared to reject Arianism was the fact the Arians, unlike Catholics, could not work miracles. Leander of Seville encouraged Reccared to make a public profession of faith in the presence of the nobles, Catholic and Arian clergy, and the people at a council in Toledo. This council became the historic Third Council of Toledo (589) where he formally abjured publicly Arianism and called upon the attending Arian bishops and nobles to do likewise and profess the Nicaean Creed. John of Biclar hailed the council as greater than Nicaea and Chalcedon because in this one the error of Arianism was extinguished once and for all; for good measure this made Reccared greater than Constantine and Maurice.The reality was that Arianism at this point was a spent movement with scarcely any real infuence in Hispania; the conversion of Reccared and the council expedited its total demise in 589. Reccared at the council delivered several speeches where he excoriated the Catholic 74
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bishops for causing the long persistence of Arianism in Hispania. He placed himself at front and center as God’s instrument for fnally bringing unity of the faith and conversion of all peoples in Hispania. On this last point, he singled out the Sueves whom he said had been fnally converted to the Catholic faith. This was a gross misrepresentation by Reccared regarding the Sueves, if we consider the chronology of events. In 585 the Sueve kingdom was conquered by Leovigild; in 586 there is the rebellion of Hermenegild followed by the death of Leovigild that same year. In 587 Reccared had already privately converted to the Catholic faith and in 589 he went public at the council in Toledo. Ever since 550, with the arrival of Martin of Braga, the Sueves had been solidly grounded in the Catholic faith; Leovigild did not have time to convert them to Arianism. It is telling that of all the Arian bishops that attended the council to renounce the heresy, not one of them was the Bishop of Braga. Leovigild apparently did not have the opportunity to appoint an Arian one. After 589 there were a few sporadic revolts against Reccared, the most notable in the Narbonne led by an Arian Bishop Athaloc; it was never at any time a serious threat to the king.The future Visigothic kings and Church right up to the Muslim invasion never relapsed to Arianism again.The newly found unity brought about by Reccared and the Church made possible a cultural ambiance that fostered what some scholars have called the “Isidorian Renaissance” of the seventh century.
Intellectual culture: the Isidorian Renaissance This section will only highlight the major writers of the Suevic-Visigothic period that fourished in the seventh century. Space does not permit us to consider the many others who also had an impact. Isidore of Seville (c. 560s–636) was without question the most renowned bishop, theologian, and writer of the period. He was the younger brother of Leander of Seville whom he succeeded as bishop in Seville in 599 or 600 where he served in that capacity for about 37 years. It was he who played a major role in many areas that had an immediate impact in his lifetime and the entire Middle Ages. Isidore was the guiding force at two infuential provincial councils: the Second Council of Seville (619) and the Fourth Council of Toledo (633). In the frst he led the bishops of Seville in a forceful defense against Monophysite views being propagated in the Visigothic kingdom by an unnamed Syrian who was at the council. In the second council, he led the way to establish liturgical uniformity in Hispania, the rite later called the Visigothic-Mozarabic Rite. Isidore promoted at this council that intense instruction of the clergy be implemented in each diocese.Those who demonstrated intellectual abilities were to be ordained while those of lesser academic inclination were sent to the monasteries. A signifcant aspect of this council under Isidore’s leadership was his condemnation of any attempts to forcefully convert the Jews; this was directed against the policies of several Visigothic monarchs who had adopted harsh measures against Jews. Isidore was not alone in his opposition to coerced baptisms of Jews; the equally famous Braulio of Zaragoza voiced clear opposition to this rash policy in a letter to Pope Honorius I.These and other reforms fowing from the council had a profound and salutary effect on the life of the Church.The numerous writings of Isidore survived and even thrived during the long Muslim centuries within the Church and even among some Muslim intellectuals. Isidore was by far the most prolifc author of the Visigothic period with approximately 17 major treatises to his credit. His works reveal a profound knowledge of aspects of Classical writers, Sacred Scripture, and the Fathers of the Church; it is a tribute to the mentoring he received from his brother Leander and his own initiative. In the medieval times, Isidore became one of the most quoted authors whose select works were read in Ireland, Gallia, North Africa, the Greek East, and in Arabic translation in the Muslim world. His works span the full range of topics: commentaries on the Old and New Testaments, doctrine, ecclesiology, 75
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liturgy, asceticism, penance, cosmology, biblical numerology, allegorical interpretations of over 300 biblical fgures, heretical sects, Christian formation and spirituality, a history to 615 AD, a work against Judaism (not anti-Semitic), lives of illustrious men (33 from Africa and Hispania), a second commentary of the Old Testament, and a history of the Germanic invasion and settlement of Hispania. Isidore’s most famous work, however, was always the Etymologiae, a didactic encyclopedia that is a synthesis of learning of 52 ancient authors and 21 Christian ones from the Bible and the Church Fathers. Wherever it was read it encouraged the reading of classical writers and a deeper understanding of the Christian faith. He began the work in 615 and it was circulating by 621 under the title Origines before the fnal version was completed. Collaborators under his guidance expanded the work signifcantly. Long after Isidore died, his mortal remains were taken in 1063 to León for safekeeping—in the face of Muslim domination—where they remain to this day. He was canonized in 1598 by Pope Clement VIII and declared a doctor of the Church by Pope Innocent XIII in 1722. In 1997 Saint Pope John Paul II declared Isidore the patron saint of the Internet, although it is not yet an offcial patronage. Leander of Seville (c. 540–c. 600), older brother of Isidore, belonged to one of the most famous Christian families of Visigothic Hispania. His father, Severianus, was a prominent member of society; we are not sure of his position, but he was either a civil servant or in the military. Leander and the family were born in Cartagena; somewhere around 551 the family decided to move to Seville. Many scholars propose that the Byzantine conquest of the southeastern Mediterranean coast was the catalyst; it formed part of the Emperor Justinian’s attempt to reestablish the Roman Empire. In Hispania the Byzantines were always seen as hostile outsiders. Leander had a second brother, Fulgentius, and a sister named Florentia. He and his siblings dedicated their lives to the mission of the Church. Fulgentius became Bishop of Astgi, close to Seville. He had books dedicated to him by his renowned brother Isidore. Florentia entered the monastic life; she and the sisters were the recipients of a rule, De institutione virginum, written by Leander. The extent of the infuence of this single extant tract has yet to be satisfactorily explored. Isidore of Seville dedicated a chapter to Leander in De viris illustribus; it is the primary source of knowledge with regard to his biography. Isidore informs us that Leander had a great literary output, but in many instances much of it has not survived.What we do have from Leander is: the aforementioned De institutione virginum, three letters that he exchanged with Gregory the Great, and an important homily on Homelia in laude ecclesiae that he preached at the Third Council of Toledo (589) and which was appended to the council acts. The homily celebrated the triumph of Catholic-Orthodoxy over Arianism.The sermon demonstrates Leander’s knowledge of Sacred Scriptures and the Church Fathers.The theological tracts against Arianism and other abundant letters vanished. Isidore did not neglect to highlight Leander’s decisive role in the offcial conversion of the Visigoths to Catholic-Orthodoxy and their repudiation of Arianism. The events leading up to that climactic moment at the Third Council of Toledo reveal that Leander circulated at the highest levels of politics and ecclesiastical affairs. Leander deftly navigated the precarious political waters of the Arian King Leovigild. This king intended to pass the kingdom to his sons, Hermenegild and Reccared, who at that time were Arians. Hermenegild, the rightful heir apparent, married a very devout Catholic woman, Ingundis, from Gallia, and they settled in Seville where they met Leander. When Leander and Ingundis successfully converted Hermenegild, it infuriated the mother Queen Gothswinda—wife of Leovigild—who was a staunch Arian. The queen persuaded King Leovigild to embark on a persecution to force the Catholics to embrace Arianism.This led to the death of Hermenegild, although no one directly blamed his father Leovigild. It is at this time that Leander went to Constantinople on what some believe was a diplomatic mission; others say he was exiled. Scholars believe there were two trips: 76
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one around 580 as ambassador for Hermenegild to the Emperor and a second in 584, as an exile, as a result of the fall of Seville, the result of Leovigild’s crushing defeat of his son’s rebellion. In any case, it was at Constantinople that Leander met the future Pope Gregory the Great. In exile he spent his time writing anti-Arian works and forging what would become a lifetime friendship with Gregory. Reccared ascended to the throne when his father Leovigild died. Leander was allowed to return to assist the new king to end the Catholic–Arian divide that had torn asunder Visigothic society. Leander went to work on Reccared and within a few months, in 597, the king abjured Arianism privately. Reccared decided, no doubt at Leander’s suggestion, to make an offcial public declaration of faith in what became the Third Council of Toledo (589). Gregory sent a couple of letters to the new Catholic king congratulating him for his conversion and rejection of heresy. Gregory enhanced Leander’s authority in Hispania by conferring on him the “pallium”. Evidence of the deep friendship between Gregory and Leander is the dedicatory preface in honor of Leander, found in Gregory’s famous work, the Moralia, also known as the Commentary on Job. The offcial conversion of the Visigoths undoubtedly was the most signifcant crowning achievement of Leander’s entire ecclesiastical tenure. Upon his death on 13 May 600 he was succeeded by his brother Isidore, who immortalized his brother by crediting him with the conversion of the Visigoths under Reccared. What we know of Ildefonsus of Toledo (607–667) is that he was most certainly of Visigothic ancestry, he abjured Arianism, and professed Nicaean Catholic Orthodoxy. He entered the monastic life where he in time became abbot of a monastery named Agali in the province of Toledo near the primatial city. In 657 Ildefonsus succeeded Eugenius II and was promoted to Metropolitan Bishop of Toledo, which by then was the primatial See of the Visigothic kingdom. He served in that capacity from 657 to 677.We are informed that he founded various monasteries, including one for women. Having come from a fnancially well-off family he devoted what he inherited to the promotion of monasticism.The majority of the information that we have about Ildefonsus’ life comes from a “Eulogy” that was written by Bishop Julian of Toledo (680–690) that was appended to Ildefonsus’ De viris illustribus. Ildefonsus intended his work to be a continuation of the one written earlier by Isidore of Seville. We are informed by Julian that Ildefonsus wrote many excellent works for the edifcation of the faithful. As is the case with so many of these early exegetes we have preserved only a few.We possess several works on baptism and the expectations of discipleship of a newly baptized person—Liber de cognitione baptismi and Liber de progressu spiritualis deserti. They show that Ildefonsus had a profound knowledge of the Church Fathers and the Bible.There is no question that his most infuential and enduring work is the De perpetua virginitate written to oppose those who questioned the perpetual virginity of Mary. Even though there was widespread acceptance of the perpetual virginity of Mary, there were apparently some who harbored doubts.A literary analysis of this work reveals that he followed the methodology called the “synonymous”, pioneered by Isidore.At each affrmation in the work different synonyms were cited to reinforce it; this was a distinctive form of apologetics. Ildefonsus made a signifcant and lasting contribution to Mariology at the theological and popular level. As the Latin Church forged ahead in developing the dogmas of the Assumption of Mary and the Immaculate Conception, this work by Ildefonsus was frequently cited in collections of patristic writers to refne this teaching.The initial work was dedicated to Bishop Quiricus of Barcelona who most believe to be the same one who succeeded Ildefonsus as Bishop of Toledo and who held that offce from 667 to 680.The Spanish delegation at the Council of Trent, which played a dominant role, invoked Ildefonsus, a native son, as an authoritative source in the defense of Mary’s perpetual virginity and related doctrines. There is still a considerable amount of research waiting to be done on its infuence and diffusion in the Middle Ages and beyond. There is a pious legend that the Blessed Virgin 77
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Mary rewarded Ildefonsus for his impassioned defense of her virginity by giving him a chasuble. In almost all future artistic depictions of Ildefonsus he is writing the treatise as the Virgin Mary appears to reward him; the most famous painting is by El Greco. No modern work on the development of Mariology in the Latin Church can ignore this important work. Fructuosus of Braga (c. 610/615–c. 665/666–667) is rare among the Fathers of Hispania in that we have a hagiography, the Vita sancti Fructuosi. It is an anonymous work that has the usual miraculous embellishments that highlight the ascetical qualities of this saint, but is lacking in any biographical data.The date of his birth is placed at 610–615, likely in the Narbonne region where his family was probably of noble status. His father was a duke who served as a soldier and had substantial landholdings in northern Hispania.After his parents died, Fructuosus inherited considerable wealth which he used to promote monasticism throughout Gallaecia in the northwest and in what are now León and Asturias. We are told that Conantius, Bishop of Astorga (some think Palencia) introduced him to a distinctive rigorous form of monasticism that Fructuosus adapted with zeal. Fructuosus founded his frst monastery (a cenobium) at Compludo in the Bierzo region near present-day Astorga. The cenobium was named after the martyrs Justus and Pastor; tradition says they were martyred on that very site. For the community, Fructuosus wrote a distinctly rigorous rule, the Regula monachrum Complutensis, that some believed built upon the ascetic tradition introduced by his predecessor Martin of Braga. He expanded his missionary work to Baetica where he founded two monasteries.The majority of his monastic foundations were confned to the north, however. It was not in the Narbonne where his reputation was formed as a monastic founder, but in Gallaecia as Bishop of Braga. At the Tenth Council of Toledo, 1 December 656, he was formally promoted from Bishop of Dumium (Braga) to Metropolitan Bishop of the See of Braga. He was following again in the footsteps of the original founder of Dumium, Martin of Braga who was also Metropolitan Bishop of Braga. Fructuosus had some confrontations with King Reccesvinth because the king denied him a request to travel to the Orient—as so many western clerics did at this time. It is said that the king feared that he might not return.The relationship was not always confrontational; for example, the king supported Fructuosus fully in his desire to reform monasticism in Gallaecia. In 654 and 656 Fructuosus became embroiled in another controversy that led him to depose the bishops of Dumium and Braga, Ricimir and Potamius, respectively. Fructuosus then took the unusual step of holding both positions simultaneously. We have no real way to measure the success of Fructuosus’ reforms, although his enduring memory and reputation hints at his having some success.Although the Breviary of Braga places his death as 16 April 665, some scholars are hesitant to put any credence on the document while others see no viable reason to reject it outright.According to tradition he was buried in the Dumium/Braga region; the exact location is unspecifed, though some think it was in Montelios, Portugal. The sum of what we have of Fructuosus’ literary legacy is: a monastic rule for his monks at Compludo, the Regula monachorum Complutensis, and a second one entitled Regula monastica communis, to which in later versions a “Pact” was appended.This form of Pactual monasticism has generated considerable discussion among scholars.The Fructuosan authorship of the second rule has been called into serious question in our time even though tradition always upheld it.There are two letters from Fructuosus, one to Braulio of Zaragoza and the other to King Reccesvinth. The Regula monachorum Complutensis teaches a most rigorous asceticism; some modern monastics have questioned whether anyone could have survived its expectations. Nevertheless, the rule is heavily steeped in the sayings of the Desert Fathers that were brought to Dumium/Braga by Martin of Braga and John Cassian. Maybe the extreme rules were intended to be an ideal to set the bar high, knowing that the best one could do was to aspire as much as possible to fulfll it. Whoever wrote the Regula monachorum Complutensis, Fructuosus or not, had an impressive 78
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command of Sacred Scripture.The Regula monachorum Complutensis, extremities aside, contains all of the salient features of the monastic life: long hours of prayer, mediation, reading, manual labor, and the necessary chores in the monastery. It is believed to have been written around 630 to 635. The Regula monastica communis is dated to about 660. Those who think that it was not written entirely by Fructuosus argue that he nevertheless contributed to the initial version.The rule speaks a great deal about abbots and the challenges of how to deal with those seeking to enter the community.The “Pact” that was appended to the Regula monastica communis seems to have been unique to this monastery and to Gallaecian monasticism.The “Pact” consists of a covenant between abbots and monks and what to do when it was violated. One feature that stands out is that it limited the authority of the abbot. As regards the two extant letters, their authorship by Fructuosus remains unquestioned. Fructuosus of Braga was long remembered after his death; devotion to his cult remained constant throughout the entire Middle Ages, more so than to that of his predecessor Martin of Braga, whose cult was limited only to pockets in Gallaecia. Julian of Toledo (642–690) was a reputable theologian and Archbishop of Toledo from 680 to 690. He was born into a Jewish family that had converted to the Catholic faith. He received a distinguished education in Toledo under the equally well-known Eugene II of Toledo and his esteemed successor Ildefonsus of Toledo. Julian spread his infuence by presiding over the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, and ffteenth Councils of Toledo, which respectively met in 681, 683, 684, and 688. Julian became embroiled in a controversy with Rome that elicited a strong response on his part against the popes Leo II and Benedict II and their theologians. It was all triggered when he published his frst Apologeticum fdei, which condemned Monothelitism regarding the two wills—human and divine—of Christ. Julian’s work was criticized by Roman theologians who insinuated that Julian might have been guilty of the same heretical errors that he was allegedly repudiating. In his response Julian fatly accused the popes and theologians that they were ignorant and had no clue what they were talking about. Julian in the end was correct; he was far and away the better of any of his critics in terms of theological knowledge. Julian, however, was not at his diplomatic best in his rebuttal. Some commentators read into this exchange a deep rift between the bishops of Hispania—via Julian—and Rome.They think that Hispania was on the verge of a schism that could have led to the isolation of the Church in Hispania. Upon closer scrutiny this interpretation does not hold up.There never was any threat of a schism and no isolation ever materialized between the two parties. It was a family squabble that was quickly put behind them by both sides; both in the end agreed on the condemnation of the heresy in question. Julian’s theology was orthodox in every respect. As primate of Hispania, Julian elevated the prestige of the See of Toledo. The particulars of his life are sketchy, as is so with many of these infuential individuals. It is regretful that only 5 of 17 works attributed to Julian were preserved. In addition to the fve extant works a brief Elogium Ildefonsi and a poem have been recently recovered.The brilliance of his intellectual skill is on display in several works: the De sextae aetatis comprobatione was intended to persuade Jews that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent, to move them to conversion.The work that got him into the heated exchange with Rome was the Apologeticum de tribus capitulis (the frst Apologeticum was lost), which he sent to Rome in 686 in full confdence that he would impress the pope with his theological acumen. The strong critique that he received instead was a shock to his intellect and pride, which is why he responded so strongly; his reputation was on the line.The work entitled Prognosticum futuri saeculi, a manual on the future life, became his most read and diffused, long after the Visigothic kingdom was gone.A second work, the Anti-keimena seu liber de contrariis, also enjoyed extensive circulation beyond Hispania. The Historia Wambae and the Ars grammatica survived and were infuential.The Ars grammatica some think was not written by Julian but by one of his pupils, while others defend Julian’s authorship. 79
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Regardless of who wrote it, the author had a profound knowledge of the classics. Let us recall the deep connections between Hispania and Byzantium; the latter was the depository of classical antiquity. Julian and his contemporaries apparently had access to classical and patristic writers and much more than we are willing to concede. Julian is credited for carrying out revisions of the highly infuential collection of canon law known as the Hispana. He even had a hand in shaping the Visigothic-Mozarabic liturgy. After his death his cult began to emerge in the midninth century in Toledo where he was buried in a church dedicated to St. Leocadia; his feast is recorded in the calendars of Santo Domingo de Silos (Burgos) and in Oña, (Burgos). Braulio of Zaragoza (c. 585/595–651) was yet another of the celebrated and prolifc authors of seventh-century Visigothic Hispania. Briefy, his surviving literary output consists of 32 letters that he exchanged with a wide variety of people.There is also the very well-known Vita sancti Aemiliani and the lesser-known Hymnus de s.Aemiliano. Braulio, on account of his eminent reputation, was personal adviser to three Visigothic kings: Chinthila, Chindasvinth, and Reccesvinth. Under Recceswinth, Braulio, it is believed, had a hand in bringing together the famous legal code known as the Liber Iudiciorum. Braulio had personal contact and correspondence with Isidore of Seville. Ildephonsus of Toledo enshrined Braulio in chapter eleven of his De viris Illustribus where we fnd some important details about his life. Braulio was from an illustrious ecclesiastical family that fourished in northeastern Spain. His father Gregory was a bishop, some think in Osma. It may come as a surprise to some that his father was a bishop, but the question of strict celibacy was hardly settled yet.We fnd in the Visigothic Councils that married men, usually of the upper class, were allowed to become clergy on the condition that they led a celibate life after ordination.The celibacy requirement, as one can imagine, was diffcult to observe and to enforce. John, his older brother, had been bishop of Zaragoza before Braulio, and Zaragoza was the pre-eminent bishopric in the Ebro valley, notably under their tenure.There are some who maintain that his brother Fronimian became abbot of a monastery also in the Ebro valley. In the collection of letters there is one addressed to two women, Basila and Pomponia.There is disagreement whether they were his birth sisters or only in the religious sense. It has become evident that Braulio was raised in a literate environment that is refected in his writings. During his time in Seville, he came under the tutelage of Isidore who led him to higher levels of his education formation. Braulio exhibits more than a passing familiarity with classical writers and the Church Fathers. Braulio is credited for being the person who encouraged Isidore to write his famous Etymologiae. Another informative detail that reinforces his intellectual background is that Braulio amassed a large personal library. Braulio, similar to Isidore, was an infuential presence in several councils held in Toledo where he was personally present: IV (633), V (636), and VI (638). One of his most notable interventions was what to do with baptized Jews that relapsed to their former Jewish faith. There was a deep rift between the bishops; some wanted to adopt a harsh policy toward them, while those represented by Braulio promoted a patient and non-coercive approach.The issue is present in the canons of Toledo VI (638). Pope Honorius I was drawn into the confict by the militant faction who accused Braulio and his supporters of being derelict on this issue.The pope wrote a letter to Braulio, which we do not have, where the pontiff sided with Braulio’s opponents and their militant views.We can reconstruct in reverse what the pontiff said in Braulio’s response in Letter 21. While he observed all of the niceties due to the pope in the opening statements, Braulio did not hesitate to forcefully deny charges of laxity and negligence of duty. He sternly corrected the pope for believing that any type of force or pressure was the policy to adopt with the Jews. Braulio appealed to Scripture, the Church Fathers, and common sense. It is lamentable that we do not have a response to Braulio from Honorius.What we do know is that the evidence suggests that the proposed harsh policy was never fully implemented.The 80
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rest of Braulio’s letters written to people of varied backgrounds reveal a compassionate attentive pastor. His pastoral role is in full display in seven letters that he wrote to people mourning the death of loved ones. Among his other writings is the Vita Sancti Aemiliani that is unique in hagiographies from the Visigothic period; there are few of them. If we compare it to the Vitas sanctorum patrum Emeretensium which has a near absence of miracles, the Vita Sancti Aemiliani is replete with miracles. Saint Aemilianus lived in the upper Ebro valley in the second half of the sixth century. Braulio also wrote a hymn in his honor.At a later date Eugenius of Toledo wrote a Mass for Aemilianus that encouraged his cult in Hispania. Lastly, Braulio’s List of the Books of Isidore of Seville is an important source of the bishop of Seville. Other luminaries that deserve consideration could not be included in this essay.Among them are: Baquiarius,Avitus of Braga, Paulus Orosius, Licinianus of Cartagena, Sisebutus Rex, John of Biclar,Taio of Zaragoza, Eugene of Toledo I, II, III, Hydatius of Chaves, Paulus Orosius, Gregory of Elvira, Pacianus of Barcelona, Potamius of Lisbon,Valerius of Bierzo, Prudentius, Priscillian of Avila, and Martin of Braga (who is already commented upon in this chapter in the Sueves section). For those who are interested, there are many excellent studies and/or editions on all of them.
Visigothic–Mozarabic liturgy The Visigothic–Mozarabic rite developed over an extended period of time. It has been identifed by various names by liturgical scholars:Visigothic,Toledan, Isidorian, Hispanic, and Mozarabic. The names are useful in that they signal important stages of development that continued in earnest in the post-Visigothic period, even in the late twentieth century. Our concern here is only with Late Antique/Suevic-Visigothic Hispania. In the Hispano-Roman Suevic-Visigothic councils spanning the Council of Zaragoza (380) to the Seventeenth Council of Toledo of 694, the Rite experienced several reforms and adaptations that integrated aspects of the Gallican, Roman, and Byzantine liturgies. One of the driving forces that set it in motion was the challenge of the Arian church in Hispania from the fourth century to its offcial extirpation in 589. The Arian rejection of the Catholic/Orthodox doctrine of the Trinity was of paramount importance, which is why the Nicaean/Constantinopolitan Creed was added to the Rite by King Reccared at the Third Council of Toledo (589). At the council Reccared said that he did this to bring the Church in Hispania into conformity with the liturgy of the East (Constantinople) where Arianism long ago was rejected. In addition, all of the canons of the Ecumenical Councils that had met up to that time were appended to the Toledo council of 589 for dissemination throughout Hispania to advance its unifcation with Rome and Constantinople. Many of the canons from these eastern councils address liturgical discipline.A unique alteration to the Creed in Hispania was the insertion of the Filioque somewhere between the sixth and seventh centuries that in time became fxed in the Creed of the Latin Church and became a source of confict with the Greek churches that contributed eventually to the separation between the Latin and Greek churches; the latter has never accepted the alteration as legitimate. Similar assimilations to the liturgy of Gallaecia during the contemporaneous Sueve kingdom in Braga were introduced by Martin of Braga at the Second Council of Braga (572) through what became known as the Capitula Martini. It is a sizeable collection of canons from the eastern councils that contained among many other things liturgical regulations that contributed to the development of the Braga Rite. Martin intended to bring the Church in Gallaecia into greater conformity with the practices of Rome and Constantinople. The Braga Rite and the Visigothic– Mozarabic Rite, although having some differences, form part of an organic development of the liturgical rites of Hispania.The Braga Rite in Gallaecia was assimilated into the 81
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Visigothic–Mozarabic Rite to bring about liturgical harmony for the Church in the seventh century.This latter stage was facilitated by two decisive events: the conquest and absorption of the Sueve kingdom by the Visigoths in 585 under the Arian King Leovigild and the conversion from of Arianism to the Catholic faith in 589 by his son Reccared. The next important step for the Braga Rite and the Visigothic–Mozarabic Rite occurred at the Fourth Council of Toledo (633). Even though Isidore of Seville infuenced signifcantly the shaping of the Rite, his brother Leander also made contributions. There is no question that Isidore contributed much to making the Visigothic rite increasingly uniform in seventh-century Hispania through this important council. It was at this council that the Braga Rite was absorbed by the Visigothic–Toledan Rite, as mandated by the council. The Metropolitan Bishop of Braga agreed that the liturgy in Braga should form one Rite with the one from Toledo, the latter representing the liturgical traditions of Rome and Constantinople. Notwithstanding this development, the Rite of Braga was always thought of locally as not being simply a mere copy of the Toledan Rite. Even though the Arian phase of Hispania had ended and there was no perceived resurgent Arianism, the road to uniformity nonetheless remained a pressing agenda of the bishops.The bishops could not imagine how important this would become for the Church when it faced the greater challenge of the strict Monotheism of the Muslims. The imposition by Pope Gregory VII of the Roman Rite precipitated the suppression of the Visigothic–Mozarabic and Braga Rites eventually in all of the Christian kingdoms.The pope commissioned the Cluniacs to impose the Roman Rite.Toledo was the only place where the Visigothic–Mozarabic Rite persisted. Ironically, the papacy proved to be the greater threat to the two Rites. Some scholars believe that the term “Mozarabic Rite” began to be used during the reform of Pope Gregory VII. The Mozarabic and Braga Rites were rehabilitated by Pope John Paul II in the latter half of the twentieth century in Toledo and Salamanca and in Braga, respectively.
Demise and dissolution of Visigothic Hispania An Arab and Berber invasion in 711 from North Africa into Hispania was precipitated by an internal struggle for the throne among Visigothic factions. When King Wittiza died in 710, Roderic (710–711) seized power; his action was not unanimously accepted as legitimate. Roderic was defeated by the Muslim forces of Al-Tariq, which brought about the fall of the capital of Toledo and the rapid collapse of Visigothic rule. Politically there was such disarray that a unifed effective resistance against the Muslims could not be mounted. The last two Visigothic monarchs to offer any counteroffensive were Achila (710–713) and Ardo (713–720) who were in Catalonia and Septimania until 720, but their efforts were feeble against the superior Muslim onslaught. Recent assessments of the Muslim Invasion have generated some highly questionable interpretations. One proposes that there was never any invasion; rather it was a migration of North Africans into the peninsula. Another is that it was not an Arab Muslim invasion, but was instead a North African Berber expansion into the peninsula. The frst is not supported by the sources,Arab or Christian, and it has gained no signifcant endorsement among scholars.The second is problematic, since the invading army was not made up of Berbers exclusively; rather it was a mixture of urban and rural Muslims from North Africa and the Middle East.The one cultural artifact in the Visigothic realm that the conquest and ensuing subjugation by the Muslims disrupted but did not extinguish completely was the intellectual culture produced by the Church.The Church, notwithstanding the new Islamic order, proved resilient; it emerged victorious as the Christian armies of the Reconquest slowly reclaimed the lands lost, culminating in 1492. 82
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Bibliography Ballesteros Mateos, J. El tratado “De virginitate Sanctae Mariae” de San Ildefonso de Toledo. Estudios sobre el estilo sinonímico latino.Toledo: Editorial Seminario Conciliar-Estudio Teológico San Ildefonso, 1985. Barlow, Claude W. (ed). Martini Episcopi Bracarensis Opera Omnia. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1950. Barlow, Claude W. Iberian Fathers, Volume 2: Braulio of Saragossa/Fructuosus of Braga. The Fathers of the Church, vol. 63.Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1969. Barlow, Claude W. Iberian Fathers: Martin of Braga, Paschasius of Dumium, Leander of Seville.The Fathers of the Church, 62, vol. 1.Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1969. Bishko, Charles Julian.“Hispanic Monastic Pactualism: the Controversy Continues”. Classical Folia (1973): 173–185. Bishop, Edmund. “Spanish Symptoms”. In Liturgica Historica.Papers on the Liturgy and Religious Life of the Western Church, 165–202. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1918, the essay in this volume, “More Spanish Symptoms,” was written by G. Mercati, 203–210. Braegelman, S.A. The Life and Writings of Saint Ildefonsus of Toledo. The Catholic University of America: Studies in Medieval History, new series, 4.Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1942. Burrus, Virginia. The Making of a Heretic. Gender, Authority, and the Priscillianist Controversy. Berkeley: University of California, 1995. Campos Ruíz, J. and Isamel Roca Melia. Santos Padres Españoles II: San Leandro, San Isidoro, San Fructuoso. Reglas monásticas de la españa visigoda. Los tres libros de las “Sentencias”. Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 321. Madrid: La Editorial Católica, 1971. Chadwick, Henry. Priscillian of Avila. The Occult and the Charismatic in the Early Church. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. Codoñer Merino, Carmen (ed.). El “De viris illustribus” de Ildefonso de Toledo. Acta Salmanticensia. flosofía y letras, 65. Salamanca, 1972. Collins, Roger. The Arab Conquest of Spain, 710–797. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Collins, Roger. Visigothic Spain, 409–711. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Custodio Vega, Angel. El “De institutione virginum et contemptu mundi” de San Leandro de Sevilla. Scriptores Ecclesiastici Hispano-Latini Veteris Medii Aevi, 16–17. Monasterii Escurialensis: Typis Augustinianis, 1948. Díaz y Díaz, Manuel Cecilio. La vida de San Fructuosos de Braga (estudio y edición crítica). Braga: Impresa do Diário do Minho, 1974. de la Díaz, Pablo C. “Los distintos ‘grupos sociales’ del norte hispano y la invasión de los Suevos”. Studia Historica: Historia Antigua (Salamanca) 1 (1983): 75–87. Díaz, Pablo de la C. El Reino Suevo, 411–585. Akal Universitaria, Serie Reinos y Dominios en la Historia de España, 312. Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 2011. Domínguez del Val, U. Leandro de Sevilla y su lucha contra el Arrianismo. Biblioteca de Visionarios Heterodoxos y Marginados: segunda series, 12. Madrid: Editorial Nacional, 1981. Escribano Paño, María Victoria. Iglesia y Estado en el certamen priscilianista:“causa ecclesiae et iudicium publicum” Zaragoza, 1988. Fear, Andrew T. The Life of St. Aemilian the Confessor in Lives of the Visigothic Fathers. Translated Texts for Historians, 26. Liverpool: University of Liverpool, 1997. Férotin, Marius. Le “Liber ordinum” en usage dans l’église Wisigothique et Mozarabe d’Espagne du V au IX siècle. Monumenta Ecclesiae Liturgica V. Paris, 1904. Férotin, Marius. Le Liber Mozarabicus Sacramentorum et les manuscrits mozarabes. Réimpression de l’édition de 1912 et bibliographie générale de la liturgie hispanique. Bibliotheca Ephemerides Liturgicae, Subsidia 78 = Instrumenta Liturgica Quarreriensa, 4. Roma: C.L.V. – Edizioni Liturgiche, 1995. Ferreiro, Alberto. “The Missionary Labors of Martin of Braga in 6th. century Galicia”. Studia Monastica 23.1 (1981): 11–26. Ferreiro, Alberto. “Linguarum diversitate: Babel and Pentecost in Leander’s homily at the Third Council of Toledo”. In XIV Centenario del Concilio III de Toledo 589-1989, 237–248. Toledo 10–14, May. Toledo, 1991. Ferreiro, Alberto. “Braga and Tours: Some Observations on Gregory’s De virtutibus sancti Martini (1.11)”. Journal of Early Christian Studies 3.2 (1995): 195–210. Ferreiro, Alberto. “Veremundu r(eg)e: Revisiting an Inscription at San Salvador de Vairão (Portugal)”. Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 116 (1997): 263–272.
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Alberto Ferreiro Ferreiro,Alberto.“St. Braulio of Zaragoza’s Letter 21 to Pope Honorius I Regarding Lapsed Baptized Jews”. Sacris Erudiri 49 (2009): 75–95. Ferreiro, Alberto. “Sanctissimus idem princeps sic venerandum concilium ad loquitur dicens: King Reccared’s Discourses at the Third Council of Toledo (589)”. Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum 46 (2014): 27–52. Ferreiro,Alberto.“Quia pax et caritas facta est: Unity and Peace in Leander’s Homily at the Third Council of Toledo (589)”. Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum 48 (2016): 87–108. Ferreiro,Alberto. Epistolae Plenae:The Correspondence of the Bishops of Hispania with the Bishops of Rome:Third through Seventh Centuries. Medieval and Early Modern Iberia Series, 74. Brill, 2020. Fontaine, Jacques. Isidore de Seville et la culture classique dans l’espagne wisigothique. 3 vols. Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1983. García Moreno, Luis A. Historia de España Visigoda. Madrid: Cátedra, 2008. García,V. and Julio Campos. San Ildefonso de Toledo. La virginidad perpetua de Santa María: El cononcimiento del bautismo, El camino del desierto. Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 320: Santos Padres Españoles, 1. Madrid: La Editorial Católica, 1971. Goffart, Walter. Barbarians and Romans.A. D. 418–584.The Techniques of Accomodation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Gómez Cobo, Antonio. La homelia in laude ecclesiae de Leandro de Sevilla. Estudio de valoración. Murcia: Espigas, 1999. González Salinero, Raúl. Las conversiones forzosas de los judíos en el reino visigodo. Rome: CSIC-Escuela Española de Historia y Arqueología en Roma, 2000. Hillgarth, Jocelyn N. and W. Levison Bernhard Bischoff (eds.). Iulianus Toletanus. Opera, I. Prognosticon futuri saeculi libri tres.Apologeticum de tribus capitulis. De comprobatione sextae aetatis. Historia Wambae regis. Epistula ad Modoenum. Corpus Christianorum. Series Latina, 115.Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 1976. Ivorra Robla, Adolfo. Liturgia Hispano-Mozárabe. Biblioteca Litúrgica. Barcelona: Centre de Pastoral Litúrgica, 2017. Janini Cuesta, José. Liber missarum de Toledo y libros místicos I Texto (Cod.Toledo Bibl. Capit. 35.3) II Introducción. Libros místicos (Cod.Toledo 35.4/35.6/35.7/33.2) y Fragm. Museo Concilios). Series Litúrgica. Fuentes III-VIII.Toledo: Instituto de Estudios Visigóticos-Mozárabes de Toledo, 1982–1983. Jimenez Garnica, A.M. Orígenes y desarrollo del Reino Visigodo de Tolosa.Valladolid, Universidad de Valladolid, 1983. King, Archibald A. Liturgies of the Primatial Sees. Bonn:Verlag Nova & Vetera, 2005,“Rite of Toledo”, 457– 469 and “Rite of Braga”, 155–285. Martín-Iglesias, José Carlos and Valeriano Yarza Urquiola (eds.). Iulianus Toletanus, Felix Toletanus, Iulianus Toletanus (Ps.). Opera, II. Elogium Ildefonsi, Vita Iuliani (auctore Felice Toletano), Antikeimena, Fragmenta, Ordo annorum mund. Corpus Christianorum. Series Latina, 115A-B.Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2014. Miguel Franco, Ruth. Braulio de Zaragoza, Epístolas, Akal: Clásicos Latinos Medievales y Renacentistas 30. Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 2015. Nock, Francis Clare. The Vita Sancti Fructuosi: Text with a Translation, Introduction, and Commentary. The Catholic University of America: Studies in Medieval History, new series, 7. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America, 1946. Orlandis, José. Historia del reino visigodo español. Madrid: Rialp, 1988. Orlandis, José and Domingo Ramos-Lissón. Historia de los Concilios de la España Romana y Visigoda. EUNSA: Universidad de Navarra, 1986. Riesco Terrero, Luis. Epistolario de San Braulio: Introducción, edición crítica y traducción.Anales de la Universidad Hispalense: Serie: Filosofía y Letras, vol. 31. Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla, 1975. Stancati, Tommaso. Julian of Toledo: Prognosticum Futuri Saeculi/Foreknowledge of the World to Come. Ancient Christian Writers, 63. New York:The Newman Press, 2010. Stocking, Rachel L. Bishops, Councils, and Consensus in the Visigothic Kingdom, 589–633. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 2000. Teillet, Suzanne. Des goths à la nation gothique. Les origines de l'idée de nation en Occident du Ve au VIIe siècle. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1984. Thompson, Edward A. The Goths in Spain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. Thompson, Edward A. “The Conversion of the Spanish Suevi to Catholicism”. In Visigothic Spain: New Approaches, 77–92. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Thompson, Edward A. Romans and Barbarians. The Decline of the Western Empire. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1982.
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The Visigothic and Suevic kingdoms Tranoy, Alain. La Galice Romane. Recherches sur le nord-ouest de la péninsule Ibérique dans l'Antiquité. Publications du Centre Pierre David, 7 and Collection de la Maison des pays ibériques, 7. Paris: Difussion de Boccard, 1981. Vázquez de Parga, Luis. Vita S. Emiliani. Sancti Braulionis Caesaragustani Episcopi. Madrid: CSIC, 1943. Velázquez Arenas, J. Leandro de Sevilla: De la instrucción de las virgenes y desprecio del mundo (Traducción, studio y notas). Corpus Patristicum Hispanium, 1. Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1979. Vives, José, et al. Concilios Visigóticos e Hispano-Romanos. España Cristiana,Textos 1. Barcelona Madrid: CSIC, 1963.
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6 POWER AND POLITICS IN IBERIAN SOCIETIES, CA. 1035–1516 Teoflo F. Ruiz
Power is an elusive term with diverse semantic meanings. The different understandings of what power stands for is often dictated by social location, political reality, and necessity. Power: at what different levels (social, economic, and political) is it articulated? Who exercises it? Who is beholden to it? In the political arena, power is often exercised in harsh and violent terms or, more subtly, through propaganda, representation, and display. Power is, of course, also part of quotidian human relations that remain “political” even though they may be “personal”. Sometimes, power may be asserted in a fairly benign fashion under the pretense that it is wielded for the beneft of the “people” (enlightened despots, dictators and the like, or troubled presidents often do that).Yet, power is never innocent or, truly, for the beneft of the many. Even though power has a wide range of meanings, for the purpose of this article I have set aside the broader defnitions of power advanced by Foucault and others (power as present in all human relations) and have focused on power as articulated through—and in the exercise of— politics.That is, power as exercised by a political actor or actors on others; power as held by the few over the many. Sometimes that power is wielded with the acquiescence or the delegation of it by those ruled through pseudo-electoral means or, in the Middle Ages, by diverse forms of representation (cortes or corts in the medieval Iberian realms) and/or consent. In certain cases, it rests upon appeals to the sacred or deployed by naked and arbitrary force.1 Whether violently or in more “benign” forms of coercion, the exercise of power is veiled by edifying discourses (“we are fghting for peace or to give freedom to our enemies”) or appeals to religion, morality, identity, or a discourse of survival against enemies (whether real or invented). The latter is often a complex combination of military force, diplomacy, morality, and other actions that underpin authority.That is, you may crush or attempt to crush an enemy through sheer military power (“we will … destroy North Korea”, the forty-ffth President of the US, Donald Trump, is said to have barked), but behind the scenes diplomatic efforts are conducted by those with cooler heads, offering to their rivals better economic terms, a preservation of the status quo, and other deals that may bring the enemy to the table.And then there is the far more complex and imprecise task of defning and explicating the workings of power in the inner workings of relations of authority and hegemony within a realm, a country, a nation, the family, or quotidian social and economic relations. 86
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Here I focus on the Iberian Peninsula in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, with emphasis on the Spanish realms of Castile and the Crown of Aragon. Full descriptions and explications of the workings of power of Iberian history over la longue durée are, of course, impossible and undesirable in an article-sized chapter. Each circumstance, each locality, each chronological period is sui generis and, although there are recognizable patterns running through the political history of Iberia, variations are determined by local conditions and events. In this chapter, I have neglected Portugal and Navarre.While the history of these two kingdoms is, of course, a very worthy topic, Portugal became a kingdom quite late (in the twelfth century), and royal ideology and ceremonies closely resembled or included variations from the patterns of neighboring Spanish kingdoms. Moreover, by the mid-thirteenth century, Portugal ceased to be a full protagonist in the so-called Reconquest. By the ffteenth century, although still deeply connected to the political history of the Peninsula, Portugal embraced its Atlantic and South-Asian destinies, becoming a secondary player in the politics of Iberia until its union with Spain under Philip II in 1580. In the case of Navarre, its political history fuctuated between those of France and Castile until its annexation by Castile in the early 1520s. The study of power is also the study of resistance. Resistance provides us with an inverted image of power, allowing us to gauge how effective or ineffective the articulation of authority had been. It would be impossible and extremely tedious, however, to try to provide an overall political history of the Spanish realms in the period. Rather, here I seek to assess those historical moments and events that shaped the devolution of power in the diverse Spanish realms in the late Middle Ages.Through the use of case studies, vignettes, and micro-historical analysis, one may be able to offer a comparative study of the different polities found in the Peninsula and of their political strategies and ideas about how to exercise and negotiate the workings of power between ca. 1035 and 1516. Castile was not the same as Catalonia or other entities in the Crown of Aragon in the Middle Ages, or even today. We must abandon the idea that Iberia was a political, linguistic, or administratively cohesive world in the Middle Ages or even later. Instead, I emphasize the differences (and similarities) that existed between the Islamic realms (above all Granada), Castile, and the Crown of Aragon (the Crown of Aragon’s individual components were, as shall be seen, also politically and culturally different). Rather than a realm-by-realm account, I examine distinct social orders and their relations to power. Accounts and, hopefully, insights into the diverse workings of power may provide some understanding of how medieval Iberian rulers and subjects thought about and acted (or failed to act) toward political power. And, far more important, how they articulated and/or resisted the exercise of authority in the period.
Introduction Until the mid-1030s, the Cordoba Caliphate enjoyed political and military hegemony throughout Iberia. Its collapse around 1035 led to the emergence of a series of petty Islamic kingdoms (the kingdoms of taifas), each of them too weak to withstand Christian advances. The fragmentation of Islamic power created the context for the rise of small Christian kingdoms in the northern parts of the Iberian Peninsula to hegemony, even though two successive invasions from Berber kingdoms in North Africa, by the Almoravids and the Almohads, to an extent thwarted Christian gains.These new Christian political players, some of them quite dynamic and innovative, redrew the political map of the Peninsula. In many respects, what we know today as Iberia remained politically essentially the same until the late eleventh century when Portugal became a separate realm and until 1212 when an international Christian army defeated the Almohads at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa.This marked the end of any hope for an Islamic revival in the 87
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Peninsula, even though the Marinids and Nasrids (both originally from North Africa) often held their own against Christian attacks. By 1212, from west to east the political map of the Peninsula looked roughly as follows. Portugal in the western part of the Peninsula became a kingdom formally in 1128. Occupying the central parts of the Iberian Peninsula was a composite monarchy, known to us as CastileLeón.With the largest demographic advantages and, to a certain extent, fscal resources, CastileLeón had always had imperial and hegemonic ambitions, especially during the reigns of Alfonso VI (1065–1109) and his grandson Alfonso VII (1126–1157). Although at times the realm was fragmented by the practice of divisible inheritance into its earliest component (Galicia,Asturias, León, Castile, etc.), the kingdom of Castile-León was offcially united under Ferdinand III in 1230 and remained fairly whole administratively for the rest of its history. In the eastern regions of the Peninsula conditions were quite different.The marriage of Petronila, the sole heir of the kingdom of Aragon with Ramón Berenguer IV, count of Catalonia (1131–1162) led to a new political entity quite different from its counterparts elsewhere in the Iberian Peninsula or in the medieval West.Within the Crown of Aragon (as the collective union of the eastern realm was known), each of the political entities—the kingdom of Aragon, the County of Catalonia (or Barcelona), and the kingdom of Valencia (after 1238)—had their own parliaments (corts, cortes), their own distinct languages, and laws.The kings of the Crown of Aragon had to deal individually with each of these entities.That political reality limited their ability to exercise power in the eastern kingdoms until the Bourbons’ harsh centralizing reforms in the early eighteenth century. One other political entity that survived the collapse of the Caliphate and the crushing defeat at Las Navas de Tolosa was the kingdom of Granada. Emerging as a rather formidable polity in terms of its economic and cultural achievements (trade with North Africa through the port of Málaga, a thriving center of learning and art) and protected by the rugged territory and mountains encircling the kingdom, Granada emerged from the debacle in 1212 to remain the last bastion of Islam in the Peninsula. Its complicated politics and succession practices would have made it (and eventually did) an easy target for Christian ambitions, were it not that Castile, its main adversary, was mired in civil confict from the mid-thirteenth century until the reign of the Catholic Monarchs. By 1492, Granada, as was the case with Navarre a few years later, would be integrated into the larger Castilian royal project for some sort of peninsular unity. As can be easily seen, these diverse political entities had distinct histories. Each of them yielded—within general patterns of rulership common to the entire medieval West—unique ways of articulating political power.What were these ways of doing so?
King and subjects: the workings and representations of royal power The power of kings (or queens in the case of Castile and a few other European polities) developed slowly throughout the Middle Ages.The issue of how to legitimize royal power became an important part of political discourse.Whether, following Walter Ullmann’s (1975) old formulation, the power of kings came from God (the so-called descending theory of power) or whether it came from “election by the people”, by which we mean the leading people in the realm (the ascending theory of power), it was of the greatest importance to trace lineages of power to undisputable sources of authority. In the Iberian kingdoms, variations of these two approaches existed or were, oftentimes, confated into uneasy compromise to underpin claims to political power. The weight of the Visigothic inheritance, stronger in Castile-León than in other peninsular realms or, even more so in its Asturian iteration, dictated, to a large extent, the nature of royal power. One must be cautious of all these facile explanations or of attributing power solely to the king and crown.As Rita 88
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Costa Gomes (2003), following Norbert Elias’ seminal work on court society, pointed out some years ago, the making of kingly power was closely related to the court and to the nobles and other worthies who were indispensable for the construction of kingly authority.2
Appeals to the sacred Following from the examples of France and England (and to a certain extent the Empire), one has come to conceive of medieval royal power as fully imbricated in sacred rituals. Coronation, usually taking place in an acknowledged ritual place (Reims, Canterbury, or Rome), by a high church dignitary and anointing with holy oil were seen as examples of the manner in which royal power was an articulation of God’s power.While I reject the positing of the French model as the norm, nonetheless, the long weight of medieval historiography, with its privileging of the French and English models, has dictated how we see kings and their ascent to the throne. If to that we add the twelfth-century French and English royal claims (though appealing to earlier precedents) to having thaumaturgical powers (the ability to cure scrofula by the royal touch), then we have a clear picture of what the model for sacred kingship looked like. Nothing could be farther from the truth on the Iberian Peninsula, or as we know through Jaume Aurell’s (2020) recent work, elsewhere in the West, where patterns of royal political representation varied from realm to realm.
Islam in Spain: Granada and personal rule We ought not to proceed without a brief glance at the Islamic kingdom of Granada. Muslim political patterns and the manner in which power was held and wielded always had a direct impact on Christian articulations of power.This was most certainly the case with Islamic Spain after the collapse of the Caliphate.Abandoning claims to direct descent from the Prophet, as the Umayyads had done, taifa rulers, and then the rulers of Granada based their power on either charismatic kingship (what Clifford Geertz long ago defned as “Baraka”, that is, a blessing, or spiritual force), or in a complicated web of familiar connections, assassination, depositions, and illegal assumptions of power. Baraka and religious fundamentalism were indeed the foundation of the Almoravids’ and Almohads’ claims to royal power and part of the religious claims underpinning royal power in Islamic Spain. In addition, and as almost a constant in Islamic Iberia, Muslim political power never solved fully the question of royal succession so that fratricidal conficts within the royal family were often the norm. Even though in the absence of a formal ecclesiastical organization—as was the case with Christians and the theoretical supremacy of the Pope on religious matters (which Castilians regularly ignored)—Muslim kings were the defenders of the faith and arbitrated religious questions. That religious authority provided them with extraordinary powers that were, nonetheless, weakened by chronic internal conficts. While a plethora of examples can be given, the fnal years of Granada, as it faced the attacks of the Catholic Monarchs, are paradigmatic of the manner in which Muslim fratricidal struggles over questions of succession favored Christians (Castilians) in their struggle to recover Islamic territory. The last Nasrid kings of Granada’s political misfortunes are a very good example of this. Although a rich and topographically well-protected kingdom, Granada became seriously threatened after 1480 by Castile’s growing pressure. In truth, Granada’s internal conficts—which did not help to keep the Christian threat at bay—went back a long time. Already under the shortlived Zirid dynasty (rulers of the taifa of Granada in 1019 and conquered by the Almoravids in 1090) the internal familial conficts weakened their rule.These intra-familial disputes were often 89
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replicated in later years. By the second half of the fourteenth century, Granada had contested successions to the throne. Muhammad VI (1360–1362) briefy overthrew his relative Muhammad V (1354–1359, 1362–1381), with a short interlude by Muhammad V’s brother Ismail (1359–1360). In the ffteenth century, as the Christians grew in strength, Granada had 12 rulers between 1408 and the fnal fall of the city in 1492.While it is remarkable that such instability had not even more dire consequences, the reality is that something not unlike the “Game of Thrones” was played at the highest level. This was partly the result of a tradition of highly personalized rulership. Personal intrigues and claims to familial descents to the line founded by Yusef after 1212 easily overcame the rational need for political continuity. That many of these rulers and pretenders sought alliances with Christian rulers only made the eventual fall of the city and its eponymous kingdom certain.
The power of kings: representations, ceremonies, and rituals From the eleventh century onward, the power of Iberian kings evolved from a kingship defned by the Crown’s private relationships with the high nobility to a slow, and often fraught, consolidation of royal authority through military leadership, the ability to grant laws, and settlement privileges (fueros). Kings also came to have a more “public” role as fnal arbiters on judicial matters, as lawgivers, and as ultimate protectors of the Church and of Christianity. In many respects, these multiple royal personae ft into Kantorowicz’s (1957) famous and paradigmatic model for the evolution of kingship in the medieval West. But the varieties of kingly power in the Spanish realms and elsewhere in the West depended on a number of other factors that were as signifcant as those listed above. Moreover, through royal entries, religious processions, inquisitorial trials, and other events, kings, nobles, ecclesiastics, and municipal authorities sought to represent their power, although not always successfully, and to reify the hierarchical order of society.The question is: how did kings, through these symbolic acts and rituals (festivals, royal entries, and the like), articulate and represent their power? The frst obvious ritual (or rituals) is the signifcant moment when kings assumed their power. Examples are best seen in the ceremonies accompanying the ascent to the throne (if there was a throne).To them we turn now.
Becoming a king (or a queen) In a world without social media and modern communication technologies, the power of medieval kings depended on a series of ceremonies or, more accurately, on the representations of these ceremonies by chroniclers and court writers, recording those special moments and ceremonies, accompanying the elevation of the kings for political purposes. Here, and in subsequent discussions, we must always remember that what we read is not always what actually happened. Nonetheless, representations of kingly power do give us a clear sense of what was considered important at specifc moments in the making of a king and in the manner in which the king’s political role was legitimized. Unlike France and England where specifc protocols were required to become a king, in the Spanish realms it is most surprising how malleable rituals and ceremonials truly were.The practices associated with the ascent of kings (and queens) followed patterns dictated by the political necessities of the moment. When they were recorded, ecclesiastical and other writers sought to ft these ceremonies into established traditions. They did not always succeed. Peter Linehan’s (1993) extraordinary book, History and Historians of Medieval Spain, a book to which I owe a great debt in writing this chapter, is the best guide to these fabrications of coronation 90
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ceremonies in the Spanish realms. But what actually happened (or what those writing thought or wished to have happened) in the actual moment of becoming a king?
The Crown of Aragon: sites of power, coronations, selfcoronations, knighthood, and royal unction The Crown of Aragon was comprised, as noted earlier, by the kingdom of Aragon, the County of Catalonia, and the kingdom of Valencia (after 1238). It developed its own political discourse(s) about power, following a diversity of precedents. From elective kingship inherited fromVisigothic traditions and its own Navarrese origins in the eleventh century, to papal infuences and French models, and to its long connection with Sicily (after 1282), and its Hohenstaufen inheritance (see below), it created its own peculiar ways of representing power and political culture.
Ceremonial sites Unlike its neighboring Castile-León, the kings of the Crown of Aragon had well-established ritual centers, that is, sacred places of coronation (as Le Goff described the role of Reims for the French monarchy) by the thirteenth century.The kings of the Crown of Aragon were to be crowned frst and foremost at Zaragoza (by the archbishop of Tarragona) as dictated by Pope Innocent III around 1204–1205.With the formalization of the union of the three polities into a complex set of political arrangements, Barcelona and Valencia also became sites for the coronation or self-coronation of kings. In the case of Barcelona (Catalonia), however, what mattered most was the exchange of oaths between the new king (or in this case count) and Barcelona leading elites, upholding Catalonia’s privileges.This exchange of oaths between the king and his subjects in Barcelona, always enacted at a location within the city long established by tradition, would become a substitute for sites of coronation in the Crown of Aragon in the late ffteenth and sixteenth centuries. That is, throughout the late Middle Ages, the kings of the Crown of Aragon had to repeat the ceremonies, whether coronations, self-coronations, or simply swearing to protect the individual rights of each of the Crown of Aragon’s polities. Being crowned at Zaragoza (the oldest and most prestigious of the three ritual centers) did not guarantee acceptance in either Catalonia, always as prickly about its privileges then as it is today, or Valencia. It is worth noting here that Catalonia never became a kingdom, but chose to remain a county or, later on in the early modern period, a principality. Although the count-kings of Catalonia (Barcelona) could have easily promoted their Catalan holdings as a kingdom (as Roger II did in Sicily and southern Italy in 1130), they chose to retain their title as counts, a dignity that was deeply grounded in contractual precedents and law.This all-important legal precedent defning the count’s authority and obligations was enshrined in the Usatges de Barcelona, a combination of Visigothic and customary laws frst enunciated in the eleventh century and codifed by the twelfth. From the much-debated Roman coronation of Pedro II (1196–1213) by the pope in 1204 to the marriage of Fernando and Isabel in 1469 and the eventual coming of the Habsburgs to rule the diverse realms of Spain, the Crown of Aragon experimented with different approaches to the question of how to mark the ascent of its kings to power. What was clear, however, is that the Aragonese/Catalans/Valencians did not always lose their taste for ceremonials as their Castilian neighbors did in the mid-twelfth century, even after Fernando of Antequera, regent of Castile and a Trastámara, came to rule the eastern kingdoms in 1412 as Fernando I. He marked his election as the new king of the Crown of Aragon with a spectacular coronation feast.Yet, coronations, and in many cases, self-coronations (indicating a great deal of malleability) were 91
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only part of one extended set of rituals marking the ascent to the throne. Coronations or acceptance of a new king at the three capital cities were always accompanied by confrmation of liberties, laws, and privileges, in what was throughout medieval Europe a consensual monarchy. In addition, royal largesse and festivals, popular and martial, were also necessary in the making of kings. Allow me to concentrate on one coronation that, although already glossed in one of my previous works, clearly shows the diverse elements associated with kingly power. In 1327, Ramón Muntaner, soldier, chronicler, and merchant, came to Zaragoza as one of the six Valencian representatives attending Alfonso IV’s unction and crowning as king of Aragon. Muntaner, a prolifc writer and keen observer of Mediterranean political life, had already detailed the successive coronations and ascent to power of earlier kings. But he was an eyewitness to this one and had no overt royalist or ecclesiastical agenda to promote in his description. Muntaner’s account provides us with a clear order of events. The death of the previous king called for elaborate demonstrations of sorrow: along the lines of the French “le roi est mort”, followed by the acknowledgment of the new king. Although we know that Pedro III (1276–1285) waited almost a year to be crowned and to ceremonially become a king,Alfonso IV followed swiftly on his father’s death to claim the throne. He went directly to Barcelona to take his oath as Count of Catalonia and to reassure the Catalans of their privileges. The visit to Barcelona was accompanied by visits to other strategic locations throughout his kingdoms, ending up around Easter Sunday 1327 (1328) in Zaragoza for his formal unction and coronation.As was the case in Castile, the king and his court abandoned mourning garments, as festive events were held all around the city.Accompanied by the main men of his court,Alfonso kept vigil over his sword and crown, placed on the main altar of Zaragoza’s cathedral. As was customary throughout the Spanish realms, he girded his sword himself, while his brothers placed spurs on his feet.This was followed by a series of vows, shouted by the king to every direction of the compass: to defend orphans, children, and widows; fght the enemies of the Catholic faith; and protect justice and the realm—refecting the courtly values also associated with kingship. He ended by, theatrically, offering his sword and life to God.The bishop anointed the king on his shoulder and right arm, and the king then took the crown from the altar and crowned himself (Muntaner 1999, 610–631; Ruiz 2012, 326–28). Muntaner’s narrative allows us to see a series of performative acts closely associated with a king’s ascent to power.The ritual was to be enacted, not unlike a play, to an audience composed mostly of magnates, ecclesiastics, and the “people” who, as Muntaner tells us, lined up Zaragoza’s streets leading to the cathedral.The rituals were to be recorded for posterity and to be used to represent the new monarch’s political power. As all these royal performances and ritual gestures did, they reifed hierarchies of power, enhancing not only the power of kings but also that of those actively participating and acquiescing in the ceremony. Yet, unlike France or England, where there was little room for changes in the rituals of coronation or in its symbolic language, in the Crown of Aragon and in Castile rites of coronation or other rites of passages, imbricated as they were in the exercise of power, admitted to dramatic alterations.They were highly malleable. Whether to be crowned by a bishop or not, whether to be crowned or anointed at all, as was the case in Castile, those were responses to the ascent of kings that were dictated by the political needs of the moment, by the preference of the main protagonist: the king.Those were decisions also taken with the consent of the great lords. The point is, of course, that those symbolic, as well as real gestures surrounding the formalization of the power of kings and their hegemonic political role—self-coronation, selfgirding of the sword, or where on the king’s body he was to be anointed (shoulder, head, or arm)—were not unusual breaks from established tradition. All to the contrary. They were, as was the absence of coronation and anointing in Castile, accepted forms of claiming the title 92
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of king. If rituals depend on re-iteration, the rituals of the Crown of Aragon and, as shall be seen far more with those of Castile, while always containing elements that were recognizable to those in attendance, allowed for a great deal of latitude and for the introduction of new elements as needed. Power was elastic, and a close adherence to specifc traditions, as was the case in France, was not necessary in peninsular kingdoms; nor did their absence affect the kings’ political role. The case of Fernando II, Isabella’s redoubtable husband and king consort, is even more signifcant. Married to Isabel in 1469, he had been named king of Sicily and Naples a year before to enhance his attractiveness as future king to the possible heir to Castile. After all, the Trastámaras in the eastern kingdom had long coveted Castile. Fernando’s father, Juan II (1458–1479), had been one of the main promoters of political unrest in Castile as king of Navarre and as one of the nefarious Infantes of Aragon. Benedetto da Maiano’s (d. 1499) sculpture, presently located in Florence, shows Fernando II sitting on a throne and being crowned king of Naples by a bishop; yet, we also know that at his father’s death, Fernando left his constant military campaigns in Castile on behalf of Isabel, making a quick detour to the three entities that comprised the Crown of Aragon to gain the recognition of their respective cortes or corts and to engage in the traditional exchange of oaths that signaled the ascent to kingship in the eastern realms. In fact, Jerónimo de Zurita, the great sixteenth-century Aragonese chronicler cum historian, argued that no king of the Crown of Aragon was ever crowned after the spectacular coronation of Fernando I in 1412. Crowned in Naples, eschewing such practices in the Crown of Aragon and Castile, he was also the recipient of spectacular royal entries in Seville and in Naples in 1506 (entering the city under a baldachin). It is clear that the acts of coronation, self-coronation, or anointing were deployed as needed and for convenience’s sake: needed in Italy but not in the Spanish realms. Fernando I (Fernando de Antequera), his rule uncertain and the result of a compromise among the Crown of Aragon’s ecclesiastical, noble, and urban elites (the Compromise of Caspe) had a spectacular and very traditional coronation ceremony in 1412. His brother, grandson, and later Habsburg descendants totally ignored these rituals. Acceptance by the cortes or corts became allimportant.There is more that can be said about the Crown of Aragon. Royal entries, a critical form of articulating royal discourses of power, the use of the baldachin, and the confating of religious and secular elements in the feasts that accompanied the king’s rise to power became signal aspects in the making of kings. I have described them elsewhere with abundant details and there is no need here to reprise that information (2012). It is time to compare developments in the Crown of Aragon with those in Castile.
Castile: The malleability of sites, rituals, and representations of power The early Leonese and Castilian realms had a long tradition of articulating power through established rituals of coronation and anointment. Borrowing from Visigothic imperial claims and from the reworking of those traditions in Asturias and León during the ninth and tenth centuries (the so-called neo-Gothic revival), the later rulers of Castile-León deployed ceremonies that legitimized their power and furthered their imperial aspirations to be the hegemonic rulers of all Christian Spain. Fernando I (1035–1065) was anointed as king, while his son, Alfonso VI (1065–1109), granddaughter, Urraca (1109–1126), and great-grandson, Alfonso VII (1126–1157) claimed at one time or another to be “emperors” of all of Spain.Alfonso VII, who may have been crowned and anointed as a child in 1111, reenacted his sacral role in an impressive ritual coronation and anointing at León in 1135. But after his death, 22 years later, things changed dramatically. 93
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I have already attempted to explain why Castilian kings, with some noted exemptions, abandoned those well-established practices of anointing and crowning that were integral to the representations of power in the medieval West (see Ruiz 1995, 230–247; 2007, 110–138). Only in exceptional circumstances from the mid-twelfth century until the present would the rulers of Castile-León appeal to such ceremonies as ways of legitimizing their power. Instead, they replaced them with rituals, if we can loosely describe them as such, that were common to other peninsular kingdoms but that became, in time, associated with the Castilian monarchy or with the Aragonese branch of the Castilian ruling house, the Trastámaras.These included being sworn by the cortes, guaranteeing ancient privileges and laws, acclamation by the “people” (by which we mean magnates and high ecclesiastics) to a traditional cry: “Castile, Castile, for the king (or queen) such and such”, and elevation upon a shield (in ancient Germanic/Navarrese fashion), though this may have been more symbolic than real. What was unusual was the existence of a clearly established tradition or ritual procedures as part of a discourse of royal power. Kings chose to be crowned or not, to be anointed or not according to the context in which they came to power. Alfonso XI’s formal knighting by a mechanical statue of St. James, coronation (self-coronation), his coronation of his wife, and ecclesiastical anointment in Burgos in 1332, 20 years after inheriting the crown and long after his majority of age, are very good examples of the extraordinary fuidity of these ceremonies of power. Partly an assertion of his ability to restore a modicum of order to a troubled Castile and partly a celebration for the impending birth of a legitimate heir, the formal ecclesiastical script for the ceremony was discarded. Instead, a mix of chivalric elements and traditions, the latter tied to the monastery of Las Huelgas of Burgos (chosen as a royal pantheon by Alfonso VIII in the late twelfth century), and partly in competition with, and in imitation of, Alfonso IV’s coronation in Zaragoza fve years earlier,Alfonso XI invented a whole array of events in which knightly virtues, kingly agency and power, and a neglect of ecclesiastical intervention were the dominant aspects (Ruiz 1984). After Alfonso XI, only his bastard son Enrique sought such ceremonies (as the frst Trastámara probably to legitimize his claims to power). Isabel, contrary to reports in fctionalized histories of her ascent to power, rose to the throne, after her half brother’s death, with a set of ceremonies carried out in Segovia in 1474 in which neither coronation, anointing, nor any of the rituals we usually associate with royal power elsewhere in the West were even hinted at. Instead, acclamation by the “people” and oath-taking before the cortes marked her becoming queen. In Isabel’s particular case, prompted as she was by political necessity (noble opposition, the claims of her niece Juana la Beltraneja, and other factors) for swift action, she acted with alacrity.When she received the news of Enrique IV’s death, she donned mourning clothing, discarded them as soon as the funeral mass concluded, was raised, as were also the banners of Castile on the occasion, and acclaimed to the traditional cries of “Castile, Castile for the Queen Doña Isabel”. Her equerry carried a naked sword of justice in front of her as she progressed to the streets of the city, now as queen. Missing from this dramatic moment were all the other rituals that traditionally marked the ascent of a king or queen to power elsewhere. In examining the Crown of Aragon and Castile’s representations of power two conclusions may be drawn. First, in Castile, crowning and anointing occurred only sporadically after the mid-twelfth century. In fact, such ceremonies took place only when a king needed to legitimize his rule because, as was the case with Sancho IV (1284–1295) or Enrique II (1369–1379), their claims were quite illegitimate. So were, to a certain extent, those of Isabel I, yet she chose to ignore these elaborate rituals. In the Crown of Aragon, after the elaborate coronation of Fernando of Antequera in 1412, coronations or royal anointing no longer played a role in the making of kings.That would also be the case for the Spanish rulers in the early modern period 94
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and into today. Whether this distancing meant a growing secular or, better yet, lay attitude toward power, as I have argued in the past, or whether there were other reasons, the reality is that representing power in the late medieval Spanish realms did not require at all the presence of ecclesiastics or of the Church.They were notable in their absence. Nor was there the kind of mystical elements that accompanied the making of kings in medieval France or in some areas of antiquity. In the Spanish realms, above all in Castile, the practicality of power often occluded the desires of the Church to serve as mediator. Yet, medieval monarchs were also contractual rulers, and while the kings and queens could do without the full religious blessing of their power, they could not do without the consent of nobles, high Church dignities (which were one and the same in the late Middle Ages), and, above all, without the representatives of their respective realms’ urban centers. It is to them that we turn now.
Royal power and political representation Long before the frst model parliament in England met in 1296 (earlier gatherings dated back to 1265) or the frst meeting of the estates in France in the early fourteenth century, CastileLeón and the diverse entities of the Crown of Aragon had well-established representative assemblies. Known as cortes in Castile and Aragon or corts in Catalonia, these representative assemblies evolved from the royal curia or court, becoming organs of government fully with the attendance of urban representatives. In the meeting of the Cortes in 1188, called into session by Alfonso IX king of León, representatives from the main Leonese,Asturian, and Galician cities were selected to attend on behalf of diverse urban centers.There is some evidence that in Castile there were meetings of the cortes as early as the late twelfth century or early thirteenth, while in Catalonia, Aragon, and Valencia their initial dates are usually listed as 1214, 1247, and 1283 respectively. In Navarre, these institutional developments had to wait until the early fourteenth century. While there is evidence that these representative assemblies were part of a top-down exercise of royal power (a logical extension of the royal curia), it is clear that bourgeois representation played a critical role in the fscal wellbeing of the Spanish crowns. While the representatives of the high nobility, the princes of the royal blood, and ecclesiastical dignitaries spoke for the interests of their respective orders, the urban representatives were the only ones who nominally paid taxes and approved subsidies for kings who, whether in Castile or the Crown of Aragon, were always in dire need of money.The Crown needed the cortes for fnancial support.The urban representatives needed the king as the preserver of order (good for business) and as a bulwark against predatory magnates. Most often, the king also needed urban militias to counterbalance the high nobility’s permanent and disruptive ambitions and ecclesiastical misbehavior. We should dismiss with alacrity any idea that this meant some kind of democratic participation.The urban procurators to the cortes or corts were, more often than not, themselves part of frmly entrenched oligarchies that controlled the urban centers’ politics and economies. By the mid- to late thirteenth century, they had gained control of the government of their respective towns, often disfranchising those below (pecheros or taxpayers, also those who fought on foot in the municipal militias). In addition, from the mid-thirteenth century onward, they obtained (in Castile) fscal concessions from the Crown that exempted them from most taxes.We are faced with the peculiar situation that this handful of representatives voted on taxes and subsidies at the meetings of the cortes or corts that they themselves seldom paid. Often, they also took part, together with Jewish royal fscal agents, in the farming of, and profting from, the collection of these taxes. 95
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Once again, it is important to re-emphasize that in most of medieval Europe, and particularly in Castile and even more so in the Crown of Aragon, the power of kings was contractual.They ruled, at least in theory, with the consent of the three orders of society represented at these representative assemblies. One important function into the modern age was the recognition of the heir to the throne.The Catholic Monarchs traveled to the eastern kingdoms to gain the cortes of Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia’s approval of Don Juan as their heir. Philip II gained the Castilian cortes acceptance of his heir, Philip (later Philip III) in Madrid in 1585 and later spent more than a year traveling through his eastern realms, seeking approval for his heir at Monzón in 1586. It was a terrible and trying trip because dealing with the different cortes (corts) of the Crown of Aragon individually was always a headache. But the kings often found themselves in need of these representative assemblies until they brought them under their thumbs (only in Castile) after the reign of the Catholic Monarchs. The kings’ natural rivals for control of the realm were often the great magnate houses that could undermine the kings’ power and challenge their authorities.The high nobility behaved as its worst in times of weak royal authority. In Castile, where primogeniture was only fully established with Fernando III becoming king of both Castile and León in 1230, the partitioning of the realms between the heirs was always a threat. Periods of royal minorities were always perilous times, as the minorities of Fernando IV (1285–1312), that of his son, Alfonso XI (1312–1350), Enrique III (1390–1406, triggering violence against Jews in 1391), Juan II (1406–1454), and that of others demonstrate. But minorities were not the only times of trouble. The Infantes of Aragon, Juan (later king of Navarre, and as Juan II, king of the Crown of Aragon) and his brother Enrique, the sons of Fernando of Antequera (the frst Trastámara king of the Crown of Aragon in 1412) were princes of the royal blood in the Crown of Aragon and also great and extremely wealthy lords in Castile, troublemakers by inclination, and willing to challenge the power of the king, raid the royal treasure and domain, and usurp the power of kings. In Aragon, the great noble families carried out wars against their own peasants and against merchants.Very often, the cortes were the only bulwark to protect the Crown in times of royal minorities, greedy regents, and even more lawless and greedy noblemen and ecclesiastical dignitaries (see Bisson 1986, 98–99; O’Callagan 1998, 1989). Here one must emphasize that the relations between representative assemblies and the monarchs, that is, the nature of power in each of these realms was dictated by the context. In addition, there are great differences between how the cortes and corts in the Crown of Aragon related to their kings versus what was the case in Castile. In the eastern realms, these representative assemblies retained, even in the Habsburg era, a great deal of autonomy, as Philip II discovered to his chagrin in his visits to his Crown of Aragon lands.The Catalonian corts were particularly cantankerous. No law could be enacted in Catalonia without the approval of the corts and no taxes collected without their assent or that of other Catalonia representative bodies.This is one of the reasons why the rulers of the Crown of Aragon preferred to put their efforts in Mediterranean affairs and in places such as Naples (Alfonso V conquered the city in 1442) or Sicily, often leaving the running of their Crown of Aragon realms to a lieutenant general. In the case of Alfonso V, who became a renaissance prince in the kingdom of Naples and never returned to the Peninsula, power was left in the capable hands of Queen Maria.This is also why the Catholic Monarchs directed their efforts toward consolidating their power in Castile and reforming the administrative and political structures of Castile. This is why they neglected the Crown of Aragon. The eastern kingdoms were always a headache and heartache. In Castile, however, the relations between the Crown and the cortes evolved in a different fashion. By the late fourteenth and ffteenth centuries, above all, during the reforms of the Catholic Monarchs, the growing deferential language of the cortes ordinances signaled the shift in their power relationship. The kings called the cortes at greater intervals of time, limited the 96
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number of cities represented, as well as the number of procurators in attendance. The cortes in Castile could still make a show of independence when Charles V came to claim the throne of Castile in 1519, but that independence was ephemeral.
Power and resistance The counterpart of the exercise of power is always resistance. Resistance came from many quarters.Those below resisted, as well as they could, those above. In Valencia, Barcelona, Seville, Burgos, and elsewhere, the frustrations of those below were often vented on Jews, conversos, or Mudejars, perceived as agents of the Crown. In Old Catalonia, servile peasants (the remenças) waged, in alliance with the king of the Crown of Aragon, a successful war to purchase their freedom against their lords between 1462–1485. Pecheros in Burgos fought the urban oligarchs in the 1330s to protest their loss of franchise.Alfonso XI intervened by curtailing the autonomy of municipal councils in Burgos and elsewhere. Full-fedged rebellions erupted in some towns, such as that in Alcaraz in 1458, or the iconic town uprising in Fuente Ovejuna in 1476. In 1521 two very different challenges to power occurred in the Spanish Realm: the great comunero revolt of town elites and lower nobility against Charles V and his Flemish advisers that ended with the royal victory at Villalar that year, and the lower class Germanía risings that took place in Valencia and Barcelona.The latter began as opposition to Charles V and ended up as an attack on Mudejars, property, and the social order. Both of these events deserve case studies for they reveal the manner in which, even though unsuccessful in most cases, power from above was contested through ritual actions, protests, and actual violence. Because of limitations of space, I focus here on three specifc cases. First, in Castile whenever the Crown was in peril because of noble violence or a contested minority, leagues of cities and members of the lower nobility came together to protect the king (or queen) and to restore order. The Hermandades, as these associations were known, appeared in moments of peril to buttress the power of kings in times of political upheaval.Those familiar with the period know of the role of the Santa Hermandad in serving as a military force in the Catholic Monarchs’ assertion of political power in Castile. In 1315, when Castile was torn by civil war during the minority of Alfonso XI, many of the urban centers of Castile, León, and Andalucía sent representatives to Burgos.There, in association with 100 members of the lower nobility, they issued ordinances (collected in the Libro de las cortes) to rule the realm, protect the king, and restore order. Sometimes the resistance came from lower social groups or from the powerless, showing the link between noble violence and peasant resistance. In late summer 1464, with the authority of the Castilian Crown at its nadir, the embattled king Enrique IV (1454–1474) faced the imminent threat of being taken prisoner by one of the noble factions that so often and so violently disrupted the peace of the realm. Nobles, organized in loose coalitions, sought to diminish the king’s power and to appropriate as much of the royal domain and fscal resources as they could. Anarchy swept the land.The possibility of the king’s imprisonment came in the wake of a long list of attacks and lewd accusations, culminating a year later, on 5 June 1465, with the symbolic deposition of the king and the ritual humiliation of his effgy outside the walls of Avila. In 1464, however, with no indication of what was going to happen within a year and prompted by the news (news that was carried orally from village to village throughout the Segovian hinterland) of the peril threatening Enrique IV, close to 5,000 peasants, armed with staves, knives, scythes, and other agricultural tools, stood as one in armed support of their king and against noble anarchy and political disruptions. This was not the only instance in which, spontaneously, peasants, or for that matter urban dwellers, rose up in arms to support their embattled and rather ineffective king. At Toro, thousands of men on foot—the chronicler estimates their 97
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number to have been at around 80,000, which is an obvious exaggeration—stood on the battlefeld on the side of noble contingents faithful to Enrique IV and against the king’s enemies. Later that year in Arévalo, popular groups, called to arms by the alcaldes (or judicial offcials) of the Hermandades (or leagues of lesser nobles and urban representatives organized to maintain peace), surrounded the castle where the king was and prevented rebel nobles from taking him prisoner (see Ruiz 2009). Finally, the so-called war of the remenças demonstrates the complicated set of political forces contending and resisting power. After the Black Death and as a result of labor shortages, lords succeeded in imposing harsh servile obligations on many peasants in Northern Catalonia at a time when serfdom was disappearing from most of Western Europe. To obtain their freedom, peasants had to pay a fee, or remença in Catalan. By the second half of the ffteenth century, many Catalan lords, high ecclesiastics, and urban oligarchs were also in open confict with the king of the Crown of Aragon, Alfonso V.The king, safely ensconced in Naples, received remença delegations, granting them the right to organize themselves into a sindicat or guild. In 1462 and in alliance with the new king of the Crown of Aragon, Juan II (1458–1479), the peasants fought a ten-year war (mostly a form of guerrilla warfare in the rugged mountains of Northern Catalonia) against their noble and ecclesiastical lords.Although small gains were made, freedom remained elusive. A second war of the remenças broke out in 1484, a time when Fernando II (1479–1516), husband to Isabel and occupied with Castilian reforms and the war against Granada, was willing, once again, to side with the peasants against his noble adversaries. In the Sentencia de Guadalupe (1486), the peasants gained their right to freedom, the only successful peasant uprising in the medieval West.These peasants had agency, could negotiate with the Crown, and defeated their noble enemies on the battlefeld.After 1486, many of them enjoyed signifcant economic gains: becoming the peasants of the mas, the heart of Old Catalonia’s rural economy. A close reading of these events shows the shifting contours of Iberia’s political landscapes. Power was always contested. Kings were never absolute.Your enemies today would become your allies tomorrow. It was a complex intertwining of political needs, often dictated by historical contexts. No single facile explanation would do. And all these changing political circumstances followed from the requirements of power. Who would rule? How well? How might that power be diminished, shared, or resisted?
Conclusion The Middle Ages was not an Orwellian world where power was exercised for the sake of power and articulated through harsh coercive methods, though they certainly existed. Throughout most of the medieval Western European world, rulers exercised power in alliance with other political forces.The level of cooperation or antagonisms changed according to changing historical contexts and the abilities or ineptness of rulers and his/her rivals. Minorities, which Castile had in larger numbers during the late Middle Ages than any place in Western Europe, impacted the nature of power and dictated different kinds of political realities. There was no teleological development from looser forms of political organization to more centralized administrative and coercive power. In the Crown of Aragon, the long-established claims to ancient liberties and privileges (mostly in Catalonia and Valencia) remained in place, in spite of the Catholic Monarchs’ reforms in Castile.The Habsburgs were not really more successful.When Philip IV and his minister, Olivares, attempted to rein in these claims of autonomy, Spain almost broke up in 1640. Centralization had to wait until the new Bourbon masters of the Spanish realms fully integrated the Peninsula into a single realm in the early eighteenth century.They did this 98
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by force and against ferce resistance.The consequences of this long history are still present in modern Spanish politics. In Castile, the late eleventh and early twelfth century saw royal claims to hegemony on the Peninsula, but the realms that composed Castile remained fragmented until Ferdinand III in 1230. Yet, because of economic, social, and political circumstances, Castile was, except for a brief period of order under Alfonso XI in the 1330s and 1340s, essentially unstable until the reign of the Catholic Monarchs. Cities (with cortes representation), the high nobility, ecclesiastical dignitaries, and the “people” intervened into the political life of the realm, although “the people” did so only in exceptional cases, as we have seen above, or in short and fnally unsuccessful bursts of violence. The relationship between the exercise of power and the politics of the realms was always complex and cannot be reduced to a lineal development, even though we often read these narratives as a move from fragmentation and strife to centralization and control. But control is not always a guarantee of order; nor was the nation-state the sole avenue for the good life and political order. I once wrote in a concluding note to one of my books: “Although the [embryonic] genesis of the nation-state is an undeniable historical fact in the late Middle Ages, I do not wish to imply here that the emergence of a centralized monarchy in Castile [but not in the Crown of Aragon] and elsewhere was a benefcial and necessary step; nor do I believe that the nation—despite its probable inevitability—is the best solution to the problems of mankind” (1994, 324). I still, with some slight modifcations to the original text, think that is right.
Notes 1 Michel Foucault’s many books deal with issues of discipline, power, and taxonomies or categories of knowledge and their relation to power. Specifcally, see his book Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977(1980). Throughout this chapter, I am indebted to Luis García de Valdeavellano’s impressive discussion of Spanish medieval institutional history in his book Curso de historia de las instituciones españolas: De los orígenes al fnal de la Edad Media (1968). 2 “Such was the medieval concept, as we shall see, which created a necessary link between the court and the king, with one reality being unable to exist without the other” (Costa Gomes 2003, 2–3).
References Aurell, Jaume. 2020. Medieval Self-Coronations:The History and Symbolism of a Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bisson,Thomas N. 1986. The Medieval Crown of Aragon:A Short History. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Costa Gomes, Rita. 2003. The Making of Court Society: Kings and Nobles in Late Medieval Portugal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books. García de Valdeavellanos, Luis. 1968. Curso de historia de las instituciones españolas. De los orígenes al fnal de la Edad Media. Madrid: Revista de Occidente. Kantorowicz, Ernst H. 1957. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Linehan, Peter. 1993. History and the Historians of Medieval Spain. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Muntaner, Ramón. 1999. Crònica. Edited by Vicente Josep Escarti.Valencia: Institució Alfons el Magnánimo. O’Callaghan, Joseph F. 1988. Las Cortes de Castilla y León en la Edad Media.Actas de la primera etapa del congreso científco sobre la historia de las cortes de Castilla y León.Valladolid: Cortes de Castilla y León. O’Callaghan,Joseph F.1989.The Cortes of Castile-León,1188–1350.Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press. Ruiz,Teoflo F. 1984.“Une royauté sans sacre: La monarchie castillane du bas Moyen Age”. Annales E.S.C. 3: 429–452.
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Teoflo F. Ruiz Ruiz,Teoflo F. 1994. Crisis and Continuity: Land and Town in Late Medieval Castile. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ruiz, Teoflo F. 1995. “La formazione della monarchia non consacrata: simboli e realtà di potere nella Castiglia mediovale”. In Federico II e il mondo mediterraneo, edited by Pierre Toubert and Agostino Paravicino Bagliani, 230–247. Palermo: Sellerio. Ruiz,Teoflo F. 2007. Spain: Centuries of Crisis, 1300–1474. Oxford: Blackwell. Ruiz,Teoflo F. 2009. “Voices of the Oppressed: Peasant Resistance in Late Medieval Castile”. In Castilla y el mundo feudal. Homenaje al Profesor Julio Valdeón, edited by María Isabel del Val Valdivieso and Pascual Martínez Sopena, III, 63–72.Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León. Ruiz, Teoflo F. 2012. A King Travels: Festive Traditions in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ullmann, Walter. 1975. Medieval Political Thought. Baltimore: Penguin.
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7 THE LAW Jesús R. Velasco
Maimonides considered that the challenge of the law was that one could not read the law without philosophizing, and without interpreting tropes and parables. But doing it was a source of perplexity, of hirah, as he put it in Arabic.A few years later, another lawyer,Alfonso X, considered in the practice of legislation that the real challenge of the law was to use this perplexity as a productive tool, by philosophizing and interpreting tropes and parables as part of the law itself, not simply as a hermeneutical tool. Because of the importance of legal perplexities at different levels of both the hermeneutics and the heuristics of the legal discourse, we will see how legal thinking does not occur exclusively in the realm of the institutions, actions, and legal concepts, but also in the interconnections of the legal discipline with many other disciplines (including poetry and literary artifacts).
What animates the law?1 Alfonso X, the king of Castile and León between 1252 (he was 31 years old) and 1284 (although he had been dethroned and replaced by his son Sancho in 1282) did not ask this question in so many words. He, however, did respond to it. In the Second Partida, Alfonso defned the people as “the sensitive soul [alma sentidora] of the kingdom”.2 This defnition is correlative to another one the legislator offered a few títulos or chapters before, in which the law established that the people must be understood as the totality of the members of the kingdom, regardless of their economic, social, or political status.3 The combination of both defnitions stipulates, therefore, that the totality of legal subjects are responsible for legal and political perception within the kingdom. The sensitive soul (or the sentient soul), which is a technical term coming from Aristotelian philosophy, is the soul in charge of sensorial and post-sensorial operations: the former, through the external senses, and the latter, through what some philosophical traditions—including Alfonso’s legislation—call the internal senses. In the same way, the sensitive soul governs all the cognitive processes of the living being, the sensitive soul of the kingdom—that is, the people—governs all the political and legal cognitive processes of the living-in-the-law or the law-abiding being.We will come back to these defnitions and their consequences later in this chapter. One could postulate that Alfonso’s response reinterprets the political theory—as Arthur Steinwenter conceptualized it—according to which the king is the lex animata, a Latin expression that has been universally translated as living law, and that I will always translate as animated 101
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law (Steinwenter 1946) with the purpose of underscoring the literal meaning of an expression that became a metonymy almost immediately after it was frst proposed in the Greek language (nómos émpsychos). In both Greek and Latin, the “soul” (anima, psyché) is the entelechía or the principle of life itself—that is, the actualization of life. But the metonymy occurs in the moment this interpretation takes place: the invisible operations that shape the way in which beings are alive become life itself. By reconnecting soul with those specifc operations, we will gain a better, maybe more original understanding of political and legal life. Alfonso, indeed, makes a radical displacement of a twofold character: frst, he displaces the animation of the law from the king’s body to the body politic composed of all the legal subjects of the kingdom, and only the legal subjects. This displacement goes against all previous ideas regarding lex animata or nómos émpsychos, as they always point toward the Basileus (in the case of Hellenistic thinkers), to Moses (in the case of Philo of Alexandria, but only insofar as Moses is the conduit of the orthos logos, that is, God’s word or God’s law), or even Jesus (in the case of Clement of Alexandria), or the Emperor (in the case of Justinian).4 Alfonso radically defnes the people to be the sentient soul of the kingdom—while the rational soul falls, of course, on the shoulders of the king. Second,Alfonso focuses on the soul as the principle of animation, forcing us, contemporary readers, to question our metonymic way of understanding the animation of the law, and consequently asking us to focus on the literal meaning of the expression lex animata. In other words, while multiplying and universalizing the political realm, Alfonso also creates a new legal and political concept, which we can call the soul politic, and that counterpoints the idea of the existence of a body politic.
Culture and law In our feld of cultural studies, we frequently look at the law from a multifaceted perspective including most of the following lines of questioning: the way in which the law relates to local life; the way in which the law debates with other legal corpora or regulations; the way in which a certain law or legal system maintains traditional links (sources, intertextualities, etc.) with other laws and legal systems; the way in which a certain legal system becomes universalized, promulgated, or abrogated; the way in which a legal system becomes the object of translation; the way in which a legal system is itself a translation from some other legal system or constellation of legal traditions; the problems of application of a law or a legal system; the legal system as a source of historical information; the legal system as an unreliable source of historical information; the rhetorical construction of a legal system or a law; and fact and fction in the creativity of legal systems.5 Those questions, among others, are extremely important, and we need to keep asking them, as they are the bread and butter of legal historical research. Of course, some of those questions are proper to historians, sociologists, and cultural historians, while others are proper to legal historians per se. Legal historians, however, have a different perspective on the law that needs to be underscored.They are the ultimate gatekeepers of the legal discipline, and they are frequently interested in the emergence and development of institutions and other legal concepts, with the purpose of understanding legal presence. Their research is often (but not always) teleological, and although this word has been used with contempt for many years, I am using it here as a diagnosis of the intellectual activity of this specifc discipline: if there is a teleology underwriting legal history it is because of the specifc political work that legal history does in the process of legitimizing or submitting institutions, procedures, legal arguments, or even jurisprudence to criticism. Juridical teleology means that the legal discipline is an art of the present. Maybe one of the most interesting examinations of how Legal History as part of the legal discipline has 102
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developed throughout the years is that of Emanuele Conte in chapter 1 of his La fuerza del texto (Conte 2016). This does not mean that legal historians have not entered the territory of cultural legal studies, on the contrary.They have indeed contributed an important body of work that deals with the relationship between culture and legal thinking. For this purpose, legal scholars have not failed to use clearly literary or otherwise theoretical approaches.6 There is even a particular affnity between specifc theoretical approaches, like semiology or narratology (for instance, the work of Michael Xifaras 2010, and 2017), and legal studies.7 Other scholars, like Beatrice Pasciuta, Emanuele Conte,Yan Thomas, or the many legal scholars gathered in Maksymilian del Mar and William Twining’s volume about legal fctions from 2015, do indeed show a cultural approach: they inquire about which questions cultural action and legal thinking have in common (Conte 2016;Thomas 2011; del Mar and Twining 2015; Pasciuta 2015).
Legal soulscapes I would like to suggest the centrality of the question what animates the law? Why is this question an important one? It is unlike all the other ones.This question suggests that the law has a soul, an anima, and that therefore the law constitutes an aesthetic universe of inquiry—the sensitive soul is what Aristotle called the aisthetikon soul. Indeed, having a soul entails that the body of knowledge of the law is shaped, informed, by a series of internal and external affects: the soul itself, in Aristotelian aesthetics and in Aristotelian psychology—or science of the soul—immaterial in itself, shapes bodies and things by dint of the activities of the Aristotelian fve external senses (touch, taste, hearing, smell, and sight) and what the Arabic thinkers and commentators of Aristotle (specifcally the academic group from Basra, Iraq, known as the Brethren of Purity, active between the eighth and the tenth centuries of the common era [second and fourth centuries of the Hijri calendar]) called the fve internal senses (common sense, imagination, fantasy, consideration/estimation/thought [diánoia], and memory).8 So, by asking what animates the law, one is asking how the law acquires a soul, how a law deploys its own aesthetics, and how the law shapes things, subjects, and actions according to this kind of aesthetics.
Animated law As mentioned, the question frst arose from Alfonso X’s defnition of the people as the sensitive soul of the kingdom.This defnition is part of the king’s idea of sovereignty, which begins with a redefnition of the king himself, at the inception of the Siete Partidas.The frst movement in this defnition consists in breaking the ties with the principle that the sovereign is not under the law (rex a legibus solutus). In the general prologue to the Siete Partidas, Alfonso expresses it in a metaphoric way: he explains that the laws of this book you have in your hands are a mirror. He seems to be deploying a well-known metaphor with a political substratum and a longue durée, as studied by Einar Már Jónsson (Jónsson 1995). Now, this mirror is not the image and likeness of the king: the laws may offer the king a distorted image of himself, an image in which he has failed to adapt to the letter and spirit of such laws.Thanks to this mirror, Alfonso says, the kings in his señorío (that is, he himself, and all the others after him) “can see all the things they must mend in themselves, and they can then mend them; and afterwards they can also mend their subjects” (Partidas, general prologue). In his notion, sovereignty falls on the side of the king only as a mediation, as imago legis, between himself and the other legal subjects, but the goal is to replicate the image of the legal subject implied in the law. 103
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Whoever has had access to the Hellenistic writers on Politics preserved in Stobaeus’s Anthologia, will see some elements of connection, and some elements of disconnection in the previous idea of the king as imago legis, as somebody who conveys the orthos logos of the law. The point of connection is that this is how the notion of the nomos empsychos, or, in Latin, lex animate, works in those treatises: in connection with the divine law, with an inscrutable law that is in itself alive, the king becomes the embodied, living law, once he has modifed himself in an adequate manner. But the disconnection is extraordinarily important: for those Hellenistic writers (Pseudo Ecphantos, Pseudo Archytas, Diotogenes, Sthenides), they can be the living law because they convey an unwritten legal truth, while, for them, the written law is apsychos, or dead (see Squilloni 1990). For Alfonso, the written law is what constitutes the mirror of the king. In other words, he is an image of a dead law, in the sense that he allows the written law to be pre-eminent over the traditions that claim the pre-eminence of unwritten, oral law—traditions, of course, that are both religious and secular, if one thinks, for the latter, about the unwritten verities of the Anglo-Saxon common law (Sobecki 2015). Alfonso himself uses the notion of dead law, with the expression boz muerta or dead voice, under which he locates the written documents and the legal written tradition in general. Dead voice is dead not because it does not have a psyche, but, rather, because it requires a theory of time that is different from the time of the natural body. Dead voice, as law, reaches, in its materiality, beyond the natural life of biological persons, and constitutes a form of universalization (Velasco 2020).
Legal subjects Who are the subjects implied in the law? The Siete Partidas makes an implicit, albeit stark, distinction between what the original text calls the gentes de mi señorío, and the pueblo or los pueblos. The expression gentes is frequently used to refer to individuals or groups who are reluctant to abide by the law. For instance, in the early manuscripts of the Partidas, conveying a frst version of the code, the king denounces the gentes de nuestro señorío for scraping the parchments containing the laws and rewriting them to their advantage, thus damaging both the king and los pueblos. From that point forward, the legal code uses the noun gente to refer to subjects of different polities, to groups of power, or even to heretics willing to found a new church. Pueblo, on the other hand, seems to refer to the actual legal subjects of the kingdom, those who accept the legal code and the principle of sovereignty: Cuydan algunos quel pueblo es llamado la gente menuda assi como menestrales e labradores e esto no es ansi ca antiguamente en babilonia e en troya. e en roma. que fueron lugares muy señalados ordenaron todas estas cosas con razon e pusieron nonbre acada vna segund que conuiene pueblo llaman el ayuntamiento de todos los onbres comunalmente delos mayores e delos medianos e delos menores ca todos son menester: e no se pueden escusar porque, se han de ayudar vnos a otros porque pueden bien beuir e ser guardados e mantenidos. (Partidas 2.10.1) While recognizing class, social, and economic differences, this law also establishes a regime of solidarity, creating a form of coexistence (and I take this term at its most literal value, with no specifc idea of tolerance or toleration underwriting it) of all under the idea of subjecthood, that is, by considering them all juridical subjects. Unlike the gentes, the pueblo are not principally 104
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natural persons with individual biographies, but rather personae fctae, as the legal technicality goes, that is the artifcial person defned in the law, by the law, and for the legal–political world.9 There is a second defnition of the pueblo that comes just two titles later in the Segunda Partida.The legislator states how the pueblo is the alma sentidora or sentient soul of the kingdom. The laws of Partidas 2.13 include legislation for each of the external and internal senses of the sentient soul, performing a tropological-legal reading of Aristotelian aesthetics as it was commented in Muslim and Jewish philosophy across the Mediterranean basin, and in particular in al-Andalus. Alfonso incorporates here some discussions, directly or indirectly taken from (in particular) the Brethren of Purity, Avicenna, and Averroes, in a vein similar in order and structure to that of Ibn Falaquera’s Sefer ha-nefesh, or Book of the Soul, although devoid of technical philosophical debates (Jospe 1988, 275–319, 321–409; see also Falaquera 2014). It is diffcult to know the exact source—and ultimately, it is not indispensable to acquire this knowledge—but what we can know is that the clear distinction between external and internal senses, and in particular the denomination of internal senses for post-sensorial operations (fantasy, imagination, thought, common sense, and memory) has an Arabic genealogy that includes thinkers like Avicenna or the Brethren of Purity, from the Persian and Arabic spaces, and Averroes, Ibn Bajja, or other Andalusi thinkers between the ninth and the twelfth centuries (see Wolfson 1935). With all these materials, the law stipulates an aesthetics of the legal subject by means of this kind of legislation. Sovereignty is fnally projected onto a body of legal subjects who are responsible for legally perceiving, thinking, and politically surveilling the kingdom. Their cognitive processes are thus put at the service of the kingdom. All of this theory of sovereignty is designed to produce a circulation of power that is different from the one devised or desired by Alfonso’s predecessors and their groups of support—noblemen, clergy. Alfonso’s idea of power circulation combines sovereign, central, concentric power (not unlike the idea of authoritarianism under the metaphor of the onion, as pointed out by Hannah Arendt), with the kind of power circulation Foucault called disciplinary power, which expands as if through capillary vases, throughout the political entity—the kingdom in this case.10 The formulation of the king implies that power circulation runs throughout those individuals who are part of the people and who therefore can be considered legal subjects.
The people When we think about this line of questioning, we must acknowledge that we face only one small portion of medieval law. Alfonso’s circulation of power is a decidedly lay understanding of power circulation that vies for the ultimate protection of authoritarian, monarchical, central, sovereign power. He focuses on a very specifc pueblo or universe of legal subjects, the ones that fall under his direct or delegate jurisdiction. It is true that Alfonso also mobilized the corpora of canon law that were available to him, and that he used their legal conclusions regarding the ecclesia in order to legislate about the people, including ecclesiastical matters and ecclesiastical subjects; the First and the Fourth Partidas bear witness to that pervasively, and so does the Third Partida and some of its laws regarding, for instance, interrogation or trial procedures (among others). Likewise, the Sixth Partida clearly legislates with canon law about last wills and inheritance. Canon, ecclesiastical law runs across the Siete Partidas, with no exception.And yet, there is a process of co-production of the lay jurisdiction between civil and canon law that is similar to what we commonly call ius commune—but it is different from it in many respects, and projects a kind of jurisdiction that I have called elsewhere a vernacular jurisdiction (Velasco 2020, ch. 3). 105
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This vernacular jurisdiction is at the intersection of different languages or forms of expression. The most important is what we can call a juridical diglossia that separates domestic languages (from dialectal to diachronic, diatopic, diastratic, and diaphasic varieties) from the universal language of the law—frequently the juridical grammar and semantics of Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek in the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages. The vernacular jurisdiction is at the intersection of what one glossator of the Corpus Iuris Civilis sees as the tension between the communem usum loquendi (the general way of speaking) and the propria signifcatio (the technical meaning) of the verba legis (the words that constitute the fabric of the law) (Dolezalek 1996). But the vernacular jurisdiction in the Iberian Peninsula is also at other different intersections that maybe are not unique to the area, but are certainly crucial within the area—specifcally, the intersections of legal systems and overlapping jurisdictions.Vernacular jurisdictions deal with what Janina Safran has cogently categorized as boundary defnition—that is, in a nutshell, the ability of individual agents to establish their identity within a multicommunal and multiconfessional region or polity (Safran 2013). Notice here the importance of some concepts or words. In particular the word law, which I am now using in the proper sense mostly used during the Iberian (and beyond) Middle Ages, and that somewhat corresponds to what we now call religion—but not quite. Immediately, we need to turn to the question of perception and, therefore, to the question that frames this entry: what animates the law? And the reason why this question is important to prefer law to religion is that all forms of judicial investigation taking place in the confessional realm during the Middle Ages are more concerned—as again Janina Safran mentions in her book—with ritual than with beliefs (see also Jaritz 2012 and, especially, Ristuccia 2018). I would perhaps express it in a different but related manner: those who seek juridical opinions, those who investigate for responses, those who search for precedent, for custom, or for exceptions within the very legal compilations, are more concerned with how religious life is presented and perceived in the community than with the specifc religious knowledge of one person in particular as a domestic, private individual. In yet other words, what seems to be a matter of concern is the representation of the juridical subject, rather than the beliefs of the natural person. We could be reading, for instance, the handbooks for confessors, which resemble other contemporary treatises containing directions for inquisitors. In works like Martín Pérez’s Libro de las Confesiones (ca. 1320–1330), Nicholas Eymerich’s Directorium Inquisitorum (ca. 1376), or Bernard Gui’s Practica Inquisitionis Hereticae Pravitatis (after 1323) the confessor and the inquisitor become especially interested in understanding the external, the aesthetic aspect of religious life: bodily positions, dietary habits, clothes, uses of space, and so on; Bernard Gui’s ffth book of the Practica is, indeed, the ultimate demonstration of such importance of rituals and gestuality.The models for interrogation in confession and in inquisition deal in particular with how rituals are and should be performed, even if the questions are frequently presented as part of a structure that has to do with the codifcation of the law, with the body of knowledge of the law—which is perhaps most clear in Eymerich’s profoundly procedural treatise, in which he supports every single consideration of canon law and its interpretation. Independently from those more codifed works, the inquisitorial labor in itself also produced intensive interrogations with the purpose, above all, of building a corpus of procedures, and, in particular, a body of precedents, a jurisprudential archive containing ethnographies of towns, villages, and hamlets across the Pyrenees, in Occitan and Catalan domains that frequently were ascribed to the kingdom of Aragon. The thick manuscripts containing the great inquisitions of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, studied by Le Roy Ladurie, Pegg, Ames, Benad, Barbezat, and others, give us not only access to the jurisprudential archive, but most importantly an enormous deal of information about the everyday lives of individuals who, in front of the 106
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inquisitor and his notaries and scriveners, become legal subjects, actors within a process (Le Roy Ladurie 1982; Benad 1990; Pegg 2001, 2008; Ames 2009, 2015; Barbezat 2018).They are then observed, perceived, animated in order to create a legal narrative within the vernacular jurisdiction in which, at play, civil law and ecclesiastical law collaborate to produce a judicial register. The inquirições, or royal inquisitions in Portugal, offer less of an idea of the interrelations between royal power and popular powers, administration of violence, and intervention of the crown into the limits of proprieties and jurisdictions, while at the same time creating a body of knowledge that helps us understand how legal investigation manages to produce both space and jurisdictional power.11 Castilian pesquisas regias intervene sometimes in local affairs, and, by presenting dozens of depositions following detailed questionnaires, also contribute to our understanding about how local affairs can be considered affairs of the kingdom, and vice versa.12 Who speaks in those documents? One would be tempted to say that there is no voice to be heard, or alternatively that one needs to break the notarial thick procedural language to hear a voice, or even yet that there is an unbridgeable gap between the voice that confesses and the voice of the private person with a name and a biography, with feelings and routines, with bodily necessities and medical conditions, the one who loves, speaks with friends and foes, and has a bad night here and there, maybe often.All those have been positions adopted by scholars in different disciplines (see the introduction of Barbezat 2018). But the fact of the matter is that the documents contain something, and that this something intends to perform a certain alchemical transformation: convey to the history of law the confguration of a legal subject and the confguration of the legal subject’s actions. The most important element of this transformation is that this subject is neither a body nor a body of documents; it is, rather, the subject that animates the law, that is, it is the legal and political soul of the jurisdictional universe. The processes of document creation, the very poetics of the document, are concerned with the modes of perception of the subject, and, more importantly, with what this subject is able to remember, the ways in which the subject remembers altogether, and how fantasy, imagination, thought, or common sense participate in this memory that is now summoned and expressed in front of the judge, the inquisitor, the notaries, the scriveners.
Documents Inquisitorial documents are not proper to one particular place, even if they occur in one given territory.They are not Occitan, they are not Aragonese, they are not French, they are not Iberian, or non-Iberian.They exist in the opportunities, necessities, and uses of the network.They travel beyond their territories of harvesting.They are not local, but they are certainly not global either. They come up, sometimes outside their context, when they are to be used by judges, inquisitors, attorneys, and also preachers, or writers. When we look at the volumes of procedures gathered by inquisitors, what we are looking at is, precisely, the poetics of an archive that did not exist, but that became a necessity once the inquisitorial systems were set in place and regulated, after the period spanning between 1215 and 1230 or so.The procedures seem to be less interested in fnding against specifc defendants, than in creating the mainframe of the inquisitorial procedure itself. Over a period of about 150 years, these thick collections of inquests constitute one of the greatest resources for confessors and for inquisitors across the pontifcal jurisdiction. Those networks are what we understand as jurisprudence, that is, the documents that serve as precedent, that turn the history of norms over time into present actions, as they are available to judges and counselors alike.We must not underestimate the potentialities of those documents 107
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within their networks: they have the power to change what happened in real life with what happened in judicial cases, taking as precedent the latter and covering the former with juridical oblivion.The Latin word for judicial precedent is exemplum, the same word the technical legal language uses as well to refer to the copy of a document.The same word is used by the literary institution as a generic label for a series of narratives that have the purpose of modifying religious, legal, political, and moral behavior. Those networks have a graphical representation. We may read the law in modern editions, and then we will have access to texts. If the editions are exceedingly good (which is diffcult, only because of the dimensions of the task), we can have access to the interactions between texts and their commentaries. If we deal with good reproductions in electronic representation, we may also have access to the jurisgraphisms (here I adapt a notion from Anne Teissier-Ensminger), or, without further precision, images that share the same spaces of the legal text (TeissierEnsminger 2004). And yet, all this is just a tiny bit less than optimal.As I mentioned, the manuscripts are indeed a graphical, albeit sometimes diffcult to interpret, representation of networks that include space and time. If we only considered, for instance, the corpus of civil law in Latin, the Corpus Iuris Civilis, in its representations after Francesco Accursio’s creation and industrialization of his magna glossa or glossa ordinaria, we would immediately have a glimpse of several processes that those manuscripts convey, and that have taken time, effort, and many particular legal individual cases to get there and to do their work from both the center and the margins of the manuscripts.Among those processes, we can mention a few: the compilation of original jurisprudence from across the Empire; the tension among languages and customs across the (eastern) Roman Empire, and how they sediment in the legal compilation; the interaction among different and separated jurisprudential cases in order to form a regula iuris, or a legal rule (Conte 2015); the processes whereby jurisprudential elements from very diverse spaces and times across the Empire turn into leges, that is, forms of universalized normativity; the exceptions that a lex receives by means of imperial edicta, or edicts and dispositions that somehow qualify the normative character of a law. Furthermore, in the processes of marginal commentary of those compilations, we see how legal scholars, legal students, and practicing lawyers remove themselves one or more degrees from the normative power of the compilation, in order to theorize about it based on the cases they are familiar with, or by including new concepts, new ideas on how to rule, etc. Glossators and the so-called post-glossators do exactly the latter: by reading the struggles for normativity contained in the legal codices (not codes!), glossators theorize about concepts or institutions that address legal problems in a universal way—and, as Aristotle would then put it, more philosophical (Aristotle. Poetics. 1451b). Those processes constitute a cycle that provides a glimpse of the law as a work in progress, but that, we should not forget, deals with the legal networks across space and time by undertaking a very important task that we can call fulanization: they remove the natural persons that are at the origin of any legal experience—the tiny lives, as Judith Revel has called them—in order to turn them into legal subjects, into more universalized subjects, artifcial persons, with no name and last name, or with those only as a placeholder for a refection on the rule, the norm, the precedent, or the exception.13 The networks constituted around jurisprudence can also be studied beyond the big corpora of civil or canon law. If we looked at customary law across the Iberian Peninsula and beyond, we would see, for instance, the organization of fueros not only as local undertakings, but also as sets of families. Indeed, we see how some fueros constitute the model for fueros from somewhere else, in exchanges that bespeak not only of political dynamics, and forms of collective legal co-production, but also real constructions of political networks, through the consolidation 108
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of equivalent forms of jurisdiction, as if they were movements of legal reformation that affect specifc cities or other political entities. It is known, for instance, that the Fuero de Cuenca was the model for many other fueros across the extremadura or borderland of Castile.14 We also know to what extent Cuenca itself became a jurisdictional center of great importance until the ffteenth century (Guerrero Navarrete and Sánchez Benito 1994; Jara Fuente 2011).15 Great, very important cities, like Toledo, Talavera, Cuenca, or Burgos, and others, were the lenders of the local laws to other emerging or recently conquered cities and political entities, in a sort of traditio legis at a local networked level.16 Those traditiones legum maybe could not predict, at any moment, whether those who gained access to the laws were more like the Greeks or more like the Romans in the known Libro de Buen Amor short narrative. In this process, jurisprudence from one jurisdiction travels to meet and to become jurisprudence from a different space, thus also exchanging the legal experiences of the legal subjects. In other words, the fulanos from one jurisdiction, the local fulanos, become more global, more exchangeable, more universal fulanos. Those networks expand throughout the confnes of the jurisdiction and beyond. One example from al-Andalus, in this case.There is no such thing as an Islamic central jurisdiction, even within specifc polities or political entities. As Wael Hallaq has demonstrated in his work about the Shari’a, while the sources of the latter can be cataloged, the content of those sources varies immensely (Hallaq 1994, 1997, 2004, 2005, 2009). Likewise, the treatment of the sources changes according to the madhhab, or, as Shahab Ahmed translates this notion, the “way to go” in legal interpretive terms (Ahmed 2017). Maybe the foundational text regarding these changes in content and treatment of Islamic law is the tenth-century Isma`ili judge al-Qa¯dı¯̣ al-Nu‘ma¯n, in which he describes the schools of Islamic law from his own vantage point. Iberian schools of law are mostly Maliki, whom he depicts as those who assert that lawyers must follow the rules from the lawyers of Medina (al-Nu‘ma¯n 143). Indeed, the Malikis defne the hierarchy of the legal sources in a way that, only in the end, favors local customs.17 However, local customs are in turn subject to discussion, as we know not only by the constitution of jurisprudential considerations by lawyers and judges across al-Andalus, but also thanks to the juridical responses the muftis (judges that respond to legal questions throughout Islam18) produced upon request.As Janina Safran (2013) has demonstrated, responses in al-Andalus during the ninth/tenth centuries were the object of discussion and disagreement—even by the same jurist sometimes, which, by the way, is the main criticism al-Qa¯dı¯̣ al-Nu‘ma¯n makes about Maliki madhhab—across Islam. Reading those responses implies not only a specifc understanding of the ways in which Andalusi legal subjects deal with (among other issues) customs, rituals, marriage, public life, or identity, but also how these questions were discussed beyond the jurisdictions of Andalusi polities, in order to become part of the legal debates across Islam. In this sense, the legal subject animates the law from the bottom all the way up. This way of animating the law has been argued to be at the core of processes of “Islamication” in some regions, as in Camilo Gómez-Rivas’s book about how the fatwas or legal responses produced by Ibn Rushd (Averroes’s grandfather) were a key element in the process of Islamication of “Morocco” during the Almoravid period, and throughout the emergence of the Almohad Empire under Ibn Tumart (Gómez-Rivas 2015).Although Ramzi Rouighi has pointed out that maybe the right way to talk about this process is to understand the generalization of a given mahdhab (in this case the Maliki one, although maybe not “Malikism” as an -ism) (Rouighi 2015) the research points to a certain process of unifcation or legal-interpretive solidarity within a given political entity, and probably beyond it. In such cases, we can again see the dynamic: law animation is the result of creating a legal subject that can travel in space and time, and that, therefore, is a legal soul rather than a legal 109
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body.The matter of this subject is memory, fantasy, imagination, and all the other internal postsensorial operations, and the actions—the only things with which the law is concerned—are those that can be perceived and controlled through the external senses.
Fulanizations How do we read all of those documents? How do we read the ways in which legal subjects animate the law? There are at least two sides to these questions. One side is that of the proper names who are, at a certain point, constituted as legal subjects. Their names are sometimes apparent, but other times, they appear fulanized. Indeed, many of the documents transmit the civil identities of those who participate in the legal business, while other documents, which have been transmitted as forms or models for further documentation, only transmit the action, while the actors themselves, as well as the places, have been erased and replaced by a placeholder name, like the English “John Doe” or “Jane Doe”, and others; those are represented in Arabic and in the Romance languages with the same word, the Arabic indefnite fula¯n. The other side that makes this question diffcult to answer is that those documents are mostly formulary; and formulae, rather than disappearing as some sort of déjà vu, déjà lu, are as invasive as the emerald ash borer. Formulae have a tendency to stand out and preclude the proliferation of the details, the rhetoric of the details, the opening toward the act of becoming a juridical subject. Reading documents, reading the small pieces of archival material produced by the law, requires paying attention to the process of becoming. How objects, actors, and actions that are one thing become something else. In other words, we need to read animation, the constitution of a movement, and the constitution of a political soul that inheres in the legal system and animates it. The Siete Partidas offer a valuable idea of this process in both the oral and the written realms. The Third Partida is entirely devoted to procedural law—and the poetics of justice. I would like to underscore here that these two doctrinal constructions go hand in hand: there would not be a procedural law without the poetics of justice. Indeed, the frst pages of the Third Partida are a very complex narrative regarding this poetics: in it, Justice becomes a space that looks like a locus amœnus, and that points to the origin of jurisdictional power through the metaphor of the fountain of justice where the legal subject fnds tranquility and inner peace.This poetics of Justice as a peaceful space is central for many of the procedures that come afterward in the Third Partida, mostly for those moments in which the legal subject faces the agents and offcers of the law in the legal space—the court, or any other space where the legal ritual takes place. A moment from Partidas 3.16.26. After taking the oath according to the Spanish custom (Partidas 3.16.25), the judge must take the witnesses, one by one, to a separate space, away from the rest of the parties involved, with only the company of a learned notary (algunt escribano entendido). In that space, what is crucial is the affective environment; indeed, the law regulates how the judge must listen to the witness very calmly or mansamente (which is an adverb that can also translate as “meekly”), in the sense that the judge’s countenance must inspire peace of mind, absolute absence of antagonism. Likewise, the judge must listen to the witness without interrupting him or her, while looking straight at his or her face, fully engaged with the witness. It is in these precise and favorable conditions of controlled emotions that the witness can now speak.The poetics of justice are here translated to the exact space of procedure. The living voice of the witness cannot be subject to a unidirectional experience. After the witness has fnished explaining his or her truth, the law acknowledges the deep gap that exists between witnessing, deposition, and even confession, on the one hand, and the correct understanding on the part of the judge. Of course, the spoken word comes accompanied by a 110
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pragmatic experience that is irreproducible in writing, which no notary could repeat as a verbal discourse. Likewise, such experience is an often agrammatical articulation in which the witness is likely bound to testify in solecisms, imprecisions, syntactic and semantic inaccuracy, and so on, no matter how peaceful and emotionally stable the conditions in which the deposition takes place—we all speak like that, in every single oral improvisation. Living voice, because it is alive, is always raw and therefore it needs to be processed, to be edited. But in order to proceed to this edition, the judge must then take the word.The law explains it in a rather theatrical way, using direct speech to allow either the judge or the notary to speak in the frst person: When the witness begins to speak, the judge must listen to him calmly, and he must be quiet until the witness has fnished. And the judge must look at the witness in his face all the time.And only when the witness has fnished speaking, either the judge or the notary who records the deposition, can begin to speak, and say this to the witness: “Now listen to me, for I wish you to hear if I understand you well”, and he should then repeat what the witness stated. If he remembers what he said, the judge should immediately cause it to be written down, or should himself do so, well and faithfully, so that nothing may be either omitted or added, and after all this has been done, he should cause it to be read to the witness, and if the latter thinks that it is correct, he should admit it.Where he sees that there is anything to correct, this should immediately be done, and after everything has been corrected, the judge should cause the testimony to be read to the witness, and if the witness thinks that it is correct, he should say so. And he who takes the testimony of the witness, who says that he is familiar with the facts, should ask him how he knows them, making him state in what way he ascertains them, whether by sight, hearing, or belief, and whichever way he mentions, the judge should cause to be recorded.19 Here we fnd ourselves in front of a civil procedure, and a poetics of justice, that deals directly with the administration of souls: external senses and affects are both involved in this moment of legal intimacy that will derive into important judicial decisions. Hearing, of course, and speech—which according to some interpreters of Aristotelian aesthetics, including the Ikhwan as-Safa’ or Brethren of Purity, Bartholomew of Glanville, Juan Gil de Zamora, and even the Siete Partidas themselves, is also part of the external senses, as its site is the tongue and shares its properties with the sense of taste. The professionals own the feld. They always have. But some of them felt perplexed. As Maimonides would put it, they felt uneasy about reading the law without philosophizing, on the one hand, and interpreting the many parables (mashal is the word used by Maimonides, which can be translated as “allegory”,“parable”, or simply “trope”) of the legal text on the other. Maimonides called hairah ̣ to this uneasiness, impasse, dilemma, or sensation of danger, a noun that in the Middle Ages was translated as “perplexitas”,“neutralitas”,“dubitas”,“turbación”, but that can also translate as fear.The sensation echoes other concerns expressed in similar ways by other thinkers across the Mediterranean, but Maimonides conceptualizes it, gives it a name that makes the struggle visible. A few years his senior, Ibn Rushd of Córdoba, Averroes, had also put on the table the main question in his Decisive Treatise. Averroes’s work in the Decisive Treatise and his multiple commentaries on Aristotle’s works always have the law in mind. Many scholars have devoted their work to that, and it would take too long to comment on this feld. But among them, Daniel Heller-Roazen put it in a way that combines erudition and theoretical acumen: they strive to put Philosophy before the law (Heller-Roazen 2006). Heller-Roazen does not mention Kafka 111
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in his article, but the reader cannot imagine immediately the metaphor of the falsafa in front of the building of the Law struggling to fnd an entry that the Law makes extraordinarily diffcult even with the doors wide open. Both Alain de Libera and Marc Geoffroy have insisted on this very question: the Decisive Treatise is, indeed, a fatwa, a legal response, in which, therefore,Averroes takes the role of a mufti— as his grandfather was. As many legal responses go, it intends to travel across the (Almohad) empire and become the center of reference for those who feel perplexed about the legality of philosophical thinking (Averroes 1996). In the end, Averroes, like Maimonides just about 20 years later, will make a distinction between those who are legitimately perplexed and that therefore have the right to feel concerned with the legal obligation to philosophically examine the world, and those who are not legitimized to do so.This distinction could, at a certain point, be conceptualized with sociological models with political projection, like those of Bourdieu, but, more importantly, such distinction gives us a series of questions that perhaps are outside the interests of those sociological models. First and foremost, the question is: who are the gatekeepers of the Law? Those gatekeepers were also learned in philosophy themselves. Al-Gha¯za¯lı¯’s Taha¯fut al-Fala¯sifah, or Destructio philosophorum, as it was known in the Latin Middle Ages (Refutation of the Philosophers, although also known as The Incoherence of the Philosophers, even in Marmura’s translation), demonstrates his vast knowledge of Greek and Roman philosophy to demonstrate how incoherent with the Law—superfuous, at best—those philosophical corpora can be.They mislead, and they do not add anything to the perfect knowledge of the Law itself—while, at the same time, they contradict Islamic principles, regardless of the “sect” one examines.20 This is the position that seems to be in dispute, and that other professional lawyers, very often judges themselves, debated in multiple ways across the Mediterranean, and in particular in the Iberian Peninsula—although, again, the networks are more important, or at least as important, as the geopolitical entities. I am not even touching the tip of the iceberg of this dispute, but I do want to mention the point of view of Averroes, because he makes clear the necessary relationship between philosophy and Law, by means of dialectical thinking—in itself a philosophical tool, although he gives it the name of a profoundly legally rooted concept in Islam, qiyas, which Muslim legal thinkers often use to refer to analogic thinking.21 This is the general conclusion Averroes reaches: it has become evident that refection upon the books of the Ancients is obligatory according to the Law [shari’ah], for their aim and intention in their books is the very intention to which the Law urges us.And [it has become evident] that whoever forbids refection upon them by anyone suited to refect upon them—namely anyone who unites two qualities, the frst being innate intelligence and the second Law-based justice and moral virtue—surely bars people from the door through which the Law calls them to cognizance of God—namely the door of refection leading to true cognizance of Him. (Averroes 2001, 6–7) By locating the connection between Law and philosophy as an obligation of Islam, Averroes takes a very bold step in his inquiry. He wants to both open the door of the Law to those who are capable of situating themselves in front of it, and asks them to enter through it and to dismiss the calls for prohibition from crossing through the door (ba¯b).This mandatory, legal task is crucial for Averroes and for those who may have felt perplexity about it—he also uses the trope of the perplexed in his Decisive treatise (7).This is what allowed him to comment on very central treatises from the philosophers, including, of course, his three commentaries on Aristotle’s De 112
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Anima: Averroes, like some of his contemporaries, wants to know how to understand the soul (nafs, what Al-Gha¯za¯lı¯ considered the lower soul that is subject to disciplining) from the perspective of the Law and according to the legal obligation of investigating it.22 The line of inquiry we need to open, therefore, is this. If we want to read what the professionals of the law want to say about the relationship between law and philosophy, a good vantage point is to ask: what do they think about how their knowledge on the science of the soul, and their theories on the soul, infect the philosophy of law, and the theory of law they want to present? Or, in other words: how do they deal with the soul of the legal subject, and therefore with the question of the animation of the law? Al-Gha¯za¯lı¯,Averroes, Maimonides, Ibn Falaquera, Thomas Aquinas, and many others, are just some of the names of those who will answer some of those questions in different ways. All of them, from within and from outside the Iberian Peninsula, are looking at the Law as an all-encompassing feld of inquiry whose discipline may be the legal discipline in terms of action and the realm of the particular, but whose science is defnitely in the world of philosophy and theology.
Legal clients The Law is not the exclusive concern of those who have the Law as their profession in any capacity. It concerns us all. It concerns the black stable boy who addresses the king in the 32nd tale from the frst part of Don Juan Manuel’s Conde Lucanor (1335), telling him that it does not matter to him whether they believe he is the son of his father or of somebody else, and that therefore he is bound to say the truth about the nakedness of the king. It is the concern of this particular person because of the racial, social, and economic circumstances that make him a stranger within the legal system, but can actually change the order of the legal discourse. Probably a slave, this man, a true parrhesiast, shows the courage of truth Foucault talked about, and, in this sense, locates himself from outside the law, to a central position before the law (Manuel 2006, ex. 32; Foucault 2012). Maybe the biggest challenge of studying medieval Iberian law is to fnd the entryways to those infections between the professional and the non-professional. Finding out such entryways will not allow us to hear new voices, but these foldings are populated with ways to talk about the law, to discuss it as a real thing, as a language, or maybe as a fctional construction at any side of the cultural object that “talks about” the law. I began this chapter with Alfonso X’s idea of the sensitive soul as a defnition of the people, and how this defnition prompted a question that—I feel—is new: what animates the law? I am closing with Al-Gha¯za¯lı¯, and how he used the expression faqı¯h al-nafs as a title of honor to all those who understood their own legal commitment to the world. Sometimes, Al-Gha¯za¯lı¯ removed this title from somebody—like, for instance, Ma¯lik ibn Anas, the founder of the Maliki mahdhab—because he thought that the Medina-born legal scholar was not up to the task of understanding the political and legal implications of legal thought. For Al-Gha¯za¯lı¯, being a faqı¯h al-nafs was the highest possible legal achievement for an individual. Such an individual had to have a deep understanding of the relationship between legal activities proper to those who know the depth of the fqh or legal wisdom, as they inhere in the human soul, as the faculty that perceives and knows. He understood that the legal subject is the one who animates the law.
Notes 1 I would like to point out that this chapter does not intend to be exhaustive regarding the law. All I intend to do is to ask a question that I believe deserves further investigation, while I underscore the
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reason for it. The question “what animates the law” is in no way interchangeable with simply “the law”—it is only one possible question. However, this question has many ramifcations, and, in particular, one that I consider extraordinarily important: the Law needs a legal subject, and the construction of this legal subject is an act of creativity, an institution, not a spontaneous or natural occurrence. Partidas 2.11.Prologue. I always quote the Siete Partidas using the same system: Partida.title.law. In this case, the reference points to the Segunda Partida, title number 11, preamble, or prologue.The day in which we will have a reliable edition of the Siete Partidas is not near; in the meantime, I am using Gregorio López Madera’s edition of 1555; Gregorio López was the President of the Council of the Indies, and created this edition under the patronage of and with the privilege of the regent of Spain, Juana de Austria, while Carlos I and Felipe II were in the process of performing the abdication of the former on the body of the latter throughout the European portion of the Empire. Partidas 2.10.1.“Cuydan algunos quel pueblo es llamado la gente menuda assi como menestrales e labradores e esto no es ansi ca antiguamente en babilonia e en troya. e en roma. que fueron lugares muy señalados ordenaron todas estas cosas con razon e pusieron nonbre acada vna segund que conuiene pueblo llaman el ayuntamiento de todos los onbres comunalmente delos mayores e delos medianos e delos menores ca todos son menester: e no se pueden escusar porque, se han de ayudar vnos a otros porque pueden bien beuir e ser guardados e mantenidos”. (Some think that the word “people” means the lesser workers, as, for instance, artisans or peasants. But it is not like that. Because in ancient times, in Babylon, Troy, and Rome, which were very important places, all these matters were regulated according to reason, giving each thing its proper name.We call people to the union of all men in common, including those of superior, middle, and inferior condition, because all of them are necessary, and none can be excepted, since they need to help one another in order to live well and be protected and well maintained.) Bibliography on the subject is large, but at the same time it follows in the footsteps of a closed tradition inaugurated in Hellenistic times around the group of treatises, or fragments of treatises, known as Perí Basileías, or On Monarchy, preserved in the second part of the Anthologia of Stobaeus. Stobaeus gathered those fragments of authors like Pseudo Ecphantus, Pseudo Archytas, Diotogenes, or Sthenides. In English, the treatises were compiled and translated in the work of Thomas Taylor (see Taylor 1882; Squilloni 1990). Steinwenter (1946) considers it a political theory. Kantorowicz (1957) thinks of lex animata as a doctrine to emphasize monarchical power. Although it may have appeared as a political theory, or at least as a theory of a particular political idea (namely, the centrality of monarchical power), it cannot really be considered a doctrine, as it never became a mainstream operative discourse—unlike the theocracy of some monarchies, like the French during the Middle Ages, or the English during the Early Modern period.There are hosts of shorter essays to explain the peculiarities of the expression by specifc authors that shed light on the metaphoric character of the notion. See for instance Martens (1994). Justinian included this idea in his Novellae, 105.2.4:“Omnibus enim a nobis dictis imperatoris excipiatur fortuna, cui et ipsas deus leges subiecit, legem animatam eum mittens hominibus: eo quod imperatori quidem iugis indesinens consulatus omnibus civitatibus et populis gentibusque in singulis quae placent distribuenti, advenit autem cum ipse annuerit trabea, ideoque et imperii consulatus per omnia sit sequens sceptra” (Justinian 2000: 507).The idea probably arrived to Justinian through the Byzantine interest on this possible political theory that some Christian authors, including Eusebius of Caesarea, fought against. See also Procopé (1988, 25–8) and Nicol (1998, 64). It is not unlikely that the knowledge of the nomos empsychos/lex animata trope in the Latin Middle Ages owes a lot to the work of Eusebius, which was translated, complemented, and commented by Hyeronimus of Stridon (Saint Jerome). It would be impossible to generate a complete bibliography on this subject, but these are the main questions we can fnd in “law and literature” or “law and culture” kind of approaches. For recent assessments, we could mention (aside from many handbooks of legal history) the following: Ost (2004), Sarat, Frank, and Anderson (2011), or more recently, Barrington and Sobecki (2019). Along with the titles mentioned in the previous note, I would like to point to the important work of legal scholars who have transformed the way in which we look at the relationship between law and culture, like James Brundage (2008), Karl Shoemaker (2010), or the cyclopean work of Emanuele Conte and Laurent Mayali (2019). See Robcis (2016).This book is a brilliant demonstration of how legal scholarship and legal practice in France (but similar studies could be produced across other polities) have used structuralism to shape political policy, regarding, for instance, in this case, the heterosexual family. The distinction between external senses (as the organs of perception) and internal senses (to name the post-sensorial operations) derives more directly from the commentators of Aristotle’s work. More concretely, it seems that the parallel between fve internal senses and fve external senses could come from
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the Arabic tradition, and more in particular the Rasa¯ʾil or Letters of the Ikhwa¯n al-Safa ̣ ¯ʾ or Brethren of Purity (Bizri 2008). Letters 32–6 are devoted to the soul and the intellect. See the new edition of these letters (Walker et al. 2015). See also Wolfson (1935) and Harvey (1975). Reading the recent book by Murad Idris (Idris 2019), especially p. 85, but the totality of chapter 2, “Summoning Hostility” (pp. 70–123), I perceive an analogy between this apparent dichotomy between gentes and pueblo and the way in which al-Fa¯ra¯bı¯, in his summary of Plato’s Laws, makes a politically productive distinction between qawm which would correspond to groups, or even groups of power (like gentes in Latin would probably correspond to similar groups of power based on familiar and affnity links), and ahl, which would correspond to the inhabitants of the madı¯na (the polis, the civitas), who are bound by the internal laws of the city or political entity. See Arendt ([1954] 1961); the structure of the onion as the perfect metaphor for authoritarian power is on p. 99. For the defnition and discussion of disciplinary power, see Foucault (1975). Most of the materials from those inquirições are awaiting proper editions and studies. I wish to thank Professor Inés Calderón Medina, one of the most important specialists in this documentary corpus, for having shared with me some of the primary materials.The Livros de inquirições de Alfonso II, from 1220 onward, are digitized at the Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo (https://digitarq.arquivos.pt/details?i d=4182562), and those from 1258 were edited by Alexandre Herculano (Herculano 1888–1977). See also Andrade and Fontes (2015). The most interesting pesquisa regia must be the so-called pesquisa de los cien, because of the 100 witnesses summoned to declare about the case Oña v. Frías. See Alfonso and Jular (2000). The case was reproduced in Oceja Gonzalo (1983), but one can also consult (much more interesting) the manuscript preserved at the Archivo Histórico Nacional, which is now available online. Judith Revel has coined the notion of tiny lives to explore the political and legal inactivity with respect to the masses of bodies of immigrants, their number, in the frame of contemporary migration and the re-emergence of authoritarian, neo-nationalist regimes across the Mediterranean—but globally, including the U.S. See, for instance, Revel (2018). See Ureña y Smenjaud, Castañeda y Alcover, and Puyol (1935). More recently, the work of Ureña and others has been re-edited with additions and corrections by Raquel Escutia Romero (Escutia Romero 2003). See also Porras Arboledas and Andrés (2018); Pérez Martin (1996). See Guerrero Navarrete and Sánchez Benito (1994) and Jara Fuente and Antonio (2011). Although specifc editions of fueros do deal with this form of exchange, interaction, and networking over time, there is no specifc work, to my knowledge, specifcally related to this subject, and it would be an important point of departure to better understand the juridical negotiations taking place in the Iberian peninsula—and beyond.The ordenamientos de cortes frequently reveal forms of networking, some of them under the general name of hermandades, which sometimes come from one city and sometimes gather groups of cities (for instance the hermandad de ciudades de Andalucía).With modern forms of digital humanities resources, a cartography of those exchanges and interactions would be most illuminating. Nu‘ma¯n (2015). See also the classical work now re-edited (Zysow and Gleave 2014). I am always referring to Islam to talk about Muslim polities and communities across the world, following here Ahmed (2017), instead of “the Islamicate world” or other expressions. “E desque el testigo començare a dezir. deue el iudgador escucharle mansamente & callar fasta que aya acabado catandole toda via en la cara. E quando acabare de dezir: deue entonçe el iudgador o el escriuano que escriue los dichos començar a fablar & dezir le. agora escucha tu a mi. ca quiero que oyas si te entendi bien. & deue entonçe recontar lo que el testigo dixo. E si se acordaren que dixo assi. deue lo luego fazer escriuir el mismo bien & lealmente de guisa que no sea menguada nin cresçida ende ninguna cosa. E despues que fuere todo endereçado. deue lo luego fazer leer antel testigo. E si el testigo entendiere que esta bien deue lo otorgar. E si viere que ay alguna cosa de emendar deue lo luego endereçar. & despues que fuere todo endereçado deuelo fazer leer antel testigo & si el testigo entendiere que esta bien deue lo otorgar E aquel que reçebiere el testigo que dize que sabe el fecho deue le preguntar como lo sabe faziendole dezir por que razon lo sabe. si lo sabe por vista o por oyda o por creençia. E la razon que dixiere deue la fazer escreuir”. Partidas 3.16.26. Al-Gha¯za¯lı¯ intends to consider Islam as a whole, independently of the internal differences among “sects”: “For the rest of the sects may differ from us in matters of detail, whereas these [philosophers] challenge the very principles of religion” (Gha¯za¯lı¯ 2000). Notice that here, Al-Gha¯za¯lı¯ uses the word Dı¯n, which in short means religion, and for principles, he uses al-tawl, which refers to the strength, the core values; this seems to be equivalent to the divine law, on other occasions referred to as the shari’a. For qiyas as analogy in legal terms, see Zysow and Gleave (2014).
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Jesús R. Velasco 22 Al-Gha¯za¯lı¯ delves into the question of the nafs as the lower or human soul—as opposed to the higher soul or ru¯h, which would correspond to the spirit—in his treatise On Disciplining the Soul [Kita¯b Riya¯dat ̣ al-nafs], book 22 of his Revival of the Religious Sciences [Ihya ̣ ¯’ ‘Ulu¯m al-Dı¯n].There is a translation of this part of the book (Winter 1995). However, at several points in this treatise, Al-Gha¯za¯lı¯ himself declares that it is not possible to keep the distinction between nafs and ru¯h, and that they often need to be interpreted as synonyms (cf., for instance, chapter 22.2, p. 17 of Winter 1995).
References Ahmed, Shahab. 2017. What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Alfonso, Isabel, and Cristina Jular. 2000.“Oña contra Frías o el pleito de los cien testigos: una pesquisa en la Castilla del siglo XIII”. Edad Media 3: 61–88. Al-Gha¯za¯lı¯. See Gha¯za¯lı¯, Al- 4. Al-Qa¯dı¯̣ al-Nu‘ma¯n. See Nu‘ma¯n, Al-Qa¯dı¯̣ alAmes, Christine Caldwell. 2009. Righteous Persecution: Inquisition, Dominicans, and Christianity in the Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ames, Christine Caldwell. 2015. Medieval Heresies: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. New York: Cambridge University Press. Andrade,Amélia A, and João L.I. Fontes. 2015. Inquirir Na Idade Média: Espaços, Protagonistas E Poderes (séculos Xii-Xiv) – Tributo a Luís Krus. Lisboa: Instituto d’Estudos Medievais. Arendt, Hannah. 1961 [1954]. “What is Authority?” In Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought, 91–141. New York:Viking Press. Averroes. 1996. Discours décisif [Fasl al-maqa¯l fı¯ma¯ bain ash-sharı¯’ah wa al-hikmah min al-ittisa¯l]. Edited by Marc Geoffroy, Introduction by Alain de Libera. Paris: GF-Flammarion. Averroes. 2001. The Book of the Decisive Treatise Determining the Connection Between Law and Philosophy. Edited and translated by Charles E. Butterworth. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2001. Barbezat, Michael D. 2018. Burning Bodies. Communities, Eschatology, and the Punishment of Heresy in the Middle Ages. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Barrington, Candace, and Sebastian Sobecki, eds. 2019. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Law and Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benad, Mathias. 1990.Domus und Religion in Montaillou: Katholische Kirche und Katharismus im Uberlebenskampf der Familie des Pfarrers Petrus Clerici am Anfang des 14. Jahrhunderts. Tübingen: Mohr. ̣ ¯’ and Their Rasa¯ʾil: An Introduction. Bizri, Nader el-, ed. 2008. Epistles of the Brethren of Purity: the Ikhwa¯n al-Safa Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brundage, James. 2008. The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Burns, James H., ed. 1988. The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Conte, Emanuele. 2015.“Ordo Iudicii et Regula Iuris. Bulgarus et les origines de la culture juridique (XIIe siècle)”. In Frontières des savoirs en Italie à l’époque des premières universités (XIIIe–XVe siècle), edited by Joël Chandelier and Aurélien Robert, 157–176. Rome: École Française de Rome. Conte, Emanuele. 2016. La fuerza del texto: casuística y categorías del derecho medieval. Madrid: Universidad Carlos III. Conte, Emanuele, and Laurent Mayali, eds. 2019. A Cultural History of Law in the Middle Ages.Vol. 2 of A Cultural History of Law. Edited by Gary Watt. New York: Bloomsbury. del Mar, Maksymilian, and William Twining, eds. 2015. Legal Fictions in Theory and Practice. Cham: Springer. Dolezalek, Gero R. 1996. “Lexiques de droit et autres outils pour le ius commune (XIIe–XIXe siècle)”. In Les manuscrits des lexiques et glossaires de l’antiquité tardive à la fn du Moyen Âge, edited by Jacqueline Hamesse, 353–376. Louvain: Université de Louvain-la-Neuve. El-Bizri, Nader. See Bizri, Nader el-. Escutia Romero, Raquel. 2003. El Fuero de Cuenca (formas primitiva y sistemática: texto latino, texto castellano y adaptación del Fuero de Iznatoraf). Facsimile edition of Ureña y Smenjaud, Castañeda y Alcover, and Puyol (1935). Cuenca: Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha. Falaquera, Shem Tov. 2014. L’accord de la Torah et de la Philosophie: Épître de la controverse. Edited and translated by David Lemler. Paris: Hermann. Foucault, Michel. 1975. Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, Michel. 2012. The Courage of the Truth (the Government of Self and Others II): Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–1984. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
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The law Gha¯za¯lı¯, Al-. 2000. The Incoherence of the Philosophers. Edited and translated by Michael Marmura. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press. Gómez-Rivas, Camilo. 2015. Law and the Islamization of Morocco under the Almoravids: the fatwas of Ibn Rushd al-Jadd to the far Maghrib. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Guerrero Navarrete,Yolanda, and José María Sánchez Benito. 1994. Cuenca en la Baja Edad Media: un sistema de poder urbano. Cuenca: Diputación Provincial. Hallaq,Wael B. 1994. Law and Legal Theory in Classical and Medieval Islam. Aldershot: Ashgate/Variorum. Hallaq,Wael B. 1997. A History of Islamic Legal Theories: An Introduction to Sunnı¯ Usụ ¯l Al-Fiqh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hallaq,Wael B. 2004. The Formation of Islamic Law. Aldershot: Ashgate/Variorum. Hallaq,Wael B. 2005. The Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hallaq,Wael B. 2009. Sharı¯’a:Theory, Practice,Transformations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harvey, E. Ruth. 1975. The Internal Wits. Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. London: Warburg Institute. Heller-Roazen, Daniel. 2006. “Philosophy before the Law: Averroes’s Decisive Treatise”. Critical Inquiry 32: 412–442. Herculano, Alexandre. 1888–1977. Portugaliae Monumenta Historica: Inquisitiones (1220 e 1258). 9 fasc. Lisboa: Academia das Ciências de Lisboa. Idris, Murad. 2019. War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jara, Fuente, and José Antonio. 2011. “Marcos de contestación y constitución urbana: la construcción de espacios de participación política en el concejo de Cuenca (siglo XV)”. Cahiers d’études hispaniques médiévales 34: 41–54. Jaritz, Gerhard, ed. 2012. Ritual, Images, and Daily Life.The Medieval Perspective. Munich: LIT Verlag. Jónsson, Einar Már. 1995. Le miroir: Naissance d’un genre littéraire. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Jospe, Raphael. 1988. Torah and Sophia:The Life and Thought of Shem Tov Ibn Falaquera. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press. Justinian. 2000. Novellae. Edited by Mommsen,Theodor, Rudolf Schoell, Paul Krüger, and Guilelmus Kroll. Corpus iuris civilis. Hildesheim:Weidmann, 1959 Kantorowicz, Ernst. 1957. The King’s Two Bodies. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. 1982. Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324. Rev. ed. Paris: Gallimard. López Madera, Gregorio, ed. 1555. Siete Partidas.Salamanca:Andrea de Portonariis. Manuel, Don Juan. 2006. El Conde Lucanor. Edited by Guillermo Serés. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg. Mar, Maksymilian del. See del Mar, Maksymilian Martens, John. 1994. “Nómos empsychos in Philo and Clement of Alexandria”. In Hellenization Revisited: Shaping a Christian Response Within the Greco-Roman World, edited by Wendy E. Helleman, 323–338. Lanham: University Press of America. Nicol, D.M. 1998.“Byzantine Political Thought”. In Burns (1988): 49–80. New univ‘ma¯n, Al-Qa¯dı¯̣ 2015. Disagreements of the Jurists:A Manual of Islamic Legal Theory. Edited and translated by Devin J. Stewart. New York: New York University Press. Oceja Gonzalo, Isabel. 1983.Documentación del monasterio de San Salvador de Oña. Burgos: J. M. Garrido Garrido. Ost, François. 2004. Raconter la loi: aux sources de l’imaginaire juridique, Paris: Odile Jacob. Partidas. See López Madera, Gregorio Pasciuta, Beatrice. 2015. Il diavolo in paradiso: diritto, teología e letteratura nel “Processus Satanæ” (sec. XIV). Roma:Viella. Pegg, Mark. 2001. The Corruption of Angels: The Great Inquisition of 1245–1246. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pegg, Mark. 2008. A Most Holy War:The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pérez Martin,Antonio. 1996.“El Derecho común y el Fuero de Cuenca”. Glossae 8: 77–110. Porras,Arboledas, and Pedro Andrés. 2018.“La pervivencia del Fuero de Cuenca en los inicios de la modernidad: el testimonio de los fueros de Consuegra y Requena”. Espacio,Tiempo y Forma. serie III, Historia Medieval 31: 597–618. Procopé, John. 1988.“Greek and Roman Political Theory”. In Burns (1988): 21–36. Revel, Judith. 2018.“Ne pas faire vivre et laisser mourir”. Esprit 7: 93–102. Ristuccia, Nathan J. 2018. Christianization and Commonwealth in Early Medieval Europe:A Ritual Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Jesús R. Velasco Robcis, Camille. 2016. The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis and the Family in France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Rouighi, Ramzi. 2015. Review of Law and the Islamization of Morocco under the Almoravids:The Fatwas of Ibn Rushd al-Jadd to the Far Maghrib, by Camilo Gómez-Rivas.TMR 15.09.30 Safran, Janina M. 2013. Defning Boundaries in Al-Andalus: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Islamic Iberia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Sarat,Austin, Cathrine O. Frank, and Matthew Anderson, eds. 2011. Teaching Law and Literature. New York: MLA. Shoemaker, Karl. 2010. Sanctuary and Crime in the Middle Ages. New York: Fordham University Press. Siete Partidas. See López Madera, Gregorio. Sobecki, Sebastian. 2015. Unwritten Verities: The Making of England’s Vernacular Legal Culture, 1463–1549. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press. Squilloni, Antonella. 1990.“Il signifcato etico-politico dell’immagine re-legge animata. Il ‘nomos empsychos’ nei trattati neopitagorici ‘Peri Basileias’”. Civilità Classica e Cristiana 11(1): 75–94. Steinwenter, Artur. 1946. “Nómos émpsychos. Zur Geschichte einer politische Theorie”. Anzeiger der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien 133: 250–268. Taylor, Thomas. 1882. Political fragments of Archytas, Charondas, Zaleucus, and Other Ancient Pythagoreans, Preserved by Stobaeus, and Also, Ethical Fragments of Hierocles, the Celebrated Commentator on the Golden Pythagoric Verses, Preserved by the Same Author.Translated from the Greek. Chiswick:Taylor. Teissier-Ensminger, Anne. 2004. “La loi au fguré: Trois illustrateurs du Code pénal français”. Sociétés & Représentations 2(18): 277–291. Thomas,Yan. 2011. Les opérations du droit. Paris: Seuil. Ureña y Smenjaud, de Rafael,Vicente Castañeda y Alcover, and Julio Puyol. 1935. Fuero de Cuenca (forma primitiva y sistemática: texto latino, texto castellano y adaptación del Fuero de Iznatoraf). Madrid:Tipografía de Archivos. Velasco, Jesús R. 2020. Dead Voice: Law, Philosophy, and Fiction in the Iberian Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Walker, Paul E., Ismail K. Poonawala, David Simonowitz, and Godefroid de Callataÿ, eds. and trans. 2015. Epistles of the Brethren of Purity: Sciences of the Soul and Intellect. Part I,An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistles, 32–6. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Winter, T.J. 1995. Al-Gha¯za¯lı¯ on Disciplining the Soul & Breaking the Two Desires: Books XXII and XXIII of the Revival of the Religious Sciences (Ihya ̣ ¯’ ‘Ulu¯m al-Dı¯n). Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society. Wolfson, Henry Austryn. 1935. “The Internal Senses in Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew Philosophic Texts”. Harvard Theological Review 28(2): 66–133. Xifaras, Mikhaïl. 2010.“Figures de la doctrine, essai d’une phénoménologie des ‘personnages juridiques’”. In La doctrine en droit administratif:Actes du colloque de l’Association française de droit administratif. Paris: Litec: 175–216. Xifaras, Mikhaïl. 2017. “Théorie des personnages juridiques”. Revue Française de Droit Administratif 33(2): 275–287. Zysow, Aron, and Robert Gleave. 2014. The Economy of Certainty. An Introduction to the Typology of Islamic Legal Theory.Atlanta: Lockwood Press.
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8 SEFARAD David Wacks
From its linguistic origins as a Biblical land of great wealth across the sea, to its more recent nostalgic imaginary as a lost Golden Age of Mediterranean Jewish culture, Sefarad has always been as much an idea as a physical place, a lens through which Iberian Jews have interpreted their world, frst in al-Andalus, then in Christian Iberia, and later in the Sephardic communities they established around the world following their expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula at the turn of the sixteenth century. The idea of Sefarad1 was a product of the culture of al-Andalus, or Arab Islamicate Spain. During this period of Muslim sovereignty, Andalusi Jewish communities enjoyed the rights of dhimmi, subject religious minorities, to practice their religion and organize the affairs of their communities. This institutional autonomy allowed Andalusi Sepharadim to develop a uniquely Iberian culture within Andalusi society, one shaped by Islamicate and Rabbinic habits of thought but also by Hispano–Romance vernacular culture.As Iberia transitioned to Christian rule, Sepharadim found the opportunity to act as mediators for Christian monarchs ruling an Islamicate society. Once most Muslim elites had left the Iberian Peninsula, the Sepharadim became the interpreters of the Andalusi intellectual legacy, which they disseminated in their writings, their religious practice, and their artistic production.This activity not only fueled the transmission of Andalusi Greco–Roman science to the Latin West, but also (in Hebrew translations) to the wider non-Arab Jewish world. After suffering a century of violent persecution and increasing pressure to convert to Catholicism, the Sepharadim were expelled from the Peninsula at the turn of the sixteenth century. Finding themselves in a diasporic network in communities across the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia, the Sepharadim continued developing their Peninsular religious and vernacular cultural practices, including speaking their own dialects of Castilian that continued to evolve over time in both written and spoken forms. In modernity, the idea of Sefarad continues to inspire a variety of historical and cultural visions of what Iberian Jewish life has been, and what it might be in the future. Over the course of this chapter I will describe this trajectory of the production of the idea of Sefarad, demonstrating how Iberian Jews constructed Sefarad in their cultural production. In al-Andalus, as we will see, al-Andalus and Sefarad were practically synonyms.The minority status granted Jews by the doctrine of dhimma created a stable space in which Andalusi Jews were able to govern the affairs of their communities, and participate fully in civic and intellectual life 119
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(Brann 2000). However, at times they also suffered violent persecution, especially in moments of political instability. The rising strength of the northern Christian kingdoms in the eleventh century prompted stricter interpretation and more rigorous enforcement of dhimmi laws that made life more diffcult for Jewish and Christian Andalusis (García-Sanjuán 2008). Andalusi Jews were regular fxtures at court, and cities such as Granada had Jewish populations that were wealthy and infuential. In one famous case, the Andalusi Jew Samuel Hanagid Naghrela commanded the Granadan army. This was unprecedented in the Arab world and unthinkable in the Latin West. During this period, Jews were so numerous and infuential in Granada that Arabic sources refer to that city as Gharnata al-Yahud (Granada of the Jews) (Gonzalo Maeso 1990). Sefaradim were also key to the economic success of al-Andalus. For example, part of the Taifa Kingdom of Denia’s commercial success was due to its Jewish merchants, who were able to leverage their broad and complex Mediterranean networks (Bruce 2017). The famed economic and cultural forescence of al-Andalus in its heyday was a favorite subject of Andalusi writers of all religions, who created a legend of al-Andalus as a place of exceptional cultural production, far from the historical cultural centers of the East, Egypt, and North Africa. It was, in the Andalusi literary imagination, a place of vast natural resources and trade wealth that attracted the best and brightest, and also (due to its far-fung location) the most intrepid of the Arab world. It was also home to a kind of cultural openness that extended to Jews and Christians, who despite their offcial status as second-class citizens, were often able to participate fully in the secular poetic and intellectual culture of the Muslim elites (Brann 2000). Around the year 1200 CE, the Seville-based Muslim poet Ismail ibn Muhammad al-Shaqundi (b. 1231) proudly declared: “I praise God that I was born in al-Andalus and that he has given me the good fortune to be one of her sons … To exalt North Africa over al-Andalus is to prefer left to right, or to say the night is lighter than the day. Ridiculous!” (1934, 42). Jewish Andalusi writers followed suit. Judah al-Harizi (Toledo 1165 – Damascus 1225), writing in Hebrew, described his homeland as “a delight to the eyes. Her light was as the sun in the midst of heaven. The Perfume of her dust was as myrrh to the nostrils and the taste of her delicious fruits was as honey to the palate” (al-Harizi 1965, 2: 297–98; 1952, 345). Before the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, Jewish life under the Visigothic kings was more diffcult.The Jewish communities of the Visigothic period were besieged and suffered steady persecution. In 613 King Sisebut ordered the forcible conversion of all Jews in the kingdom. This anti-Jewish sentiment may have been fueled by Eastern Marian treatises translated from Syriac such as that of Nicholas of Antioch, circulating in Latin translations in the West (Roth 1994, 7–20).Their lot was not unlike that of other Jewish communities living in what had been the Latin Roman world.They left little in the way of documentation and are practically ignored by contemporary Jewish sources in the Arab world. The legend of the Jews opening the city doors of Toledo for the Muslim invaders in 711 might be just that, but it speaks to the poor treatment Jews suffered under Visigothic rule. Life as a dhimmi in al-Andalus was, by modern standards, no picnic: there was the poll tax or jizya to be paid, certain social and economic restrictions to be respected (at least on the surface), and in times of economic crisis and political turmoil, Andalusi Jews were as vulnerable as any other minority. However, the Islamic legal framework provided a stable space for Judaism to coexist and thrive, albeit under Islamic hegemony.The model was not unlike that practiced by Rome, Persia, and Byzantium in managing relations with its many ethnic and religious minority populations (Cohen 1994, 55). The protected status of Jews in Andalusi society created an opportunity for the idea and the reality of Sefarad to grow and establish itself: its geographic and, to a certain extent, cultural distinction from the rest of the Muslim world provided it with a geographic basis for its distinct 120
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cultural identity: it was the only part of the Muslim world, except perhaps Muslim-ruled Sicily, with a signifcant Latin Christian population. Sephardic intellectuals were also Andalusi intellectuals, in the sense that they participated fully in the intellectual life of the dominant culture (Brann 2000). Even those moments in which Sephardic intellectuals famously participated in the projects of kings such as Alfonso X, they were more like guest workers than citizens of the majoritarian intellectual republic. Andalusi Sepharadim, however, were trained in classical Arabic, and some were familiar with the Qur’an and its commentaries, as well as the poetic canon and other forms of learned discourse. The equivalent in Latin Christendom would be if they had received a scholastic education and a university course of study in the liberal arts, which practically no Jew would accomplish in thirteenth-century Castile or Aragon. They typically wrote on secular subjects in Arabic, and in some cases they wrote on Jewish subjects in Arabic as well: though the canonical version of Guide for the Perplexed for modern Maimonides scholars is the twelfth-century Hebrew translation of Joseph ibn Tibbon, Maimonides wrote Dalalat al-ha’irin in Judeo-Arabic, or Arabic written in Hebrew characters, just as Romance-speaking Iberian Jews would later come to write Ibero-Romance dialects in Hebrew script. Even in the thirteenth century, in a Toledo that had been ruled by Christian monarchs for over a century, a Sephardic intellectual such as Jacob ben Elazar wrote a treatise on Hebrew grammar, the Kitab al-Kamil, in Arabic (Ben Elazar 1977). Andalusi Jews’ access to the culture of the dominant elites led to an important innovation in Hebrew literature: the adaptation of Arabic poetics to the Biblical Hebrew language and the birth of a new kind of poetry (Brann 1991, 20–4). Hebrew poets learned in Arabic and experts in the Hebrew Bible began to refashion the Hebrew of the Bible in the image of Arabic, using it to express the images and conceits of Classical Arabic poetry, adapting the Hebrew to the meters of Classical Arabic, and forging a new poetics for Jews to write poetry not only in the synagogue but also in the wine party, the social gathering, and even the battlefeld. Hebrew grammarians who were expert in Arabic philology likewise wrote treatises dedicated to systematizing and classifying the Hebrew language, laying the groundwork for the language’s revivifcation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Stavans 2008; Sáenz-Badillos and Targarona Borrás 1988). In this sense it is probably useful to think of the new Hebrew poetics as a product of Andalusi culture, for it was only through Arabic philology and Classical Arabic poetics that it was able to develop. It is hard to overstate the importance of Arabic learning for the Sephardic intellectual legacy. In terms of the poetry,Arabic provided Iberian Jewish poets with the poetic building blocks that made it possible for them to express themselves in the poetic idiom of the day, but in their own Biblical Hebrew. It allowed them—in their collective imagination—to elevate Hebrew to the level of sophistication enjoyed by Arabic, the dominant offcial language of the society in which they lived (Sáenz-Badillos 1993, 220–245). The importance of Arabic learning to the Jewish Iberian identity continued well into the period of Christian political domination. On the one hand, their knowledge of Arabic gave Jewish elites a signifcant competitive advantage under Christian rule: they were able to navigate the largely Arabophone social worlds, bureaucracies, and institutions of the cities Christians conquered from Muslim rulers. They were also famously involved in the project of translating Arabic learning frst into Latin under Archbishop Raymond of Toledo in the early twelfth century and later into Castilian under Alfonso X of Castile-León in the late thirteenth century. Arabic continued to be an important language of study for Sepharadim well into the fourteenth century (Pearce 2017), and continued to be used as a signal of cultural prestige in Sephardic architectural arts.The remains of a fourteenth-century synagogue in Molina (Guadalajara) were found to be decorated with plaster carvings in the Andalusi style and a bit of Arabic script as well.This and other such fndings support the idea that Castilian Jewish communities continued 121
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to value Arabic as intellectually (if only symbolically) valuable after centuries of Christian rule (Esteban and González 2010). Just as Rabbinic Judaism is built upon an idea of a place, so the idea of Sefarad is very much a place that exists outside of time, and therefore resists the kind of periodization toward which literary scholars and historians incline. Because it is constituted by an elite that was not sharply divided between Muslim- and Christian-ruled Iberia, we can observe more cultural continuity between Sefarad under Muslim rule and Sefarad under Christian rule than we can in, for example, the courtly culture of Toledo under Yahya II al-Qadir (r. 1081–1085) and Alfonso VI of Castile and Leon (r. 1065–1109) who conquered that city in 1085. Sefarad was (and is) an idea produced by real people who lived in real circumstances that we are able to know to some extent from the record that has come to us. My comments here will center less on the historical record of Jewish life in the Iberian Peninsula2 and more on the representations Iberian Jews created of their experience and the ways in which they understood the world around them and their place in it. The word “Sefarad” is of Biblical origin, but its association with the Iberian Peninsula is fairly arbitrary. In Ovadiah (1:20) we read:“the captives of Jerusalem, that are in Sefarad, shall possess the cities of the South”. While the location is historically uncertain, but may refer to Lyria in Asia Minor, in Jewish tradition Sefarad has been associated with the Iberian Peninsula since the Roman Period (Gerber 1992, x). For a long time, it is practically synonymous with al-Andalus, the Arabic name for the Iberian Peninsula or at least those parts of it under Muslim rule. Where does the idea of Sefarad reside? Jewish historical and cultural consciousness resides not in the court (because there is no Jewish court), but in the rabbinate, which is a kind of metaphorical court. Once the Israelites had no king, the symbolic site of power shifted from court to rabbinate. Rabbinic discourse was in part an extended allegory of the activities of the Kohanim (priestly caste, descendants of Aaron) and the Levites (assistants to the priests, descendants of Levi, son of Jacob) in the Hebrew Kingdoms: sacrifces became prayers, and so forth.3 Just as Muslim and Christian Iberian court historians were developing chronicles of the great deeds of their employers and their employers’ predecessors, Iberian rabbis likewise curated the memory of the community’s leadership by writing genealogies of rabbis leading from Moses to the current leadership. Abraham ibn Daud (ca. 1110–ca. 1180), writing in Seville, explains how the most infuential rabbis in the region concentrated in Sefarad: The generation of these three men, R. Hananel, R. Nissim, and R. Samuel ha-Levi the Nagid, was the frst generation of the rabbinate.The mastery of the Talmud now rested [exclusively] in [Sefarad]4 where there fourished fve rabbis all of whom were named Isaac.Two of them were natives of [Sefarad]; a third came from a neighboring area; while the remaining two migrated from abroad. (Ibn Daud 1969, 58, 78) This “frst generation of the rabbinate” means that Sefarad was now home to the most authoritative rabbis of the region, making it effectively the capital of the Jewish diaspora. Just as Rome was home to the leadership of the Catholic world but also looked east to Jerusalem, or Baghdad was home to the Abbasid Caliphate but looked east toward Mecca, Sefarad was home (according to Ibn Daud) to the spiritual leadership of the Jewish diaspora, even as the community looked east to Jerusalem in anticipation of an eventual messianic redemption. A later Sephardic chronicler, Abraham Zacuto (1452–ca. 1515), in his own history of the Rabbinate Sefer Yuhasin (Book of Lineages) explains how the last rabbis of the Babylonian Gaonim (leaders of the most authoritative rabbinic academies in what is now Iraq) escaped persecution 122
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to Spain.This mirrors the claims of the Caliph Abd al-Rahman III establishing Cordoba as the seat of his new Caliphate rivaling the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad: In the days of Eldad the Danite, the head of the Academy in Matha Mehasia was R. Samuel ha-Cohen Gaon son of Hophni, father-in-law of R. Hai. He, too, wrote many books. He passed away during R. Hai’s reign four years before the death of R. Hai. However, the members of R. Hai’s Academy appointed Hezekiah, the grandson of David. B. Zakkai as Exilarch and he took the place of R. Hai the Gaon, obm.The informers denounced him to the king. He was apprehended and arrested, put into irons, his property was confscated, and his two sons fed to [Sefarad] to R. Joseph haLevi the Nagid son of R. Samuel Ibn al-Nagrela the Nagid. R. Joseph loved Hezekiah the Head of the Academy and they remained together until the persecution in Granada, when this Nagid was killed. One of Hezekiah’s sons fed to Saragossa, where he married and had children. Afterwards his descendents moved to the land of Edom [Christian-ruled Iberia]. One of them was R. Hiyya ibn al-Daudi, who died in Castile in 4514 [1154]. After him, not a single person known to be of the house of David remained in [Sefarad].After Hezekiah, the Exilarch and the Head of the Academy, the fve academies of the Gaons ceased to exist. (Zacuto 2005, 515) Jewish Iberian writers thus referred to Sefarad mostly in terms of a religious and social community, but occasionally (and usually in Arabic) in terms of a place, with a specifc landscape, agricultural personality, and climate, but even then as a place where great rabbis and poets lived. Writers often described Sefarad in positive comparison to other places and historical moments, at times when their poetic canvas broadened to include the wider Mediterranean or Jewish world. One of the earliest testimonies of this discourse is a poem, one of two extant by Iberian Jewish women written in Hebrew,5 by the wife of the tenth-century Jewish notable and poet Dunash ibn Labrat, in which she bids her husband farewell as he embarks on a long and dangerous journey away from Sefarad: Will her love remember his graceful doe, Her only son in her arms as he parted? On her left hand he placed a ring from his right, On his wrist she placed her bracelet. As a keepsake she took his mantle from him, And he in turn took hers from her. Would he settle, now, in the land of [Sefarad], If its prince gave him half the kingdom?6 According to tradition, the source of Sefarad’s prestige was not only the richness of its geography and natural resources, but the superior cultural legacy of the Jews who settled there. In the following century, the poet Moses ibn Ezra, in his treatise on Hebrew poetry Kitab al-Muhadara wal-mudhakara (The Book of Discussion and Conversation), builds on the Biblical tradition that the courtiers and priests who lived in Jerusalem emigrated to Sefarad in order to emphasize the superior heritage and cultural legacy of the Sefaradim in the contexts of the broader Jewish world: As the Book narrates: “And the exiles of this army of the Children of Israel are from the land of the Canaanites to Tsarfat (France), and the exiles from Jersualem that are 123
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in Sefarad”. The people migrated to Tsarfat, and to Sefarad, called al-Andalus in the language of the Arabs, after the name of a man named Andalisan,7 in the time of the ancient king Isaac. In the language of the Christians Isfaniyaa [i.e., “Hispania”], also after the name of a man who was its ruler under Roman rule, before the Goths, whose name was Isfan. His capital was in Isfuliyya, named after either the former or the latter. And the ancients called it Isfamwa. (Ibn Ezra 1982, 2: 66–7;Arabic 1: 53–5) Poets also lauded Sefarad as a home to brilliant poets who excelled in both Hebrew and Arabic, reinforcing the idea of Sefarad as a prestigious place with an unparalleled cultural legacy. In the thirteenth century, the poet Judah al-Harizi, an accomplished translator of Arabic into Hebrew and author of the rhyming prose maqama (a collection of tales written in rhyming prose) Tahkemoni, explained how the poets of Sefarad were uniquely gifted in the practice of bida’ (technical innovation in poetry): They are talking about the heroes of poetry who fourished in [Sefarad], and the vigor of their rhetoric both in meter and rhymed prose. All of them agreed, decided, and were unanimous in the opinion that there are no poems comparable in strength to the poems of Solomon, the small (Ibn Gabirol). Nor in depth comparable to the poems of (Samuel) Hanagid. Nor are there poems comparable in sweetness and smoothness to those of (Joseph b.) Hisdai. (al-Harizi 1965, 74; 1952, 41–2) In this passage, al-Harizi not only claims the poetic supremacy of the poets of Sefarad; he also stresses that what distinguished Andalusi Hebrew poetic culture was its diversity, as each poet forged a path of innovation that would distinguish him among the rest.We learn from him that it is not enough to speak of a single Andalusi Hebrew poetics, but rather that it is the variety and originality of the Andalusi Hebrew poets that earns them their fame within the broader Jewish world. Despite (or perhaps because of) the undeniable importance of Arabic poetics to Sephardic Hebrew poetry, a number of authors wrote on the superiority of Hebrew over Arabic as a poetic language, a concept that became known as ʿibraniyya (Ar., literally “Hebrew-ism”).This debate, which perhaps mirrored the debate in the Muslim world over the intrinsic superiority of Arabic ʿarabiyya (Arabic-ism), was a bit of a straw man argument: by the thirteenth century in Christian-ruled Iberia, while Arabic was undeniably an important language of scholarship for Jewish intellectuals, it had all but ceased to be a productive poetic language. Sephardic poets at this time wrote verse almost exclusively in Hebrew, and only occasionally in Arabic and, as we will see, in Ibero–Romance as well. Nevertheless, Moshe ibn Ezra’s assertion that Hebrew’s excellence was owed to Arabic (Ibn Ezra 1982, 1: 23–43; 2: 31–50) continued the ʿarabiyya debate, and later poets took up the challenge, championing Hebrew’s supremacy over Arabic. One of the best-known proponents of ʿibraniyya or Hebrew supremacy was Judah al-Harizi, whose preface to the Tahkemoni contains a graphic account of Hebrew’s degradation, and a rally for its defense. In a rhyming prose peppered with Biblical quotations, he claims that the Jewish communities have abandoned Hebrew in favor of Arabic: They have enslaved the tongue of the Israelites to the tongue of Kedar [Arabic] and they said: “Come and let us sell her to the Ishmaelites”.And they said to her: “bow down, that we may go over”. And they took her and cast her into the pit until she perished among them.And the tongue of Kedar blackened her, and like a lion, tore 124
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her. An evil beast devoured her. All of them spurned the Hebrew tongue and made love to the tongue of Hagar [Arabic]. They embraced the bosom of an alien. They desired the wife of a stranger.They kissed her bosom, for stolen waters were sweet to them. Their hearts were seduced when they saw how excellent was the poetry that Hagar, Sarrai’s [Sarah’s] Egyptian handmaiden had borne.And Sarai was barren! (al-Harizi 1965, 32; 1952, 9–10) Al-Harizi’s contemporary Jacob ben Elazar, an accomplished Arabist and author of a book of tales in Hebrew, writes along similar lines in explaining the justifcation for his book: The reason for this book of tales, and the composition therein of my words, is because the learned amongst the Arabs were troubling the Holy Tongue, who nonetheless boasted against it in their insolence, saying: “It should be ftting to write in our language every tale!” They were challenging our language, saying,“We will prevail!” Whereupon I began to compose, saying: You would mock me, saying “Is not the Holy Tongue crude?” But no! She is a giant who silences all others, Run to her and do not falter, Whether elegy or invective, saw or anecdote. (Ben Elazar 1992, 14–5) The irony of these challenges to the supremacy of Arabic was that even by the time of Ben Elazar, the threat of Arabic as a serious competitor to Hebrew was fast waning. According to Ross Brann, “Hebrew had essentially supplanted [Arabic] it as the language of scientifc, philosophical, and religious discourse. For Hebrew literature in the post-Andalusian age it was a battle against the ghost of Arabic language, poetry, and culture and not against its looming presence” (Brann 1991, 123). Hebrew, for now, had effectively won the battle against Arabic, a battle made all the easier in the transition to Christian rule. Despite the important Arabic-toLatin and Arabic-to-Castilian translation projects directed by Archbishop Raymond of Toledo (twelfth century) and Alfonso X of Castile-León (thirteenth century), Latin, and eventually Ibero–Romance, were the languages of court and of the Church, and this was the new reality in which the increasing majority of Iberian Jews (and a growing number of Iberian conversos) lived. Nonetheless, Arabic continued to be an important language of learning and prestige model of poetics and style for generations of Jews living in Christian Iberia and Southern France (Pearce 2017). Sephardic Jews in this regard served a very important role in European intellectual history: they were the gatekeepers of Arabic learning in both the Hebrew and Latin spheres, and were largely responsible for the transmission of an important body of learning begun with Aristotle, and expanded and nuanced by Muslim scientists such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes), that set Western Latin Christendom on fre and gave some Sephardic scholars a signifcant advantage as intellectual brokers. Andalusi converts to Christianity such as Petrus Alfonsi translated and taught the Andalusi curriculum to eager students in Paris and London (Tolan 1993). Abraham ibn Ezra, who continued to live as a Jew, followed a similar trajectory, and traveled throughout Western Europe teaching Andalusi science in Jewish communities. His translations of Arabic scientifc works forged a new Hebrew scientifc vocabulary and helped to develop Hebrew as a language of secular learning (Sela 2003, 94–123). 125
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While literary Arabic passed into the realm of the arcane arts in Christian Iberia, Ibero– Romance became ascendant as a language of court and of learning, even if in al-Andalus many spoke Romance but did not write or compose in it. In fact, many Andalusis spoke dialects of Romance. Jewish Iberian sources in Hebrew mention and make use of Ibero–Romance beginning in at least the eleventh century. Most Hispanists are familiar with the Romance kharjat (Sp. jarchas), the fnal couplets of Arabic and Hebrew strophic poems or muwashshahat (Ar., literally, “belt- or girdle-poems”) written in vernacular Arabic or Andalusi Romance (Armistead 2005; Heijkoop and Zwartjes 2004; Rosen 2000; Zwartjes 1998). Contemporary evidence suggests that these were not, as some have suggested, mere Jewish and Muslim appropriation of the “quaint songs of the Christians”, but rather refect actual language use of Muslim and Jewish Andalusis. Moses ibn Ezra recounts a time in Granada when he met with a well-known Muslim scholar who challenged Ibn Ezra to recite the Ten Commandments in Arabic (instead of Biblical Hebrew). Ibn Ezra responded by asking the scholar to recite the fatiha (the frst sura of the Qur’an) in Andalusi Romance, a “language that he spoke and knew quite well” (Ibn Ezra 1982, 2: 49; Arabic 1: 42). A number of Andalusi Hebrew poets write zajals and muwashshahas with concluding verses in Andalusi Romance, which suggests that some Jews were at least profcient in Romance. Maimonides (aka Musa ibn Maimun, ca. 1136–1204), who lived in Cordova until his early teens, gives us a rare (if indirect) glimpse of the Romance poetry of Andalusi Jews. In his discussion of appropriate and inappropriate uses of language, he describes a poetic gathering in which participants recite poems in Arabic, Hebrew, and “another language” (Tobi 2010, 431), which in al-Andalus in the twelfth century can only be Andalusi Romance (Monroe 1988). Other accounts of Jews speaking Romance come in the form of laments over the sorry state of Hebrew learning in Christian Iberia, especially by Andalusi Jews looking down their noses on their northern neighbors.When the intolerant Almoravids took Granada in 1090, the poet Moshe ibn Ezra went into exile in Castile, where he was dismayed by the poor level of Hebrew among Castilian Jews, whom he described as “stammerers and unintelligible”. His contemporary Solomon ibn Gabirol, similarly exiled to Zaragoza, complained that half of the community there spoke Arabic and the other half Aragonese, but none was competent in Hebrew (Brann 1991, 61). Under Christian rule the Jewish communities of Iberia became more isolated from the culture of the Islamicate world, both socially and intellectually, but not entirely.The Jewish communities of Christian Iberia were a kind of proto-colonial elite, serving the Christian kings as valuable cultural mediators and translators (Ray 2006). Jewish notables such as Samuel Halevi followed trends in Christian nobility in projecting an image of class power, proximity to the King, lineage, funereal pomp, and charitable foundations. Just as the nobility over the fourteenth and ffteenth centuries changed in nature (urban, newer, less established bloodlines, salaried positions at court), so too did Jewish notables respond to this change in creating their public image (Múñoz Garrido 2016). Halevi’s famous Synagogue del Tránsito in Toledo is perhaps the bestknown example, as it prominently features the coat of arms of Castile and León accompanied by a Hebrew inscription (Múñoz Garrido 2010, 139). Emigration to and immigration from Muslim countries continued during this period (Judah Halevi, for example, migrated from Tudela in Navarra to Granada after corresponding with the poet Moshe ibn Ezra), and the increasingly Hispanized Sephardic Jews maintained familial and commercial ties with Jewish communities around the Mediterranean (Goitein 1967). Over the course of the fourteenth century, a rising tide of anti-Judaism in Christian Iberia made life increasingly diffcult for Jews, who were subjected to increasingly aggressive campaigns 126
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of proselytization. They were made to attend sermons by and participate in religious disputations with Christian Friars, mostly Dominicans. In 1391 a wave of popular anti-Judaic violence swept across Castile and Aragon.Thousands of Jews died, and many converted or fed the realm. Sephardic poets wrote elegies for the dead and mourned the golden age of Sefarad in Biblical language used to lament the destruction of the Temple (van Bekkum 2001).The massive conversions that took place during this period created a large class of conversos or New Christians, and a class of conversos or New Christians who were technically Christian but whose spiritual beliefs and practices varied wildly and produced some very innovative hybrid forms (Meyerson 2010).The elites among these conversos, joining those who converted in the wake of 1391 and largely free of the social restrictions Jews experienced in Christian society, entered the Church, the royal administration, and other sectors of public life closed to them as Jews and soon became a very powerful elite who attracted no little resentment and suspicion from their fellow Old Christians.8 The converso phenomenon divided families and put further stress on Iberian Jewish communities. Nonetheless, despite the devastation and despair that followed in the wake of the 1391 riots, there were examples of Jewish communities that fourished and scholars who produced important poetry and works of rabbinic thought. During the course of the ffteenth century, for example, the Jewish community of Morvedre (Valencia) underwent what Marc Meyerson has called an economic and cultural “renaissance”, and the poetic circle of Zaragoza produced some of the most beautiful Hebrew poetry written on the Iberian Peninsula (Targarona Borrás 2002). Similarly, Eric Lawee writes that after 1391 rabbinic thought went through “a slow but steady recovery of learning … and the production of novel achievements in various disciplines and genres by an impressive cadre of diverse thinkers and writers” (Lawee 2012, 352).To wit, all four Biblical commentaries that are still included in the standard edition of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, are written by Sephardic scholars after 1391 (Lawee 2012, 361). During this period, Jewish sources on Jewish use of the vernacular vary from silent to negative. Though by the sixteenth century we have numerous rabbinic responsa (offcial decisions written in reply to a question on a point of Jewish law) written partially in Judeo–Spanish (Benaim 2012), Peninsular Jews left very little in the way of written Romance. Until the ffteenth century, the only (surviving) signifcant work in a Peninsular vernacular by a Jewish author is the Proverbios morales of Shem Tov ben Isaac Ardutiel of Carrión (ca. 1335). However, during this period we do see an increasing use of the vernacular within the Jewish communities for paraliturgical and administrative purposes (such as the community ordinances or takkanot of Valladolid), if not for belles lettres (Abrahams 1981, 261; Moreno Koch 1987).There are scattered examples. In the ffteenth century, Rabbi Isaac ben Sheshet Perfet reports that in Aragon some congregations recited vernacular translations of the Book of Esther on the festival of Purim for those who did not understand Hebrew (Isaac ben Sheshet Perfet 1967, 2: 551, sec. 388).We have a single responsum from the Cairo Geniza written in Judeo–Spanish (Hebrew characters) by Rabbi Isaac Campantón of Zamora and dated to the second half of the ffteenth century (Arad and Glick 2013). It is believed that rabbis gave sermons in the Iberian vernaculars (Gross 1995, 63 n 36), and we have only a single ketubah (wedding contract) written in Catalan (Majorca 1327) instead of the traditional Aramaic text (Lacave 2002, 21–2 and 203–4). While it is clear that Iberian Jews spoke and wrote in Romance languages, they certainly did not celebrate it when they imagined the cultural life of Sefarad in writing. In fact, the more assimilated Iberian Jews became to the Romance vernacular culture of their Christian neighbors, the more the rabbis protested, as we are about to see. Increasing conversion to Christianity and Hispanization over the course of the fourteenth century had its reaction in Hebrew literary practice as a form of cultural resistance 127
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(Targarona Borrás 2002, 263), a stance that recalls the thirteenth-century rallying cries to shore up Hebrew learning in the fact of the hegemony of Arabic as an intellectual language. The poets of the “Zaragoza circle” led the charge in championing a conservative poetic style that harkened to the Andalusi golden age as a bulwark against social and religious change. In this environment, writing in Romance was associated with conversion to Christianity and contributing to the downfall of the Jewish community. At the turn of the ffteenth century, the poet Solomon Da Piera writes to Astruc Rimokh, chastising him for writing poetry in Aragonese: the language of the Torah alone gives forth poems; It rectifes the babbling of those of barbarous tongue I have been given the laws of poetry; what do I care for the language of Yael or the dialect of the chief of Qenaz? The Hebrew language is my intimate, what do I care for the language of the Arameans or the musings of Ashkenaz? I shall annoint the Holy Tongue as my priest! What could I possibly care for the babble of the rabble? (De Piera 1941, 89;Targarona Borrás 2002, 263;Wacks 2015, 131) The darkening cloud of persecution and Inquisition that characterized ffteenth-century Jewish life in the Iberia Peninsula lead famously to their expulsion from Spain and its territories in 1492.Thousands fed to Portugal only to be forcibly converted in 1497.The Spanish Inquisition, established in 1478, violently policed the boundaries of religious identity, and brutally punished those conversos who chose to continue practicing Judaism or Islam. Despite this looming threat, there is ample evidence that many did just so. Sources indicate evidence of a thriving cryptoJudaism well into the seventeenth century and beyond, which begs the question of whether converso cultural life might also fall under the rubric of Sefarad as an idea. The literary response to the destruction of organized Jewish life on the Iberian Peninsula was dramatic. As with the violent pogroms of 1391, poets wrote elegies (Heb. kinot) to commemorate the destruction of their communities, and historians such as Solomon ibn Verga documented (or perhaps “dramatized” is more accurate) the events leading up to and following the expulsion, framing the unprecedented disaster in prophetic terms as punishment for a historic failure to keep God’s commandments and for the errors of cultural assimilation and conversion to Christianity (Baer 1947, 64). After the expulsion of Jews from Spain and Portugal, there were offcially no practicing, unbaptized Jews on the Peninsula; nonetheless the idea of Sefarad thrived in the Sephardic imaginary. In their new homes in Tetouan, Izmir, Salonica, and elsewhere, Sepharadim continued to speak their language, primarily medieval Castilian, which came to dominate and assimilate the other Ibero–Romance dialects spoken by the exiles, who came from all areas of the Peninsula (Attig 2012, 836; Bunis 1992; Rodrigue Schwarzwald 1999). Sephardic intellectuals such as Moses Almosnino and others in the sixteenth century, and those working in Italy and Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, engaged in their own interpretation of Hispanic culture outside the borders of the Empire (Wacks 2015, 191–96; Borovaya 2017). Sepharadim continued to sing the songs and tell the stories they had told in Spain, in a dialect of medieval Castilian to which the exiled speakers of other Ibero–Romance dialects such as Galician and Catalan eventually assimilated. Sephardic Spanish continued to be an important vehicle for the cultural life of the Sephardic diaspora until modernity, and as is well known, researchers in the twentieth century were still able to collect a tremendous amount of 128
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traditional material, some of it medieval, in Sephardic communities ranging from the Balkans to Los Angeles (Díaz Mas 2007, 72–150). Over the centuries, Sephardic voices have expressed a mixture of bitterness and nostalgia for Sefarad. On the one hand, the trauma of Inquisition, persecution, and expulsion (as well as the prohibition in Spain itself of practicing Judaism that was in force until the 1960s) made it less likely that Sepharadim would actually seek to return to their ancestral homeland. On the other, many Sepharadim kept alive the idea of Sefarad and the idea of an eventual return, perhaps modeled on the idea of a messianic redemption from diaspora from the Biblical homeland Zion that historically gave structure to Jewish ideas about history and time. Sephardic families often kept keys that they believed were taken from their homes in Spain and passed them down for generations, more as a praxis of nostalgia than in hopes of an eventual return (Lévy and Olazabal 2014).The Spanish state has only recently joined in this nostalgia. In the early twentieth century, Spanish senator Ángel Pulido organized a campaign to reunite the Sepharadim (and particularly those strategically located in North Africa and the Balkans) with their homeland (Alpert 2005; Bel Bravo and Antonia 1993). Some Spanish offcials saw in the Sepharadim a latent corps of colonial administrators for Spanish Imperial designs in Africa, and cultural ambassadors of Spain in the Balkans and elsewhere (Rohr 2011). Franco’s experiments with religious liberties in the 1960s and the cancellation of the Edict of Expulsion by King Juan Carlos in 1991 (Sloan 2009, 188) and offer of Spanish citizenship in 2015 (Emerguí 2014) did not yield a massive wave of “repatriation” but speaks to a softening of Spanish policy toward Sepharadim in the wake of the transition to democracy and the religious freedom promised by the Constitution of 1978 after Franco’s death (Avni 1982, 201–214). Today, there is a great deal of interest in Sefarad both among Sepharadim as well as nonSephardic Jews and non-Jews living in countries with historical ties to Sepharadim and their descendants. Offcial Spanish and Israeli philosephardisms coincide with a revival of interest in Sephardic culture among American Ashkenazi Jews (spurred by the rising importance of Latino culture in the U.S.). In particular there is a great deal of interest in Sephardic music and food, and a booming Jewish tourism business in Spain and Portugal (Flesler and Pérez Melgosa 2008, 2010). At the same time, Sephardic Spanish is simultaneously becoming extinct as a natural, vernacular language (Harris 1994) and experiencing a renaissance in poetry and music (Balbuena 2016). It continues to be the focus of academic study in the U.S., Europe, and Israel, where the Israeli government has established the Autoridad Nasionala del Ladino (National Authority for Ladino) in 1997 with the goal of preserving and promoting the use and study of Sephardic Spanish. Most recently, the Real Academia Española is creating an Israeli Academy of the Spanish Language formed of academic experts in Sephardic Spanish (Morales and Pita 2018). Because the idea of Sefarad had always been constructed as a cultural and aesthetic ideal and not only as a specifc historical moment, its post-Expulsion transformation into a diasporic imaginary (modeled in some ways after the common Jewish diasporic imaginary of the biblical Zion) has been able to thrive despite, and in some ways because of, the fact that Sepharadim have not lived openly in Spain or Portugal for hundreds of years. The idea of Sefarad continues to transform and thrive today both in Spain and elsewhere. The very recent revitalization of Jewish life in Spain is the latest chapter in this process, as nascent Jewish communities in cities such as Seville and Oviedo join the more established ones in Madrid and Barcelona.Though many of these new Spanish Jews come from other traditions, their communities are forging a neo-Sephardic culture that draws on historic Sephardic rite and tradition. In parallel to this process, Spanish and foreign academics continue to curate the intellectual and artistic legacies of Sefarad, providing us with an increasingly rich and 129
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nuanced understanding of the idea of Sefarad.The study of Sefarad as an idea or feld of cultural practice has much to offer to enrich medieval Iberian studies. More than just the study of a “minority culture” that thrived within Andalusi or Christian societies, it is a different lens through which to view the world: if Hispanism sees the medieval Iberian world through Castilian, Christian eyes, and takes as its center the courts of the kings of Castile-León, the study of texts and cultural practices of Jewish Iberians see the world through two lenses: the Jewish and the Sephardic. It is a sort of double consciousness (Du Bois 1989, 3) by which Sepharadim see themselves both as Jews constituted within a Jewish symbolic order, and on the other hand see themselves refected as dhimmi or Jewish subjects of Muslim or Christian majoritarian cultures.This cosmovision is signifcantly different from the Christological world order that characterized Christian sources and provides a very different lens through which to read Iberian literature and culture.
Notes 1 A note on terminology: Sefarad refers to the Iberian Peninsula.The adjectival form is Sefardi, Sefaradim in Hebrew; I will use the anglicized forms Sephardic, Sepharadim (elsewhere you may see Sephardim for the plural, which is an anglicized version of the Ashkenazi Hebrew pronunciation). In Arabic, the Iberian Peninsula is al-Andalus; I use the anglicized version of the Arabic adjectival forms Andalusi, Andalusis, which should not be confused with Spanish Andaluz, Andaluces or English Andalusian, Andalusians, both of which refer to modern Andalucía in Southern Spain. I will refer to the dialect of Spanish spoken by Sepharadim (known variously as Ladino, Judeo–Spanish, etc. as Sephardic Spanish). A converso is a Jew or descendant of Jews who has converted to Christianity. 2 For histories of Jews in Iberia, see Baer (1992);Ashtor (1973); Roth (1994); Gerber (1992); Ray (2012); Zohar (2005). On Jewish chronicles and proto-historiography in the Middle Ages see Ben-Shalom (2016). 3 According to Joel Kraemer, the Mishna, a late antique commentary on the Hebrew Bible,“rebuilds the temple in words” (Kraemer 2015, 24). Jacob Neusner writes that throughout all of halakha or Jewish law,“a double metaphor pertains, the metaphor of god’s activity in creation, the metaphor of the priests’ and Levites’ activity in the tabernacle” (Neusner 1999, 154). 4 Translators into English often render the Hebrew word “Sefarad” as “Spain”.Throughout this chapter I have emended it to “Sefarad” in order to underscore how authors construct the idea of Sefarad (which is quite different from our idea of “Spain”), indicating the change by putting the word in brackets. 5 On the deafening silence of women writers in the medieval Hebrew archive, see Rosen (2003). 6 See also the prose translation of S.J. Pearce that accompanies her economic/material analysis of the bracelet motif (Pearce 2014, 149). 7 The etymology of al-Andalus is from the Arab historian Ali ʿIzz al-Din Ibn al-Athir (1160–1233) (Ibn al-Athir 1965, 4: 556–57). 8 For an overview of Sephardi/converso history, see Gerber 1994; Díaz Mas 1992; Benbassa and Rodrigue 2000; Roth 2002; Zohar 2005.
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David Wacks Heijkoop, Henk, and Otto Zwartjes. 2004. Muwaššaḥ, Zajal, Kharja: Bibliography of Strophic Poetry and Music from Al-Andalus and Their Infuence in East and West. Leiden: Brill. Ibn al-Athir, ʿIzz al-Din. 1965. al-Kamil fl-Ta’rij. Edited by Carl Johan Tornberg. Beirut: Dar Sadir. Ibn Daud, Abraham ben David. 1969. A Critical Edition with a Translation and Notes of the Book of Tradition (Sefer Ha-Qabbalah). Edited and translated by Gerson D. Cohen. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Ibn Ezra, Moses. 1982. “Edición, traducción y estudio del Kita¯b al-Muhạ¯ḍara wal-muda̱¯ kara de Moše ibn ʿEzra”. Doctoral Dissertation, Madrid: CSIC. Isaac ben Sheshet Perfet. 1967. The Responsa of Isaac ben Sheshet Perfet Hebrew. Edited by Yisrael Hayim Daikhes. Jerusalem: [h. mo-l.]. Kraemer, David. 2015. Rabbinic Judaism: Space and Place. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324 /9781315673257. Lacave, José Luis. 2002. Medieval Ketubot from Sefarad. Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press. Lawee, Eric. 2012.“Sephardic Intellectuals: Challenges and Creativity (1391–1492)”. In The Jew in Medieval Iberia 1100–1500, edited by Jonathan Ray, 352–394. Boston:Academic Studies Press. Lévy, Joseph Josy, and Inaki Olazabal. 2014.“The Key from (to) Sefarad: Nostalgia for a Lost Country”. In Anthropology and Nostalgia, edited by Olivia Angé and David Berliner, 139–154. New York: Berghahn Books. Meyerson, Mark. 2010. “Seeking the Messiah: Converso Messianism in Post-1453 Valencia”. In The Conversos and Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain and Beyond, edited by Kevin Ingram, 51–82. Leiden: Brill. Monroe, James T. 1988.“Maimonides on the Mozarabic Lyric”. La Corónica 17 (2): 18–32. Morales, Manuel, and Antonio Pita. 2018. “Una RAE para la lengua sefardí”. El País, February 19, sec. Cultura. https://elpais.com/cultura/2018/02/18/actualidad/1518954881_674484.html. Moreno Koch,Yolanda, ed. 1987. De Iure Hispano-Hebraico. Las Taqqanot de Valladolid de 1432. Salamanca: Universidad Pontifcia de Salamanca; Universidad de Granada. Múñoz Garrido, Daniel. 2010.“La creación del mundo en el arte medieval: La Sinagoga del Tránsito”. ’Ilu: Revista de Ciencias de las Religiones, 18. Múñoz Garrido, Daniel. 2016.“‘Felicidad, bienestar, gloria y honor’; la imagen pública que Samuel ha-Leví proyectó en la Sinagoga del Tránsito”. Sefarad 76 (1): 97–120. Neusner, Jacob. 1999. The Four Stages of Rabbinic Judaism. London: Routledge. Pearce, S.J. 2014. “Bracelets Are for Hard Times: Economic Hardship, Sentimentality and the Andalusi Hebrew Poetess”. Cultural History 3 (2): 148–169. Pearce, S.J. 2017. The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition:The Role of Arabic in Judah Ibn Tibbon’s Ethical Will. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ray, Jonathan. 2006. The Sephardic Frontier: The Reconquista and the Jewish Community in Medieval Iberia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Ray, Jonathan, ed. 2012. The Jew in Medieval Iberia: 1100–1500. Boston:Academic Studies Press. Rodrigue Schwarzwald, Ora. 1999. “Language Choice and Language Varieties Before and After the Expulsion”. In From Iberia to Diaspora: Studies in Sephardic History and Culture, edited by Yedida K. Stillman and Norman A. Stillman, 399–415. Leiden: Brill. Rohr, Isabelle. 2011.“‘Spaniards of the Jewish Type’: Philosephardism in the Service of Imperialism in Early Twentieth Century Spanish Morocco”. Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 12 (1): 61–75. Rosen,Tova. 2000. “The Muwashshah”. In The Literature of Al-Andalus, 165–189. Cambridge: Cambridge University. Rosen, Tova. 2003. Unveiling Eve: Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Roth, Norman. 1994. Jews, Visigoths, and Muslims in Medieval Spain: Cooperation and Confict. Medieval Iberian Peninsula.Texts and Studies, vol 10. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Sáenz-Badillos, Ángel. 1993. A History of the Hebrew Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sáenz-Badillos, Ángel, and Judit Targarona Borrás. 1988. Gramáticos hebreos de Al-Andalus (siglos X-XII): flología y Biblia. Córdoba: Ediciones El Almendro. Sela, Shlomo. 2003. Abraham Ibn Ezra and the Rise of Medieval Hebrew Science. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Sloan, Dolores. 2009. The Sephardic Jews of Spain and Portugal: Survival of an Imperiled Culture in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. Stavans, Ilan. 2008. Resurrecting Hebrew. New York: Nextbook: Schocken. Targarona Borrás, Judit. 2002. “Los últimos poetas hebreos de Sefarad: Poesía hebrea en el mundo románico”. Revista de Filología Románica 19: 249–268. Tobi, Joseph. 2010. Between Hebrew and Arabic Poetry: Studies in Spanish Medieval Hebrew Poetry. Leiden: Brill.
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PART III
Histories
9 RE-READING THE CONQUEST OF IBERIA The dynamism of a medieval tradition Nicola Clarke
Introduction At frst glance, the history of the Muslim conquest of Iberia might seem a straightforward one. In a single battle in 711, an invading army overthrew the Visigothic regime, after which— swiftly and with, it seems, relatively little fuss—the peninsula became the newest province of the Umayyad caliphate. The historiographical reality is both more complicated and more interesting.The primary texts are in broad agreement about the basics, but closer examination shows us enormous variety in the approaches of different authors and compilers—what they include and exclude, how they arrange and explain it—which only increases and diversifes as time goes on. Material culture, likewise, suggests a post-conquest landscape not simply of binary opposites and linear cultural change—Christian to Muslim,Visigothic and Roman to Arabic and Berber— but of experimentation and creativity (Carvajal López 2019). Recent scholarly debate on the period has seen a minor revival of the argument—advanced frst and most notoriously by Ignacio Olagu¨e (1969)—that the conquest as we (think) we know it never took place (González Ferrín 2006; González Ferrín 2013). This chapter certainly does not propose to champion a position that, for a variety of reasons, has met with spirited and convincing criticism over the years (Guichard 1974; García Sanjuán 2013).1 But it will seek to suggest that, in attempting to reconstruct a singular conquest, we risk missing the wood for the trees.We need to be thinking, rather, in multiples: there is no one conquest of Iberia to fnd, either as it happened at the time or how it was remembered later, but rather numerous overlapping events, experiences, and images of conquest, captured within a textual tradition of memory that should be read for its dynamism and polyphony, rather than sifted for points of agreement, with divergences treated as faws. I shall begin with the building blocks of the conquest tradition—the key events, locations, and individuals named in the written sources—and signaling the points at which the narratives may be complicated. I will then outline key trends in scholarship on the period, before giving an overview of the main textual evidence and how it may be handled.
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Events As a rule of thumb, the further away a text is from 711, the more elaborate its conquest narrative, in terms of both the level of detail and the complexity of the sequence of events. At its most basic, the tradition contains four main elements: a Visigothic king (Roderick), a conqueror from across the straits (Ṭāriq b. Ziyād, sometimes trailed by Mu¯sā b. Nuṣayr), a single battle in which Ṭāriq defeats Roderick, and the year in which all or most of this takes place (711 CE/91–2 AH). The so-called Treaty of Tudmīr, probably our earliest textual source (c. 713), contains none of these four elements, but otherwise they are common to almost all accounts.The Latin tradition adds further Christian characters, whose heroism or villainy is expressed in terms of whether they resist or collaborate with the invaders. The Arabic tradition—most of which was written down later than its Latin counterpart—also adds Christian collaborators (usually a single fgure, the mysterious Count Julian), and sketches the breakdown of the relationship between Ṭāriq (the plucky Berber underdog who does most of the work) and Mu¯sā (the bad boss who tries to claim all the credit). From the tenth century onward, the Arabic tradition also elaborates on the single-battle template with a host of smaller encounters—sieges, surrenders, subterfuge—at a variety of locations, and adds an additional conqueror, Mughīth al-Ru¯mī. It is primarily the Arabic texts that also give us those episodes that cause unease among historians seeking the facts: Ṭāriq’s discovery of a glorious golden table linked with scriptural forefather Solomon; Mu¯sā’s encounter with a copper fortress that lacks an entrance and literally sucks in those unwary souls who try climbing over the wall; a house covered with locks by each successive Visigothic king which, when unwisely (or fatefully) opened by Roderick in 711, proves to contain images of turban-wearing horsemen and the ominous promise that these people would be arriving to conquer the peninsula later that same year. The density of such “legendary” elements in the earliest Andalusī Arabic account, that of Ibn Ḥabīb (d. 852), led one scholar to reject it outright (Dozy 1860: ii, 32–7), at considerable cost to its reputation among modern scholars (Ibn Ḥabīb 1991, editor’s introduction: 18–20). Challenges to the veracity of such elements go back further than this, however. Medieval authors were not simply historiographical magpies, grabbing every curio they found, but were selective in what they included or excluded, even if they rarely tell us directly about the latter. The Egyptian jurist Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam (d. 870), true to his legal training, regularly used isnāds (transmitter chains, on which more below) to highlight his informants—and thus, implicitly, to invoke the reputation of those individuals as confrmation of the validity of his account. At times, too, his text fags up doubts by giving generalized citations for some tales (such as the non-specifc “the people of Egypt” [Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam, Futu¯ḥ Miṣr, 1922, 209]), or by departing from the convention of opening a report with the neutral qāla (“he said”) and its derivatives, as when discussing the Table of Solomon: [Ṭāriq] entered [Toledo] and asked about the Table; it was his only concern, since it was the Table of Sulaymān b. Daʾu¯d, as the People of the Book claim. (Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam 1922, 207, emphasis mine) A century later in al-Andalus, at the high point of historical composition under the reinvigorated Umayyad dynasty, ‘Arīb b. Sa‘īd (d. 980)—to judge from the portions of his no-longer extant work quoted by Ibn al-Shabbāṭ (d. 1221)—was likewise cautious about this aspect of the conquest tradition.‘Arīb explored the options for what the “Table” might have been, before concluding it was probably a Visigothic artifact, rather than anything to do with Solomon (Ibn al-Shabbāṭ 1971, 149; Rubiera Mata 1980). 138
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Reconstructing and deconstructing conquest: scholarly trends We are richly endowed with textual sources on the Muslim conquest of Iberia, but they come with challenges, both individually and collectively. The majority of them, especially those in Arabic, were produced over a century after the actual events, and many long after that; they are thus the product of later generations, and inescapably shaped by later priorities and understandings.They are also, to one degree or another, polyphonic: the Latin texts emulate late Roman models, and borrow material from earlier authorities (Linehan 1993); the Arabic texts draw (directly or indirectly) on a host of oral and written testimonies. In both traditions, authors and compilers do not simply copy their sources wholesale, but select, excise, and reshape—and in ways that are only partly visible to us, since the earlier texts frequently do not survive. How these challenges are viewed in modern scholarship varies; much depends, of course, on the questions we want to ask.Those who wish to reconstruct from these sources “what really happened” have sometimes despaired of the Arabic tradition as a whole (Collins 1989, 23–36), or else concluded there is nothing much to fnd anyway (González Ferrín 2006). Others see considerable grounds for optimism (García Sanjuán 2013), especially when the texts are set alongside material evidence of the conquest, such as lead seals (Ibrahim 2011) and coins (Gasc 2019). On balance, few would now argue that the textual sources are wholly useless as sources of information on 711; even former skeptics have been at least partially won round (Collins 2012). But they must, nonetheless, be read with care. The main difference between historians of the conquest lies in the methodological frameworks they use to exercise that care. In this section, I shall discuss the key methodologies that have infuenced readings of the Iberian conquest tradition, with particular reference to debates surrounding the Arabic sources. Since the advent of revisionism in the 1970s, the prevailing tendency in scholarship on the medieval Arabic–Islamic historical tradition—not just for al-Andalus, but more broadly—has been skepticism. Surviving histories of the early medieval Islamic world are abundant, thanks to both a technological advance—paper, much cheaper and easier to produce than parchment (Bloom 2001)—and a thriving intellectual culture (Khalidi 1994; Robinson 2003, 31–2; Toorawa 2005, 7–17). But as noted above, these “primary” sources were separated, both temporally and culturally, from the periods they narrate; the pace of change in the early Islamic world was so rapid that even a gap of a few generations meant a gulf of understanding. History was written by the winners, in the sense that it projected later assumptions back on to the past; and, since past precedents lay at the heart of legal questions and claims to power alike, writing history could never be a neutral activity. Still, while for some this means that only sources outside the Islamic tradition—and thus free, theoretically, of its entanglements—can be safely used (Crone and Cook 1977), for others the skeptical approach is an overreaction. A substantial kernel of truth may be mined, the argument goes, if we triangulate between texts; by adjudicating on disagreements, discarding exaggerations, and examining the fne grains of onomastic evidence, there is no need to abandon the written tradition on the conquest of Iberia entirely (Vallvé 1989; Chalmeta 1994; Kennedy 1996). Allied with this approach, in many respects, is source criticism. Again, this methodology assumes a core of authentic material—that the later texts were based on earlier sources, both oral and written—and attempts to peel back the layers of extant texts to get at these sources. Key to this methodology is the medieval Arabic equivalent of citation: the isnād. During the early medieval period (ninth and tenth centuries), the juristic convention of prefacing a report about the Prophet Muḥammad (ḥadīth) with a formulaic summary (isnād) of how the report reached the reciter (“X heard from Y, who heard from Z, who was there when Muḥammad said…”) passed into general scholarly practice for writing about the past, not least because the majority 139
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of those who wrote histories in the medieval period were jurists by both training and profession. Source criticism uses isnāds to work out who was involved in the transmission of historical reports; while it does compare and contrast the content of sources, as triangulation does, it does so primarily in an effort to turn up pieces of lost texts, and reconstitute the origins of particular subsets of the tradition. For the conquest of Iberia, source criticism’s main practitioners—such as Mahmud Makkī (1957; 1998) and Luis Molina (1989; 1998; 1999)—have identifed two distinct memory traditions, one Egyptian and one Andalusī, each with its own features and priorities. Other, adjacent studies have sought to collect information on early authorities mentioned in isnāds and reports in connection with al-Andalus (Marín 1981). Source criticism, though, can only take us so far. For example, serious questions have been raised regarding the veracity of isnāds (Schacht 1949), and while this critique has itself been challenged (Siddiqui 1993), it is increasingly clear that that the relationship between oral and written transmissions in the early Islamic community was more complex than is sometimes recognized (Cook 1997; Toorawa 2005, 18–31; Schoeler 2006), and that medieval compilers of historical reports did not simply transmit material unchanged, but also edited and reshaped it (Leder 1988; Robinson 2003, 35–8). Medieval authors were themselves aware of the potential for misleading isnāds, moreover.A sub-discipline of isnād-criticism existed, in which the collected biographies of transmitters were scrutinized to enable implausibilities to be spotted—isnāds containing individuals whose lifetimes did not overlap and who therefore could not have been a direct route of transmission, for example—and unreliability. Some individuals had poor reputations, casting doubt on reports for which they were listed in an isnād, absent attestations from other sources. One such was the easterner al-Wāqidī (d. 823)—rumored to have written a work on the Iberian conquest—who was seen in some quarters as a questionable source due to what later, tighter standards considered poor scholarly practice (Clarke 2012, 38–9). Nonetheless, this did not discourage later compilers from using reports attributed to the likes of al-Wāqidī, as shall be seen below; nor does it mean that we can take isnāds at face value.While the importance of the isnād as a stamp of authority waxed and waned in medieval Islamic historical writing, it retained enough appeal that some later texts on the conquest of Iberia have isnāds that reach further back to the conquest generation than do earlier texts: that is, additional, earlier names appear to have been plugged in, to bridge the transmission “gaps” left in earlier texts, and thus make the accounts sound more authentic (Makkī 1957, 171–73; Makkī 1998, 182–83, 186; Clarke 2012, 36–8; García Sanjuán 2013, 230–32). Another infuential approach to early Islamic historiography, infuenced in part by theological scholarship, has been form criticism.The argument here is that the tradition was dominated by topoi: rote, much-repeated clichés of historical storytelling, used in multiple texts to describe multiple different events, with only the names changed. Rather than seeking to represent the past as it was, authors instead re-shaped it to ft familiar, expected templates, such that any genuine information was distorted beyond recognition (Conrad 1992; Noth and Conrad 1994). Andalusī historical writing was not immune to this practice (Manzano Moreno 1992); one example is the interchangeably formulaic sieges to which cities are subject in many medieval accounts (Noth 1989), a framework that came to determine the way the conquest of Cordoba was reported (Clarke 2011).We can see this as the tradition calcifying, or simply as a feature of how collective memory functions: societies remember events that matter to them, or ones that are made to matter by being presented in appealing forms. The prospects for reconstructing “actual” history, by these lights, looks bleak—but there are, however, signifcant limitations to this approach as well.At its crudest, form criticism runs the risk of doing exactly what it argues that medieval narratives do: effacing diversity and specifcity within the tradition.The key issue, after all, is meaning; topoi are used because they are in some way meaningful to the author and/or 140
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their present audience, and thus they help give shape to and make sense of the past.A topos that bore no meaning for either author or audience would be an ineffective tool of communication or memory (Clarke 2012, 147–154). Form criticism might tell us what we have—a lot of narratives that bear limited resemblance to the reality of the events described—but it does not explain why it looks that way.Why did medieval authors pick these topoi, and not others? One answer to that question is that they did not pick anything at all, because they were simply compiling material from those who came before them, but this is unsatisfactory; there is too much evidence, now, that the accounts that have reached us were the products of at least some re-shaping, as noted above.A better answer, perhaps, lies in the cultural turn; that is, in paying attention to the socio-cultural shaping of the accounts, by which I mean not just authorial intent—insofar as this is a meaningful concept in a feld so reliant on problematic unique manuscripts and outdated critical editions (Zadeh 2011)—but the wider cultural context that gave the accounts meaning (Spiegel 1997). To Derrida’s contention that “there is nothing outside the text” (2016 [1976], 177), since language structures thought, cultural history adds Bakhtin’s insight that language is itself structured by social difference (Bakhtin 1981; Clark 2004, 162). With a handful of exceptions (Safran 2013; Bray 2019), the cultural turn has had only limited impact on the study of medieval Islam as yet, but it has been very infuential in other areas of medieval history, to the extent that promises to move “beyond the cultural turn” date back at least two decades (Bonnell et al. 1999). Here, then, is a way to talk about the conquest tradition that allows for—and indeed, is predicated upon—multiplicity.The fact that we encounter multiple layers of a “primary” source when we read these texts—and through them glimpse multiple memories of the conquest— should be seen as a feature rather than a bug. There may be nothing outside the text, but everything inside it is worthy of study: historical detail, narrative structure, scholarly apparatus, intertextuality, rhetoric. Such an approach is not new, even if it has not always been labelled in this way, but it has become increasingly important. Research on medieval Christian historiography has long been alert to what one scholar terms “the increasingly blurred boundary between history and literature” (Ward 2009, 147), and some studies of Islamic chronicles have followed suit, exploring “literary” elements such as plot structure, style, characterization, and dialogue, for both eastern (Leder 1992; Beaumont 1996; Judd 2005) and Andalusī texts (Rubiera 1985–1986; Keyes Filios 2014). Similarly, scholars have sought to read the apparently legendary material within the tradition for cultural meaning (Hernández Juberías 1996; Safran 2002; Clarke 2012). Others have looked in more detail at the Andalusī cultural contexts that the texts were produced by, and written for, with some studies focusing on the patronage and power of the Umayyad court, especially during the caliphal period in the tenth century (Manzano Moreno 1999; Martinez-Gros 1992; Safran 2000), and others considering the memory communities— especially of Mālikī jurists—that transmitted and shaped both the source material and the texts as they have come down to us (Borrut 2010; Safran 2019). These sorts of approaches build upon the insights of source criticism and the careful biographical work that has been done to understand the voices we only hear from indirectly.They also draw on the methods of form criticism, but with the crucial modifcation that not all topoi are used in the same ways for the same purposes, because they both encode and create cultural meaning. Spotting a cliché is not the conclusion of an investigation into our texts, but the beginning, as scholars working on medieval Christian chronicles have long since pointed out (Morse 1991): this is not about distinguishing “fact” from “fction”, but rather understanding the rhetorical tools medieval writers had at their disposal (Meisami 2005, 149–152), in order to work out how topoi and other literary techniques were used to create meaning (Clarke 2016). Remembering and retelling the conquest was central to a host of cultural projects, such as 141
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creating continuity between Visigothic past and Asturian–Leonese present in the Latin tradition, and underscoring caliphal authority in the Arabic one; accordingly, the conquest assumed multiple different forms over the centuries. Even where medieval authors writing about this past did not consciously set out to serve later priorities, they refected them nonetheless, simply by virtue of working in such changed circumstances. The tenth-century Cordoba of Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīya—a rapidly Islamicizing and expanding seat of Umayyad power, wealth, and Mālikī law—was a world away from Ṭāriq’s frst forays into the peninsula. It would be a mistake to argue that there is no recoverable past within the historical tradition, but it would be even more misguided to pretend that all accounts are, at heart, telling the story of the same conquest. I will end this section with a brief discussion of the pace and nature of cultural change in al-Andalus. The contours of the mid-twentieth-century debate between Américo Castro and Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz are well known: the former argued that interchange between Muslims, Christians, and Jews was central to the making of Spain, while the latter, in response, evoked the older notion of an eternal Iberian identity that predated and outlasted the arrival of Islam (Hillgarth 1985), such that it was Islam that was altered by the Iberian context, not the other way round (Sánchez-Albornoz 1974).The modern ideological dimensions of this debate are obvious, and they have also fed into debates on the conquest (Olagu¨e 1969; González Ferrín 2013; García Sanjuán 2019). Some aspects of what we might term the minimalist position—that there was no conquest or that it was not Islamic—are easily dealt with.There is ample archaeological evidence—especially numismatic—for the existence of Arabic-language fscal governance in Iberia shortly after 711 (Zozaya 1998; Ibrahim 2011; Martínez Jiménez et al. 2017; Gasc 2019). Furthermore, examinations of early eighth-century burials at sites in Pamplona (Prevedorou et al. 2010) and Nîmes (Gleize et al. 2016)—the latter being under Islamic rule for a short part of the period—have found skeletons with dental decoration and isotopic signatures indicating North African heritage and cultural practices, together with Islamic burial customs like the positioning of the body. So far, so good. Where scholars are still at variance is on the nature and degree of changes the conquest brought. How centralized and systematic was this governance? How quickly were Islamicization and Arabicization visible to the subjects of the new regime, and which aspects of their lives were most affected? Ultimately, what is the most useful way to characterize the conquest: Muslim,Arab(ic), or Berber? The summary answer that follows is necessarily brief; recent efforts to synthesize textual and material evidence on the conquest have dealt with these matters more systematically (Manzano Moreno 2006; García Sanjuán 2013). The matter of religious conversion has, as is to be expected, played a big part in these debates. Since conversion to Islam constituted a change of legal status—with implications for many areas of life, such as taxation and marriage—there are surviving template documents in medieval legal formularies (Shatzmiller 1996), although we have little direct evidence about either numbers or individual experiences. While it has been argued that Christian identity waned rapidly, for institutional reasons (de Epalza 1994), most indications are that Muslims—whether Arab, Berber, or Hispano–Roman—remained a demographic minority even as they dominated politically and culturally. Richard Bulliet’s (1979) attempt to model conversion rates, by studying patterns of naming in the scholarly genealogies contained within biographical dictionaries, remains the most infuential of its type. Bulliet’s work has come in for criticism, although as has been noted, much of this stems from a misunderstanding of what he sought to do (Penelas 2002; Harrison 2012). Bulliet was not seeking to quantify the absolute number of Muslims in the population (or to suggest that the fgure ever reached 100%), but rather to model the pace of conversion: of all the people who ever became Muslim, how many of them had converted by the year 750, or 850, or 900? Bulliet’s data led him to conclude that conversion to Islam within al-Andalus 142
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increased most sharply around the turn of the tenth century (1979, 117), and that the “midpoint” of cumulative conversion in Iberia—that is, the point by which half of conversions had taken place—fell in the middle of the Andalusi caliphal period, and around 70 years later than in eastern lands like Iraq, Syria, and Egypt (1979, 124–25).The extent of Islamicization among the Berbers is less clear; disparagement of Berber understandings of Islam is proverbial in the medieval Arabic sources (Clarke 2013), certainly, but the conquest took place in a period when a distinctively Islamic identity, while still partly in the process of formation (Johns 2003), was being enthusiastically promoted by the center, and taken up well beyond it (Hoyland 2006). If we move away from thinking of Islamicization in al-Andalus purely—or even mostly—in terms of religious conversion, but instead consider it as a social process, the picture becomes more complex and, again, multiple (Boone 2009, 128–153; Carvajal López 2013). Neither Arabic names nor the Arabic language were the exclusive provenance of Muslims, as documentary evidence shows (Rodríguez Fernández 1964) and discussion of the “Mozarab” phenomenon has long acknowledged. Roger Wright (2012), assessing medieval literary and epigraphic evidence in light of modern sociolinguistic research on emigrant language use, concludes that spoken language in al-Andalus did not directly correlate with either religion or ethnicity; the Berber portion of the Muslim army—the vast majority of it, if we are to believe the textual sources—were likely Latinized, and early settlers probably soon became bilingual. Ceramic evidence, likewise, strongly cautions against assumptions that, in their cultural practices, Andalusīs were either one thing or the other, post-conquest (Carvajal López 2019). Broader attempts to map out the social composition of al-Andalus, using textual and archaeological evidence to differing degrees, have generally stressed ethnic diversity and cultural change (Chalmeta 1994; Glick 2005; Coope 2017). Pierre Guichard (1977) posited a considerable degree of segregation between, and thus continuity within, cultural groupings, arguing for widespread endogamous marriage practices on the basis of onomastic evidence; more recent research, however, has had much to say about the cultural and legal practices surrounding intermarriage (Manzano Moreno 2006, 129–146; Zorgati 2012; Safran 2013; Barton 2015). In short, the conquest both brought about decisive, lasting change, and was much slower and more variable in its effects than the word “conquest” might imply.
Assessing the textual evidence I shall now move on to survey the main textual sources for the medieval memory of the conquest in Latin (to the end of the ninth century) and Arabic (to the early fourteenth century). For reasons of space and clarity, after a brief discussion of a documentary source I shall focus on one subset of the literary tradition, chronicles—that is, on texts whose primary goal is to tell a retrospective narrative about the past. I have previously discussed the rich geographical tradition elsewhere (Clarke 2012, 69–83). In order to highlight the way that conquest memory developed—and, I would argue, was enriched—over time, I will deal with most texts in chronological order of composition, except where they are more logically dealt with as separate groupings (that is, Latin texts and eastern Arabic texts). Published translations into English and Spanish will be noted, where they exist. For documentary evidence, we are not well served.There is broad scholarly consensus that the so-called “Treaty of Tudmīr”, an Arabic text outlining the terms of a surrender agreement between ‘Abd al-Azīz b. Mu¯sā b. Nuṣayr and Murcian potentate Tudmīr (Theodemir), should be considered our earliest written source. It only survives as an embedded document in multiple later texts, the earliest being a tenth-century manuscript of the Chronicle of 754 (Corpus Scriptorum Muzarabicorum 1973, vol. 1: 37); other versions, with minor variations (Ṭāha 1989, 97), 143
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include one quoted in the biographical dictionary of al-Ḍabbī (d. 1203), which has been translated into English (Melville and Ubaydli 1992, 10–12). This complicated transmission history means that the treaty’s authenticity has—unsurprisingly—been called into question (Christys 2002, 175–76). In form and content, though, it is consistent with early post-conquest documents from elsewhere in the Islamic world (al-Qāḍī 2008), and lacks features common to later forgeries (Clarke 2012, 20–1). The picture painted in the treaty is of an army on the march, promising those who are surrendering to them freedom of worship and protection of property, in return for a regular supply of wheat, oil, and other supplies, alongside an annual monetary payment. But it is nonetheless an army which already uses some (if not all) of the formal terminology of post-conquest governance, noting that the arrangement offered constitutes ‘ahd allāhi wa-dhimmatihi wa-dhimma nabīhi,“the covenant and protection of God, and the protection of His Prophet” (al-Ḍabbī 1885, 259). No explicit link is made with the wider caliphate, or the Umayyad dynasty, however.‘Abd al-Azīz, son of Mu¯sā b. Nuṣayr and governor of al-Andalus at the time, concludes the agreement under his own name. When we turn to the literary evidence, the picture is both brighter and messier.The earliest post-conquest Iberian histories are two anonymous Latin chronicles, widely assumed—by virtue of tone and framing—to be written by Christian subjects of the new Muslim regime. The brief notice in the Chronicle of 741 says only that the conquest took place during al-Walīd’s reign, and was carried out by Mu¯sā—positioned as al-Walīd’s general—who subsequently extracted tribute (Corpus Scriptorum Muzarabicorum 1973, 7–14; Hoyland 1997, 612–627).The lengthier Chronicle of 754 goes into more detail on the events and characters of both the conquest and the post-conquest settlement (Corpus Scriptorum Muzarabicorum 1973, 16–54; Wolf 1999, 111–177), introducing Ṭāriq as the main conqueror, narrating conficts among the Christian political and ecclesiastical elite, and listing Muslim governors down to the year 754 “which has now begun” (Wolf 1999, 158). It expresses—and seeks to provoke—considerably more emotion than its predecessor, lamenting the fall of Iberia in delightfully hyperbolic terms (“Even if every limb were transformed into a tongue, it would be beyond human capability to express the ruin of Spain and its many and great evils” [Wolf 1999, 133]), while also being clear that such suffering is ennobling—and, frankly, overdue—for a peninsula that had previously escaped the attention of God’s historical plan.The clear implication is that the conquest is a traumatic but ultimately temporary state of affairs: a test from God.The author passes no comment on the religious identity of the conquerors, preferring to focus his ire on the selfinterest and lack of resistance of his own side: the treacherous Visigothic troops who deserted Roderick in his hour of need, the bishop who fed his fock, and the royal collaborator, Oppa. Over a century later, the Chronicle of Alfonso III—composed in Latin in Asturias, likely during the 880s, with (at the very least) the close personal involvement of the titular monarch—took a similar line, but wove in a strand of hope in the shape of the heroically stubborn fgure of Pelayo (Crónicas Asturianas 1985; Wolf 1999, 161–177), imagined as the Visigothic forebear of the Asturian kings, and thus as the promise of unbroken continuity between pre-conquest and post-conquest Iberia. Substantive narratives in Arabic did not appear until over a century after the conquest. When they did, they were closely associated—in terms of both sources and compilers—with the Mālikī school of Sunnī law (Makkī 1998). Although named after Medinan scholar Mālik b. Anas (d. 795), the Mālikī school nonetheless had a strong presence in the western Islamic world, especially in al-Andalus, where Mālik’s works were taken up during the ninth century (Carmona 2005), and where the school came to enjoy largely uncontested dominance, thanks in part to considerable state support (Fierro 2005a). Since legal training was central to advanced education, many scholars made their living by teaching or practicing law, and reports about the 144
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past were central to Islamic law, it is not surprising that so many of our early historical texts were the product of these circles. After a long silence, the mid-to-late ninth century saw two histories produced in quick succession: the Kitāb al-taʾrīkh (“Book of History”) of Ibn Ḥabīb (d. 852, al-Andalus) and the Futu¯ḥ Miṣr (“Conquest of Egypt”) of Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam (d. 870, Egypt). Both are larger works with sections on the Iberian conquest; both authors were Mālikī jurists, and many sources they name also moved in Mālikī or proto-Mālikī circles (Makkī 1957).While historical writing was not held to the same standards of verifcation as were legal works, the infuence of jurisprudential themes and scholarly practices is evident, as are the priorities of the Mālikīs as a memory community (Safran 2019). The Futu¯ḥ Miṣr’s version (Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam 1922, 204–211), in particular, focuses heavily on anecdotes about the legal rights and wrongs of looting during a military campaign (Clarke 2012, 29–33). One pivotal item of loot is the Table of Solomon, which becomes the center of a struggle between Ṭāriq and his patron Mu¯sā, when Ṭāriq secretly replaces one of the Table’s legs, and is able to use his possession of the real leg to demonstrate to the caliph back in Damascus that he deserves the credit for the conquest, not Mu¯sā. Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam also highlights pre-conquest unrest in Iberia, with a major role for a Christian collaborator, the disaffected Count Julian (1922, 205–6), who may (Chalmeta 1994, 119) or may not (Vallvé 1989, 121) be historical, but certainly works as a legitimating device for Ṭāriq’s invasion. Ibn Ḥabīb, while he includes many of the same anecdotes and cites many of the same sources, is also interested in stories with more generalized moralistic stings in the tail (1991, 137–149); that is, stories that look less like extrapolative case studies about specifc legal questions (such as how much loot is too much), and more like folkloric or even existential episodes in which humans fall victim to fate, or suffer for treading on supernatural-adjacent turf.Where Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam has only the House of Locks (1922, 206), Ibn Ḥabīb adds the more elaborate and fantastical tale of the City of Copper (1991, 144–45; Clarke 79–81). Ibn Ḥabīb’s account does not feature Julian, and its confrontation between Mu¯sā and the caliph (1991, 147–49) does not involve Ṭāriq or confict over the Table, stressing instead the caliph’s injustice to Mu¯sā. Andalusī history features less prominently in Islamic chronicles from further to the east. Al-Ṭabarī (d. 923), whose choices over what to include and exclude from his monumental Taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-al-mulu¯k (“History of the Prophets and the Kings”) have been enormously infuential on modern scholarship since the publication of de Goeje’s 15-volume critical edition, has little to say on the conquest—just a series of short notices about Ṭāriq fghting Roderick and falling out with Mu¯sā (al-Ṭabarī 1879–1901, vol. ii.2: 1217, 1230, 1253).Al-Ṭabarī’s eastern contemporaries al-Balādhurī (d. 892) and al-Ya‘qu¯bī (d. c. 897) offer more color, if not more space. The former features Julian (but not Roderick), explains why Ṭāriq fell out with Mu¯sā, mentions the Table of Solomon in passing, and alludes to Mu¯sā falling from favor with the later caliph Sulaymān (al-Balādhurī 1866, 230–31); the latter features Roderick (but not Julian), mentions the confict between Ṭāriq and Mu¯sā, and describes Ṭāriq swapping the Table legs without ever explaining why (al-Ya‘qu¯bī 1883, vol. 2: 341; al-Ya‘qu¯bī 2018, 993).Tales that were meaningful for Egyptian and Andalusī audiences, in other words, had so little resonance further east that they did not even warrant a punchline. The tenth century saw a new drive to put al-Andalus on the Islamic historical map, encouraged in large part by the Umayyad dynasty, in the wake of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III’s (r. 912–961) declaration of his caliphate in 929 (Martinez-Gros 1992; Safran 2000). In ‘Abd al-Raḥmān’s rhetoric, the move to reclaim the caliphate was framed as continuity rather than innovation: the Umayyads were and always had been the rightful caliphs, and it was simply that they had been keeping quiet about it for a while, after the unpleasantness of being ousted from Damascus in 145
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750. The chroniclers—such as Aḥmad al-Rāzī (d. 955) and his son ‘Īsā (d. 989), Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīya (d. 977), and ‘Arīb b. Sa‘īd (d. 980)—followed suit. The best illustration of the continuity narrative at work comes from a description of the Great Mosque of Cordoba, quoted by Magribi writer Ibn ‘Idhārī (d. 1307) (1948–1951, vol. 2: 229–230) from a lost account by al-Rāzī.2 Charting the history of the site from conquest to caliphate, al-Rāzī’s description explicitly parallels Cordoba and the Umayyad mosque in Damascus when recounting how the building was initially shared between Christians and Muslims, and presents the transition from Damascene to Cordoban Umayyads as a smooth one, uninterrupted by any reference to massacres or revolution (Khoury 1996).This narrative is in line with work done to the building over several generations, whose architectural and decorative features likewise echo those of the Damascene mosque (Fierro 1991; Fierro 2007; Fernández-Puertas 2009). This political moment, combined with the import of changing standards and fashions in history-writing, led to the development of a distinctively Andalusī historical tradition, to which the conquest was central (Manzano Moreno 1999, 398–401).The conquest narratives of Aḥmad, ‘Īsā, and ‘Arīb survive only in later—though substantial—quotations by the likes of Ibn ‘Idhārī (1948–1951, vol. 2: 4–23), Ibn al-Shabbāṭ (1971, 138–150), and the easterner Ibn al-Athīr (d. 1233) (1965–1967, vol. 4: 556–568, 576), together with two anonymous texts of uncertain dating, the Akhbār majmu¯‘a (“Collected reports”) and Fatḥ al-Andalus (“The conquest of al-Andalus”). The frst of these texts (Akhbār majmu¯‘a 1867, 4–21; Akhbār majmu¯ʻa 2011, 48–56) contains a substantial amount of material known to be from the tenth century, but there is no consensus on when it reached its surviving form (Molina 1989; Manzano Moreno 1992).The second (Fatḥ al-Andalus 1994, 12–37; Fatḥ al-Andalus 2002, 7–29) seems from internal evidence to date to the twelfth century (Sánchez-Albornoz 1998).Taken together, the remnants of these tenth-century narratives show us a tradition that chose to remember the conquest in different ways than the ninth-century version did, notably with a hitherto-unseen geographical tour of al-Andalus—and thus of places that owed obedience to the Umayyads—couched in terms of Ṭāriq and Mu¯sā each undertaking his own separate itinerary of conquest (de Santiago Simón 1998; Molina 1998, 42–3, 49; Clarke 2012, 38). Akhbār majmu¯‘a is the earliest extant text to feature a third leader of the conquest, Mughīth al-Ru¯mī. Positioned explicitly as a client (mawlā) of the Umayyad family in general, rather than as a client of one individual as Ṭāriq is, Mughīth refects the changed practice of clientage in al-Andalus in this period (Fierro 2005b), and thus has the feel of a character created specifcally for the tenth-century caliphal context, especially since he is credited with the conquest of Cordoba, the Umayyads’ capital (Martinez-Gros 1992, 57–60; Clarke 2011); furthermore, the name al-Ru¯mī (“the Roman/Byzantine”) implies he is a convert from Christianity. The fnal text that I shall discuss here, Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīya’s Taʾrīkh iftitāḥ al-Andalus (“History of the Conquest of al-Andalus”), is more unusual. It survives in a single manuscript, which was edited and translated into Spanish early last century (Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīya 1926), and has recently also been translated into English (Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīya 2009).This fascinating work departs from the conventional narrative—as it had become established in Arabic, at any rate—with its close attention to the members of the Visigothic elite besides Roderick (and Julian). Grammarian Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīya was a descendant of Roderick’s predecessor, Witiza (r. 702–710) (Ibn al-Faraḍī 1983–1984, §1316), via that king’s granddaughter, Sara—a heritage commemorated in the author’s name, since the patronymic “Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīya” translates as “son of the Visigothic woman”. Sara has a starring role in Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīya’s account of the conquest (1926, 2–11; 2009, 49–54); after her father and his brothers join forces with Ṭāriq, disgruntled at what they see as the usurpation by Roderick of a crown that is rightfully theirs, Sara becomes a bridging fgure between the old regime and the new, traveling to Damascus to petition the caliph to settle a dispute with her uncle over her landed property. In the process, she becomes a mawlā of the Umayyad dynasty 146
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in all but name, uniting Christian subjects to Muslim rulers; her new caliphal patron even takes on the key patriarchal role of arranging a marriage for her, to the symbolically named ‘Īsā, by whom she has two equally symbolically-named sons, Ibrāhīm and Isḥāq (Fierro 1989; Christys 2002, 158–183). We are told that the young ‘Abd al-Raḥmān I (r. 756–788) was witness to all this, and duly honored the relationship when at length he set up home in al-Andalus. Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīya’s family ties to the Umayyads went back to the time of the conquest, in other words— and through his contribution to the historical tradition, the conquest is remembered as bringing justice to the people of Iberia, Muslim, and Christian alike, with the advent of Umayyad rule.
Conclusion The historicity of the Muslim conquest of Iberia as an event—or, more accurately, as a process— is widely attested by a range of evidence.The historicity of the conquest tradition, by contrast, is more questionable, and has been widely questioned, including by the medieval authors themselves. The memory of the conquest was central to communal identity formation and ruling ideology in both the north and south of the peninsula; accordingly, narratives of the conquest grew more elaborate with each passing generation, with the result that there are multiple coexisting conquests of Iberia. Of course, neither of these contentions—that the conquest took place or that its written memory was deeply mutable—means that our work here is done, or that there is nothing more to learn.Archaeological research into the conquest increasingly offers us the chance to construct a history of Islam’s arrival and establishment in Iberia that is not simply a one-size-fts-all tale of elite individuals and decisive battles, but is alert to regional and local variation, and to the fner grain of adaptation and cultural change as it was felt—and actively engaged with—in the lives of women and men across the peninsula. Studies like that of Safran (2019), moreover, show us how many layers of meaning remain to be found even in the most familiar narratives, if we are prepared to approach the textual tradition as a living and dynamic one. Efforts to decode and contextualize the purposes of the medieval narratives have hitherto—not least in my own work—been quite Umayyad-centric, but it is long past time for us to explore the ways in which the conquest was experienced and remembered in the world beyond the ruling elite, by bringing material and textual research together.
Notes 1 For more on the so-called “negationism” controversy, including references to a much wider array of responses to Olagu¯e and González Ferrín, see García Sanjuán (2019) and Wolf (2019). 2 Ibn ‘Idhārī does not specify which al-Rāzī in this case, although when writing about the conquest, he briefy cites ‘Īsā in a way that suggests he usually uses Aḥmad (Ibn ‘Idhārī 1948–1951, vol. 2: 6).
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10 ‘ABD AL-RAḤ MA¯ N III AND THE CALIPHATE OF CORDOBA Maribel Fierro
The Umayyad caliph of Cordoba ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III (r. 300/912–350/961), together with al-Manṣu¯r b. Abī ‘Āmir (Almanzor)—the chamberlain who became the de facto ruler during the reign of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III’s grandson—represent the period when Umayyad Cordoba, the capital of al-Andalus (Muslim Iberia), reached its political and economic apogee, and saw a remarkable fourishing of science and culture.1 Such developments are conjured in the description of Cordoba as “the ornament of the world”, an epithet allegedly formulated by the tenth-century Saxon nun Hroswitha. More recently, this epithet was taken up as the title of María Rosa Menocal’s book on Andalusi achievements in inter-religious “tolerance”—understood not in the modern sense of ensuring freedom of expression and religion, but as a creative cultural exchange between different religious groups whose coexistence was regulated by a specifc legal system (dhimma) and who were allowed to hold different beliefs.2 It was written to address a wide audience in a critical moment of recent history, being published shortly after 11 September 2001. The expression “the ornament of the world” does indeed appear in the writings of Sister Hroswitha.3 However, when she described Cordoba in such glowing terms, she was not referring to the Islamic city but to the pre-Islamic one. In fact, she specifes that Cordoba was the ornament of the world when the “Hispanii” held it in their possession. She then moves on to discuss how the town fell into the hands of the Saracens, a period for which she does not have any compliments. Her concern was the fate of her co-religionists, the Christians, and their suffering after the Muslim conquest, when “the faithful city was lulled indeed into a feigned peace, overwhelmed as it was so often by a thousand evils” (Wiegand 1936, 131) Although the conquerors had initially intended to put an end to Christianity, eventually they decided to allow the Christians to keep their religion while forbidding them from insulting Islamic beliefs, a crime punishable by death.Things stayed this way until the times of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III, described in unfattering terms:“this sacrilegious man, conducting himself so arrogantly in his palace and heaping up for himself well-merited punishment, presumed that he was to be the very king of kings, and that all nations would become subject to his command, and that there was not a tribe so replete with reckless valor as would venture to encounter his army in war” (Wiegand 1936, 133). Thus, the association of Hroswitha’s famous epithet with Cordoba at the time of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III does not at all refect her intention. Still, it captures well what other types 152
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of sources, especially those written in Arabic by Muslims, convey about the magnifcence of the caliphate of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III—“the sun that rose in the West”4—and that of his son al-Ḥakam II, and about the splendor of their capital.5 Archaeological excavations conducted there, both in past decades and at present, provide abundant proof of such splendor.6 In this chapter, after a brief overview of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III’s caliphate, I will frst concentrate on his portrayal by Muslim and non-Muslim scholars, and then on the cultural and scientifc fourishing that took place under ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III and his son al-Ḥakam II, paying attention, on the one hand, to current work on the bāṭinī (esoteric) dimension of this fourishing and, on the other hand, to certain legal developments hitherto neglected.
A long reign and a short legacy ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III was the frst Cordoban Umayyad to take the title of Prince of the Believers, and his reign was the second longest of any Muslim caliph. In the year 316/929, after having ruled as emir for 17 years and successfully defeating a number of rebel lords in al-Andalus, he took the title of caliph, which his Cordoban ancestors had never used offcially, although their poets had not been shy in bestowing it upon them. The frst Cordoban Umayyad rulers had merely reminded their subjects that they were the descendants of the Umayyad caliphs of Damascus, under whose rule al-Andalus had been conquered and Islamized.Apart from the title of caliph, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III’s victories against his Andalusi enemies at home, his Christian enemies across the northern frontier, and his Fatimid enemies across the Strait of Gibraltar also earned him the title of al-Nāṣir li-dīn Allāh (“he who wins for the religion of God”).7 ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III was a resourceful military commander and a clever political leader, as well as a great builder: under his reign new fortifcations were erected, an imposing minaret was added to the Great Mosque of Cordoba, the royal palace was expanded, and the palatine city of Madīnat al-Zahrā’ was built near Cordoba, a symbol of political power and religious salvation (Gurriarán Daza 2008; Hernández Jiménez 1975; León Muñoz and Murillo Redondo 2009; Vallejo 2010; Fierro 2017).‘Abd al-Raḥmān III was effcient in establishing a well-run administration and in attending to the affairs of the state, with an effective taxation system that relied on the country’s thriving agricultural production, thereby making it possible to maintain a strong army. Commerce fourished with North Africa and the Eastern Islamic lands across the Strait of Gibraltar, and also with Christendom. Special attention was paid to the arrival in Cordoba in the year 330/942 of Amalftan merchants bringing with them purple and brocades.8 The coastal regions of al-Andalus became increasingly active as maritime routes now free of pirates—such as those who had been based in Fraxinetum (near modern Saint Tropez in France)—facilitated trade.The Umayyad feet grew to face the Vikings’ sporadic incursions, and more importantly the Fatimids’ expansionist policies toward the far-western Maghreb (what is now Algeria and Morocco) (Lirola Delgado 1993). Embassies from the Holy Roman Emperor Otto I and the Byzantine Emperor traveled to Cordoba (Cardoso 2018; see also Renzi Rizzo 2002). Political and economic exchanges with the North African Berber principalities intensifed, while military intervention in the area also took place (Ballestín 2006).The Christian and Jewish communities had their share in the economic and cultural developments that marked ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III’s reign and that of his son al-Ḥakam II (r. 350/961-366/976). Figures such as Bishop Recemund and Jewish dignitary Ḥasdāy b. Shapru¯ṭ animated the intellectual life of their communities and played a prominent role in different capacities in the Umayyad administration, for example as ambassadors to the Christian polities (Forcada 2009; Perlmann 2010). This summarizes what can be found in any presentation of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III, whether aimed at specialists or at a wider audience, for example the entry in the latest edition of the 153
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Encyclopedia Britannica (Khalidi 2016). It constitutes the portrayal of a successful ruler whose legacy was nevertheless short-lived. By the end of the fourth/tenth century, during the reign of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III’s grandson Hishām II, the Cordoban caliphate was torn up by internal strife within the Umayyad family, with different pretenders to the throne fghting against each other. Madīnat al-Zahrā’ was looted and fell into ruin, and the sizeable Umayyad family, despite its numbers, almost completely vanished from the historical record (Wasserstein 1993; Scales 1994). After losing power during the period of the ftna (civil war) between 399/1009–421/1031, the Umayyads never regained it. It was not until many centuries later—during the 1568–1571 Morisco rebellion in Granada—that a political fgure would again claim Umayyad ancestry.The rebel leader Hernando de Válor’s claim to Umayyad ancestry was a refection of the longing for a time when the Iberian Peninsula had been conquered for Islam under the reign of the Umayyad caliphs from Damascus, at the very moment in which Islam was doomed to disappear from it. Also by the end of the fourth/tenth century, less than 50 years after ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III’s death, the Christians had become increasingly aggressive in their military advances into Andalusi territory. By then they had lost their awe for the Cordobans after witnessing their weaknesses for themselves, when Christian troops entered Cordoba to aid one pretender to the throne against another.What they saw during the ftna tore asunder the imposing image they had held of the Cordobans (Ibn ‘Idhārī 1993, 85). In North Africa, in spite of the Fatimid imam-caliph’s 359/970 departure to Cairo, which limited the Fatimids’ expansionist policies in the area, a fragmented al-Andalus could hardly maintain its dominance over the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar. Different Berber polities emerged as a prelude to the formation of the great Almoravid and Almohad empires during the ffth/eleventh and sixth/twelfth centuries, when al-Andalus was to be ruled from Marrakech, becoming part of the Maghrebi polities run by the despised Berbers. In fact, during the Umayyad period a core pillar of Andalusi identity was the fact of being Arabic speakers steeped in Arab culture (mostly poetry). Thus, Andalusis set themselves as cultivated men of letters in opposition to the unsophisticated inhabitants from the other side of the Strait, cast as unrefned, ignorant speakers of a barbarian tongue (García Gómez 1976; Martinez Gros 1997; Larsson 2004; Rouighi 2019).The Taifa kingdoms ruled by Andalusi rulers (whether of Arab or “old” Berber stock)9 as well as by slaves (ṣaqāliba), which had emerged out of the disintegration of the Umayyad caliphate of Cordoba, maintained and developed this identity. In this context, the Zirids of Granada, for example, were despised as “new” Berbers who had just arrived from North Africa, they were seen as possessing all the shortcomings of their ethnicity, as proven by their violent behavior and over-reliance on non-Muslims (Ávila 2004; García Sanjuán 2004). The great historian of this time, Cordoba’s Ibn Ḥayyān (387/987–469/1076), whose historical work al-Muqtabas has made it possible to largely reconstruct Umayyad history, was convinced of the existence of a “Berber problem” that had played a crucial role in the destruction of all that the Umayyads had built. It had its roots in the caliphate’s military policies, when North African soldiers were recruited to fght in the Iberian Peninsula, starting with the 700 soldiers from Tangiers that the second caliph, al-Ḥakam II, had incorporated into his army (Ibn Ḥayyān 1965; Spanish trans. García Gómez 1976, 231).
Writing history and representing ‘Abd al-Raḥ ma¯n III Spanish conservative nationalistic historiography has long regarded al-Andalus as a historical accident, a reality that had mostly negative consequences, such as those described by Sister Hroswitha—notwithstanding an artistic legacy that has made Spain a particularly attractive 154
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tourist destination. Thus, al-Andalus was fated to disappear as the Christians won back a territory that was rightfully theirs to begin with, in order to reconnect with Spain’s destiny as a Catholic country.This process is what is called the Reconquista, a powerful ideological tool that served to legitimize the Christian conquest of al-Andalus in the past, and which nineteenthcentury historians elevated to the offcial understanding of national history to be learned in school by Spanish children (Ríos Saloma 2011, 2013; López et al. 2015; Porcel Bueno 2017). Eight centuries of Muslim rule were thus dismissed as an interlude in Spain’s “true destiny”. In this brand of historiography, the Umayyad period has been valued as untainted by the political hegemony of the “foreign” and fanatical North African Berber empires, but especially because it was the period closest to pre-Islamic Hispania and thus susceptible to revealing patterns of continuity with the Christian past that transcended the fateful event of the Arab conquest in 711. While the conquerors and their descendants must have told stories about the conquest, these early layers of memory are almost impossible to recover because they were not set down in writing (Martinez Gros 1992; Clarke 2012). When the Umayyads took power in Cordoba in the middle of the second/eighth century, they were interested in memorializing their own achievements and in limiting the memory of the exploits of the conquerors.Thus, if we move to the fourth/tenth century, we fnd almost no information about the clients (mawālī) of Mu¯sā b. Nuṣayr, the great conqueror of the Peninsula; rather, almost all the mawālī that appear in the historical record are linked to the Umayyads.The former must have continued to exist, but their link to the early second/eighth-century conqueror lost its relevance and thus went unrecorded, while at the same time some of these clients had probably shifted their allegiance to the new rulers and become Umayyad mawālī. Even though the Umayyads of Cordoba had a vested interest in constructing their dynastic memory, historical writing took a long time to get off its feet in al-Andalus, perhaps because before ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III took the title of caliph, the Umayyads in al-Andalus had not found a strong enough formula to legitimize their rule, insofar as it involved the division of the Sunni community. The jurist Ibn Ḥabīb (174/794-238/853) wrote a Kitāb al-ta’rīkh dealing with Islamic history in general that included concise information about the governors and emirs of al-Andalus.The foundations of Andalusi historiography were laid around 100 years later by Aḥmad al-Rāzī (274/888–344/955), who wrote under ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III—two-and-a-half centuries after the conquest—a work entitled Ta’rīkh mulu¯k al-Andalus. It is known to us only through quotations in later works and through the Castilian rendition of a lost Portuguese translation made ca. 1300 (Molina 2012; Gomes 2017).Aḥmad al-Rāzī covered the events from the conquest up to his own times with a decided focus on the Iberian Peninsula, as the title clearly indicates. Thus, he included its geographical description using as his main source the Latin author Orosius (d. ca. 420), whose Historiae were translated from Latin into Arabic around the same time, probably as part of the same effort to establish a dynastic history that had to be rooted in Arabia, the place of origin of the Umayyad family, but also in the pre-Islamic past of the region where they had eventually settled (Penelas 2008; Sahner 2013; Elices 2017). In his work, Aḥmad al-Rāzī included data about those who had inhabited the Iberian Peninsula before the Arab conquest.This local geographical focus can be understood as a refection of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III’s major achievement: to have secured for himself and his descendants control over al-Andalus, the land where his ancestor ‘Abd al-Raḥmān I (r. 138/756–172/788) had found refuge after being ousted by the Abbasids, and where the Umayyads had managed to create a new polity. Later, the Umayyads had been on the verge of losing control over it under the centrifugal pressure of the rebellions that took place in the second half of the third/ninth century, when lords from different ethnic backgrounds—such as the muwallad (i.e. descendant of native 155
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converts) Ibn Ḥafṣu¯n (d. 306/918)—came close to establishing their own kingdoms. Because ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III had managed to defeat them and especially because he had taken their most important fortress, Bobastro, in 315/928, the eighth Umayyad emir of Cordoba could adopt the title of caliph and be represented as the re-founder of the dynasty, a new ‘Abd al-Raḥmān I who had once again united a divided Muslim community. Not only that, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III had also once more secured the borders with the Christians who inhabited the northern territories of al-Andalus. Andalusis’ conception of Al-Andalus, in fact, corresponded to the geographical reality of Hispania, encompassing the whole of the Iberian Peninsula. However, the Umayyad caliph’s control over the frontier areas was not as secure as claimed in the offcial historiography, as the battle of al-Khandaq (Simancas) revealed in 327/937. In that year, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Christians of Zamora, betrayed by the Muslim frontier lords whose political survival depended on balancing their allegiance to Cordoba with their coexistence alongside their Christian neighbors (Fierro 2011c). The caliph’s defeat was downplayed in the offcial reports, which magnifed his successes against the northern enemies, so much so that they may have misled us into imagining that the military power of the fourth/ tenth-century Umayyads was stronger than it actually was (Suñé Arce 2019; see also Albarrán 2018). Aḥmad al-Rāzī’s Ta’rīkh was continued by his son, ‘Īsā al-Rāzī (d. 368/980), who covered the reign of al-Ḥakam II.Another offcial historian,‘Arīb ibn Sa‘d (d. 370/980), took a different approach from the Rāzīs: instead of focusing on the local context of the Umayyads of Cordoba, he inserted the local history of al-Andalus into the universal history of Islam, writing a continuation and supplement to the famous Ta’rīkh of al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923) (Castilla Brazales 2007). This approach refects the Umayyad caliphs’ aspirations—however theoretical—to extend their rule outside al-Andalus and to regain control of the Holy Places of Islam as the proper culmination of their caliphate.These aspirations were cited in the letters sent to their North African allies, as the Cordoban caliphs had to counteract the strong claims to the universal imamate made by their North African rival, the Fatimid imam-caliph. Universal Islamic history was also very much present in a book of adab, al-‘Iqd al-farīd, written by one of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III’s court poets, Ibn ‘Abd Rabbihi (246/860–328/940). Recent studies have illuminated how this work refects the caliphal ambitions of the Cordoban Umayyad ruler, and a worldview adapted to the caliphate’s imperial cultural needs.This explains the almost complete lack of interest in materials dealing with the local Andalusi context (Toral-Niehoff 2015, 2018). While on the one hand Umayyad links to the Iberian Peninsula required knowledge of the region’s history, Umayyad caliphal ambitions required the telling of Islamic universal history and the appropriation of the Arab culture as developed in the East. Likewise, Ibn al-Qu¯ṭiya (d. 367/977) in his Ta’rīkh iftitāḥ al-Andalus emphasized how the Umayyads’ rule would survive and thrive as long as they adequately rewarded those who served them loyally, and as long as they recruited the men who served them without discriminating on the basis of their lineage or genealogy. Ibn al-Qu¯ṭiya—whose female ancestor was a Goth—took pride in an ancestry that linked him to a woman of the local pre-Islamic nobility, and his work is rightly considered a seminal source for recovering the construction of an Andalusi identity that was closely linked to ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III’s legitimation as caliph (Martinez Gros 1992; Filios 2015). Chronicles similarly stressed the Umayyad princes’ own indigenous ancestry via the slave concubines who begot them, for example as shown in their description as being blond-haired and blue-eyed (Martinez Gros 1997, 64; Ruggles 2004; Marín 2011). Of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III it is remembered that he had a son with a Qurashi wife, unusually referred to by his maternal line as Ibn al-Qurashiyya. However, the caliph preferred as his heir al-Ḥakam, the son of a slave concubine, thus publicly demonstrating that the offspring of mixed marriages had the same 156
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rank as those of “pure” Arab stock, against the claims to the contrary of some Arab lineages in al-Andalus (as shown in Fierro 2008; French translation Fierro 2011b). Umayyad memorialization was pursued by other authors such as Mu‘āwiya b. Hishām Ibn al-Shabinisī (d. 447/1055–6) in his Kitāb fī dhikr al-dākhilīn ilā al-Andalus min Banī Marwān, Ibn al-Ṣaffār al-Anṣārī (285/898–352/963) in his Kitāb fī ash‘ār al-khulafā’ min Banī Umayya, and Ibn Abī l-Fayyāḍ (375/986–459/1066) in his Kitāb al-‘ibar, of which only fragments survive (one of them reporting the famous anecdote about ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III’s 14 days of happiness) (Álvarez de Morales 1978–1979; Pérez Álvarez 2012).At the same time, the ever-growing group of religious scholars also made an effort to record their own achievements, justifying their role as indispensable agents in the functioning of Islamic society, as interpreters of the law and mediators between the ruler and the people. In this sense, this period saw works such as the Kitāb quḍāt Qurṭuba by Ibn Ḥārith al-Khushānī (d. 361/971), the Ṭabaqāt al-naḥwiyyīn wa-l-lughawiyyīn by al-Zubaydī (316/928-379/989), and the Ta’rīkh ‘ulamā’ al-Andalus by Ibn al-Faraḍī (d. 403/1013). Ibn al-Faraḍī’s Ta’rīkh was to be continued in later times in a series of interconnected biographical dictionaries supporting the conviction that there was an uninterrupted chain of scholars—almost all of them of Maliki persuasion—who had ensured the correct understanding of the Revealed Scripture and the correct practice of ritual and legal procedures since Umayyad times. Ibn Juljul (332/943–384/994), in turn, wrote a book about scholars versed in the rational sciences entitled Kitāb ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbā’ wa-l-ḥukamā’ wa-l-falāsifa al-qudamā’ wa-l-islāmiyyīn, thus documenting the plurality of scholarly activities under the caliphate’s rule. Most of our present knowledge about the caliphate period in al-Andalus comes from the work of its most important historian, the aforementioned Ibn Ḥayyān of Cordoba, who hailed from a family that had long served the Umayyads in different capacities (his grandfather had died in the battle of al-Khandaq). In his al-Muqtabas fī ta’rīkh rijāl al-Andalus, which deals with the history of al-Andalus before his own time,10 Ibn Ḥayyān collected information from more than 30 previous sources, and by doing so, as Luis Molina has analyzed, made those works largely redundant (Molina 2006).Writing after the demise of the Umayyad caliphate in 422/1031, Ibn Ḥayyān, although pro-Umayyad, did not censure the shortcomings and unpleasant features of the rulers of the dynasty’s rulers. He offers a multifaceted representation of the caliph, together with a detailed physical portrait (Marín 2011).Thus, in his description of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III he adds a striking section in which he quotes, among others, Ibn Ḥazm (d. 456/1064), also a descendant of a Cordoban family who had worked in the Umayyad administration. In this section, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III’s cruelty toward women and others is depicted in gruesome detail. Let us examine an example that both corroborates and contradicts ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III’s depiction in other Muslim and Christian sources. Ibn Ḥayyān states that some of his teachers who had lived during ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III’s times, and who were informed by eunuchs active in the caliph’s court, recalled his brutal treatment of two slave girls.11 In one such episode, an anonymous slave girl known for her haughty character dared to show her displeasure at being kissed by the caliph in the gardens of Madīnat al-Zahrā’. Enraged, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III called his eunuchs and ordered them to burn her face with a candle. On another occasion, when he was in his villa at al-Nā’ura, the executioner Abu¯ ‘Imrān was called inside a room, where the eunuchs were holding a beautiful young woman who was begging for mercy, while the caliph insulted her.‘Abd al-Raḥmān III ordered the executioner to behead the woman, which he did when his attempt at dissuading the ruler failed. Later on, the executioner found on his leather mat pearls and precious stones that had fallen from a necklace when her head was cut off.The executioner wanted to return them to ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III, but was told to keep them and in this way he had money enough to buy himself a house. 157
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We have seen how the tenth-century Benedictine nun Hroswitha—one of the few nonArabic sources that have anything to say about ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III—knew that he had claimed an elevated title, calling him the “very king of kings”, and also that he had obtained military successes that made him a fearful opponent.This coincides with what Muslim historians recorded about the many instances in which ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III publicly displayed the punishments he inficted on his defeated enemies, including crucifed bodies and severed heads. In one of his military actions, says Hroswitha, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III attacked the Galicians to prove them wrong, as they had claimed that they would never submit to the Muslims. Having vanquished them, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III took some prisoners who were offered the possibility of ransom, but one of them, unable to gather the required amount, had to leave his son in the hands of the Muslim ruler. ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III was known to be “tainted with vice, and that he ardently loved youths of handsome appearance and desired to join them to friendship with himself ” (Wiegand 1936, 141). The young boy taken hostage was called Pelagius. The caliph met him when he was “clad in rich garments” and with “his throat adorned with a jewelled necklace”, and tried to kiss him, but Pelagius refused him.‘Abd al-Raḥmān III tried a second time: With his right hand he held frmly the face of the martyr, embracing with his left that hallowed neck, that thus he might imprint at least one kiss. But the martyr confounded the crafty pleasantry of the king and speedily directed against the royal countenance a swinging fst, dealing such a blow to that downturned face that the blood, fowing forthwith from the resultant wound, polluted his beard and bedewed even his garments. (Wiegand 1936, 141–45) Eventually, Pelagius was beheaded and became a martyr for his faith, as he had said to the Muslim ruler: “It is not meet that a man cleansed in the Baptism of Christ submit his chaste neck to a barbarous embrace, nor should a worshiper of Christ who has been anointed with sacred Chrism court the kiss of a lewd slave of the demon” (Wiegand 1936, 143).As a number of scholars have underlined, what we have in Hroswitha’s narrative is a tale of cultural and religious incompatibility that is given fesh and voice in the young Pelagius (Jordan 1999; Hutcheson 2001; Weston 2002). The martyrdom of Pelagius was the subject of two other Christian works: one written before the year 967 in the Iberian Peninsula by someone called Raguel,12 and the other a Mozarabic liturgy written around 967 or 30 years earlier in León to commemorate the arrival of the saint’s relics (Simonet 1897–1908, 592, 614, 615, 702–703; Christys 2002, 88–91, 94–100). In the text written by Raguel, Pelagius, a handsome and chaste boy, substitutes as hostage his relative the bishop Hermoygius, taken prisoner in 920 during the battle of Valdejunquera by an anonymous Muslim king who had fought against the king of León, Ordoño II. When the emir tried to touch the boy, Pelagius struck him, saying that he was not effeminate.When the king realized that the boy was frm in his refusal, he ordered Pelagius to be seized with iron tongs and twisted about, until he should either renounce Christ or die. Pelagius did not renounce his faith and was cut to pieces by sword and thrown into the river (I am following here Jordan 1999, 26). The details found in Hroswitha’s rendition about the necklace worn by Pelagius and about the emir having bled are not mentioned. In the texts of both Raguel and Hroswitha, as well as in the Muslim source, it is stated that the information was obtained from direct witnesses. In the case of Hroswitha, the oral transmission probably took place during the embassy sent in 955 by ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III to the emperor Otto I, in which the Cordoban Christian Recemund participated. 158
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The similarities and parallels between the stories collected by Ibn Ḥayyān regarding ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III’s treatment of the slave women and the Pelagius story are many. In both cases, the stories are transmitted orally by anonymous informants. Likewise, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III directs his desire toward someone who is in his power and in a position of submission and inferiority, and from whom he obviously expected no rejection of his sexual advances. In both Hroswitha’s story and Ibn Ḥayyān’s, the object of the emir’s desire wears a necklace encrusted with gems.13 When the rejection takes place, the rage of the emir cannot be controlled and leads to the torture and execution of the one who would not submit to his sexual desire.The main difference is the gender of the victim: a boy in the Christian source, and a slave girl in the Muslim source. In the case of the Christian rendition of the story, the fact that the object of desire is a boy is of primordial importance, as it serves to establish a boundary between the chaste Christian and the depraved Muslim court where he now lives. In the case of the episodes recorded by the Muslim source, it adds to other episodes that portrayed ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III as a ruler who went beyond the acceptable use of violence and imposed unnecessary cruelty on specifc individuals (Fierro 2004b). Such cruelty was also noted by the archenemies of the Umayyads of Cordoba, the Fatimids. In Qāḍī al-Nu‘mān’s (d. 363/974) Kitāb al-majālis wa-l-musāyarāt, the legitimacy of the ruler’s violence is discussed with examples taken from the practice of both the Umayyad and the Fatimid imam-caliphs in dealing with their enemies. Moreover, reference is made to two particular cases that affected a person very close to each dynasty: in the case of the Fatimids, the missionary Abu¯ ‘Abd Allāh whose activities had been decisive in the establishment of the Fatimid caliphate; in the case of the Umayyads, the loyal client Badr who had helped ‘Abd al-Raḥmān I in establishing his rule in Cordoba. Both were executed by those whom they had loyally served (Nu‘mān 1997, 165–66, 169–172, 212–13;Yaloui 1978, 19). A later Fatimid source transmitted that ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III had personally executed his son ‘Abd Allāh during the Festival of Sacrifce, thus adding to the representation of the frst Umayyad caliph as cruel and merciless (Fierro 2009). Given the power and extent of Fatimid anti-Umayyad propaganda, these episodes may best be understood within this context.The focus on the private violence of the ruler is also found in the history of the last of the Aghlabid emirs, the rulers of Ifriqiya deposed by the Fatimids (Nef 2009). Not only negative things were said about ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III. Ibn Ḥayyān also relates how a mentally ill man was killed by the caliph’s guard of eunuch slaves, who thought he was attacking ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III. The caliph reprimanded the guard and compensated the family of the mentally ill man (Ibn Ḥayyān, al-Muqtabas, vol.V, 1979, 22–3 of the Arabic edition, Spanish translation 1981, 39). In his relations with former rebels,‘Abd al-Raḥmān III knew how to combine the stick with the carrot. In contrast to the Fatimid imam-caliph—infallible and endowed with supernatural knowledge, and thus above any possibility of censure—‘Abd al-Raḥmān III was reprehended by a judge he himself had named the chief judge of Cordoba Mundhir b. Sa‘īd al-Ballu¯ṭī (d. 355/966).The issue was the caliph’s decision to use tiles of gold and silver in his palatine town of Madīnat al-Zahrā’, and ultimately he recanted, thus publicly showing that he was not above the law. On the other hand, elsewhere he is shown trying to infuence another chief judge to be lenient against the letter of the law for reasons of political expediency (Fierro 2004a, 2012b).
Umayyad survival and the need for knowledge When ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III took power at the age of 21 in the year 912—corresponding in the Muslim calendar to the year 300, the turn of a century—the Umayyads of Cordoba were well 159
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aware that they were experiencing a decisive moment that would force them to fght for their survival. They had to face the rebel lords who had taken control of most of al-Andalus and recover their authority as leaders of a united community. By choosing ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III to succeed his grandfather,‘Abd Allāh (r. 275/888–300/912), the Umayyads did the right thing, as the young emir was eventually successful. One hundred years later, the Umayyads would disappear precisely due to their inability to fnd a new ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III to check their internecine fghts and stop the descent into political fragmentation. As important as it was to fght rebels such as Ibn Ḥafṣu¯n and his sons, it was also crucial to counteract the Fatimids’ doctrinal appeal and their expansionist policies in North Africa. The complex ways in which the Umayyads and Fatimids interacted is a relatively new feld of inquiry that has already offered many insights, and will continue to do so in the future.14 There are still many aspects to explore, such as the unusual decision on the part of ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III to isolate his heir al-Ḥakam from his brothers, and also what seems to have been a deliberate policy to force him to delay producing offspring.These are steps that could perhaps have been related to the specifc pattern of succession among the Ismā‘īlī imams, for whom the inheritance of their special charisma imposed more restrictive measures on the process of selecting heirs to the throne than among the Sunni caliphs.Along the same lines, al-Ḥakam’s dedication to learning does not seem to have been a matter of choice. ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III had many assets as a military and political leader, but he does not seem to have been a cultivated man or someone with particular intellectual proclivities. He is said to have studied the legal work al-Muwaṭṭa’ written by the Medinan scholar Mālik b. Anas (d. 179/795), the eponymous founder of the prevailing legal school in al-Andalus. But perhaps this was just something that had to be said because caliphs, according to the Sunni legal doctrine on leadership of the community, were supposed to have at least some religious knowledge, and also because through the adoption of Mālik’s doctrines the Umayyads of Cordoba connected themselves to Medina, the town where the Prophet had acted as statesman, and thus to the Prophet himself. However, even though ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III was clearly not a scholar, at least two of his sons were: al-Ḥakam and ‘Abd Allāh. ‘Abd Allāh—whose violent end we have already mentioned—is described as “having been acknowledged by the majority of Cordobans for his virtue, religiosity, culture, generosity and wide learning, including fqh, ḥadīth, lexicology, poetry, mathematics and medicine” (Molina 1983, p. 134 of the Arabic text, p. 172 of the Spanish translation). Al-Ḥakam was also described in similar terms, so much so that religious scholars (‘ulamā’) considered him one of their own, and also received praise for his love of books, which led him to amass a vast library (Ávila and Fierro, forthcoming). Having succeeded in imposing unity over his territories and checking the Fatimids’ expansionist policies, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III was aware that his heir would not be able to derive legitimacy from military pursuits as he had, and that he would therefore need another foundation to sustain his authority as caliph. That foundation was knowledge, which was helpful for two reasons. On the one hand, it would bind the caliph to a group that was crucial for maintaining order in society—the religious scholars— and on the other hand, because it would allow the Umayyad caliph to counteract one of the crucial claims made by his rival, the Fatimid imam-caliph—that is, the possession of supernatural knowledge and infallibility. This kind of knowledge was not something that Sunni caliphs like the Umayyads of Cordoba could claim. However, there is growing evidence that they became interested in the “sciences of the ancients”, giving them a special place in their residences (Calvo Capilla 2012, 2014).These “sciences” included alchemy and magic, as shown by the works Ghāyat al-ḥakīm (= Picatrix) and Rutbat al-ḥakīm by Maslama b. Qāsim (295/908–353/964), who can be traced to the entourage of the caliph himself (Fierro 2012c). Recently, other related works have also been connected to 160
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this entourage, such as a text that North African Jew Du¯nash b.Tamīm (d. ca. 360/971) wrote for Ḥasdāy b. Shapru¯ṭ, who served the Cordoban caliph in various capacities.15 Another book is the Kitāb al-khawāṣṣ, attributed to Hermes (‘Azzāwī 1975, 130).Al-Ḥakam II received a letter from the Byzantine emperor that records the caliph’s interest in philosophy, and has been preserved together with the Arabic version of a hermetic work attributed to Apollonius of Triana, known as the Book of Causes (Stern 1969). Likewise, the Rasā’il Ikhwān al-Ṣafā already circulated in the Iberian Peninsula at the time. Based on all this evidence, we can reconstruct the kind of books from the library of al-Ḥakam II that were burnt by al-Manṣu¯r b.Abī ‘Āmir under pressure from some of the jurists (Safran 2014). This is not to say that al-Ḥakam II disregarded the study of Islamic law. He is remembered as having charged the Maliki scholar Ibn Akhī Rabī‘ al-Ṣabbāgh (265/878–318/931) with the composition of a work collecting all the sayings of Mālik b. Anas, excluding those of his contemporaries and students.The title was Kitāb al-istī‘āb li-aqwāl Mālik mujarrada du¯na aqwāl aṣḥābihi (also known as Ta’līf fī asmi‘at ‘an Mālik), a work continued by the jurist from Seville Ibn al-Makwī and by Umayyad scholar Abu¯ Marwān al-Mu‘ayṭī (El Hour 2009; Lirola Delgado and Navarro i Ortiz 2009; Cano Ávila 2006). Although it has not been preserved and it is not clear that it was ever actually completed, the initiative is not without interest. This attempt at compiling the legal doctrine of Mālik without any interference from other voices points to a desire to establish the foundations of the Maliki legal school as the uncontaminated teachings of its founder.This attempt echoes what Qāḍī l-Nu‘mān, the chief judge of the Fatimids, had done during the reign of al-Mu‘izz (r. 341/953–365/975).16 In the legal initiative of al-Ḥakam II there was not only the need to counteract the religious policies of the Fatimids, but also the will to again stress al-Andalus’s connection to Medina, and thus to the Prophet himself (Fierro 2007). All of these innovative initiatives, all of these efforts to diversify in a complex way the very basis of Umayyad legitimization, were intelligently conceived and deftly implemented. Regrettably, the shortcomings of the third caliph, Hishām II, dissolved what his father and grandfather had achieved.We will never know to what extent these shortcomings were a consequence of Hishām II’s personality (Molina 1984), or the result of the education he received, shaped by a misguided policy of succession.
Notes 1 This chapter has been written within the project Practicing Knowledge in Islamic Societies and Their Neighbours, funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Anneliese Maier Award 2014). Except for the sources and some seminal studies, the bibliographical references given in this chapter are limited to studies that have appeared in the last two decades. Both ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III and al-Manṣu¯r b. Abī ‘Āmir have been the object of monographic works (Vallvé 2003; Fierro 2005, 2011a; Bariani 2003; Ballestín 2004; Sénac 2006; Echevarría 2011). 2 Menocal (2002); Spanish translation Sanín (2002). The expression has been used often (Hillenbrand 1992). For other approaches to the same topic, see Christys (2007); Mazzoli-Guintard (2007); Safran (2013). 3 Specifcally, it appears in Hroswitha’s prologue to her Passion of Pelagius (Wiegand 1936, 129–157), where the Passio Sancti Pelagii (The sufferings of Pelagius, the most precious martyr, who in our times, at Cordova, was crowned with martyrdom) is edited and translated (128–29). 4 First published in 1997, Barceló (2010) remains required reading on the subject. 5 Recently, the reign and fgure of al-Hakam II are receiving new interest (Vallejo 2016; Manzano 2019 [this book appeared after this chapter had been written]). 6 León Muñoz and Murillo Redondo (2014, 5–35). See also Castro del Río (2005); Anderson (2018). For urbanism from a legal point of view, see van Stäevel (2004). 7 Together with the studies cited in note 1, for ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III’s caliphate, see also Lévi-Provençal (1950–1953, vol. 2; Spanish translation García Gómez 1950–1957, vol.VI); Manzano (2006, 363–503).
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9 10 11 12 13
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On the submission of rebel lords, see Acién Almansa (1997), and on the adoption of the title of caliph, see Safran (2000). Ibn Ḥayyān (1979; Spanish translation Corriente and Viguera 1981 [p. 322 of the Arabic text and pp. 358–59 of the Spanish translation]). See also Taher (2007); Manzano (2013); Gaiser (2013). The textile industry and commerce have been studied in the PhD Thesis by López de Marigorta (2017). Montel (2019) analyzes the exchanges with North Africa. “Old Berbers” were those who had entered the Iberian Peninsula at the time of the conquest and had thus assimilated to a common Andalusi identity. Two volumes are preserved for the caliphate period: see Bibliography. Ibn Ḥayyān, al-Muqtabas, 1979, vol.V, p. 23 of the Arabic edition; Spanish translation 1981, p. 40. I have previously dealt with these two episodes in Fierro (2012a). Bowman (2000). Raguel has been identifed by some as a Cordoban priest, but in my view behind the name there is the Arabic rajul, i.e.“a man”, and thus it merely indicates the anonymous transmitter of the story. The earliest preserved fgurative representation of Pelagius shows him holding a Gospel book, his head haloed, his expression serene.“What is striking is what he wears under his robe.Around his neck there is something like a necklace—the necklace given him by the caliph, perhaps” (Jordan 1999, 38) (the author is inclined toward another possible interpretation). Just an example: Cressier and Vallejo Triano (2015).The Proceedings of the conference on Fatimids and Umayyads: Competing Caliphates, organized by Miriam Ali-De-Unzaga, Patrice Cressier, Farhad Daftary, and Maribel Fierro that took place in 2016 at the Institute of Ismaili Studies (London) will offer a much-needed state-of-the-art fndings. Mimura (2015).“We have already explained this [i.e. lunar phases] and have put fgures about it in our book which we composed and sent to Abu¯ Yu¯suf Ḥasdāy (c.915–c.975) to reply the questions which reached us from the city Constantinople. It consists of three parts: the frst part is on the science of the confguration of the orbs (‘ilm al-hay’a); the second part is on the knowledge of the orbs according to calculation; and the third is on the judgement of stars [i.e. astrology]” (95). Dodge (1960); Madelung (2003, 70–1). In Fierro (2014). I did not mention al-Ḥakam II’s initiative, which should be taken into account when discussing attempts at codifcation.
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Maribel Fierro Halm zum 70. Geburtstag/Difference and Dynamics in Islam. Festschrift for Heinz Halm on his 70th Birthday, edited by Hinrich Biesterfeldt and Verena Klemm, 125–144.Wu¨rzburg: Ergon Verlag. Fierro, Maribel. 2014. “Codifying the Law: The Case of the Medieval Islamic West”. In Diverging Paths? The Shapes of Power and Institutions in Medieval Christendom and Islam, edited by John Hudson and Ana Rodríguez, 98–118. Leiden: Brill. Fierro, Maribel. 2017. “Madīnat al-zahrā’, Paradise and the Fatimids”. In Roads to Paradise. Eschatology and Concepts of the Hereafter in Islam, edited by Sebastian Gu¨nther and Todd Lawson, 979–1009. Leiden: Brill. Filios, Denise K. 2015. “Playing the Goth Card in Tenth-Century Córdoba: Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīya’s Family Traditions”. La Corónica 43 (2): 57–84. Forcada, Miquel. 2009.“Ibn Zayd, Rabī‘”. In De Ibn al-Ŷabbāb a Nubḏat al-‘aṣr. Vol. 6 of Biblioteca de al-Andalus, edited by Jorge Lirola Delgado, 282–286, no. 1441.Almería: Fundación Ibn Tufayl de Estudios Árabes. Gaiser, Adam. 2013. “Slaves and Silver across the Strait of Gibraltar: Politics and Trade between Umayyad Iberia and Khārijite North Africa”. Medieval Encounters 19: 41–70. García Gómez, Emilio. 1976. Andalucía contra Berbería. Barcelona: Departamento de Lengua y Literatura Árabes. García Sanjuán, Alejandro. 2004 “Violencia contra los judíos: el pogromo de Granada de 459 H/1066”. In De muerte violenta: política, religión y violencia en Al-Andalus. Vol. 4 of Estudios onomástico-biográfcos de al-Andalus, edited by Maribel Fierro, 167–206. Madrid: CSIC. Gomes, Maria Joana. 2017.“From Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn Mu¯sa al-Rāzī to Mouro Rasis”. Philological Encounters 2: 52–75. Gurriarán Daza, Pedro. 2008. “Una arquitectura para el califato: Poder y construcción en al-Andalus durante el siglo X”. Anales de arqueología cordobesa 19: 261–276. Hernández Jiménez, Féliz. 1975. El alminar de ‘Abd al-Rahman III en la mezquita mayor de Córdoba. Génesis y repercusiones. Granada: Patronato de la Alhambra. Hillenbrand, Robert. 1992.“The Ornament of the World: Medieval Cordoba as a Cultural Centre”. In The Legacy of Muslim Spain, edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi, 112–135. Leiden: Brill. Hour, Rachid el. 2009. “Ibn Ajī Rabī‘, Abu¯ Muḥammad”. In De Ibn Aḍḥà a Ibn Bušrà. Vol. 2 of Biblioteca de al-Andalus, edited by Jorge Lirola Delgado and José Miguel Puerta Vílchez, 85–86, no. 280. Almería: Fundación Ibn Tufayl de Estudios Árabes. Hutcheson, Greg. 2001. “The Sodomitic Moor: Queerness in the Narrative of the Reconquista”. In Queering the Middle Ages, edited by Glen Burger and Stephen Kruger, 99–122. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ibn Ḥayyān. 1965. Al-Muqtabas. Edited by ‘Abd al-Raḥmān ‘Alī al-Ḥajjī. Beirut: Dār al-thaqāfa. Spanish translation García Gómez, Emilio. 1967. Anales palatinos del califa de Córdoba al-Ḥakam II, por ‘Īsà ibn Aḥmad al-Rāzī. Madrid: Sociedad de Estudios y Publicaciones. Ibn Ḥayyān. 1979. Al-Muqtabas. Edited by Pedro Chalmeta, Federico Corriente and M. Sobh. Madrid: Instituto hispano-árabe de cultura-Facultad de Letras de Rabat. Spanish translation Corriente, Federico, and María Jesús Viguera. 1981. Crónica del califa ‘Abdarraḥmān III an-Nāṣir entre los años 912 y 942. Zaragoza: Instituto Hispano-Árabe de Cultura. Ibn ‘Idhārī. 1993. La caída del califato y los Reyes de Taifas (al-Bayān al-mugrib).Translated by F. Maíllo Salgado. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, Estudios Árabes e Islámicos. Jordan, Mark D. 1999.“Saint Pelagius, Ephebe and Martyr”. In Queer Iberia. Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, edited by Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson, 23–47. Durham: Duke University Press. Khalidi, Tarif. 2016. “‘Abd al-Raḥmān III”. Encyclopædia Britannica. Accessed May 15, 2018. www.britan nica.com/biography/Abd-al-Rahman-III Larsson, Göran. 2004.“The Berber as a symbolic epitome in the history of al-Andalus”. In About the Berbers: History, Language, Culture and Socio-Economic Conditions, edited by Bo Isaksson and Marianne Laanatza, 90–8. Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet. León Muñoz, Alberto, and J.F. Murillo Redondo. 2009. “El complejo civil tardoantiguo de Córdoba y su continuidad en el Alcázar Omeya”. Madrider Mitteilungen 49: 323–335. León Muñoz, Alberto, and J.F. Murillo Redondo. 2014. “Advances in Research on Islamic Cordoba“. Journal of Islamic Archaeology 1 (1): 5–35. Lévi-Provençal, Évariste. 1950–1953. Histoire de l’Espagne Musulmane. 3 vols. Paris: G.-P. Maisonneuve. Spanish translation by García Gómez, Emilio. España musulmana hasta la caída del califato de Córdoba (711–1031 de J.C.), tomos IV-V de la Historia de España Menéndez Pidal, Madrid, Espasa-Calpe, 1950– 1957,V, 261–368.
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Abd al-Raḥmān III Lirola Delgado, Jorge. 1993. El Poder naval de al-Andalus en la época del califato omeya. Granada: Universidad de Granada/Instituto de Estudios Almerienses. Lirola Delgado, Jorge, and Estela Navarro i Ortiz. 2009. “al-Mu‘ayṭī, Abu¯ Bakr”. In De Ibn al-Ŷabbāb a Nubḏat al-‘aṣr. Vol. 6 of Biblioteca de al-Andalus, edited by Jorge Lirola Delgado, 544–551, no. 1554. Almería: Fundación Ibn Tufayl de Estudios Árabes. López, César, Mario Carretero, and María Rodríguez-Moneo. 2015.“Conquest or Reconquest? Students’ Conception of Nation Embedded in a Historical Narrative”. Journal of the Learning Sciences 24 (2): 252–285. López de Marigorta, Eneko. 2017. “Las Bases de la islamización social en el sudeste de al-Andalus: Crecimiento urbano e intercambios en las coras de Ilbīra y Pechina en época omeya”. PhD diss., Universidad del País Vasco. Madelung,Wilferd. 2003.“A Treatise on the Imamate of the Fatimid Caliph al-Mansu¯r bi-Allāh”. In Texts, Documents and Artefacts. Islamic Studies in Honour of D.S. Richards, edited by Chase Robinson, 69–77. Leiden: Brill. Manzano, Eduardo. 2006. Conquistadores, emires y califas: los Omeyas y la formación de al-Andalus. Barcelona: Crítica. Manzano, Eduardo. 2013.“Circulation de biens et Richesses entre al-Andalus et l’Occident européen aux VIIIe-Xe siècles”. In Objets Sous Contrainte. Circulation des objets et Valeur des choses au Moyen Age, edited by Laurent Feller and A. Rodriguez, 147–80. Éditions de la Sorbonne. Manzano, Eduardo. 2019. La corte del califa. Cuatro años en la Córdoba de los omeyas. Madrid: Crítica. Marín, Manuela. 2011.“Una galería de retratos reales: los soberanos omeyas de al-Andalus (siglos II/VIIIIV/X) en la cronística árabe”. Anuario de Estudios Medievales 41 (1): 273–290. Martinez Gros, Gabriel. 1992. L’idéologie omeyyade. La construction de la légitimité du Califat de Cordoue (Xe-XIe siècles). Madrid: Casa de Velázquez.Martinez Gros, Gabriel. Martinez Gros, Gabriel. 1997. Identité andalouse. Paris: Sindbad. Mazzoli-Guintard, Christine. 2007. “Vivre dans la différence, vivre dans l’indifférence? La coexistence pacifque entre communautés religieuses dans la Cordoue des Xe-XIe siècles”. In Colloque International Vivre dans la Différence, edited by Gabriel Audisio and François Pugnière, 91–106. Nîmes: A. Barthélemy. Menocal, María Rosa. 2002. The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. Boston: Little, Brown. Spanish translation by Sanín, Carolina. 2002. La joya del mundo: Musulmanes, judíos y cristianos, y la cultura de la tolerancia en al-Andalus. Barcelona: Plaza Janés. Mimura,Taro. 2015.“A Glimpse of Non-Ptolemaic Astronomy in Early Hay’a Work—Planetary Models in ps. Mashā’allāh’s Liber de orbe”. Suhayl 14: 91–115. Molina, Luis, ed. and trans. 1983. Dhikr bilād al-Andalus (Una descripción anónima de al-Andalus). 2 vols. Madrid: CSIC, Instituto “Miguel Asín”. Molina, Luis. 1984.“Sobre un apodo del omeya Hišām II”. Al-Qanṭara 5: 469–471. Molina, Luis. 2006.“Técnicas de amplifcatio en el Muqtabis de Ibn Hayyan”. Talia Dixit 1: 55–79. Molina, Luis. 2012.“al-Rāzī, Aḥmad”. In De al-Qabrīrī a Zumurrud. Vol. 7 of Biblioteca de al-Andalus, edited by Jorge Lirola Delgado, 159–163, no. 1652.Almería: Fundación Ibn Tufayl de Estudios Árabes. Montel, Aurélien. 2019. “Al-Andalus et le Maghreb à l’époque des Umayyades de Cordoue. Réseaux d’échanges et ambitions impériales (IXe-Xie siècle)”. PhD diss., Lyon University. Nef, Annliese. 2009. “Violence and the Prince: The Case of the Aghlabid Amīr Ibrāhīm II (261– 289/875/902)”. In Public Violence in Islamic Societies: Power, Discipline and the Construction of the Public Sphere (7th–19th Centuries CE), edited by Christian Lange and Maribel Fierro, 217–237. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press. Nu‘mān, Qadi al-. 1997. Kitāb al-majālis wa-l-musāyarāt. 2nd ed. Edited by Muḥammad al-Ya`lāwī. Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī. Penelas, Mayte. 2008. “El Kitab Hurusiyus y el ‘Texto mozárabe universal’ de Qayrawan. Contenidos y fliación de dos crónicas árabes cristianas”. In ¿Existe una Identidad mozárabe? Historia, lengua y cultura de los cristianos de al-Andalus (siglos IX-XII), edited by Cyrille Aillet, Mayte Penelas, and Philippe Roisse, 135–158. Madrid: Casa de Velázquez. Pérez Álvarez, María de los Ángeles. 2012. “Ibn Abī l-Fayyāḍ, Abu¯ Bakr”. In De al-‘Abbādīya a Ibn Abyaḍ. Vol. 1 of Biblioteca de al-Andalus, edited by Jorge Lirola Delgado and José Miguel Puerta Vílchez, 689– 691, no. 219.Almería: Fundación Ibn Tufayl de Estudios Árabes. Perlmann, Moshe. 2010.“Ḥasdāy b. S̲h̲apru¯ṭ”. In Encyclopédie de l’Islam. Consulted online on 18 June 2020 dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004206106_eifo_SIM_2782, First published online.
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Maribel Fierro Porcel Bueno, David. 2017. “Entre el discurso historiográfco y la invención literaria: la Reconquista o la denominación de un tópico literario”. Iberoromania: Zeitschrift fu¨r die Sprachen, Literaturen und Kulturen der Iberischen Halbinsen und Lateinamerikas 86: 173–189. Renzi Rizzo, Catia. 2002.“I rapporti diplomatici fra il re Ugo di Provenza e il califfo ‘Abd ar-Ramân III: fonti cristiane e fonti arabe a confronto”. Reti Medievali Rivista 3 (2): www.rmojs.unina.it/index.php/ rm/article/view/4562/5119. Ríos Saloma, Martín. 2011. La Reconquista, una construcción historiográfca (siglos XVI-XIX). México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México-Marcial Pons. Ríos Saloma, Martín. 2013. La Reconquista en la historiografía española contemporánea. Madrid: Sílex. Rouighi, Ramzi. 2019. Inventing the Berbers: History and Ideology in the Maghrib, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ruggles, D. Fairchild. 2004. “Mothers of a Hybrid Dynasty: Race, Genealogy and Acculturation in alAndalus”. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34 (1): 65–94. Safran, Janina. 2000. The Second Umayyad Caliphate. The Articulation of Caliphal Legitimacy in al-Andalus. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Safran, Janina. 2013. Defning Boundaries in al-Andalus: Muslims, Christians and Jews in Islamic Iberia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Safran, Janina. 2014. “The Politics of Book Burning in al-Andalus”. Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 6: 148–168. Sahner, Christian. 2013. “From Augustine to Islam: Translation and History in the Arabic Orosius”. Speculum 88: 905–931. Scales, Peter C. 1994. The Fall of the Caliphate of Córdoba. Berbers and Andalusis in Confict. Leiden: Brill. Sénac, Philippe. 2006. Al-Mansur. Le féau de l’an mil. Paris: Perrin. Simonet, Francisco Javier. 1897–1908. Historia de los mozárabes de España. Madrid:Viuda e hijos de M.Tello. Stäevel, Jean-Pierre van. See van Stäevel, Jean-Pierre. Stern, Samuel M. 1969.“A Letter of the Byzantine Emperor to the Court of the Spanish Umayyad Caliph al-Hakam”. Al-Andalus 26: 37–42. Suñé Arce, Josep. 2019.“Was the Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba as Strong as Arab Chroniclers Claimed?” Al-Masāq 31: 35–49. Taher, Mostapha. 2007.“Les rapports socio-économiques entre al-Andalus et le Magrib al-Aqsa aux Xe et XIe siècles”. In Le Maghreb, al-Andalus et la Méditerranée occidentale (VIIIe-XIIIe siècle), edited by Philippe Sénac, 183–200.Toulouse: CNRS-Université de Toulouse Le Mirail. Toral-Niehoff, Isabel. 2015. “History in adab context: The Book on Caliphal Histories by Ibn ‘Abd Rabbihi (246/860–328/940)”. Journal of Abbasid Studies 2: 61–85. Toral-Niehoff, Isabel. 2018.“Writing for the Caliphate.The Unique Necklace by Ibn ʿAbd Rabbihi”. Al-Usur al-wusta 26: 80–95. Vallejo, Antonio. 2010. La ciudad califal de Madinat al-zahra’. Arqueología de su excavación. Córdoba: Almuzara. Vallejo,Antonio. 2016.“El heredero designado y el califa: el Occidente y el Oriente en Madīnat al-Zahrā’”. Mainake 36: 433–464. Vallvé, Joaquín. 2003. Abderramán III: califa de España y de Occidente, 912–961. Barcelona:Ariel. van Stäevel, Jean-Pierre. 2004. “Prévoir, juguler, bâtir: droit de la construction et institutions judiciaires à Cordoue durant le 4e/Xe siècle”. Cuadernos de Madinat al-Zahra’ 5 : 31–51. Wasserstein, David. 1993. The Caliphate in the West: An Islamic Political Institution in the Iberian Peninsula. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Weston, Lisa. 2002.“The Saracen and the Martyr: Embracing the Foreign in Hrotvit’s Pelagius”. In Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages, edited by Albrecht Classen, 1–10. New York: Routledge. Wiegand, SisterM. Gonsalva. 1936. “The Non-Dramatic Works of Hrosvitha. Edition, Translation and Commentary”. PhD diss., Saint Louis University. Yaloui, Mohammed. 1978. “Controverse entre le Fatimide al-Mu’izz et l’Omeyyade al-Nasir, d’après le Kitab al-majalis wa-l-musayarat du cadi Nu‘man”. Cahiers de Tunisie 26: 7–33.
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11 WRITING THE PAST, ORDERING THE WORLD Alfonso the Wise’s Estorias within his political and cultural agenda Leonardo Funes
When Alfonso X convened a group of collaborators in 1270 to propose the ambitious undertaking of a general chronicle of Spain which would cover its history from the time of Noah up to the present, he had ample experience in bringing together and coordinating groups of learned sages and men of letters (what we today would call scholars and intellectuals). One need only think of the meeting of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish astronomers that produced the Tablas alfonsíes (Alfonsine Tables) and the Libros del saber de astronomía (Books of Astronomical Knowledge) under his guidance, or in the team of jurists charged with composing various law codes.1 History was the last feld of knowledge (or the last discursive genre) that the Wise King and his collaborators undertook in the broad spectrum that covered the sciences (astronomy, astrological medicine, and gemology), technology (with treatises on astrolabes and clocks), exemplary didactic narrative (Calila e Dimna), religious themes (Cantigas de Santa María [Songs of Saint Mary] and various hagiographies), courtly pastimes (Libro de axedrez, dados e tablas [Book of Chess, Dice and Gaming], and a hunting treatise), and the Law. At the time these chroniclers were focused on gathering sources for their work, the Wise King was on the eve of celebrating the completion of the second decade of his reign. There were signs of an evident and logical decline in the exercise of his power: political conficts with members of the royal family, with the principal nobles of the realm, and with the hierarchy of the Church; economic problems stemming from infation, monetary politics, and the heavy fscal burden carried by the lower classes and the local urban councils; and fnally growing internal and external obstacles to the king’s imperial ambitions (O’Callaghan 1985 and 1993, 114–130). Despite all of this, the initiation of a program involving the writing of history in such a context is a sign of the royal determination to reaffrm the king’s political convictions and desire to set out a course of action.This plan was governed by a monarchical vision of power, marked by an indifference to clouds that were gathering on the horizon, and that heralded the crisis that would cast a shadow over the end of his reign. The creation of historical chronicle texts encompassed the last period of the reign of Alfonso X, between 1270 and 1284, a period in which the king’s last hopes for the success of his political program slowly ceded to the inevitable certainties of his fnal defeat. Despite these 167
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circumstances, both the Estoria de España (History of Spain) and the General Estoria (General History) became works that had a lasting impact in the Peninsula, reaching even into modernity and affecting the foundations of contemporary Spanish historiography. But before addressing those aspects which confrm Alfonsine history’s literary and cultural relevance, a brief overview of its general characteristics is required.
The “Estorias” of Alfonso the Wise: a general description Alfonso X conceived his Estoria de España (= EE) as a history of the events that had taken place in the Peninsula from the time of Noah until the end of the reign of Fernando III of Castile and León—but one in which the narrative would go beyond a simple succession of Visigothic and Asturian–Leonese and Castilian kings, in order to encompass the history of all the peoples that had inhabited Iberia at different moments in the past.2 To accomplish this goal he had recourse to a vast array of sources that exceeded a strictly historiographical purview: the works of Rodrigo Ximénez de Rada, Archbishop of Toledo, especially his Historia de rebus Hispaniae (History of the Kings of Spain), to whom he traditionally refers to as “el Toledano”, the Chronicon Mundi (Chronicle of the World) of Bishop Lucas of Tuy (called “el Tudense”), and the Cánones crónicos (Chronological Canons) of Jerome; the works of Paulus Orosius, Ovid, Salustius, Suetonius, Lucan, Jordanes, and Isidore of Seville; and a series of Hispano–Latin and Arab chronicles, in addition to some works in Romance (principally epic and clerical poems).Although the original design of the EE divided the subject matter according to señoríos—that is, the different peoples that had dominated the Peninsula at given times: Greeks, almujuces (al-majus = “barbarians” in Arabic),Africans (Carthaginians), Romans, and Goths—the textual tradition imposed another kind of four-part division.The frst dealt with the ancient history of Spain until the arrival of the Goths; the second referred to the Visigothic kingdom of Toledo up until the Muslim conquest; the third covered the kingdoms of Asturias and León from the time of Pelayo up until Vermudo III; and the fourth corresponded with the kingdom of Castile, from Fernando I to Fernando III. The work was never completed. The initial impulse (1270–1274) produced a fnal version up to the middle of Part III (the reign of Alfonso II), and the rest remained in a draft stage up to the interruption of the narrative during the reign of Alfonso VII.The latter state is referred to as the Versión Primitiva de la EE (The Primitive Version of the History of Spain).When in 1282 the work of the chroniclers was again taken up, they did not begin anew at the point where the work had stopped in the Versión primitiva, but rather started from scratch—the very beginning—re-elaborating and reorganizing everything that had been done, continuing to the death of Fernando II of León, where once again the work stopped.This re-elaboration is known as the Versión crítica de la EE. In times of Sancho IV, there was an attempt to re-elaborate Parts III and IV. One section of this attempt has survived from the reign of Ramiro I to Fernando III, which today is referred to as the Versión retóricamente amplifcada de 1289, as well as the Crónica sanchina. Completion of the original plan was not achieved in this version, since it is interrupted at the same place where el Toledano had fnished (the conquest of Córdoba).This is not the place to describe in any detail the complicated and extensive redactions in the transmission of the text. Suffce it to say that we are dealing with an incomplete work that went through at least three stages of redaction (the primitive, the critical, and the rhetorically amplifed versions). Shortly after the beginning of the redaction of the EE (ca. 1272), the Alfonsine chroniclers began to compile a second historical work, the Grande e General Estoria (= GE) (The Great and General History), conceived as an ambitious universal history since the Creation to the time of Alfonso X.This endeavor also remained incomplete until the king’s death in 1284, reaching only to the time of the parents of the Virgin Mary, and thus covering history prior to the Christian Era.3 168
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Six parts of the GE have come down to us. Parts I, II, and IV are complete, while Parts III and V have suffered losses of text, and only a small fragment of Part VI has survived. How “universal” was this chronicle, we might ask? The preserved text allows us to gauge and appreciate the scope of the GE. It was to cover Israel and all the peoples with which the Hebrews came into contact; Egypt (known by means of Arab historians); Greece and Rome (their myths as well as their history); material touching upon India (via the expeditions of Alexander the Great); Iberia, naturally; and a bit of the rest of Europe (basically Britain),Asia, and Africa. A rapid and very incomplete enumeration provides a good idea of the content of the GE. Part I, from the Creation to the death of Moses (along with the mythical history of Greece and the history of the Pharaohs of Egypt); Part II, from Joshua to the death of David (with additional mythological Greek history); Part III, from the history of the Greeks after Troy and Biblical history until the Babylonian Captivity; Part IV, from Nebuchadnezzar until Ptolemy IV Philopator (with the history of Alexander the Great); Part V, from the Maccabees until the Emperor Tiberius (with a complete translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia); and Part VI, which contains a genealogy of the Virgin Mary, the life of her parents and those of John the Baptist, and the history of King Herod and Octavius Augustus. The complex structure of this chronicle emerges from its combination of four models: (1) A Romance-language Bible (with the inclusion of, for example, complete versions of the Psalms and the Books of Wisdom in Part III), and since the Bible was the historical work par excellence of the Middle Ages, whose veracity was guaranteed by God, it was logical to also include the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) in its vulgate version (along with the so-called Glossa ordinaria); (2) a biblia historial (a kind of Biblical history up to the time of the Maccabees) in the style of Petrus Comestor’s Historia Scholastica (Scholastic History), a compendium of Biblical narrations added in the form of an appendix—with the addition of a synchronic series of pagan deeds or signifcant events—composed in the twelfth century, and which was part of the university canon of works in the thirteenth century; (3) Biblical and secular history that advances simultaneously, and for which the Chronicon of Jerome (brought up to date, of course) functioned as the organizing structure for the chronology (Rico 1984). They also took advantage of the Antiquities of the Jews by Flavius Josephus, a work in which Biblical narrations are fltered through the historical criteria of the Greco–Latin tradition, which increased the impression of objectivity and veracity (Lida de Malkiel 1959); (4) narratives from pagan history, like the translation of the Metamorphoses and the Heroides of Ovid (Fernández-Ordóñez 1992).
The political and cultural project of Alfonso X Historians, as well as literary scholars, have long valued the importance of the Alfonsine chronicles—the EE especially—as sources of Peninsular history, as antecedents of historiographical practices in the vernacular, as milestones in the evolution of Castilian prose, and as secondary witnesses to the epic legends that circulated during the thirteenth century in Castile (a feature that dominated the study of the chronicles for the better part of the twentieth century). Although all of these approaches are indisputably legitimate, there are other aspects of the chronicles that should be taken into consideration in order to reach a deeper and broader understanding of their historical and cultural relevance, and their exceptional character in the context of medieval European historiographical traditions. A basic fact to keep in mind is that the Wise King’s historiographical work is inscribed in a vast, much larger political and cultural project which he advocated.To speak here of a “project” implies accentuating the existence of a premeditated program of political action, an exceptional gesture for its time. In fact, during the period that marked the consolidation of kingdoms in 169
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Europe between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—a process that also marked the Latin Church with the appearance of the papal monarchy—it was logical for rulers to seek to increase their power. However, what distinguishes Alfonso from his predecessors and contemporaries is that this aspiration for power is invested in a concrete program, which implies a planned, rational effort aimed at the acquisition and exercise of power. The original plan acquired an international projection starting in 1256 with Alfonso’s claim to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire.While it might seem that the king’s imperial enterprise was excessively ambitious and unrealistic, its true signifcance lay in the fact that it was a reasoned affrmation of his power in the context of an internal politics sustained by the authority of the prestige derived from its alleged imperial condition. The narrow connection between the cultural and the political becomes evident if we keep in mind the king’s need to train people capable of occupying offcial positions in a centralized administration. In addition, the necessity of winning over the good will of social groups that extended beyond the aristocracy and the ecclesiastical hierarchy (the petty nobles, the mounted urban nobility, and the two councils) was imperative.The grand scale of this instructional footprint is revealed in the cultural endeavor’s design, whose most distinct aspect is the elevation of the Castilian language as a cultural idiom on a par with Latin. All this underscores the exceptional nature of the Alfonsine experience, something which I will emphasize throughout this chapter. If Alfonso’s linguistic politics remained an unprecedented fact in the larger European context, his cultural politics remained equally unknown. No one can deny the signifcance of French language and letters in Western Europe from at least the eleventh to the end of the fourteenth centuries, when their centrality was displaced by Italian.Yet France never saw a project as broad or as ambitious as Alfonso’s cultural enterprise until Charles V the “Wise” a full century later. Neither was there anything similar before, with the exception of Emperor Frederick II in the frst half of the thirteenth century, to whom Alfonso was related.
Unique features of historical writing in the scriptorium of Alfonso The singular character of the Alfonsine historiographical enterprise in relation to other contemporary historiographical traditions of his time reveals various notable aspects. One of them relates to the political moment in which it is articulated. It is well known that history is written from two distinct perspectives: victory and defeat. From a victorious standpoint, historiography justifes and legitimates a factual hegemony. From the view of the defeated, history permits the pursuit of a struggle by other means, vindicating a lost cause, rationalizing the reasons for the loss as it belittles the legitimacy of the victors.Alfonso X, however, speaks in principle from another position, one that lays out a project aimed at achieving hegemony. In other words, a before (and not an after) the confict is settled outside the discourse; an instance that is open either to victory or defeat.When Alfonso articulates history, he enunciates a discourse that accompanies the political practice of administering power just as it transforms the terms of that power. As we know, however, legislative and chronistic activities were not separate but rather constituted one single process in and of itself. For these reasons, manifestations of political contest led to fnal instances that marked the end of this process and were articulated from a position of defeat. Such would be the case with the so-called Versión crítica de la EE (Critical version of the EE), a reelaboration undertaken when the king had been despoiled of his power by means of a general rebellion of the kingdom in favor of his son Don Sancho. Another aspect of the exceptional nature of this enterprise that needs to be emphasized has to do with the place of articulation, which had enormous consequences for the development 170
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of historiography in vernacular Romance. Georges Martin (1997) has underscored how, for the frst time ever, the royal fgure is transformed from the receiver of historical discourse into its giver.The habitual practice of historical discourse had been relegated to the chronicler, relying on some written authority, an ecclesiastical dignitary, a bishop, or abbot, who would assume the authorship of the historical narrative—under his own initiative or by or by royal mandate—and offer it to the king as the primary recipient. But even in those cases in which the king was the commissioner of the historiographical labor, the prelate-chronicler would work according to his own agenda. Such is the case with el Toledano who, as Peter Linehan has shown (2007, 78), wrote his chronicle with the objective of mounting an historical argument regarding the Toledan Church’s supremacy within the Spanish Church.The panorama on the other side of the Pyrenees is no different. In the case of France, Saint Louis was the commissioner of a historical compilation of the dynasties of France, written by the monk Primat, who likely worked under the supervision of Matthew of Vendôme, abbot of Saint-Denis (Guenée 2016). When Primat turned over his fnished work, known as the Roman des rois (Romance of the Kings), to King Phillip III in 1274—the same year in which the Versión primitiva de la EE was interrupted—an historiographical tradition known as Les Grandes Chroniques de France (The Great Chronicles of France) was established, according to which the Abbey of Saint-Denis assumed the responsibility for narrating the past and the French Crown received the offcial history of the kingdom.4 Quite to the contrary is the case of the EE, the use of the frst-person plural in the prolog (i.e., the royal we) and its clear identifcation by means of the enumeration of all the titles it assumes. This makes Alfonso the unequivocal author of the Estorias, with the enunciating voice of the chronicler directing itself toward a generic recipient comprised of the whole of his subjects— the people—although in truth that audience is a much more restricted group that barely transcended the members of the court. Another singular aspect of the Alfonsine chronicles, especially the EE, is the marked coherence with which the work engages political practice and royal culture. Only positioned from that perspective can we capture with greater clarity the signifcance of historiographical writing as carried out by Alfonso’s collaborators, whose task it was to constitute a discourse for the Alfonsine dispositive, plan, or design. I appeal to the Foucauldian concept of “dispositif ” (or the various institutional, physical, and administrative mechanisms and knowledge which enhance and maintain the exercise of power within a social body) to clarify the working and uses of chronistic texts in Alfonso X’s Castile. It is well known that Foucault (1980), having changed his focus to the domains of knowledge and power, coined the term “dispositif ” as a substitute for and improvement on the notion of “episteme”, which is circumscribed by the discursive universe.“Dispositif ”, on the other hand, seeks to determine a set of heterogeneous discourses, institutions, architectural structures, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, and scientifc pronouncements, etc., which are combined to vouchsafe the use and preservation of power. In this way, it encompasses the discursive and the non-discursive, resulting in the conjunction of power and knowledge (Deleuze 1990). The non-discursive elements of the Alfonsine dispositive that I wish to pursue here are the following: The visual production of spectacle manifested by the opposite poles of artistic practices: on the one hand the architectural grandeur of the cathedrals, and on the other the thorough and minute production of royal codices of luxurious design flled with profuse illustration (both of which are seen today as fruits of Gothic art in Castile and León). Alfonso X fnished or propelled the construction of the cathedrals of León, Burgos, and Toledo, three crucial points of reference for his kingdom.The cathedral of Burgos, started in 1221, was completed during his reign; the same master builder who would later make the plans for the cathedral 171
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of León worked there.The latter was Alfonso’s greatest work, begun in 1225 and fnished in the fourteenth century.The transition from the smooth wall to stained glass windows—made possible by the technological innovations of Gothic architecture—transforms the interior of these cathedrals and the physical nature of the sacred space.The result is a felicitous encounter between the logic that sustains the Alfonsine cultural enterprise and the deep correspondence that art critics have detected in the relationship between the Gothic and the medieval Scholastic tradition, or in other words the synthesis of faith and reason. Reason, science, and mathematics contribute new elements to the articulation of faith as an elevation of the soul. At the heart of this Christian imaginary, however, Alfonso is interposed in the iconographic design of the windows which bear his image as Emperor, accompanied by the pope in the clerestory of the central nave. This is supplemented by multiplying the image of his royal person in different interior and exterior spaces, in the pictures and sculpture of the church. At the same time, from a civic point of view, we know that the cathedral is the most eloquent manifestation of a centralized, consolidated power, requiring not only surplus wealth but effcient political organization through time to maintain its continuity. The planning, administrative control, direction, and coherence of the actual work all point yet again to the programmatic imprint of Alfonsine practices. It was not simply a case of manifesting faith in artistic terms, but rather signaled an advance to a new level in the political and social development of structures of government. I will later return to the other extreme of this production, that of illustrated books and codices. Another feature is the transfer of the remains of Kings Recesvinth and Wamba, bothVisigothic kings, to Toledo.The second of these transfers is very signifcant because it occurred at the time that the Versión Primitiva of the EE was being written. In fact, in April of 1274 King Alfonso ordered the exhumation of the remains of King Wamba, found in Pampliega (near Burgos) to take them to Toledo. Here, they would be buried with the remains of another monarch from the same kingdom, Recesvinth, brought to Toledo from what had been the ancient city of Gerticos, situated most likely in the province of Salamanca. Bringing together the remains of two of the most noteworthy Visigothic kings in Toledo, the old capital of the Gothic kingdom—one for his work as a lawgiver, the other for his defensive approach to the Crown’s interests vis-à-vis the rights of the aristocracy—was devised in order to strengthen the historical relevance of that city and endow it with a discrete social signifcance in topographical memory (García de Cortázar 2002–2003, 20). The impact of the ceremonial spectacle of these acts upon the public was calculated and effected through the king’s “entradas” (royal ceremonial entries) to cities in the realm, facilitated by the itinerate nature of the Spanish court (González Jiménez y Carmona Ruiz 2012).What we see here is the clear operation of politics in the construction of civic memory and the production of presence that is central to the Alfonsine dispositive.5 In addition, the constitution and maintenance of an “imperial court”,6 whose magnifcence was as proverbial as it was costly to the royal treasury, also contributed to the conveyance of presence for the royal personage, projected even to international dimensions. Lastly, we have the founding of the Military Order of Saint Mary of Spain (Orden Militar de Santa María de España), with a maritime mission and a purview that surpassed Castile, all in accord with the ideas and aspirations of King Alfonso (Torres Fontes 2000–2001).As a result, this chivalric order sought the protection of Saint Mary and at the same time bore the name of Spain and not Castile, unlike all other military orders not under its constitution, similar in the spirit of the Order of Calatrava.The fact that the Order’s leadership was entrusted to his second-born son, Prince Sancho, emphasized its direct submission to the monarch.Various interests and ideological lines converge here: the endorsement of noble and ecclesiastical imaginaries by means 172
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of exalting the chivalric ideal of crusade under the monarchy’s protection, whose resonance in Parts III and IV of the EE is undeniable. As we analyze certain passages from the chronicles, further allusions will be made to the discursive dimensions of the Alfonsine dispositive.We know, moreover, that the most studied facet of Alfonso’s cultural initiatives is their bookish dimension. As a result, I only wish to emphasize those aspects within this very obvious facet that are paid short shrift.The entire Alfonsine enterprise rests on writing and the production of codices and manuscripts.This means Alfonso wagered on the use of written prose as a fundamental practice, in the context of competing discursive oral and written practices that characterized the entire system of literary production in Castile during the thirteenth century (Funes 2009). But let us now turn to the texts to clarify these points through an analysis of specifc passages.
The power of writing: the prologs to Alfonso’s histories The greater part of the prolog to the EE is a translation of the prolog from el Toledano, which in no way diminishes its value as a testimony to the value of writing for the Alfonsine historical imagination. (I will return to the audacious ideas regarding translation held by Alfonso’s collaborators, as laid out in the GE.) The text begins with the problem of the transmission of knowledge, which is the frst obligation of the person who acquires it, and the ethical principle that sustains the precarious edifce of human wisdom, always imperiled by laziness, forgetfulness, and death. The distance between the Castilian version and the Latin original is evident in the very frst sentence, where we see the rhetorical play with which el Toledano initiates his period, alluding to wisdom as subject (“Fidelis antiquitas et antiqua fdelitas … credidit actibus minorari, si sibi soli se genitam reputaret” [trusted ancients and ancient fdelity … believed to be considered lesser if produced only for itself], Fernández Valverde 1987, 5). This is in contrast to the plain style with which Alfonso personalizes the phrase:“Los sabios antiguos” (the wisemen of old). Following this, the continued enumeration of types of knowledge in el Toledano is transformed in the Castilian version into a knowledge of the times (“saber de los tiempos”): the natural sciences and ethics are knowledge of the present, astronomy and astrology are knowledge of the future, and history, knowledge of the past. At the same time, the prolog to the GE, completely original to Alfonso as far as we can determine, insists on the following temporal division:“Natural cosa es de cobdiciar los omnes saber los fechos que acaescen en todos los tiempos, tan bien en el tienpo que es passado, como en aquel en que estan, como enel otro que ha de uenir” (“It is natural for men to covet knowledge of things that occur at all times, as much for the time that is past as well as in the time in which they are, also as in the time that is to come”) (García Solalinde 1930, 3). Writing imposes itself as the most effective medium with which to vanquish forgetfulness, ensure transmission, update the past, and reach future generations.The Castilian version emphasizes here that writing brings together the three vectors of time. It registers the past in order to update it to the present and reach into the future, adding at the same time new resonances to this affrmation regarding the powers of the written word, germane to the vernacular context of the text and alien to the Latin framework of the source. In effect, Alfonso attributes to the written practice power reserved until that moment for the oral discursive practice of jongleuresque performance.The corporal gesturing of a performer is no longer needed to bring to life past deeds before the eyes of an audience.The written text is now self-suffcient to accomplish that effect.Writing emerges as a condition of possibility of knowledge in general, and historical knowledge in particular. It is also something that endows rationality as a consequence of the organizing capacities of the written register:“los sabios ancianos … escriuieron los fechos … et 173
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las leys … et los derechos … et … las gestas … por que los que despues uiniessen por los fechos de los buenos punnassen en fazer bien, et por los de los malos que se castigassen de fazer mal, et por esto fue endereçado el curso del mundo de cada una cosa en su orden” (the old sages … committed to writing the events, … the laws, … the privileges … and the deeds … so that those who came after would by virtue of good deeds seek to do good, and by example of the bad ones would be chastened from doing ill, and for this reason the way of the world was set in motion and each thing in its order) (PCG, 3b23–35). One needs to pay attention to the nuances of the translation in order to appreciate the audaciousness of Alfonso’s formulation.While what el Toledano says—“ut per hec mundi cursus in suo ordine dirigatur” (so that by these means the course of the world should proceed with rectitude)—is circumscribed by a moral dimension and focuses on the correct direction of the unfolding of history, Alfonso celebrates the power of writing to organize the world—that is, its ability to intervene in the human construction of social reality.At this point, a didactic political dimension is opened up in the text.While el Toledano’s encomiastic phrases about writing are part of the topical nature of the exordium and affrm a basic element of his Latinate culture, the translation of phrases enables them to acquire a new sense in the context of Romance vernacular culture, dominated until then by orality. Writing as an instrument for social organization makes itself more evident in legal discourse. One need only remember the Siete Partidas to confrm the organizing desire behind not only of the ample questions posed by what we today would call constitutional, penal, and civil law, but the minutiae of daily life; things like the art of courtly conversation, the delicate limits that separate jest and offense, the forms of informal storytelling (“retraer”), moderation in eating and drinking, and decorum in both dress and comportment. The historical narrative as well as the doctrinal exposition and prescriptive formulation of the law are all dominated by didacticism, as I have noted—explained by the Alfonsine cultural project’s great didactic enterprise and supported by its use of the Romance vernacular. This pedagogical undertaking also sought consensus to a great degree: if the regime advocated by Alfonso was rationally superior to the existing seigniorial system, a more educated populace, better disposed to rational thought, would spontaneously give its support to the king’s program. That is the argument developed in the Setenario (Book of Seven), as Diego Catalán already noticed (1992, 16–7). In effect, Alfonso tells us that the principal people of the realm exhorted his father, Fernando III, to proclaim himself emperor: Mas él, commo era de buen seso … entendió que commo quier que ffuese bien e onrra dél e de los suyos en ffazer aquello quel conseiauan, que non era en tienpo de lo ffazer, … porque los omnes non eran adereçados en ssus ffechos así commo deuían … Et por ende teníe que deuíe fazer … por que conplidamiente meresçiesen sser onrrados … e que este adereçamiento non se podía fazer sinon por castigo e por conseio que ffziesen él e los otros reyes que después dél viniesen … Mas porque los rreyes esto non podían ffazer por los grandes ffechos … en que eran … conueníe que este castigo que ffuese ffecho por escripto para ssienpre, non tan solamiente para los de agora, mas para los que auyan de uenir … Et esta escriptura que … touyesen así commo heredamiento de padre e bienfecho de sennor … Et esto que ffueste puesto en libro que oyesen a menudo. (Setenario, ed.Vanderford 1945, 22–3; my italics) (And he, being of good reason … understood that although it would beneft and honor him and his descendants to carry out that which was advised, it was not the time to do so … because men were unprepared to act as was needed … And thus he 174
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knew what had to be done … so that they would fully be honored … and how this preparation could not be carried out without advice and council provided by him and other kings that were to come … And because the kings could not do this because of the great deeds … in which they were engaged … it was more advisable for it to be permanently put into writing, and not just for the current time, but rather for those who are to come … And this is a composition that … was understood as a paternal inheritance and a noble act of virtue … And this was written in a book to be heard many times.) The connection between the didactic function of the Alfonsine cultural enterprise and the achievement of political objectives is explicit here.What is interesting to underscore, however, is the privileged position assumed by writing and the book as an instrument of this political– cultural effort. The book, moreover, complements the royal presence in the didactic cultural endeavor as it is endowed with an exceptional representational and communicative power.This allows us to understand the cultural signifcance of one of the primordial traits of the Alfonsine book: its self-explanatory power. I am referring to how the text aspires to provide as much information as possible to facilitate its correct understanding, without references to other data or texts, whatever its subject. Its discourse embraces rationalizations, etymological glosses, antecedents, and consequences, as it manifests an absolute confdence in the didactic power of writing. The prolog to the Libro de las armellas (Book of Armillary Spheres) or the Açafeha tells us that king Alfonso commanded that his “sabio Rabiçag el de Toledo que le fziesse bien conplido et bien llano de entender” (sage Rabiçag, the one from Toledo, to make it complete and very easy to understand) (Gil 1985, 71) so that, in a kind of “do it yourself ” mode, anyone could construct and use the instruments guided only by reading the instructions in the book. It is easy to conjecture a similar mandate propelling the redaction of the chronicles. Moved by the pedagogical drive of Alfonso’s literate court, as a possessor of knowledge and anxious to communicate it, the Alfonsine historiographical model confrms the close bond that exists between a model of history as a record of the great deeds of great men (“grandes fechos de los altos omnes”) and the political model that is an inventory of the necessary forms of conduct suited for the exercise of power. The narrative and its sense situate themselves between these two coordinates, just as the events are molded narratively by means of their actualization and adaptation to the contemporary situation of the King Alfonso (i.e., the projection of politics into history), as well as the fact that the events narrated offer clear positive or negative paradigms for that practice (i.e., the projection of history into politics).The objective is always to impose norms of conduct that will generate the necessary conditions for the establishment of a new socio-political order. Finally, the prolog to the EE concludes in a manner completely different from el Toledano. While Don Rodrigo, the bishop, relies on the conventions of commissioned writing and a certain rusticitas (humble rusticity) to enumerate the list of his sources and review the content of his work,Alfonso presents himself as an author unto himself: Nos don Alfonsso, por la gracia de Dios rey de Castiella, de Toledo, de Leon, de Gallizia, de Seuilla, de Cordoua, de Murcia, de Jaehn et dell Algarue, ffjo del muy noble rey don Ffernando et de la reyna donna Beatriz, mandamos ayuntar quantos libros pudimos auer de istorias … et compusiemos este libro de todos los fechos que fallar se pudieron … desdel tiempo de Noe fasta este nuestro. Et esto fziemos por que fuesse sabudo el comienço de los espannoles. (PCG 4a21–48) 175
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(We Don Alfonso, by the grace of God king of Castile,Toledo, León, Galicia, Seville, Córdoba and Mucia, Jaén and Agarve, son of the very noble king Fernando and the queen Beatrice, ordered that all available books of history be gathered … and composed this book with all the events that could be found, from the time of Noah to our own.And we did this so that it could be known as the beginnings of Spaniards.) In the long passage that follows, a narrative intended to summarize historical material, we see the organizational drive of Alfonsine writing through a series of interpretive criteria (both original and inherited) concerning the Hispanic past: the notion of Spain as an historical subject whose territory and people suffer a series of invasions by foreigners (Greeks, Romans, and Barbarians); the privileged role played by the Gothic people as defnitive lords of the Spanish soil, in accordance with the Neo-Gothic thesis received from Hispano–Latin historiography; the crucial importance of the Muslim invasion (The “Pérdida de España” or Loss of Spain) as an historical point of infection, and for this reason the only detailed theme in the entire passage; and the principle of the uniqueness of Spain’s seigniory, whose lack explains the land’s misfortunes. I should stress the signifcance of that “Nos don Alfonsso” (We Don Alfonso) with which the Wise King occupies the place of the traditional chronicler-cleric (bishop or abbot), establishing in this manner a completely new authorial fgure for the genre of historiography. On a discursive plane, Alfonso X achieves what his father had accomplished in politics: to beneft from all the advantages of royal power, founded on divine right, without paying the price of ecclesiastical oversight of the temporal dimension of his investiture. He occupies the place of the Archbishop, without feeling obligated to sustain the Archbishop’s ideology. In this way, the legislator-historian-king imposes his determination to write from an absolutely superior position.
The powers of the book: ordinatio, mise en page, and the production of the codex Critics, since the time of Menéndez Pidal, have analyzed many aspects of the compositional techniques, discursive strategies, and actual writing of the Alfonsine chroniclers. I now wish only to call attention to the collaboration between certain narrative techniques and the graphic resources of the writing for converting the historical past into text.We have the opportunity to examine this thanks to the preservation of the royal codex of the EE kept at the Biblioteca de El Escorial (Ms.Y.1.2).The conjunction of the spatializing resources of writing and the enunciative organizational markers for the narrative by which the discourse is either extended or reduced, abbreviated or amplifed, circumscribed or selected, can all be found there.These markers upon which the discourse supports its forward movement have a dual function: frst as distributional patterns for the narrated material, and second as organizational norms for the structure of a historical narrative that seeks to present itself as a faithful mirror of History itself. In the folios that present the “señorío de los griegos” (the Seigniory or Domain of the Greeks)—that is, the chronicle’s account of the fgure of Hercules emerging as a central protagonist and civilizing hero of Hispania—we see how the thematization of physical, historical place is feshed out via certain narrative strategies. These initial chapters of the EE verify a certain delimitation of the spatial frame in which the action (the history of Spain) is developed by means of a double narrative process involving the foundation and recognition of geographical places. The territorial grid that represents the cities designated by the text is charged with a transcendent signifcance since a story or verbal analogy is behind each place name. Cadiz and Seville are paradigmatic examples of this, with their towers, statues, and inscriptions. The effect seeks recognition in the audience, as part of the agreement or pact presented by the text between the narrative and readers.The Alfonsine chronicle would say to its reader–listeners that 176
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places they knew and had passed through were charged with history, and were thus signifcant, relevant, and possessed identity.Those places had once had a beginning and were later transited by great men who illuminated the reader–listeners’ past.The entire frst section of the chronicle thematizes origins through the act of naming: the relationship between anthroponym → toponym is only one of the traits that mark the triple textual genesis of the world, its things, and its relation (story).7 We witness here the politics of the construction of memory in full action. In summary, the graphic resources of writing (divisions, chapters, epigraphs, internal prologs, and catalogs), the organizational markers (many of them in the form of formulaic phrases), and the thematizing of the establishment of Iberian space and its entry into history, achieved by means of a narrativizing procedure, all constitute fundamental instruments for achieving an effcacious distribution of the narrative material while endowing history with an order and intelligibility. What we can also confrm in the making of the royal chronistic codices—like the already mentioned Ms. Escorial Y.1.2 de la EE or Ms. 816 of the Biblioteca Nacional de España, which contains Part I of the GE—is that many elements of the mise en page, or layout, of the illustrations and miniatures that accompany the text reinforce effects on the meaning that point to the legitimation of the Alfonsine story as a true representation of the past (the Hispanic memory), the present (the new political order), and the future (the imperial glory of the realm). Two fnal notes: in this kind of manuscript production, appropriate to a royal scriptorium endowed with great materials and personnel, the chroniclers, compilers, redactors, and copy editors of the historical text themselves normally do not intervene in the making of the manuscript, which would cast into doubt the perfect harmony of the different norms of representation. In this case, I appeal to the authoritative opinion of Inés Fernández-Ordóñez, who maintains that “cabría la posibilidad, hasta hoy no demostrada pero no descartable, de que la copia hubiera sido el resultado de la colaboración de copistas profesionales con los historiadores alfonsíes, que también actuarían de amanuenses” (the possibility exists, although it remains unproven but not discountable, that the copy would have been the result of the collaboration of professional copyists with Alfonsine historians, who would also have served as scribes) (2009, 108, n. 26). This study also adduces similar cases of autograph English and French manuscripts of the Lower Middle Ages. Lastly, if in the mind of the Alfonsine historians the past possessed the same consistency and structure as the story of that past (and therefore their task was not so much to seek to rewrite history as it was to remake the real past), one can infer from the inspection of royal codices that these written objects possessed an added referential quality as fawless physical representations of the historical past.The perfect calligraphy of the copy, the chromatic richness of the inks, the spectacular nature of its miniatures, the sumptuousness of a delicately prepared written surface, provide an extra guarantee of veracity to whoever leans over to look at the folios of these codices: on the inside there can be nothing but the absolute truth of everything worthy of memory that happened in Spain or across the world.
Form and ideology in the Alfonsine Estorias As I have argued in detail elsewhere (Funes 1997), the complex work of writing—which involves the compilation and translation of Latin,Arabic, and French sources, the prosifcation of Romance texts or Romanced in verse, and the condensation of all these materials into a unique narrative discourse—forms a broad spectrum of formal procedures that affect the structural categories of the story and amplify the semantic resonances of the narrated history. The pre-eminence of the category of “personage”, or character, in the organization of the story, which is typical of all medieval historiography, appears here in the form of an exemplary 177
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fgure, animated by recourse to fguratively linking the great heroes of Hispanic history (a notable example is the series that connects Hercules-Alexander the Great-Julius Caesar-Alfonso X, constructed in relation to the foundation of Seville, which I analyze in Funes 2004). In the same way, the narrative sequence, a basic component of the event and minimal unit of the historical narrative, is organized according to the model of the exemplum, so that the action, descriptions, and their linking comply with a referential function whereby the logical and temporal structure of the plot reproduces the structure of history, and an exemplary function, revealing models of conduct to be followed or avoided, along with certain guiding principles of historical development. Finally, narration and point of view are placed on a superior objective plane, accompanied by all the powers of omniscience that are at the same time distanced by the need to articulate other voices (the sources). This double play of unity and intermediation allows for the maintenance of a univocal, objective perspective and a many-sided story, where controversial and contradicting things fnd a point of equilibrium. The story of Dido, narrated in chapters 51–60 of the EE, provides an illustration of what has been said.Alfonso embraces the two known versions of the story, the “historical” one taken from the Historiae Philippicae (Philippic Histories) of Pompeius Trogus, via the summary made by Justinus Frontinus at the end of the second century, and the literary one that comes from el Toledano’s Historia Romanorum (History of the Romans, inspired by Virgil’s Aeneid) and Ovid’s Heroides (Heroines) VII.The double, contradictory account of Dido’s deeds is explained in this case by the trace of the didactic political Alfonsine text: the Queen of Carthage is transformed into a model and an anti-model of a ruler in accordance to the tradition of the De regimine principum (The Governance of Kings and Princes). In the historical version, the virtues of the good ruler become manifest: the ruler fortifes the city, consults with his or her counselors in making decisions, compensates the good citizen, keeps his or her word to the last, and is punctilious in questions of genealogy (even when these last two virtues may lead to death). By the same token, the “poetic” version emphasizes the ruler’s errors, upon turning over the kingdom to a foreigner (Aeneas) when moved by passion, rapt, and rash, and when trusting in blindly made promises by someone unworthy of belief.The narrative development of the two versions takes advantage of any and all resources for displaying in detail the vicissitudes of history and culminates with the insertion of the extended prose translation of Heroides VII, in which every lyrical element and rhetorical embellishment in the Latin text is transformed into historical details that betray the amplitude of the Alfonsine chroniclers’ historical awareness. And lastly, one needs to remember that this story is not inserted in its corresponding chronological place—that is, in the section dedicated to the “Realm of Africa” (chapters 16–22). Instead it appears amidst the preliminaries of the Third Punic War, as an explanation for the enmity between Romans and Carthaginians that culminates in the destruction of Carthage, which in its own way explains the millenarian confrontation between Africa and Europe, something Alfonso’s contemporaries understood only in terms of the confrontation between Muslims and Christians.With all this, the details of the tragic love affair between Dido and Aeneas are projected onto a portentous frame of historical description as the beginnings of a centuries-long enmity. We can thus conclude that these procedures—in addition to a new narrative dispositio, or arrangement (analytically set out, endowed with a chronology, a synchrony of lordships, time ruptures, and narrative recapitulations), plus a conjunction of enunciative markers—underscore the relevance of the historical account to the Alfonsine present, forming an explanation that brings together the search for consensus by means of the teaching and legitimation of King Alfonso’s political ideas. All these facets point to the presence of an ideology at work in the chronicle, one which would consist of—as proposed by Hayden White (1987, 107) and based on Louis Althusser’s (1965) theory—an interpellation of the subject, the placement of the message’s 178
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recipient in a social position which makes possible the reception and interpretation of the text. This presupposes appealing to a productive notion of ideology: the chroniclers are not devious individuals who purport to exercise a sort of psychological manipulation of their readers, but rather agents of the manuscript culture that furnishes to certain sectors of society a series of parameters in the permanent, collective task of endowing sense to individual conduct and social practice in relation to intelligible ways of understanding the world. In the context of these general considerations, it is clear that the relationship between the political project and the historical work should not be understood as the mere instrumentalization of political propaganda, but neither should they be taken as a frame of references sustained by the mere fact that both the political and the historical messages emanate from a single author. Both the EE and the GE owe their origins, structure, and the unique discursive development of their material to the guiding principles of the specifcally historical conception of the Alfonsine political enterprise, which simultaneously refects the ideology of the times with the peculiarities of the autonomous process of their symbolic confguration. We must ask up to what point these resonances are the fruit of the Alfonsine chroniclers’ writing. Could they not be simple reiterations of the sense and ideas of their sources? Although it is undeniable that Alfonso maintains a debt to his sources and a high degree of fdelity to the originals in his translations (this is especially notable in the case of the GE), the novelty of the Alfonsine historical narrative, be it in the context of Hispanic or universal history, is evident as soon as we turn to its articulation within the context of the king’s larger institutional program. This weaving into the broader network of associations established by the interrelationship of ideas and institutions underpins the king’s program and helps us identify the manner in which a particular text works, produces sense, and makes especially signifcant that which is translated, and which upon frst inspection seems only like a simple linguistic transfer. Two examples that illustrate this issue follow, one from each work. In Part II of the EE there is an episode that narrates an event from the time of Chindasvinthus, a Visigothic king.The episode involves a journey to Rome undertaken by Bishop Tajón of Saragossa in search of a copy of Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job (Morals on the Book of Job) and the way he obtained it.What was originally a monastic legend became the Continuatio Hispana (the Mozarabic Chronicle or Crónica mozárabe de 754) that was subsequently appropriated by el Toledano, from whom Alfonso derives the incident. I have analyzed this episode elsewhere in detail (Funes 2010), and a summary of the most pertinent points of my argument follows. If in el Toledano’s version Bishop Tajón’s journey is transformed into an intellectual endeavor undertaken to preserve the vestiges of a cultural legacy—an act of resistance calculated to counter the barbarism of a world in ruins—in Alfonso’s time the story becomes part of a larger, enormously dynamic encyclopedic frame and vision that gives impetus to an ever bigger, more ambitious, intellectual venture. This story, narrated in the vernacular, evokes other associations in its most immediate audience: the tale of the sage Bidpai, or Berzebuey, told in Calila and Dimna, who searches for a book in India, and who, according to the version in the GE, is tasked to perform this intellectual deed by King Sirechuel. The incident also references the story in the prolog to the Lapidario (Lapidary), which tells of the loss and recuperation of that book thanks to the Wise King. Additionally, it brings to mind the importance given to the restoration of damaged texts found in the prolog to the Espéculo (Mirror).And fnally—at least within the sphere of the court—it recalls King Alfonso’s directive to his collaborator, Bernardo de Brihuega, to scour libraries in search of sources that would allow him to write his monumental hagiographic compilation (Díaz y Díaz 1962), a reference that would not have been lost on courtiers.The intellectual hero carries out a mission of conquest because he has gained the support of the royal personage; the virtuous association of this pair ensures the fowering of culture, 179
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and the happiness and wellness of the people.The Alfonsine chroniclers read in the same way the pairs Chindasvinthus–Tajón and Sirechuel–Berzebuey (as well as the very real association of Alfonso X–Bernardo de Brihuega): the harmonious collaboration between those who hold Knowledge and Power and promote a cultural and political program whose goodness is ensured by divine decree. In this way, the network of associations produced by King Alfonso’s larger enterprise, which gives this story a whole new set of resonances, goes well beyond the Alfonsine chroniclers’ fdelity to a source.The public hears the same story (in another language, which is no small difference), yet understands it distinctly. In the case of the GE, Sánchez-Prieto Borja (2001) has demonstrated the enormous weight the Bible bears upon GE as a major source; one of the main reasons why this universal history is much less “historiographical” than the EE. Even so, within a purely Christian, providentialist worldview, the work of accommodating the Biblical source with the remaining, complementary sources, especially the work of translation, open up the text to new nuances of meaning. I will briefy illustrate this with a few passages taken from Genesis found in Part I of the GE. The Alfonsine chronicles tell us that after Cain’s murder of Abel, their father Adam fell into a depression so deep that 100 years passed before his renewing of intimate contact with Eve, despite her constant request to return and engender more children in order to comply with the divine mandate to multiply.The detail comes from the Pantheon of Godfrey of Viterbo, although evidently it is included in order to provide a subtle degree of secularization to sacred history by rationalizing events in terms of purely human behavior. Other passages permit us to glimpse Afonso’s collaborators’ peculiar linguistic awareness, molded according to the Christian imaginary. In fact, from the Christian perspective, the imperfect human condition was the mark of moral insuffciency, the fruit of sin—but at the same time, via an inversion that does not seem anything but paradoxical, a limitless opportunity for work (and creativity) whose aim was to reduce the fallen character with which humankind contaminated its creations (in this case, the achievements of verbal art).Translation and glossing, often one in the same thing, were both the punishment and comfort of every medieval writer, aimed at realizing an unattainable perfection. Humankind, as much in spirit and image of God, could not live its earthly existence in terms other than a kind of exile, and could not avoid that its literary craft be infused with a nostalgia for Paradise Lost. It is interesting to see how Alfonso develops his understanding of humankind’s exile in the GE. The story of the Creation, equipped with a careful compilation of patristic commentaries of the Biblical text, the Historia Scholastica (Scholastic History), and the Jewish Antiquities, is suggestive of a primordial form of languages: the language of God, whose perfection manifested itself in its creative capacity.The chronistic text, however, eliminates direct discourse and converts speech acts into mute actions, so that the creative word is inferred only as the discernment of created things: “El primero dia crio la luz, e todas las naturas delos angeles buenos et malos, que son las criaturas spiritales; et partio esse dia la luz delas tiniebras, et ala luz llamo dia, e alas tiniebras noche” (“The frst day created the light, and the nature of all the good and bad angels, which are the spiritual creatures; and parted the light from the darkness on that day, and the light called it the day, and the darkness night”) (Solalinde, 1930, 4; my italics). But then, with humankind we are told more openly about a second form of language: God puts Adam before all the earthly created animals so that he might name each of them. The result is that Adam’s speech does not create things, but rather identifes them and permits their recognition. By means of that recognition Adam understands that all the animals have a mate at their side, and only then does God create his companion.Adam’s speech is, thus, in itself a creation of the divine language and therefore inevitably subaltern. Even so, his language is what names the creatures of the world, the 180
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one that assigns the frst words to the frst things. It therefore enjoys the perfection enjoyed by the frst human couple in the Garden of Eden, manifested basically in their immortal condition. The language evoked in the story of the Creation is in this way not only perfect but powerful; it reveals the creative power of the mouth of God and a cognitive power in the mouth of humankind. Once banished from Eden, Adam and Eve begin humankind’s exile in the imperfect realm of the fnite. But even then there remains a second expulsion that the text presents as being as terrible as the frst one.A great deal of time afterward, during the Second Age of the World, after the Flood, divine ire will once again come down on humankind because of the construction of the Tower of Babel.The supreme value of human language, its unique and universal character, is emphasized now at the very instance of its loss. Although despoiled of the creative capacity of the Divine Word, after Babel the original human word awakens the nostalgia for a now eternally lost perfection; the perfection that resulted in the essential unity of words and things.According to the text: Desque cato Dios aquella obra, dixo: “Euat que un pueblo es este, e uno el lenguage de todos, e començaron esto a fazer … descendamos alla et confondamosle el lenguage que an agora todos uno, et mezclemos gele de guisa que, maguer que se oyan, que se non entiendan aunque esten muy cerca unos dotros” … E partieron a cada uno el lenguage que era antes uno comunal a todos … Onde dize Moysen enel onzeno capitulo quelos partio Dios daquel logar por todas las tierras desta guisa: que quando ell uno demandaia ladriellos, ell otro le daua bitumen, et quando ell otro pidie bitumen, ell otrol aduzie agua; et quando ell otro dizie agua, estel traya alguna delas ferramientas … de guisa que nunca ell uno daia lo que ell otrol pidie, et quedaron de fazer la cibdad e la torre. (Solalinde 1930, p. 43) (God having seen that deed, said: “behold this people is one, and with one language for all, and they began to do this … let us come down and confuse the language that was one for all, and mix it in such a way that, although it be heard, they cannot understand even in close proximity to one another” … and they split up among them the one language that before was common to all … Where Moses says in the eleventh chapter that God dispersed them from that place through all the lands so that: when one requested bricks, another gave him pitch, and when another asked for pitch, the other brought water; and when another said water, they would bring to him some tool … so that no one ever gave anyone what the other requested, and they stayed to build the city and the tower.) It is interesting to note the manner in which the disappearance of a common language affects both communication and the pragmatic dimension of language (inspired in this case by Vincent of Beauvais’ commentary in his Speculum historiale [Mirror of History, Niederehe 1987, 88]). If one cannot speak, one cannot do, and as a result, cannot coexist with another. For this reason, peoples are separated into nations and are dispersed across the face of the earth, a diaspora that is the culmination and measure of humankind’s exile, the harshest possibility in life because it is marked by a separation (exile) from the universal human language. Henceforth, humankind would be condemned to the mediation of imperfect conventional languages as a means of knowing reality. 181
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The moral and religious consequences (effects, traces, etc.) of this vision can be found in the GE’s sources, but it is also possible to detect in the manner in which Alfonso assimilates the traditional story a scientifc perspective and even, to a certain degree, a secular one for which he relies upon Muslim and Jewish commentators. If on this point we attend to the resonances of the text within the frame offered by the weaving of discursive and extra-discursive relations of the Alfonsine program (apparatus, dispositive, etc.), we can appreciate the manner in which the Babel episode is narrated and how Alfonso expects his audience to understand by way of contrast that his cultural enterprise is a vindication of humanity based on an optimistic understanding of its capabilities and the human condition, which are not viewed as irredeemably corrupted by sin. If the diversity of languages impedes the unifcation of peoples under a single, universal rule, Alfonso now proposes a way of solving this in the context of his imperial aspirations, which is by no other means than writing and translation. One language, receptor of many tongues, is offered as a modest substitution for the universal language: Castilian, embodied in writing, will be the vehicle to reach the level of a relationship, as close as possible, in which things are indistinguishable from the words that designate them. The Alfonsine chroniclers in their reading of Babel highlight the loss of the unity of sign and signifer as offered by Petrus Comestor in his Historia Scholastica:“Sobresta razon fabla mahestre Pedro en este departimiento dun lenguage en muchos, e diz que non fzo y Dios ninguna cosa de nuevo, ca las razones e las sentencias delas palabras unas fncaron en todas las gentes mas que les partio alli las maneras e las formas de dezir las, de guisa que non sopiessen los unos que dizien los otros nin que querien, e quedarie luego la obra” (“Master Peter speaks about this issue concerning the division of one language into many, and he says that God did not do anything new here: the meanings and senses of the words remained the same for all the peoples, He only separated the ways in which to express them, so that in this manner they would not understand what others said nor what they wanted, and so the work would remain interrupted”) (Solalinde 1930, 43; my italics). The detail with which the Alfonsine texts glossed the meanings of the most diffcult terms in their Latin and Arabic sources provides the most evident proof of the confdence and daring with which the king and his collaborators attempted to retrace for all humankind one of the ancestral routes of humanity’s exile. The Estorias of Alfonso the Wise reveal themselves to be the witnesses of an exceptional time and of a learned court that was absolutely convinced of the transcendence of its labor (it is ftting to remember that Chapter I of the Tablas Alfonsíes proclaims the beginning of a new era in the history of the world, one called “la era alfonsí”).The representational ambitions of the Hispanic and human past in these chronicles existed in consonance with the ambitious objectives of the Wise King’s and his collaborators’ cultural and political goals.Although the historical conditions were not apt for the triumph of Alfonso’s political enterprise, neither were the intellectual tools nor the mental resources required for the complete development of the historiographical model they had designed. In light of the several dozen chronistic manuscripts that have come down to us that were copied across three centuries, this is perhaps the most splendid failure and enduring infuence of the Iberian Middle Ages.
Notes 1 Concerning the labor of so-called “escuelas alfonsíes” (Alfonsine schools), the work of Gonzalo Menéndez Pidal (1951) continues to be useful; also benefcial is the information provided by José S. Gil (1985, 57–119). 2 Of the immense bibliography dealing with this topic—which had as its starting point the studies and frst modern edition of Ramón Menéndez Pidal (1906), and gained crucial momentum with the
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3 4
5 6 7
research of Diego Catalán (1962)—I want to emphasize the indispensable collected volumes published by Inés Fernández-Ordóñez (2000) and Georges Martin (2000). Until recent years, we only had access to a partial edition of the work, Parts I and II, carried out by Antonio García Solalinde (1930 and 1957–1961).The complete work was published in ten volumes at the start of this new century (Sánchez-Prieto Borja 2001–2009). One particular case, also contemporaneous, is represented in Llibre dels fets del rei en Jaume (Book of the Deeds of King Jaume) a Catalan work composed in the frst person that narrates events during the reign of Jaime I of Aragón (Bruguera 1991). But here one would have to keep in mind that, frst, this text is closer to the genre of memoir rather than the chronicle, taking its inspiration from autobiographic models in Arabic historiography of the period (Aurell 2008); and second, this is a magisterial instance of orality put into writing by court scribes, the result being far from a formally structured composition as it maintains the speaker’s lofty voice in a quasi-Augustinian confessional design. With some liberty, I use the suggested concept of the “production of presence”, coined by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (2004), although I believe this to be faithful to his proposed way of thinking about silent practice in relation to things in the world oscillating between sensorial effects of presence and meaning. Indeed, from the time he would have received the announcement of his election to emperor, in 1257, he established this court, naming Alberto de Vienne as his Seneschal; Enrique, bishop-elect of Spira, as his chancellor; and Enrique, Duke of Brabant, as his imperial curate (Salvador Martínez 2003, 161–63). The chronicler stresses that “estas conpannas fueron se tendiendo por las tierras e poblaron toda Espanna, e a las tierras que poblauan ponienles nombres dessi mismos” (these campaigns were extending over the lands and they populated all of Spain, and to the populated lands they gave their own names) (6b29–32).
References Althusser, Louis. 1965. Pour Marx. Paris: Maspero. Aurell, Jaume. 2008. “La chronique de Jacques I: une fction autobiographique. Auteur, auctorialité et autorité au Moyen Age”. Annales. Histoire, Sciences sociales 63: 301–318. Bruguera, Jordi, ed. 1991. Llibre dels fets del rei En Jaume. Barcelona: Barcino. Catalán, Diego. 1962. De Alfonso X al Conde de Barcelos. Cuatro estudios sobre el nacimiento de la historiografía romance en Castilla y Portugal. Madrid: Gredos. Catalán, Diego. 1992. La Estoria de España de Alfonso X. Creación y evolución. Madrid: Fundación Ramón Menéndez Pidal – Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Deleuze, Gilles. 1990.“¿Qué es un dispositivo?” In Michel Foucault, flósofo, 155–163. Barcelona: Gedisa. Díaz y Díaz, Manuel C. 1962. “La obra de Bernardo de Brihuega, colaborador de Alfonso X”. In Strenae. Estudios de Filología e Historia dedicados al Profesor Manuel García Blanco, 145–161. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca. Fernández Valverde, Juan, ed. 1987. Roderici Ximenii de Rada. Opera Omnia. I: Historia de rebus Hispaniae sive Historia gothica. Turnhout: Brepols. Fernández-Ordóñez, Inés. 1992. Las “Estorias” de Alfonso el Sabio. Madrid: Istmo. Fernández-Ordóñez, Inés, ed. 2000. Alfonso el Sabio y las Crónicas de España.Valladolid: Fundación Santander Central Hispano – Centro para la Edición de los Clásicos Españoles. Fernández-Ordóñez, Inés. 2009.“Manuscritos historiográfcos ‘de autor’”. In Los códices literarios de la Edad Media. Interpretación, historia, técnicas y catalogación, edited by Pedro M. Cátedra, Eva Belén Carro Carbajal and Javier Durán Barceló, 91–125. San Millán de la Cogolla: Cilengua – Instituto de Historia del Libro y de la Lectura. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings. Edited by Colin Gordon, 194–228. New York: Pantheon Books. Funes, Leonardo. 1997. El modelo historiográfco alfonsí: una caracterización. London: Queen Mary & Westfeld College – Department of Hispanic Studies. Funes, Leonardo. 2004.“La crónica como hecho ideológico: el caso de la Estoria de España de Alfonso X”. La Corónica 32 (3): 69–89. Funes, Leonardo. 2009. “La evolución literaria como contienda de prácticas discursivas”. In Investigación literaria de textos medievales. Objeto y práctica, 109–125. Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila. Funes, Leonardo. 2010. “El viaje en busca del libro: la Visio Taionis en la Estoria de España de Alfonso el Sabio”. In “De ninguna cosa es alegre posesión sin compañía”. Estudios celestinescos y medievales en honor del
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Leonardo Funes profesor Joseph Thomas Snow, edited by Devid Paolini. II, 172–189. New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies. García de Cortázar, José Ángel. 2002–2003.“De las conquistas fernandinas a la madurez política y cultural del reinado de Alfonso X”. Alcanate 3: 19–54. García Solalinde,Antonio, ed. 1930. Alfonso el Sabio, General Estoria. Primera Parte. Madrid: Molina. García Solalinde, Antonio, Lloyd A. Kasten and Victor R.B. Oelschlager, eds. 1957–1961. Alfonso el Sabio, General Estoria. Segunda Parte. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científcas. Gil, José S. 1985. La escuela de traductores de Toledo y sus colaboradores judíos. Toledo: Instituto Provincial de Investigaciones y Estudios Toledanos. González Jiménez, Manuel y Ma and Antonia Carmona Ruiz. 2012. Documentación e Itinerario de Alfonso X el Sabio. Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla. Guenée, Bernard. 2016. Comment on écrit l’histoire au XIIIe siècle. Primat et le Roman des roys. Paris: CNRS Éditions. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. 2004. Production of Presence. What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lida de Malkiel, María Rosa. 1959. “Josefo en la General estoria”. In Hispanic Studies in Honour of Ignacio González Llubera, edited by Franck Pierce, 163–181. Oxford: Dolphin Book. Linehan, Peter. 2007. Spain, 1157–1300.A Partible Inheritance. Oxford: Blackwell. Martin, Georges. 1997. “Alphonse X et le pouvoir historiographique”. In L’Histoire et les nouveaux publics dans l’Europe médiévale (XIIIe-XVe siècles), edited by Jean-Philippe Genet, 229–240. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Martin, Georges, ed. 2000. La historia alfonsí: el modelo y sus destinos (siglos XIII-XV). Madrid: Casa de Velázquez. Menéndez Pidal, Gonzalo. 1951. “Cómo trabajaban las escuelas alfonsíes”. Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 5: 363–380. Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, ed. 1906. Primera crónica general. Estoria de España que mandó componer Alfonso el Sabio y se continuaba bajo Sancho IV en 1289. Madrid: Bailly-Baillère e Hijos. Niederehe, Hans J. 1987. Alfonso X el Sabio y la lingüística de su tiempo. Madrid: Sociedad General Española de Librería. O’Callaghan, Joseph F. 1985.“Paths of Ruin:The Economic and Financial Policies of Alfonso the Learned and Their Contribution to His Downfall”. In The Worlds of Alfonso the Learned and James the Conqueror. Intellect and Force in the Middle Ages, edited by Robert I. Burns, 41–67 Princeton: Princeton University Press. O’Callaghan, Joseph F. 1993. The Learned King.The Reign of Alfonso X of Castile. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Rico, Francisco. 1984. Alfonso el Sabio y la “General estoria”.Tres lecciones. Barcelona: Ariel. Salvador Martínez, H. 2003. Alfonso el Sabio. Una biografía. Madrid: Polifemo. Sánchez-Prieto Borja, Pedro, coord. and ed. 2001–2009. Alfonso el Sabio, General Estoria. Madrid: Biblioteca Castro. Torres Fontes, Juan. 2000–2001. “La Orden de Santa María de España y el Monasterio de Santa María la Real, de Murcia”. Alcanate 2: 83–95. Vanderford, Kenneth H. 1945. Alfonso el Sabio, Setenario. Buenos Aires: Instituto de Filología. White, Hayden. 1987. The Content of the Form. Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
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12 FROM ISLAMIC TO CHRISTIAN CONQUEST Fatḥ invasion and Reconquista in medieval Iberia1 Alejandro García-Sanjuán
Introduction The historical process that took place in Iberia during the medieval period is largely determined by the existence of an Arab and Islamic society between the eighth and ffteenth centuries, which was fnally destroyed as a result of the process of conquest carried out by the different Iberian Christian kingdoms. Although “al-Andalus” is normally used by scholars to name this society, in Arabic it was rather a geographical toponym covering the whole Iberian territory (García-Sanjuán 2003), whether it was under Islamic or Christian political control, much like the name Hispania as used among Christians. The long-lasting history of this Iberian Arab and Islamic society and the consequences of its fnal destruction by Christians have been the object of strong ideological elaboration leading to prejudices and stereotypes. Much of this ideological burden comes from Spanish historical writing which has been traditionally highly infuenced by nationalism and Catholicism since the nineteenth century, thus provoking most of the stereotypes and prejudices that have plagued modern Spanish scholarship. But historical prejudices are not exclusive to any single cultural tradition, and the Medieval Iberian past can be considered a good example in this regard because, as I will try to show, the Arab tradition has developed its own biased reading of the history of al-Andalus. I fnd it particularly interesting to compare the opposite ways in which the medieval Iberian past has been received and interpreted within different cultural traditions. Therefore, in what follows I will try to put forward these differences by analyzing their respective origins and also by paying special attention to the use of historical vocabulary which is critical to understand the meaning of many of the stereotypes and prejudices that are still operating in modern historical writing. In an article written between 1943 and 1947 for the newspaper Tribune, British novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic George Orwell formulated an idea which was soon to become a widely accepted aphorism:“history is written by the winners” (Orwell 2000). It holds true that, throughout history, there are many cases in which the only extant narratives of wars and conquests are those written by the winners.This might be one of the meanings of Orwell’s aphorism. But most likely what he was trying to say is that, regardless of the existence of narratives 185
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coming from the side of the losers, history is written by the winners because the predominance of their viewpoint is actually part of their victory. To my mind, one of the most interesting features of Iberian medieval history consists of the switching of roles between victors and vanquished. The Islamic conquest from 711 made the Muslims victors and they prevailed politically, as well as socially and culturally, at least till the thirteenth century. However, as it is well known, they were fnally the vanquished, since the Christians managed to seize the Islamic territory of al-Andalus through a long-lasting process of conquests ending in 1492 and which very frequently is still called Reconquista in current Spanish historical writing. For reasons that I’ll explain below, I’m intentionally avoiding that concept in the present chapter. Both Muslims and Christians wrote accounts of the Islamic conquest in which they respectively assume the roles of victors and vanquished.These narratives are somewhat related to each other, particularly in the case of Christians, since their strong consciousness of losers right after 711 acted as a major driving ideology impelling them to recover the territories that, according to their own view, were illegitimately and unjustly taken from them. Similarly, both Muslims and Christians developed different approaches to the Christian takeover of the Islamic territories. Comparing the diverging viewpoints about the Islamic conquest of Iberia and the Christian conquest of al-Andalus (again, the so-called Reconquista) lead us to propose a few general considerations which may serve as a general framework to my approach. Firstly, the respective visions of victors and vanquished are totally opposite. The vision of the victors is rather glorifying while that of the vanquished is negative and even dramatic. Secondly, there has been a marked tendency toward continuity, so that both views have remained virtually unchanged up to the present moment in modern Arabic and Spanish historical writing, respectively. Thirdly, this continuity is actually the hallmark of both Arabic and Spanish historical writing, that is to say, a unique feature that makes them different from any other scholarly tradition. Fourthly, this peculiar form of approaching the study of the Islamic and Christian conquests is characterized by the use of an exclusive vocabulary which is different in each of the two cases and which, at the same time, is unique and cannot be found in any other modern historical writing. Therefore, both modern Spanish and Arabic scholarly traditions have generated one-sided and biased narratives of the conquests because usually they just don’t take into account the opposite view. For this reason, I think both should be considered to a large extent as cultural prejudices rather than the product of historical knowledge.
Fatḥ in classical and modern Arabic tradition In his In God’s Path: The Arab Conquest and the Creation of an Islamic Empire, Robert Hoyland refers to the accounts from the Arabic sources about the Islamic expansion as follows: “The problem with this narrative is not so much that it is wrong, but that, like all histories told from the standpoint of the victors, is idealizing and one-side”. Next he adds: “The second element that needs to be put back is the voices of the vanquished and the non-Muslim conquerors” (Hoyland 2015, 2–3). Arabic vocabulary of warfare is rich and there are a good number of verbs and nouns used to describe situations of conquest.Three of the most common words expressing these ideas are ghazà (noun ghazwa), istawlà (noun istīlā’), and ghalaba (noun taghallub). However, none of these are used to describe the expansion of Islam and its conquests, neither in classical Arabic sources nor in modern Arabic historical writing.There is another different word to name that process, a word that is only used for this specifc historical case.This word is fatḥ which has the general 186
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meaning of “opening”.Apparently, therefore, fatḥ does not have a direct or evident relation with the idea of conquest in the same way, for example, that jihad does not have it with the idea of war. However, it is the word that has been exclusively used in Arab classical and modern tradition to describe the Islamic expansion that occurred after the death of Muḥammad. The reason behind this reality is to be found in the Qur’an. Fatḥ is the name of the su¯ra 48 which starts with the following verse, where God says to Muḥammad: inna fataḥ-nā la-ka fatḥan mubīnan, which can be translated as “Truly We have opened up a path to clear triumph for you [Prophet]” (all Qur’anic quotations are taken from Abdel Haleem [2004]). Two key elements are to be taken into consideration when assessing this verse. First, this Qur’anic decree determines that it is God who gives the fatḥ. Therefore, divine intervention plays an essential role: God becomes the subject of the action, responsible for the Muslims achieving victory. Actually, the Qur’an also includes the word fattātḥ (34:26) as an attribute of God (García-Sanjuán 2013; Donner 2016). On the other hand, Muslim commentators usually link this verse with the al-Hudaybiyya pact established between Muḥammad and Quraysh tribe, before he became the lord of Mecca. Al-Fatḥ is thus the opening of Mecca to Muslims, upon its fnal surrender to the Prophet in 631. Therefore, fatḥ is narrowly associated in the Qur’an with the idea of victory over the enemy, in this case that of Muḥammad over Quraysh, which is by far the foremost Islamic achievement in early Islam. Being associated with the conquest of Mecca, fatḥ became a word with strong resonances and a huge ideological potential. Mecca is the center of Islamic spirituality, the spot of the Kaaba shrine, the frst place where, according to Islamic tradition, man worshiped God. Given its Qur’anic association with Mecca, the concept of fatḥ was the most appropriate name to express the Islamic concept of victory, in which the subject of the action is not the Muslims, but God himself. Over time, fatḥ gathered steam as the ultimate expression of the idea of holy war on behalf of Islam. From the eighth century onward, fatḥ became a specifc literary genre in Arabic historical writing, devoted to describing the process of conquests following the death of Muḥammad and leading to the establishment of the Arab Empire ruled by the Umayyad dynasty. Around 50 works dealing with the Islamic conquests and bearing the word fatḥ in their titles are known so far (either in singular or in plural, futu¯ḥ), although many more were probably written (Noth and Conrad 1994, 31). The earliest known example was probably written by Sayf ibn ‘Umar from Kufa (d. 780/796) under the title of Kitāb al-futu¯ḥ al-kabīr wal-ridda, which al-Ṭabarī later used as a primary source. Nearly by the same period, Abu¯ Ismā’l al-Azdī wrote Futu¯ḥ al-Šām, devoted to the conquest of Siria.This literary genre consolidated over the ninth century with works like Kitāb al-futu¯ḥ by Ibn al-A’tham (d. 204/819) and the more well-known books by al-Balāḏhurī (d. 278/892), Futu¯ḥ al-buldān (“The Conquests of the Countries”) and the Egyptian Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam (d. 257/871) and his Futu¯ḥ Miṣr (“The Conquest of Egypt”). Andalusi historical writing tradition developed a little later than in the Middle East, but some of their representatives adopted the same approach of the futu¯ḥ genre.The oldest extant example was that of Ibn al-Qu¯ṭiya (d. 367/977), Kitāb iftitāḥ al-Andalus (“The Book of the Conquest of al-Andalus”), followed by two anonymous works, Akhbār majmu¯’a fī fatḥ al-Andalus wa-dhikr umarā’i-hā (“Collected accounts on the conquest of al-Andalus and mention of its emirs”) and Fatḥ al-Andalus. This fatḥ literary genre is highly signifcant in order to gain knowledge about Arab selfawareness of their conquests: as John Tolan observed, the conquests inspired the Arabs with a triumphalist vision of their expansion (2002). In my opinion, the late American Arabist and 187
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Islamicist Bernard Lewis gave the best explanation of the idea of fatḥ in classical Arabic historical writing: These were not seen as conquests in the vulgar sense of territorial acquisitions, but as the overthrow of impious regimes and illegitimate hierarchies, and the “opening” of their peoples to the new revelation and dispensation.The notion of a superseded old order is vividly expressed in the invocation of an ultimatum said to have been sent by one of the Muslim Arab commanders to the Princes of Persia:“Praise be to God who has dissolved your order, frustrated your evil designs and sundered your unity”. The use of the root ftḥ is thus not unlike the twentieth-century use of the verb “liberate”, and is indeed sometimes replaced by the latter verb ḥarrara in modern Arabic writing on early Islamic history. (1991, 93–4) In Andalusi fatḥ literature, as well as in other Arabic sources including accounts of the arrival of Muslims to Iberia, that word is oftentimes used as a way of attributing the conquest of alAndalus to God himself: “God conquered al-Andalus for the Muslims” (fataḥa Allāh al-Andalus ‘alà-l-muslimīn), as we read in the aforementioned anonymous chronicle Fatḥ al-Andalus and in Ibn ‘Idhārī, a chronicler from Marrakech writing in the early fourteenth century (as cited in García-Sanjuán 2013, 59–60). A slightly different expression of the same idea was formulated by Ibn al-Faraḍī (d. 1012), a Cordoban author from the time of the Caliphate who wrote a dictionary of Andalusi ulama, including among his biographies that of Mu¯sà ibn Nuṣayr, the Arab wālī or governor of Ifrīqiya who played a leading role in the coming of Muslims to Iberia.According to Ibn al-Faraḍī,“Mu¯sà attacked al-Andalus and God conquered it by his hand” (ghazā Mu¯sà ibn Nuṣayr al-Andalus fa-fataḥa Allāh ‘alà yaday-hi) (as cited in García Sanjuán 2013, 60). In this case Mu¯sà acts as the hand of God, a mere instrument of the divine will by which God “opens” the land of al-Andalus to the Muslims. But fatḥ not only shaped most Arabic classical narratives about Islamic expansion.Along with its strong Islamic connotations, the second most remarkable feature of fatḥ is probably its enduring persistence in modern Arabic historical writing up to the present time. A quick look over some well-known examples will suffce to show this.The frst one is the book by Iraqi historian Abd al-Wahid Dhu Nun Taha which was originally published in Arabic in 1982 under the title of Al-Fatḥ wa-l-istiqrār al-‘arabī al-islamī fī shimāl Ifrīqiya wa-l-Andalus, later translated into English with the same title: The Muslim Conquest and Settlement of North Africa and Spain. The second example is more recent and more closely related to the specifc case of Iberia. In 2011, Moroccan historian Ahmed Tahiri published the last contribution so far of modern Arabic scholarship to the study of the Islamic conquest from 711. His book seems to be of particular interest due to several reasons. On the one hand, we fnd two interesting elements in its title. It is a bilingual edition, in Arabic and Spanish. Being so, it has two titles, in both languages, but in both cases the main title is the same: Fatḥ al-Andalus, in Arabic. It is also worth mentioning that the subtitle includes the use of the concept of “incorporation”: Iltiḥāq al-Gharb bi-dār al-Islām (“The Incorporation of the West to Islam”).“Incorporation” must be considered as a euphemism aimed at softening the violence associated with the notion of “conquest”, which normally implies the use of force.Therefore, it confrms the narrow identifcation of Tahiri’s approach with the viewpoint of the victors already expressed through the concept of fatḥ. Interestingly enough, “incorporation” has also been largely used in Spanish 188
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academic historical writing as a way of describing the Christian conquest of al-Andalus and must be considered as part of the Reconquista paradigm, as we shall see below. But, in my view,Tahiri’s approach is remarkable for another reason. In the book he explicitly mentions the idea that the Muslim conquerors brought the light of knowledge to a backward Europe which lived in the darkness of ignorance:“It is a conquest that had strong infuence in getting the Iberian Peninsula out of the obscurantism of the European Middle Ages bringing it to the brightness of the Arab civilization” (Tahiri 2011, 7).2 Tahiri thus places the Islamic conquest of Iberia within the general framework of the classical contrast between barbarism and civilization, a fairly well-known literary topos, that is to say, a common place that we may fnd throughout history as the most usual way of justifying any act of conquest. Conquerors usually present themselves as the civilized ones and justify their conquests by the need of taking their civilization to barbarian peoples. Using of fatḥ in modern Arabic tradition is not limited to scholarly historiography. Much to the contrary, it is a very widespread way of describing Islamic expansion which may be found in very different forms of historical writing. I have chosen Wikipedia as an example because it may fairly be considered a good representation of mainstream concepts about the past. According to classical Islamic tradition and Arabic scholarly historical writing, the expansion of Islam is systematically characterized in Arabic Wikipedia as fatḥ.This is, for instance, the case with the titles of the articles dealing with the conquest of Egypt (al-fatḥ al-Islāmī li-Miṣr) and the conquest of al-Andalus (al-fatḥ al-Islāmī li-l-Andalus).3 Interestingly enough, fatḥ is never used to describe other different historical processes of conquest.This holds true, for example, with regard to the conquest of al-Andalus by Christians: actually, the expression “Christian fatḥ of al-Andalus” is just simply nonexistent in Arab tradition. Instead of these nonexistent forms, the end of al-Andalus is usually named in Arabic modern historical writing as suqu¯ṭ, which has the meaning of “fall”, a word with clearly negative connotations which is very much connected with the viewpoint of the vanquished. It is thus hardly surprising that the Arabic Wikipedia article dealing with the Christian conquest of al-Andalus bears the title of “the fall of al-Andalus” (suqu¯ṭ al-Andalus).4
Invasion and Reconquista The triumphalist vision of the Islamic conquest of Iberia and the pessimistic idea of the “fall” of al-Andalus in the hands of Christians are transformed into opposite concepts in the Spanish tradition, as the arrival of Muslims to Iberia is interpreted in catastrophic terms, while their fnal defeat has been glorifed as a national liberation struggle called Reconquista. In what follows, my goal is to approach the development of both ideas in Spanish historical writing. The vision of the vanquished concerning the Islamic conquest is to be found in Latin sources written by local Hispanic clerics. As we can imagine, the approach of these texts to the Islamic conquest is entirely different from what we have seen so far in Arabic texts. Instead of the legitimizing account of the Arabic sources, the Latin sources emphasize the negative aspects of the coming of the conquerors, especially their violence over the local population. Before mentioning some examples taken from Latin texts, I would like to highlight one point. Even though there are more differences than similarities in the visions of victors and vanquished, there is at least one aspect in which both visions coincide. It is the idea of the coming of the conquerors as a divinely ordained event, interpreted as a gift in the vision of the conquerors and as a punishment for their own sins in the case of the vanquished.This approach is usually called providentialist and represents a common ground in both classical Arabic and Latin literary traditions concerning the Islamic conquest of Iberia. 189
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Latin sources are, in general, older than Arabic and therefore closer to historical events. In the specifc case of Iberia, the earliest available text providing a description of the conquest is commonly known as The Mozarabic Chronicle from 754, so called because it is an anonymous text reportedly written by a local Mozarabic Christian cleric, probably from Toledo, whose account ends in that year. The anonymous author emphasizes the extreme violence and cruelty of the conquerors throughout his account, thus turning this chronicle into a classic example of the vision of the vanquished.There are two peak moments in his narrative in this regard.The frst one is when the new political system set up by the conquerors is featured as a “savage kingdom”: “The Saracens set up their savage kingdom in Spain, specifcally in Córdoba, formerly a patrician see and always the most opulent of cities, a city accustomed to giving its frst fruits to the kingdom of the Visigoths” (Wolf 1999, 133). More interestingly, the second reference includes an expression that has come to prominence because of the highly misleading use made of it in modern Spanish nationalist historiography. Bitterly complaining of the misfortunes caused by the conquerors, the author says that they caused Spaniae ruinas, that is to say,“the ruin of Spania”: Who can relate such perils? Who can enumerate such grievous disasters? Even if every limb were transformed into a tongue, it would be beyond human capability to express the ruin of Spain and its many great evils. But let me nevertheless try to summarize everything for the reader on one brief page. Leaving aside all of the innumerable disasters that this cruel, unclean world has brought to its countless regions and cities since the time of Adam—that which, historically, the city of Troy sustained when it fell; that which Jerusalem suffered, as foretold by the prophets; that which Babylon bore, according to the scriptures; that which fnally Rome went through, martyrially graced with the nobility of the apostles—all of this and more Spain, once so delightful and rendered so miserable, endured as much to its honour as to its disgrace. (Wolf 1999, 133) Spaniae ruinas was easily turned in modern Spanish historical writing into the “ruin of Spain”, thus generating confusion between two different historical realities, old Roman and Visigothic Hispania/Spania, which included the Iberian Peninsula, and modern or contemporary Spain, with a different territorial shaping. On the other hand, transforming the “ruin of Spania” into the “ruin of Spain” explains much of the biased and one-sided approach to the origins of al-Andalus that is to be found in modern Spanish scholarship since the nineteenth century. In 1892, Eduardo Saavedra, Arabist and member of the Royal Academy of History, published the frst academic Spanish monograph on the Muslim conquest of Iberia under the title of Estudio sobre la invasión de los Árabes en España (“Study about Arabs’ Invasion of Spain”). The fact that the frst scholarly Spanish monograph on the origins of al-Andalus bears in its title the word “invasion” and, at the same time, the fact that it describes this historical event very negatively as a “huge national catastrophe” (“inmensa catástrofe nacional”) could hardly be considered sheer accident (1892, 1). Both elements are integral parts of the National Catholic reading of medieval Iberian past and therefore both are key for understanding the idea of Reconquista. Using the idea of invasion to describe the origins of al-Andalus has been in force in Spanish academic historical writing until modern times.The 1994 book by Pedro Chalmeta (Invasión e islamización. La sumisión de Hispania y la formación de al-Andalus) represents a clear example, not only because of its title, but also because the author is far from being connected with traditional National Catholic historiography. Therefore, it shows that the idea of invasion has 190
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been uncritically accepted by most Spanish historians, regardless of their respective ideological profles. If we cast now a quick look over other non-Spanish scholarly traditions, what we fnd is that the prevailing concept to describe the origins of al-Andalus is not “invasion”, but “conquest”. This is, for example, the case of Roger Collins (The Arab Conquest of Spain [1989]) or, more recently, Nicola Clarke (The Muslim Conquest of Iberia. Medieval Arabic Narratives [2012]). This difference can hardly be considered as a mere coincidence. Actually, the truth is that the concepts of “invasion” and “conquest” can be considered, to a certain extent, as synonymous, being frequently used to describe acts of war leading to the seizing of territories. Still, it also holds true that both concepts have very different connotations in everyday language. For example, we speak of “conquest” (in the Spanish sense of conquista) with a usually positive meaning when talking about “conquering someone”, in the romantic sense of the expression. So, conquest in these contexts is used to express the positive idea of gaining the affection, admiration, love, or sympathy of someone by seduction, personal appeal, or force of personality. Likewise, we speak of conquest when a certain group, or, in general, the whole society, manages to gain new rights (social conquests or political conquests). On the contrary, in everyday language the idea of invasion has usually very negative connotations. For example, when we talk about “invading someone’s privacy”, we mean that we are crossing the limits of what we should or can know about a person.The same negative meaning is revealed in the vocabulary of biology, for example in the concept of “invasive species”, which are those foreign species harming the surrounding environment. These lexical differences are signifcant.While the idea of “invasion” as the most typical way to describe the origins of al-Andalus in Spanish historical writing represents the vision of the vanquished,“Reconquista”, instead, expresses the viewpoint of the victors, with all its legitimizing burden. Both “invasion” and “Reconquista”, on the other hand, are inextricably intertwined, like two sides of the same coin, framing the basic core of traditional Spanish scholarship about the Medieval Iberian past. The narrow connection between both concepts is revealed by the meaning of Reconquista in the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy of Language, which provides, so to speak, the “offcial” version of the Spanish language. For the frst time since its original publication in 1780, the dictionary included in 1936 a new defnition of the word “reconquista” specifcally related to the particular historical context of medieval Iberia:“Recovery of the Spanish territory invaded by the Muslims which ended with the taking of Granada in 1492”.5 There are two main features in this defnition that should be taken into account. Firstly, the naming of Visigothic Iberia as “Spanish territory”, a clearly misleading viewpoint which betrays the infuence of a nationalist approach. Secondly, the narrow relationship of the idea of “invasion” as the origin of al-Andalus and the notion of Reconquista. Again, it should be stressed that both notions are the hallmarks of traditional Spanish nationalist scholarship about medieval Iberia. The notion of Reconquista has had such a wide diffusion that it has been fully adopted in other foreign, non-Spanish academic traditions. In 1978, British scholar D. Lomax published The Reconquest of Spain, a handbook of medieval Iberia where the idea of Reconquista was clearly understood as a valid concept to describe both Muslim and Christian sides of the historical process. In his prologue, the author justifed the suitability of that concept by appealing to its medieval origin: “The Reconquest is a conceptual framework useful to historians, but not an artifcial one like the Middle Ages. It was an ideal invented by Spanish Christians soon after 711, and its successful realization has preserved it since then as a historiographical tradition” (Lomax 1978, 1). However, the claim that the notion of Reconquista is an original medieval concept must be properly nuanced. 191
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The project of taking over the Islamic Iberian lands from the hands of the Muslims because this territory once belonged to Christians was clearly affrmed in the Middle Ages. Written sources provide us with very explicit references revealing that both Christians and Muslims were perfectly aware of these ideas. One of the earliest mentions is to be found in Latin chronicles written in the late ninth century in Oviedo, the capital city of the kingdom of Asturias, the frst Christian entity in post-Muslim Iberia:“Christians day and night face the battle with them and daily fght, until divine predestination orders that they be cruelly expelled from here” (Gil Fernández, Moralejo and Ruiz de la Peña 1985, 171, 244). So is the case, for instance, of a very eloquent text from the Memoirs of the last Zirid ruler from Granada in the late eleventh century.When talking about the visit of Sisnando Davídiz to his capital city to collect taxes (parias), ‘Abd Allāh points out the following: He said to me face to face: “Al-Andalus originally belonged to the Christians. Then they were defeated by the Arabs and driven to the most inhospitable region, Jillīqiya.6 Now that they are strong and capable, the Christians desire to recover what they have lost by force. This can only be achieved by weakness and encroachment. In the long run, when it has neither men nor money, we’ll be able to recover it without any diffculty”. (Tibi 1986, 90) Although Medieval Iberian Christians developed and successfully achieved the project of seizing and destroying al-Andalus, it would be deeply misleading to confuse that course of events with the modern concept of Reconquista, as defned by modern Spanish historiography. Reconquista is not a medieval but a modern word.As Mexican historian Martín Ríos Saloma (2011) has rightly shown, its usage to describe the medieval project of seizing al-Andalus was unknown before the nineteenth century and actually it only became mainstream in Spanish historical writing during the last quarter of that period. In fact, not only is the word Reconquista a neologism, but the concept is also totally new. Actually, the medieval project of seizing al-Andalus was turned by modern Spanish nationalism into a national liberation struggle called Reconquista, claiming that the Spanish nation must have been shaped in the fght with Islam. Reconquista, therefore, is a modern concept that does not match medieval ideas about conquering al-Andalus, being rather an integral part of modern Spanish nationalism. By projecting the values of the present into the past, early Spanish nationalism assumed the perspective of the victors through the identifcation of the Spanish nation with Catholicism: defeating of Muslims and the imposition of Catholic faith became the main pillar of the new national historical narrative in which the idea of Reconquista played a key role. The right understanding of the relevance of Reconquista in modern Spanish scholarship requires a careful examination of the work of Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz (1893–1984). There are two main reasons, in my view, to take him into account. Firstly, he has been largely infuential over Spanish medieval studies during the second half of the twentieth century, being considered as the best Spanish historian of his generation by some of the most relevant specialists in medieval studies in Spain. Secondly, he is the greatest exponent of the National Catholic approach to the medieval Iberian past and, as such, the main proponent of the traditional idea of Reconquista. His conception of the meaning of the Muslim conquest in the history of Spain largely coincides with nineteenth-century Spanish scholarship. Accordingly, his interpretation of the role played by Islam was totally negative, based on the idea that the Muslim conquest twisted Spain’s historical destiny, as he wrote in one of his early works from 1929.This “deviation” of Iberia’s 192
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destiny is framed by an intensely negative vision of the consequences of the Muslim conquest, to the point that the eight centuries of existence of al-Andalus would be summarized, according to his own words, as “the tragedy that Islam provoked in Spain” (Sánchez-Albornoz 1943, 44). On the other hand, Sánchez-Albornoz raised the Reconquista to the highest possible point, describing it as the fundamental explanatory key of the history of Spain. It was precisely in his best-known work, España, un enigma histórico (“Spain, An Historical Enigma” [1956]) where he included a chapter entitled “The Reconquest, Key to the History of Spain” (García-Sanjuán 2017). Given that Sánchez-Albornoz died more than 30 years ago, one might think that the nationalist idea of Reconquista would have fallen into oblivion, being excluded from the most recent scholarship. However, nothing is further from reality.Actually, Reconquista has been ideologically reloaded in such a way that it continues playing the same role as always, remaining the basic conceptual pillar of the conservative approach to the medieval Iberian past.The last part of my chapter is devoted to this issue. The frst and main reference in this regard is Al-Andalus contra España, la forja del mito, published in the early twenty-frst century by Arabist and member of the Spanish Royal Academy of History, S. Fanjul. In keeping with traditional Spanish scholarship, Fanjul approaches the origins of al-Andalus in highly dramatic and catastrophist terms, describing the Islamic conquest as a social and political cataclysm (Fanjul 2000, 24).With the apparent intention of debunking the myth of religious tolerance and coexistence, the real aim of Fanjul is, however, the delegitimization of al-Andalus as the anti-Spain whose destruction was the necessary condition for shaping the Spanish nation. Fanjul has been largely infuential over Spanish conservative circles, both scholarly and nonscholarly, and consequently the debate about al-Andalus over the past 20 years or so has shifted to one concerned with tolerance. Dispelling the myth of al-Andalus represents the new, updated, twenty-frst-century version of the Reconquista paradigm: a new format to hold the same old musty National Catholic ideas about the medieval Iberian past. This is the approach taken in Al-Andalus y la cruz. La invasión musulmana de Hispania, by Spanish medievalist Rafael Sánchez Saus (2016), where, again, debating religious tolerance is the straw man that allows a pitiful and biased delegitimation of al-Andalus as a horrifc and tragic historical experience for Iberian Christians living under Islamic rule (García-Sanjuán 2016). The very heavy ideological burden of Reconquista seems even more obvious when the concept is used by politicians as part of their strategy for gaining support among the most traditional and conservative sectors.That is the case, for instance, of Santiago Abascal, leader of Vox, a far-right and ultranationalist political organization currently on the rise in Spain. In early 2018 and on the occasion of the public commemoration of the taking of Granada, which takes place annually in that city on 2 January,Abascal wrote on his Twitter feed: On January 2, 1492 the Reconquista was fnished with the #TomaDeGranada, thus defeating the last Islamist stronghold on our soil. Centuries later the indelible pride for an exploit of 7 centuries remains, and so does our determination of not being subjected to Islam. (Accessed December 2018)7 Examples of this new version of the old paradigm of the Reconquista are relatively abundant, revealing that old prejudices associated with Spanish nationalism are deeply rooted in conservative sectors, whether they are individuals from the media, scholars, or politicians (García-Sanjuán 2018). 193
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Again in connection with the commemoration of the taking of Granada, former highrank PP8 member Esperanza Aguirre expressed in her social networks being proud of this feat, affrming that it was a day of glory for Spanish women, because with Islam they would not have freedom.9 By saying so,Aguirre endorsed a teleological vision of the past, a historical reading in which Reconquista is praised and extolled as the original cause of certain historical processes with which, in reality, it has no relation whatsoever. In this case,Aguirre turns the Catholic Monarchy into feminist activists from the late ffteenth century. Just as medieval Christian kings are commended for what they were not, Muslims of alAndalus are denigrated and vilifed for what they did not do. Isabel San Sebastián, a well-known Spanish journalist, said the following about the terrorist attacks in Barcelona in August 2017:“I curse you, f… Islamists.We already kicked you out of here once and we’ll do it again. Spain will be Western, free and democratic”.10 In 2006, E. Manzano talked about the rising of an “unspeakable conservative reaction” against the romantic vision of al-Andalus and warned about an “infamed return to the ideology of Reconquista that seemed defnitely cornered” (Manzano 2006, 21–2). It would hardly be exaggerated to say that, 12 years later, his forecast was totally justifed.
Final observations Clichés and stereotypes are widespread in every cultural tradition with regard to the past. In the particular case of Medieval Iberia we may fnd strong prejudices in both Spanish and Arab traditions which are very much connected with the respective viewpoints of victors and vanquished with regard to the confict between Muslims and Christians. Spanish cultural and scholarly tradition has been mainly shaped by National Catholicism. Accordingly, the origins of al-Andalus have been regarded usually in negative terms as a foreign invasion with a clear delegitimizing intention.This approach is compatible with the viewpoint of the vanquished as expressed in Latin accounts of the conquest. Conversely, the Christian conquest of al-Andalus has never been regarded in Spanish historiography as an invasion, but as a legitimate re-taking of a previously lost territory.Therefore, the conquest of al-Andalus has never been called “invasion”, but Reconquista, with a clear legitimizing intention. The Islamic conquest has been approached in Arab tradition in accordance with the viewpoint of the victors.Therefore, it has been legitimized and glorifed through the Qur’anic idea of fatḥ which is exclusively used to name the Islamic expansion both in Arab classical and modern tradition. In Arabic, therefore, the Christian conquest of al-Andalus has never been called fatḥ, but rather fall, according to the viewpoint of the vanquished.
Notes 1 This text is the result of my contributions to three previous academic meetings which took place throughout 2018: the workshop After the conquest: convergent methodologies and divergent practices in the study of the Iberian Reconquista, 9th–14th centuries, held at the Woolf Institute (Cambridge, UK) and organized by Rodrigo García-Velasco; the Gastvorträge und Veranstaltungen held at the University of Hamburg and organized by Sabine Panzram; and the Heidelberg vorträge zur mittelalterlichen Geschichte der Iberischen Halbinsel, held at the University of Heidelberg and organized by Nikolas Jaspert. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all organizers for inviting me to participate in these three scholarly events. 2 The translation is mine. “Se trata de una conquista que infuyó de forma destacada para arrebatar a la Península Ibérica del oscurantismo de la Edad Media europea y trasladarla al resplandor de la civilización árabe”. 3 Accessed 20 November 2018.
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From Islamic to Christian conquest 4 Accessed 20 November 2018. 5 “Recuperación del territorio español invadido por los musulmanes y cuyo epílogo fue la toma de Granada en 1492”. See Nuevo tesoro lexicográfco de la lengua española: http://ntlle.rae.es/ntlle/SrvltGUIL oginNtlle.Accessed December 2018. 6 The original English text says “Galicia”, but translating the Arabic name Jillīqiya by Galicia is clearly misleading, since Jillīqiya covered a much wider territory than present-day Galicia: see the study by Carballeira (2007). 7 “El 2 de enero de 1492 concluyó la reconquista con la #TomaDeGranada derrotando así al último reducto islamista de nuestro suelo. Siglos después permanece el orgullo imborrable por una gesta de 7 siglos.Y permanece la determinación de no someternos al Islam #EspañaEsReconquista”: https://tw itter.com/Santi_ABASCAL/status/948164179080466432.Accessed December 2018. 8 PP (Partido Popular) is the most important mainstream Spanish conservative political party. 9 “Hoy hace 525 años de la toma de Granada por los Reyes Católicos. Es un día gloria para las españolas. Con el Islam no tendríamos libertad”: https://twitter.com/EsperanzAguirre/status/815942890857 885696.Accessed December 2018. 10 “Malditos seáis, islamistas hijos de… Ya os echamos de aquí una vez y volveremos a hacerlo. España será occidental, libre y democrática”: https://twitter.com/isanseba/status/898252410396606464. Accessed December 2018.
References Abdel Haleem, Muhammad A.S. 2004. The Qur’an. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carballeira Debasa,Ana María. 2007. Galicia y los gallegos en las fuentes árabes medievales. Madrid: CSIC. Chalmeta, Pedro. 1994. Invasión e Islamización. La sumisión de Hispania y la formación de al-Andalus. Madrid: Editorial Mapre. Clarke, Nicola, 2012. The Muslim Conquest of Iberia. Medieval Arabic Narratives. New York: Routledge. Collins, Roger. 1989. The Arab Conquest of Spain, 711–797. Oxford: Blackwell. Donner, Fred M. 2016. “Arabic Fatḥ as ‘Conquest’ and its Origin in Islamic Tradition”. Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 24: 1–14. Fanjul, Serafín. 2000. Al-Andalus contra España. La forja del mito. Madrid: Siglo XXI. García-Sanjuán,Alejandro. 2003.“El signifcado geográfco del topónimo al-Andalus en las fuentes árabes”. Anuario de Estudios Medievales 33(1): 3–36. García-Sanjuán, Alejandro. 2013. La conquista islámica de la península ibérica y la tergiversación del pasado: del catastrofsmo al negacionismo. Madrid: Marcial Pons. García-Sanjuán,Alejandro. 2016.“La persistencia del discurso nacionalcatólico sobre el medievo peninsular en la historiografía española actual”, Historiografías – revista de historia y teoría 12: 132–153. García-Sanjuán, Alejandro. 2017. “Al-Andalus en la historiografía nacional católica española: Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz”. eHumanista 37: 305–328. García-Sanjuán, Alejandro 2018. “Rejecting al-Andalus, Exalting the Reconquista: The Persistence of an Exclusionary Historical Memory in TODAY’s Spain”, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, 10–1: 127–145. Gil Fernández, Juan, José L. Moralejo and Juan I. Ruiz de la Peña. 1985. Crónicas asturianas. Oviedo: Universidad de Oviedo. Hoyland, Robert G, 2015. In God’s Path:The Arab Conquest and the Creation of an Islamic Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewis, Bernard. 1991. The Political Language of Islam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lomax, Derek K. 1978. The Reconquest of Spain. London: Longman. Manzano, Eduardo. 2006. Conquistadores, emires y califas. Los Omeya y la formación de al-Andalus. Barcelona: Crítica. Noth,A. and L.I. Conrad 1994. The Early Arabic Historiographical Tradition:A Source-Critical Study. Princeton: Darwin Press. Nuevo tesoro lexicográfco de la lengua española, s.v.“Reconquista”, accessed december 2018, http://ntl le.rae.es/ntlle/SrvltGUILoginNtlle. Orwell, George, 2000. As I Please, 1943–1945. Collected Essays, Journalism, Letters. Edited by S. Orwell and I.Angus. Boston: David R. Godine. Ríos Saloma, Martín F. 2011. La Reconquista. Una construcción historiográfca (siglos XVI–XIX). MéxicoMadrid: UNAM and Marcial Pons. Saavedra, Eduardo. 1892. Estudio sobre la invasión de los Árabes en España. Madrid.
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Alejandro García-Sanjuán Sánchez, Saus. 2016. Al-Andalus y la cruz. La invasión musulmana de Hispania. Barcelona: Stella Maris. Sánchez-Albornoz, Claudio. 1943. España y el Islam. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana. Sánchez-Albornoz, Claudio. 1956. España, un enigma histórico. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana. Tahiri, Ahmed. 2011. Fath al-Andalus y la incorporación de Occidente a Dar al-islam. Seville. Tibi,Amin T. 1986, ed. The Tibyan. Memoirs of ‘Abd Allah ibn Buluggin, last Zirid emir of Granada. Leiden: Brill. Tolan, John. 2002. Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination. New York: Columbia University Press. Wolf, Keneth B., ed. 1999. Conquerors and Chroniclers of Early Medieval Spain. 2nd edition. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
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13 ISLAMOGOTHIC IBERIA The Tārīkh of Ibn al-Qūṭīyah Nasser Meerkhan
The emirate of Cordoba (756–929) was established by a survivor of the Umayyad dynasty of Damascus, ʻAbd al-Raḥmān I (731–788), also known as al-Dākhil or The Entrant. The Abbasids, after massacring the Umayyads, conspired against him on more than one occasion. Moreover, rivalry between Berber soldiers, Syrian clients, and noblemen—of both Arab and Visigothic descent—created an atmosphere of hostility that threatened the attempts to establish a centralized rule in Cordoba. Al-Andalus, commonly referred to as Islamic Iberia, thus came to exist amidst and struggle against threats of disruption. The gruesome events in the Eastern Mediterranean condemned the newly found Umayyad emirate in Cordoba to a reign of uncertainty. In particular, the rivalry between the Abbasids and the Umayyads led to the rebellion of the former and the eventual extermination of the Umayyad dynasty.1 It is not surprising, therefore, that even the earliest accounts of the conquest of Iberia would involve nostalgic views toward the Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus. It is surprising, however, to fnd a tenth-century Arabic text that includes a wistful treatment of the last Visigothic rulers of the Peninsula and their crucial role in what is depicted as a peaceful transfer of power, following the conquest, to the new Umayyad lords of Iberia. This is the case with Tārīkh Iftitāḥ al-Andalus—or The History of the Conquest of al-Andalus—from here on referred to as Tārīkh, by Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah (Ibn Al-Qu¯ṭīyah and Ibrāhīm Ibyārī 1982). Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah was a historian and grammarian mawlā2 of the Umayyads and a descendant of the Visigothic nobility. A Sevillian by birth, he spent most of his life in Cordoba where he was a renowned authority on Arabic grammar, until his death in 977.3 The Tārīkh spans the foundational period of al-Andalus and ends with the reign of the Emir ʻAbd al-Raḥmān III, who would later become the frst Umayyad Caliph of Cordoba (Bosch-Vilá 2018).4 Since the nineteenth century, critics have praised the Tārīkh for its unique portrayal of the early centuries of Islamic civilization in Iberia.5 Very few studies, however, are dedicated to the text itself. Rather, some scholars tend to employ the Tārīkh as an example to validate varying historiographical approaches to al-Andalus and the Islamic Middle Ages; while others attempt to determine the text’s historical accuracy.6 This approach stems from a comprehensible desire to use the Tārīkh as a “reliable source” for the early years of Islamic presence in Iberia. After all, the Tārīkh along with the anonymous Akhbār7 Majmūʻah (i.e. Collected Accounts) are among the most complete of tenth-century historiographical texts dealing with the frst two centuries of al-Andalus. However, if we can overcome the desire to unearth al-Andalus’s history as if it were 197
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a physical artifact, we will realize that the Tārīkh provides a far more signifcant opportunity: an invitation to reshape our understanding of al-Andalus, rather than a dull confrmation of what we already assume we know about it. In Between History and Literature, Lionel Gossman successfully points to the dynamic interplay between literary dimensions of history and historical dimensions of literature (Gossman 1990, 3). His wish to demonstrate this tight connection between history and literature is not a whimsical, contemporary imposition on past texts. It derives organically from such texts as Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah’s Tārīkh: texts that can only be read meaningfully when standing at the threshold of history and literature. The Tārīkh is not only replete with “literary” tropes when detailing “historic” events; it intertwines literature and history in such a way that it remains possible yet becomes ridiculous to attempt to separate them. One of the best examples is wāqiʻat al-ḥufrah (the “incident of the hole”). The anecdote tells how a trap was set during the reign of Emir al-Ḥakam I (796–822) in Toledo to keep its residents in line, having observed signs of their disobedience and excessive pride. Al-Ḥakam appoints a certain muwallad,8 ‘Amru¯s, as ruler of Toledo.The Emir commands ‘Amru¯s to inform the Toledans that he prefers them over the hateful Umayyads. ‘Amru¯s would also be asked by the Emir to inform Toledans that he will ask Toledan “troops” to live in a separate palace, which was built from a pit within its walls (emphasis mine). The palace had two doors: one for entering and one for exiting. One day, al-Ḥakam promised a feast to his “beloved” Toledans. As guests entered the designated door, rather than enjoying a splendid banquet, executioners decapitated unsuspecting guests over the aforementioned pit. It was not until some 5,300 people had died that a wise man, before entering, noticed how no one was exiting the other door. He looked up, spotted “blood vapor” and warned his fellow Toledans about the trap. From that day on,Toledans were obedient to al-Ḥakam (65–7). As Brian Catlos explains in his most recent book, this is clearly a literary trope that is very unlikely to be based on a true, historical event (Catlos 2018, 63).Yet if we read this anecdote closely, its fgurative meaning elucidates the historical context that subtends such a fantastical tale: the story’s overt warning is far more disturbing when read in literary terms than in historical ones. Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah emphasizes that the palace was built from the same hole into which the bodies were thrown.The anecdote is thus a powerful metaphor of the political instability of early al-Andalus, stating that the “walls” of a palace, rather than protecting their inhabitants, had been built from— and in order to further deepen—the same abyss in which they would be brutally killed. My emphasis on the literary scope of the text derives substantially from the fact that Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah is still venerated as an authority on Arabic. His dominance of grammar was such that Ibn al-Faraḍī, in his short biography of Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah, would not hesitate in calling him “ahead of his time” when it came to knowledge of Arabic (103).The Tārīkh therefore bears linguistic and literary signifcance, making it a real gem for history and literature students alike.The exciting combination of anecdotes, metaphors, verses, and prophecies offers the reader an unsettling and chaotic vision of the frst two centuries of Muslim rule in Medieval Iberia.This is unmistakably intentional: we are not reading a (still meaningful) collection of anonymous histories, such as with Akhbār Majmūʻah. Rather, Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah’s text is a conscientious amalgamation of akhbār that vacillates between explicit praise of morality and piety on the one hand, and implicit admonition regarding authoritarianism and imprudence on the other.The goal, as we shall see, is to leave it clear to the Umayyads that the centralized ruling model is still as precarious as it was before the establishment of the Caliphate in 929 CE. In a sense, Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah offers a cautionary tale: political stability in al-Andalus can always be tenuous. In terms of content, the Tārīkh seems to be a chronological account of the different Emirs of al-Andalus until the reign of the frst Caliph of Cordoba, ʻAbd al-Raḥmān III.That is to say, 198
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between the years 756 and 929. However, the parts of the text leading up to the establishment of the emirate by ʻAbd al-Raḥmān I in 756, as well as later sections that deal with local revolts, make this characterization imprecise.The narrative of the frst few years of the Muslim conquest in the Tārīkh provides a unique reinterpretation of the wide array of political entities and interests that were involved in establishing the early presence of Muslims in Iberia.These interests are divided mostly along ethnic lines in the narrative (the Syrians, the Berbers, the Yemenites, the Visigoths, etc.). Later on, the author struggles to incorporate the humiliating, decades-long defeats that the Umayyads suffered at the hands of rebels such as ‘Umar Ibn Ḥafsu¯n, as shall be seen. Thus, in order to accurately describe the work’s structure, its discussion can be divided into two sections.The frst will touch upon the events leading up to the establishment of the emirate of ʻAbd al-Raḥmān I.This comprises roughly 30% of the work.The remaining part corresponds to the traditional characterization of the text as a chronological akhbār of different Emirs, rebels, and noblemen. It should be noted that the initial section is what distinguishes the Tārīkh among other chronicles of the Islamic conquest of Iberia: it synchronizes the last Visigoth ruling model with that of the frst Umayyads through a concern for morality in ruling. Maribel Fierro elucidates this concern in the text in her 1989 essay “La obra histórica de Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyya” (Fierro 1989).9 In addition to its concern for ethical rule, the history of Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah is a narrative that seeks to legitimize power on the basis of continuity and translatio imperii.10 It seamlessly introduces the Visigoths in the foundational narrative of al-Andalus, using Sarah the Goth and her uncle Artabas as key fgures in the transference of power from the Visigoths to the Umayyads. When put in the context of its emergence (tenth century), the Tārīkh becomes a portrayal of the past as an apologetic justifcation for the present. It refects a political view in which non-Arab nobles and their mixed descendants can be allies of the Arab elite, rather than their perceived enemies. Thus, uncertainties on the future of the Umayyad Caliphate in the tenth century moved Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah to rethink the past of al-Andalus in search for reconciliatory, rather than confrontational, terms for describing the relationship between the descendants of the Visigothic nobility and the Arab heirs of the throne. In the words of Gabrielle Spiegel, The prescriptive authority of the past made it a privileged locus for working through the ideological implications of social changes in the present and the repository of contemporary concerns and desires. As a locus of value, a revised past held out for contemporaries the promise of a perfectible present. (Romancing 5) The Tārīkh also resorts to prophecies and divine omens to solidify the trifold connection between the Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus, the success of their only survivor in founding the Emirate of Cordoba, and the newly founded Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba in 929. I believe that this need for establishing legitimacy through history writing, as Spiegel would say, refected an anxiety for uncertainty on succession in the court.Thus, it is likely that the text was written during the problematic reign of Caliph al-Ḥakam II, who would not produce an heir until the age of 46.11 This is also supported by the fact that our historian had a long life, according to Ibn al-Faraḍī (103). Furthermore, it can be inferred from at least one paragraph of the text that ʻAbd al-Raḥmān III, the frst Caliph, could have been dead by the time the Tārīkh was written, as he is referred to in the past tense. Last but not least, the Tārīkh redefnes the problematic emergence of al-Andalus by exposing the chaotic and fragile alliances that defned the frst two turbulent centuries of Islamic presence in the Iberian Peninsula. 199
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Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah’s history begins with two major events: Ghaiṭasha’s [Witiza] death, and the rebellion of his army commander, Ludharīq [Roderick], who seized Cordoba with his loyal army men. This version of the story differs from its counterpart included in the Mozarabic Chronicle of 754 (the so-called Continuatio Hispana which covers the years 610–754) and aligns more with the version of the later Chronicle of Alfonso III (between 866–910).12 For in the Tārīkh, the time between the death of Witiza and the Muslim conquest is greater than the commonly referred one-year term between the two events. Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah states that by the time Tariq would attack Roderick’s army,Witiza’s sons had grown up and could ride horses (49). It is my belief that this change in the account, highlighting the fact that Witiza’s sons had grown by the time of the conquest, is not an arbitrary one. It rather shows Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah transforming the ambiguous context of the rise and fall of Roderick into a story of revenge, justice, and dynastic rivalry.Thus, from the very frst paragraph, he creates a sense of continuity between the Umayyads of Damascus and those of Cordoba by drawing on parallelisms between their respective destinies.This is further evidenced by the fact that Roderick is soon to be called by Witiza’s offspring their “father’s dog”, a grave insult in Arabic, as they agree to betray him in response to Roderick’s earlier rebellion. Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah on one level thus commemorates the fall of Roderick as a result of Roderick’s own tyranny, in conformance with other Arabic and non-Arabic sources of the conquest of al-Andalus. On the other hand, however, Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah evokes the turbulent world of early al-Andalus in which greed, revenge, and the lust for power often overshadowed any quest for dynastic legitimacy. ‘Umar al-Ṭabbā‘, in his 1994 edition of the Arabic text, seems to agree that Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah emphasizes the Visigothic role played in the Muslim conquest. He contrasts Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah’s account with that of Akhbār Majmūʻah in which the focus remains solely on the Umayyads rather than the Visigoths (Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah and Ṭabbā‘ 1994, 31). The rivalry between Roderick and Witiza’s sons is highly reminiscent of the confict between the Abbasids and the Umayyads that ended in Damascus in 750 with the victory of the former and extermination of the latter.Yet Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah’s text reveals not only a continuum in time between the Umayyads of Damascus and those of Cordoba; the text also constructs a continuum in space between Syria and Iberia. In Damascus, Sarah the Goth would meet ʻAbd al-Raḥmān I for the frst time:“Years later in al-Andalus he [ʻAbd al-Raḥmān I] would remind her of that and whenever she visited Cordoba he would give her leave to enter the palace and visit the royal family” (50). Sarah is the frst of a series of infuential noblewomen who will appear in the text as, ostensibly, marginal fgures. After all, this is a history focused on infuential men in early al-Andalus. However, it is the role of contemporary readers and critics to make sure that women of the Umayyad court are no longer forgotten in the background. Sarah the Goth, along with other courtly women that will be discussed later, such as ʻAbd al-Raḥmān II’s concubine Ṭaru¯b, have played crucial roles in the early historiography of al-Andalus. No reading of Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah’s text is complete without paying attention to the roles played by noblewomen and concubines in different Umayyad courts.At this point of the Tārīkh, ʻAbd al-Raḥmān I’s reminder to Sarah serves as a reminder for the reader that the encounter between the Visigothic nobility and the Umayyads actually began in Damascus and continued in Cordoba. This continuity is also visible in ʻAbd al-Raḥmān I’s Rusafa estate, which memorialized the Rusāfa in central Syria, the Umayyad Caliphs’ favored residence (Menocal 2002, 9).The fact that Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah focuses on the encounter in Damascus between Sarah and ʻAbd al-Raḥmān I, who must have been a child at the time, re-emphasizes both the legitimacy and the continuity of the Umayyad rule in Iberia, given that the shift of power from the Visigoths to the Umayyads was initiated in Damascus, and had involved the same people: Sarah and ʻAbd al-Raḥmān I.This is a clear example of what 200
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Spiegel, inspired by Bakhtin, claims to be the essential meaning of a text: it is relational, rather than inherent (Romancing 9). The story of Sarah’s uncle Artabas is perhaps one of the most controversial in the text, to such an extent that it is the only excerpt that Pons Boigues decided to include as a sample in his Ensayo bio-bibliográfco mentioned above. Perhaps the most signifcant part of Artabas’ conversation with ʻAbd al-Raḥmān I occurs when the former confrms his desire to secure the Emirate for his descendants, and Artabas decides to instruct ʻAbd al-Raḥmān I on good governance.The Visigoth informs the Emir of his people’s disapproval of him and the Emir expresses his gratitude for this valuable information (76). Artabas, who is at frst characterized as an unjust manipulator who takes away Sarah’s sons’ lands, becomes a pious nobleman and one of the most astute men of his time, according to the text (76). His profle in the Tārīkh stands out, frst, as a key fgure in a peaceful transfer of power between some Visigothic rulers and the Umayyads. Second, and most importantly, his profle is seamlessly included with akhbār of otherwise Muslim men. By presenting Artabas as the only man to have had the courage to confront the Emir with people’s criticism of him, Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah makes his story an essential part of the description of ʻAbd al-Raḥmān I’s reign. In other words,Artabas’ vision of governance is one in which a leader’s survival is contingent upon his awareness of the people’s sincere opinion of him. Only then can he be guaranteed to hand down his throne to his descendants. This is a brief yet key anecdote for understanding the Tārīkh. It is reminiscent of the translatio imperii topos present in the frst few pages of the text, as it focuses on the succession of power—in this case, through transmitting knowledge on good governance—from one of the last members of the Visigothic ruling family to the founder of the Andalusí branch of the Umayyad rulers.As Jacques Le Goff reminds us in his discussion of Christian and profane medieval themes of conceiving history, “[t]he transfer of power, the translatio imperii, was above all a transfer of knowledge and culture, a translatio studii” (Le Goff 1988, 171). Immediately after the anecdote of his encounter with ʻAbd al-Raḥmān I, another story is told about Artabas to reinforce not only his generosity, but also the ease with which he gave away his lawful possessions. In this rather curious anecdote, ten Syrian noblemen come to visit Artabas. During their visit,Artabas receives a Syrian client—Maymu¯n al-ʻĀbid—with extreme humility. He takes Maymu¯n by the hand and gives him his seat. The man asks Artabas to share one of his estates with him, since he, like many Syrians, had not anticipated the fall of the Umayyads in Damascus, and thus was not prepared to stay in al-Andalus permanently. Artabas, rather than split certain lands with Maymu¯n, insists on bequeathing him a generous amount of land, cattle, and a castle (76). Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah briefy mentions that this same Syrian client would one day become the founder of the Banu¯ Ḥazm; once again, the historian underscores transference of power and authority from Visigoths to Muslims.Artabas’ magnanimous actions provoke one of the visitors, Ṣumayl—to whose akhbār the text turns in the following chapter—to accuse Artabas of belittling his Muslim guests (76).13 Artabas responds by calling Ṣumayl ignorant, for their religion, i.e. Islam, would have commended his act of charity. At the same time, Artabas explains that his actions come from his Christian belief of the obligation of sharing one’s own God-given gifts with all fellow humans. He then grants ten estates to each of the ten attendees, since only abundance can make kings happy, according to Artabas (77). One cannot dismiss the fact that in these few pages, the last Visigoth is the one who acts with moderation, paving the way for ʻAbd al-Raḥmān I to establish not only his own rule, but that of his dynasty and descendants. In this frst part of the text, then, a nostalgic view toward the early days of al-Andalus prompts the author to reshape the Islamic conquest of al-Andalus into a story 201
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of dynastic legitimacy, in which the descendants of Witiza, the last legitimate Visigothic king, contribute to the prosperity of the last legitimate descendent of the Umayyads, ʻAbd al-Raḥmān I. Let us now turn to the abundant prophecies in theTārīkh. Even a cursory examination of the text shows that it abounds with prophecies, omens, and divine messages. In a chapter in which Laura Grillo refects on her personal experience researching divination in Côte d’Ivoire, she confrms that “divination is the process of puzzling out one’s own meanings and motivations” (Grillo 2010, 40). Indeed, omens, prophetic visions, and supernatural interventions reveal Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah’s own appraisals of various Emirs. It is a very subtle critical method: those Emirs he seems to approve of are associated with positive divinations; the opposite is true for those he judges as faulty. Moreover, supernatural interventions also frequently appear at moments where a critical change in the path of history is about to take place, such as the decisive battles between ʻAbd al-Raḥmān I and his opponents, as shall be seen shortly. I will divide the prophecies into two simple yet contradictory categories that facilitate their understanding. The frst category includes omens in which al-Andalus is taken as a land of victory and prosperity for Muslims. The second group refects Muslims’ self-awareness of the instability of their state in Iberia, and therefore a widespread anxiety regarding the ephemerality of the Muslim presence in the Peninsula. I shall start with the frst category of omens: those that predicted and privileged the presence of Muslims in Iberia. I refer to these as “propitiatory prophecies”. The frst one in Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah’s text is interestingly a legend that concerns the Visigoths: the famous legend of the enchanted palace of Hercules in Toledo. It is related that the kings of the Goths had a temple (bayt) in Toledo wherein was an ark (tabūt) in which were kept the Four Gospels upon which they took the sacred oath.They exalted this temple and kept it closed.When one of their kings died they inscribed his name on it. Now, when Ludharīq became king he took the crown and placed it on his head, which was something not approved of according to Christianity.Then he opened the temple and the ark, although this was forbidden by Christianity. Inside the ark he found pictures of Arabs with bows on their shoulders and turbans on their heads. On the wooden base was written: If this temple be opened and these pictures taken out, then al-Andalus will be invaded by the people shown in the pictures and conquered by them! (51) The potency of such a prophecy comes from the message it conveys regarding the Muslim conquest from the Christian perspective. It is one that would only come true when a ruler deliberately disobeyed the mandates of Christianity, as highlighted twice in Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah’s paragraph above. He thus postulates that the Muslim conquest is a curse for the Visigoths that they had brought on themselves. Here we are in the presence of one of the most common topoi in monotheistic Mediterranean cultures: the fall from grace due to the violation of a prohibition motivated by arrogance and excessive curiosity. Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah moves on to explaining how Yuliyan, the legendary Count Julian who allegedly helped facilitate the Muslim conquest of Iberia,“met with Ṭāriq and incited him to come to al-Andalus, telling him of its splendor and the weakness of its people and their lack of courage” (52). This was to take revenge for Roderick’s seduction of Yuliyan’s daughter. It is worth mentioning here that Yuliyan’s “treason” as portrayed in the Tārīkh is secondary to Roderick’s vainglory: it is the latter who is to blame for the fall of al-Andalus into Muslim hands. The next propitiatory prophecy occurs when Ṭāriq is on his ship sailing to Iberia. He falls into a long sleep, in which he has a dream that he takes as an auspicious omen for the conquest: Muhammad the Prophet gives him his blessing to conquer Iberia (52). Let us not forget that a 202
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vision of Muhammad in one’s sleep, according to the hadith, cannot be a deception, giving this paragraph even more potency and authority. In the words of Prophet Muhammad, the Devil cannot impersonate him in dreams (Juynboll 2007, 272). Yet prophecies are, certainly, more effective when looked at in retrospect. Ex eventu prophecies are a recurring strategy in the text. The author’s knowledge of the aftermath of a certain historical moment clearly informs his decision to include a divine omen that anticipates the outcome. This is why the history of ʻAbd al-Raḥmān I is one of the most heavily laden with omens and divine interventions. It points to the correlation between the signifcance of an historical event and the number of divine interventions present in it. In ʻAbd al-Raḥmān I’s story, the propitious omens begin as he ventures onto Iberian soil.14 And when [Badr, Abu Furay’a and Tammam] crossed the sea and met with ʻAbd al-Raḥmān I, the latter said: Who is this, Badr? To which he answered “Your servant Tammam, and this is your servant Abu Furay’a”. ʻAbd al-Raḥmān I then punned: Tammam, our affairs shall be fulflled [tamma], God willing, and Abu Furaya, we shall possess [iftara’a, literally defower or initiate] this land, God willing. (al-Ṭabbā‘ 86) As ʻAbd al-Raḥmān I prepares to fght his enemy Yusuf al-Fihrī just outside of Cordoba, ʻAbd al-Raḥmān I inquires about the day and date.When he realizes that the following day would be Friday and the Day of ‘Arafah, he takes this as a good omen, as his ancestor Marwān ibn al-Ḥakam (the fourth Umayyad caliph of Damascus) had won the battle of Marj Rāhiṭ against yet another al-Fihrī (al-Ḍaḥḥāk) on that very same day just outside Damascus.15 What we have here is an iteration of circular history under God’s blessing.The Umayyads were blessed in the battle of Marj Rāhiṭ, and omens implying parallelisms in the current circumstances should lead to a similar success. The propitious omens abound as ʻAbd al-Raḥmān I comes across a young man, Sābiq bin Mālik bin Yazīd, whose name he also interprets as an omen of victory (70). ʻAbd al-Raḥmān I appoints the young man as his saddle-mate, or riding companion.This is a good example of how prophecies in Andalusí historiography infuenced, altered, and shaped the perception of historical reality. Even though this is probably no more than a dramatic sketch invented later, its presentation as a factual matter helps us to better understand the centrality of prophecies in times of war throughout Andalusí history. Moving on to another propitiatory prophecy, Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah’s account of the reign of ʻAbd al-Raḥmān I’s son Hishām (788–796) includes a prophecy that highlights his legendary piety. An astrologer predicts he will have only seven years left to live. Hishām remains unaffected by this knowledge, as he decides to spend his last years worshipping God.A description follows of all the pious actions for which Hishām is remembered. If one were to consider Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah’s text as a quasi-mirror of princes for the new caliph ʻAbd al-Raḥmān III (or his successor, if the text was indeed written after his death), the anecdote could be interpreted as a reminder for governors of the importance of piety; a recurring theme in the Tārīkh.This is further emphasized by the fact that the akhbār of the Emir Hishām portray him as one who ruled with kindness, justice, and humility (82). Furthermore, in the context of Islamic historiography, this narrative is an inherently contradictory one: whereas the omen itself is catastrophic, as can be seen in the astrologer’s initial reluctance to convey his vision to the Emir, I still consider it a propitiatory prophecy because of the broader message it delivers. That is, a good ruler knows how to turn an imminent tragedy into an opportunity to serve God by becoming an exemplary Emir (82). Indeed, Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah goes on to explain that Hishām built the Great Mosque of Cordoba (which was actually built by his father ʻAbd al-Raḥmān I) and was praised by no less than Anas ibn Mālik for his efforts (83). 203
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And now we may turn to the second category of prophecies: those depicting the anxiety of Muslims regarding their ambiguous future in al-Andalus. I’ll call them “inauspicious prophecies”. These might be of greater interest for the broader audience of the Tārīkh since such prophecies would gradually become more predominant as Muslims began to lose control of larger parts of the Peninsula.The akhbār of the Emir al-Ḥakam (796–822), whose reign in Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah’s text is distinguished for the high number of opponents he killed, provides one of the most remarkable inauspicious prophecies: it depicts the fear of future catastrophe for Muslims in al-Andalus. In an incident that Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah attributes to Ibn Waḍḍāḥ,16 we learn that al-Ḥakam, while resting near an unnamed valley, makes the following observation: He looked towards a valley and said, “On the Day of Judgment the Dissenters (khawarij) will come—I can almost see them now pouring out of this valley, killing people and enslaving children. I hope there will be an ‘al-Ḥakam’ alive to be victorious and defend Islam”. (92) One might expect to read such an apocalyptic prophecy in an aljamiado17 text from the sixteenth century.Yet the fact that it appears in a tenth-century treatise leaves no doubt that the foreboding of future disaster was established in al-Andalus since an early stage of the Muslim presence in Iberia. Inauspicious prophecies will intensify later on in the history of al-Andalus as tensions between the Muslim and Christian community rise, leading up to the eventual expulsions of all moriscos in the year 1609. The next inauspicious prophecy appears in what can otherwise be considered one of the most amusing akhbār in Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah’s text: those regarding ʻAbd al-Raḥmān II (822–852). After discussing the arrival of the musician Ziryāb to the court, the author recounts an anecdote replete with sexual innuendos.A suggestive exchange of poetry between the Emir and the poet and astrologer Ibn al-Shamir excites the former to the point that he returns to Cordoba in order to sleep with his favorite concubine (99).Whereas in the case of Hishām an anecdote of evident piety framed the Emir’s good ruling; in this case, the anecdote sets the ground for the depiction of ʻAbd al-Raḥmān II as a ruler more concerned with worldly pleasures than with righteousness. The Emir’s akhbār culminates with a series of events during his reign in which the destiny of Islam in al-Andalus is threatened. It goes as follows: the major deed of this Emir is the construction of the Great Mosque of Seville (100), which curiously enough becomes a metonym for Islam in the following vision experienced by the Emir: After the building of the Great Mosque of Seville was complete,Abd al-Rahman II had a dream in which he entered the building, to fnd the Prophet Muhammad—peace and praises be upon him—lying in the prayer-niche, dead, and wrapped in a shroud. The dream caused him to awake in distress, so he asked those who interpreted dreams for an explanation.They told him,“This is where his Faith will die”. Immediately after that the capture of the city by the Vikings occurred. (101) Even though Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah interprets the dream as a foreshadowing of the Vikings’ attack on the city, the words of the Emir’s interpreters nevertheless imply a greater fear of Islam’s demise in Iberia—in fact, we detect a fear of the destruction of Islam as a whole, after it is lost in Iberia.18 The episode of the Vikings includes two additional supernatural events.The frst is a terrifying 204
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eclipse that took place a little before their attack, during which a special prayer was held in the new mosque. The second event was when the Vikings entered the mosque. The Vikings say a very beautiful young man drove them out of the mosque. According to the translator, this is probably a local legend regarding an angel. Some Vikings actually stayed and converted (101). The last anecdote regarding ʻAbd al-Raḥmān II ends as the frst one began, with Ziryāb, the famous Baghdadi musician, and his presence at the court of the Emir. He soon becomes a favorite of the Emir “because of his knowledge of literature, his anecdotes, and his musical ability” (102). The Emir orders that he be paid thirty thousand dinars, which the kuhzzān (money keepers) refuse to do.The Emir then decides to pay him from his personal stash (102). ʻAbd al-Raḥmān II’s akhbār, then, portray him as a desire-driven Emir, as the anecdotes on his 30 years of reign revolve around his sexual desires, a dark nightmare depicting the death of the Muslim faith, and his excessive love for the arts. There is an evident correlation between his impious deeds and the turbulence that characterized his reign. His is perhaps the episode that most clearly reveals Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah’s critical view of the history of the Umayyads in Iberia.The subtle criticism should not be eclipsed by the text’s explicit praise of Abd al-Rahman II (who is still admired today as a patron of culture). Criticism of past Emirs becomes even less nuanced in the akhbār of Emir Muhammad’s reign (852–886).This is because what Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah deems the turning point—toward the worse— in the Emir’s reign is his decision to appoint Hāshim Ibn ‘Abd al-‘Azīz19 as a chamberlain. Hāshim’s appointment, according to Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah, marks the beginning of a troublesome era in which old, wise counselors are replaced with young, immature ones (109). Once more, we have an Emir whose initial characterization shapes his reign. In this case, it is again a turbulent time due to the Emir’s dubious reliance on young advisors, rather than older, wiser ones. The text mentions that during Emir Muhammad’s reign there was a plot to assassinate him (112), an increase in the palace eunuchs’ power (113–14), a rivalry between Muslim and Christian offcials initiated by Hāshim’s jealousy (115), and a famine (118), among other troublesome events. Emir Muhammad’s akhbār also include an alarming number of executions (123), yet Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah justifes his actions by mentioning the Emir’s divine dream in which God showed him “the best method of attack and combat” (122).Thus, Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah makes sure not to leave any space for speculation as to whether this was a “bad decision” by the ruler in question by providing a divine justifcation for his actions. Subsequently, the Tārīkh turns to the uprisings of Ibn Ḥafṣu¯n and Daysam Ibn Isḥāq, among others. Even before the account of the uprisings, it should be noted that the instability among the Umayyads stands out in the pages to come. First of all, the reign of the Emir al-Mundhir (886–888) is cut short when he is suddenly assassinated.20 The rumor mentioned by Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah about a eunuch poisoning him to escape punishment could be interpreted in different ways (131). It could be yet another example of the alarming role the eunuchs played at the court of some Umayyad Emirs, a topic that will be addressed below.This interpretation fts with the observation that the text was likely written during the reign of Ḥakam II, rather than ʻAbd al-Raḥmān III. However, Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah could also be hinting at a political assassination by providing a frivolous explanation for the Emir’s death. The instability peaks during the reign of the Emir ʻAbdullāh (888–912): the rivalry reaches his family when his son Muṭarrif kills his own brother Muhammad, after having killed Ibn Umaīyah (not to be confused with Aben Humeya, who was a leading morisco rebel in the Alpujarras revolts of 1568–1571), the head of the Emir’s army against ‘Umar Ibn Ḥafṣu¯n.21 Whereas Ibn ‘Idharī concludes his akhbār on Muṭarrif by stating that it is unclear whether Emir ʻAbdullāh ordered him killed or pardoned (Ibn ʻIdhārī 1980, 150), Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah confrms that he was killed and characterizes Muṭarrif ’s death as a just punishment for his actions (135).This is another moment 205
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in the text in which Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah prioritizes the importance of just governance. It also hints at the ambivalence of political assassinations in the text, since they could be a sign of justice or one of unnecessary cruelty, depending on the author’s opinion of the perpetrator. Thus, in a rather Machiavellian way, violent acts such as assassinations in the Tārīkh are not automatically condemned. Rather, depending on their outcome, they can be denounced or condoned. As the text progresses, three marginalized groups become notoriously more signifcant in shaping the politics of tenth-century al-Andalus: eunuchs, muwalladūn rebels, and, last but not least, women of the court. Going back to ʻAbd al-Raḥmān II’s reign, Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah narrates that his concubine who gave birth to his son, ‘Abdallāh’, Ṭaru¯b, “had great infuence with ʻAbd al-Raḥmān II, and persuaded him to make ‘Abdallāh his successor, using the women of the palace, eunuchs (ftyān), and servants (khadam)” (112). In fact, in many instances in the text, ‘Abdallāh is referred to as “the son of Ṭaru¯b”, thus highlighting the importance of his mother’s role not only as umm walad,22 but also as a powerful fgure whose political maneuvers confrmed her son as the heir to his father’s throne. Ṭaru¯b’s efforts, however, were nullifed by a conspiracy of the eunuchs, headed by a certain Saʻdu¯n. In a suspenseful anecdote, Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah relates how, after having found out about the death of ʻAbd al-Raḥmān II before either of his possible heirs (‘Abdallāh and Muhammad), the eunuchs had a long debate which resulted in the election of Muhammad as their new Emir. In order not to draw ‘Abdallāh’s attention, the eunuchs make sure Muhammad is dressed so as to give the impression that he is in fact Muhammad’s daughter until he can safely make it to the palace. Once there, ʻAbd al-Raḥmān II’s death is confrmed and Muhammad is elected to become the new Emir (112–14). What stands out here is the fact that the ultimate decisionmakers toward the end of the ninth century were the eunuchs.This invites the reader to reconsider the characters at the center of the plot of this (hi)story: yes, the main events are focused on the Emirs and other infuential men in early al-Andalus, as indicated in the names of Emirs, noblemen, and notable rebels that appear in all titles of the different chapters of the Tārīkh. However, on many occasions, it is women like Ṭaru¯b and eunuchs like Saʻdu¯n who are pioneering the diplomatic maneuvers in an attempt to secure the power in the hands of whichever candidate would best suit their needs. We may now turn to the Tārīkh’s numerous digressions that recount revolts.Toward the end of the biography of Emir Muhammad, the text’s focus shifts to the rebellions of the muwalladūn. Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah introduces them within the context of “troubled fnal days” for the Emir’s rule. Unlike the Visigoths at the beginning of the text, the muwalladūn rebels are unmistakably characterized in evil terms. For example, the frst group that Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah discusses, Banu¯ Marwān, is explicitly described as a threat not only to the Umayyad’s of al-Andalus but to Islam as a whole.The rise of Ibn Marwān prompts him to become the leader of the muwalladūn of West al-Andalus (101).This could be read as Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah portraying himself as part of an elite (in this case, descendants of the early noble Visigoths and Arabs) looking down on local rebels. Ibn Marwān’s rebellion is immediately followed by that of perhaps the most serious threat the Umayyad’s of al-Andalus would face until the rise of Banu¯ ‘Āmir: ‘Umar Ibn Ḥafsu¯n. His successful rebellion in Bobastro would make his territory expand to cover the area from Algeciras all the way to Tudmir (121). By this point in the text, the reader will notice that the protagonists of the (hi)story are now the muwalladūn. The next akhbār, for instance, are no longer those of an Emir—as had been the case in the text since the akhbār of Ṣumayl—but rather those of Umaīyah ibn ‘Isā ibn Shahīd, a mawlā of the Umayyads. Umaīyah’s father, ‘Isā, rose to power during the reign of al-Ḥakam I, eventually holding the position of wazīr for both al-Ḥakam and his heir, ʻAbd al-Raḥmān II. The akhbār of Umaīyah include a curious anecdote that once again illustrates Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah’s concern for the lingering risk posed by 206
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minorities regarding the stability of al-Andalus. The author says that Umaīyah passed by a group of captives of Banu¯ Qasi and found them reciting the poetry of ‘Antarah (such poetry is characterized by praising virility and heroism on the battlefeld). Umaīyah is furious with the captives’ mu’addib (instructor) for teaching “those demons” poetry that makes them more aware of the virtues of bravery. He then orders the mu’addib to teach them poetry in praise of wine instead (106). The developments in Ibn Ḥafsu¯n’s rebellion are, conveniently enough, left unfnished at this point of the text (as Emir Muhammad was unable to relinquish them). Rather, Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah shifts the reader’s attention to other, less signifcant rebellions that the Emir did manage to terminate: Banu¯ Salīm and ‘Ubayd Allah ibn ‘Abd al-‘Azīz. The akhbār of both rebellions function as yet another cautionary tale in which the Umayyads do not hesitate in terminating, with the sword, every single member of a revolting group. Nonetheless, these akhbār are ineffective as they are surrounded by descriptions of events that leave it clear how little control the Umayyads had had over certain parts of al-Andalus: those of ‘Umar Ibn Ḥafsu¯n and, as the following chapter of the Tārīkh shows, those of Banu¯ Mu¯sā as well. The akhbār of Mu¯sa ibn Mu¯sa comprise a story of two allies whose mutual admiration ends with jealousy. According to Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah, Mu¯sā ibn Mu¯sā decides to marry his incredibly beautiful daughter to the most handsome youth of al-Andalus: Izrāq ibn Montiel, another muwallad who was at the time appointed by Emir Muhammad over thaghr23 Wādī al-Ḥijārah. When the Emir discovers the marriage plans and demands an explanation, Izrāq reassures him by stating that his intention is to try and win Mu¯sā back to the side of the Umayyads. Mu¯sā, in turn, fnds out about the complicity between Izrāq and the Emir and decides to attack his son-in-law. As Izrāq’s wife—Mu¯sā’s daughter—expresses her admiration for her father, Izrāq decides to go after him personally to prove he is more courageous than Mu¯sā. The dexterous warrior manages to wound Mu¯sā, and the latter dies before reaching Tudela (112). Mu¯sā is then succeeded by his son, making the rule of Banu¯ Mu¯sā last until the reign of the frst Cordoban Caliph, ʻAbd al-Raḥmān III. ʻAbd al-Raḥmān III manages to extinguish all rebellions, and he successfully defeats his opponents (140). Surprisingly, the manuscript does not end here; rather, it ends with a most peculiar passage regarding the sons of Emir Muhammad. Ibrāhīm visits his brother ‘Uthmān (both are sons of the Emir Muhammad I) where ‘Uthmān shows him much appreciation and asks a concubine to sing a song. She sings “It delights my heart to see your visitors”. When they leave, ‘Uthmān whips her saying she must be in love with his brother.Another day Ibrāhīm comes again,‘Uthmān asks the concubine to sing again, and this time she sings “the crow of dissent and division is not welcome” (141). ‘Uthmān goes to whip her, but a humorous character with the name of Abu¯ Sahl al-Iskandaranī, who was present the frst time the concubine was whipped, points out ‘Uthmān’s unjust treatment of the concubine.When Ibrāhīm hears about the incident, he realizes his brother’s jealousy and tells him that he shall never visit him again, and then leaves (141). Critics often ignore this peculiar parable-like conclusion, though it is clearly signifcant.The fact that Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah chooses to end on such a troublesome note provides more proof of the author’s concern with the behavior of some of the men in the ruling dynasty. Rather than ending his work with praise for ʻAbd al-Raḥmān III, Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah highlights the jealousy and rivalry between two brothers, members of the Umayyad dynasty.The re-emergence of rivalry between a ruler’s sons is uncanny, and could be interpreted as a bad omen of a history that repeats itself. These critical views of the policies of many Umayyad Emirs make us question the assumptions about Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah’s bias toward the Umayyads. Even though it is evident that he is writing under the rule of ʻAbd al-Raḥmān III or al-Ḥakam II, and is therefore unable to openly 207
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condemn past actions of the Umayyad Emirs, his criticism of certain aspects of governance during the reign of many Emirs makes it clear that the Tārīkh is far more than an ideological tool at the service of the Umayyads. Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah’s account is less detailed than others, such as al-Bayān al-Mughrib or the Akhbār Majmū‘a, yet it is thanks to its relative brevity and the highly anecdotal character of the text that his critical view and advocacy of good governance is conveyed in precise terms. The author’s preoccupation with justice is always present in the stories he chooses to include (and those he excludes).That is to say, his selectiveness in relating the akhbār is far from arbitrary: his choices can help us to characterize him as a historian who, by emphasizing the importance of piety and justice in governance, warns his readers of the dangers of deviating from such a model. His salient examples vividly depict the consequences of greed, jealousy, and an overreliance on unseasoned young advisors which should not be overshadowed by his inevitable loyalty to the Umayyads. Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah’s history gives the reader quite a puzzling account of a ruling dynasty that constantly strived to have a centralized Emirate (and later, Caliphate).This centralized hegemony, however, remained like Macbeth’s dagger: hanging in the air, right there in front of their eyes, yet ungraspable as soon as they would reach out for it.A careful reading of Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah’s account leaves the reader with the following question, so rhetorical that the answer is almost implied in the question itself: how could anyone ever manage to have long-term control over a land of such complex possibilities of shifts in political alliances? The Umayyads, in a way, remained a foreign power for a majority of the local inhabitants.Their methods of terminating uprisings through extermination (as noted in a different part of Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah’s text) could not have made them any more popular.We come back here to wāqiʻat al-ḥufrah: though the anecdote was most likely fctional, the implications were most certainly real. In other words, Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah transcribes an oral history of al-Andalus. He perpetuates stories that circulated and had an undeniable impact on the view of the Umayyads by Andalusíes. As for the eighth-century Islamic conquest of Iberia, the Tārīkh provides a narrative that should be heard and discussed: the Muslims, after following orders from Damascus to have a “trial attack” under the leadership of Ṭarīf ibn Mālik on Iberia, found a possibility for a successful conquest (al-Ṭabbā‘ 9).This makes it reasonable to turn around the centuries-long question of “why did Muslim forces decide to take over Iberia?”Texts like Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah’s Tārīkh make us ask a simpler yet more realistic question: why would they not? Even if Iberia itself could have been of little material interest to the expanding Muslim empire, it was clearly in their interest to protect the northern borders of the wilāyah of North Africa. Mu¯sā ibn Nuṣayr saw the rivalry between Roderick and the descendants of Witiza as an opportunity to attack. Additionally, Muslim forces accepted to side with the latter faction through the intervention of Ceuta’s ruler, Julian, who offered to provide them with his own ships. After defeating Roderick’s army, Muslim forces managed to take over most of the peninsula through a combination of battles, alliances, and negotiations with the local nobility.This last method was perhaps the most effective as it secured wealth through jizyah taxes to the newcomers on the one hand, and for the Visigothic nobility to keep their domains on the other. Thus, what we have in Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah is a hybrid Andalusí identity par excellence. The biographical facts we have about him from other sources pale in comparison to what his own words tell us about him. He is a Muslim intellectual, well read, and quite versed in Classical Arabic.Yet he is also aware of the uniqueness of his own Visigothic origins, which remained present in his name, and not in a favorable manner. In such a patriarchal culture where only the male ancestor’s name is normally given, his laqab is most uncommon: the son of al-Qu¯ṭīyah (the Arabicized form of la godilla, a pejorative diminutive of Goda, in reference to his ancestor Sarah the Goth). His name clearly identifes him as muwallad. He seems more 208
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interested in conveying meaningful stories than facts, as is hinted at in Ibn al-Faraḍī’s biography of Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah. For Ibn al-Faraḍī says that our historian was not reliable in his transmission in hadith and fqh as he would not return to the sources.Thus, Ibn al-Faraḍī concludes that the reliability of what was heard of Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah was to be based on his words’ meaning, rather than accuracy (103). Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah writes to satisfy the Umayyads’ need for legitimizing their newfound Caliphate.Yet the ends do not justify the means. He produces an anecdotal history that embodies the complex notion he has of what al-Andalus, a turbulent political entity, meant in his own time. He refects on how al-Andalus had come to exist as such, and includes contradictory speculations regarding its future. He reminds us of the presence of Sarah both in Damascus and in Cordoba to vouchsafe the notion of the continuity of the Umayyad’s reign through a Visigothic personage—his own great-great-grandmother. In this way, his text attempts to reduce the otherness of the Visigoths, weaving them into the fabric of Andalusí history. In fact, it highlights the otherness present among the Muslims themselves as he repeatedly mentions the uneasiness the frst Berber conquerors of al-Andalus felt about the Syrian clients. He glorifes ʻAbd al-Raḥmān I’s deeds, yet he does not hesitate to call him greedy when Artabas’ conciliatory role is at stake. At the same time, he is quite aware of the persuasive quality of prophecies and knows exactly when to include a prophetic vision in his history. His text refects his understanding of the need to portray simultaneously the Emirs as both imperfect humans and divinely chosen rulers. Finally, he knows better than to isolate the role played by Visigoths in the Muslim conquest of alAndalus from that played by the Muslims themselves.This is why, at the beginning of his akhbār, rather than fnding an abrupt conquest by the Muslims, we see a gradual transfer of power from the Visigoths to the Umayyads. From his text we can conclude that the transfer is made possible due to three major factors. First, the Muslims’ divine mandate to spread Islam on Earth. Second, Rodrigo’s vainglory and misuse of power that brought about his own destruction.Third, and most importantly, the fact that the Visigoths were no strangers to the Umayyads—as can be seen in Sarah’s episode—which, far more than a story of ethnic and religious intermixing, would provide a narrative to facilitate the Umayyads’ efforts to restore their lost glory in the west, in al-Andalus. Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah’s use of the prophecies shows how God ordained the Muslim conquest, yet his depictions of Sarah and Artabas remind us that the Visigoths, who ruled before the Muslims, were equally respectable and mature forebears on a socio-moral level, thus offering an opportunity for the construction of a sense of identity and continuity between the Visigoths and the Umayyads. The Tārīkh, then, reinterprets the frst two centuries of the Muslim presence in Iberia: it tells the story of the Umayyad rulers as a logical, divinely ordained convergence between the descendants of the last Visigothic king and the descendants of the last Umayyad caliph of Damascus. In this way, whether written by the historical Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah, great-great-grandson of the historical Sarah la Goda, or not; whether a real history or a pseudo-epigraph, the Tārīkh is ideologically committed to a nostalgic evoking of the past—one that is perhaps more wistful than real—that legitimates the Visigothic role in the founding of al-Andalus. It is a work about a not-so-distant past that seemed crucially important to another later historical present, namely, the establishment of the Caliphate of Cordoba during the frst third of the tenth century and the acceptance of the muwalladūn as partners in laying the groundwork for it.
Notes 1 For more on the crisis of the Umayyads and their downfall, see Chapter 4 of Ira Lapidus’ A History of Islamic Societies (2002), especially pp. 51–8.
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Nasser Meerkhan 2 Mawlā (plural mawāli) is a pre-Islamic concept referring to clients of tribes. Its meaning expanded in Islam, under the Umayyads, and came to refer more generally to non-Arab Muslims. See Jamila Bargach (2002), p.50. 3 All dates in this chapter are Common Era. 4 All English quotations from the Tārīkh come from David James’ translation, unless otherwise noted. When necessary, I will make some changes to the translation which will be noted as well. 5 It is one of the primary sources used by Reinhart Dozy in his 1861 work Histoire des Musulmans d’Espagne jusqu’a la conquête de l’Andalousie [History of the Muslims of Spain until the Conquest of al-Andalus] (Dozy and Lévi-Provençal 1932). Before this seminal work, Dozy had developed various hypotheses regarding the composition and sources of the Tārīkh, a few of which are still accepted among some scholars.Views on Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah’s rationale in writing the Tārīkh have varied greatly over the years. For instance, Marín-Guzmán’s analysis of the rebellions of ʻUmar Ibn Ḥafṣu¯n and Daysam Ibn Isḥāq places the Tārīkh as a valid source for the constant rebellions during the Umayyad emirate (Marín Guzman 2006, 146).This is in line with David James’ observations, who in the introduction to his English translation of the Tārīkh in 2009 states that much of the text deals with overcoming challenges to central authority in the early days of al-Andalus (Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah et al. 2009, 32). Denise K. Filios highlights the signifcance of the discrepancies between Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah’s account of the story of Ludharīq [Roderick/Rodrigo] and earlier Arabic texts (Filios 2009, 383). Justin Stearns also references the Ludharīq anecdote as he points out the connections between the Andalusíes’ narratives of the end of times and present-day nostalgia for al-Andalus (“Representing” 365). Ron Barkai explains how Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah’s ambiguous identity played an important role in his attempt to reconcile the last Visigoth families with the frst Arab families in Iberia (66–9). Juan Pedro Monferrer Sala seems to agree that Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah’s Visigothic origins are visible in the text, but he also confrms that the author makes many mistakes when discussing the Christian world (Thomas et al. 2009, 457–58). Finally,Antoine Borrut’s signifcant study on the political rhetoric of periodization in Early Islam refers to Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah as an Andalusí example of texts that would highlight the continuum of the Umayyads as rulers of Muslims (Borrut 2014, 51). 6 For example, Pons Boigues, in his magnum opus Ensayo bio-bibliografco (1898), believes that the parts of the Tārīkh that deal with Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah’s ancestors are not based on any personal family anecdotes of Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah’s; rather, they rely on the sources mentioned by Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah himself—his teachers, a historical work byʻAbd al-Malik ibn Ḥabīb, and a poem by Tammām Ibn ʻAlqama, neither of which have survived to our time (85).These views sharply contrast with Arabists such as Julián Ribera who, in his Spanish edition of Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah’s text in 1926, would argue that Hispanic blood ran through Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah’s veins and informed his spirit (Ibn Al-Qu¯ṭīyah, and A.A.M. Qutaybah 1926, XII). Roger Collins questions the work’s authenticity, as a part of a larger argument in which he states that what dominates Arab records of the conquest is fantasy (Collins 1989, 34–5). Similarly, Charles Pellat considers Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah’s need to please the Umayyads a compromising factor (Pellat 1962, 121). 7 Akhbār—plural of khabar (report; piece of information)—is a term heavily associated with a more fexible type of the oral transmission of history, since unlike stricter forms such as hadīth for example, it does not require isnād (a traceable chain of sources). For a more detailed study of the evolution of both the akhbār and the hadīth tradition, see Tarif Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period (1994), Chapter 2. 8 Muwallad (plural Muwalladu¯n, hispanized as muladí[es]) are Muslims of local descent. Struggles to legitimize their cause vis-à-vis growing Arab elitism became especially signifcant when Islam expanded east to the Indies and west to Iberia. 9 Other scholars have since further explored the topic of effective governance in the Tārīkh. For a more recent example, see Herrero (2010), pp. 475–488. 10 The concept in the present chapter has more to do with the linear transfer of both political and spiritual power between dynasties than with the fgure of an “emperor”. 11 He was believed to be homosexual and had kept a male harem. See Daniel Eisenberg’s entry in Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia (2003), pp. 398–99. 12 In the Mozarabic Chronicle the author explicitly states that it was a year after Roderick took power that Muslim forces attacked Spain and killed him, with no mention of Witiza’s sons whatsoever (López Pereira 1980, 69).The author of the Chronicle of Alfonso III, on the other hand, condemns the sins of Witiza’s sons, implying that they had grown, as he points out that they asked for the help of Saracens out of jealousy and greed (Barkai 1984, 40). 13 It is important to remember that this is the same Ṣumayl that had allied with Yusuf al-Fahrī against ʻAbd al-Raḥmān I at the time of his arrival in the Peninsula, and is thus a rival of the Umayyads. For more
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14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23
on Yusuf al-Fahrī’s confict with ʻAbd al-Raḥmān I, see Marilyn Walker’s entry on ʻAbd al-Raḥmān I in Medieval Iberia:An Encyclopedia (2003), p. 4. The translation is mine, since I disagree with James’ interpretation: “Tammam punned, ‘It’s fulflled!’ Abu Furay’a punned in turn,‘God willing, we’ll ravage the land!’” (69) This is the second day of the Hajj, which Muslims believe to have been the day that a part of verse 3 of the Quranic Sura al-Mā’idah, announcing that the religion of Islam had been perfected, was revealed. The most complete biography of Ibn Waḍḍāḥ can be found in Tārīkh ʻUlamāʼ Al-Andalus by Ibn al-Faraḍī (c. 1000; 1890), pp. 317–19. Aljamiado, from Arabic ʻajamīyah, is a term that denotes Romance-language texts transcribed with Arabic (and sometimes Hebrew) characters. This evidence supports Fierro’s observations on the presence of prophecies regarding expulsion during the foundational period of al-Andalus. For a brief overview of Hāshim’s rise to power and his eventual execution by al-Mundhir, see David James, 125, note 2. Interestingly enough, the assassination does not appear in the Akhbār Majmu¯‘a, where the anonymous author simply states that al-Mundhir died only two years after he became Emir, unable to solve the problems of his Emirate (Ibyārī 1981, 132). Nor does Ibn ʻIdhārī speak of an assassination, as in al-Bayān al-Mughrib he says that al-Mundhir’s death was caused by a malady (Ibn ʻIdhārī et al. 1848, 118). Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyah seems to be hinting at the conspiracy between Ibn Ḥafṣu¯n and Muṭarrif to overthrow Emir ʻAbdullāh, on which Ibn ‘Idhari elaborates further (150). This is a common name for concubines who give birth to potential heirs to the throne. It literally translates to “mother of a son”. Thaghr, literally “mouth” or “opening”, can also refer to vulnerable spaces on the frontier where an enemy could be expected to attack. See Ralph W. Brauer (1995), pp. 25–6.
References Bargach, Jamila. Orphans of Islam: Family,Abandonment, and Secret Adoption In Morocco. Rowman & Littlefeld Publishers, 2002. Barkai, Ron. Cristianos y Musulmanes En La España Medieval: (El Enemigo En El Espejo). Ediciones Rialp, 1984. Boigues, Francisco Pons. Ensayo bio-bibliográfco sobre los historiadores y geógrafos arábigo-españoles. SF de Sales, 1898. Borrut, A. “Vanishing Syria: Periodization and Power in Early Islam”. Islam – Zeitschrift für Geschichte Und Kultur Des Islamischen Orients, vol. 91, no. 1, 2014, pp. 37–68. Bosch-Vilá, J.“Ibn al-Ḳu¯ṭiyya”. In Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, Edited by P. Bearman,Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W.P. Heinrichs. doi:10.1163/1573–3912_islam_SIM_3265.Accessed 3 Aug 2018. Brauer, Ralph W. Boundaries and Frontiers in Medieval Muslim Geography. American Philosophical Society, 1995. Catlos, Brian A. Kingdoms of Faith:A New History of Islamic Spain. Basic Books, 2018. Collins, Roger. The Arab Conquest of Spain, 710–797. B. Blackwell, 1989. Dozy, Reinhart P.A., and Evariste Lévi-Provençal. Histoire Des Musulmans D’espagne: Jusqu’à La Conquête De L’andalousie Par Les Almoravides, 711–1110. E.J. Brill, 1932. Fierro, Maribel.“La obra histórica de Ibn al-Qutiyya”. Al-Qantara, vol. 10, no. 2, 1989, pp. 485–512. Filios, Denise K.“Legends of the Fall: Conde Julián In Medieval Arabic and Hispano-Latin Historiography”. Medieval Encounters, vol. 15, no. 2/4, 2009, pp. 375–390. Gerli, E Michael, and Samuel G Armistead. Medieval Iberia:An Encyclopedia. Routledge, 2003. Gossman, Lionel. Between History and Literature. Harvard University Press, 1990. Grillo, Laura. “Memoir as Method, or ‘What the Devil Was I up to Anyway?’” Divination: Perspectives for a New Millenium, edited by Patrick Curry,Ashgate, 2010. pp. 39–46. Herrero, Omayra. “El Perdón Del Gobernante En Las Sociedades Islámicas Pre-Modernas: Su Estudio a Través Del Ta’rij Iftitah Al-Andalus De Ibn Al-Qutiyya. (Spanish)”. Futuro Del Pasado: Revista Electrónica De Historia, vol. 1, 2010, pp. 475–488. Ibn, al-Faraḍī A.A.M, and Baskuwal Ibn. Historia Virorum Doctorum Andalusiae. Madrid: La Guirnalda, 1890. Ibn, Al-Qu¯ṭīyah, Muḥammad Ibn ʻUmar, and David James. Early Islamic Spain:The History of Ibn Al-Qu¯ṭīya: A Study of the Unique Arabic Manuscript In the Bibliothèque Nationale De France, Paris,With a Translation, Notes, and Comments. Routledge, 2009.
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Nasser Meerkhan Ibn, Al-Qu¯ṭīyah, and Ibrāhīm Ibyārī. Tārīkh Iftitāḥ Al-Andalus. al-Ṭabʻah 1. ed. Dār al-Kutub al-Islāmīyah, 1982. Ibn, Al-Qu¯ṭīyah, and A.A.M. Qutaybah. Historia de la Conquista de España. Tipografía de la “Revista de Archivos Bibliotecas y Museos”, 1926. Ibn, Al-Qu¯ṭīyah, and ʻUmar Ṭabbāʻ. Tārīkh Iftitāḥ Al-Andalus. Muʼassasat al-Maʻārif, 1994. Ibn, ʻIdhārī. Al-Bayān Al-Mughrib Fī Akhbār Al-Andalus Wa-Al-Maghrib. Bayru¯t: Dār al-Thaqāfah, 1980. Ibn, ʻIdhārī M, Reinhart P.A. Dozy, Evariste Lévi-Provençal, and ibn S. ʻArīb. Al-juzʼ Al-Awwal[-Al-Thālith] Min Al-Bayān Al-Mughrib Fī Akhbār Al-Andalus Wa-Al-Maghrib. Brīl, 1848. Ibyārī, Ibrāhīm. Akhbār Majmu¯ʻah Fī Fatḥ Al-Andalus Wa-Dhikr Umarāʼihā Wa-Al-Ḥuru¯b Al-Waāqiʻah Bi-Hā Baynahum. al-Ṭabʻah 1. ed. Dār al-Kutub al-Islāmīyah, 1981. Juynboll, G.H.A. Encyclopedia of Canonical Ḥadīth. Brill, 2007. Khalidi, Tarif. Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period. Cambridge University Press, 1994. Lapidus, Ira M. A History of Islamic Societies. Cambridge University Press, 2014. Le Goff, Jacques. Medieval Civilization, 400–1500. B. Blackwell, 1988. López Pereira, José Eduardo. Cronica Mozarabe De 754.Anubar Ediciones, 1980. Marín-Guzmán, Roberto.“Political Turmoil in Al-Andalus in the Time of the Amir ‘Abd Allah (888–912): Study of the Revolt of Daysam Ibn Isḣāq, Lord of Murcia and Lorca and the Role of ‘Umar Ibn Ḣafsu¯n”. The Muslim World, vol. 96, no.1, 2006, pp. 145–174. Menocal, Maria Rosa. The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance In Medieval Spain. Little, Brown & Company, 2002. Molina, Luis.“Un relato de la conquista de al-Andalus”. Al-Qantara, vol. 19, no. 1, 1998, pp. 39–65. Pellat, Charles. “The Origin and Development of Historiography in Muslim Spain”. In Historians of the Middle East, edited by B. Lewis and P.M. Holt, London, 1962, pp. 118–126. Thomas, David, et al. Christian Muslim Relations:A Bibliographical History. Brill, 2009.
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PART IV
Philosophy and spirituality
14 CORPOREALITY AND SOTERIOLOGY IN MEDIEVAL SPANISH HAGIOGRAPHY The body as signifer in the Libre dels tres reys d’Orient Andrew M. Beresford
Do not despair: one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume: one of the thieves was damned. Samuel Beckett (after St.Augustine) Preserved uniquely in Escorial MS K–III–4 alongside the Libro de Apolonio (Book of Apollonius, fols. 1r–64v) and the Vida de Santa María Egipciaca (Life of St. Mary of Egypt, fols. 65r–82r), the Libre dels tres reys d’Orient (Book of the Three Kings from the East, fols. 82v–85v) offers an arresting insight into the eschatological and soteriological intricacies of thirteenth-century hagiographic composition. Notable for its unorthodox structure and distinctive combination of sources, the Libre commences with an account of the reception of the Magi in Herod’s court before advancing to descriptions of the Adoration and the Massacre of the Innocents (lines 1–80). Inspired by the Arabic Gospel of the Infancy, its central section offers an exploration of the abduction of the Holy Family during the Flight into Egypt, recounting a miracle in which an infant is cured of leprosy when Mary cleanses his body in the bathwater in which she had previously bathed the infant Christ (lines 81–215).The poem thereafter concludes with a briefer, fnal section, which records the dialogue between Christ and the two thieves, Dismas and Gestas, during the climactic stages of the Crucifxion.The former, the once leprous infant, recognizes Christ’s divinity and is saved, while the latter, obstinately refusing to do so, fnds himself condemned not merely to the ignominy of judicial execution, but to the horrors of eternal damnation (lines 216–245). With the notable exception of David William Foster, who avers that the poem “appears to be composed of two major events lacking any signifcant inter-relationship” (1970: 77), the overwhelming majority of the Libre’s critics have advanced readings that isolate and defend issues of structural and conceptual unity. Commenting on topics such as the fusion of sources and traditions (Chaplin 1967; Richardson 1984), the techniques of narrative elaboration (Keller 1978; Zubillaga 2017), the signifcance of manuscript context (Beresford 2000), and the relationship 215
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between the Libre and other forms of devotional composition (Zubillaga 2019), critics have demonstrated that, far from a random or arbitrary creation, the poem is predicated on a carefully interlinked tripartite sequence of binary oppositions in which its protagonists fnd themselves confronted by dilemmas that exert a lasting and meaningful effect on both their ontological as well as their spiritual destiny. Underpinned by an overarching contrast between perception and blindness, between a willingness to embrace Christ and the abject folly of ignorance, the protagonists of the poem function as archetypes of virtue and vice, reaching outward in order to assail its audience with representations of idealized and/or reprehensible behaviors.The composition has implications in this respect not solely for the other works of the manuscript, which pose a range of comparable soteriological dilemmas, but for the corpus of early Castilian poetry more broadly, where questions of pious exemplarity are appraised from a range of mutually informative perspectives. Despite key advances in scholarship, however, the principal signifer of the Libre—the human body—is a topic that has not yet received the attention that it deserves. Figured partly as a structuring principle and partly as a hermeneutic for devotional and ideological indoctrination, the body functions throughout the poem as a leitmotif, impacting on questions of individual/collective identity as well as the broader issue of structural and intellectual coherence. Exploiting the rich conceptual potential of representations of suffering and pain, the early stages of the poem formulate a contrast between the Magi, who embrace the inevitability of Christian dominion, and Herod, who spurns it, opting instead to put the Holy Innocents to the sword.While their mothers bitterly lament their murder, Christ, who escapes death, soon comes into contact with a leprous child. Conceptualized initially as a dermal other, a fgure whose skin serves as an external correlative of the transgressions of his parents, the child is cured by the cleansing waters of baptism, which subsequently solemnize his newly acquired status as a member of the sacramentally reborn. Reincorporated in this way into society, the infant functions no longer as a catalyst for expressions of shame.Yet nailed alongside Christ on the cross some 33 years later, his body is transformed once again into an object of scopic fascination, serving along with that of a fellow criminal as a bounded system capable of conveying a range of complex ideological and soteriological meanings. It becomes important, in view of this, to reappraise the position of the body in the Libre and to consider not solely how it functions across the three episodes to produce a composition that is coherent, consistent, and above all, conceptually unifed, but how it serves, as is the case with the corpus of thirteenth-century poetry more broadly, as a stimulus for audience engagement and the development of procedures of mimetic identifcation. The relationship between identity and the physical body dominates the early stages of the poem. Christ, a king above kings, is recognized by the Magi, but not by Herod, who, rather than acquiesce to a fgure of higher authority, conceals his irritation and opts instead to order the sons of his kingdom slain. By delivering gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh—an event rendered in visual form in the illustration located strategically between the title of the poem and its opening line—the Magi draw attention to Christ’s status as an ontological composite, counterpointing his hybrid destiny as terrestrial king, ineffable God, and mortal man (Figure 14.1). Characterized as fgures who are as enlightened and reverential as Herod is foolish and malicious, the Magi formulate a relationship between antithetical and opposing extremes, casting conficting approaches to kingship and individual discernment in terms of a binary opposition between type and anti-type.As they bow in humble obeisance, celebrating the life of the Infant, Herod evolves into an implacable instrument of death, commanding his men to behead as many newborns as they can fnd. The narrator, intruding self-consciously into the narrative, injects an impression of heightened emotional tension, revulsed at how implacably Herod’s men obey their lord:“¡Mezquinos, que sin dolor / ob[e]decieron mandado de su señor!” (“Oh, wretched 216
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Figure 14.1 Detail. Adoration of the Magi, early thirteenth century. Biblioteca del Real Monasterio del Escorial MS K–III–4, fol. 82v.
men, for without sorrow, they obeyed the orders of their lord!”) (Zubillaga 2014: 187; lines 58–9). His assertion, however, proves ill-founded, for as the subsequent description reveals, the assassins far exceed Herod’s instructions, wrenching the arms of infants from their sockets along with their shoulders before severing their heads: Quantos niños fallavan, todos los descabeçavan: por las manos los tomavan por poco que los tiravan, sacavan a las vegadas los braços con las espaldas. (lines 60–5) [However many children they found, they beheaded them all: they took them in their hands and tore them as if they were nothing, they sometimes ripped off their arms along with their shoulders.] Although emended by Manuel Alvar (1965: 37 n.65), whose edition artifcially assuages the brutality of the Libre—rendering espaldas as espadas—the manuscript reading, as Alan Deyermond and Jane Connolly (1984) have demonstrated, generates an uncomfortable mood of revulsion. Far from a narrative anti-climax, with decapitation followed by occasional acts of posthumous mutilation, the poem depicts a moment of mindless and unsolicited butchery, a violation of the most profound and basic human bonds. Wrenched so violently from their mothers that their arms and shoulders are hewn from their bodies, the Infants are subjected 217
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to a fate that far outstrips the callousness of Herod’s mandate. Complementing decapitation, which, as its etymological evolution from the Latin caput suggests, functions as a swift and implacable punishment for capital crimes, the hewing of arms and shoulders plays on the instinctive human sensitivities of the Libre’s audience, encouraging them to formulate a vivid mental image of bodies, not yet fully grown, that have been violated, brutalized, and smashed into pieces—the usual parts, but no longer in the usual place. The encounter serves accordingly as an ambivalent catalyst for reactions of sympathy and disgust, encouraging procedures of empathetic engagement while at the same time repelling audiences with its horrifying monstrosity (Miller 1997). The process of identifcation, in part, is one of ontological displacement and the concomitant superimposition of self onto imagined other (Figure 14.2). Encouraged to read their bodies, and indeed, the bodies of their children, in terms of the sadistic corporeal violence inficted on the Innocents, members of the audience fnd themselves confronted with a reminder not simply of the precariousness of terrestrial existence, but of the inescapable frangibility of the human body per se.With heads, arms, and shoulders brutally severed from their torsos, the Innocents serve as a representation of the horrors of corporeal fragmentation. Preying accordingly on primal fears and apprehensions relating to the totality of the human body (a notion encoded linguistically into the designation of the individual as an entity that cannot or should not be divided), the Infants become a focus for sensate identifcation, challenging traditional distinctions between subject and object, between the self as a coherent ontological entity and its inexorable dissolution and descent into ambiguity. The construction of selfhood in this way becomes fuid and polymorphous, with an exceptionally violent and brutalizing death evincing moods of apprehension and disgust as well as morbid and intrusive fascination. Compelled to contemplate
Figure 14.2 Detail. Massacre of the Innocents, ca. 1180. Basílica de San Isidoro de León, Panteón de los Reyes, León.
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the unimaginable, to form a vivid mental image of the shocking anatomical consequences of Herod’s brutality, members of the audience become trapped by competing imperatives, with the desire to visualize, commemorate, and revivify vying awkwardly with instinctive reactions of horror, nausea, and revulsion—a basic overarching desire to turn away. Inducing moods of affective mimetic identifcation as well as guilt and uncertainty, the Libre preys in this way on the fears and neuroses of the medieval Iberian psyche, anticipating the requirement for posthumous corporeal reassembly at the Last Judgement. As members of the audience become increasingly aware both of their limitations, their inability to emulate the Innocents in anything other than a partial or tokenistic manner, and of their guilt, fantasizing intrusively and voyeuristically over representations of corporeal degradation, they become as excited as they are appalled, transforming the bodies of the martyrs into a collectivized locus of fetishistic scrutiny. Important to recognize, however, is that the episode is infected from a female rather than universal perspective. Recalling Jeremiah 31:15, the grief of the mothers is described not simply as inconsolable, but as a typological fulfllment of that of Rachel: Mesquinas, ¡qué cuitas vieron las madres que los parieron! Toda madre puede entender quál duelo podrié seyer, que en el çielo fue oído el planto de Rachel. (lines 66–71) [Oh, wretched women, what torments the mothers who bore them saw! Every mother can understand the extent of their anguish, just as Rachel’s lament was heard in heaven.] Celebrated as a feast from the ffth century onward, the cult of the Innocents, as Kathleen Nolan (1996: 95) demonstrates, became particularly popular in the twelfth century, when the number of artistic and literary representations reached its zenith. Serving in part as an opportunity for bereft mothers to assuage their anguish, depictions of the Innocents refect chiefy on questions of female spirituality and motherhood, functioning as a conceptual prolepsis for the grief of the Virgin. In contrast to other women who have their offspring wrenched from their bosoms and slaughtered, Mary, as the accompanying illustration reveals (Figure 14.1), continues to cradle Christ affectionately in her arms. The Flight into Egypt ensures her escape and enables her child to arrive at a state of adult maturity.Yet with his subsequent arrest and crucifxion, she fnds herself compelled, belatedly, to suffer the agony of his loss—an image that culminates in the psycho-theological intensity of the pietà, where she cradles the dead Christ in her arms as if he were still an infant. Her sorrow, which unites her with all grieving mothers, can be read alongside an absence of reference to questions of fatherhood or paternal suffering, mirroring in effect the absence of Joseph from large sections of the Gospel narrative, particularly the Passion. It becomes tempting, accordingly, to interpret the Massacre, as Laura Jacobus (1999) avers, as a uniquely female trope (Figure 14.3). Offering a gut-wrenching evocation of unbearable loss, the actions of Herod’s henchmen cannot be contemplated dispassionately by women, particularly in an age in which constructions of female identity were functionally integral to constructions of secular motherhood. The Massacre serves partly therefore to mark out the exceptionality of the Virgin, and partly to underline an impression of overarching maternal equivalence, with Mary standing both as the unattainable ideal of purity and virtue, and as a vulnerable human subject capable of dignifying 219
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Figure 14.3 Massacre of the Innocents from the polychrome tabernacle from the Ermita de Santa María la Real del Campo del Castildelgado, Burgos, c. 1300. Barcelona, Museu Frederic Marès. © Foto: Ramon Muro.
the sorrow of all grieving mothers.The parallel is enhanced by the relationship between Christ and the Innocents, for despite the fact that their martyrdoms function as baptisms by blood, they are unable to ascend to heaven as martyrs until Christ shatters the gates of hell and escorts their souls to heaven. As Rosa Alcoy (1985) reveals, it is perhaps for this reason that various artistic representations depict the reappearance of the mothers as mourners at the Crucifxion, with their grief for the dead Christ functioning correspondingly as an analeptic refection on the slaughter of their own infant sons. It is clear in this respect that scholarship on the poem, and indeed on early Spanish poetry more broadly, has much to learn from art historical research, which should be regarded not as separate and distinct, but as the product of a complementary creative agenda (see also Quintana de Uña 1987). Although cultural historians such as Philippe Ariès (1962) have proposed that medievals were unwilling to recognize childhood as a separate phase of life, remaining emotionally detached from their offspring as a protective response to unfavorable levels of infant mortality, the Libre establishes a profoundly emotional connection between mothers and their sons.With responses to the Massacre collectivized rather than individually rendered, and envisioned typologically as a stylized fulfllment of Old Testament prophecy, the emphasis of the poem falls on communal identifcation rather than personalized lamentation or expressions of resistance. Unnamed and indistinct from one another, the mothers are reduced to a shadowy collectivized presence, their compassionate 220
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maternal grief standing in opposition to acts of ruthless male violence.The male/female polarity is enhanced most notably in the visual tradition, where, as various critics have recognized, the mothers often fnd themselves confronted by strong muscular men whose weapons intimate suggestions of sexualized—and particularly phallic—violation. The polarity is further extended, as Jacobus (1999) observes, in representations that explore the sexual and symbolic connotations of the breast, which becomes exposed to the public gaze when the infants are forcibly wrenched away from the mothers who nursed them.Those who had created and nurtured life are transformed accordingly into the defled witnesses of its premature annihilation, functioning in effect as a chorus of violated plañideras (communal mourners) engaged in procedures of ritualized lamentation. Crucial to recognize, however, is that the Massacre functions not solely as a representation of sacred history, but as a cipher for broader cultural developments. In her analysis of the Winchester Psalter, Kristine Edmondson Haney (1986: 34–5) equates an explosion of interest in twelfthcentury England to reports of brutality under King Stephen, overlaying the monstrousness of Herod onto accounts of contemporary despotism (Figure 14.4). Equally informative is the work of Rachel Dressler, which interprets the treatment of sculpted images in Chartres Cathedral as “coded references to Jewish guilt and Muslim vice” (1995: 191). Signaling the presence of Crusader-infected content and the representation of the Innocents as miles Christi, Dressler affrms that the sculptures could potentially have been inspired by the Children’s Crusade of 1212, a date that raises considerations for the chronology of the Libre, which is likely to have been composed at some point during the following decades. Perhaps most incisive, however, is the work of David Kunzle (2001), which focuses on the representation of the Innocents in the paintings of Pieter Bruegel. Interpreting the artist’s treatment of the theme as a comment on the atrocities committed by the Spanish in the Low Countries in the sixteenth century, Kunzle convincingly demonstrates that Herod is represented specifcally as its governor, the Duque de Alba.The Massacre functions in this respect as a malleable metaphor
Figure 14.4 Massacre of the Innocents from the Infancy Antependium from Parish Church of Arteta, Navarre, c. 1325–1350. Barcelona, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.
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and mirror for crimes such as murder, genocide, and callous governance, heralding the importance of events far beyond the narrative. Herod, correspondingly, functions both as King of the Jews—a designated somatic and spiritual other—and as a metaphor for stultifying blindness and mindless political violence. Formulated in contradistinction to the collectivized Christian self, he misappropriates power and descends to the level of a tyrant, ordering a barbaric act of infanticide that results not solely in the slaughter of a generation, but in the estrangement of potential allies and the forced exile of the Holy Family. Since the poem exudes an air of universality, it becomes crucial to consider not solely when it was composed and copied, but how its emphasis would have been renewed by subsequent generations, with each successive retelling offering a fresh perspective on questions of alterity and opposition. Rendered almost infnitely malleable, a semiotic nomad striving for identifcation with an appropriate sign, Herod becomes an all-encompassing manifestation of the despised and repudiated other—a negative exemplum or symbolic leper capable of spreading death and destruction to all that he touches. It becomes important, in view of this, to understand how the development of his character relates to the two subsequent narrative episodes, and to consider how his transgressions impact more broadly on questions of soteriology, with the salvation of the Innocents counterbalanced by the inevitability of his own corporeal deconstitution and eternal damnation.Although the specifcs of his fate are not recorded, popular tradition held that Herod lived until the age of 70 before suffering an agonizing affiction in which his genitals liquesced and swarmed with stinking maggots—an appropriately corporeal punishment for an abhorrently unfatherly crime (Beresford 2014: 970). The opposition between Herod and the Magi leads in the central portion of the Libre to a contrast between the Good and Bad Thieves, but most signifcantly, to the relationship between Christ and Dismas. As they traverse the path from Judea to Egypt, the Holy Family are assailed by a brace of thieves, the eldest of whom determines, with Herod-like cruelty, to have Mary and Joseph beheaded before cleaving the Infant with his knife (Figure 14.5). Opting instead, however, to detain them as prisoners, the Good Thief resolves to welcome them into his home, where they are received with unexpected deference. The Good Thief ’s wife, toiling indefatigably to ensure their comfort, even takes the time to bathe the Infant, shedding copious tears as she cradles him tenderly in her arms. Her actions, which arouse Mary’s curiosity, lead to a startling admission. Wishing herself dead and characterizing her plight as a punishment for her sins, the Good Thief ’s wife announces that her infant son is suffering from leprosy. Her tears in this respect function as a symbol of repentance as well as sadness, relating her to—while at the same time distancing her from—the grieving mothers of the Massacre: Ella dixo:“No lo çelaré, amiga, mas queredes que vos diga; yo tengo tamaña cueita que querría seyer muerta; un fjuelo que havía, que parí el otro día, afélo allí, don jaz, gafo, por mi pecado despugado”. (lines 165–172) [She said:“I shall not hide it, my friend, but you want me to tell you; I have such great sorrow that I wish I were dead; a little child that I had, that I gave birth to the other day, behold him there, where he lies, leprous, condemned for my sins”.] 222
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Figure 14.5 Flight into Egypt from the Altarpiece of the Life of the Virgin/the Altarpiece of the Nursing Madonna by Antoni Peris (f. 1393–1423). © Museu de Belles Arts,València.
Refocusing the attentions of the audience on the signifying potential of the human body, the poem formulates Christ, who is pristine, and Dismas, who is tainted by the stigma of leprosy, as binarily opposed objects of fetishistic scrutiny. Lauded as sublimely beautiful and objectifed through the power of the gaze, Christ functions as a focalizing nucleus for expressions of social homogenization and aspirational desire, signaling the hope of forgiveness and the prospect of ultimate redemption. Dismas, in contrast, segregated from the presence of those gathered—positioned conspicuously allí—is characterized as a source of pollution and ritual impurity. Suffering from a form of living death and reputedly able to contaminate merely by contact, he becomes a representation of the uncertain, the in-between, a transgressive taboolike force capable of shattering confdence in the ineluctable primacy of human structure, system, and order (Kristeva 1982). It becomes important, in view of this, to ensure that he is banished implacably from society, maintaining a safe and appropriate distance from all that is clean and devout. Yet Mary, overcoming instinctive human reactions of disgust and deflement, takes pity on Dismas’s abject condition and offers in turn to bathe him: “yo lo bañaré, que no só ascorosa” (“I’ll bathe him, for I’m not squeamish”) (line 174). Enfolding the leprous child in her arms, she brings him into contact with the waters in which Christ had been immersed, and in this way cures him miraculously of his affiction.The bath functions accordingly not solely as a mechanism for restoring the clarity of the once clearly demarcated borderline between life and death, 223
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but as a symbol of the sacramentally redemptive waters of baptism and the prospect of ultimate salvation: la Gloriosa lo metió en el agua do bañado era el Rey del cielo e de la tierra. La vertut fue fecha man a mano, metiól’ gafo e sacól’ sano. En el agua fncó todo el mal, tal lo sacó com’ un cristal. (lines 179–185) [The Glorious One put him in the water where the King of Heaven and Earth was bathed. The miracle took place instantly, she put him in leprous and lifted him out healthy.The corruption remained in the water, she lifted him out as clear as crystal.] Conceptualized as a process of death and cognate rebirth, baptism signals the demise of Dismas’s existing self and his transformation into a more highly evolved form.The bath, envisioned both as a tomb to his former life and as a womb capable of fostering his rebirth into a future of salvifc certainty, functions, as Robin M. Jensen (2012) suggests, as an ambivalent signifer of dislocation and belonging. Casting off his former self, Dismas negotiates an irrevocable social boundary, becoming a member of a new race, a new identity, a single, exclusive family of heirs to the kingdom of heaven. Dead to his former self, he is reborn, sealed, and signed by the Holy Spirit, putting on Christ, as Galatians 3:27 affrms, as an incorruptible garment. Additional textual authority is offered by John 3:5, which proclaims that only those of water born will gain access to the kingdom of heaven. Dismas’s immersion is not solely in this sense a physical or bodily experience, but one that is fundamentally soteriological, paving the way both for his execution on the cross and his heartfelt expression of contrition. As Gilbert Lewis (1987: 596) reveals, leprosy—or Hansen’s Disease, to give it its modern medical name—has traditionally served as a catch-all for a range of sores and skin conditions, from vitiligo through to psoriasis or even impetigo. Marked as products of divine retribution, its victims have traditionally been stigmatized and segregated, their appearance regarded as an external manifestation of sin. Frequently described in the Bible, notably in Leviticus, which devotes two chapters to generalized instructions for diagnosis and ritual cleansing, the symptoms of leprosy include deformity, loss of feeling, atrophy, blindness, and paresis (or weakness of voluntary movement). Since the Libre, other than characterizing Dismas as a source of abject repudiation, makes no explicit reference either to the symptoms of his suffering or their dermatological appearance, it becomes tempting to assume that “gafo”, which, as Alvar (1965: 177) affrms, is derived from the Arabic qaf‘a (an allusion to the leper’s twisted and stunted fngers), could potentially refer to any number of generic skin ailments.The crucial conceptual point is that Dismas is not simply afficted but ritually impure. Identifying him as a fgure to be repudiated and disavowed, his dermal appearance serves as an external correlative of inner iniquity, pointing ultimately to the sins of his parents and the dire corporeal consequences of transgressions such as simony, murder, lust, or even incest. As Joseph Zias (1989) reports, rabbinical law reads leprosy specifcally in terms of an excess of blood, affrming that it is caused by a failure to observe an appropriate period of post-menstrual separation, or more directly, by a husband engaging in coitus with his wife during her menstrual period. Although it seems implausible that the Jewish authorities would have been incognizant of the fundamental biological laws of procreation, it is noticeable that such beliefs appear not 224
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only to be widespread, but to have infuenced subsequent Christian thought. Important in this respect are the works of writers such as Gregory of Tours, who, as Zias (1989: 29) demonstrates, associate leprosy with procreation, averring that the offspring of sexual unions taking place on the Sabbath will suffer either from leprosy or epilepsy. A potential explanation is offered by modern medical studies, which reveal that the onset of pregnancy can produce hormonal changes capable of triggering leprosy, an affiction that could potentially have remained at a subclinical level for an extended period, possibly even as long as 20 years. It is likely, in view of this, that women would have frst noticed the disease with the onset of pregnancy, and since disease in the biblical sense is commonly fgured as a direct result of and punishment for sin, it becomes almost inevitable that parents would be blamed for transgressing basic sexual laws. Although regulations for the management of lepers have varied across time and between locations, a common denominator is a requirement for the separation of its victims from the routines of everyday life.The implicit assumption is that since bodily corruption declares spiritual corruption, the leper is dead to the world and cannot therefore be readmitted or come into contact with those who are clean, particularly fgures of religious authority whose cleanliness is fundamental to their station and ability to exercise spiritual dominion. Generating moods of fear and revulsion, the leper functions as a manifestation of the abject, a corpse-like reminder of death and the dissolution of the human form into the anonymous detritus of the grave (Kristeva 1982).The emphasis of separation is in this sense as reciprocal as it is antithetical, predicated on opposing dichotomies of life/death and purity/corruption. Regarded as a source of deflement, the unclean must not only be avoided, but separated entirely from people and places, particularly those associated with worship. The clean and pure, in contrast, must eschew contact with the afficted, lest their association result in a concomitant descent into contamination and deflement. Mary’s decision to bathe the infant is in this sense all the more remarkable. Rather than contracting the same disease or becoming tainted by spatial proximity, she offers proof of her divinity by curing Dismas of his sickness and raising him from death to life. He is able in this way to progress to a state of adult maturity, an achievement that in itself recalls the fight of the Holy Family from Herod’s murderous clutches and the corresponding progression of Christ from infant to adult. Echoing the ritualistic procedures outlined in Levitical law, the sanitizing waters of the bath function as a source of miraculous purifcation, a purgative or primal rite of passage authorizing Dismas’s readmission to his family and human society at large. Cleansed along with the specifc transgressions of his parents, the consequences of original sin are confdently washed away. Once dead to the world, cast out of the land of the living, Dismas is restored to the life from which he had previously been estranged.The poem in this respect further cements the relationship between type and anti-type, reminding its audience of the distinction between Herod and the Magi whilst offering a proleptic anticipation of the soteriological opposition between the adult Dismas, who repents and is saved, and his companion, Gestas, who refuses to do so, condemning himself thereby to the horrors of eternal damnation.The implication is that, since the barriers between the opposing dichotomies of life/death, virtue/sin, and redemption/ damnation are by no means fxed, the individual, blessed with the gift of free will, retains an intrinsic and inviolable capacity for self-renewal and the achievement of celestial grace. The concluding sections of the Libre further extend the relationship between corporeality and soteriology. Recognizing Christ as the son of God, the wife of the Good Thief gives voice to a heartfelt expression of gratitude before enjoining her husband to inspect the newly revitalized body of their son—his body now as pristine and perfect as that of the infant Christ. Ontologically as well as physically transformed, Dismas continues to function as a scopic object and focus for self-defnition, offering his father a tangible visible illustration of the power of God 225
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on Earth. The Good Thief, accepting corporeal evidence as proof of the miraculous, resolves thereafter to deceive his companion and escort the Holy Family to Egypt.Although the content of the following section is condensed, formulating a striking 33-year distinction between story and narrative time, we soon learn that, subsequent to the fight of the Holy Family, the Bad Thief fathers a son of his own, who, like Dismas, promptly follows in his footsteps by emulating his appalling example. In addition to general acts of thievery, the text reports specifcally on the brutal decapitation of pilgrims:“salién robar caminos / e degollavan los pelegrinos” (“they went out to steal from the roads and beheaded pilgrims”) (lines 220–21). It in this way recalls Herod’s imperative at the start of the Libre, further reinforcing the poem’s structure by formulating an explicit link between pilgrimage and the notion of life as a soteriological journey. In contrast to theft, which demonstrates a basic level of dishonesty, acts of murder and corporeal mutilation serve as indexes of a more profound descent into criminality. In view of the specifc wording of the Libre, it may even be that decapitation is envisaged as a primary objective, a form of callous psycho-pathological obsession rather than an accidental by-product of a life of theft. It is probably for this reason that, when at last detained by Pilate, Dismas and Gestas are sentenced to death on the cross, the summum supplicium of Roman judicial procedure.The episode, which is barely developed beyond the formulation of a simple but effective binarism, records only the most basic details of their fate, omitting reference to the circumstances of their arrest, trial, and journey to Calvary. Equally conspicuous by its absence is a consideration of the horrifc brutalizing pain of crucifxion, with preliminary acts of scourging or fogging followed by the agony of nails penetrating the fesh and the prospect of a slow and lingering death caused by blood loss, exhaustion, and suffocation. In the case of Dismas, of course, the irony is obvious. Designed specifcally in order to stigmatize and humiliate its victims, crucifxion transforms the human body, as is the case with leprosy, into an object of public disgust, subjecting it to a curious and controlling gaze capable of marking it out as alien, as other, as polar opposite—a tangible visual manifestation of all that mannered society is not. The Libre in this respect generates an additional layer of meaning by playing on the Christus quasi leprosus or Christ-as-leper tradition (Giles 2018).The association, derived ultimately from St. Jerome’s free translation of Isaiah 53:4 from Greek into the Latin of the Vulgate, characterizes Christ as a fgure who, having assumed “the likeness of sinful fesh” (Romans 8:4) in its most base and wretched form, will be correspondingly repudiated and punished (Brenner 2015: 224–25).The welts and contusions inficted on Christ’s body, functioning as a striking visual and symbolic correlative of the leper’s disfgured and lacerated skin, serve thus as an anticipation of the fact that, precisely as is the case with the infant Dismas, he will be summarily cast out from society, despised, and rejected by those who look upon him. Yet taking the question of corporeal suffering for granted, the Libre is instead developed with admirable narrative economy, compelling its audience to engage once again in acts of imaginative visualization and affective mimetic identifcation. Dismas, located on the right-hand-side of Christ, solicits his mercy and recognizes him as the Savior. He is rewarded accordingly with the gift of eternal life: El que en su agua fue bañado fue puesto al su diestro lado; luego quel’ vio, en Él creyó e merçet le demandó. Nuestro Señor dixo:“Oy serás comigo en el santo paraíso”. (lines 228–233) 226
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[The one who was bathed in his water was placed on his right-hand side; when he saw him, he believed in him and sought mercy of him. Our Lord said:“Today you shall be with me in holy paradise”.] Gestas, in contrast, stubbornly refuses to believe. Positioned symbolically on the left-hand-side of Christ, he remains trapped by blindness and ignorance, unable, like Herod, to recognize the identity of the Savior through the cognitive power of the gaze. Seeing only a common criminal, a fgure nailed unceremoniously to an instrument of lethal torture, he affrms that since Christ cannot help himself, he will be unable to help others: El f de traidor quando fablava todo lo despreçiava. Diz:“Varón, ¡cómo eres loco, que Christus non te valdrá tan poco! A sí non puede prestar, ¿cómo puede a ti uviar?” (lines 234–39) [When the son of the rascal spoke, he despised it all. He said: “Man, how foolish you are, for Christ cannot help you at all! He cannot save himself, how can he help you?”] In contrast to the treatment of Dismas, Christ in this instance remains silent, refusing to dignify Gestas’s ignorant and misguided retort with a clarifying response. Reiterating the dialectical nature of their soteriological destinies, the text instead concludes with curt precision, affrming that while Gestas is damned, Dismas ascends to Paradise: [É]ste fue en inferno miso e el otro en paraíso. Dimas fue salvo e Gestas fue condampnado. (lines 240–43) [The latter was sent to hell and the other to paradise. Dismas was saved and Gestas was condemned.] The two thieves serve in this respect as the opposing poles of a binary opposition. Dismas, a lifelong malefactor responsible for a catalogue of demeaning and abhorrent transgressions, recognizes Christ as the Savior and expresses contrition, transforming himself in so doing from a delinquent into a positive exemplum. Since the blood that he sheds, invested with redemptive properties, constitutes a form of symbolic baptism, his suffering relates him to that of the Innocents, who, with equal grace, are received into heaven as martyrs. For those who look on, the spectacle of his death, the frst tangible fruit of Christian redemption, constitutes an experience that is consummately edifying.Transcending the abject horror of judicial execution, Dismas’s publicly displayed corpse serves as a catalyst for procedures of specular self-examination and profound soteriological inquiry. Recognizing themselves in Dismas, just as Dismas himself found inspiration in the suffering of Christ, the audience transforms the former sinner into a locus of scopic veneration, a focalizing nucleus for expressions of repentance and confessional self-defnition. His punishment, in this sense, is inherently paradoxical: exemplifying the medieval obsession with the ambiguity of suffering and pain, his twisted and mutilated body—a 227
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penalty in itself for brutalizing the bodies of his victims—serves as both the cause of and the solution to his predicament.As repellent as it is beautiful, as fearful as it is enviable, his unendurable yet enthralling sacrifce captivates and beguiles the attentions of believers, elevating him to the status of a saint (Figure 14.6). Yet his companion, Gestas, in contrast, spurns Christ in a ft of stubborn pique and dies accordingly in a state of despair, unregenerate, and like Herod, damned for all eternity. Despite the fact that he is subjected to precisely the same torment, secured brutally by his hands and feet to the wood of the cross, his suffering is neither edifying nor inspiring. In fact, it serves merely to offer him—and, by extension, the audience—a proleptic foretaste of the torments to which he will be subjected.The crucial point is that Gestas’s mortal demise is not the end of existence,
Figure 14.6 Crucifxion from the Altarpiece of the Holy Cross by Miquel Alcanyís (f. 1407–1447). © Museu de Belles Arts de València.
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but merely the conclusion of his earthly travail. His suffering, which provides appropriate and compelling evidence of the ineluctable primacy of the judicial apparatus, serves as a punishment for the crimes of theft and murder, shattering his corporeal integrity just as he himself had annihilated the bodies of others.Yet his pains, although tangible and excruciatingly real, function merely as the fulcrum of a see-saw ambivalence, formulating his death as a transformative obstacle on the pathway toward ontological fxity—the endless, immutable certainty of the life to come. Serving as a prelude to a series of more devastating and virulent forms of suffering, his humiliation on the cross emphasizes the extent to which he has been condemned in perpetuity to endure the degradations of the ignominious and the uncontrite.The execution is not in this sense the punishment per se, but, as Samuel Edgerton (2003: 236–37) suggests, a premature remanding of his soul to the supreme court, where Christ, as King of Heaven, will pronounce the ultimate verdict, condemning him to an appropriately ignoble and inglorious end. In his landmark analysis of the relationship between punishment and spectacle, Mitchell B. Merback (1999: 221–22) explains how the contrasting fates of Dismas and Gestas are central to the medieval economy of response. Just as it succeeds in transforming the former into the likeness of Christ, and hence a fgure worthy of compassion, admiration, and veneration, the same violent and brutalizing death marks out the latter unambiguously as a scapegoat, a fgure worthy of nothing but mockery and scorn. Suspended on either side of Christ, Dismas and Gestas function as antithetical models for a culture attuned to pain’s instrumentality in the pursuit of redemption, the contrast between them thematizing a type of existential crossroads that the devout will be obliged to negotiate at the hour of their deaths. Formulating torture as a mechanism for transcending the wickedness of his former life and accessing a new self, an identity purged of iniquity and pristine in its commitment to an afterlife of contrite purity, Dismas blossoms at the moment of death, recognizing the authority of the divine in the fgure at his side.Yet Gestas, in contrast, blinded by obstinate ignorance, succeeds merely in haunting the spectacle of redemption, transforming himself in so doing into a fearful exemplum of despair, a soul teetering on the precipice of damnation and annihilation. It becomes possible in this respect to read their respective fates in terms of the terminology advanced by Elaine Scarry (1985), with the suffering of Gestas functioning as a form of life-ending or world-destroying nihilism, but that of Dismas offering a life-affrming mechanism for enabling him to progress through a form of symbolic rebirth to become patron of the good death. His conversion in this sense marks a crucial and necessary stage on the penitent’s path toward reconciliation and self-understanding. As Merback (1999: 222–23) rightly adduces, the contrasting examples of Dismas and Gestas are unlikely to have been far from the minds of medieval Christians, particularly those who faced the imminent prospect of death, or, at a more specifc level of correspondence, participated in or witnessed the staging of acts of public torture and execution.Although the Libre, as is the case of the corpus of early Spanish poetry more generally, fully endorses the effcacy and moral correctness of capital punishment, regarding it as an integral and necessary component of the judicial apparatus, the question of how individuals react to its operation is of paramount importance. Suspended on the cross, Gestas becomes a source of abject repudiation, his corporeal mutilation fgured as a disgusting but necessary manifestation of the rule of law and the ineluctable fate meted out to those who transgress or err in their obligations. His companion, Dismas, in contrast, suffers an identical fate, but rather than lapse into despair, he accepts his punishment, ensuring in so doing that the brutalization of his fesh and the voiding of his blood are reformulated conceptually as sacrifces capable of ensuring his salvation.The two fgures stand in this respect, as is the case with Herod and the Magi (and, indeed, their own fathers before them), as examples of type and anti-type.While Dismas’s death is to be embraced and lauded, that of Gestas is to be diligently eschewed, his worthless corpse expelled from society as if it were that of a leper. 229
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In its effect on the audience, the Dismas/Gestas relationship is by no means straightforward. Averring that identity formation is a process that embroils subjectivity in a complex and potentially ambivalent dialectic of absence and presence. Merback (1999: 241) demonstrates that before an empathetic approximation of one’s life to a sensate other can be recognized and fully enacted, a part of what is already present in the self must also be displaced from its ontology in time and space so as to be constituted as a presence in the life of the reformulated desiring subject.The process, which has an obvious analogue in mystical spirituality, where contemplation commonly results in the capacity of the soul to transform itself into the observed or imagined object through a process of mimetic self-displacement, creates a fusionary process outside of which it becomes impossible for simple terms or even identities to exist as discrete entities. Accordingly, the mechanics of audience/character identifcation are such that, although Dismas and Gestas continue to stand as distinct individuals, counterpointing mutually exclusive reactions to contrition and belief, they remain functionally inseparable, both within the poem and more broadly in the mind of its audience, which becomes unable to emulate positive exemplarity without at the same time repressing or rejecting its negative counterpart. The complexity of the process could potentially be related to representations of the abject and the interaction between forces of purity and corruption, particularly, as suggested by the central portion of the poem, the notion of leprosy as a type of living death. It also encourages the audience to focus on the spatial dynamics of execution, which, as Mary Douglas’s (1973) anthropological work reveals, are predicated on an analogy with organic human defecation. Set up specifcally outside the city walls, the designated locus of criminal execution—here Calvary—remains separate from society. Condemned criminals, taken from incarceration within the bowels of the city, then pass along a street that, like the colon in the abdomen connecting the digestive system to the rectum, expels them as if they were human feces passing through an anus-like gate. Taking the process of abject repudiation to an extreme, Gestas’s fate evinces reactions of horror and disgust, but also a desire for his worthless and polluted cadaver to be consumed utterly by the fames of hell—an absolute and inviolable separation of the clean and the virtuous from the leper-like contamination of his stubborn refusal.Yet Dismas’s execution, functioning rather as a sanitizing social purgative, transforms him into an expressive and compelling model of contrition.Tortured and forced to endure unimaginable pain, he is expelled from society (for a second time) as a dangerous and polluting force, the actualization of his penance rendering him clean and uncontaminated, a freshly sanitized model of the good death to which believers should aspire. It becomes possible, in view of this, to read his example in relation to the edicts of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), which encouraged the devout to adopt the sacraments of confession and penance so as to unburden the soul of sin, partake of the grace of the crucifed Christ, and embrace active and dynamic models of spiritual consolation. The Libre in this respect advances a complex and conceptually sophisticated re-reading not just of biblical history but of the contrary and conficted nature of the human condition per se. Envisioned respectively as dextra and sinistra, as saved and damned, Dismas and Gestas adopt contrary and opposing positions indicative of their antithetically opposed natures.The former, like the Magi and the Good Thief, accepts the salvifc certainty of Christ, and by expressing contrition, demonstrates that he is receptive to the revelation of divine truth and the potential for redemption.The latter, in contrast, refuses to acknowledge the primacy of Christ, and like Herod and the Bad Thief, condemns himself to an eternity of hellish torment. Demonstrating how the potential for salvation lies within, the contrast between Dismas and Gestas focuses the attentions of the audience on the divided, conficted condition of human nature and the position of mortals suspended precariously between extremes of hope and despair.The fundamental point, as Vivienne Richardson (1984: 184–85) rightly recognizes, is that in each of the Libre’s 230
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sections, its protagonists formulate responses to precisely the same stimuli: Herod, a king like the Magi, is offered an opportunity to venerate Christ, just as the Bad Thief could have been merciful to the Holy Family and Gestas could have repented on the cross.The fact that they choose not to do so, of course, ensures not only that they are damned, but that the ternary structure of the poem becomes saturated by a marked impression of dualism, with the relationship between virtue and salvation, on the one hand, offset on the other by an inexorable correlation between vice and damnation. The Libre in this way reaches outward from its immediate context to offer a profound comment on the soteriological complexity of thirteenth-century Spain and the Middle Ages more broadly. Preserved uniquely in Escorial MS K–III–4 as the third in a tripartite sequence of poems, each exploring the dialectical relationship between virtue and vice (Beresford 2000), it refects unambiguously on questions of decision-making and individual judgment, formulating that of Christ not solely as the conclusion of its three narrative sections, but of the sequence of poems as a whole. With the partial exception of Gonzalo de Berceo’s Martirio de San Lorenzo (Martyrdom of St. Lawrence), which offers a truncated account of the roasting of St. Lawrence on the gridiron, the Libre constitutes the only complete extant account of martyrdom in the thirteenth-century poetic corpus—a factor that marks a signifcant distinction between Spain and other European nations, where martyrdom remains the dominant mode of hagiographic composition. Comparing and contrasting the fate of the Innocents, who are murdered by Herod’s henchmen, with that of Dismas, a thief and murderer who belatedly repents on the cross, the poem adopts an unequivocally optimistic outlook, affrming that individuals, however iniquitous or disturbing their crimes, retain the potential for redemption, even whilst drawing their fnal breath. It serves in this respect as a manifestation of a dilemma that culminates in the later Middle Ages in the bleak soteriological pessimism of works such as Fernando de Rojas’s Celestina, where the question of last-minute repentance is appraised from an altogether more barbed and cynical perspective.
References Alcoy, Rosa. 1985. “Una propuesta de relación texto-imagen: Las madres de los Santos Inocentes y la iconografía de la Pasión en la pintura italiana del siglo XIV”. D’Art 11: 133–159. Alvar, Manuel, ed. 1965. Libro de la infancia y muerte de Jesús (“Libre dels tres reys d’Orient”). Clásicos Hispánicos 2.8. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científcas. Ariès, Philippe. 1962. Centuries of Childhood.Translated by Robert Baldick. London: Cape. Beresford,Andrew M. 2000.“The Vida de Santa María Egipciaca and the Question of Manuscript Unity”. In Text & Manuscript in Medieval Spain: Papers from the King’s College Colloquium, edited by David Hook, 79– 102. King’s College London Hispanic Series 5. London: Department of Spanish and Spanish American Studies, King’s College. Beresford, Andrew M. 2014. “Abjection, Marriage, and the Burrowing Worm: The Body as Bounded System in the Dança general de la Muerte”. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 91.8: 965–980. Brenner, Elma. 2015. “Between Palliative Care and Curing the Soul: Medical and Religious Responses to Leprosy in France and England, c. 1100–1500”. In Medicine, Religion and Gender in Medieval Culture, edited by Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa, 221–235. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Chaplin, Margaret. 1967. “The Episode of the Robbers in the Libre dels tres reys d’Orient”. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 44: 88–95. Deyermond,Alan, and Jane Connolly. 1984.“La matanza de los inocentes en el Libre dels tres reys d’Orient”. El Crotalón 1: 733–38. Douglas, Mary. 1973. Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. London: Routledge. Dressler, Rachel. 1995. “‘Deus hoc vult’: Ideology, Identity and Sculptural Rhetoric at the Time of the Crusades”. Medieval Encounters 1: 188–218. Edgerton, Samuel Y. 2003. “When Even Artists Encouraged the Death Penalty”. Law and Literature 15: 235–265.
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Andrew M. Beresford Foster, David William. 1970. Christian Allegory in Early Hispanic Poetry. Studies in Romance Languages 148. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Giles, Ryan D. 2018. “The Breath of Lazarus in the Mocedades de Rodrigo”. In Beyond Sight: Engaging the Senses in Iberian Literatures and Cultures, 1200–1750, edited by Ryan D. Giles and Steven Wagschal, 17–30.Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Haney, Kristine Edmondson. 1986. “The Winchester Psalter”: An Iconographic Study. Leicester: University Press. Jacobus, Laura. 1999. “Motherhood and Massacre: The Massacre of the Innocents in Late-Medieval Art and Drama”. In The Massacre in History, edited by Mark Leven and Penny Roberts, 39–54. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Jensen, Robin M. 2012. Baptismal Imagery in Early Christianity: Ritual, Visual, and Theological Dimensions. Grand Rapids, MI: Barker Academic. Keller, John Esten. 1978. Pious Brief Narrative in Medieval Castilian and Galician Verse: From Berceo to Alfonso X. Studies in Romance Languages 21. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Kunzle, David. 2001. “Spanish Herod, Dutch Innocents: Bruegel’s Massacres of the Innocents in their Sixteenth-Century Political Contexts”. Art History 24: 51–82. Lewis, Gilbert. 1987.“A Lesson from Leviticus: Leprosy”. Man ns 2: 593–612. Merback, Mitchell B. 1999. The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Picturing History. London: Reaktion Books. Miller,William Ian. 1997. The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Nolan, Kathleen. 1996. “‘Ploratus et ululatus’:The Mothers in the Massacre of the Innocents at Chartres Cathedral”. Studies in Iconography 17: 95–141. Quintana de Uña, María José. 1987. “Los ciclos de Infancia en la escultura monumental románica de Navarra”. Príncipe de Viana 48.181: 269–298. Richardson,Vivienne. 1984. “Structure and Theme in the Libre dels tres reys d’Orient”. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 61: 183–188. Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain:The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: University Press. Zias, Joseph. 1989.“Lust and Leprosy: Confusion or Correlation?” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 275: 27–31. Zubillaga, Carina, ed. 2014. Poesía narrativa clerical en su contexto manuscrito: estudio y edición del Ms. Eng sci K–III–4 (“Libro de Apolonio”,“Vida de Santa María Egipciaca”,“Libro de los tres reyes de Oriente”). Incipit Ediciones Críticas 8. Buenos Aires: SECRIT. Zubillaga, Carina. 2017.“El llanto como medida de la sensibilidad medieval en el contexto del Ms. Esc. K– III–4 (Libro de Apolonio, Vida de Santa María Egipciaca, Libro de los tres reyes de Oriente)”. Bulletin of Spanish Studies 94: 25–40. Zubillaga, Carina. 2019.“El debate de la caridad en los textos y contextos manuscritos, devocionales y de representación de la Adoración del Auto de los Reyes Magos y el Libro de los tres reyes de Oriente”. Revista de Filología Española 99: 227–244.
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15 CONTESTED MARTYRDOM Voluntary death and blessed cursing in the works of Eulogius and Paulus Alvarus of Córdoba Ryan D. Giles
What a noble thing is the soul ready for its release from the body, if now must be the time, and prepared for whatever follows … not in mere revolt like the Christians, but … undramatic. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 11.3 In the Spring of 2016 an exhibition opened in the meatpacking district of Copenhagen, called the Museum of Martyrs. In the wake of several terrorist attacks in the E.U. by gunmen claiming to be Islamic martyrs, the exhibition was immediately criticized by journalists and politicians in the Danish capital.Viewers were especially troubled by the way in which the museum’s displays combined the examples of Western heroes, such as Socrates and Joan of Arc, with the peaceful self-immolation of Buddhist monks, mass suicides of cult members, the stories of terrorists who infamously sacrifced themselves in attacks on the Twin Towers, and more recent bombings in Brussels. Supporters of the exhibition warned of the dangers of limiting free speech, recalling how terrorists had used violence to stop artists from caricaturing the Prophet Mohammed. Artists and organizers explained to reporters that the exhibition was intended to provoke a transhistorical, cross-cultural conversation about what martyrdom has meant in the past, as well as its current signifcance. In the words of theater and flm artist, Henrik Grimbäck:“the word ‘martyr’ has been popping up in our minds more and more. It would have been in many ways strange if we were not discussing our own time when we did this show” (Overgaard 2016). Stage designer, Ida Grarup, similarly insisted that “the show does not endorse such actions, but seeks to explore the many defnitions of the word ‘martyr’” (Overgaard 2016). According to the museum’s website, “The exhibition will explore why some people will die for what they believe in … We continue to wonder … [what] drives people to martyrdom. Do the martyrs of today differentiate from past martyrs, and what does it mean to die for your beliefs?” (“Martyr Museum”). In 2017, the exhibit caused even more controversy when it was shown in Berlin, provoking a formal complaint from the French Embassy.The Danish art collective again defended their work, insisting that “all the martyrs in the artwork have been appointed martyr by either a state, religion or an organisation” (Inge 2017). The present study concerns an example of collective martyrdom that took place in the midninth-century, and raises important questions about how this form of death was motivated and 233
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defned in the context of late antique and early medieval Christianity.The basic outline of the story is well-known to scholars working on the history of Christianity and medieval Iberia. During the decade of the 850s, in Muslim Córdoba, dozens of lay and religious Christians— men and women, young and old—felt compelled to provoke their own execution by denouncing Islam, and proclaiming their faith in the Gospel. Under the political and religious order that followed the city’s conquest in 711, Mozarabs—that is, Christians living under Islamic rule— were permitted to continue practicing their faith and enjoyed legal protection from persecution and forced conversion, provided they paid a special tax, and refrained from building new places of worship, or participating in religious displays.1 Some of the martyrs came from mixed families or were converts, and could therefore be executed as apostates who had previously lived as Muslims. Martyrs from Christian families would not have received punishment for simply adhering to their religious identity (though proselytizing declarations of faith were prohibited), had they not gone on to execrate blasphemously the Prophet Mohammed.This was treated as a capital offense, whether committed by a transgressive Muslim or member of another faith. Latin accounts from the period were recorded by Eulogius and Paulus Alvarus, a learned priest and equally well-read layman.These friends and ardent supporters of the martyrs described how a number of offenders were fogged or beaten. When given the chance to save themselves, the martyrs refused to recant their unsolicited imprecations against the Prophet, or what Alvarus calls their blessed “maledictio” (1996, 100). Sometimes in a ft of rage, in other cases reluctantly, the judge most often ordered them to be jailed and beheaded.2 According to Eulogius, their bodies were then publicly exhibited as a deterrent, burned, and otherwise dishonorably disposed of—although believers managed to retrieve relics. Eulogius, as Alvarus recounts, joined the martyrs when he was himself imprisoned and decapitated, after denouncing the Prophet.3 Historians point out that a majority of Christians in the city disapproved of this supposed martyr movement (see, for example, Hollander 2017, 205). They also fnd that the minority of supporters were reacting against increased Mozarabic assimilation into Muslim culture and society (Hitchcock 2008, 32).The Emir entrusted Christian leaders to resolve the issue among themselves, calling on them to hold a council that would fnd a reasonable way to put a stop to this outbreak of extremism. This council—in opposition to the minority position of Eulogius and Alvarus—disapproved of any further adherence to the movement.The leaders stopped short, however, of delegitimizing those who had already been executed.4 A number of scholars have examined arguments made by Eulogius and Alvarus that, like Christians under the Romans, the Mozarabs faced a true persecution and the martyr movement was therefore legitimate (Wolf 1988; Duque 2011). In what remains of this chapter, my purpose is to contextualize and examine the implications of two aspects of these arguments that have yet to be fully explored in Eulogius’s Memoriale Sanctorum (Memorial of the Saints) and Alvarus’s Indiculus Luminosus (Luminous Catalogue).We will see how their dual defense of the martyrs, and the reported counterarguments of their co-religionists, are informed by the contested legacy of voluntary martyrdom and the signifcance of malediction in early Christian history and theology. Kenneth Wolf (1988) has shed light on the criticism that Eulogius responds to in his attempt to equate Cordoban martyrs with their Roman predecessors.The apologist draws on Gregory the Great to explain the lack of miracles associated with the Mozarabic victims, in comparison to early Christians killed by Pagans (1852, 748D).5 Gregory had, as Wolf observes, left “periodic disclaimers, questioning the need for miracles as indicators of sanctity” that helped bolster the Mozarabic cause (1988, 79). In addition, Eulogius responds to the assertion made by opponents that monotheistic Muslims, who share core beliefs with both Jews and Christians, should not be likened to Pagans who sacrifced to idols. Inspired by a polemical tradition that had made 234
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its way to the Peninsula, Eulogius counters this claim with an extended denunciation of the Prophet as an apocalyptic anti-Christ, comparable to Emperor Nero.6 Like Alvarus, he links the founder of Islam with Satan and heaps abuse on the Prophet, directly addressing him in a series of insults and curses.The most diffcult problem Eulogius faced, however, was the seeming contradiction that Wolf calls “martyrdom without persecution” (1988, 96).This required the Latin writer to engage in what Ksenia Bonch Reeves has called a “reverse logic”, in which “Muslim tolerance toward Cordovan Christians” was considered “an obstacle to martyrdom”, but since “martyrdoms arose, there must have been active persecution” (2016, 146). In early martyrologies, Christians were typically forced to renounce their faith, and often subjected to extensive tortures and grotesque mutilation. In contrast, there was no such policy in al-Andalus.7 Wolf describes this problem:“the excessive volition that characterized the confessors’ pursuit of martyrdom and the lack of provocation on the part of the authorities … the precise boundaries of acceptable volition on the part of a Christian facing execution had never really been established during the martyrial phase of church history” (1988, 98). In his brief treatment, Wolf observes that some canonized martyrs, ecclesiastical writers, and early Christian sects—namely, Ignatius of Antioch, Tertullian, and the North African Donatists—promoted a voluntary martyrdom in which believers were expected to offer themselves willingly, eagerly, and even insistently for execution.8 The Donatists, whose sect arose in the fourth century, refused the fellowship of Christians who had been willing to surrender their sacred writings to the Pagans during the persecution of Diocletian, dismissing them as “traditores” or those who “hand over” (the origin of the word “traitors” and its equivalents in Western European languages) (Tilley 1996, ix).At the same time, other ecclesiastical authorities and models of self-sacrifce for Christ conveyed the message that, although martyrdom necessarily involves a degree of willingness, believers should avoid capture and the risk of torture and execution if possible—partly because they might crack under pressure and be coerced into betraying the faith. Wolf mentions the martyrdom of Polycarp of Smyrna and the writings of Clement of Alexandria as illustrations of this tendency to caution against zealously volunteering oneself for death. Opponents of the Cordoban martyrs claimed the executed Christians, having not heeded such warnings, were complicit, self-murderers, and heretics, guilty of killing their own souls (Eulogius 1852, 750D–751A; Alvarus 1996, 119).9 Recently, Adriano Duque (2011) has considered this issue, rightly suggesting that a touchstone for Eulogius’s defense of the Cordoban martyrs can be found in Augustine’s City of God, a text that the Mozarabic priest had brought from Pamplona to add to his library. In fact, Eulogius at one point cites from the City of God (13.7), to argue that martyrdom is precious in the sight of God, in spite of its gruesome appearance in the eyes of humankind (1852, 763A; 1986, 363).10 Duque specifcally points to a section (1.21) in which the Bishop of Hippo concludes that cases of self-immolation in the Bible, like that of Samson, were “directed by God’s command” as opposed to “personal determination” (2011, 37).Augustine contrasts these examples with the human volition of the Donatists, who rejected Catholic authority and—according to him—sought martyrdom without divine guidance. Another telling passage, not discussed by Duque, further complicates the views of Eulogius and his critics. It can be found in a subsequent chapter of the City of God (1.26). Here Augustine comments on the example of martyrs who appear to have committed suicide: They say, in the time of persecution some holy women escaped those who menaced them … by casting themselves into rivers which they knew would drown them; and having died in this manner, they are venerated in the Church Catholic as martyrs. Of such persons I do not presume to speak rashly … it may be they were not deceived by 235
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human judgment, but prompted by divine wisdom, to their act of self-destruction … But this we affrm, this we maintain, this we every way pronounce to be right, that no man ought to infict on himself voluntary death. (1986, 145) Christian historian Collin Garbarino (2011) has studied the question of voluntary martyrdom in the writings of the Bishop of Hippo. In his sermons on the feast days of martyrs, Augustine repeatedly condemns the Donatist heresy that was particularly strong in North Africa.This sect viewed the choice to avoid dying for one’s religious beliefs, and instead live peaceably under a Roman regime now free of persecution, as excluding Catholics from participation in the true Church—that is, the original Ecclesia of earlier centuries when the frst saints willingly gave their lives as martyrs or witnesses to the faith. For example, in his analysis of a sermon given for the feast of Cyprian, Garbarino summarizes Augustine’s position: unlike the impatient Donatists, Cyprian “waited for his persecutors to come to him. In doing this, he imitated Christ, who waited for the guards to seize him in the garden … voluntary martyrs … lack patience … preferring to end their lives” (quoted in Garbarino 2011, 55). Again, in a sermon for the lesser-known martyr Quadratus, Augustine advised that “what is required is the spirit of the martyr, because God, after all, does not delight in the shedding of blood. He has many hidden martyrs” (quoted in Garbarino 2011, 60). On the other hand, the earlier North African writer Tertullian mocked those who preferred to die of “soft fevers”, rather than willingly risk their necks for the sake of Christ, in his sectarian De Fuga in Persecutione (On Fleeing under Persecution) (1872, 369). Church historians have pointed to Tertullian’s departure from orthodoxy in De Fuga, an early-third-century work that anticipates aspects of the later Donatist view of martyrdom: “it condemns fight in time of persecution, for God’s providence has intended the suffering.This intolerable doctrine had not been held by Tertullian in his Catholic days” (Chapman 1912,“Tertullian”).11 Augustine, in one of his sermons, instead sees the natural deaths of faithful participants in the Catholic Church as a legitimate witness to the Gospel, since the ultimate persecutor or “adversary … is inside us” (quoted in Garbarino 2011, 60). Eulogius and Alvarus both counter their critics by emphasizing divine inspiration, and stressing the spiritual “cause” that makes the martyr as opposed to the physical torments per se. Eulogius insists that they were “stimulated by heavenly will”, and Alvarus describes “the love of Christ” granting them the “virility” to “produce the fame of sacrifce from within” (1852, 760C; 1996, 88). Opponents of the Cordoban movement pointed out that early martyrs suffered tortures at the hands of the Romans that were totally unlike the effcient execution of would-be saints under the Emirate. Eulogius summarizes the argument:“state violence had not compelled them to deny their faith … instead they offered themselves willingly… they should not be called martyrs … if they are not violently dragged to their martyrdom. Instead, coming by their free will they bring scorn to those who have not subjected them to harassment” (1852, 751BC, 754B). In their rejection of this view, both apologists defend the willfulness of the Cordoban martyrs in their own demise, employing militaristic imagery that is reminiscent of that found in the writings of Tertullian, who wrote:“It is our battle to be summoned to your tribunals that there, under fear of execution, we may battle for the truth. But the day is won when the object of the struggle is gained … you sacrifce the Christians at their wish, kill us, torture us, condemn us, grind us to dust” (Apologeticus 1872, 50).Alvarus similarly praises the many “combats” (agones) of voluntary martyrs, whose detractors accused them of committing acts of self-immolation in a “time of no persecution” (non esse persecutionis tempus), and therefore being unworthy of the sacrifcial witness of early martyrs (1996, 88). Eulogius insists on the Cordoban martyrs’ willingness 236
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to die even more fervently:“receiving a premature death … freely they long for the destruction of the fesh, offering the voluntary sacrifce of their souls to God … those who came to their passion without being sought for” (1852, 744BC, 758B). Whereas Augustine warns Christians against undertaking a “spontaneous death” (spontaneam mortem), Alvarus praises those he calls “our spontaneous martyrs” (nostros spontaneos martires)—using the same Latin term that refers to something undertaken of one’s own accord (1996, 114). Like Tertullian, Alvarus casts aspersion on those who would prefer to participate in some kind of hidden, inner witness, without physically seeking to risk their lives for the sake of Christ. In spite of their Augustinian justifcations, he condemns his Christian enemies as cowards who refuse to pray openly, and keep their beliefs to themselves, only daring to “utter evasive words” (fugatis sermonibus) (1996, 104). Eulogius, like Augustine, cites Paul’s words from the New Testament in the context of the suffering inficted on saints by their persecutors, “God’s will be done” (1852 757D; Augustine 1990, 42; Acts 21:14 [New Revised Standard Version]). The Bishop of Hippo, however, explained how Paul passively submitted to God’s plan for him to be tormented, minimizing his own will.The Mozarabic priest, on the other hand, refers to the Apostle’s suffering as a means of legitimizing a movement that celebrated the initiative of Christian martyrs actively bringing about their own deaths. Comparing Augustine’s arguments about martyrdom to those of Eulogius and Alvarus makes it clear that the Mozarabs misleadingly drew on the authority of the Bishop of Hippo, while closely aligned themselves with the alternative tradition of writers like Tertullian. In spite of the fact that they both cite the Bishop of Hippo, Eulogius and Alvarus consistently contradict his ideas when it comes to the legitimacy of a would-be martyr’s will in seeking a certain death. As we have seen, Augustine’s understanding of true versus counterfeit martyrdom, as part of his condemnation of the Donatists, more closely refects the earlier-cited criticism of those who denounced the Cordoban movement, according to Eulogius:“they offered themselves willingly … they should not be called martyrs … if they are not violently dragged to their martyrdom. Instead, coming by their free will”. By seeking to die for their faith, and condemning those who rejected this path, the Donatists—like Eulogius and Alvarus—radicalized the tradition of Ignatius and especially Tertullian.The former Church Father, in his letter to Polycarp the Bishop of Smyrna, embraced his own martyrdom:“I am writing to all the churches, and I give injunctions to all men that I am dying willingly for God’s sake” (as quoted in Harding 2003, 329).The latter went so far as to describe true saints as “hungering” for “the martyrdoms of which they have had a taste” in his Scorpiace (Antidote for the Scorpion Sting), and—in a letter to Scapula, the Proconsul of Carthage—desiring to “rush forth to the combat”, unlike heretics who would rather seek to avoid it (1872, 381, 51). In contrast, Augustine more closely aligned himself with the view of Clement, who, as Candida Moss observes, negated the status of voluntary martyrs as “amartyros” (2012, 543). In the Stromata (Miscellanies), this early Bishop of Alexandria sternly warned against such movements: “we too blame those who have rushed on death … eager to hand themselves over … athletes of death … they do not preserve the characteristic mark of faithful witness” (as quoted in Middleton 2006, 24). Other denunciations, consistent with Augustine’s later position, could be found in the Martyrdom of Polycarp and the Acts of Cyprian: “we do not approve of those who come forward of themselves: this is not the teaching of the Gospel … our discipline forbids anyone to surrender voluntarily” (as quoted in Moss 2012, 547). Christians opposed to the Cordoban movement seem to have relied on such longstanding ecclesiastical precedents to reject their death-seeking co-religionists as latter-day amartyros. They made essentially the same arguments as Clement and Augustine, and apparently worried that proponents of the movement were reviving a condemned tenet of Donatism—a North African heresy that had persisted in the period leading up to the Muslim conquests 237
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(González 1971, 105).Augustine was the main opponent of these heretics, and repeatedly characterized them as simple-minded zealots. He found that their misinterpretation of the Gospel led them to see the only true Christians as a people uncompromisingly resistant to authorities outside their own sect—namely the Christianized Roman Empire—and denounced their eagerness to die at the hands of executioners. Eulogius attempts to turn this kind of allegation against his critics, claiming that their reliance on doctrinal erudition to undermine support for the martyrs missed the point of Scripture (e.g. 1852, 751CD).Alvarus takes this counterattack a step further, accusing his opponents of themselves being Donatists (in their rejection of the true Roman Church) and speaking with what he describes as an uncircumcised tongue. Opponents of voluntary martyrdom had long relied on Pauline reasoning to criticize what they saw as a literal, self-directed victimization of the fesh, lacking in an inner, spiritual sacrifce directed by God.Alvarus identifes them as the real Pharisaic hypocrites—more interested in philosophizing about Holy Writ than acting on the living Word: “we, true servants of the Gospel, disciples of Christ, followers of rustics … let us pursue what is solid” and “alive” not what is “empty … I have said enough about the Donatists” (1996, 134, 136).12 Importantly, Augustine had not only opposed the Donatists for willingly presenting themselves for execution, but for going to great lengths to provoke their own deaths. In the case of the martyrs of Córdoba, the main provocation, as mentioned earlier, involved publicly excoriating and cursing the Muslim Prophet before a judge and other witnesses. It is true that some early martyrs spoke against the Pagan gods, as in the case of Crispina, who was said to have shouted out to a proconsul, “Perish the gods who have not made heaven and earth!” (Musurillo 1972, 305). On the Iberian Peninsula, Prudentius wrote of how St.Vincent publicly maligned Roman deities as having “no brain”,“roaming in flth”, and being “devils” (Krisak 2019, vv. 68, 80, 92). In general, however, they were tortured and sentenced to death for refusing to engage in polytheism or recant their outlawed faith, as means of restoring the peace, and not for blasphemy.They were seen as threatening the imperial, institutional meaning of Pax, understood as a lasting pact or truce made possible through the maintenance (by force if necessary) of Roman authority, law, and civic duty.The Mozarab martyrs, as has been shown, were neither compelled to worship as Muslims, nor to deny their faith by authorities in Córdoba. Even fellow Christians seem to have been troubled by their use of violent, abusive language, in Arabic, as a means of ensuring their deaths. For example, Eulogius recounts how Perfecto was turned in for blasphemy, and during his sentencing intensifed his imprecations,“I cursed your Prophet and [again] I curse him as a man possessed, a magician, adulterer, and liar” (1852, 767D, 768C). Nunilo and Alodia, during their trial, are said to have confessed their belief in Christ after “cursing the enemy of faith” (776A). Similarly, María of Córdoba tells of how her brother was among those killed for having defamed and harshly mocked the Muslim prophet (Aldana García 1998, 131). While Alvarus bemoans the increasing use of Arabic among Christians (1996, 184), this fuency ironically facilitated the martyrs’ ability to provoke their own deaths—allowing them to blaspheme the Prophet in his own language. As Brian Catlos puts it,“their acts of blasphemy were theatrically staged in Arabic to provoke the most visceral reaction” (2018, 102). Eulogius emphasizes how one of the frst martyrs, Isaac, used his cultured Arabic to curse Islam (1852, 737AB).These and other Cordoban martyrs behaved in a way that corresponds with what G.E.M. de Ste. Croix has found in the stories concerning a minority of early martyrs, such as the Egyptian Potamiaena, who “made some abusive reply, for which she was immediately put to death” (2006, 169). Moss notes how the second-century martyrs of Lyon also provided examples of being “antagonistic, or provoking the judge” (2012, 538). In the words of Ste. Croix, such martyrs “deliberately and unnecessarily attracted attention to themselves”, and “after being arrested behaved with deliberate contumacy at their trial” (2006, 169). Christian Sahner has recently pointed out that the 238
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Cordoban movement differs from examples of martyrdom among Christians being put to death in the recently Islamicized Middle East (2018, 159). He fnds that this can be partly attributed to the more abrupt linguistic and societal changes taking place on the Iberian Peninsula, in contrast to a shared Arabic culture on the other side of the Mediterranean. The precedent of earlier, Western Christians like the martyrs of Lyon blasphemously going to battle against the Pax Romana, in my view, provides another, more deeply rooted explanation. Eulogius writes of comparable accusations of “deliberate contumacy” being leveled against the Cordoban saints, whose hostile words were seen as violating a number of New Testament precepts: “‘Love your enemies’ [Matt. 5:44] … ‘Do violence to no man, neither calumniate any man’ [Luke 3:14]; and ‘when he was reviled, he did not revile’ [1 Pet. 2:23] … ‘Those who revile shall not possess the kingdom of God’” [1 Cor. 6:10] (1852, 751C). He concludes that the martyrs’ Christian accusers “found testimonies in the surface of the letters” (superfcie litterarum) that were “almost in accord with their insanity” (1852, 752A). He later backs up this defense of righteous malediction by recalling that the rite of Baptism includes a curse of Satan—one that has been preserved in the Mozarabic liturgy (1852, 754B). As a prelude to a lengthy catalogue of examples of sanctifed verbal violence from the Old Testament, Alvarus defames those who reject the martyrs for reviling Mohammed:“whoever affrms that those who curse the Church’s enemies are themselves cursed”, and “hate the sacred religion” (1996, 101). Here again, the dispute between supporters and critics of the martyrs hinged on interpretations of Scripture. Augustine had identifed the seeming contradiction between the prohibition against cursing in the New Testament, and instances of approved vituperation in the Old. In his study of cursing in the Middle Ages, Lester Little cites a telling passage from another sermon by the Bishop of Hippo: Many passages in Scripture … if read superfcially and without much refection, seem to go counter to this precept of the Lord wherein he admonishes us to love our enemies … pray for those who persecute us; for in the prophets we fnd many imprecations against enemies that are held to be curses. (1993, 88) Early Christian monastics, as evidenced by the rule of Benedict, continued to urge believers to be peacemakers, and refrain from verbal as well as physical violentia, instead blessing one’s enemies and returning “blessings for curses” (Little 1993, 98).The same kinds of biblical verses that were used to criticize the Cordoban martyrs had been interpreted by St. Gregory in his Dialogues as a qualifed prohibition against maledictio. Gregory distinguished between the kind of malediction that is inspired by divine justice, and cursing motivated by the often vindictive and malicious will of human beings (Little 1993, 89). Carolingian exegetes continued to draw on the same distinction in their condemnations. Old Testament curses and Gospel warnings against imprecation could also be reconciled, for example, by interpreting maledictory Psalms as prefgurative allusions to the fate of Judas, typologically voiced by Jesus standing in judgment. In this way, just cursing was effectively attributed to God, whereas Christian sinners were warned against initiating maledictio of their own accord (Little 1993, 95). Curses voiced by human beings could be divinely ordained, as in the case of Moses. A contemporary of Eulogius and Alvarus, the Frankish Benedictine monk Rabanus Maurus, recalls the example of Moses prophetically blessing the righteous and imprecating sinners: “just as he promised those who abide by the commandments of God benedictions and perpetual blessedness, so on the other hand, announced to those who did not wish to observe the divine precepts maledictions” (Little 1993, 103). In contrast, opponents of the martyrs’ movement in 239
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Córdoba viewed the cursing that provoked their deaths as the product of a faulty human will, seeming to express malice against their neighbors and to needlessly pursue a death wish. In short, they identifed the would-be victims as potentially malicious amartyos. Eulogius and Alvarus not only attacked their critics for misreading biblical bans against malediction, but also for cursing the martyrs, as opposed to the Muslims and their Prophet. Eulogius also apologetically associates the martyrs’ anti-Islamic obloquies with “celestial malediction” (maledictione coelesti) (1852, 767A). Just as the impetus behind the victims’ self-sacrifce ultimately comes from God, so do the imprecations that provoke their deaths. According to Alvarus, by refusing to condone their cursing, Cordoban Christians implicitly blessed the followers of the Koran: “he who prohibits malediction, calls for benediction”, whereas the martyrs “cursed the pseudo-prophet”, their accusers “disparaged the worshippers of Christ” (1996, 120).Apparently taking inspiration from the martyrs, the writer ends his work with a polemical tirade in which he curses Mohammed and his followers in graphic, bodily terms that verge on the hysterical, and equate Islam to a salacious cult of Venus.13 Christian opponents of the martyrs, according to Alvarus, perpetrated violence against the Church itself—the Body of Christ—through their denunciations of the movement, and subsequent refusal to acknowledge the sanctity of their brutal demise (1996, 132). For Alvarus, their rejection of religious immolation and promotion of peacemaking constituted a form of collusion with punishments that Muslim enemies inficted on the Cordoba martyrs.The apologist sarcastically describes the situation in the Andalusian city, where the rights of religious minorities are restricted, but also legally protected under what he views as a false Islamic Pax or state of “wolves and dogs in peace” (1996, 108).This idea of a counterfeit peace jeopardizing the Christian fock also hearkens back to the writings of Tertullian, as it associates the religiopolitical order of the persecutory Pax Romana with the Pax Islamica. In his De Corona Militis (On the Soldier’s Garland), this third-century author records how believers reacted against a soldier and fellow Christian who provoked his own execution by refusing to wear a ceremonial crown. As Moss points out, “the pragmatic concern of others in the Carthaginian community, Tertullian tells us, was that man’s actions would threaten the peace” (2012, 547). In the same treatise, the North African writer goes on to condemn Christian critics of the martyr for their cowardly desire to avoid confict: “they are also purposing the refusal of martyrdom. So they murmur that a peace so good and long is endangered for them. Nor do I doubt that some are already turning their back on the Scriptures … equipped for fight from city to city … their pastors are lions in peace, deer in the fght” (1872, 334). Alvarus, in this sectarian tradition of Tertullian, sees his detractors as afraid to disturb the peace, and behaving as “little men” patiently condoning a “hatred of martyrdom” (1996, 132). In a word, they are what the early Christian zealots of North Africa called tratores. Alvarus characterizes his beloved martyrs as, on the one hand, true practitioners of peace: “they appear humble, meek, simple, tranquil against the enemies of Christ” (1996, 112). Drawing on imagery that is strikingly similar to that of Tertullian, he simultaneously describes them as militants for Christ engaging in an “ever so beautiful fght … they thrust themselves onto the feld of battle” (1996, 114).14 In the fnal chapters of his polemic he contrasts what is described as the warlike nature of the Muslims’ prophet with the peaceful nature of Christianity: “Jesus Christ taught us peace and patience, and he war” (1996, 179). As I hope to have shown in this study, the arguments of Eulogius and Alvarus are vexed by a set of interrelated issues. In their attempts to justify the problematic role of spontaneity or personal will in seeking martyrdom, they manipulate and diverge from the Augustinian consensus view, drawing especially on less orthodox ideas closely associated with Tertullian. The two Mozarabic writers attempt to reverse the criticism of their detractors by accusing 240
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these so-called Christians of being Pharisaic hypocrites who appeal to the letter instead of the spirit of Scripture. By understanding benediction and malediction as alternatively divine or malicious—according to the needs of the movement—they not only condone, but also bless the violent language of the martyrs. Finally, they undertake an effort to propagandistically commingle notions of Roman and Islamic Pax in the interest of promoting Cordoban martyrs. Both authors engage in imaginative projects that contend with and politically refashion inherited notions of the voluntary versus involuntary nature of martyrdom. Their works rely on the sacred, rhetorical power of verbal violence, and a bellicose understanding of Christian peacemaking.
Notes 1 It seems that the Cordoban Christians were not initially required to wear special clothing, and—in a more signifcant show of relative tolerance—allowed to ring their church bells. See Feliciano Delgado León’s edition of the work of Alvarus (1996, 51). Eulogius claims to have suffered the relatively minor indignity of being harassed on the street and mocked by children while wearing his clerical garb (754CD–755A). 2 In the case of the martyr Isaac, who worked in the Emir’s government, the judge gives him the chance to save his life by admitting to being drunk or mentally disturbed (737CD). 3 Alvarus wrote the hagiography of his friend Eulogius, the Vita vel passio S. Eulogii. Eulogius was a well-educated priest from a prominent family. Concealing an apostate Muslim girl from discovery by authorities, he ended up publicly denouncing Islam and was sentenced to death in 857. Prior to his execution, Eulogius had been prohibited from serving as Archbishop of Toledo and incarcerated. For further bibliographic information on the lesser-known life of the layman Alvarus, see Delgado León’s edition (1996, 15–22). 4 Nor did they ban veneration of the martyrs’ relics. The executions continued during the fnal years of Abd ar-Rabmán II (who reigned from 822–852). His successor, Muhammad I (reigned 852–886), would initiate a policy of no longer allowing offcials from the Mozarabic community to hold court appointments. See María Jesús Aldana García’s edition of the works of Eulogius (1998, 16).The most recent historical evaluation of the martyrdoms can be found in Catlos (2018, 105–110). 5 Eulogius cites a passage from Moralia in Job (34.7). In his hagiographic treatment, Eulogius does describe one rather underwhelming, would-be miracle: “as soon as his body was thrown from the upper level onto the river-bank, a dove of snowy whiteness, gliding through the air, in the sight of all few down and sat on the martyr’s body” (quoted in Hollander 2017, 221). 6 On the spread of earlier anti-Islamic polemics to Iberia, see John Tolan (2002, chap. 4). 7 Eulogius admits that no actual torture compelled Christians of Córdoba to embrace martyrdom (751BC). 8 As Aldana García has shown in her edition, apart from Tertullian, Eulogius was infuenced by works of St. Cyprian of Carthage (1998, 58–77). See also Hollander (2017), who examines parallels and contrasts between hagiographic legends originating on the Peninsula and earlier Roman models. In keeping with peculiarities in the development of Iberian sanctity, he fnds that monastic asceticism seems to have served as a preparation for martyrdom. More importantly, Cordoban martyrs are strikingly confrontational, as opposed to showing the “cheerfulness” and “gentleness” of most predecessors (Hollander 2017, 217–18). 9 All citations of Eulogius are from the edition in Patrologia Latina, volume 115. Citations of Alvarus are from the edition of Delgado León. English translations of both writers are mine. Just as this volume went into print, Kenneth Wolf published a splendid translation of Eulogius’s works. 10 I have cited the book and chapter from Augustine’s treatise, followed by the page number of the translation used. 11 Tertullian, in his later years, embraced the Montanist heresy which forbade feeing from persecution as did the later Donatist sect that Augustine condemns (Chapman 1911,“Montanists”). 12 In condemning those whom he views as Islamicized co-religionists,Alvarus evokes imagery from Paul’s letter to the Romans. The Apostle contrasted the letter of the law and the circumcised fesh of Jews with the spirit and the inner, circumcised heart of Christians (2:29 [NRSV]). 13 Alvarus is given to using grotesque sexual images, apparently meant to disgust readers of his invective (e.g. 1996, 146, 162). He also wrote a polemical letter in which he employs scatological imagery to
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References Aldana García, María Jesús, ed. and trans. 1998. Obras completas de San Eulogio: Introducción, traducción y notas. Córdoba: Universidad de Córdoba. Alvarus of Córdoba, Paulus. 1996. Álvaro de Córdoba y la polémica contra el Islam: El “Indiculus luminosus”. Edited by Feliciano Delgado León. Córdoba: Publicaciones Obra Social y Cultural Cajasur. Augustine. 1986. “The City of God”. In The Confessions, The City of God, on Christian Doctrine, translated by Marcus Dods, edited by Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler, 127–620.Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica/University of Chicago Press. Augustine. 1990. Sermons on the Old Testament.Translated by Edmund Hill, edited by John E. Rotelle. New York: New City Press. Aurelius, Marcus. 2006. Meditations. New York: Penguin. Catlos, Brian. 2018. Kingdoms of Faith:A New History of Islamic Spain. New York: Basic Books. Chapman, John. 1911. “Montanists”. In The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 10. New York: Robert Appleton Company.Accessed 25 May 2018. www.newadvent.org/cathen/10521a.htm. Chapman, John. 1912. “Tertullian”. In The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 14. New York: Robert Appleton Company.Accessed 25 May 2018. www.newadvent.org/cathen/14520c.htm. Cuffel, Alexandra. 2007. Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic. South Bend: Notre Dame University Press. De Ste. Croix, G.E.M. 2006. “Voluntary Martyrdom in the Early Church”. In Christian Persecution, Martyrdom, and Orthodoxy, edited by G.E.M. De Ste. Croix, Michael Whitby, and Joseph Streeter. New York: Oxford University Press. Duque, Adriano. 2011. “Claiming Martyrdom in the Episode of the Martyrs of Córdoba”. Collectanea Christiana Orientalia 8: 23–48. Eulogius of Córdoba. 1852. Memorialis Sanctorum. Patrologia Latina 115. Edited by J.P. Migne. Paris: Migne. Gambarino, Collin. 2011. Augustine, Donatists and Martyrdom. Brepols: Brill. González, Justo L. 1971. A History of Christian Thought.Vol. 2. Nashville:Abingdon. Harding, Mark. 2003. Early Christian Life and Thought in Social Context:A Reader. New York: Bloomsbury. Hitchcock, Richard. 2008. Mozarabs in Medieval and Early Modern Spain: Identities and Infuences. New York: Routledge. Hollander, Aaron T. 2017. “Blazing Light and Perfect Death:The Martyrs of Córdoba and the Growth of Polemical Holiness”. In Contested Spaces, Common Ground: Space and Power Structures in Contemporary Multireligious Societies, edited by Ulrich Winkler, Lidia Rodríguez Fernández, and Oddbjørn Leirvik, 203–224. Leiden: Brill. Inge, Sophie. 2017. “Fury as ‘Martyr Museum’ in Germany Includes Paris Jihadist Who Stormed the Bataclan, Killing 90 People”. Daily Mail. Accessed December 2017. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article -5144931/Fury-martyr-Museum-Germany-includes-Paris-jihadist.html. Krisak, Len, trans. 2019. Prudentius’ Crown of the Martyrs:“Liber Peristephanon”. New York: Routledge. Little, Lester K. 1993. Benedictine Maledictions: Liturgical Cursing in Romanesque France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. “Martyr Museum”. CPH Stage 2016. Danish National School of Performance Arts. www.sort-hvid.dk/en/ project/the-museum-of-martyrs/. Middleton, Paul. 2006. Radical Martyrdom and Cosmic Confict in Early Christianity. New York: Bloomsbury. Moss, Candida. 2012. “The Discourse of Voluntary Martyrdom: Ancient and Modern”. Church History 81(3): 531–551. Musurillo, Herbert, ed. and trans. 1972. The Acts of the Christian Martyrs. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Overgaard, Sidsel. 2016. “Denmark’s ‘Martyr Museum’ Places Socrates and Suicide Bombers Side-BySide”. All Things Considered. National Public Radio. Accessed September 2020. www.npr.org/sections /parallels/2016/06/07/480305537/denmarks-martyr-museum-places-socrates-and-suicide-bombers -side-by-side.
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16 RAMON LLULL AND LULLISM Mark D. Johnston
The Majorcan lay theologian and philosopher Ramon Llull (1232–1316) is unquestionably one of the most infuential thinkers of the Iberian Middle Ages, ranking alongside King Alfonso X “the Wise”, Arnold of Villanova, Averroes, Maimonides, or Petrus Hispanus in the range, depth, and impact of his legacy. Much of that impact dates from the Renaissance and early modern era, which lie outside the scope of this volume. However, for students and scholars of medieval Iberia, Llull and his work offer remarkable examples of the rise of vernacular literatures, the growth of lay spirituality, relations among the peninsula’s three monotheist cultures, and the impetus for reform of Christian society in the later Middle Ages. Llull’s vast legacy has generated an equally vast body of modern scholarship, compiled in bibliographies that interested readers should consult: Brummer (1976); Salleras i Carolà (1986); Fidora and Rubio (2008, 517–537); and the University of Barcelona’s online database. Fidora and Rubio provide the best comprehensive account of Llull’s life and work;Austin and Johnston (2018) offer a full survey of Llull’s achievements and legacy, from the medieval to the modern era.
Ramon Llull (1232–1316) Despite Llull’s immense legacy, the trajectory of his long life and career remain frustratingly diffcult for modern scholars to understand, due to the incomplete sources available.The most important sources consist of: (1) the quasi-hagiographical Vita coaetanea composed by anonymous admirers at Paris in 1311, as Llull prepared to offer proposals at the forthcoming Council of Vienne (Vita 1980; 2010); (2) a few dozen original documents (including his will) that testify to his personal activities (Hillgarth 2001); (3) the colophons appended to most of his writings after 1294, which identify their place and date of composition; and (4) autobiographical comments scattered throughout his writings. Excellent analyses in English of all the biographical information provided by these sources are available from Hillgarth (1971, 1–134), Bonner (1993, 1–56), and Fidora and Rubio (2008, 3–124). Ramon Llull was born on Majorca in 1232, the son of a Barcelona merchant family that settled on the island after its conquest from the Muslims in 1229 by King James I “The Conqueror” of Aragon. According to the Vita of 1311 (1980, 272–75), Llull was serving in the early 1260s as a “seneschal” to the future King James II of Majorca when he experienced a “conversion to penitence”, prompted by visions of the Crucifxion, which left him resolved 244
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to devote his life to converting all infdels to Christianity. Llull eventually retired to a life of private contemplation and study on Majorca, where—according to the Vita (1980, 280) and his own frequent claims—God revealed to him the plan for a “Great Art” (“Ars magna”, described below), a unique theological and philosophical system that would demonstrate the truth of Christian doctrine to all unbelievers. On Majorca, Llull began writing the frst of his over 250 works in Latin, Arabic, and his native Catalan. The most important of these early works is his Book of Contemplation (Libre de contemplació), the seminal record of his plan for the Great Art (Llull 1906–14). Notice of Llull’s endeavors by clerical authorities evidently prompted by 1276 a summons to Montpellier from King James II of Majorca, so that Llull’s work could undergo review by a Franciscan scholar, who approved its piety and devotion, according to the Vita (1980, 282). With his visit to Montpellier, Ramon Llull began a life of constant peregrination, rarely returning to Majorca, but instead traveling throughout France, Italy, North Africa, and even as far as Cyprus, promoting his Great Art and trying to convert unbelievers. In the course of his travels, Llull visited Paris three times, hoping to combat there the Scholastic doctrines that he considered inimical to his goals (Moreno Rodríguez 1982); offered several proposals on missionizing to successive popes in Rome; attended the Council of Vienne in 1311 (Garcías Palou 1975); and tested the effcacy of his proselytizing methods in trips to Bougie and Tunis in North Africa (Sugranyes de Franch 1954). Oddly, it seems that Llull never visited Valencia, even though this kingdom was home to a large population of subject Muslims available for evangelizing. According to the Vita of 1311 (1980, 284–89), he suffered a spiritual crisis while at Genoa in 1293, doubting his ambitions and debating whether he should join the Franciscan or Dominican orders. Llull ultimately decided to continue his own unique mission, and resumed the peripatetic campaign to promote his Great Art and evangelizing goals. Meanwhile, he wrote incessantly, striving to perfect the scheme of his Great Art, to apply its methods to all branches of knowledge, to defend fundamental doctrines of Christian theology, to recommend strategies for evangelizing unbelievers, and to argue for the reform of Christian society.Already over 80 years old, he made a fnal missionary journey to Tunis in 1315. He died there, or more likely while returning early in 1316 to Majorca, where he lies interred in the church of Saint Francis. His will provided funds for copying his oeuvre and disseminating it to trusted devotees at Genoa, Majorca, and Paris, a posthumous initiative critical to the eventual spread of his ideas and goals.
Llull’s Great Art To any modern reader encountering Ramon Llull’s Great Art for the frst time, its structure, methods, and language will rightly seem baffing, especially for students or scholars accustomed to the practices of Scholastic theology and philosophy. Fidora and Rubio (2008, 243–297) offer an excellent explanation in English of how Llull’s Great Art functions.The following brief summary highlights only its most notable features. Ramon Llull deliberately designed his Great Art as a syncretic instrument of evangelization, for the conversion to Catholicism of Muslims, Jews, Eastern Orthodox Christians, and even those pagans (such as the Tatars) who had come to the notice of Western Europeans by the end of the thirteenth century. In his work, Llull adopts several strategies intended to make his system intelligible to these diverse audiences. First, he bases the entire system of his Great Art on a fxed selection of God’s inherent qualities (called “dignities” or “principles”) that he believed any monotheist could accept as the foundational elements of all being and knowledge. Second, he avoids citing specifc scriptural, theological, or philosophical authorities, knowing that these 245
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would be unconvincing to unbelievers, and instead cites most often his own writings. Third, Llull developed his own idiosyncratic theological and philosophical terminology, again probably to avoid identifcation with specifc Christian, Muslim, or Jewish doctrines. By far the most innovative feature of Llull’s Great Art was his symbolic designation of the divine dignities or principles with alphabetical letters, arranged in circular and tabular diagrams (see Figures 16.1 and 16.2) designed to enable the quasi-mechanical combination of the dignities and principles into theological or philosophical propositions. These diagrams are the famous “fgures” (fgurae) that made Llull’s Great Art so popular as a “thinking machine” in the Renaissance and early modern era. In the early versions of his Great Art, Llull presented a selection of 16 fundamental principles, apparently based on the classical scheme of the four natural elements (Yates 1954; Ruiz Simon 1986). Later, he reduced this selection to nine principles, probably to support more readily arguments for the three-fold nature of the Christian Trinity (Pring-Mill 1955–56; Gayà Estelrich 1979). In all versions of his Great Art, these principles constitute the essential components of all being, activity, and knowledge, which allow humans to fnd in any creature a refection of its Creator. In the course of his long career, Llull wrote numerous works applying the Great Art to almost every one of the medieval arts and sciences.When necessary, he created specialized lists of alphabetically designated principles or concepts to assist discourse regarding any subject. Llull’s fnal full redaction of his Great Art in 1308 advertises itself as a “General Art” (Ars generalis), useful for investigation and argumentation in all felds of inquiry (Llull 1986a). This extension of
Figure 16.1 “Figure A” (Prima Figura) of Llull’s Great Art, from Raymundi Lulli Opera ea quae ad adinventam ab ipso Artem Universalem … pertinent (Strasburg Lazarus Zetzner, 1617), 2.
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Figure 16.2 “Figure A” (Prima Figura) of Llull’s Great Art, from Raymundi Lulli Opera ea quae ad adinventam ab ipso Artem Universalem … pertinent (Strasburg Lazarus Zetzner, 1617), 7.
the Great Art to all realms of knowledge made it especially attractive to Renaissance and early modern authorities seeking an encyclopedic method of inquiry (Rossi 1960;Vasoli 1978). Ramon Llull explicitly rejected the methods of his Scholastic contemporaries, especially their use of Aristotelian syllogistics. Modern scholars have long recognized that his Great Art relied instead on relentlessly analogical argumentation, to show how any correct understanding of its principles ultimately affrmed the truth of Catholic doctrine (Pring-Mill 1961, 1972; Johnston 1987). All creatures, their existence, and knowledge of them refect their Creator, in a unitary “exemplarist” metaphysical and epistemological scheme (Aragüés Aldaz 2016). In this respect, Llull’s Great Art was anachronistic, drawing inspiration from Patristic authorities, Arab philosophers from the frst centuries of the Islamic Golden Age, and from the twelfth-century Parisian Victorines, whom he occasionally cites. However, the analogical methods of his Great Art, even if schematized in alphabetical diagrams and using strange terminology, still corresponded to techniques common in the popular preaching of his era and to basic Neoplatonic axioms formalized by Scholastic contemporaries such as Aquinas and Bonaventure (Johnston 1996).
Llull as vernacular writer Ramon Llull wrote most of his over 250 works in Latin and some in his native Catalan.Thanks to training with a Muslim slave during his early period of study (Vita 1980, 278–79), he also learned enough Arabic to prepare versions in that language of some of his writings, although 247
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none of these have survived. The loss of these Arabic versions has been a major obstacle to evaluating Llull’s knowledge of Islamic theology and philosophy. His Latin prose is mediocre, often refecting transparently the syntax and vocabulary of his native vernacular idiom, and his lack of formal education. However, his writings in Catalan remain to this day monuments of that language’s medieval literary heritage (Badia, Santanach, and Soler 2016). Thanks to Llull’s extensive vernacular oeuvre, as well as to his celebrity as a theologian, philosopher, and missionary, his name appears on plazas, monuments, schools, and other public institutions throughout modern Catalonia. Llull wrote nearly all of his vernacular texts in order to promote the dissemination of his ideas among lay readers, and so often adapts genres familiar to them. The best-known and most-studied of his vernacular writings are his two so-called “spiritual romances”, Blaquerna (Llull 2009, 2016) and Felix or Libre de meravelles (Llull 2011–15). Each of these narrative works recounts how its eponymous protagonist traverses Christian society, affording Llull as author the opportunity to critique the failings of his contemporaries throughout secular and ecclesiastical circles. Each text also includes sections, perhaps composed independently, that have enjoyed their own celebrity among modern readers: from Blaquerna, the Book of the Lover and Beloved (Libre d’amich e amat), still read today as a guide to Christian devotion (Llull 1995); from Felix, the Book of Beasts (Libre de les besties), a fable of political confict in the animal kingdom based on Oriental sources (Llull 2011–2015, 1:221–269; Bonner 1993, 239–288). Many of Llull’s other Catalan writings also imitate well-known genres of contemporary vernacular literature. The Catalan version of his encyclopedic Tree of Knowledge (Arbor scientiae) of 1295 (Llull 2000), the Arbre de sciencia (Llull 1917–1926), mimics the scope and design of vernacular encyclopedias for lay readers (Franklin-Brown 2012). His several compilations of proverbs (Llull 1928) seek to provide suitably pious and edifying alternatives, some based on the system of his Great Art, to the voluminous corpus of such works already circulating in all the Western European vernaculars (Tous Prieto 2011).
Ramon Llull’s legacy in the late medieval, Renaissance, and early modern eras Scant documentation survives of Ramon Llull’s impact and infuence during his own lifetime. His contemporaries apparently ignored him or derided him as a “fool”, as he complains in several of his writings, such as the Song of Ramon (Cant de Ramon) and Disillusion (Desconhort) (Llull 1936, 219–260). The dissemination of Llull’s writings among his enthusiasts at Genoa, Majorca, and Paris, as mandated in his will, nonetheless nourished there the promotion of his Great Art and missionary ideals (Hillgarth 1998). His Parisian devotees, led by the physician Thomas Le Myésier, produced by 1325 a synthesis of Llull’s work and a beautifully illuminated account of his life, the Breviculum (Le Myésier 1990). In the ffteenth century, the Lullian corpus available in Paris attracted the notice and keen study of Nicholas of Cusa (Colomer i Pous 1961, 1975). In fourteenth-century Aragon, the activities of his Catalan followers prompted unsuccessful persecution from the Dominican Inquisitor Nicholas Eymerich (Heimann 2001), even while the Aragonese crown also granted licenses for teachers of Lullism in schools of the realm (Ramis Barceló 2012). By the late ffteenth century, a pious patron endowed a Lullist school in Barcelona (Hernando i Delgado 1999–2000; Ramis Barceló 2015), and another arose on Majorca, where it became a full-fedged university in the early modern era (Lladó Ferragut 1973; Ramis Barceló 2014a, 2014b, 2016a; Barceló i Crespí and Urgell Hernández 2002). At Toulouse, the Catalan theologian Raymond of Sabunde (1385–1436) offered his own version of Llull’s exemplarist metaphysics and epistemology in his controversial Theologia naturalis (Puig i Oliver 1997; Fidora 2001). 248
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The real impact of Llull and Lullism occurs after the medieval era, and so lies beyond the scope of this chapter. Still, it is important to know that, by the early sixteenth century, enthusiasm for Llull’s work, especially at Paris and Barcelona, but clearly also in northern Italy and even in the territories of the Holy Roman Empire, made the Great Art one of the most popular philosophical systems of Renaissance and early modern Europe (Colomer i Pous 1975;Vasoli 1978; Batllori 1993; Romano 2015). Giordano Bruno taught Lullism (Yates 1964; Rowland 2009). Leibniz claimed inspiration in mathematics from Llull’s scheme of alphabetical notation (Rossi 1960). Llull’s name became so renowned that it appeared on numerous texts of alchemical, cabbalistic, and hermetic doctrine, some as early as the fourteenth century, even though he never wrote any works on these subjects (Bonner 1993, 59;Yates 1964; Zambelli 1965; Pereira 1989). Colorful legends of Llull’s alchemical and cabbalistic endeavors nonetheless persisted in popular and academic accounts of his work into the early twentieth century (Waite 1922). In Spain, academic and ecclesiastical cultivation of Lullism continued into the nineteenth century, generating new editions of Llull’s writings and studies of his work (Domínguez Reboiras 2010; Ramis Barceló 2014a, 2014b). Meanwhile, as the Spanish empire expanded overseas, evangelists who accompanied the frst Colombian expeditions, such as Bernat Boïl, and later colonial missionaries, such as Junípero Serra, brought Lullist ideals and goals to the New World (Prunés 2003; Dagenais 2018). In the twentieth century, histories of Christian missions and advocates of inter-faith dialogue routinely cite Ramon Llull as a hero of pacifc evangelism.
Understanding Llull and Lullism The long career of Ramon Llull, his extensive oeuvre, the novelty of his Great Art, and its formidable infuence in Western culture present many challenges and opportunities to all modern scholars seeking to understand any aspect of his life, work, and legacy. The deliberately syncretic design of Ramon Llull’s Great Art, combined with his refusal to cite authorities and idiosyncratic terminology, has not deterred generations of modern scholars from seeking specifc texts, doctrines, or models for Llull’s work in Islamic and Jewish sources. His earliest writings included a translation of the Logic of Alghazali (Llull 1913–1914; Lohr 1967) and he occasionally cites Islamic sources of inspiration like the sufs, in texts such as his Book of the Lover and the Beloved (Llull 1995).The best assessments of his familiarity with Islamic and Jewish sources have identifed various possible infuences (Urvoy 1980; Garcías Palou 1981; Hames 2000). Still, no single author or text clearly offers a model for Llull’s work. Ultimately, the quest to identify specifc Islamic, Jewish, or even Christian analogs may be illusory, a mirage created by the disciplinary constructs of “infuence” and “source” in modern philology, thanks to its focus on textual genealogies. As a self-educated layman, Llull was never obligated to master the authoritative texts prescribed for study in the curricula of the universities or mendicant schools, but could instead choose for his use only those most relevant to his purposes. Apologetic treatises like the Arab Christian Contrarietas alfolica, one of the rare works cited by name in Llull’s oeuvre, evidently served him as sources of information about Islamic theology (Burman 1991).Wherever he lived or traveled, the texts that he read were always whatever he found available, as a layman, in locations as diverse as the abbey of La Real, the convents that he visited, the schools of Paris and Montpellier, or the personal collections of his lay, clerical, and academic supporters. Identifying the actual materials available to Llull in any location, as Hillgarth (1963) has done for La Real, remains a formidable, but unavoidable, challenge for ongoing study of his intellectual and spiritual development. Although Llull learned enough Arabic to style himself a christianus arabicus (Lohr 1984), the actual texts accessible to him in that language were surely limited wherever 249
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he sought them. Thus, Alghazali’s rudimentary summary of logic, which Llull rendered into Catalan, was a work scarcely valued by his Scholastic contemporaries, but perhaps the only text available to him for practicing translation during his early years of study on Majorca. Llull evidently never learned Hebrew. His knowledge of Jewish theology—such as the cabbalistic doctrines popular in thirteenth-century Spain—must have depended on translations, Christian apologetic works, or direct interrogation of Jewish contemporaries, as Hames (2000) has aptly suggested.Throughout his long career, Llull surely learned much simply through conversation with the many laypeople, clergy, and academic scholars that he engaged. These interpersonal encounters remain the most intriguing, and diffcult to assess, “infuences” on Llull’s learning and the development of his thought. For all these reasons, the most useful recent scholarship on the “sources” of Llull’s work and of late medieval Lullism are the studies that investigate the cultural practices, social networks, and textual communities in which Llull and his later followers developed their ideas and goals. The frequent lionization of Ramon Llull as a hero of medieval Iberian convivencia may still offer, despite its essentializing and anachronistic perspective, a convenient point of departure for understanding his activities within the complex interaction of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish cultures in the Western Mediterranean world of the late thirteenth century. It is impossible, if not disingenuous, to deny that the ultimate purpose of Llull’s Great Art was the conversion of unbelievers to Christianity, or to ignore that some of his writings advocated tactics of crusade and forced evangelization that were hardly pacifc (Beattie 2018). But even so, we must accept that Llull clearly believed in the effcacy of religious disputation with those unbelievers, whether as subject populations under European control or abroad in their own milieus (Mayer 2008; Roque 2008; Friedlein 2011). Comparison of Llull’s methods to those of contemporary mendicant missionaries yields some insight into his possible tactics and their standards for success (Coll 1944–1946; Oliver 1965–1969; Colomer i Pous 1988). Several of his own writings—most famously his often-cited Disputation of Five Wise Men (Disputació de cinc savis), Disputation of Ramon the Christian and Hamar the Saracen (Disputatio Raimundi christiani et Hamar saraceni), or Book of the Gentile and Three Wise Men (Libre del gentil e dels tres savis)—offer his own highly idealized representations of these encounters (Llull 1986b, 1993, 1998; Bonner 1993, 73–172). Yet, apart from his own texts such as these, the historical documentation of his efforts consists of a few terse offcial licenses that authorized him to proselytize Jews in the Crown of Aragon or Muslims in Italy (Hillgarth [2001], 66, 67, 71–72). Any understanding of the practical circumstances in which Llull sought to evangelize unbelievers requires far more attention to the social, cultural, political, and even economic factors that enabled similar proselytizing by laypeople, such as the curious debate with Jews staged at Majorca in 1286 by the Genoese merchant Inghetto Contardo (Limor 1985). The same need for attention to the broad contexts of Llull’s evangelizing endeavors applies to his entire career.Veneration of Llull since the late Middle Ages as the divinely inspired “Universal Doctor” and a unique genius—perhaps even privy to still unidentifed sources of Islamic and Jewish thought—has only served to depress modern scholarly analysis of the social networks, textual communities, institutional structures, academic practices, ecclesiastical policies, or political interests that he engaged. Simply put, Ramon Llull is the most remarkable, but imperfectly understood, lay theologian and philosopher of his era (Imbach 1989). Some of the most basic questions about his activities remain diffcult to answer. Exactly how, where, and with whom did he pursue and acquire his education? How could contemporaries deem Llull a “master” (magister), even though he lacked an academic degree? How compelling was his claim to divine inspiration—a common strategy for medieval laypeople and female religious seeking to justify their interventions in theological affairs? How exactly did he engage the local and international 250
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social and professional networks that were essential to promoting his idiosyncratic schemes? The Vita and the scant documentation about his activities still cannot answer these questions. More evidence must be sought for analyzing the patronage that he received or sought—not always successfully—from the kings of Aragon, Majorca, and France (Hillgarth 1971, 46–134). Similarly, understanding Llull’s networks of contacts with lay devotees, academic offcials, or clerical authorities surely could yield more insights. For example, we know that: the Franciscan Minister-General Ramon Gaufredi, famous for his support of the Franciscan Spirituals, granted Llull permission to teach his Great Art in houses of the order (Hillgarth 2001, 60–61); the Vita of 1311 reports that Llull enjoyed enthusiastic support among “devout widows and matrons” of Genoa (Vita 1980, 301), where his supporters included the nobleman Percival Spinola (Fidora and Rubio 2008, 69); at Paris, Francesco Caroccioli, Chancellor of the University of Paris, provided Llull with a letter of commendation, using Biblical images typically employed to praise the devotion of the simple and humble (Johnston 1996, 8).All of these precious and few records of specifc moments from Llull’s career have of course attracted intense scrutiny from modern scholars, but remain for now tantalizing glimpses of the social, cultural, and political networks that he evidently exploited in the pursuit of his goals for almost 50 years. Tracing the circumstances and conditions that fostered interest in Llull’s work, during the century after his death in 1316, is scarcely less challenging to modern scholars. The historical documentation available for analyzing the rise of Lullism is fortunately more ample than the records from Llull’s own lifetime. A critical time and place to examine anew is fourteenthcentury Aragon, where very specifc social, political, intellectual, and religious interests both encouraged and doomed the anti-Lullist campaign of the Inquisitor Nicholas Eymerich. His efforts clearly failed to counter widespread enthusiasm for Lullism among both lay and clerical audiences. The many copies of Llull’s Latin and Catalan writings made in the 1300s, welldocumented in bibliographical inventories, merit renewed scrutiny as evidence of the textual communities that helped spread Lullism in the Crown of Aragon and eventually throughout the realms of Spain (Ramis Barceló, ed. 2016b). By the late ffteenth century, enthusiasm for Llull’s work inspired the pious patronage that endowed a Lullist school at Barcelona and the missionary zeal of friar Bernat Boïl, the monk from Montserrat who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage. Elsewhere in ffteenth-century Europe, Nicholas of Cusa is emblematic of the interest in Llull’s work that attracted advocates of political or ecclesiastical reform and of academic alternatives to Scholastic teachings.The ample scholarship available concerning well-known fgures like Cusanus can provide models for analyzing the social networks and textual communities of other ffteenth-century Lullists. Equally ample information exists regarding the networks and communities that by 1500 joined such diverse promoters of Lullism as Cardinal Cisneros in Spain and Jacques Lefevre d’Étaples in Paris (Rummel 1999; Llinarès 1973; Báez Rubí 2018). Their intellectual, religious, social, and political affliations provide a basis for exploring retrospectively the formation of the Lullist networks and communities that made possible Llull’s astonishing legacy in Renaissance and early modern Europe.
Conclusion The legacy of Ramon Llull and his work constitutes perhaps the most impressive channel of continuity between medieval Iberia and Renaissance and early modern Europe. That legacy remains unfamiliar among modern students and scholars due to several factors. The peculiar methods and language of Llull’s Great Art are admittedly diffcult to grasp without extensive study. Llull’s veneration as a “cultural hero” and near-saint in modern Catalonia has tended to limit interest in Llull and Lullism to partisans of that region’s national heritage.The most impor251
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tant research on Llull and Lullism is written in Catalan, a language not commonly understood by students and scholars of European history outside Spain. Nonetheless, for anyone interested in the broadest possible example of how the cultures of medieval Iberia intersected with the rest of Europe and the Western Mediterranean in the later Middle Ages, and then globally with the Renaissance and early modern worlds, Llull and Lullism offer rich and rewarding felds to explore. Extensive extant scholarship exists to support all such exploration, especially on those aspects of Llull’s life and work, noted above, that remain imperfectly understood or most perplexing. These include, among others: 1) The secular, academic, and ecclesiastical policies applicable to Llull’s initiatives as a lay teacher and preacher, especially the recognition of his authority to pursue these initiatives by lay, clerical, and academic authorities in each locale where he was active. 2) The cultural, social, economic, and political profle of each subject Muslim or Jewish population—from the Jews of Barcelona to the Muslims at Lucera—that Llull engaged, whether as targets of evangelization or as resources for his own edifcation. 3) The intersection of Llull’s proposals for the political, economic, social, or ecclesiastical reform of the Christian West with those of contemporaries—such as Pierre Dubois or Marsilius of Padua—whose arguments were much better known in his era. 4) The circumstances of Llull’s relations with specifc members of the mendicant orders, such as the Franciscan leader Ramon Gaufredi or the friars that he recruited to assist him late in his career. 5) The readership, ownership, and circulation of Lullian mansucripts, well-cataloged in available inventories, but still awaiting detailed analysis of their individual use and appropriation. 6) The material and logistical support that Llull received from Catalan and Italian merchants, both in their home territories and in North Africa. 7) The terms and conditions of the royal patronage that Llull sought or received, especially as compared to the support provided by the Aragonese and French crowns for contemporaries with similar interests. 8) The broader activities and interests of the cells of those disciples—many still known only as names—that Llull attracted in Paris, Genoa, Barcelona, and elsewhere. All these aspects of Llull’s life and work have received keen attention from modern scholars. Future scholarship can most helpfully extend their research through localization, that is, by investigating the individual communities where Llull pursued his goals and by identifying the precise networks of social, economic, political, or cultural interests that linked Llull and his associates in those communities. Future research on Llull and Lullism cannot rely simply on collating literary “sources” or ideological “infuences” across time and space, but must examine more closely how real local communities and their members acquired, appropriated, aided, or advertised Llull’s work for their own advantage.Without their efforts, Llull’s work would never have achieved the impact that it did in later centuries. In short, the social, political, economic, and cultural histories of Lullism remain to be written.
References Aragüés Aldaz, José. 2016. Ramon Llull y la literatura ejemplar. Alicante: Universidad de Alicante. Austin,Amy M., and Mark D. Johnston, eds. 2018. Companion to Ramon Llull and Lullism. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Badia, Lola, Joan Santanach, and Albert Soler, eds. 2016. Ramon Llull as a Vernacular Writer: Communicating a New Kind of Knowledge.Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer.
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Ramon Llull and Lullism Báez Rubí, Linda. 2018. “Lullism among French and Spanish Humanists of the Early 16th Century”. In Companion to Ramon Llull and Lullism, edited by Amy M. Austin and Mark D. Johnston, 399–436. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Barceló i Crespí, Maria, and Ricard Urgell Hernández. 2002.“La Universitat de Mallorca: origen i evolució fns al segle XVIII”. In Les universitats de la Corona d’Aragó, edited by Joan J. Busqueta and Juan Pemán, 157–192. Barcelona: Pòrtic. Batllori, Miquel. 1993. Ramon Llull i el lul·lisme.Valencia: E. Climat. Beattie, Pamela. 2018.“Ramon Llull’s Crusade Treatises”. In Companion to Ramon Llull and Lullism, edited by Amy M.Austin and Mark D. Johnston. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Bonner, Anthony, ed. 1993. Doctor Illuminatus: A Ramon Llull Reader. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Brummer, Rudolf. 1976. Bibliographia Lulliana: Ramon-Llull-Schrifttum 1870–1973. Hildesheim: H. A. Gerstenberg. Burman,Thomas. 1991.“The Infuence of the Apology of Al-Kindi and Contrarietas alfolica on Ramon Llull’s Late Religious Polemics, 1305–1313”. Mediaeval Studies 53: 197–228. Coll, José María. 1944–1946. “Escuelas de lenguas orientales en los siglos XIII y XIV”. Analecta Sacra Tarraconensia 17: 115–138, 18: 50–89, 19: 217–240. Colomer i Pous, Eusebio. 1961. Nikolaus von Kues und Raimund Llull. Berlin:Walter de Gruyter. Colomer i Pous, Eusebio. 1975. De la Edad Media al Renacimiento: Ramon Llull, Nicolás de Cusa, Juan Pico della Mirandola. Barcelona: Herder. Colomer i Pous. 1988. "Ramon Llull y Ramon Martí”. Estudios Lulianos 28: 1–37. Dagenais, John. 2018. “A Lullist in the New World: Junípero Serra”. In Companion to Ramon Llull and Lullism, edited by Amy M.Austin and Mark D. Johnston, 533–551. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Domínguez Reboiras, Fernando. 2010.“La recepción del pensamiento luliano en la Península Ibérica hasta el siglo XIX: Un intento de síntesis”. Revista de lenguas y literaturas catalana, gallega y vasca 15: 361–385. Fidora, Alexander. 2001. “La relación entre teología y antropología flosófca en el Liber creaturarum de Ramón Sibiuda”. Revista Española de Filosofía Medieval 8: 177–185. Fidora, Alexander, and Josep E. Rubio, eds. 2008. Raimundus Lullus: An Introduction to his Life, Works and Thought. Turnhout: Brepols. Franklin-Brown, Mary. 2012. Reading the World: Encyclopedic Writing in the Scholastic Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Friedlein, Roger. 2011. El diàleg en Ramon Llull: l’expressió literària com a estratègia apologètica. Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona. Garcías Palou, Sebastián. 1975. “Ramon Llull ante la convocación del Concilio de Vienne”. Estudios Franciscanos 76: 343–358. Garcías Palou, Sebastián. 1981. Ramon Llull y el Islam. Palma: Gráfcas Planisi. Gayà Estelrich, Jordi. 1979. La teoría luliana de los correlativos: Historia de su formación conceptual. Palma: L. C. San Buenaventura. Hames, Harvey J. 2000. The Art of Conversion: Christianity and Kabbalah in the Thirteenth Century. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Heimann, Claudia. 2001. Nicolaus Eymerich (vor 1320–1399). Münster: Aschendorff. Hernando i Delgado, Josep. 1999–2000. “Escoles i programes acadèmics a la Barcelona del segle XV: L’escola de mestre Ramon Llull i l’ensenyament de disciplines gramaticals i d’arts”. Acta historica et archaeologica mediaevalia 20–21: 633–662. Hillgarth, Jocelyn N. 1963.“La biblioteca de La Real: fuentes posibles de Llull”. Estudios Lulianos 7: 5–17. Hillgarth, Jocelyn N. 1971. Ramon Lull and Lullism in Fourteenth-Century France. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hillgarth, Jocelyn N. 1998. Ramon Llull i el Naixement del Lul.lisme. Barcelona:Abadia de Montserrat. Hillgarth, Jocelyn N., ed. 2001. Diplomatari lul·lià. Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona. Imbach, Ruedi. 1989. Laien in der Theologie des Mittelalters.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Johnston, Mark D. 1987. The Spiritual Logic of Ramon Llull. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Johnston, Mark D. 1996. The Evangelical Rhetoric of Ramon Llull. New York: Oxford University Press. Le Myésier, Thomas. 1990. Breviculum ex artibus Raimundi electum. Edited by Charles Lohr et al.Vol. 1 of Raimundi Lulli Opera Latina, Supplementum Lullianum.Turnhout: Brepols. Limor, Ora. 1985. The Disputation of Majorca 1286: A Critical Edition and Introduction. Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Lladó Ferragut, Jaime. 1973. Historia del Estudio General Luliano y de la Real Universidad Literaria de Mallorca. Palma: Cort.
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Mark D. Johnston Llinarès, Armand, 1973, “Le Lullisme de Lefèvre d’Etaples et de ses amis humanistes”. In L’Humanisme français au début de la Renaissance, edited by Jean-Claude Margolin, 126–137. Paris: J.Vrin. Llull, Ramon. 1617. Raymundi Lulli Opera ea quae ad adinventam ab ipso Artem Universalem … pertinent. Strasburg: Lazarus Zetzner. Llull, Ramon. 1906–1914. Libre de contemplació. Edited by Salvador Galmés.Vols. 2–8 of Obres de Ramon Lull. Palma: Commisió Editora Lulliana. Llull, Ramon. 1913–1914. Lògica del Gazzali. Edited by Jordi Rubió i Balaguer. “La lògica del Gazzali posada en rims per en Ramon Llull”. Anuari de l’Institut d’Estudis Catalans 5: 311–354. Llull, Ramon. 1917–1926. Arbre de sciencia. Edited by Salvador Galmés.Vols. 11–13 of Obres de Ramon Lull. Palma: Commisió Editora Lulliana and Diputació Provincial de Balears. Llull, Ramon. 1928. Proverbis de Ramon. Mil proverbis. Proverbis d’ensenyament. Edited by Salvador Galmés.Vol. 14 of Obres de Ramon Lull. Palma: Diputació Provincial de Balears. Llull, Ramon. 1936. Cant de Ramon. Desconort. Edited by Salvador Galmés.Vol. 19 of Obres de Ramon Lull. Palma: Diputació Provincial de Balears. Llull, Ramon. 1986a. Ars generalis ultima. Edited by Alois Madre.Vol. 14 of Raimundi Lulli Opera Latina. Turnhout: Brepols. Llull, Ramon. 1986b. Disputació de cinc savis. Edited by Josep Perarnau i Espelt. Arxiu de Textos Catalans Antics 5: 7–229. Llull, Ramon. 1993. Libre del gentil e los tres savis. Edited by Anthony Bonner.Vol. 2 of Nova edició de les obres de Ramon Llull. Palma: Patronat Ramon Llull. Llull, Ramon, 1995. The Book of the Lover and the Beloved: An English Translation with Latin and Old Catalan Versions Transcribed from Original Manuscripts. Edited by Mark D. Johnston.Warminster:Aris and Phillips. Llull, Ramon. 1998. Liber disputationis Raimundi christiani et Homeri saraceni. Edited by Alois Madre.Vol. 22 of Raimundi Lulli Opera Latina.Turnhout: Brepols, 172–264. Llull, Ramon. 2000. Arbor scientiae. Edited by Pere Villalba Varneda.Vols. 24–26 of Raimundi Lulli Opera Latina. Turnhout: Brepols. Llull, Ramon. 2009. Romanç d’Evast e Blaquerna. Edited by Joan Santanach and Albert Soler.Vol. 8 of Nova edició de les obres de Ramon Llull. Palma de Mallorca: Patronat Ramon Llull. Llull, Ramon. 2011–2015. Llibre de meravelles. Edited by Lola Badia et al.Vols. 10 and 13 of Nova Edició de les Obres de Ramon Llull. Palma: Patronat Ramon Llull. Llull, Ramon. 2016. Romance of Evast and Blaquerna.Translated by Robert D. Hughes. Barcelona: Barcino. Lohr, Charles H. 1967. Raimundus Lullus’ Compendium logicae Algazelis: Quellen, Lehre und Stellung in der Geschichte der Logik. Freiburg im Breisgau:Albert-Ludwigs-Universität. Lohr, Charles H. 1984. “Christianus arabicus, cuius nomen Raimundus Lullus”. Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie Und Theologie 31: 57–88. Mayer,Annemarie C. 2008. Drei Religionen—ein Gott? Ramon Llulls interreligiöse Diskussion der Eigenschaften Gottes. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder. Moreno Rodríguez, Felipe. 1982. La lucha de Ramon Llull contra el averroísmo entre los años 1309–1311. Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Oliver,Antonio Oliver. 1965–1969.“El beato Ramón Llull en sus relaciones con la Escuela Franciscana de los siglos XIII-XIV”. Estudios Lulianos 9: 55–70, 145–165; 10: 47–55; 11: 89–119; 13: 51–65. Pereira, Michela. 1989. The Alchemical Corpus Attributed to Raymond Lull. London:Warburg Institute. Pring-Mill, Robert D. F. 1955–1956. “The Trinitarian World Picture of Ramon Llull”. Romanistisches Jahrbuch 7: 229–256. Pring-Mill, Robert D. F. 1961. El microcosmos lul·lià. Oxford: Dolphin. Pring-Mill, Robert D. F. 1972. “The Analogical Structure of the Lullian Art”. In Islamic Philosophy & the Classical Tradition: Essays presented to Richard Walzer on the occasion of his 70th Birthday, 315–326. Columbia, S. Carolina: University of South Carolina Press. Prunés, Josep M. 2003.“Nuevos datos y observaciones para la biografía de Fray Bernardo Boyl”. Bollettino uffciale dell’Ordine dei Minimi 49: 555–574. Puig i Oliver, de Jaume. 1997. La flosofa de Ramon Sibiuda. Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans. Ramis Barceló, Rafael. 2012. “Un esbozo cartográfco del lulismo universitario y escolar en los Reinos Hispánicos”. Cuadernos Antonio de Nebrija 15: 61–103. Ramis Barceló, Rafael. 2014a.“Las cátedras lulianas de la Universidad de Mallorca (1692–1830)”. Bolletí de la Societat Arqueològica Lul·liana 70: 185–205. Ramis Barceló, Rafael. 2014b. “El Pontifcio Colegio de la Sapiencia de Mallorca durante el siglo XVII: constituciones y colegiales”. Historia de la educación 33: 167–192.
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Ramon Llull and Lullism Ramis Barceló, Rafael. 2015. “Aristotelismo, lulismo y ramismo en Barcelona durante el siglo XVI: JoanLluís Vileta y sus discípulos”. Cauriensia 10: 385–407. Ramis Barceló, Rafael. 2016a.“La flosofía luliana en la universidad durante los siglos XV y XVI”. Anuario flosófco 49: 177–196. Ramis Barceló, Rafael, ed. 2016b. Franciscanismo y lulismo en los Reinos Hispánicos. Monographic issue of Archivo Ibero-Americano 76, n. 282. Romano, Marta M. M., ed. 2015. Il Lullismo in Italia: itinerario storico-critico. Palermo: Offcina di Studi Medievali. Roque, Maria Àngels, ed. 2008. Ramon Llull and Islam:The Beginning of Dialogue/Ramon Llull y el islam: el inicio del diálogo. Barcelona: La Magrana. Rossi, Paolo. 1960. Clavis universalis:Arti della memoria e logica combinatoria da Lullo a Leibniz. Milan: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura. Rowland, Ingrid D. 2009. Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ruiz Simon, Josep Maria. 1986. “De la naturalesa com a mescla a l’art de mesclar (sobre la fonamentació cosmològica de les arts lul·lianes)”. Randa 19: 69–99. Rummel, Erika. 1999. Jiménez de Cisneros: On the Threshold of Spain’s Golden Age. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Salleras i Carolà, Marcel. 1986.“Bibliografa lul.liana (1974–1984)”. Randa 19: 153–198. Sugranyes de Franch, Ramon. 1954. Raymond Lulle, Docteur des Missions. Schönick-Beckenried, Switzerland: Nouvelle Revue de Science Missionnaire. Tous Prieto, Francesc. 2011.“Breus proposicions que contenen molta sentència: els proverbis lul·lians i les ‘formes sentencioses’”. Studia Lulliana 51: 77–98. University of Barcelona. Base de Dades Ramon. Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona. http://orbita.bib.ub .edu/llull/. Urvoy, Dominique. 1980. Penser l’Islam: Les présupposés islamiques de l′″Art” de Lull. Paris: J.Vrin. Vasoli, Cesare. 1978. L’enciclopedismo del Seicento. Naples: Bibliopolis. Vita coaetanea. 1980. Edited by Hermogenes Harada.Vol. 8 of Raimundi Lulli Opera Latina. Turnhout: Brepols, 269–309. Vita coaetanea. 2010. Ramon Llull:A Contemporary Life.Translated by Anthony Bonner. Barcelona: Barcino. Waite, Arthur E. 1922. Raymund Lully: Illuminated Doctor, Alchemist, and Christian Mystic. London:W. Rider and Son. Yates, Frances. 1954. "The Art of Ramon Lull (An Approach to It through Lull’s Theory of the Elements)”. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 17: 115–173. Yates, Frances. 1964. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zambelli, Paola. 1965. “Il De auditu Kabbalistico e la tradizione lulliana nel Rinascimento”. Atti dell’Accademia Toscana di Scienze e Lettere “La Colombaria” 30: 112–247.
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17 TOLEDO AND BEYOND Bishops and Jews in medieval Iberia Lucy K. Pick
In 2004, I published a book called Confict and Coexistence: Archibishop Rodrigo and the Muslims and Jews of Medieval Spain about Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, Archbishop of Toledo from 1209 to 1247. I introduced Jiménez de Rada as an apparently paradoxical fgure; on the one hand he used Jews as his fnancial agents and he protected them from the dress restrictions of the Fourth Lateran Council, while on the other, he depicted Jews as allies of the Muslim conquerors of Spain in his historical writings, and wrote a work of anti-Jewish polemic in which he attacked rabbinic scriptural exegesis. I accounted for this paradox by arguing that all of these activities were in fact part of a single program aimed at defning and therefore both limiting and permitting a place for Jews (and Muslims) in Christian society, under Christian rule, a rule that in the Iberian Peninsula meant, he hoped, under himself as primate of all the Spains (Pick 2004). What I did not question at the time, was the fact that Rodrigo, as archbishop, was deeply involved with the Jewish community of Toledo. And indeed he was—he wrote about Jews, he seemed aware of current theological debates within the Jewish community, he negotiated with the Jewish community of Toledo about the payment of the tithe mandated by the Fourth Lateran Council, he purchased land from them, he had at least two Jews who served as fnancial agents for him, and as his own canon-prebendaries complained to the pope: He established Jews as administrators over the chapter’s property, and these defraud the chapter’s property and the friends of the Church with their usuries; they often enter the chapter through the middle of the Church, to the great and serious scandal of the Christian people; they receive tithes and thirds and dominate the vassals and possessions of the Church; they are enriched not a little from the patrimony of the Crucifed one, and they do even worse. (Pick 1997, 218) Thus, I took for granted a world in which the image that was used for the dust jacket of my monograph on Rodrigo, of an archbishop disputing with a group of Jews, was unsurprising. It is an illustration from a manuscript produced in Toledo during the early years of Rodrigo’s archiepiscopacy containing the defense of Mary’s virginity against the heretics Jovinian and Helladius, and the Jews by the seventh-century archbishop, Ildefonsus of Toledo. Although Ildefonsus did not write his text in the form of a dialogue, the manuscript illustration shows him garbed as 256
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archbishop engaged in public disputation with a representative Jew. Both archbishop and adversary gesture as if speaking, and each side is accompanied by an audience that listens to the arguments being put forward.The illustrator imagined Toledo as a world in which bishops and Jews encountered each other face to face and engaged each other directly.1 This image of Rodrigo as an archbishop with close connections of different kinds to Jews seemed unsurprising. It ft what we know about bishops and Jews in other parts of Europe, for instance in German cities like Mainz,Worms, and Speyer, where bishops governed Jews based on their rights of lordship as secular princes (Havercamp 2004, 59–64). However, it should have surprised me. In fact,Archbishop Rodrigo’s multilayered and direct relationship with the Jews of his city and archdiocese was innovative at this time in post-conquest medieval Iberia. No Iberian bishop before his time in the post-conquest period had as much contact with Jews, or as many kinds of contacts—political, fnancial, theological—as Rodrigo did. This chapter will consider the roots of his relationships and attitudes toward Jews by examining the history of connections between bishops and Jews in medieval Iberia before 1200. None of Rodrigo’s predecessor bishops in Christian Spain were as preoccupied as he with Jews, neither as an ideological and theological problem, nor as fnancial and economic partners or rivals. This is primarily because, from the moment Jews surface in numbers suffcient to become a presence in the documentary record in Christian Spain in the late ninth century, they belong to the purview of the highest lay lord—be he king or count—not to the Church. Evidence for this is patchy in the early period, but consistent across Christian Spain. Elka Klein’s (2006) study of Jews in Barcelona before 1300 shows its count and then king gradually asserting lordship over the city’s Jews with no competition from religious authorities.The 1079 division of rights and property between brother-Counts Ramon Berenguer II and Berenguer Ramon II includes the name of some 55 Jews. Klein convincingly argues that this represents a lordship over the Jews that has more to do with rights of access to their property via taxation than ownership of their persons.This levy was probably irregular and arbitrary, but constrained by custom (Klein 2006, 36–40). Royal successors to the counts of Barcelona later articulated in writing the notion that lay authority had special claims over the Jews as a matter of principle. King Alfonso II of Aragon issued a fuero, or civic charter, to recently reconquered Teruel in 1176 or 1177, which clarifed the relationship of Jews to the Crown.A passage from the fuero that set the fnancial penalty for injuring or murdering a Jew at half that for committing the same offense against a Christian, also related that the sum paid in recompense for the offense must go, not to the victim or his family, as in the case of damage inficted against a Christian, but to the king, explaining,“For the Jews are servi of the king, and are always assigned to the royal treasury” (Castañe 1991, 573; as quoted in Klein 2006, 74).This passage found its way from the fuero of Teruel into a signifcant number of municipal codes in Aragón, Castile, and León issued in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, including the infuential code of Cuenca of 1190–1191.2 Much ink has been spilled to discuss what was meant by calling the Jews servi, a word that embraces a spectrum of meanings, from slaves to servants. David Abulafa (2004, 102–119) traces parallel uses of the term and connects it to a privileged status as royal servant. Klein de-emphasized the weight of the word servi and suggested the term “assigned (deputati)” is the key element of the phrase, indicating something weaker than ownership of the Jews by the king, and attesting at most to an immediate legal relationship between king and Jews, without intermediaries.Again, the Jews were less the king’s property than a fscal resource.The king had rights to their taxes and fnes for damages done to them, and also the concomitant obligation to protect them (Klein 2006, 74–75). And the fuero of Teruel does not seem to have imported any novelties into Castile when it inspired city codes there.The 1141 code of Calatalifa in which the property of Jews and Muslims is described as “de 257
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palatio”, of the palace, seems to have conveyed the same kind of unmediated fscal relationship between the king of Castile-León and non-Christians there.3 The king’s fnancial rights over Jews could be, and were, given away like any other royal fscal perquisite, as favors to bishoprics and to monasteries, and this is how some Jews at least came under the aegis of parts of the Church. On occasion, kings even granted them rights of jurisdiction over Jews, which they sometimes subsequently tried to claim back, to the consternation of the religious institutions that had been awarded them.4 The general principle that assigned the fnances of Jews in the frst instance to the Crown seems to have been left unquestioned. Nor was the royal relationship with Jews conceived of as based on fnances alone. Possession of the Jews was obviously a fnancial boon for the king, but we must remember that it was founded in a category that is theological as well as legal, that of Jew, which kings never forgot.When the Council of Coyanza in 1055, called by King Fernando I and Queen Sancha of Castile-León, forbade Jews from living with Christians, it was evoking categories of persons based on theological principle and staking a claim to adjudicate based on those categories.5 So where did this leave the bishops? The Council of Coyanza tells part of that tale too. It was an ecclesiastical council, but fully under the control of the king.The bishops of Castile-León, like the Jews, were highly dependent on their kings. It is impossible to speak of a Spanish “Church” independent of or separate from the “State”, even after the Gregorian reform empowered the bishops of other regions of Europe. Kings continued to make rhetorical use of the Muslim threat along their borders to claim great control to appoint and direct their own bishops and rule their Church (Linehan 1971, 1–4). Only by the late twelfth century did bishops begin to make systematic use of the jurisdictional powers of Rome in their disputes, and even then, primarily in regards to their fellow ecclesiastics, not against the king (Fletcher 1978, 181–83).Thus, the kings controlled, taxed, and regulated the Jews while the bishops let them do that without interference. Without regular legal and fscal jurisdiction over Jews, bishops could still have other kinds of dealings with Jews. León in the eleventh and twelfth centuries is a good early counterpoint to Archbishop Rodrigo’s Toledo in the thirteenth century. It was likewise a royal city with an important prelate. Moreover, from an early time, it had an old and thriving Jewish community. We know from their Arabized names that the Jews of León were not immigrants from beyond the Pyrenees, like Jews elsewhere in the towns on the road to Santiago de Compostela, but rather were either former residents of Muslim Spain, or their descendants. The Jews of León lived in a suburb a mile outside the city, the Castrum Iudeorum or Castle of the Jews. A dozen or so tombstones survive from the Jewish cemetery that was part of this community. A bridge linked it to the city, the source of the neighborhood’s current name of Puente Castro (Castle Bridge). The royal castle that gave it its name played an important defensive role for the city of León. Because of the castle, the whole community was under royal control (Rodríguez Fernández 1969, 25–33). Jews are prominent and present in the large number of documents preserved in the collection of the cathedral of León, and were highly active in land markets from the late tenth century onward.6 They had extensive holdings in the rich farming region south of the city. Both men and women of the Jewish community bought and sold property from their Christian neighbors, and confrmed transactions between Christians.They seem fully assimilated into the economic life of the region.The property they owned was not located in exclusively Jewish areas, but bordered that of Christian neighbors.There are isolated references to the “felds of the Jews” and “road of the Jews” in these regions.The village of Trobajo may take its name from the family of the Jew, Jacob Trebalio, who was active there.7 Thus it is striking that in the documentary records of the cathedral itself, the bishop is never seen engaging with Jews in a fnancial transaction. 258
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Given that this is an ecclesiastical document collection, it is remarkable that virtually all the activity of Jews at this time is with laypeople. Because of the nature of the collection and its intention to preserve transactions relating to the see of León, property relationships between Jewish and Christian laypeople are, if anything, under-reported.Where we have an example of a church fgure acquiring Jewish property in León, it was mediated by the crown: before King Vermudo II died in 999, he gave his loyal priest and chronicler Sampiro the villa of Alija, which had belonged to Vidal the Jew.8 When the bishops of León acquired a portion of the taxes owed by the Jews to the king, it was by means of royal gift. King Fernando gave the cathedral of León 500 solidi (s.) of silver as well as a hide and worked leather from the taxes of the Jews who lived in Castrum Iudeorum, in what appears to be the earliest grant of Jewish taxes to a religious institution in CastileLeón (Soifer Irish 2016, 94–95).9 After his death in 1065, the canons regularly celebrated a requiem Mass for the king for which they received 200 s. of that sum.10 It is signifcant that King Fernando gave some of the revenue he received from the Jews to León for the sake of his soul. Eliana Magnani (2003) has argued that it is wrong to regard pro anima gift-giving like this example as a simple quid pro quo exchange of material benefts in return for the promise of salvation. Grace could not be bought this way. Rather, gifts to God went beyond mere reciprocity of this kind because the material donation pro anima was intended to set in motion a process that required both the gift itself and its donor be spiritually transformed or converted to sacred use, before salvation could be confdently hoped for. Material goods must be converted to alms for the poor, or at least for “God’s poor”, the monastic or clerical recipients, and the donor was meant to undergo a similar spiritual transformation, assisted by the prayers of those whom he or she materially supported.These transformations were modeled on the central transformation of the Christian faith, the conversion of bread and wine in the Eucharist, where a material object is changed into a spiritual reward (Magnani 2003, 272–76, 284).Applying Magnani’s reasoning to King Fernando’s gift, we see how money from Jewish taxes was transformed into pious revenue for the see of León, an act that spiritually “laundered” the king’s income from the Jews. In 1074, Bishop Pelayo stated that it was his predecessor,Alvitus (bishop of León 1057–1063), who had divided the king’s gift of Jewish revenue into 200 s. for the canons, for which they offered prayers for King Fernando’s soul, and 300 s. for the bishop. Pelayo decreed that he now intended to give 30 s. annually out of his share to pay for candles to be lit all night long at the altar of Mary, Cyprian, and the Saviour, and in particular in honor of the Saviour.11 The sum of 30 s. was not chosen arbitrarily; it evokes the price of 30 coins paid to Judas to betray Jesus. Just as the king cleansed the money he received from the Jews by giving it to the church, and the canons accounted for their portion through memorial liturgy for the monarch, so too did the bishop now cleanse his portion by donating a part of it for the liturgical and ritual practices of the cathedral denominated in a spiritually weighty sum.This example, and others that I shall discuss later in this chapter, must caution us against assuming a dichotomy of motives behind Christian involvement with Jews, namely that Christians could either be motivated in their treatment of Jews by spiritual concerns or fnancial ones, but not both.12 Here and elsewhere, we see theology and economy work together in harmony in what Javier Castaño (2001, 165–67) has called a “sacred fscality”. Bishop Pedro, in 1092, expanded this gift to add an additional 20 s. from his portion of the Jewish tax in order to light the altar of John the Baptist, and took care to recall again that this money came from the taxes on the Jews.13 In 1120 Bishop Diego expanded the gift again by an additional 30 s., still taken out of the bishop’s portion of the royal tax on the Jews of the Castrum. At the same time, he made new donations for the upkeep of the altar of the cathedral that included, “A third from Almunia and the tenth of the king from the cattle 259
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who pasture at Almunia…5 s. from the church of San Martin del Mercado and a good tithe and two vineyards at Montefrío” (Fernádez Catón 1990, 5: no. 1368).There may be a Jewish connection for much of this donation. Almunia would later be a center where Jews owned property, and perhaps already was by this time.The “third” is the third part of the tithe owed to the Church, dedicated to upkeep of the Church, and this tithe may have been paid by local Jews on property acquired from Christians. Montefrío was also a Jewish area, which seems to have been near the Castrum of the Jews.14 Here again, the tithe may be that owed by Jews in that area. The Jews of León were heavily involved in viticulture in the region, and by the ffteenth century would pay tax to the cathedral for vineyards at Almunia.15 The parish of San Martín del Mercado became the new location of the Jewish aljama after their community at the Castrum was destroyed in 1196, but there were already Jews on the calle Fagildo near San Martin in the eleventh century.16 The text describing the bishop’s gift relates that the Jews paid their tax to the king on the feast of St Martin. The gift may give further evidence that Jews were in this area by the twelfth century. In this bishop’s gift, we again see Jewish money cleansed by using it for sacred purposes. As discussed earlier, the Jewish community of Castrum Iudeorum of León was destroyed and displaced in 1196. At the time, Alfonso IX of León was at war with Alfonso VIII of Castile. A combined army of Castilians and Aragonese attacked León that June.They were unable to take the city but they destroyed the Castrum after a siege that began on 23 June and ended two days later with the capture of the king’s fortress and the burning of the Jewish community and its synagogue. Later Hebrew chronicles report that the Jews who survived were taken captive.17 The motivations for this destruction were certainly grounded in both politics and economics. The Jews were there, the Jews were prosperous, and the Jews were closely associated with the army’s target, the king of León. But when armies or mobs attack Jews, theological righteousness coincides with economic self-interest. In 1197,Alfonso IX gave the bishop and see of León the whole of the Castrum Iudeorum in compensation for the lost 500 s. they used to receive from the Jews who had lived there.18 The destruction of the Castrum is a good moment to leave León for Toledo.Toledo had been conquered from the Muslims in 1085 and it contained a large Jewish population. Christian Toledo attracted Jews feeing the restrictions and persecutions of the Almoravids and Almohads, and the city became an important royal center as the Muslim frontier moved south. Like León in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, documents from twelfth-century Toledo contain numerous references to Jews which reveal many connections between Jews and the king and other laypeople, but virtually no links between Jews and the cathedral of the city. This situation begins to change before Rodrigo became archbishop in 1209. His predecessor, Archbishop Martín López, purchased houses and shops inside Toledo from the wealthy Jew,Abu ‘Omar b. Suxen, the almojarife, or tax-collector of Alfonso VIII. After Abu ʿOmar died in 1205, Martín purchased all his holdings in Olías, where wealthy Jews were active. In January 1206, the Jew, Abu Harun Musa ibn Axaat, placed his lands, vineyards, and oxen in Olías, his houses inside and outside of Toledo, and all his goods, in the hands of the canons of Toledo as security for a debt of 300 morabetinos (mrs.) which he promised to repay by the following feast of John the Baptist (24 June).19 One of the earliest references to Rodrigo as Archbishop of Toledo is in a purchase of land from this same Abu Harun Musa.At the end of October 1209, Rodrigo’s new archdeacon of Toledo, Mauricio, bought property at Olías on the archbishop’s behalf from the Jew, his wife, and his sons for 381 mrs.20 The original Arabic version of the document states the purchase price of 381 mrs. was equivalent to a debt that Abu Harun Musa owed to the previous archbishop, Martín.The document of 1209 does not, therefore, record a simple sale, but rather a loan called in by the archbishop (Grassotti 1972, 120–21).Two things are noteworthy: frst, the 260
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debt was originally incurred to the canons but was subsequently depicted as being incurred to Archbishop Martín, and it was repaid, not to the canons, but to Rodrigo himself through his archdeacon. Second, the original debt of 300 mrs. had climbed to 381 mrs. in less than three years. As I have said, Jews had to pay ecclesiastical tithes on land acquired from Christians.This claim is frst pressed in some parts of Spain in the twelfth century. This tithe allowed bishops to tap the fnancial resources of the Jews, resources that had been the exclusive purview of the kings. It was of special concern in places like Toledo where Jews were moving into Christian areas and buying property, and where wealthy Jews were capable of buying up substantial amounts of land, eliminating the duty of its former Christian owners to tithes for it. One of the several provisions of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 that concerned the Jews was the requirement that Jews pay tithes on land acquired from Christians.21 Pope Honorius III wrote in 1217 to the bishop of Palencia, the abbot of Husillos, and the dean of Toledo, in response to a complaint by Mauricio, the bishop of Burgos. Mauricio, formerly the archdeacon who bought Jewish property for Rodrigo, had reported that the Jews of Burgos neither paid tithes nor dressed differently from Christians, as Lateran IV required.22 Honorius wrote to Rodrigo, charging that Jews throughout the province of Toledo evaded the tithes and distinctive dress.23 In March 1219 Honorius required Rodrigo ensure Jews tithe both for land purchased from Christians, and for buildings that they erected on the land, however, he then exempted the Jews of Castile from the dress regulations as a response to complaints from both the archbishop and King Fernando III (1217–1252) that the Jews of Castile would rather live under the Moors than adhere to the dress regulations. Since the bulk of the king’s revenues came from the Jews, or so Honorius reasoned in the bull, fscal disruption and discord would result in Castile if the dress regulations were applied.24 On 16 June 1219, King Fernando III confrmed a pact made between Rodrigo and the Jews of Toledo to resolve the question of the tithes.The pact required every Jewish male adult to pay one-sixth of a gold mr. annually to the archbishop. In return, all the Jews of the Toledan archdiocese were freed from paying the tithes and offerings required by Lateran IV.The pact covered lands purchased from Christians before the agreement, and nor would Jews tithe for land bought at a future date from Christians, as long as land of equal value was sold to Christians. Jews would have to tithe for land purchased from Christians after the pact, but not for any buildings on that land, whenever built, directly contradicting Honorius’s letter that March. Payment was due each year between the feasts of Saint Michael (29 September) and Saint Martin (11 November). Finally, Rodrigo promised to defend and aid the Jews so far as he was able, taking on the protective role of the king in relation to the Jewish community.25 By means of this pact, Rodrigo gained a new, stable source of revenue and a role with the Jewish community. Likewise, the wealthy Jews who bought and sold much property, a group that overlapped with those who helped Rodrigo with his fnancial dealings, got to replace a potentially costly tithe on property with a modest, fxed poll tax. The big losers here were poor Jews who might never buy Christian land and thus need to tithe, but who now owed an annual poll tax, and the other bishops of the archdiocese of Toledo, who saw their ecclesiastical tithe vanish in Rodrigo’s pact. Indeed, bishops of Baeza, Palencia, and Burgos, and the deans of Burgos and Calahorra complained to the pope that the Jews were not paying them the tithes they owed.26 The purchase from Abu Harun Musa and the poll tax pact are representative and useful examples of Rodrigo’s dealings as archbishop with the Jews of Toledo. As I (Pick 2004) argued in my book, they were part of a larger program that included the writing of religious polemic directed against Jews together with conquest and settlement of Muslim-held lands, scholarly 261
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patronage, and literary creation.This program was aimed at containing threats, both internal and external, Christian and non-Christian, to allow Christians, Muslims, and Jews to live together under Christian hegemony. It was a program that seamlessly blended theological, political, and economic concerns, and indeed could not conceive of these as separate. Why was Rodrigo, compared to his predecessors, so innovative and aggressive in his approach to the Jews? His early years spent in France at the University of Paris may be one factor. Rodrigo was probably in Paris in 1198 when Philip Augustus invited the Jews to return to the royal domain from whence they had been expelled in 1182. Certainly, he acquired some key theological concepts in Paris, which he applied to the Iberian situation, that is to say, the notion that the world was designed to be united under God, but was fractured by sin into different groups of all kinds. But we can look closer to home than Paris for sources of infuence. Rodrigo was born in Navarre to a Navarrese father and a Castilian mother from just over the disputed border of those two kingdoms, and Navarra was home to a wealthy and active Jewish population, especially in the city of Tudela. Between 1142 and at least 1202, documents record property transactions and loans given by the Jew, Abulhasan, and his brother Juce of Tudela, and Juce’s son, Muza.27 The activity of this family recalls that of the prominent and wealthy Jewish families in Toledo at the end of the twelfth century and into the thirteenth, buying and selling land and loaning money to their Christian neighbors. In 1163, Rodrigo’s ancestor Aznar de Rada recognized that he still owed 600 mrs. of the 870 mrs. Juce had loaned him, and he swore that if he did not repay it in one year, he would give the Jew his land at Valtierra, held in pledge for the loan.28 In 1188 his son, Lop Aznárez sold all his property in Valtierra to Muza, son of Juce for 1,500 mrvs.29 This seems to describe a similar process as the document I described earlier, in which a purchase of land by Rodrigo from a Jew in fact concealed a repayment of a debt by that Jew. Here, it is the Jew who is the buyer and the Christian is the one whose family owes the debt. María Dolores Quiroga (1955, 412–420) identifes Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, whose cognomen comes from the same Navarrese castle, as a direct descendent of Aznar de Rada and his son Lop Aznárez, great-great grandson of the former and great-grandson of the latter. The Jewish lending family of Abulhasan, Muza, and Joce was operating in the very region that we know was dominated by Rodrigo’s family while he was growing up. Another possible Navarrese precedent for Rodrigo’s later activity in Toledo involves the same Jewish family. I discussed earlier Rodrigo’s pact to replace the Jewish tithe with a poll tax. Rodrigo was not the frst Iberian prelate to exchange the tithe for a poll tax. In 1143, Miguel, bishop of Tudela (1119-1151), exempted Abulhasan and his brothers from paying the tithe for lands which they bought or accepted in pledge from Christians. As we can see from this family’s extensive dealings as lenders with Christians, releasing them from the tithe would have been a substantial boon to them. In place of the tithe, Abulhasan was to give the church one morabetino. He would, however, owe tithes for property acquired after this date. The document related that the bishop did this “with a good heart and on account of all the service which you have done and continue to do for me and for the whole church” (Carrasco, Miranda García, and Ramírez Vaquero 1994, no. 13).30 I originally hypothesized that Rodrigo was infuenced in his own exchange of the tithe with a poll tax by the jizya owed by nonMuslims in Muslim Spain. But a more immediate precedent and example may have been Bishop Miguell of Tudela’s tax. Interestingly, as Rodrigo would later do, Bishop Miguel, whose diocese covered Tarazona and Tudela, promoted the translation of Arabic scientifc texts from the Banu¯ Hu¯d library; one of the frst, if not the frst, Iberian bishop to support such translation work, a task that often involved contributions from Jews. The Jewish community of Tudela was not only wealthy, it 262
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was scholarly, like that of Toledo, including among its eleventh- and twelfth-century members Yehudah haLevi,Abraham ibn Ezra, and Benjamin of Tudela. Its reputation was such that among Jews it was known fguratively as “Lucena” in comparison to the famous Andalusi Jewish center of Jewish learning, whose Jews were expelled by the Almohads in 1148 (Lacave 1996, 83–86; Carrasco 2006, 357). Bishop Michael had asked 1 mr. from this one family, while Archbishop Rodrigo demanded one sixth of a mr. each from all Jewish male householders. The difference between the two sums is signifcant, less because of their cash value than for what they symbolized. In the time of Fernando III, when Rodrigo made his pact with the Jews, a morabetino had been set as worth 180 pepiones, the “pennies” that circulated as money in use in Castile.31 Thus, the sum Rodrigo takes care to call one sixth of a morabetino is in fact equal to 30 pennies. In 1238, Rodrigo conceded his revenues from the Jews earned from the poll tax in the town of Maqueda to his canons, “namely 30 pennies from each one” (AHN MS987B, fols. 30r–31r; Hernández 1985, no. 450).32 Thirty coins is a symbolically weighty sum, being, as we discussed earlier with respect to the thirty s.-worth of candles given by the bishop of León to burn on the cathedral’s altars, the price paid to Judas to betray Jesus. Javier Castaño (2001), who has studied efforts by dioceses across Spain and southern France to require Jews to pay them 30 pennies a year from the thirteenth century on, argues that this charged sum was intended both to recall and reinscribe Jewish guilt for the crucifxion on a yearly basis. At the same time, it became the price Jews had to pay to be allowed to live in Christian society. Payment of this sum defnes them as theologically and legally other than the rest of the community, and incorporates them into the community on these terms. Jews were charged this sum in dioceses across Castile and Navarra until the expulsion of 1492. It became detached from its original excuse of being a tax to replace the tithe, and developed simply into an additional impost. When Jews referred to it, they declared its payment exempted them from the requirement to wear a distinctive dress or a Jewish badge; they themselves made no acknowledgment of its theological meaning (Castaño 2001, 165–191). Signifcantly, in Rodrigo’s original pact, the theological barb of associating the Jews of his own day with the betrayal of Christ by Judas is deliberately concealed in the document, which describes the sum as one-sixth of a mr. rather than the 30 pennies that represented a euphemism that masks the insult. Archbishop Rodrigo’s poll tax is one of the earliest examples of a poll tax on Jews that is explicitly keyed to Judas’s 30 coins, and Bishop Miguel of Tudela’s exemption of one Jewish family from the tithe in exchange for a poll tax may have been its model. Even though Miguel’s exemption was not connected in monetary terms to the sum paid to Judas for his betrayal of Christ, this transaction was in the minds of the members of his cathedral in the decades following his episcopacy.The late Romanesque cloister of the cathedral of Tudela was begun around 1186, and Pamela Patton (2004) has noted the anti-Jewish subtext of its sculptural decoration. Two capitals on the inner faces of the northeast pier of the cloister, directly facing the door to the church, highlight Jewish conspiracy in the story of the Passion. The frst shows Jewish conspirators, distinguished by their dress, plotting the death of Jesus at the house of Caiaphas. The second shows the payment of Judas. Judas stands, backed by a demon, hand out, in the left corner of the capital while a parade of three Jews approaches him and the frst presses coins into his hand. Patton (2004, 317–322) argues that such scenes as these are iconographically rare in Romanesque sculpture, and they highlight the innovative role of Tudela’s cathedral in relationships with Jews in medieval Iberia (Figures 17.1 and 17.2). From the earliest moments of interaction between bishops and Jews in medieval Spain, both sacral concerns and fnancial exigencies were blended together.There is more work to be done 263
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Figure 17.1 Conspiracy at the House of Caiaphas, capital,Tudela Cathedral. Photo credit: Pamela A. Patton.
on Jews, bishops, and other ecclesiastical institutions in medieval Iberia, including a thorough examination of the less-studied period between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. It would be most proftable if this work did not attempt to further a false dichotomy between fscal concerns and theological ones.As Javier Castaño (2001) has argued so eloquently and I have tried to show, there was a “fscal sacrality” or “sacred fsc” that shaped both royal and episcopal notions of what to do with Jews. 264
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Figure 17.2 Judas capital,Tudela Cathedral. Photo credit: Pamela A. Patton.
Notes 1 Madrid Biblioteca Nacional MS 21546. 2 David Abulafa,“Nam iudei servi regis sunt, et semper fsco regio deputati.The Jews in the municipal Fuero of Teruel (1176–77)”, in Jews, Muslims, and Christians in and around the Crown of Aragón, Elena Lourie and H.J. Hames (Zaragoza: Brill, 2004), pp. 97–99. Translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 3 Tomás Muñoz y Romero, Colección de fueros municipales y cartas pueblas (Madrid: Impr. de Don J.M. Alonso, 1847), p. 532. 4 For examples of cases in León and Castile where bishoprics and monasteries received fnancial rights and legal jurisdiction over Jews, see Maya Soifer Irish, “Tamquam domino proprio. Contesting Ecclesiastical Lordship over Jews in Thirteenth Century Spain”, Medieval Encounters 19 (2013): pp. 543–46. 5 “Et nullus christianus aut christiana cum iudeis ausus sit in domum manere, aut cum eis cibum sumere”. Alfonso García Gallo,“El Concilio de Coyanza”, Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español 20 (1950): p. 297. 6 E.g., from the period before 1050: José Manuel Ruíz Asencio, ed., Colección documental del archivo de la catedral de León (León: CEISI, 1987), 3: nos. 579, 610, 614, 667, 704, 737, 742, 756, 774, 787, 792, 828, 853, 888; José Manuel Ruíz Asencio, ed., Colección documental del archivo de la catedral de León (León: CEISI, 1990), 4: nos. 910, 923, 951, 960, 967, 986, 1017, 1027, 1063, 1064. 7 Rodríguez Fernández, Judería de León, 57. Documents involving Jews at Trobajo include: Ruíz Asencio, CD León, 3: nos. 667, 737, 853; Ruíz Asencio, CD León, 4: nos. 923, 951, 967. 8 Ruíz Asencio, CD León, 3: no. 756. 9 The solidus was a money of account related to the silver dirham of al-Andalus, just as the morabetino, discussed later in the chapter, was derived from an Andalusi gold dinar. On the value of currency and the meaning of coinage in early Iberian charters, see Eduardo Manzano Moreno and Alberto Canto, “The Value of Wealth: Coins and Coinage in Iberian Early Medieval Documents”, in Beyond the Reconquest: New Directions in the History of Medieval Iberia (711-1085), ed. Simon Barton and Robert Portass (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 169–197.
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Lucy K. Pick 10 Rodríguez Fernández, Judería de León, no. 48, pp. 180–81. 11 Ruíz Asencio, CD León, 4: no. 1193. 12 Scholars who have recently argued for a dichotomy between economic and spiritual concerns with respect to the Church’s dealings with the Jews in Spain include: Jonathan Ray, “The Jews Between Church and State in Reconquest Iberia: The Evidence of the Ecclesiastical Tithe”, Viator 38 (2007): 155–56; Soifer Irish,“Contesting”, 534–35. Soifer Irish tempers this view in her recent book Jews and Christians, cf. esp. 80–89, which emphasizes the pragmatic and economic realities of the relationship between the Iberian Church and the Jews. 13 Ruíz Asencio, CD León, 4: no. 1264. 14 Ruíz Asencio, CD León, 4: nos. 967, 1063. 15 Rodríguez Fernández, Judería de León, 58–59, 124, 131, 236. 16 Rodríguez Fernández, Judería de León, 97–99; Ruíz Asencio, CD León, 4: nos. 1017m 1027. Jews live in barrios named for Saint Martin not only in León, but also in Burgos, Frómista, and Toledo. Many Jewish converts to Christianity in Spain will centuries later take the name Martí or Martínez. 17 Rodríguez Fernández, Judería de León, 33–35; Javier Castaño and Avello José Luis,“Dos nuevos epitafos hebreos de la necrópolis del Castro de los Judíos”, Sefarad 61 (2001): 304–5. 18 Fernández Catón, CD León 5, no. 1368; José María Fernández Catón, ed., Colección documental del archivo de la catedral de León (León: CEISI, 1991), 6: no. 1731. 19 Angel González Palencia, Los mozárabes de Toledo en los siglos XII y XIII (Madrid: Instituto Valencia de Don Juan, 1926), 3 no. 907; Pilar León, Tello, Judíos de Toledo (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científcas, 1979), 2, no. 79. 20 González Palencia, Mozárabes de Toledo, 1: no. 373; Pilar León Tello, Judíos de Toledo (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científcas, 1979), 2: nos. 88, 89; Francisco J. Hernández, Los cartularios de Toledo (Madrid: Fundación Ramón Areces, 1985), no. 305. 21 Antonio García y García, ed., Constitutiones Concilii quarti Lateranensis una cum Commentariis glossatorum, Monumenta Iuris Canonici, Series A, vol. 2 (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1981), pp. 106–9, 114–15. 22 Demetrio Mansilla, ed., La documentación pontifcia de Honorio III, Monumenta Hispaniae Vaticana, Sección: Registros, vol. 2 (Rome: Instituto Español de Historia Eclesiástica, 1965), no. 26. 23 26 Jan. 1218. Mansilla, La documentación pontifcia de Honorio III, no. 142. 24 Mansilla, La documentación pontifcia de Honorio III, nos. 211, 212. 25 Madrid, Archivo Histórico Nacional, MS 987B, fols. 20r–v; Julio González, Reinado y diplomas de Fernando III (Córdoba: Publicaciones del Monte de Piedad y Caja de Ahorros de Córdoba, 1983), 2: no. 77. 26 Solomon Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the Thirteenth Century (New York: Hermon Press, 1966), nos. 60, 62, 66. 27 Juan Carrasco, Fermín Miranda García, and Eloísa Ramírez Vaquero, Los judíos del reino de Navarra. documentos 1093–1333 (Pamplona: Gobierno de Navarra, 1994), nos. 11–13, 15–22, 24–28, 30, 32, 34–38, 40, 42–50, 52, 54–56, 58. 28 Carrasco, Miranda García, and Ramírez Vaquero, Judíos de Navarra, no. 24. 29 Carrasco, Miranda García, and Ramírez Vaquero, Judíos de Navarra, no. 52. 30 “Hoc donatiuum dono uobis bono corde et propter multa seruicia que mihi fecistis et facitis et ecclesie mee”. 31 Manuel González Jiménez, ed., Crónica de Alfonso X (Murcia: Real Academia Alfonso X el Sabio, 1998), p. 5. 32 “Videlicet xxx denarios annuatim pro unoquoque”.
References Abulafa, David. 2004.“Nam iudei servi regis sunt, et semper fsco regio deputati.The Jews in the Municipal Fuero of Teruel (1176–77)”. In Jews, Muslims, and Christians in and around the Crown of Aragón, edited by Elena Lourie and H.J. Hames, 97–123. Zaragoza: Brill. Carrasco, Juan. 2006.“La villa de Tudela y las otras gentes del libro: moros y judíos (c. 900–1498)”. In Città e vita cittadina nei paesi dell’area mediterranea, edited by Biagio Saitta, 355–366. Rome:Viella. Carrasco, Juan, Fermín Miranda García, and Eloísa Ramírez Vaquero, eds. 1994. Los judíos del reino de Navarra. Documentos, 1093–1333. Pamplona: Gobierno de Navarra. Castañé Llinás, José, ed. 1991. El fuero de Teruel. Teruel:Ayuntamiento de Teruel.
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Toledo and beyond Castaño, Javier. 2001. “Una fscalidad sagrada: los ‘treinta dineros’ y los judíos de Castile”. Studi Medievali 42: 164–204. Castaño, Javier, and Avello José Luis. 2001.“Dos nuevos epitafos hebreos de la necrópolis del Castro de los Judíos”. Sefarad 61: 229–318. Fernández Catón, José María, ed. 1990. Colección documental del archivo de la catedral de León. León: CEISI. Fernández Catón, José María, ed. 1991. Colección documental del archivo de la catedral de León. León: CEISI. Fletcher, R.A. 1978. The Episcopate in the Kingdom of León in the Twelfth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. García Gallo,Alfonso. 1950.“El Concilio de Coyanza”. Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español 20: 275–633. García y García, Antonio, ed. 1981. Constitutiones Concilii quarti Lateranensis una cum Commentariis glossatorum. Monumenta Iuris Canonici, Series A, vol. 2.Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. González, Julio, ed. 1983. Reinado y diplomas de Fernando III. Córdoba: Publicaciones del Monte de Piedad y Caja de Ahorros de Córdoba. González Jiménez, Manuel, ed. 1998. Crónica de Alfonso X. Murcia: Real Academia Alfonso X el Sabio. González Palencia, Ángel. 1926. Los mozárabes de Toledo en los siglos XII y XIII. Madrid: Instituto Valencia de Don Juan. Grassotti, Hilda. 1972. “Don Rodrigo Ximénez de Rada, gran señor y hombre de negocios en la Castile del siglo XIII”. Cuadernos de Historia de España 55–56: 1–302. Grayzel, Solomon. 1966. The Church and the Jews in the Thirteenth Century. New York: Hermon Press. Havercamp, Alfred. 2004. “Jews and Urban Life: Bonds and Relationships”. In The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages, edited by Christoph Cluse, 55–69.Turnhout: Brepols. Hernández, Francisco J. 1985. Los cartularios de Toledo. Madrid: Fundación Ramón Areces. Klein, Elka. 2006. Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power in Medieval Barcelona.Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press. Lacave, José. 1996.“Tudela y Lucena”. Sefarad 56: 83–86. León Tello, Pilar. 1979. Judíos de Toledo. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científcas. Linehan, Peter. 1971. The Spanish Church and the Papacy in the Thirteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Magnani, Elianna. 2003. “Transforming Things and Persons: The Gift Pro Anima in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries”. In Negotiating the Gift, edited by Gadi Algazi, Valentin Groebner, and Bernhard Jussen, 269–284. Göttingen:Vendenhoeck & Ruprecht. Mansilla, Demetrio, ed. 1965. La documentación pontifcia de Honorio III. Monumenta Hispaniae Vaticana, Sección: Registros, vol. 2. Rome: Instituto Español de Historia Eclesiástica. Manzano Moreno, Eduardo and Alberto Canto. 2020.“The Value of Wealth: Coins and Coinage in Iberian Early Medieval Documents”. In Beyond the Reconquest: New Directions in the History of Medieval Iberia (711–1085), edited by Simon Barton and Robert Portass, 169–197. Leiden: Brill. Muñoz y Romero, Tomás, ed. 1847. Colección de fueros municipales y cartas pueblas. Madrid: Impr. de Don J.M.Alonso. Patton, Pamela. 2004. “The Cloister as Cultural Mirror. Anti-Jewish Imagery at Santa María la Mayor in Tudela”. In The medieval cloister. Le cloître au Moyen Age. Architektur, Funktion und Programm, edited by Peter K. Klein, 317–332. Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner. Pick, Lucy K. 2004. Confict and Coexistence: Archbishop Rodrigo and the Muslims and Jews of Medieval Spain. Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press. Pick, Lucy K. 1997. “Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada and the Jews: Pragmatism and Patronage in ThirteenthCentury Toledo”. Viator 28: 203–222. Quiroga, María Dolores. 1955.“Filiación genealógica y curiosos pormenores de la Casa de Rada”. Príncipe de Viana 61: 411–460. Ray, Jonathan. 2007. “The Jews Between Church and State in Reconquest Iberia: The Evidence of the Ecclesiastical Tithe”. Viator 38: 155–164. Rodríguez Fernández, Justiniano. 1969. La judería de la ciudad de León. León: Centro de Estudios e Investigación “San Isidoro”. Ruíz Asencio, José Manuel, ed. 1987. Colección documental del archivo de la catedral de León. León: CEISI. Ruíz Asencio, José Manuel, ed. 1990. Colección documental del archivo de la catedral de León. León: CEISI. Soifer Irish, Maya. 2016. Jews and Christians in Medieval Castile. Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press. Soifer Irish, Maya. 2013. “Tamquam domino proprio. Contesting Ecclesiastical Lordship over Jews in Thirteenth Century Spain”. Medieval Encounters 19: 534–566.
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18 TURNING AND RETURNING Religious conversion and personal testimony in Iberian societies Ryan Szpiech
In 1423, Alfonso the Magnanimous, King of Aragon (d. 1458), sent a letter from the Castel Nuovo in Naples, to Tunis, offering its recipient free passage on any ship, Christian or Muslim, “to any of our lands”. The offer included passage for his wives, children, servants, and all worldly goods. This extraordinary privilege was granted without condition, “non obstantibus quod fdem xpianam, ut percepimus, abnegaveritis, et propterea crimina plurima et enormia comiseritis” (Calvet 1914, 41) [Even though, as we knew, you denied the Christian faith and thereby committed many great crimes]. The addressee of the letter is “dilectum nostrum ffratrem Entelmum Turmeda alias alcaydum Abdallah” [our beloved friar Anselm Turmeda alias alcaide Abdallah], i.e., the Mallorcan Franciscan Anselm Turmeda (ca. 1352–ca. 1424/30), known after his conversion to Islam (ca. 1387) as ‘Abdallāh al-Tarjumān.This was not the frst such high-profle letter sent to Anselm/‘Abdallāh. Eleven years prior, Benedict XIII (Pedro Martínez de Luna), papal claimant in Avignon, wrote to him to offer absolution. Benedict recounts how, “temptatus a diabolo…habitu Ordinis Fratrum Minorum…ac fdei cristiane proposito penitus derelictis, eiusdem secte ac sarracenorum perfdie te dedisti” (Pou y Martí 1913–14, 467) [tempted by the devil…[and] having thoroughly abandoned the habit of the Franciscan order…and the way of life of the Christian faith, you gave yourself to the same perfdious sect of the Saracens]. In exchange for his return to Christian lands and to the Christian faith, “omnem culpam ac reatum apostasie huiusmodi…remittimus” (467) [We remit all guilt and charge of such apostasy]. In the years between these two letters,Turmeda himself wrote a narrative of his conversion in Arabic titled Tuḥfat al-adīb fī al-radd ‘alā ahl al-ṣalīb [Gift of the Lettered One to Refute the People of the Cross], a lengthy apology for Islamic belief and polemic against Christian dogmas that begins with a detailed autobiography.After describing his youth and education in Mallorca and Aragon, he tells how he studied for a decade in Bologna under the tutelage of a learned old Christian. One day he asked his master about the identity of the “paraclete” or advocate, whom Jesus mentions in the Gospel of John (e.g., 15:26).“The old man began to weep…‘You should know, my son, that the Paraclete is one of the names of…Muḥammad, Peace be upon Him.’…‘O master,’ I exclaimed,‘What is to be done then?’‘My son,’ he said,’ you should enter the religion of Islam” (Epalza 1994, 215–19; trans. Boase 1996–97, 63–64, with my changes). Shortly after, Turmeda made his way to Tunis, professed his faith in Islam, married, and began 268
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a lifelong career in service of the Ḥafṣid empire. He never accepted either offer of return to Christianity or Christian lands. Turmeda’s case, while unique in many ways, is also representative of some of the key aspects of the history of conversion in medieval Iberia. The rivalry between Islam and Christianity, dramatized on a small scale in Turmeda’s account, can in general terms be understood as the same contest that frames nearly the whole span of medieval Iberian history, from the arrival of Muslim troops in 711 to the fnal conquest of Muslim Granada in 1492. Anselm’s journey from Mallorca to Tunis and from Christianity to Islam mirrors in reverse that slow conquest, and even foreshadows the migration of many Moriscos (former Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity in 1501 and after) to Tunis after their fnal expulsion from Iberia in the seventeenth century.The contest for Anselm’s allegiance by Christians and Muslims alike echoes the theological struggle for Christian supremacy over other faiths, including both Islam and Judaism, that was a defning feature of the medieval Church.The format of Anselm’s attack on his former faith is also representative of the tradition of polemical writing by converts—from Judaism and Islam to Christianity, from Christianity and Judaism to Islam, and in some rare cases, from Christianity or Islam to Judaism—that became more popular over the course of the Middle Ages and laid the groundwork for the development of the genre of autobiography in the early modern period. Finally, the survival of documents about Turmeda, written from both Christian and Muslim perspectives, raises one of the most important issues at stake in studying medieval conversion: the question of how to reconcile religious change understood as a social process, and conversion understood as a metaphor of culture expressed retrospectively in words and images. Using Turmeda’s example as a point of departure, this chapter will consider conversion in medieval Iberia both as a social phenomenon and as a literary and theological construction. It will frst provide a broad overview of conversion in social and political terms, offering a bird’seye view of some key changes that shaped religious encounters in medieval Iberian history. It will then raise the question of methodology, suggesting that although “conversion” serves as a useful historiographical shorthand for larger and more complex social processes, it is most meaningfully studied from a critical perspective as a metaphor of cultural expression. After surveying a few texts that recount conversion stories told from different narrative perspectives, such as Milagros de Nuestra Señora of Gonzalo de Berceo (d. before 1264), the Cantigas de Santa María of King Alfonso X (d. 1284), and subsequent Romance fctions, it will consider the place of conversion in theological treatises such as the Kuzari of Judah Halevi (d. 1141), the Llibre del gentil y dels tres savis of Ramon Llull (d. 1316), and the Sefer Aḥiṭub ve-Tsalmon (ca. 1420–50). It will conclude by comparing these to frst-person accounts of conversion by three well-known converts who, like Anselm Turmeda, also wrote polemical attacks on their former faiths: Petrus Alfonsi (converted ca. 1106), Abner of Burgos/Alfonso of Valladolid (d. ca. 1347), and ‘Abd al-Ḥaqq al-Islāmī (late fourteenth century). Although these examples are widely disparate in date, focus, and context, conversion appears in all of them as a rhetorical tool or narrative device, a refection not of single events in mundane history but of a theologically infected prophetic history.These examples show that conversion in Iberian societies was as much a topos of discourse as it was a phenomenon of Iberian social and religious history, and merits critical treatment as an aspect of poetics and a metaphor of culture more than as a historical fact or event.
Conversion in Iberia: a brief historical overview. The Iberian Peninsula is unique in medieval history in part because it was the only European territory in which Muslims enjoyed independent polities, and in part because it also was home to a sizeable Jewish population, established far earlier and in greater numbers than anywhere else 269
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in Latin Christendom.While communities of Jews had been scattered throughout parts of the Mediterranean (e.g., Alexandria, Rome, parts of Greece) since antiquity and continued to exist in areas of the former Roman Empire (such as Constantinople), their communities were in most places of moderate size. Between the fall of Rome and the year 1000 CE, the majority of Jews was to be found east of Palestine in Babylonia or in North Africa and Iberia, mainly in Islamic rather than Christian territories. Because of the long duration of Islamic rule in al-Andalus and the sizeable Jewish population there up to the twelfth century, Iberia was the only land in Europe or the western Mediterranean—with the exception of Sicily in the tenth to twelfth centuries—shared by sizeable populations of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. For this reason, premodern Iberia is also a uniquely fruitful location to consider the history of religious change, constituting what Mercedes García-Arenal and Yonatan Glazer-Eytan have called “a laboratory of conversion” (2019, 3). Conversion from Judaism to Christianity—held up as a Christian ideal since the frst century—was an important topic of debate in Iberia before the arrival of Islam in the eighth century. While much discussion of “Jews” took place in the total absence of real Jewish communities, anti-Jewish thought had a measurable effect on social interaction as well. Small pockets of Jews had settled in Iberia in the Roman period and those that remained under Visigothic rule faced considerable religious hostility and little legal protection, including the threat of forced conversion.The question of coercion presented a theological conundrum in the medieval church, in which forced conversion was at once prohibited and, in sacramental terms, still recognized as spiritually valid. A papal recommendation against forced conversion had existed in Latin Christendom since the time of Pope Gregory I (reg. 590–604) (Gregorius 1982, 48). Nevertheless, only a few decades later, King Sisebut (d. 621) ordered the forcible baptism of all Jews in his kingdom. Although Bishop Isidore of Seville (d. 636), at the Fourth Council of Toledo in 633, forbade conversion by force, he nevertheless partially upheld Sisebut’s ruling by deeming all earlier forced baptisms as valid and binding (Vives, 1963, 211).This Janus-faced policy established a contradictory pattern of Christian treatment of Jews in Europe that continued to obtain in later centuries, leading to both pastoral and theological arguments that appealed to Jews to convert and outbursts of violence that forced them to accept baptism. The arrival of Islam to the peninsula in 711 initiated a process of radical social and political change that eventually yielded numerous conversions to Islam. Islam spread initially through the expansion of culture, forbidding coercion in religion and promoting an inclusive and ecumenical “community of believers” in which Jews and Christians “did not need to ‘convert’ to anything in order to become active participants” (Donner 2010, 114). In Iberia, as elsewhere in the expanding Islamic world, conversion was not an imperative so much as cultural assimilation and political submission, which allowed Jews and Christians the freedom to maintain their own religious traditions as subject populations. Jews and Christians, named as monotheistic “people of the Book” (ahl al-kitāb) who recognized prophetic tradition as revealed in scriptures, enjoyed a protected status under a “covenant of protection” (dhimma) that prevailed under Islamic rule. As dhimmīs, Jews and Christians were allowed to practice their religions and establish their own internal legal systems, in exchange for accepting second-class status involving payment of a poll tax and observance of limits on their public expression of religion and social authority (Cohen 1994, 54–55, 112). Although strictly prohibited from direct insolence to Muslim authority or disrespect to Islam, the dhimmī population enjoyed religious autonomy and was largely free from coercion or persecution.This may have relieved the pressure to convert to Islam, but it did not greatly slow the process of cultural assimilation.As Richard Bulliet has suggested through a study of rates of conversion to Islam in the Middle Ages, conversion proceeded slowly but steadily during the 270
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period of the Emirate in the frst two centuries of Islamic rule in Iberia (756–929) (Bulliet 1979, 114–127). Although his model does not discuss the total percent of Muslims in Iberian society, it suggests indirectly that by the time of the Caliphate of Cordoba (929–1031), a majority of the native population had converted to Islam (Catlos 2014, 19). Muslim society in al-Andalus was composed of a small Arab elite, a large Amazigh (Berber) contingent, and a large class of “new Muslims” (muwalladu¯n), made up of recent converts and their descendants (Glick 2005, 184). Despite occasional outbreaks of violence against Jewish and Mozarabic minorities such as the well-known “martyrs’ movement” of Mozarabic Christians in ninth-century Cordoba (Coope 1995) or the attack on the Jews of Granada in 1066 (see Ashtor 1992, 2:187–89), the Muslim-dhimmī relationship guided inter-religious interaction under Islamic rule even after the arrival of the Almoravids in the late eleventh century.The situation shifted somewhat with the military campaign of Aragonese King Alfonso I in 1125.After aiding Alfonso in his failed bid to take Granada, many Mozarabic Christians either migrated north or were deported, leading some to convert to Islam in order to remain (Lagardère 1988: 15; Fierro 1997: 155–56). During the period of Almohad rule that began in the middle of the twelfth century and saw the elimination of dhimmī privileges, Christians became scarce in al-Andalus, as can be discerned from contemporary sources such as the poetry of Ibn Quzmān (Corriente 1990). Jews, on the whole, fared rather differently, at least through the Almoravid period. Although concrete documentation to measure Jewish life under Islamic rule in the Emirate period is lacking, it is assumed that Jewish society began to fourish at this time. It was in the ninth century that Bodo, a deacon in the palace of Louis the Pious (d. 840), fed south and converted to Judaism, taking refuge in Cordoba (Reiss, 2019: 52–55). He there engaged in an epistolary debate with Mozarabic (Christian) author Paulus Alvarus (himself, apparently, also of Jewish ancestry). It is telling that Bodo chose to relocate to Islamic lands after his conversion, a choice not unlike that of various other converts to Judaism in Christian Europe who apparently found the dhimmī contract more accommodating to Jewish life. Numerous references to such converts were preserved in the Cairo Genizah, a storeroom in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fusṭāṭ (Old Cairo), where documents from local Jewish life were stored between the ninth and nineteenth centuries (Goitein, 1967–93: 2:304;Yagur 2017, 16–71). By the tenth century, Jews were numerous in al-Andalus and Jewish culture began to enjoy an efforescence in all areas—literary, economic, intellectual, religious—unlike anything seen since the Second Temple period (Ashtor 1992, 1:241–42). While there is little information about Jewish conversion to Islam in this period, the picture of Jewish success suggests that culturally Arabized Jews faced relatively little pressure to assimilate religiously, and that this situation continued even in the Almoravid period. Eventually, the Almohads abolished the dhimma agreement and the twelfth century saw widespread migration of Jews to Christian territories and to other areas of the Islamic world as well as more conversion (Stroumsa 1995). Most famously, the philosopher Maimonides left Cordoba in adolescence and, like numerous Jews of the period, was forced to feign conversion to Islam (Stroumsa 2009, 59).After living for a time in Almohad Fez, he fnally settled in Cairo, then a part of the Fatimid Caliphate, where he emerged as a leader of the Jewish community. In addition to his voluminous religious and philosophical writing, he also wrote numerous epistles, including a letter to a willing convert to Judaism and another discussing feigned conversion as a means to escape duress (60). His example makes evident the radical restriction of Jewish religious freedom imposed under the Almohads of al-Andalus. Beginning in the late eleventh century, as Christian forces pressured the Almoravid territories from the north, a sizeable population of Muslims came to accept Christian political sovereignty and remained to live as religious minorities in Christian kingdoms.While they hardly formed a coherent population with any kind of single group identity, historians have come 271
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to categorize them as mudejares, referring to their status as a subject population that remained after conquest.1 This population responded to Christian conquests differently in different regions. Around Toledo and western Castile, a good portion of the conquered Muslim population converted, perhaps, as Catlos proposes, because the presence of Mozarabic Arabized Christians originally from Andalusī territories facilitated the acceptance of Christian religion without the loss of Arabic culture (2014, 24, 48). By contrast, conquests further south and in Aragon produced less conversion to Christianity, instead leading to the formation of a larger mudejar class. After the conquests of Almohad territory, many other Muslims, especially the intellectual and political class, migrated south to the new Nasrid kingdom of Granada, or to North Africa. The mudejares who stayed in Castile and Aragon came more from the laboring classes than from the intelligentsia, and enjoyed a limited right to religious and legal autonomy.While stories of prominent converts have survived—such as the famous case of Abu Zayd, Almohad ruler of Valencia, who converted and took the name Vicente Belbís in 1232 (Burns 1987)—conversion to Christianity was not common enough to eclipse mudejar identity, although acculturation to Romance cultural norms was widespread (Catlos 2014, 82). Nevertheless, legal texts from both Christian and Muslim traditions explicitly sought to control conversion between Islam and Christianity. The Siete partidas, the extensive law code prepared by King Alfonso X of Castile in the thirteenth century (reg. 1252–84), prohibits under pain of death Cristian conversion to Judaism (VII.24.7) or Islam (VII.25.4). It also orders (VII.25.5) that those who convert and then return to Christianity be prohibited from productive economic life, facing the loss of “honors and earnings” unless (VII.25.8) the convert provide some important service to the Christians (Alfonso 1807, 3:673, 677–680).While such conversions were relatively rare, evidence of them still survives in archival sources (Nirenberg 1996, 127–28). Parallel to the Partidas, the so-called Leyes de moros, a fragmented fourteenth-century Romance translation of part of the book of Malikī jurisprudence Kitāb al-tafri‘ [Book of Derivations (of Legal Principles)] of Ibn al-Jallāb al-Baṣrī (d. 1007)—a work widely disseminated among Iberian Muslims—similarly stipulates death for Muslims who convert to another faith (Gayangos 1853, 142; cf. Abboud-Haggar 1999, 2:571–72).2 A more nuanced question raised on both sides was the legality of converting between other laws, such as Muslims adopting Judaism in Christian territory. The Christian jurist Oldradus de Ponte (d. ca. 1337) suggests that a Jew should be allowed to convert to Islam, judging it to be a “viam minus malam” (Zacour 1990, 77) [path of lesser evil], a judgment invoked in the ffteenth century in the real case of a Muslim woman converted to Judaism in Talavera (Nirenberg 1996, 190–94). The Leyes de moros/Tafrī‘ more explicitly orders that “la syerva et el christiano et el judio, sy se tornaren los unos a la ley de otros, non les enpesca” (Gayangos 1853, 143; cf Abboud-Haggar 1999, 2:572) [The female slave, the Christian, and the Jew should not be prohibited if they convert to the law of the others]. Caught between two legal traditions, and competing with Jews for preeminence in Christian society, the mudejares played an important role in Christian society in Castile until the end of the ffteenth century, when they were forced to accept baptism. Similar decrees of forced conversion followed in Aragon in 1526.The last Muslims of Iberia survived through the sixteenth century as Moriscos, forcibly converted crypto-Muslims, eventually facing expulsion from the peninsula between 1609 and 1614. At the same time, while Jews found a new and useful role in Christian society in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, they also faced increasing hostility from ecclesiastical leaders, including pressure to convert.This shift was part of a broader process of consolidation of Christian orthodoxy across Europe that involved new policies and norms governing Christian interaction with non-Christians. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215), initially responding to 272
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the spread of Christian heresy in southern France, articulated a broad policy of ecclesiastical order and discipline. Lateran IV also coincided with the emergence of mendicant orders of friars such as the Franciscans and Dominicans, both producing missionaries and scholars that propagated a new, more systematic vision of Christian orthodoxy, including the organization of “inquests” (inquisitionibus) into heretical belief and behavior (Cohen 1982, 45). In the middle of the thirteenth century, Humbert of Romans, Master General of the Dominican Order, encouraged the study of Arabic and Hebrew to facilitate missionary campaigns in the Holy Land (Vose 2009, 45), leading to more intense critical reading of non-Christian sources by select groups of Dominicans in Aragon (Chazan, 1989: 30;Vose 2009, 107, 129). As part of such efforts, Friar Raymond of Peñafort helped organize a debate in Barcelona in 1263 between the converted Jew Friar Paul Christiani and the leader of the Catalan Jewish community, Nahmanides (d. 1270). It centered on the Christian claim that post-biblical Jewish literature in the rabbinical tradition, above all the Talmud, proved that the Messiah had already come and that Christian dogma was true. In the wake of the debate, Pope Clement IV (reg. 1265–68) issued a bull (“Turbato corde”) urging friars to serve as inquisitors to investigate not only heretical Christians but also Jews who might have encouraged conversion to Judaism or helped converts return to the Jewish fold (Grayzel, 1989: 103;Tartakoff 2012, 27–28). One of the most prominent Dominicans working in the period of the Barcelona Disputation was Ramon Martí (d. after 1284). He developed the arguments from the Barcelona Disputation in his elaborate polemical treatise Pugio fdei (Dagger of Faith), based on citations of biblical,Talmudic, and midrashic literature, doing so “ut Deo cedat ad gloriam et honorem, fdelibus ad confrmationem, et fdei defensionem et infdelibus ad veram et utilem conversionem” (Ramon Martí 1687, 6) [in order to render glory and honor to God, confrmation and defense of faith to the faithful, and, to the unfaithful, true and useful conversion]. The aggressive policies of the thirteenth-century church, which mirrored and fomented a popular anti-Jewish hostility expressed in Christian preaching, were at odds with the protected status of Jews and Muslims as property and servants of the crown, an embodiment of the “king’s treasure”.This tension reached a breaking point in the summer of 1391, when anti-Jewish riots broke out in Seville and quickly spread across much of the peninsula. In a matter of months, thousands of Jews were killed and many thousands more were forced to convert to Christianity, although exact fgures are not possible to determine (Baer 1961, 2:96; cf. Mitre Fernández 1994, 54). Zealous preaching campaigns over subsequent decades such as that led by Vincent Ferrer (d. 1419) produced the conversion, in name at least, of many thousands more. One of the converts from 1391, Jerónimo de Santa Fe (Joshua Halorki), led the Christian offensive against the Jews at the Disputation of Tortosa in 1413–14, repeating many of the arguments about Christological themes in post-biblical Jewish sources that had been adduced at the Disputation of Barcelona and in the works of Ramon Martí (Baer 1961, 2:170–232). Among the many changes brought about by these riots and subsequent conversion campaigns, most important was the emergence of a new class of converted Jews (conversos) that was caught between two social and religious identities. Many conversos, forced to adopt Christianity in public, maintained some Jewish traditions and beliefs in their private life, and a culture of suspicion began to emerge in which converso religiosity was scrutinized. Such scrutiny intensifed over the course of the century, eventually leading to the formation of the Tribunal of the Holy Offce of the Inquisition by the Spanish monarchs in 1478 and, in 1492, the expulsion of all unconverted Jews from Castile and Aragon.While the initial focus of the Inquisition was the religious habits of conversos, its scope widened in the sixteenth century to include Moriscos, Protestants, and other “heterodox” groups (Peters 1989, 101). By the early sixteenth century, the once-diverse societies of Muslim and Christian Iberia had been consolidated both politically 273
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and religiously. Conversion, conquest, and expulsion drove Jewish and Muslim religious life underground and, eventually, eradicated it from the peninsula.
Conversion as a historiographical problem: between metaphor and event This sketch of broad historical trends might offer a coherent overview, but what does it really tell us about conversion per se? To locate a conversion on a timeline of events is to assign it a fxed and recognizable shape, one that is expected to recur in various historical contexts and periods in a meaningfully similar way. Is this expectation justifed? Are the conversions to Islam of the Maghrebi Amazighs in the late seventh century and of Christian Visigoths in the early eighth— at a period when Islam was a young religion without a robust intellectual and legal tradition— similar to the conversion of Anselm Turmeda in the late thirteenth century, when Islam boasted of libraries of exegetical, legal, philosophical, and scientifc literature and represented a formidable military threat to Christian dominance all across the Mediterranean? Can the feigned and temporary “conversion” of Maimonides under duress be compared to the coerced but largely permanent “conversions” of many Iberian Jews after the riots of 1391? If, as upheld at the Fourth Council of Toledo, forced baptisms are binding, must conversion always involve belief? Must it be publicly performed and witnessed? Can it be compared across religious traditions? The case of Anselm Turmeda with which this chapter began, while a ftting embodiment of many aspects of Iberia’s history of conversion, is also representative of the conceptual problems that accompany that history. Most pressing among these problems is the central question of how conversion can be treated as a historical subject at all. On the one hand,Turmeda’s conversion is straightforward for historians. Although the texts surrounding Turmeda’s conversion— both Christian letters and his own compositions—are stylized and full of fgurative language, Turmeda was a real person, and his profession of Islam (perhaps around 1387) was a real event that affected Christian–Muslim relations in the western Mediterranean in the early ffteenth century. Even decades later, the prospect of his return to the Christian fold was apparently of such momentous importance that it merited conciliatory letters from some of the top brass of the western Mediterranean.There is, in this sense, no doubt that his conversion “took place” and it is logical to see it as a verifed historical occurrence. On the other hand, one might ask, what did his conversion entail, and is that meaning consistent across historical (and culturally different) accounts? What, after all, can actually be known of his, or any, turn of faith? Judging by the words of king and pope, he was guilty of apostasy. He “denied the Christian faith”,“committed great crimes”. and “gave himself ” to the “perfdious sect of the Saracens”. But in his own words, he stood before the sultan and, before both Muslim and Christian onlookers, “professed my belief in the true faith” (Epalza 1994, 228–29; trans. Boase 1996–97, 68). How can his story—or any story of conversion or apostasy—be told without bias? The facts and the meaning of Turmeda’s turning depend on which documents we are reading, all of which were written decades after the events they recount. Turmeda’s story underscores the point that analyzing religious change as a coherent phenomenon requires making decisions about its meaning that are not based on objective, or even commonly shared, parameters.This problem is acute in the history of religion because conceptualizing conversion in terms of facts—dates, locations, events—imparts to religious change a specifc shape, distinguishable from other possible shapes. It presumes that conversion “happens” at some discrete point in time and thus can be compared to other measurable historical events (Szpiech 2013, 9–10). How can such conceptions be justifed? As Karl Morrison has noted, what survives from the history of conversion is not facts but texts, and readers “cannot determine exactly what happened in the event of conversion or recover the unspoken content that the 274
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text held for its author” (1992, 4). What can be historicized is not some idea of “conversion” per se, but its representation in a multitude of contrasting words and images. The elasticity of the concept of conversion, and the essentially Christian nature of the language with which it is discussed, are evident in the variety of terms used to name it.3 The word “conversion” (Cast. tornarse, convertirse) might equally denote a “turning towards” faith or a “turning away” from sin, a change of heart or a change of affliation. Conversion can be voluntary or forced, gradual or sudden, a radical departure from or a “coming home” to orthodoxy. Morrison points to this variety, stating,“the history of ‘conversion’ is a history of metaphorical analysis” (1992, 2), a study of cultural rather than social history. In the context of the medieval Mediterranean, in which virtually all conversion was conversion between monotheistic faiths whose differences hinged on rival interpretations of shared fgures and events in prophetic history, conversion can be meaningfully approached not simply as a fgure of language, but as a temporal metaphor. All conversion, as it has emerged from Christian tradition, makes sense not as a single moment but as an event whose meaning depends on what precedes and follows it.Thus, if conversion is a metaphor, it is always one embedded in the context of a narrative structure, however implicitly. Bruce Hindmarsh has pointed out the close connection between the idea of conversion and the structure of narrative, noting, “If narrative in its classical form is defned as a plot with a beginning, middle, and end … then all narratives are, in one sense, conversion narratives” (2014, 346). Iberia is, in this sense, not simply a “laboratory of conversion”, but even more, a laboratory of conversion stories.
Romancing conversion Given the social landscape, conversion is not surprisingly a prominent and recurring theme in Iberian literature, conceived of both as a movement between religious communities and as a spiritual renewal from within. Early Romance literature contains numerous accounts of moral and spiritual transformation, what Lozano-Renieblas calls the “hagiography of conversion” (Lozano-Renieblas 2000, 161). For example, the thirteenth-century poem Libro de Santa María Egipcíaca recounts the repentant turn from prostitution of Saint Mary of Egypt. Similarly, the Vita coaetanea (Contemporary Life) of Mallorcan polymath Ramon Llull describes the author’s Franciscan-like “conversion to penance” when visions of Christ transformed him from a vain jongleur into a committed missionary and spiritual philosopher (Vega 2002, 19–22, 261). A number of the Marian miracles in Gonzalo de Berceo’s Milagros de Nuestra Señora (Miracles of Our Lady), written in the Riojan Romance dialect in the middle of the thirteenth century, dramatize similar scenes of penitence. Of the 25 stories, two also deal explicitly with the conversion of Jews to Christianity. Miracle 16,“The Jewish Boy”, retells the popular tale of how a young Jew, wanting to play with his Christian friends, took communion with them on Easter. When his father found out, he grew angry and threw the boy into the oven, but the Virgin Mary protected him.The neighbors, Jews and Christians, discovering the crime, then threw the father into the oven in the boy’s place, and “cantaron grandes laudes, fzieron rrica festa” (Gonzalo 2006, 200; 1997, 79) [they sang great lauds, they had a lavish celebration]. Even more explicit is the conversion of the Jews in miracle 23, “the Merchant of Byzantium”. When a Jew asked a Byzantine merchant who might guarantee his loan, the latter named Jesus and Mary. Later, after the merchant was detained on business and unable to return in time to pay his debt, he threw what he owed into the sea and it miraculously foated to the door of the Jew on the day it was due.When the merchant returned home, the Jew claimed he had not been paid, until the statue of Christ spoke and accused him of lying. He confessed and “elli con sus compannas fo luego convertido, murió enna fe Buena, de la mala tollido” (Berceo 2006, 281; 1997, 122, with my changes) 275
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[He and his companions were immediately converted;/ he died in the good faith, wrested from the bad one]. The format of conversion through miraculous Marian intervention is elaborated on a much greater scale in the Cantigas de Santa María (Songs of Holy Mary) of King Alfonso X, written in Galician-Portuguese in the 1270s.Alfonso’s Cantigas reuse 19 of Berceo’s 25 plot lines, recounting some 356 miracle stories (out of 427 total songs). Among these, 18 stories deal explicitly with conversion (one Cathar heretic, two doubting Christians, four pagans, fve Muslims, and six Jews, including both conversion stories found in Berceo).4 Cantiga #4 retells the “Jewish boy” story, adding that, after Mary protected the boy,“a Judea criya,/ e o menỹo sen al/ o batismo recebia” (Alfonso 1986–89, 1:66; 2000, 7) [the Jewess came to believe, and the boy received baptism at once]. Cantiga #25 retells the Byzantine merchant story, describing how in the end, ̃ ali logo de chao/ en Santa Maria creeu/ e en seu Fill’, e foi crischao” (Alfonso 1986–89, the Jew “bees 1:122; 2000, 35) [at once believed wholeheartedly in Holy Mary and in Her Son and became Christian]. Some of the converts in the Cantigas become Christian after Mary’s miraculous protection from harm in battle (#28, #205), her revival of a dead child (#167), or her protection from the devil (#192). Cantiga #46 tells a unique story in which a moor went abroad “per crischãos guerrjar e roubar” [to make war on the Christians and pillage], robbing an image of the Virgin Mary as booty. Because the image caused him to have religious doubts, he challenged God to show him a sign, agreeing to convert to Christianity if he did. Adur pod’ esta razon toda o mour’ encimar, quand a omagen enton viu duas tetas a par, de viva carn’ e d’ al non, que foron logo mãar e deitar leite come per canudos… Quand’ esto viu, sen mentir començou muit’ a chorar, e un crerigo vĩir fez, que o foi batiçar. (Alfonso 1986–89, 1:173; 2000, 62) [The Moor had scarcely uttered this when he saw the statue’s two breasts turn into living fesh and began to fow with milk in gushing streams.When he saw this, verily he began to weep and had a priest called in who baptized him.] This motif linking conversion with lactation appears in other Romance texts, such as the Castilian version (late thirteenth-century?) of the popular Eastern romance Flores y Blancafor (Wacks 2019, 119). In this text, the Christian countess Berta nurses both her own daughter, Blancafor, and the Muslim son of her captor, Flores. The boy eventually agrees to convert to Christianity, “ca la naturaleza de la lecha de la Christiana lo mouio a ello” (Arbesú 2011, 116– 17) [because the nature of the milk of the Christian woman moved him to it].
Conversionary apologetics These and numerous other examples of fction and poetry in Ibero-Romance from the thirteenth to ffteenth centuries depict conversion in idealized terms as the denouement of a plot 276
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confict or the culmination of a miracle. Other texts make use of conversion as the basis of a theological or apologetic argument, such as the early thirteenth-century fragment Disputa entre un cristiano y un judío [Dispute between a Christian and a Jew], one of the earliest Iberian examples of Jewish–Christian polemic in Romance (Castro 1914).Texts of this sort—systematic treatises defending one religion or attacking another, such as the Tuḥfa of Turmeda—offer brief descriptions or allusions to conversion as rhetorical devices to justify or affrm a religious argument. Polemical texts were immensely popular in medieval monotheistic traditions, appearing in a wide variety of languages, forms, and cultural contexts. Although they are often studied apart from belletristic literary texts in poetry and prose, this separation according to perceived genres can prove reductive.The many ways that conversion appears in medieval writing demand a comparative, thematic analysis of different textual witnesses rather than a strict adherence to categories based on generic literary forms. One of the most infuential stories of conversion from this tradition of conversionary polemics is also one that, like Turmeda’s text, raises the historiographical problem of how to understand fctional accounts of allegedly real events. Among the various references to Jewish conversion preserved in the Cairo Genizah are a handful of documents relating to the legend of the Khazars, a semi-nomadic Turkic tribe in the central Asian steppe north of the Black sea. According to various sources, some of the nobility and royalty (and perhaps commoners as well) abandoned their tribal religion and adopted Judaism around the turn of the ninth century. The Genizah collection preserves letters exchanged between one of the Khazar leaders named Joseph and the Cordoban grandee Ḥasdai ibn Shapruṭ (d. ca. 975), Jewish physician and minister to Caliph Abd al-Raḥmān III.The Khazar legend was preserved in the collective memory of Andalusī Jews for centuries, and served as the basis for a philosophical defense of Judaism by Iberian poet Judah Halevi, the Kitāb al-radd wa-l-dalīl fī al-dīn al-dhalīl [Book of Refutation and Proof in Defense of the Despised Faith], now considered one of the masterpieces of medieval Jewish literature. Written by Halevi in Judeo-Arabic between 1130 and 1140, it is better known to posterity as Sefer Ha-Kuzari [Book of the Khazar/Kuzari], the title of the Hebrew translation made a few decades later by Granadan Jew, Judah ibn Tibbon (d. after 1190). The bulk of the text consists of a rationalist defense of Judaism, but Halevi frames this philosophical content with a narrative of the conversion of the Khazar king. Halevi begins by saying that he was asked to gather arguments to defend Judaism against its critics, both internal and external. “This made me remember the arguments of the rabbi who studied with the Khazar king who converted to Judaism some four hundred years ago” (Judah 2009, 47). Halevi then opens the story with a classic motif of medieval conversion narratives, a dream: It begins with the king having a recurring dream of an angel who appears to him and tells him, “Your intentions are desirable to the Creator, but not your deeds” … This prompted the king to explore other belief systems and religions. Ultimately, the king, together with a great populace of Khazars, converted to Judaism. (47–48) The story told in the Kuzari transforms historical events into a legend of Jewish myth and a frame to contain a philosophical defense of Judaism. The actual details of the moments of “turning” are spare.The path to the king’s conversion is described as a search for the meaning of his dream, consisting of a brief discussion with a philosopher, a Christian, and a Muslim, followed by a long discussion with a rabbi that takes up most of the frst book of the work.The king is full of doubts and the process of conversion is not rapid, but little by little, the rabbi convinces him of point after point, helping him to 277
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comprehend the meaning of his prophetic dream.At the start of book two,“the king eventually revealed his recurring dream to his chief offcer” (Judah 2009, 141).The two set off to a distant mountain cave, a kind of rustic synagogue, where they met with local Jews.Their conversion is then related in a single sentence:“they disclosed their identity to them, embraced their religion, were circumcised in the cave, and then returned to their country, eager to learn the Jewish law”. After keeping their conversion secret for a time,“fnally they revealed their secret to the public and prevailed upon the rest of the Khazar population to convert to Judaism” (142).The rest of the work, including three lengthy remaining books, consists of a detailed account of the king’s questions and answers with the rabbi who teaches him about Jewish thought and belief. In its presentation of a conversion story in the context of a religious apology for Judaism and rationalist polemic against rival faiths, the Kuzari might also be compared to later works that use a similar format. One that deserves mention is Ramon Llull’s Llibre del gentil i dels tres savis [Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men], from ca. 1274–76, which tells a similar story of a gentile king in search of true religion.The king hears the cases of a Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim presented in turn, eventually choosing one of the three, although the wise men ask not to hear which (Ramon Llull 2001, 206).This multi-voice debate structure is repeated again in the ffteenth century in a lesser-known Hebrew work from Aragon, the Sefer Aḥiṭub ve-Tsalmon [Book of Ahitub and Salman], from ca. 1420s–40s. This anonymous work tells of a righteous queen of an unnamed island whose people follow a variety of religious ideas without certainty of any one true faith. Like the king of the Khazars, she has a crisis of faith while in bed, when “a profound plan came into her mind: fnd rules for her people so that there would not be different opinions” (Lara Olmo and Carlos, 1988, 8).After sending her wisest men off the island, one returns as a Jew, another as a Christian, and a third as a Muslim.After holding a debate between the Christian and Jew, she calls on the Muslim to mediate, and when he chooses to convert to Judaism, the queen and the whole island follow, leaving the Christian to commit suicide in disgrace (199).The Jew then teaches the queen the tenets of Judaism. Clearly modeled on the Kuzari but also resembling the structure of the Book of the Gentile, the Book of Ahitub uses rational and exegetical arguments to defend the true faith, and employs conversion as a plot device to punctuate the triumph of the protagonist and the defeat of the Christian enemy.
Testimonies of conversion Polemical texts like these not only make use of conversion stories as rhetorical frameworks. Many also link conversion stories to the frst-person testimony of an allegedly real author as a way to lend authority to the text or authenticity to the authorial voice. Such frst-person accounts build on what was the standard model of conversionary rhetoric throughout the Middle Ages, the model of Augustine of Hippo in the Confessions (397 CE) (Hindmarsh 2014, 347). Just as Augustine tied his conversion to a refutation of Manichaeism,Western authors in the twelfth century and after began to link their conversion stories to polemical writing against their former faiths. One of the frst Iberian—and European—texts written about conversion in this way was the Dialogus contra Iudaeos [Dialogue against the Jews] of Petrus Alfonsi of Huesca, converted to Christianity in 1106.The work proved to be one of the most widely read polemical works of the Middle Ages, circulating around Europe and being preserved in many copies (Tolan 1993, 98–99; Petrus 2018, XII–XVII). It is not necessary to summarize the content of the arguments,which present a dialogue between a Christian and a Jew divided over twelve books, including four books disproving Judaism, one book disproving Islam, and seven books proving the foundations of Christian truth.What is most germane in this discussion is the highly innovative structure of the dialogue, frst introduced in 278
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the opening frame of the text, in which the voice of “Peter”, the Christian persona standing in for the author, converses with “Moses”, Peter’s (and the author’s) name before conversion. Conversion here is not an experience or a miraculous event, but a rhetorical device used to structure the work and authorize the argumentation.The two voices represent a split in the perspective of the author himself, whose Jewish self, Moses, “salutauit me more non amici sed quasi alieni” (Petrus 2018, 10) [greeted me not as a friend but as if I were a stranger]. Unlike the religious dialogues like the Kuzari or Llull’s Book of the Gentile, in which different characters represent different religions, the Dialogue introduces conversion as a split in the identity of the author Petrus Alfonsi, who invokes his own individual conversion as proof of his knowledge and experience. Petrus Alfonsi’s Dialogue is the frst of a number of Iberian polemical treatises in which personal experience serves to authenticate religious arguments. As Petrus boasts to Moses, the Jews “qui me antea nouerant … probaverant peritum in libris prophetarum et dictis doctorum” (Petrus 2018, 4) [who had known me previously … had considered me well trained in the books of the prophets and the sayings of the sages]. One author who follows Petrus’s model— both in content and in form—is the fourteenth-century convert Abner de Burgos, known after his conversion to Christianity around 1320 as Alfonso de Valladolid. Unlike Petrus and many subsequent polemical authors, Abner/Alfonso continued to write in Hebrew after conversion, seeking to engage directly with fellow Jews in debate. His earliest and longest text, the Moreh Tsedeq (Teacher of Righteousness), survives now only in a Castilian translation, under the title Mostrador de justicia. Like the Dialogue of Petrus Alfonsi, the Teacher is structured as a dialogue between Jewish and Christian selves, a Christian “Teacher” (Heb. Moreh, Cast. Mostrador) and a Jewish antagonist, the “Rebel” (Heb. Mored, Cast. Rebelle). Also like the Dialogue, the prologue represents the conversion of the author himself from Judaism, establishing this double perspective as a means of authorizing the arguments to follow. Unlike the Dialogue, however, the conversion of the author that opens the work is represented in dramatic narrative detail, constituting one of the most substantial medieval examples of a frst-person narrative of conversion in a Romance language. Caté la premia de los judios, el mi pueblo donde yo era, que sson en esta luenga captividad quexados e quebrantados e angustiados en ffecho de los pechos, el pueblo que descendieron de la ssu onrra e del ssu loor que ssolian aver, e non an ayuda nin ffuerça en ssý. E acaesçió un dia, penssando yo mucho en este pleito, que entré a la ssignoga con gran lloro e amargura de mi coraçon, e ffz plegarias a Dios … E de la gran coyta que tenia en mi coraçon e de la lazeria que avia tomado canssé e adormesçíme; e vy en vision de ssuenno un grand omne que me dizia:“Por qué estás adormesçido?” (Abner 1994–96, 1:13) [I saw the burden of the Jews, my people from whom I am descended, who are, in this long captivity, oppressed and broken and burdened heavily by taxes, this people that has lost the honor and glory it once had, which has no help or strength in itself. And it happened one day, as I was thinking much on this plight, that I went into the synagogue with great cries and bitterness of heart, and I prayed unto the Lord … And in the great anxiety which I had in my heart and from the toil I had taken upon myself I grew tired and fell asleep. And I saw in a dream vision a great man who said to me: “Why are you asleep?”] The details of this scene—a Jew falling asleep in the synagogue while praying for relief for his people from the pressures of Christian rule—is unique in Romance literature, as is the content 279
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of the Jewish sources that Abner cites —Talmud, midrash, Arabic, and Hebrew philosophy—to support his pro-Christian agenda. After his dreams and study continued for some 25 years, “convertíme a la Ley de los christianos publicament, loado sea Dios, por salvar mi alma de los mis pecados e de los pecados de todos los judios, que tenia a cuestas ssi non descubriesse a ssus orejas lo que me mostraron del çielo” (1:15) [I converted to the Law of the Christians publicly, God be praised, to save my soul from my sins and from the sins of all the Jews, for whom I was responsible if I didn’t reveal to them what was shown to me from heaven].This opening represents one of the most elaborate conversion narratives from medieval Iberia, offering a unique example of the fusion of both Hebrew and Romance literary traditions and of Christian and Jewish ideals of faith. The argument that, as Morrison notes, there is no “general morphology of conversion, applicable to conversion as a universal human experience” (Morrison 1992, XV) is exemplifed by comparing Abner/Alfonso’s dramatic narrative—full of visions, doubts, delays, and a narrative climax—with the telegraphic narrative of North African Jew ‘Abd al-Ḥaqq al-Islamī. Virtually nothing is known of this author other than that he was born in Ceuta in the fourteenth century and converted to Islam, writing an anti-Jewish polemic (tentatively dated to the 1390s) entitled Al-Sayf al-mamdu¯d fī l-radd ‘alā aḥbār al-yahu¯d [The Outstretched Sword in Refutation of the Jewish Sages].The text consists of fve chapters, each on a common theme from Muslim apologetics (proof of Muhammad’s prophethood, the falsifcation [taḥrīf] of Scripture by Jews and Christians, etc.).The author relates his conversion in a brief prologue. Sixteen years ago, [God] revealed to me the truth, about which the rational person does not doubt … It was part of the wisdom of God that [my destiny] remain concealed and secret within Him, without his revelation or manifestation, until He favored me and inspired me [to know] that this destiny was not suffcient for me nor was it going to save me, but rather that it was my duty to spread [the teaching] of His unity and proclaim His non-human character and His glory, making known the faith in His prophet Muhammad … I hastened to do that which would save me from painful punishment and which would bring me close to tranquil paradises. In this way, I began to speak the words of [God’s] unity and lack of human attributes, testifying that there is no God but the One God, who has no equal, and testifying that Muhammad is His servant and messenger. (‘Abd al-Ḥaqq 1998,Arabic 9–11) Like Abner/Alfonso and Petrus Alfonsi,‘Abd al-Ḥaqq makes use of his conversion to authorize his attack on his former religion, but unlike both he does not structure his text as a dialogue between selves but as a straightforward theological polemic. For ‘Abd al-Ḥaqq, conversion to Islam is simply compliance with the will of God, not a hermeneutical puzzle or internal struggle as in Abner of Burgos or Anselm Turmeda. These examples of what can be called “testimonial” narratives are just some of the texts from the Iberian world or western Mediterranean dramatizing conversion in a frst-person voice (García-Arenal 2001). Other salient examples include the account of Solomon Halevi, known as Pablo de Santa María after his conversion to Christianity around 1391, who narrates his account of conversion as a kind of ethical will to his son, Alonso de Cartagena; or the account of Juan Andres, who opens his anti-Muslim Confusión o confutación dela secta mahometica y del alcoran [Confusion or Confutation of the Muhammadan Sect and the Qur’ān], published in 1515, with an account of his conversion from Islam in 1487.Additional examples can be found from across Europe and the Mediterranean, including the Opusculum de conversione sua [Little Work about 280
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His Conversion] by twelfth-century convert Herman (Judah) of Cologne, the Hebrew conversion narrative of Giuan d’Oppido, from Norman Italy, converted to Judaism at the dawn of the twelfth century, or the elaborate narrative of Jewish convert to Islam Samawʾal al-Maghrebī that forms part of his anti-Jewish polemic Ifhām al-Yahu¯d [Silencing the Jews], from ca. 1163.5 Although these texts are all different in perspective, language, and argument, they all present conversion—like the narrative of Anselm Turmeda that began this chapter—through a personal narrative of psychological and spiritual transformation, involving many of the same plot elements such as unexpected dreams, secrets and disclosures, physical and existential journeys, and scriptural exegesis that reveal hidden destinies through prophecy and prediction. In all of these, conversion functions as more than just a subject or an experience. It is also a rhetorical device expressing a plot climax, the resolution of a protracted dramatic struggle. In Iberian conversion stories, as in those told across the medieval and early modern Mediterranean, conversion refects broader hermeneutical and historical arguments between rival faiths. Positioned between event and rhetoric, these conversion narratives refect a double imperative of expressing the microcosmic uniqueness of individual experience and the universal, macrocosmic exemplarity of polemical argument.
Conclusion: conversion and coercion Conversion narratives in medieval Iberia offer a lens through which to consider broader shifts in social and religious relations between Jews, Christians, and Muslims.Yet they are not transparent testimonies, but rather are constructed pieces of writing that shed more light on cultural and religious norms than on events in social, political, or economic history.Varied accounts—both those of a known author, like Anselm Turmeda, and of invented subjects, like Halevi’s Khazar king—appear in Iberia in the context of polemical or apologetic religious writing. In a similar way, conversion appears in Romance poetry and narrative from this period as a useful plot device signifying the culmination of action and the resolution of confict. These examples appeared in the context of large social upheavals. The mass conversions of 1391, followed by the imposed conversions of Muslims in Castile in 1501 and in Aragon in 1526, all represent cases of radical violence in which conversion was a force that reshaped Iberian society in the mold of a homogeneous, Catholic polity. The contrary conceptions of conversion as both an act of will and an act of violence, as both the product of belief and the result of ceremony or sacrament, make the topic of conversion a problematic subject for historiography as much as a fruitful object of literary and iconographic analysis.These multiple and contrary ideas persisted throughout the Iberian Middle Ages, shaping Iberian history, thought, and culture in every period, from as early as the anti-Jewish Visigothic policies of the seventh century to well past the traumatic expulsions of 1492 and 1609.
Notes 1 The term mudejar derives from the Arabic term mudajjan, “one who remains” (or ahl al-dajn, “people who remain”), terms that only appear in the later Middle Ages (Harvey 1990, 3–4). 2 On the translation and circulation of the Kitāb al-tafri‘ in Romance (or Tafria), including various Aljamiado versions, see Abboud-Haggar (1999, 1:13–33); and see the comments by Harvey (2005, 155). 3 A full discussion of these terms is provided in Szpiech 2013, 26–27, 99–100, 247n17, 260n7. 4 Jews: #4, #25, #85, #89, #107, and #108; Muslims: #28, #46, #167, #192, #205; pagans: #15, #196, #306, #335; Christians: #8, #16; heretic: #208. 5 These texts are all considered in more detail in Szpiech 2013, which provides a full bibliography for each.
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References Abboud-Haggar, Soha. 1999. El tratado jurídico de al-Tafri‘ de Ibn al-Ǧallāb: Manuscrito aljamiado de Almonacid de la Sierra. 2 vols. Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico. ‘Abd al-Ḥaqq al-Islāmī. 1998. Al-Sayf al-mamdu¯d fī l-radd ‘alā aḥbār al-Yahu¯d. (Espada extendida para refutar a los sabios judíos). Edited by Esperanza Alfonso. Madrid: CSIC. Abner de Burgos/Alfonso de Valladolid. 1994–96. Mostrador de Justicia. Edited by Walter Mettmann. 2 vols. Opladen:Westdeutscher Verlag. Alfonso X. 1807. Las siete partidas del rey don Alfonso el sabio. 3 vols. Madrid: Imprenta Real. Alfonso X. 1986–1989. Cantigas de Santa Maria. Edited by Walter Mettmann. 3 vols. Madrid: Castalia. Alfonso X. 2000. Songs of Holy Mary:A Translation of the Cantigas de Santa Maria.Tempe:Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Arbesú, David. 2011. Crónica de Flores y Blancafor. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Ashtor, Eliahu. 1992. The Jews of Moslem Spain. 3 vols. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society. Baer,Yitzhak. 1961. A History of the Jews in Christian Spain. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America. Boase, Roger. 1996–97. “Autobiography of a Muslim Convert: Anselm Turmeda (c.1353–c.1430)”. Al-Masāq 9: 45–98. Berceo, Gonzalo de. 1997. Miracles of Our Lady. Translated by Richard Terry Mount and Annette Grant Cash. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Berceo, Gonzalo de. 2006. Milagros de Nuestra Señora. Edited by Juan Carlos Bayo and Ian Michael. Madrid: Castalia. Bulliet, Richard W. 1979. Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Burns, Robert I.S.J. 1987. “Príncipe almohade y converso mudéjar: nueva documentación sobre Abu¯ Zayd”. Sharq Al-Andalus 4: 109–122. Calvet, Augustí. 1914. Fray Anselmo Turmeda: Heterodoxo español. Barcelona: Ed. Estudio. Castro, Américo. 1914.“Disputa entre un cristiano y un judío”. Revista de flología española 1: 173–180. Catlos, Brian. 2014. Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c. 1050–1614. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chazan, Robert. 1989. Daggers of Faith. Thirteenth-Century Christian Missionizing and Jewish Response. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cohen, Jeremy. 1982. The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Cohen, Mark R. 1994. Under Crescent and Cross:The Jews in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Coope, Jessica A. 1995. The Martyrs of Córdoba: Community and Family Confict in an Age of Mass Conversion. Lincoln: University of Nebraska. Corriente, Federico. 1990. “Judíos y cristianos en el Dīwān de Ibn Quzman, contemporáneo de Abraham ibn Ezra”. In Abraham ibn Ezra y su tiempo. Actas del Simposio Internacional (Madrid,Tudela, Toledo, 1–8 febrero 1989), edited by Fernando Díaz Esteban, 73–77. Madrid: Asociación Española de orientalistas. Donner, Fred M. 2010. Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. de Epalza, Míkel. 1994. Fray Anselm Turmeda (‘Abdallāh al-Tarjumān) y su polémica islamo-cristiana. Edición, traducción y estudio de la Tuḥfa. Madrid: Hiperión. Fierro, Maribel. 1997.“Christian Success and Muslim Fear in Andalusi Writings during the Almoravid and Almohad Periods”. Israel Oriental Studies 17: 155–78. García-Arenal, Mercedes. 2001.“Dreams and Reason:Autobiographies of Converts in Religious Polemics”. In Conversions Islamiques: identités religieuses en Islam méditerranéen, edited by Mercedes García-Arenal, 89–118. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose. García-Arenal, Mercedes, and Yonatan Glazer-Eytan, eds. 2019. Forced Conversion in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam: Coercion and Faith in Premodern Iberia and Beyond. Leiden: Brill. Gayangos, Pascual de. 1853. Tratados de legislación musulmana. Madrid: Imprenta de la Real Academia de la Historia. Glick,Thomas F. 2005. Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages. 2nd rev. ed. Leiden: Brill.
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Turning and returning Goitein, Shelomo D. 1967–1993. A Mediterranean Society.The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza. 6 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press. Grayzel, Solomon. 1989. The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century. vol. 2. Edited by Kenneth Stow. Detroit:Wayne State University Press. Gregorius, Magnus. 1982. S. Gregorii Magni registrum epistularum Libri I–VII. CCSL 140. Edited by D. Norberg. Turnhout: Brepols. Harvey, L. P. 1990. Islamic Spain 1250–1500. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harvey, L. P. 2005. Muslims in Spain, 1500–1614. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hindmarsh, Bruce. 2014.“Religious Conversion as Narrative and Autobiography”. In The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion, edited by Lewis R. Rambo and Charles E. Farhadian, 343–368. New York: Oxford University Press. Judah, Halevi. 2009. The Kuzari: In Defense of the Despised Faith.Translated by N. Daniel Korobkin. Jerusalem: Feldheim. Lagardère, Vincent. 1988. “Communautés mozarabes et pouvoir almoravide en 519 H/1125 en Andalus”. Studia Islamica 67: 99–119. Lara, Olmo, and Juan Carlos. 1988. “Edición crítica, traducción y comentario de la obra Sefer ʾAḥiṭub we-Ṣalmon”. Ph.D. Diss., Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Llull, Ramon. 2001. Llibre del gentil e dels tres savis. Edited by Anthony Bonner. 2nd ed. Palma de Mallorca: Patronat Ramon Llull. Lozano-Renieblas, Isabel. 2000.“El encuentro entre aventura y hagiografía en la literatura medieval”. Actas del XIII congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas, edited by Florencio Sevilla Arroyo and Carlos Álvar 1:161–167. 4 vols. Madrid: Castalia. Martí, Ramon. 1687. Pugio fdei adversus mauros et judaeos. Leipzig: Heirs of Friedrich Lankisch, at the press of Johann Wittgau’s widow. Mitre Fernández, Emilio. 1994. Los judíos de Castilla en tiempo de Enrique III: El pogrom de 1391.Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid. Morrison, Karl F. 1992. Understanding Conversion. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Nirenberg, David. 1996. Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Peters, Edward. 1989. Inquisition. Berkeley: University of California Press. Petrus, Alfonsi. 2018. Petri Alfonsi Dialogus. Edited by Carmen Cardelle de Hartmann, Darko Senekovic, and Thomas Ziegler. Florence: SISMEL Edizioni del Galluzzo. Pou y Martí, José María. 1913–1914.“Sobre Fray Anselmo Turmeda”. Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona 7: 465–472. Riess, Frank. 2019. The Journey of Deacon Bodo from the Rhine to the Guadalquivir:Apostasy and Conversion to Judaism in Early Medieval Europe. New York: Routledge. Stroumsa, Sarah. 1995.“On Jewish Intellectuals Who Converted in the Early Middle Ages”. In The Jews of Medieval Islam: Community, Society, Identity, edited by Daniel Frank, 179–97. Leiden: Brill. Stroumsa, Sarah. 2009. Maimonides in His World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Szpiech, Ryan. 2013.Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Tartakoff, Paola. 2012. Between Christian and Jew: Conversion and Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1250– 1391. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Tolan, John. 1993. Petrus Alfonsi and His Medieval Readers. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Vega, Amador. 2002. Ramon Llull y el secreto de la vida. Madrid: Siruela. Vives, José, ed. 1963. Concilios Visigóticos e Hispano-Romanos. Barcelona: Institute Enrique Flórez. Vose, Robin. 2009. Dominicans, Muslims, and Jews in the Medieval Crown of Aragon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wacks, David. 2019. Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Yagur, Moshe. 2017.“Religious Identity and Communal Boundaries in Geniza Society (Tenth–Thirteenth Centuries): Proselytes, Slaves,Apostates”. Ph.D. thesis, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. (Hebrew). Zacour, Norman. 1990. Jews and Saracens in the Consilia of Oldradus de Ponte.Toronto: Pontifcal Institute of Mediaeval Studies.
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PART V
Gender
19 MEDIEVAL IBERIAN WOMEN AND GENDER Marie A. Kelleher
Once a limited feld, nearly synonymous with either the history of queens or other powerful women or the study of the limitations of women’s lives set out in law, the current scholarship on women in medieval Iberia has expanded over the past several decades to encompass the ways in which cultural constructs of gender mapped on to women of various status groups.This shift in scholarly focus is present in one form or another in studies of gender of all medieval regions. But medieval Iberia, with its many boundaries and boundary-crossings, offers special challenges and opportunities for the study of medieval women and gender.This chapter will focus on women in medieval Iberia between the eighth and sixteenth centuries, examining how gender intersected with life stage, social class, respectability politics, and religious affliation in order to gain a more complete view of the situation of women in medieval Iberia, as well as provide a perspective on how the particular case of Iberia might prompt us to look at medieval gender in new ways.
Legal perspectives Women’s experience in medieval Iberia—and historians’ knowledge of that experience—is in large part a function of the law, its courts, and its documents.Although by the thirteenth century the multiple Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula had developed their own legal codes and court systems, beneath all of them lay the common foundation of the ius commune—the combination of Roman and Canon law that was taught in the medieval universities, and that formed the theoretical and structural basis for all law of the Iberian Peninsula’s Christian kingdoms (Bellomo 1995, 58–77; Font Rius 1967).Although monarchs found the ius commune useful primarily for its theory of centralized monarchy, the gender ideas embedded in both Roman and canon law migrated into the law codes of the Iberian kingdoms along with this political theory. While none of the ius commune ideas were completely alien to the gender system of medieval Iberia, judges, legislators, and litigants could now refer to an organized and authoritative legal vocabulary of gender. Roman law imported four major ideas: fragilitas, imbecilitas, levitas, and verecundia.The frst of these, fragilitas, assumed a generalized “womanly weakness”— physical, intellectual, and moral—and a consequent need for male protection and even guardianship. This trait of womanly weakness was occasionally linked to imbecilitas or incapacity—a term applied also to children and lunatics, and one that rendered women permanent minors in the eyes of the law. Levitas referred to women’s supposed innate “light-mindedness”, implicitly 287
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opposed to the gravitas that suited men to public life of politics and the law courts; levitas was reinforced by the concept of verecundia, a matronly modesty or shame that meant that maintaining the public sphere as a male preserve served women’s innate preferences (Kelleher 2010b, 24–27; see also Gardner 1986). The canon-law half of the ius commune affrmed the spiritual equality of the sexes but reinforced the Roman-law ideas about women’s natural weakness and incapacity.According to the twelfth-century jurist Gratian,“man (vir) is so-called not because of his sex but because of his virtue (virtute) of soul; woman (mulier) so-called not because of the sex of her body but because of her softness (mollitie) of mind” (Gratian, Decretum, C. 33 q. 7 d.p.c.17), and later canonists asserted that the gender binary was rooted in a divinely ordained system.1 The idea of matronly modesty also formed a part of canon law: Pope Boniface VIII made provision to have certain women’s testimony taken in situ, because “it is ftting [for women] neither to wander about, nor to mix with the crowd of men”2—a provision of canon law that presents an odd combination of matronly verecundia with an acknowledgment of women’s legal agency. This package of gender ideas—perhaps not new but now fully articulated and bearing the authority of antiquity—would take root in the legal culture of the Iberian Peninsula during the thirteenth century, when monarchs began to commission or endorse the creation of law based on ius commune principles. In law codes throughout the peninsula, the gender ideas of the ius commune appear again and again, sometimes lifted almost verbatim from Roman or canon law.The Customs of Tortosa echoed Roman ideas of female modesty in their provision that women should not be compelled to appear personally in court for any contract that they cosigned with their husbands.3 The royal fueros (furs) of Valencia invoked female weakness in their ruling that a wife’s property was immune from her husband’s debts because “the fragility of her sex should not be turned against her or result in the diminution of her goods”.4 The Siete partidas of Castile’s Alfonso X assumed married women into the legal and social status of their husbands’ families,5 and in general refect an unquestioning assumption of female inferiority: “Likewise, the man is of a superior condition to the woman in many things and in many ways, as is clearly shown in the laws of the Titles of this our book which treats of all the matters aforesaid”.6 Women in medieval Iberia thus lived their lives governed by a patriarchal legal system with centuries-old roots, one that added legal weight to a broader cultural framework that constrained their every action. But the relationship between real women and the law was not just a struggle between oppression and resistance; it was an ongoing legal conversation, one in which women were participants who used the law courts as a forum to construct their own legal and social identities. To do so effectively, these women (or their legal representatives) would have to construct a narrative that could be understood by both the court they stood before and the communities they lived in (Davis 1987; Smail 2003). This means that to be effective litigators and self-fashioners, women needed to adopt the gendered legal vocabulary of the courts, even if the gender norms according to which they pled their cases were belied by the bare substance of their actions. Constructing such a narrative would have been no easy task, for women who litigated in Iberian courts would have had their stories measured according to at least three types of identity. The frst of these was their identity as a woman in general, according to the ius commune ideas of womanly weakness, incapacity, light-mindedness, and modesty. But not every woman accessed these ideas in the same way. A woman’s marital status as unmarried, wife, or widow provided one set of differences when it came to a woman’s standing in medieval Spanish law, especially when it came to litigation over property rights.A woman’s perceived incapacity and weakness were part of the basis for the laws that gave over management (though not ownership) of a married woman’s dowry and other marital assigns to her husband during the course 288
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of their marriage. Yet those very same qualities, accessed in a different way in a courtroom context, allowed a married woman to invoke a provision of Roman law, the Velleian senatus consultum, in order to absolve herself of any negative consequences of fnancial decisions made by her husband, unless she had explicitly signed on to those decisions, on the grounds that she lacked the capacity to understand or effectively object. A widowed mother, by contrast, would have to go before a court to explicitly renounce this same privilege of fnancial immunity in order to make herself master of her late husband’s estate, discharge his debts and contracts, and control the estate as guardian of the couple’s minor children (Kelleher 2010a). Marital status also mattered in how women accessed gender narratives in cases of violence. In cases of rape, the parents and legal representatives of unmarried women emphasized these victims’ special vulnerability and sexual innocence as part of a narrative strategy to underline the damage done in the act. But this latter strategy would only work if the woman in question could successfully position herself in terms of a third category: that of respectable versus disreputable women. A woman who fell on the wrong side of that divide of reputation—a highly subjective judgment usually rendered by neighbors—could fnd herself unable to bring a charge of rape successfully, on the principle that she had already made her sexuality common property, and thus neither she nor any man had ownership of it (Kelleher 2010b, 134–142). The societal imperative to divide good from bad women also meant that women of dubious reputation could be ejected from their homes in “good” neighborhoods—though, importantly, they could not be deprived of their property rights over those homes.Widows also needed to negotiate this boundary of respectability in their courtroom presentations: relatives of a widow’s deceased husband who could prove that she was not living a chaste and respectable life would have grounds to have her stripped of administration of the estate and even custody of her minor children (Kelleher 2010b, 95–109).
Boundaries of caste Thus, though law codes provided a limited menu of gender narratives, a woman’s choices in relation to which narratives to use and how to deploy them were governed by where she fell among the several divisions within the broader category of “woman”. Another important way that women’s experience was divided was by status.The apex of the status hierarchy in Iberia, as in other places, was occupied by queens and noblewomen. In Iberia, queens served as important political links, both horizontally, helping to forge alliances through marriage, and vertically, by giving birth to children to continue a royal line (Shadis 2009, 51–72; Earenfght 2013, 6–15). Yet the Iberian queen was more than a passive tool in diplomatic negotiations, a link in a chain guaranteeing the continuance of one essentially male dynasty or another, or a royal consort whose primary public power lay in her ability to mediate with the king. Iberian queens, like their contemporaries in other kingdoms, also managed their own estates, had charge of their own separate households, and championed interests that may or may not have overlapped with those of their respective royal husbands. María de Luna (1358–1406), wife of Martin I of Aragon, only became queen in her late thirties when her brother-in-law Joan I died suddenly.When she came to power, she was already an accomplished statesman, having been raised in the royal court, and having honed her abilities as patron of her family’s interests and lineage (Silleras-Fernández 2008). Spanish queens were also important patrons of religion: Elicsenda de Montcada (1292– 1364), fourth and fnal wife of James II of Aragon, founded the Franciscan convent of Pedralbes in 1326, and lived adjacent to it from her widowhood in 1327 until her death in 1364, using her infuence to win substantial royal concessions for the house through the reigns of two of her stepsons (Castellano i Tresserra 1998, 25–34); Queen Eleanor/Leonor (r. 1174–1214), the 289
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English-born wife of Alfonso VIII of Castile, founded Las Huelgas, a Cistercian abbey that would become a touchstone of Castilian royal identity (Shadis 2009, 39–40). The idea that medieval queens were sources of independent power is something that historians of queenship in other medieval kingdoms have taken up in recent years. This tendency may, however, have been stronger in Iberia, where queens exercised more formal public power than in other places, in part due to a reconquest-fueled expansion of available lands that allowed cognatic kinship and partible inheritance practices to survive there long after they had been replaced by agnatic kinship structures and primogeniture elsewhere in medieval Europe (Bianchini 2012, 6–7; Earenfght 2005). Queens took advantage of the Iberian custom of corulership to exercise signifcant power alongside their husbands, brothers, or sons.The Aragonese King James I “The Conqueror” (r. 1213–76) notes frequently in his chronicle how he turned to his second wife Violant of Hungary (r. 1235–51) for advice in important political matters, including how to manage the surrender of the city of Xàtiva during the conquest of Valencia, and how to handle the 1247 revolt of the Valencian Muslim leader al-Azraq (VanLandingham 2005, 114–18). Berenguela of Castile (ca. 1180–1246) came to her marriage with Alfonso IX of León with a signifcant power base of her own in the borderlands between the two kingdoms that she had from her father as Alfonso VIII of Castile as her marriage portion. But she was also a ruling partner in her seven-year marriage, dispensing royal justice and co-issuing 80 percent of the couple’s royal charters. Even when she turned over the rule of Castile to her 16-year-old son Fernando (Fernando III, r. 1217–52), she continued not only to bear the title of queen but also to exercise joint power with him, down to her death in 1230 (Bianchini 2012, 39–57, 125–179; Shadis 2009, 110–19). Finally, queens in the Crown of Aragon could wield sovereign political power through the institution of the lieutenancy, an offce most often used as a training-ground for crown princes. Maria de Luna served for a year as lieutenant for her husband King Martin I (Silleras-Fernández 2008, 37–64), and Queen María of Castile, wife of Alfons V “the Magnanimous” of Aragon (r. 1416–58), governed Catalonia and occasionally the entire Crown of Aragon from 1420–23 and again from 1432–58 while her husband spent the majority of his reign in the Crown’s territories in Naples. During her two lieutenancies, she convened the corts, oversaw royal justice, raised ransoms for her husband when he was captured in Naples, and dealt with the ongoing protests and revolts by the semi-servile remença peasants of Catalonia (Earenfght 2009). In all of these cases, the particular Spanish legal and geopolitical context meant that these queens’ power was real, public, and offcial, even while broader cultural assumptions meant that their power was almost always intertwined with their relationship to a male authority fgure, whether husband, brother, or son. In the tenth- and eleventh-century kingdoms of León and Castile, daughters and sisters of ruling kings also wielded power: rather than being married off, daughters of the royal lineage ruled over substantial territories affliated with monastic foundations that they ruled as lords (dominae), consecrating themselves to divine service without taking vows or submitting to claustration, and thus extending the reach of their lineage’s temporal and spiritual authority (Pick 2017, 62–103). Occasionally, Spanish queens even ruled in their own names. Urraca of León (r. 1109–26) ruled as queen of León, Castile, and Galicia, during which time she put down a revolt in Galicia and held together her kingdoms against several factions, some within her own family. One of these was Urraca’s half-sister Teresa (b. 1080), countess of Portugal, who also briefy reigned over that territory as queen and was recognized as such by Pope Paschal II in 1116. She was stripped of the position, but not the title, by her son Afonso, who is credited with being Portugal’s frst independent monarch (r. 1139–85); it was, however, his mother who frst broke away from vassalage to León (Pick 2017, 230–36; Reilly 1982, 107–108, 124–25). It should be noted that both Urraca and Teresa had 290
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tumultuous reigns: the Spanish kingdoms may have made greater provision for women as rulers than other parts of medieval Europe, but cultural norms meant that a woman ruling as something other than an adjunct to a husband or a male heir would face constant challenges. Perhaps no medieval Spanish queen approached these gendered challenges more strategically than Isabella I (r. 1474–1504), who was the primary ruler of the kingdom of Castile even during her long marriage to King Ferdinand of Aragon. In no place other than perhaps the Latin crusader kingdoms was rulership so linked with what Peggy Liss has called “an essentially militant tradition of […] cultural and religious distinction” (Liss 2004, 93). Infuenced by both her personal piety and the temper of an age in which the pragmatic accommodations of past monarchs had largely given way to the desire to drive all non-Christians from the peninsula, Isabella sought to embody her kingdom’s quasi-mythologized version of crusader-kingship, intertwined with a wholehearted embrace of an eschatological vision of a Castilian monarchy itself as intimately connected with God, destined to bring about the second Jerusalem. Undoubtedly aware of how gendered the role of crusader-monarch was, Isabella used all media at her disposal, ranging from sermons and hymns to popular songs and romances, as well as visual representations ranging from art to her own self-presentation in royal processions, to reinforce this image and her own role in it (Liss 2004, 91–105; 2017, 138–144;Weissberger 2003, esp. 44–55). Far away from the court, the workings of gender also impinged on the lives of working women.Women were important participants in the economic life of medieval towns. In commercial cities, women might participate as commercial investors, contracting with organizers of long-distance trading voyages to use their capital (slightly but usually not signifcantly less than that of male investors) to purchase the foreign goods that the women planned on selling at a proft back home.7 But most women who participated in the economy of Iberian cities were not wealthy investors. The municipal ordinances of the city of Barcelona, for instance, show women working as buyers and sellers in almost all of Barcelona’s food trades: although butchers were exclusively male, the people who cut and sold fsh in the city’s one licensed fsh market were women.Women also appear as sellers of produce, poultry, cheese, oil, and prepared foods in the city’s markets and busy maritime district (Vinyoles i Vidal 1983, 141–42), and the municipal ordinances deliberately use both male and female pronouns to refer to people in the various steps of the bread trades, from millers (farineras), to bakers and oven-tenders (faqueras), to the bescuyteras who made the hard-tack known as bescuyt (“twice-cooked [bread]”) that helped to sustain the crews of the city’s military and merchant ships.8 Iberia’s urban women, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim alike, also participated in several artisanal sectors beyond the provisioning trade, whether working as sole proprietors, alongside husbands and other family members, or as widows carrying on their husbands’ work.Women could even be guild members in some trades, although women who worked independently tended to be concentrated in the lower-skilled textile trades such as carding and spinning (Cuadrada 1999; Lightfoot 2013, 16–17; Rich Abad 2014, 79–81). Yet despite their importance in building and sustaining the urban economy alongside men, working women on their own might be subject to other workings of gender—specifcally, the idea that a woman not under male supervision might be suspected of sexual behavior that would result in serious legal and social disability. Many urban working women would have been migrants from the nearby countryside, intending either to resettle permanently or to stay just long enough to earn a dowry to take back to their natal villages. This was especially true of women in domestic service: in ffteenth-century Valencia, almost three-quarters of the capital city’s apprentices and domestic servants came from outside the city walls, often from families in the villages and parishes in the district immediately surrounding the city, but sometimes from much further away.The fact that these women were likely to be separated from family networks 291
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potentially gave them more say in their own marital decisions (Lightfoot 2013, 20–21, 43–61). Yet the lives of unmarried medieval women in Iberia, as elsewhere, were complicated by more than mere economics. Sexual activity was a part of many unmarried women’s lives (Karras 1999b; Ruggiero 1985, 31–38; Lansing 2003, 85–89), but a woman who lived outside the context of a male-headed household had to take care to guard her reputation, lest she be branded a prostitute, with all the disabilities that entailed.This task was complicated by the unclear location of the line that divided a respectable single woman from a disreputable one (Karras 1999a, 162–63).According to high and later medieval canon law, a prostitute or “public woman” (mulier publica) was not necessarily a woman who sold her sexual services; rather, her place was defned relationally, as a woman who, by dint of her promiscuity, had made her sexuality public property; this defnition encouraged the confation of sexually active single women with prostitutes. As early as the twelfth century, canonists were writing that a woman who took numerous lovers could be categorized as a prostitute, even if she took no money in exchange for her sexual favors.9 What they could not agree on was how many constituted “too many”—that is, where the line was that separated a sexually active woman from a prostitute—whether that number lay in the single digits10 or in the dozens or even thousands.11 This ambiguity meant that categorizing the relative legitimacy of a woman’s sexual behavior largely depended on her reputation among her neighbors. In the fourteenth-century Crown of Aragon, most citizen complaints to the royal courts centered around the crime and general disorder that such unsupervised women might bring with them: in Zaragoza, the parishioners of the church of the Blessed María and Saint Joseph complained that certain women of ill repute were introducing a dangerous element into the parish. Likewise, Sister Agnès, a contemplative at Barcelona’s lepers’ hospital, complained that the women who were living in the street behind the hospital (at that time a sparsely populated district) were attracting men who brawled and generally created an uproar that disrupted prayers and divine offces (Kelleher 2010b, 103–104). Citizens and authorities alike were perhaps most concerned that the presence of disreputable women might “cast a shadow upon the chastity and pure reputation of others”12—that is, that their presence in a certain district might encourage people to harass “good women” as well. Civic authorities in the later medieval cities increasingly moved to solve this problem by confning commercial prostitutes to brothels or brothel zones or by keeping them out of particular neighborhoods, especially those surrounding religious institutions (Webster 2013, 489; Graullera 1990; Kelleher 2010b, 105–109). But these social anxieties could also be at the root of the many legal disabilities faced by women whose sexual behavior crossed the invisible line between sexually active single woman and mulier publica.Women deemed to be prostitutes were not only marginalized socially and physically; they were also considered unreliable as witnesses in court, and could be barred from accusing others of crimes—a measure that would have had the effect of muzzling women who had been assaulted.13 In fact, many secular legal codes either state outright or suggest by their silence that a mulier publica could not, by defnition, be the victim of rape (Córdoba de la Llave 1994, 25–26; Sabaté 1994, 295). Since they had made their sexuality public property, these women could make no claim to having been deprived of something that was no longer theirs. In between the respectable married woman and the (potentially) disreputable single woman lay the concubine, a woman in a long-term publicly recognized and mutually consensual union that lacked one or more of the elements that made a marriage—usually dowry, and defnitely ecclesiastical sanction (Karras 2014). In high medieval Castile, the concubine or barragana was an accepted member of both urban and rural society. So long as she was not the concubine of a married man, the medieval Castilian barragana had civil rights and responsibilities comparable to those of a wife, and her status was recognized in early Spanish law. Her children were not barred 292
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from inheritance, provided that her partner had not been married at the time the child was conceived or born. Informal “marriages” of this kind were not uncommon throughout Europe but may have had more general acceptance in the newly conquered areas of high medieval Castile, due to the early gender imbalance of the new Christian settlements (Dillard 1984, 127–134). Of potentially more concern were the concubines of clergy. In the rural parishes of Catalonia, both literary and documentary sources suggest that community reception of the priest’s wife depended more on the particulars of the individual woman’s case than on her relationship status more generally. Parish visitations show that parishioners noted that these couples lived together “like man and wife”, and even refer to the woman in question as the priest or rector’s dona—a word that might mean either “woman” or “wife”. Communities sometimes heaped scorn on women whom they perceived as having other unappealing qualities—from a general high-handedness to more tangible offenses like lending money at excessive interest—but so long as she behaved well, there was every chance that a priest’s concubine would integrate well into the life of her village or town. A long-term concubine of a priest or rector contributed economically to their shared household and even assisted her partner in his clerical duties, from working on clerical estates to hosting guests to baking the Eucharist, and bequests of land from her partner, either in his testament or as an inter vivos donation, could allow her to provide for herself or her children. Being a priest’s concubine might have even lent a woman a certain status in a rural community, especially if she came from a poorer family who might not otherwise have been able to provide her with a decent dowry.The priest’s concubine lacked the legal status of a wife or even a lay barragana, and any children that the couple had would be illegitimate, meaning that a woman could fnd herself and her children repudiated or abandoned if her clerical partner buckled under the force of ecclesiastical discipline, or simply chose to abandon her.Yet evidence suggests that these women’s male partners did their utmost to keep their families together, and that her neighbors recognized these unions as more or less legitimate (Armstrong-Partida 2017, 42–51, 91–98; Kelleher 2002). One fnal status-marked group of women that bears consideration is Iberia’s female slave population. Although Charles Verlinden has noted that medieval slavery in general was more male than female, the reverse seems to have been true for the urban centers of the Mediterranean. Female slaves in Christian Iberia might work on agricultural estates, or in other gendered occupations such as food trades and the textile industry, but the vast majority of female slaves would have been employed as domestics in private Christian or Jewish households.Whether she was an unconverted Muslim or a converted baptizata with a new Christian name, a slave woman would have worked alongside free servants. There was, however, a defnite hierarchy that was most evident in issues surrounding the bodily integrity of the slave woman versus that of the servant. Both free servants and slaves were subject to sexual predation at the hands of (or sometimes entered into voluntary sexual relationships with) male members of the household, but where a seduced or raped servant might successfully sue for a dowry, the illegitimate children of household slaves usually received no recognition (though female slaves did occasionally fle and even win paternity suits against their owners). A comparison of the situation of free versus enslaved wet nurses is illustrative of this difference in bodily sovereignty. Both surrendered control of their sexuality, as medical manuals warned that intercourse could render a mother’s milk toxic. Both were quite literally highly valued: a free wet nurse might command an annual salary of 50 sous, and a slave woman who had recently given birth commanded some of the highest prices at the slave market. But where a slave woman’s milk was a boon, her infant was a liability, and would often be shipped off to an orphanage. And where free wet nurses were at the top of the household serving hierarchy, the same did not apply to enslaved wet nurses who remained, for all the literal and metaphorical value they represented, more thing than person to the people who owned them (Blumenthal 2009, 80–121, 172–191;Winer 2006, 142–156; 2008, 165–177). 293
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Confessional crossings A woman’s place in the societies of medieval Iberia was not just determined by class or gender; the intersection between gender and religion played an important role in a woman’s lived experience, and women who were members of religious minority communities found themselves negotiating multiple sets of gender and status rules. In early al-Andalus, the lives of women of the Mozarabic Christian community were in large part structured by Visigothic law, which was maintained by the dhimma pacts issued to Christian communities under Muslim rule. A Mozarabic woman married to a Muslim husband not only got some of her community’s privileges and restrictions; she got some of those of the religious community she married into, including her right to maintenance and the application of Islamic divorce law. Malikite law also allowed an unconverted Christian wife of a Muslim man to go to church, drink wine, and eat pork.And while stories like the tale behind the Martyrs of Cordoba, in which the symbols of the movement were two young girls whose Christian mother had secretly taught them Christianity, may have been highly fctionalized to echo the tales of the virgin martyrs of Late Antiquity, they also suggest that Mozarabic women in these mixed unions, like conversa women centuries later, may have had some infuence in their children’s religious and cultural upbringing (Estévez 2015, 222–27). The position of Muslim women differed according to whether they were living under Muslim or Christian rule. In al-Andalus, Muslim women’s lives were regulated by religious texts and the law that sprang from them. Malikite law treated Muslim women and men as spiritual equals, but Qur’anic affrmations of the natural superiority of men over women (An-Nisa v. 38) provided justifcation for women’s inferior legal and political position in Andalusi society. Women were legally excluded from all public offce, including as judges and preachers (Arié 1993, 137–38). Nevertheless, some women were able to parlay their positions within the emiral or caliphal households into positions of real political infuence.The most notable of these was Subh (d. 998), a Christian Navarrese woman who became one of the concubines of Caliph al-Hakam II after having been raised and educated in the caliphate. Poet and mother of the future Caliph Hisham II, Subh wielded considerable political infuence throughout her career, and was only brought down by the ascendancy of al-Mansur in the fnal years of the caliphate (Arié 1993, 139–142; Barton 2015, 33–34). Court women in general were often well-educated participants in the cultural life of al-Andalus. There were well-known female poets in every century from the emirate through the end of the taifa period. Many were slaves of the caliphal household, but some were nobles, like Umm al-Kiram, daughter of King al-Mutasim of the taifa of Almería (r. 1051–91) whose poetry declared her love for a palace servant. Walladah bint al-Mustakf (d. 1091), daughter of Caliph Muhammad III al-Mustakf (r. 1024–25) was famous for her frankly sensual love poetry: Wait for my visit when darkness falls; night is the best concealer of secrets. Such passion I feel for you that, if they felt so, the sun would not shine, the moon not appear the stars not move. Elite women also worked in other learned occupations: Radiya, Lubna, Muzna—all palace slaves of Caliph al-Hakam II—worked as secretary-scribes; Umm al-Hasan, daughter of the fourteenth-century physician Abu Jafar al-Tunyali, devoted herself to the study of both medicine and literature. Records also show the occasional woman working in occupations as diverse 294
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as lexicographers, historians, mathematicians, astronomers, musicians, and medical practitioners (though only with female patients), as well as students of history, mathematics, jurisprudence, and the Qur’an and hadith (Viguera 1992, 709–719; Lachiri 1993, 110–16;Arié 1993, 156–160). The exalted careers of these elite women were not, however, representative of ordinary Muslim women in al-Andalus, whose status was more mixed. While the twelfth-century philosopher Ibn Rushd (1126–98) noted that an uneducated woman who lacked skills was an economic drag on both her husbands and her city (Viguera 1992, 712), his ideas would have been considered alongside those of Baghdadi theologian al-Ghazali (1058–1111), who held that women were naturally weak and it was men’s job to protect them. Marriage agreements included a dowry (mahr) that a man promised his future wife; also, the bride’s trousseau, and women, like men, could initiate divorce with a legitimate grievance, or as part of a mutual arrangement with her husband. Andalusi writers and religious scholars also made note of women’s right to sex with her husband at least once a month. The real gender issue for Muslim women was their presence and/or appearance in public. Many Muslim legal and cultural authorities believed that women’s public presence posed a danger to the social order because of the disruptive power of their sexuality. Ibn Abd al-Barr (d. 1070) pointed to the disorder that could arise from women’s desires and desirability as a reason to require that women be veiled in public. Even the sound of women in public could pose a danger: one ninth-century conduct treatise tried to ban the slide sandals that were fashionable among Andalusi Muslim women at that time, arguing that the clopping sound they made could alert men to the presence of a woman and thereby inspire lust.The life of a respectable woman might include several legitimate public appearances, such as visits to the bathhouse, or the market, or to tend the tombs of relatives. She might also go out as part of a family group to festivals both sacred and secular. But religious scholars and Andalusi writers more generally focused on a married man’s responsibility to control his wife’s sexuality—often by controlling her public conduct—in order to prevent the danger that uncontrolled female sexuality posed to the male-dominated order, both within marriage and in society at large (Arié 1993, 138–149; Marín 2002, 6–13). Women in Mudejar society—that is, Spanish Muslims living under Christian rule—had to contend with the intersection of their generally subordinate gender role within Muslim society with the subordinate position occupied by their entire faith community. In some ways, a woman’s position in Mudejar society was similar to her position in al-Andalus. A couple’s children belonged to the family lineage, which affected a mother’s rights: a widow who remarried lost custody of her children to her deceased husband’s relations; a woman who separated from her husband returned to her parents’ home—sometimes, if she had a strong family, with her dowry (Meyerson 1991, 249–250). But being a member of a minority religious community also meant that Mudejar women were subject to certain restrictions that did not apply to Andalusi Muslim women.Alfonso X’s 1252 ordinances of Seville, as well as the 1268 corts of Jerez, forbade Mudejar women from dressing in the manner of Christian women, and especially in luxury fabrics and jewels and certain colors—though marriage contracts and wills from the thirteenth through ffteenth centuries suggest that wealthy Mudejar women still wore fne clothes and luxury fabrics (Arié 1993, 153–55). Even positions that looked superfcially similar on both sides of the religio-political boundary could be quite different when put into new context. As they did in al-Andalus, men in Mudejar communities policed the sexuality of women. But the possibility of interfaith sexual conduct added a new layer of complication.The ability to maintain women’s sexual honor was one important signifer of community identity, and regulating women’s behavior was a way for a subcommunity to maintain boundaries in an atmosphere of uncomfortable proximity (Barton 2015, 143–152; Mirrer 1996, 17–29). Within the Mudejar communities of the Crown of Aragon, Mudejar law ordered that a woman who had sex with a Christian man 295
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was to be punished with 100 lashes—effectively a death sentence—as much because of Islamic prohibitions on extramarital sexuality as because of miscegenation anxiety. Crown courts, which claimed jurisdiction over cases under the jurisdiction of the aljama (the corporate body of a religious minority community) that involved capital punishment or mutilation, regularly commuted these sentences to enslavement to the crown, thus tying the interests of Christian supremacy to Mudejar codes regarding family honor.Yet one common fate of Muslim women who became Crown slaves was their sale to state-run brothels that might be patronized by Christians as well as Muslims, thereby adding to the cycle of miscegenation anxiety for Muslims, while simultaneously sending a message of dominance of Muslims, even as Christian authorities strictly punished interfaith sexual activity of their own community’s women (Nirenberg 1998, 136–39; Meyerson 1988; Rivera Garretas and Milagros 1996, 169–174). While a Muslim woman’s situation might vary depending on which side of the religiopolitical border she lived, Iberian Jewish women were members of a religious minority no matter where they were. In al-Andalus, Jewish women from elite families would have had access to education. Two early modern Arab writers make note of at least one Jewish female poet in al-Andalus: a certain Qasmuna, who wrote poetry in Arabic and who scholars speculate may have been the daughter of the Cordoba court offcial Samuel ha-Nagid (993–1055). Her existence, and the possible existence of others like her in al-Andalus is supported by Genizah evidence that reveals that some Jewish women living under Islamic rule were highly educated (Melammed 2011, 260–63). They were also considered competent to run household affairs when their husbands traveled for business, sometimes for extended periods of time. Letters in the Cairo Genizah from Andalusi Jewish wives writing to their husbands, or mothers to their sons, expressing their wishes that men away on business would be home in time for religious holidays or family celebrations, are flled with few indications as to how women were taking on the fnancial and emotional burdens of being head of household. Andalusi Jewish women also took over as de facto heads of household when they were widowed: in 1053, Shimon ben Israel, a Spanish Jew who had relocated to Jerusalem, wrote to his sister Belluta, living in the taifa of Toledo. His letters apparently respond to earlier letters he had received from her in which she had updated him on family news and on her ongoing preparations to assemble a dowry for her daughter, but never mention any husband of his sister, suggesting that she was taking on all these duties on her own (Melammed 2015, 94–103). The Genizah letters reveal a world in which men were default heads of household, but also recognized women’s capacity to run things in their absence.The letters, however, refect only a small slice of the female Jewish population in al-Andalus: those in merchant families, or those married or related to men prosperous enough to travel.We have evidence of a broader swath of womanhood for Jewish women in Christian-controlled Iberia. A Jewish woman’s life centered on the home and the family, with a gender dynamic that emphasized male control: the ideal Jewish wife was a good wife and mother who improved her husband’s standing by bringing in her own family connections. Men controlled household economics, and daughters were not generally heirs if they had brothers, although Halakhah required them to be maintained from the estate of deceased parents until they married, at which time the estate would pay them a dowry (Winer 2006, 77–79, 90–91). Women’s leisure time was also most appropriately spent with other women within the household: in general terms,“good” women avoided public space, especially those spaces where they would come into contact with men (Blasco Martínez 2010, 92–99). Yet as Elka Klein once noted, patterns of women's behavior reveal the serious problems with analyzing women’s position in terms of a public/private dichotomy: not all forms of public activity were equal, the household was not automatically inferior to the public realm, and 296
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women could work around the limitations, or even use the limitations to their advantage (Klein 2006, 52). Take, for example, the seemingly solidly patriarchal structure of Jewish divorce law: a woman who was unhappy in her marriage could not demand a divorce. She could, however, force her husband to divorce her by deliberately making herself into a “rebellious wife”—that is, by refusing her husband sex or refusing to perform household duties—though she risked losing part of her ketubah settlement (analogous to the Christian dowry) by doing so (Decker 2017, 39–41). Women’s religious activity is another place where the neat public/private dichotomy breaks down upon closer inspection. Jewish law restricted women’s activity as participants (as opposed to observers) in synagogues, courts, and schools. Even as passive participants, they sat separately in a women’s section in the synagogue, and their legal testimony was accepted in only certain very narrowly defned situations. But Jewish women did contribute directly to the religious life of their community, donating funds for the maintenance of synagogues, contributing to charitable trusts for boys’ education and girls’ dowries, and funding the purchase of temple ornaments and the writing of Torah scrolls (Melammed 2011, 259). Women with legal grievances against male members of the community took advantage of a custom that allowed them to interrupt services to force a congregation to address their issues (Klein 2006, 50). Jewish women were also active in several economic areas, including property ownership, moneylending, and artisan and provisioning trades—albeit often in partnership with their husbands or male relatives. Iberian Jewish women are somewhat more visible in “female” professions like wet-nursing or as professional mourners, but also in less typically female professions like physicians.Widows are likewise more visible than married women, and seem to have been the most active in the public realm, acting as guardians of minor children and administrators of estates left to them by their husbands—positions that gave them both legal and economic power that were most often associated with men (Rich Abad 2014; Winer 2006, 85–103; Klein 2006, 53–54).Yet as Sarah Ifft Decker has demonstrated in her examination of the vibrant group of independent female Jewish moneylenders—many of them married women—in the Catalan town of Vic, all of these general statements about Jewish women’s public agency or lack thereof should be tempered by an awareness of the role that locally or chronologically specifc factors could play in determining Jewish women’s experience (Decker 2020). New problems arose for Jewish and Muslim women in the ffteenth and sixteenth centuries, when members of both religions faced a choice between converting to Christianity or leaving the Iberian Christian kingdoms altogether. For Jewish women, this story begins not in 1492 with the Alhambra Decree, which expelled all Jews from the Spanish kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, but in 1391, when anti-Semitic preaching led to attacks on Jewish communities throughout the peninsula, resulting not only in massacres and dispersed communities but also thousands of forced conversions.This wave of conversos and conversas lived side-by-side with the Jewish communities that remained after 1391, freely communicating with their Jewish neighbors.These fuzzy boundaries between Jewish and convert communities were not always to the advantage of Jewish women, who could fnd themselves in a bind if their husbands converted: conversion did not erase Jewish marriage, but a converso husband would have been alienated from the community, leaving the unconverted wife to be pulled between loyalty to her religious community’s gendered views of a married woman’s obligation to her husband on the one hand, and loyalty to her own religious obligations—especially if the couple had children—on the other (Guerson and Lightfoot 2020, 134–140).Women who did convert found themselves in a different sort of bind, their dowries taxed when monarchs allowed the creditors of a dissolved Jewish aljama to demand repayment from the converso communities (Oeltjen 2020, 41–58). These conversas were also particular targets of surveillance for offcials of the Inquisition, due in large part to their gendered roles surrounding food preparation: Jewish neighbors traded or 297
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sold conversas unleavened bread for Passover and kosher meat throughout the year; in return, conversas did favors for their Jewish neighbors, such as lighting fres on the Sabbath or providing charity and material aid for resource-depleted Jewish communities. In one Inquisition trial from the 1480s, conversa sisters Isabel, Inés, and María de la Higuera of the Castilian town of Alcázar de Consuegra admitted to observing Passover and not only eating unleavened bread but sometimes baking it with her Jewish neighbors in their homes. Isabel confessed to eating meat that had been slaughtered by Jewish butchers; that she had visited with Jewish friends in her home and theirs; that she had given charity to the Jewish community. Christian authorities would use the existence of cases like Isabel’s to justify the eventual expulsion of Iberia’s Jews at the end of the ffteenth century, determining that the remaining Jews were necessarily dangers to the fragile Christianity of the converts. But with the public institutions of the faith—synagogues, schools, community organizations—eradicated, the main rituals that remained were private ones, conducted in the home.This left women more than ever at the center of accusations of Judaizing in the sixteenth-century Inquisition, as women’s activities, like preparing Sabbath meals and ritual foods, became the new symbols of crypto-Judaism (Melammed 2002, 16–34). Women who converted from Islam during the same decades around 1500 faced challenges similar to those of the formerly Jewish conversas: unlike men, whose roles in the Islamic community would have been public and undoubtedly religious in nature, women were more intimately involved in domestic and life-stage rituals that may have been hidden from view, and that blurred the line between religious ritual and cultural practice.These moriscas, as they came to be called, were instrumental in several rites of passage that preserved Muslim cultural practices. These rites, from rituals to welcome newborn babies to circumcision of male infants to postmenstrual cleansings and other ritual bathing to preparations of bodies for burial that recalled Muslim practice, may or may not have been conscious acts of resistance, but they certainly attracted the scrutiny of neighbors and of the Inquisition in the decades after 1502. Moriscas posed an additional danger in the eyes of the Inquisition in that they were potential conduits for the transmission of Islamic culture (if not religion) from one generation to the next, and their dominance of the domestic sphere made them focal points of cultural resistance: the morisca Leonor de Morales’s husband denounced her before the Inquisitorial authorities for cooking meat in oil rather than in fat, eating while sitting on the ground, changing into clean clothes on Fridays, and—perhaps most damningly—for convincing him to adopt these practices as well (Constable 2018, 94–101, 108; Perry 2005, 40–53, 66–79, Morales case at 76). But as with conversas, moriscas’ agency was not limited to the domestic realm.The inquisitorial context of early modern Spain left many moriscas as heads of household.Their activities to protect these households and their resources made these women a not-infrequent presence in the public world of the courts, and in one notable instance in 1557, as members of a delegation of headsof-household that the morisco community of Valladolid sent to negotiate with the Crown for the community’s survival in the face of clerical arguments that their neighborhood should be broken up in order to encourage greater cultural assimilation (Cavanaugh 2020, 154–59). Regardless of whether their activities were public or domestic, moriscas, like conversas, had the potential to act as conduits for the transmission of Islamic culture, and the fact that they now did so from within the Christian community rather than from outside of it made them into targets of fear and suspicion in the age of Inquisition. This “dangerous domesticity”, as Mary Elizabeth Perry has called it, led to an ever stricter separation and scrutiny of the behavior of “New Christians”, and of that community’s women in particular, as the medieval centuries gave way to the early modern era, and to the height of inquisitorial interest in relapsed converts (Perry 2005, 65–87). Lacking meaningful contact with former co-religionists meant that Iberia’s late medieval and early modern conversas and moriscas could not fully participate in 298
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their old religion, but limpieza de sangre (“purity of blood”) laws of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would mean that they were never fully accepted into the new community (Kamen 2014, 301–318). Caught between two worlds and able to belong fully to neither, many of these women forged a third way, keeping the traditions of their faith and culture as best they could, every meal preparation and neighborly interaction scrutinized for signs of heresy.
Conclusion Many things bound together the experience of Iberian women with women elsewhere in medieval Europe. The peninsula was part of the larger medieval gender system, one in which women were regarded as naturally inferior to men. As in other places, the operations of gender were not uniform: a woman’s position as married or single, maiden or widow, affected how overarching gender ideas would infuence her life, and how she would deploy those ideas in courtroom narratives. A woman’s social status also intersected with gender: queens wielded public power that in some ways defed gender conventions; elite Christian, Jewish, and Muslim women had access to education and cultural capital that more ordinary women did not; urban working women ran their own businesses and earned their own money while enslaved women lacked even the authority over their own bodies.Yet as in other places, women of all these status groups were subject to the workings of the same gender ideas regarding female inferiority and incapacity; even queens only rarely ruled except as adjuncts to their husbands or sons. And, as everywhere, a woman’s bodily sovereignty was always in dispute. Yet while Iberia formed a part of the broader medieval European gender system, its unique characteristics—most notably its multiple and shifting internal religio-political boundaries— added another dimension to the already complex webwork of gender, relational status, and socio-economic position.The religious plurality of the peninsula meant not only that we have different religious gender systems to contend with; it also meant that where a woman lived might place her as a member of a religious majority or minority community, with consequences for how the various and overlapping gender systems applied to her. Control over women’s bodies took on heightened signifcance when they were members of a religious minority community, thereby shoring up the operations of patriarchy.And early modern Iberian women who converted from Judaism or Islam to Christianity had to contend with increased scrutiny of their every action, as the rituals of the home became the focus of inquisitors.All in all, women’s place in Iberia was diverse, complicated not only by the many intersections of gender, status, and religion but also by the many opportunities that the geopolitical context of the Iberian Peninsula afforded for boundary-crossing.These crossings could pose hazards to the women in question, but they present intriguing opportunities for scholars interested in a fuller and more complex picture of medieval women.
Notes 1 Johannes Teutonicus, Glossa ordinaria to C. 33 q. 5 c. 12, v. Est ordo naturalis; Rufnus, Summa decretorum, to C. 33 q. 5 c. 15, v. Cum caput. 2 Liber sextus 2.1.2. 3 Costums de Tortosa 4.7.1. 4 Furs de Valencia, 4. 19.28. 5 Siete Partidas IV.2.7. 6 Siete Partidas IV.23.2. 7 ACB Notaris 92, 154v–155r, 169v–170r., and 183v–184v. (1328). 8 See, for one example among many that refers to both male and female members of these professions, AHCB Llibres del Consell 13, f. 33v–34r. (1333/34).
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Marie A. Kelleher 9 Decretum 34 c. 16. 10 Odofredus, Lectura super Dig. vet. to Dig. 23.2.43, as cited in Brundage 1987, 465. 11 Johannes Teutonicus, Glossa ordinaria to D. 33 c. 6, v. Si non pellicem, to C. 27 q. 1 c. 41, v. promiscuum, and to C. 32 q. 4 c. 11, v. quarum; for number of partners, See Glossa ordinaria to D. 34 c. 16, v. quae multorum and to D. 45 c. 9, v. paucorum. 12 Pragmàticas IX.3.2 (1330), in Constitucions i altres drets de Catalunya (Barcelona: [s.n.] 1704; repr. Barcelona: Base, 1973). 13 Bernard of Parma, Glossa ordinaria to X 5.1.20, v. concubinarios.
References Arié, Rachel. 1993.“Aperçus sur la femme dans l’Espagne musulmane”. In Árabes, judías y cristianas: mujeres en la Europa medieval, edited by Celia del Moral, 137–160. Granada: Universidad de Granada. Armstrong-Partida, Michelle. 2017. Defant Priests: Domestic Unions, Violence, and Clerical Masculinity in Fourteenth-Century Catalonia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Barton, Simon. 2015. Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines: Interfaith Relations and Social Power in Medieval Iberia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bellomo, Manlio. 1995. The Common Legal Past of Europe: 1000 –1800.Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Bianchini, Janna. 2012.The Queen’s Hand: Power and Authority in the Reign of Berenguela of Castile. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Blasco Martínez, Asunción. 2010.“Queen for a Day:The Exclusion of Jewish Women from Public Life in the Middle Ages”. In Late Medieval Jewish Identities: Iberia and Beyond, edited by Esperanza Alfonso and Carmen Caballero-Navas, 91–106. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Blumenthal, Debra. 2009. Enemies and Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth-Century Valencia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Brundage, James A. 1987. Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Castellano i Tresserra,Anna. 1998.Pedralbes a l'edat mitjana: història d'un monestir femení.Barcelona:Ajuntament de Barcelona [for the Abadia de Montserrat]. Cavanaugh, Stephanie M. 2020. “In Defense of Community: Morisca Women in Sixteenth-Century Valladolid”. In Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, edited by Michelle ArmstrongPartida,Alexandra Guerson, and Dana Wessell Lightfoot, 151–173. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Constable, Olivia Remie. 2018. To Live Like a Moor: Christian Perceptions of Muslim Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Spain. Edited by Robin J. E.Vose. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Córdoba de la Llave, Ricardo. 1994. El instinto diabólico. Agresiones sexuales en la Castilla Medieval. Córdoba: Universidad de Córdoba. Cuadrada, Coral. 1999. “Les dones en el treball urbà (segles XIV-XV)”. Anuario de estudios medievales 29: 219–234. Davis, Natalie Zemon. 1987. Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Decker, Sarah Ifft. 2017.“Jewish Divorce and Latin Notarial Culture in Fourteenth-Century Catalonia”. In Boundaries in the Medieval and Wider World: Essays in Honour of Paul Freedman, edited by Thomas Barton, Susan McDonough, Sara McDougall, and Matthew Wranovix, 37–56.Turnhout: Brepols. Decker, Sarah Ifft. 2020.“Credit and Connections: Jewish Women between Communities in Vic, 1250–1350”. In Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, edited by Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Alexandra Guerson, and Dana Wessell Lightfoot, 17–40. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Dillard, Heath. 1984. Daughters of the Reconquest:Women in Castilian Town Society, 1100–1300. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Earenfght, Theresa. 2005. “Preface: Partners in Politics”. In Queenship and Political Power in Medieval and Early Modern Spain, edited by Theresa Earenfght, xiii–xvii.Aldershot:Ashgate. Earenfght, Theresa. 2009. The King’s Other Body: Maria of Castile and the Crown of Aragon. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Earenfght, Theresa. 2013. “Introduction: Not Partial, Prejudiced, or Ignorant: The Study of Queens and Queenship in Medieval Europe”. Introduction in Queenship in Medieval Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Medieval Iberian women and gender Estévez, María de la Paz. 2015.“Identidades híbridas: las mujeres mozárabes entre Al-Andalus y la cristiandad”. Fundación para la historia de España (Argentina) 12: 222–227. Font Rius, Josep Maria. 1967.“La recepción de del derecho romano en la peninsula ibérica durante la Edad Media”. Recueil de mémoires et travaux publié par la Société d’histoire du droit et des institutions des anciens pays du droit écrit 6: 85–104. Gardner, Jane F. 1986. Women in Roman Law and Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gratian. 1855. Decretum. In Patrologia Latina 187, edited by J.P. Migne. Paris: Migne. Graullera,Vicente. 1990.“Los hostaleros del burdel de Valencia”. In Violència i marginació en la societat medieval (Revista d’història medieval 1), edited by Pablo Pérez García, 201–213.Valencia: Department d’Història Medieval de la Universitat de Valencia. Guerson, Alexandra, and Dana Wessell Lightfoot. 2020. “Mixed Marriages and Community Identity in Fifteenth-Century Girona”. In Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, edited by Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Alexandra Guerson, and Dana Wessell Lightfoot, 132–150. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Kamen, Henry. 2014. The Spanish Inquisition:A Historical Revision. 4th ed. New Haven:Yale University Press. Karras, Ruth Mazo. 1999a.“Prostitution and the Question of Sexual Identity in Medieval Europe”. Journal of Women's History 11: 159–177. Karras, Ruth Mazo. 1999b. “Sex and the Singlewoman”. In Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800, edited by Judith M. Bennett and Amy M Froide, 127–145. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Karras, Ruth Mazo. 2014. Unmarriages: Women, Men, and Sexual Unions in the Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kelleher, Marie A. 2002.“‘Like Man and Wife’: Clerics’ Concubines in the Diocese of Barcelona”. Journal of Medieval History 28 (4): 349–360. Kelleher, Marie A. 2010a. “Hers by Right: Gendered Legal Assumptions and Women's Property in the Medieval Crown of Aragon”. Journal of Women’s History 22 (2): 34–55. Kelleher, Marie A. 2010b. The Measure of Woman: Law and Female Identity in the Crown of Aragon. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Klein, Elka. 2006.“Public Activities of Catalan Jewish Women”. Medieval Encounters 12: 48–61. Lachiri, Nadia. 1993.“La vida cotidiana de las mujeres en al-Andalus y su refejo en las fuentes literarias”. In Árabes, judías y cristianas: mujeres en la Europa medieval, edited by Celia del Moral, 103–121. Granada: Universidad de Granada. Lansing, Carol. 2003.“Concubines, Lovers, Prostitutes: Infamy and Female Identity in Medieval Bologna”. In Beyond Florence:The Contours of Medieval and Early Modern Italy, edited by Paula Findlen, Michelle M. Fontaine, and Duane J. Osheim, 85–100. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lightfoot, Dana Wessell. 2013. Women, Dowries and Agency: Marriage in Fifteenth-Century Valencia. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Liss, Peggy K. 2004. Isabel the Queen: Life and Times. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Liss, Peggy K. 2017. “Isabel of Castile (1451–1504): Her Self-Representation and Its Context”. In Queenship and Political Power in Medieval and Early Modern Spain, edited by Theresa Earenfght, 138–144. Hampshire: Ashgate. Marín, Manuela. 2002. “Marriage and Sexuality in Al-Andalus”. In Marriage and Sexuality in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, edited by Eukene Lacarra Lanz, 3–20. London: Routledge. Melammed, Renée Levine. 2002. Heretics or Daughters of Israel?:The Crypto-Jewish Women of Castile. New York: Oxford University Press. Melammed, Renée Levine. 2011. “The Jewish Woman in Medieval Iberia”. In The Jew in Medieval Iberia, 1100–1500, edited by Jonathan Ray, 257–285. Brighton, MA:Academic Studies Press. Melammed, Renée Levine. 2015. “Spanish Women’s Lives as Refected in the Cairo Genizah”. Hispania Judaica Bulletin:Articles, Reviews, Bibliography, and Manuscripts on Sefarad 11 (2): 93–108. Meyerson, Mark D. 1988. “Prostitution of Muslim Women in the Kingdom of Valencia: Religious and Sexual Discrimination in a Medieval Plural Society”. In The Medieval Mediterranean: Cross-Cultural Currents, edited by Marylin J. Chiat and Kathryn L. Reyerson, 87–95. St. Cloud, MN: North Star Press. Meyerson, Mark D. 1991. The Muslims of Valencia in the Age of Fernando and Isabel: Between Coexistence and Crusade. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mirrer, Louise. 1996. Women, Jews, and Muslims in the Texts of Reconquest Castile. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
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Marie A. Kelleher Nirenberg, David. 1998. Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages. 2nd printing, with corrections. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Oeltjen, Natalie. 2020.“Challenges Facing Mallorcan Conversas after 1391”. In Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, edited by Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Alexandra Guerson, and Dana Wessell Lightfoot, 41–58. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Perry, Mary Elizabeth. 2005. The Handless Maiden: Moriscos and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Spain. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pick, Lucy. 2017. Her Father’s Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in the Early Spanish Kingdoms. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Reilly, Bernard F. 1982. The Kingdom of León-Castilla under Queen Urraca, 1109–1126. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rich Abad, Anna. 2014. “Able and Available: Jewish Women in Medieval Barcelona and Their Economic Activities”. Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 6: 71–86. Rivera, Garretas, and Maria Milagros. 1996. “La construcción de lo femenino entre musulmanes, judíos y cristianos (Al-Andalus y Reinos Cristianos, siglos XI-XIII)”. Acta historica et archaeologica mediaevalia 16: 167–179. Rufnus. 1963. Summa decretorum, edited by Heinrich Singer.Amsterdam: Scientia Verlag. Ruggiero, Guido. 1985. The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice. New York: Oxford University Press. Sabaté, Flocel. 1994.“Femmes et violence dans la Catalogne du XIVe siècle”. Annales du Midi 106: 277–316. Shadis, Miriam. 2009. Berenguela of Castile (1180–1246) and Political Women in the High Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Silleras-Fernández, Núria. 2008. Power, Piety, and Patronage in Late Medieval Queenship: Maria De Luna. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Smail, Daniel Lord. 2003. The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264– 1423.Teutonicus, Johannes: Cornell University Press. Glossa ordinaria. VanLandingham, Marta. 2005.“Royal Portraits: Representations of Queenship in the Thirteenth-Century Catalan Chronicles”. In Queenship and Political Power in Medieval and Early Modern Spain, edited by Teresa Earenfght, 109–119. Aldershot: Ashgate. Viguera, María J. 1992. “Aṣluḥu Li’l-Ma’ālī: On the Social Status of Andalusī Women”. In The Legacy of Muslim Spain, edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi, 709–724. Leiden: Brill. Vinyoles i Vidal, Teresa Maria. 1983. “La mujer bajomedieval a traves de las ordenanzas municipales de Barcelona”. In Las mujeres medievales y su ámbito jurídico: Actas de las II Jornadas de investigación interdisciplinaria, edited by Seminario de Estudios de la Mujer, 137–154. Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Webster, Jill R. 2013.“Refections on Three Interacting Aspects of Late Medieval Barcelona: Poverty, Piety and Prostitution”. In A l’entorn de la Barcelona medieval: estudis dedicats a la doctora Josefna Mutgé i Vives, edited by Manuel Sánchez Martínez et al. Barcelona: CSIC. Weissberger, Barbara F. 2003. Isabel Rules: Constructing Queenship,Wielding Power. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Winer, Rebecca Lynn. 2006. Women,Wealth, and Community in Perpignan, c. 1250–1300: Christians, Jews, and Enslaved Muslims in a Medieval Mediterranean Town. Aldershot: Ashgate. Winer, Rebecca Lynn. 2008. “Conscripting the Breast: Lactation, Slavery and Salvation in the Realms of Aragon and Kingdom of Majorca, c. 1250–1300”. Journal of Medieval History 34 (2): 164–184.
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20 IBERIAN QUEENSHIP Theory and practice Núria Silleras-Fernández
In El Corbacho,Alfonso Martínez de Toledo’s famous, misogynistic tract of 1438, the author, the Archpriest of Talavera, vilifes women, whom he associates with evils such as love and desire, and whom he blames for the downfall of Man. Not even queens escape his bitingly satirical condemnation. In fact, the Archpriest begins the second part of his text with a chapter titled: “De los viçios e tachas e malas condiciones de las perversas mugeres, e primero digo de las avariçiosas” [Regarding the vices, sins, and bad characteristics of perverse women, the frst of whom I speak are those who are greedy]. Here, to illustrate women’s supposedly great avarice—one of the Seven Deadly Sins—he chose a queen of Aragon as his example. Martínez de Toledo was familiar with the Crown of Aragon because he lived there for some time in the 1420s, before moving to Italy and fnally returning to Castile to serve as chaplain in the courts of Juan II (1406–54) and Enrique IV (1454–74) (Martínez de Toledo 2011, 16–19).1 The Archpriest of Talavera explains that, once upon a time, there was “una reina muy honesta con fngimiento de vanagloria, que pensava aver más frmeza que otra, diciendo que quál era la vil muger que a ombre su cuerpo librara por todo el aver que fuese al mundo” (146) [a very honorable queen, with vain pretensions, who believed herself to be more steadfast than any other, said that only a bad woman would give over her body to a man, even if he offered her everything in the world]. She insisted on her virtue and honesty of her intentions so much that—in a trope typical of medieval didactic literature—a knight decided to prove if her actions would match her words, and if “por dones libraría su cuerpo” [in exchange for gifts she would give over her body]. So, he began to tempt her with precious objects, offering them to the queen in exchange for her chastity. First, he offered a diamond ring ten times more valuable than the one she owned, but she refused and told him she would not have been moved had it been a hundred times more valuable. Next, he tempted her with a ruby “que fziese luz como un antorcha” [which shone like a torch]. Nevertheless, she said no, adding that it would not tempt her even if it were as brilliant as four torches. Undeterred, the knight countered by offering her the city of Rome. Again, she said no—not even for the whole Kingdom of Castile. Then, the knight went all out: “Señora, quien vos fziese del mundo emperadora e que todos los hombres e mugeres vos besasen las manos por señora, señora ¿amarle íades?” [My lady, would you yield to love him, who would make you empress of the world so that all men and women would kiss your hands as their sovereign?]. It was at this point that the queen conceded: “¡Ay, amigo! Tanto podría el ombre dar que…[Oh, my friend! Were a man able to give so much…].The knight realized that 303
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“Si yo toviese agora que dar, la mala muger en las manos la tenía” (147) [If I were to have to give this now, he would have an evil woman in his hands]. She immediately realized the mistake she had made, but it was too late; her greed had triumphed over her virtue. For the Archpriest of Talavera, the moral of the story is obvious: all women are equally inclined to evil and greed, even to the point of prostituting themselves.The only difference is that the higher up they are on the social scale, the more a man must offer before she surrenders her virtue. This is to say, gender trumps class—even among royalty. Martínez de Toledo’s parable exemplifes the conundrum that women, including queens, faced in the Middle Ages.The standard misogynous discourse of the time associated all of them, with the exception of the beatifc Virgen Mary and a few other saintly women, with everything bad. Even those authors who claimed to “defend” women against “slanders” had a very diffcult time setting aside the accepted view of women as “imperfect males”. This was a construction of womanhood derived from classical sources, including the work of Aristotle, the Hippocratic theory of the four bodily humors; Biblical tales, notably the temptation of Eve and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden; and the writings of the Church Fathers.These various misogynistic traditions converged in unequivocally signaling women’s inferiority to men, and therefore justifying the treatment of women as second-class members of society. Nevertheless, not all women (or men) were the same. Class and wealth, together with ethnicity and religious affliation all function as markers of status and identity in medieval Iberian society. If the Archpriest of Talavera’s parable asked the question “How much does social status really matter when all women are of the same fawed nature?”, the answer would surely have been clear. A queen was, by virtue of her nature, unlike other women. The queen had no equal in her own kingdom. She was perched at the highest point of the social pyramid and could look down with restrained disdain on lowly commoners, like Martínez de Toledo, who were so far below her world.Thus, queenship existed at the intersection between gender and social status. The queen was a woman, although, as Butler (1988) has shown, gender is performative. And in many medieval texts it appears just so, although in others it is construed as binary and physical. Social status was not only the product of gender, but it also, as Kimberle Crenshaw would put it, intersects with other categories: in this case, with one’s social class, lineage, and estate, one’s religious affliation (that is, as a Latin Christian), one’s wealth, one’s networks, and one’s ethnic identity (that is, if one were a native or a foreigner) (Crenshaw 1989, 140).Thus, when a queen was attacked by a moralist on account of the supposed weakness of her gender, she could defend her prestige and reputation by invoking her superior social status as queen to dismiss virtually any critic, whether a nobleman, cleric, or commoner. In the case of courtiers or clerics, she could use her social infuence to retaliate: by casting them into disfavor or depriving them of offce or benefce. But, in any event, in the case of the Archpriest of Talavera, there was a catch in his story.A knight could never tempt a queen in this way, no matter how “greedy” she might be. Who can give a queen more than she already has? Who can make a queen empress of the world? No knight has this power.As a moralist, the Archpriest of Talavera’s parable should have led him to consider the role of God as the provider, not a lowly and deceitful knight. But Talavera was focused not on Christian morality, but feminine immorality. Like the Corbacho, the legal codes and didactic texts that mapped out gender norms and stereotypes regarding women were written by men.Their intent was to restrict the role of women in society; but, in fact, queens of the Iberian kingdoms throughout the Middle Ages took on active roles in politics and exercised considerable formal and informal power and infuence, whether ruling as queens in their own right, governing as regents or lieutenants, or wielding their status as consorts, mothers, or dowagers. Queens were powerful women, and many of them were very powerful indeed. Of course, power has to be understood in the broadest sense, not 304
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only as formal authority deriving from her offce as queen, but also as a product of her family status, her ability to build networks of infuence and patronage, and her charisma and political savvy. It was all about getting or forcing people to do what you wanted to do.As Foucault noted, all power is relational and individual. It is present everywhere, and comes from everywhere, and is expressed in actions (Foucault 1981). Moisés Naim defned it as the ability to direct or prevent the current or future actions of other groups and individuals…power is what we exercise over others that leads them to behave in ways they would not otherwise have behaved. (2014, 16) Of course, not any woman could be a queen. The fundamental prerequisite was noble birth; but there were other basic expectations as well. A certain level of refnement and education, including literacy, was expected.This would serve her to construct a royal persona that appeared pious, well-balanced, who was capable of supervising her household and dependents, managing her fnances effciently, and participating in the rituals and the life of the royal court, as well as in government. A queen-consort might not wield formal authority, but with her intimate access to the king, she was supposed to serve as an intercessor between her husband and his subjects, preferably as a peacemaker, and was expected, just like the king, to pose as an example of virtue for the kingdom. Her prime role, however, was to produce children, and specifcally a male heir—one who could guarantee political stability and dynastic continuity to the kingdom. Other children, and particularly daughters, would be married off to build political alliances. Brothers or half-brothers of the heir could be potentially problematic.Thus, while queens were expected to maintain dynastic continuity through reproduction, this was a delicate task. Infant mortality was high, and both pregnancy and childbirth were dangerous. Moreover, there was a fne balance between not producing a single child and producing too many. Childlessness could bring an end to the entire dynasty, while a surfeit of offspring could serve to divide the family and to dissipate its wealth and titles. Such were the expectations placed on queens. The present chapter examines queenship, focusing on the Christian-ruled lands of the Iberian Peninsula during the High and Later Middle Ages (from 1000 CE forward), examining the foundations of the institution, the challenges women faced in the Middle Ages, the inheritance laws and marriage arrangements, the processes of self-fashioning (Greenblatt 2005) that queens engaged in, the authority and infuence that queens and concubines wielded, and the function and interrelation of piety and ceremonial in sustaining queenship in the Peninsula during this period.2 The infuence of queens was far reaching, and included their activities in politics and government, their religious activism, and their patronage of culture and the arts. This commissioning of buildings, objects, and literature was not trivial; it contributed to the ruling dynasty’s memory and reputation while serving to reinforce the queen’s own authority (Martin 2012, 7). Iberian queens were active patrons of art and culture, often through the foundation and support of monasteries. Some of the most prestigious and wealthy religious houses were founded and/or patronized by queens for spiritual and political reasons, either on their own initiative or together with their husbands (García Herrero 2017, 14–15; Graña Cid 2019, 65). For instance, the establishment of Las Huelgas in Burgos was the joint endeavor of Alfonso VIII (r.1158–1214) and Leonor Plantagenet (r. 1170–1214).The monastery of Santa María de Pedralbes in Barcelona was founded in 1327 by Elisenda de Montcada, who was buried there in 1364. She was Jaume II of Aragon’s fourth queen-consort, and as a dowager lived in a palace adjacent to the convent. Royal monasteries and cathedrals were used as burial places for royals, and their sarcophagi and tombs feature some of the most exquisite sculptures of the time.At the 305
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monastery of Mirafores, Isabel I commissioned a massive carved sarcophagus masterpiece for her parents, Juan II and Isabel of Portugal from Gil de Siloé (Pereda 2001). To understand queenship, one must push against historical categories that have long been accepted uncritically. Over the last 20 years or so, for example, queenship studies have established that rulership and kingship were not synonymous in the Middle Ages, and that monarchical power was a broad enterprise in which other members of the royal family could also participate, particularly the queen, but also male and female offspring, mothers, sisters and brothers, and other close relatives (Earenfght 2013; Huneycutt 1989, 19–20; Silleras-Fernández 2015a 266; Pick 2017, 4). Likewise, the court, administration, and royal household were very much integrated, and there was virtually no distinction between the public and the private spheres in royal circles.Thus, if we are to understand how medieval monarchy, power, and patronage functioned, we must take into account the role of the queen. Finally, contrary to what many contemporary literary texts assert, and what many scholars have until recently assumed, it was not exceptional for a medieval queen to wield real power and engage actively in politics, patronage, and in the court culture of her time; rather, it was truly exceptional for a queen not to.
Political agency vs. discourse When the Archpriest of Talavera was living in the Crown of Aragon the queen at the time was María of Castile (r. 1416–58). She was not only queen-consort of Alfons V the Magnanimous (r. 1416–58), but also served as his lieutenant-general for three years (1420–23), and subsequently as lieutenant of Catalonia for over 20 (1432–53). In Earenfght’s view, during Maria’s long tenure as lieutenant, the queen “governed like a king and lived like a saint” (2010, 5). Maria’s role was in part to counterbalance the power of her cousin and brother-in-law, Joan of Aragon, king-consort of Navarre. Her husband Alfons’s lack of legitimate children made his brother the heir presumptive to the Crown of Aragon, and Joan was also appointed lieutenant of Valencia and Aragon. Such long lieutenancies were needed because Alfons preferred to reside in Naples, where he lived from 1420 to 1423, and subsequently, after he conquered the kingdom, from 1432 until his death in 1458. It was a remarkably long absence from his home realms, and one that prompted several poets to console Maria as a woman forsaken by her husband, particularly after 1449, when Alfons openly declared his lover, Lucrezia d’Alagno, to be his concubine-queen in Naples. In a poem dedicated to Maria of Castile, Joan de Tapia went as far as asking: “¿Qué uale la criatura/ que de todos non es amada?” [What is she worth/ who out of all is not loved?] (Cancionero de Estúñiga 375–77). She may have not been loved by her husband, and may not have given him any children, but María was still Alfons’s queen and very much involved in formal politics as his lieutenant. Remarkably, l’Spill (“The Mirror”), a Catalan analog to the Corbacho (which is to say, the Catalan misogynistic text par excellence), was written by María of Castile’s physician, Jaume Roig (1401–78). In 1460, just two years after the queen’s death, Roig (2010) wrote this satirical autobiography in verse in which the narrator advises his nephew, Joan Fabra, not to marry because, simply put, women are not morally worthy.While it is not likely that the Archpriest of Talavera and Jaume Roig’s paths ever crossed in person, both must have been fully aware of the fact that in the Crown of Aragon there was a queen who was governing on behalf of her absent husband, Alfons V, and in tandem with her brother-in-law, Joan of Aragon.The picture was further complicated by the fact that Joan was also king-consort of Navarre thanks to his marriage to Blanca I of Navarre, who before she inherited Navarre in 1425 had been the queen-consort of Martí the Young, king of Sicily (r. 1390–1409). Blanca had served as lieutenant in Sicily, frst on Martí’s behalf in 1404, and then in 1409 as his dowager and on behalf of the new ruler of Sicily, 306
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her father-in-law, Martí I of Aragon. Moreover, Martínez de Toledo and Roig also must have known that a few decades earlier in neighboring Castile, during the minority of Juan II, the de facto rulers had been the king’s mother, Catalina of Lancaster, and his uncle, Fernando—the same Fernando who was elected king of Aragon in 1412 and was the father of Alfons V and Joan I. Not long after, in 1438, Fernando’s daughter, Leonor, the dowager of Duarte I of Portugal (r. 1433–38), would come to serve as regent on behalf of her young child, the future Afonso V. It was a regency that faced strong resistance and resulted eventually in Leonor’s dismissal (Seabra Rodrigues 2012, 191–200). In other words, at the very time Jaume Roig and the Archpriest of Talavera were dismissing the notion of feminine power, women were ruling either in their own right, or as regents or lieutenants, in Navarre,Aragon,Aragonese Sicily, Castile, and Portugal. Indeed, this was the case even in Nasrid Granada. Here, a century earlier, Fatima bint al-Ahmar (d. 1348), a daughter of Muhammad II (1273–1302); had exercised enormous power during the reigns of her son and grandsons (Boloix 2016; Rubiera Mata 1996, 187–89). In the era of Roig and Martínez de Toledo, a consort, Zahr al-Riyadh, engaged in court intrigue to have her husband crowned as Muhammad IX (1411–31), and once he was in power, she carried out her own statesmanship, corresponding directly with both Alfons V and María of Castile (Boloix 2013, 88–136). Thus, Martínez de Toledo, Jaume Roig, and their contemporaries knew frst hand that monarchy was not all about an all-powerful king who ruled alone with only the help of male advisors.They and their courtly peers knew what queens were doing and could do, which was to rule. But neither their treatises, nor their literary creations, whether fction, poetry, or chronicles, acknowledged the roles that women played.Texts are not only signifcant for what they say, but also for what they leave out. Discourse does not equal “historical reality”; thus, such obvious omissions can be seen, in effect, as a reaction against female agency. Feminine power was only recognized and celebrated when there was no alternative—thus, chroniclers (particularly those patronized by the queen herself) lionized Isabel I the Catholic (r.1474–1504), who as queen of Castile in her own right, and arguably, the senior partner in her marriage to Fernando II of Aragon (r.1479–1516), embodied a formal authority that could neither be denied nor ignored.This was no less the case in Nasrid Granada, where the accomplishments of women were ignored by chroniclers, unless they were undeniable.There are a few exceptions, like Isabel de Solis, a Christian woman who had converted to Islam as Zoraya, and Aixa, the mother of the last Nasrid ruler of Granada,Abu `Abd Allah Muhammad (“Boabdil”; r. 1482–83 and 1487–92), who is portrayed traditionally as reprimanding her son for losing his kingdom (Salicrú 2011, 480).
Queen and queen-lieutenants in the Crown of Aragon Maria of Castile’s lieutenancy was not an anomaly; she was ruling not only because her husband preferred to live in Naples, but because there was a strong tradition of queen-lieutenants in the Crown of Aragon, unlike in neighboring Castile, where the power of queens derived through inheritance or regency. The Crown of Aragon was a Mediterranean multiple or composite monarchy, which is to say, it was a geographical aggregate of several independent kingdoms and principalities with their own laws, customs, institutions, and languages that happened to share a single ruler (Elliott 1992, 52–53; Gloël 2014, 91–92; Hamilton and Silleras-Fernandez 2015). In addition to its mainland principalities in the Iberian Peninsula—Catalonia, Aragon, and Valencia—at various times the Crown of Aragon also included Mallorca and Menorca, Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily (intermittently since 1282), Naples (from 1442), Jerba (1284–1333), Athens and Neopatria (1381–88), as well as Roussillon and Montpellier, in modern France. 307
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In sum, the medieval Crown of Aragon was, from an institutional point of view, a precursor of the Early Modern Spanish Empire under the Hapsburg dynasty. Facing analogous challenges of geographical dispersal, the Hapsburgs also employ the women of the dynasty as lieutenants, although they called them viceroys, or regents. The offce of the lieutenancy in the Crown of Aragon was created by Jaume I (r. 1213–76), who after conquering the kingdoms of Valencia (1231) and Mallorca (1276), had to deal with the problem of ruling a dispersed array of independent kingdoms, each of which required the royal presence. But the monarch could not be in more than one place at once, so he designated a lieutenant who could represent him in his absence and would serve as his autonomous representative invested with royal authority.The offce was established on 15 June 1274, when he named his second son, Jaume, who was the heir to Mallorca, Roussillon, and Sardinia, as royal lieutenant in Montpellier (Lalinde 1960, 101–102). Hence forward, the lieutenancy tended to be reserved for the king’s presumptive heir, and served to help to formally legitimize his future rule, while giving the prince practical political experience while helping his father govern.This institution freed Aragonese monarchs from the necessity of cultivating royal favorites, of the type that became so infuential and controversial in other kingdoms.The political travails of the Crown of Castile in the fourteenth century, for example, can be traced through the tenure of a series of royal favorites: Leonor López de Córdoba (1362–1420), Inés de Torres,Alvaro de Luna (c.1390–1453), Juan Pacheco (1419–79), and Beltrán de la Cueva (c. 1443–92). When there was no legitimate heir, or when the heir was too young to serve as a lieutenant, the king might choose another close family member, such as a brother, and uncle, or a wife to serve as lieutenant. By the mid-ffteenth century and during the Hapsburg period, the pool of potential lieutenants expanded, to include royal daughters, aunts, and sisters (Lalinde 1960, 111; Silleras-Fernández 2008, 2015a 162–68). Dynastic or familial proximity to the monarch was the most signifcant element in determining who would be selected as lieutenant, and helped make the queen an ideal candidate—preferable even to male relatives of the ruler, who might not be trusted, or might harbor ambitions of revolt or independence. Here, the fact that queens were seen as “weaker” because of their gender, became an advantage. Moreover, queen-consorts tended to be foreigners, and therefore had no loyalties to local noble lines.Thus, they were not beholden to the various aristocratic factions and other interest groups at court and could be seen as impartial.This contrasts with the fgure of the royal favorite, who was inevitably a local nobleman, immersed in such struggles, and who harbored ambitions that did not correspond to the priorities of the king or his dynasty. The institution of the lieutenancy, for which royal women were so well ft to serve, provided a solution to the problem of ruling a widely dispersed aggregate monarchy, and consequently the institution not only survived the count-kings of the Barcelona dynasty that established it, but was adopted by the Trastámaras and the Hapsburgs who succeeded them (Silleras-Fernández 2015a, 265; Gamero Imago 2013, 315–16). On the other hand, in the Crown of Aragon, there were no queens who ruled in their own right, nor any who served as regents for minor heirs—not because of any specifc prohibition or “Salic Law”, although male siblings tended to be preferred over daughters, but simply because such an opportunity never arose.There were only three cases that could be counted as almost exceptions to the “rule” just stated: Petronila of Aragon, Jaume I, and Juana I. First, Petronila, the heiress of the Kingdom of Aragon, who was married to Ramon Berenguer IV, Count of Barcelona, in 1137, when she was only 2 years old and he was 24 (Ubieto Arteta 1987, 70–71). This was the seed of the Crown of Aragon that kept on growing in the following centuries. Because Petronila was betrothed as an infant, and her husband became the de facto ruler since the beginning, it is not clear what type of political role she had. Her husband, Ramon Berenger, died in 1162 and her son, Alfons, did not come of age until 1164, so it is most likely that she 308
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was more active in politics during this interval (Hirel-Wouts 2015, 19–22). She transmitted the throne to her son Alfons on 18 June 1164, having previously excluded female succession in her testament of April 4, 1152 (Hirel-Wouts 2015, 30–33). Petronila and Ramon Berenguer’s son, Alfons I the Troubadour (r. 1164–96), was the frst Count of Barcelona and also the frst to hold the title of King of Aragon—titles he would pass on to his descendants.The only other minority that occurred in the Crown of Aragon was that of Alfons’s grandson, Jaume I (r. 1213–76), who succeeded his father at age fve. In this case, however, his mother, Maria de Montpellier, had died a few months earlier, leading Innocent III to intervene, and put the young heir in the care of the Order of the Temple (García Gallo 1966, 49 and 67; Bisson 1986, 58.) Finally, in 1516 when Fernando I of Aragon died with no legitimate male heirs, and named his daughter, Juana I of Castile, as his heir, it was her son, Carlos I/V who actually ruled. As for the many queens who did serve as lieutenants in the Crown, their authority varied widely in terms of both duration and scope.While Maria of Castile acted as lieutenant for over 20 years with broad powers to rule, Blanca of Anjou (r. 1295–1310), a queen of Jaume II (r. 1291–1327), served in the offce only for April 1310, minding the throne only while the king was away on Crusade against Muslim Almería.The case of Maria de Luna (r. 1396–1406) falls in the middle. Maria served as lieutenant-general of the whole of the Crown of Aragon for a year, from 1396 to 1397, after her husband, Martí I, unexpectedly inherited the throne while he was abroad helping their son conquer the Kingdom of Sicily. During this year she fought a war against her niece Joana, Countess of Foix, who as the eldest daughter of the deceased king, Joan I, contested Martí’s claim. Maria stood up frmly for her husband’s rights, writing to her offcials on 28 July 1396: notorio es a todo el mundo que la dita Comtessa, ni otra fembra qualquiere, fncando en el Reyno hombre nascido de linaje reyal, no puede suceder en el Regno, assi por las ordinaciones feytas por los Reyes pasados d’Aragón, como por la sucessión posada en el testamento del Senyor Rey Don Pedro. (García Gallo 11) it is known to all that neither the said Countess [Joana de Foix] nor any other woman associated to a royal male of royal lineage can succeed to the throne, in accordance with the promulgations made by the former Kings of Aragon, as much as a result of the orders of succession in the will and testament of the Lord-King Pere. (Silleras-Fernandez 2008, 48) After Maria had successfully defended the Crown against the Foix, in his work Lo Somni (“The Dream”), the royal secretary Bernat Metge (1983) compared Maria de Luna to Quintus Fabius Maximus Cunctator (“The Delayer”) who had saved ancient Rome from the Carthaginians (Silleras-Fernandez 2008, 53): La nostra gent d’armes diu que els hic gità, ciudant donar entenent que són estats altre Fàbio Màximo, que vencé més batalles per Roma no batallant, que altres combatent los enemics. Sàpies certament (e dic grosseria, car per tal com ést espirit, mills ho saps que jo) altre no els hic gità sinó la saviesa e indústria e bons tractaments de la dita senyora, que ab los grans preparatoris que féu, ajudants en açò la nostra insigne ciutat de Barchinona e Aragó los espantà e els féu fugir, així com lo lleó lo cérvol e el grifaut la grua. (237) 309
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Our men-at-arms say that you expelled them, meaning to say that you are another Fabius Maximus, who won more battles for Rome by not fghting than others won by battling the enemy. And know you for certain (and if I say it bluntly, know it is because such is my character, as you know better than I) that none other could have expelled them without the wisdom, industry and good management of the said lady, who did it by careful preparation, aiding her in this our fag-ship city of Barcelona and Aragon, which shocked them and gave them to fight, just as the lion to the stag and the griffon to the crane. (Silleras-Fernandez 2008, 53) On Martí’s return and coronation in 1397, Maria was relieved of the lieutenancy, although she remained the king’s very trusted and active advisor. Five years later she was named lieutenant over the Kingdom of Valencia, a post she would hold until her death in 1406.The kingdom was locked in a destructive cycle of noble feuding, and Maria was appointed not because Martí was unable to go to Valencia himself, but because she was seen as a more effective peacemaker in this situation. Maria may have been an effective, prudent, and discreet lieutenant, but nevertheless, the fact that she was a woman discomfted even some of her supporters.When her trusted advisor, Francesc Eiximenis, a Franciscan theologian, political scientist, and moralist, dedicated the Scala Dei, a treatise on feminine virtue, to her, his aim was to reinforce her devotion, piety, and support of the Church and his own order, but to steer her away from actual governance (Silleras-Fernandez 2015a, 21–58).
The conundrum of the institution: inheritance laws A queen’s potential for ruling was not only conditioned by the succession laws of her kingdom, the precise historical context of her accession, and the interests of the powerful men who surrounded her, but also by her own interests and ability. Few Iberian queens were sovereigns in their own right, and those that were ascended the throne because there was no male heir who might take precedent over them. Consanguinity, or relation to the regal bloodline, legitimacy, and birth order (ideally represented by the frst-born legitimate son) were the prime determinants for royal succession. However, once a ruler took the throne, he or she needed to be recognized by the magnates, prelates, and cortes (parliaments) before whom the new monarch swore to respect the laws and privileges of the kingdom. In Navarre, Castile, León, and Portugal female succession was admitted when it was unavoidable, which is to say if the former king had no surviving legitimate sons. Alfonso X’s (r. 1252–84) comprehensive legal code, the Siete Partidas, guaranteed female succession in Castile-León: “si fjo varón y non oviesse, la fja mayor heredasse el Reyno” (Partida II, 15, 2) [if there are no sons, the eldest daughter should inherit the kingdom (Parsons 2001 367)]. He reiterated the legality of female succession in his Espéculo (c.1255–60), but stressed that preeminence fell to the frstborn male heir:“maguer la fja nasca primero que el fjo e oviese después varón aquél lo debe heredar [in spite of the daughter having been born frst, should [the king] have a son after, it is he who should inherit [the kingdom” (Espéculo, II, 16, 1 and 2)].The Partidas went on to specify that if the frst-born son were to die before becoming king, the crown was to go per stirpe to his legitimate children, rather than laterally to a sibling. Legal codes in the Middle Ages, however, were not acts of legislation, but statements of principle; and these could be ignored or over-ridden if there was no political will to respect them.And this is precisely what happened even before Alfonso X himself had died. After the death of his heir, Fernando de la Cerda, in 1275, the throne was seized by Alfonso’s second son, Sancho IV, who, appealing 310
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to customary law, ignored the legitimate legal claims of his nephews, Alfonso and Fernando, the sons of his deceased elder brother (González Alonso 14). In the infghting that followed, Alfonso X’s wife,Violant of Aragon (r. 1252–84), and Fernando de la Cerda’s dowager, Blanca of France, daughter of (Saint) Louis IX of France, played an important role. Both defended the interests of the Infantes de la Cerda and decisively, although ultimately unsuccessfully, opposed Sancho’s claim to the throne (Fuente Pérez 2017). In the Crown of Aragon there was no formal law either permitting or excluding women from inheriting the throne, but custom and the temperament of the nobility was not inclined toward it, and in their last will and testaments, the count-kings invariably named a son as successor. Here too, however, rules could be bent if it were seen as politically convenient or necessary. Hence, in 1347, when Pere the Ceremonious (r.1336–87) “per voluntat de Déu” [by the will of God] was having trouble engendering a male heir; he was willing to support the succession of a daughter, if only to prevent his half-brother, Jaume, from being declared his heir (Crònica 1091). But his proclamation of his eldest daughter, Constança, as his successor provided the justifcation for a signifcant number of Aragonese noblemen to rally behind Jaume of Urgell—who was serving as lieutenant of Aragon—and rise up against the king in a rebellious “Union”.Although Pere was ultimately victorious at the battle of Épila in July 1348, he only abandoned his plan for female succession in the 1370s in order to ensure that his daughter Elionor would never inherit the throne. By this time Pere had two legitimate sons, Joan and Martí, but most importantly, Elionor was married to Juan I of Castile, and Pere was determined not to have the Trastámaras take control of the Crown. Of course, this is precisely what would happen in 1412, after Joan and Martí had both died without leaving legitimate male issue and Joan’s daughters had already had their claims denied. Instead the crown went to Fernando de Antequera (r.1412–16), Pere’s grandson through his daughter Elionor and her husband, Juan I. In this case, political expedience led to the recognition of matrilineal succession, even though there were candidates to the throne, like Jaume II of Urgell, who traced their descent from Pere through the male line (Silleras-Fernandez 2008, 162–63). In the Kingdom of Navarre, which emerged in the eleventh century out of the Kingdom of Pamplona, the succession to the throne was regulated in the Fuero General (II, 4, 1) compiled in the second half of the thirteenth century.According to the Fuero the heir was to be a legitimate child of the previous sovereign and preferably male, but females were also allowed to inherit (González Alonso 17–18). In 1234, the Navarrese crown passed from the native Jiménez dynasty to the Counts of Champagne, through the sister of Sancho VII (1194–1234). In 1274 an infant, Juana (1274–1305), inherited the crown with her mother Blanche of Artois serving as regent until Juana’s marriage to Philip I of France. The Capetian kings of France ruled the kingdom through the reign of Juana II (1328–49), whose marriage to Philip of Evreux brought the crown into the patrimony of that cadet branch of the Capetian family.The last of the Evreux was Blanca I (1425–41), whose reign was overshadowed by her consort, Joan Trastámara, who ruled as king until his death in 1479. Joan suppressed the claims of his son, Carlos of Viana, and daughter, Blanca, who was supported by rebels as queen from 1461 to 1474. In 1479 another daughter, Isabel, inherited the crown, but died a year later passing it to her husband, Gaston Phoebus of Foix. Gaston’s daughter, Catherine held the title from 1483 to 1517, but in 1512 Fernando the Catholic seized the territories south of the Pyrenees, and the kingdom was split into two independent French- and Spanish-dominated crowns.Thus, in Navarre over the course of the Middle Ages, a series of queens held the title in their own right, and ruled, either alone, or together with a king-consort, and more than one served as regent for an infant heir (Pavón 2014;Woodacre 2013). Nevertheless, female succession invariably signaled the end of a dynasty here, and the disruptions and uncertainty that came with it. 311
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The Kingdom of Portugal came into being as the result of female succession. At his death in 1109 Alfonso VI left the then-county of Portugal to his illegitimate daughter, Teresa, and her Burgundian husband, Henry, to hold in vassalage from the king’s only legitimate heir, the widowed Urraca, who inherited Castile, León, and Galicia, holding it for her infant son, the future Alfonso VII. But on Alfonso VI’s death, Henry and Teresa attacked Urraca.When Henry died in 1112, following his siege of Astorga,Teresa took control of Portugal and declared herself queen—a title which Paschal II (1099–1118) recognized in 1116. She continued to spar with Urraca and when her son, Afonso I (r. 1139–85) came of age, she refused to relinquish power. Joining with the Galician nobility, Teresa attempted to unite them with Portugal, provoking a counter-campaign by Alfonso VII, and leading the Portuguese nobility to join with Afonso, who overthrew his mother and sent her into exile in the confnes of a convent in 1128. She died in 1130 still holding her title, and under Afonso, Portugal was recognized by Castile-León as an independent kingdom. The next opportunity for female succession would not come until 1383, when Fernando I of Portugal left only one legitimate heir, his daughter Beatriz, who had been broadly recognized as his successor, and had been betrothed to a Castilian royal bastard as part of Fernando’s elaborate scheme of matrimonial alliances aimed at ensuring the integrity of the Portuguese crown and his own line. However, the War of the Two Peters, the Hundred Years War, and noble factionalism in both Portugal and Castile undermined these plans. Beatriz suffered a series of further politically motivated betrothals and was eventually married to Juan I of Castile. But her brief claim to the crown (a few months in 1383) was not widely recognized and the deceased king’s illegitimate brother, João I (1385–1433), was able to impose himself as the new ruler. João established the Avis dynasty and secured Portuguese independence from Castile—at least until 1580, when Felipe II (1556–98) claimed the Portuguese crown through his mother, Empress Isabel (1526–39), the daughter of Manuel I (1495–1521) and Maria of Aragon (1500–17).This initiated a 60-year period of “dual monarchy”—the culmination of two centuries of intensive intermarriage between the ruling families of the two kingdoms. Although most Portuguese queens were from Castile, one of the most infuential of the kingdom’s female sovereigns was Isabel of Aragon (r. 1282–1325, d. 1336), the daughter of Pere the Great and Costanza of Sicily. During her reign, Isabel played an important role as mediator and peacemaker between her husband, Dinis I (r. 1279–1325) and their son and heir, Afonso IV (r. 1325–57), and acquired a reputation for piety, charity, and religious patronage (Andrade 2014). On her husband’s death she took the vows of a Poor Clare and continued her work as a peacemaker, intervening dramatically in 1336 to stop the war between her son and Alfonso XI of Castile by placing herself between the two armies. Her reputation continued to grow in the years after her death thanks in part to the dissemination of an anonymous hagiography, Lenda da Rainha Santa or Livro que fala da boa vida que fez a Rainha de Portugal, Dona Isabel, e dos seus bõos feitos e milagres em sa vida y depoys da morte [The Legend of the Saint-Queen or The Book which tells of the good life which Lady Isabel, the Queen of Portugal led, together with her good deeds and miracles both in life and after her death (Nunes 1921)]. She was canonized in 1625, the only peninsular queen who would receive this honor. In Castile itself, a number of women inherited the throne and ruled or were regents or queen-consorts.When Urraca inherited Castile and León from her father, Alfonso VI in 1109, she was already a widow, but mother of a potential heir, her son Alfonso, and one whose father, being deceased, could not threaten the status quo of the kingdom’s nobility (Reilly 1982). However, her marriage to Alfonso I of Aragon (r. 1104–34) in 1109, whom she enlisted as a counterweight to Enrique of Portugal, prompted the Galician nobility to declare her son, Alfonso, King of Galicia, and rise against her. Alfonso I of Aragon’s heavy-handed and 312
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self-interested interventions in Castile and their personal incompatibility led to war between the couple, culminating in a brokered truce and annulment in 1112. In her remaining 14 years, Urraca struggling to maintain the integrity of her father’s patrimony while suppressing her own son. She relied on male favorites, two of whom, Gómez González and Pedro González de Lara, not only became her lovers but each sired an illegitimate child by the queen. Her political efforts were largely successful, and when she died in 1126 Alfonso VII came fully to power, taking the title of Emperor of León. By the time Urraca’s great-great-granddaughter, Berenguela, inherited the Castilian throne in 1217, Castile and León had separated. She had been married to Urraca’s great-grandson,Alfonso IX of León (r. 1188–1230), but Innocent III (1198–1216) forced the marriage to be annulled in 1204 due to consanguinity after the couple had produced a son, Fernando. Meanwhile, her father Alfonso VIII (r. 1158–1214) had died and left Castile to his only son, the ten-year-old Enrique (1214–17), for whom Berenguela served as regent. When Enrique died—in a somewhat suspicious accident—the line of succession went through Berenguela and her son. During Fernando III’s reign (1217–52) she was an active force, reinforcing his claims against those of Alfonso XI, actively patronizing religious institutions, and managing the personal and political affairs of her son. This culminated in the reunifcation of Castile and León under his rule in 1130, after Berenguela succeeded in obtaining the acquiescence of Alfonso XI’s two daughters, who had been named as heirs of León (Bianchini 2012; Shadis 2009; Salvador 2012). In Castile-León it was not only queens of the blood who took on the role of regent, helping to carry their conjugal dynasties through potentially perilous periods of minor succession. When Sancho IV of Castile and León (r. 1284–95) died, he left a ten-year-old Fernando IV (r. 1295–1312) as his heir. Sancho had designated his wife, María de Molina, as regent, and it was she who fended off a series of attempts by rival claimants and the Crown of Aragon to usurp her son, until he came of age in 1301. At his death, María intervened again, this time as regent for Fernando’s one-year-old son, Alfonso XI (r. 1312–50), alongside a clutch of royal princes (Carmona Ruiz 2005). Alfonso’s mother, Constança of Portugal, died in 1313, only a year after her husband. Gómez Redondo (2007) considers María de Molina the patroness and instigator of a new cultural model,“molinismo”, that defned a religious and cultural shift that took place in Castile from 1285 to 1315 (961). Likewise, when Enrique III (r. 1390–1406) left an infant Juan II (1406–54) as heir, his mother, Catherine of Lancaster, joined with his uncle, Fernando de Antequera, to serve as regents. The two did not get along, and after Catherine aggressively defended by force of arms her right to keep physical control of her son, the kingdom was effectively divided, with the dowager-regent controlling the north (Echevarría 2002). From there on she used her family connections to strengthen Castilian foreign relations and, reinforcing her pious reputation, promulgated a series of stringent decrees against her kingdom’s Jews and Muslims—although these were never applied consistently (Catlos 2014, 192). The most notable and exceptional of reigning Castilian queens was, of course, Isabel I the Catholic, who ruled for three decades from 1474 to 1504 (Azcona 1993; Liss 2004). After the death of Juan II, the crown passed to his son, Enrique IV (r. 1354–74), an unpopular and weak king opposed by many of his own nobility. He had designated his daughter, Juana, heir to Castile; but the fact that she was married to Afonso V of Portugal (1438–81) and branded as illegitimate (as “La Beltraneja”, the daughter of the royal favorite, Beltrán de la Cueva), and that Enrique was impotent, prompted noble discontents to act. They obliged Enrique to name his half-brother, Alfonso, as successor in 1464; but after the king reneged, civil war broke out.Alfonso’s untimely, suspicious death four years later left the rebels with little choice but to recognize his sister, Isabel, as their candidate. And so it was, when Enrique died in 1474, Isabel proclaimed herself queen of Castile, after six years of warfare and intrigue. But with Isabel the insurgents got more than 313
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they bargained for. Strong-willed and independent, in 1469 she had defed their intention to marry her to Afonso V of Portugal by clandestinely marrying her 17-year-old cousin, Fernando, king of Naples, and son and heir of Joan II of Aragon. Fernando II would rule Aragon from 1479 to 1516. The prospect of a female sovereign in this unequivocally patriarchal society was a source of great anxiety among both the nobility and the clergy (Weissberger 2004, XIV).As early as 1468, when the 17-year-old Isabel was seen by many as the most likely successor, the Augustinian friar Martín de Córdoba wrote a treatise for her called Jardín de nobles doncellas (The Garden of Noble Maidens) in which he encouraged her to focus on becoming a wife and mother, instead of governing. He also asked Isabel to strive to be virtuous as only a man could be: “Pues la Señora, aunque es hembra por naturaleza, trabaje por ser varón en virtud y así haga bien que no se ensalce por vanagloria, mas que abaje por humildad” (107) [“So, the Lady, although she may be female by nature, should strive to be male in virtue, and so she would do better not to puff herself up in vainglory, but rather, bow in humility”].Without knowing it, the friar, like many other didactic authors who wrote treatises for Isabel and other queens, advocated in effect for gender performativity, anticipating Simone de Beauvoir’s axiom, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” and Judith Butler’s affrmation that gender is “an identity institute through a stylized repetition of acts” (de Beauvoir 2011, 293; Butler 1988, 519). This trope of women demonstrating their virtue by behaving or becoming more like men, is by no means unique to didactic treatises, but is also present in hagiographic texts. Martín de Córdoba was only the frst of a whole series of noble and clerical authors who tried to shape Isabel’s persona as queen; and they consistently advocated that she not actively engage in politics, which was seen as essentially masculine.The genre of specula principum presumed that sovereign power was to be exercised by men. Reading these treatises, historians might believe that she took this to heart and that her political role was limited, were it not for the abundant archival documentation and chronicles which prove the contrary (Silleras-Fernandez 2016). However, in order to maintain an acceptable image while maintaining her authority, Isabel took great care that the chronicles of her reign depicted her as a ruling sovereign, but also as a wife, mother, and pious Christian. It was because of this that the royal chronicler, Fernando del Pulgar, described the Catholic Monarchs as “a single will that inhabited two bodies”. Isabel’s marriage to Fernando was also unique. First, he was a sovereign of his own considerable kingdoms and would not only be a king-consort, the future of whose lineage depended on appropriating the Crown of Castile.Thus, the terms of their betrothal as stated in the “Concord of Segovia” were clear. Fernando and Isabel would each be the principal ruler in their own realms, and their competencies and rights were clearly delineated. They became separate but equal partners, as expressed in their motto, “Tanto monta, monta tanto”. Fernando, when he came to Castile, would not bring with him the nobility of Catalonia and Aragon to up-end the noble culture in Castile. Moreover, only their own children would inherit their realms separately. Thus, when Isabel died in 1504, survived only by daughters, Castile went to Juana, her and Fernando’s surviving eldest child, while Fernando continued to rule in Aragon. Had he subsequently produced a surviving legitimate male heir with his second wife, Germana de Foix, the two realms would have most likely remained separate. But if Isabel’s succession did not signal the end of the Trastámara dynasty, that of her daughter, Juana, would.When Juana I inherited the throne in 1504 at age 25, she was already married to a Habsburg, Philip of Burgundy “the Handsome”.A power struggle ensued between Fernando, Philip, and Juana resulting in Fernando abandoning Castile and remarrying (to Germana de Foix) and in Philip taking preeminence over Juana.When her husband suddenly died in 1506, Juana I seems to have suffered from a debilitating episode of grief that provided a pretext to 314
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label her “mad” and be put aside; and for her power to be claimed, frst by her father, and then by Cardinal Cisneros, who served as regent while waiting for her son’s succession as Carlos I/V (r. 1516–56) King of Spain and later Holy Roman Emperor (Aram 2005; Fleming 2018; Perez 2014). After some hesitation, when Fernando fnally died, Fernando ceded his throne to Juana so that it might pass to his grandson Carlos (Calderón Ortega et al. 2015 6–8).
Queen-consorts and the marital principle of indissolubility Over the course of the Middle Ages, the majority of queens in the Iberian kingdoms reigned as consorts. Their claim to queenship came through marriage, and with the reintroduction of Roman law and the dowry in the twelfth century, they, or their families, were in effect “buying” their way into the relationship. Marriages were arranged, and betrothals often took place when one or both parties was a minor or infant, meaning that consent, particularly in the bride’s case, seldom played a role in spite of the fact that the Church regarded it as a prerequisite. In exchange for the marriage price and whatever benefts a diplomatic alliance with her family brought, a queen was supposed to receive from her husband enough possessions and rents to maintain a household and establish her own networks of patronage and infuence by securing dependable clients and faithful servants. A queen was expected to be generous to both courtiers and the Church, so she required substantial patrimony. Once married, a queen-consort could in principle expect to remain on the throne until she or her husband died. The principle of marriage indissolubility—which together with heterosexuality, monogamy, and exogamy—was regarded as an inviolable Christian tenet—was critical to a queen’s status, and was echoed in the Siete Partidas (Seven-Part Code) of Alfonso X:“no se pueden partir sino por muerte o por otras cosas çiertas que manda la yglesia” (Partida II, 6–2) [they cannot be separated except by death, or for certain other reasons (Parsons 298)]. Divorce was prohibited by canon law, and annulling marriages became increasingly diffcult after the Gregorian Reforms of the twelfth century (Mazo Karras 2014, 212; Santos Silva 2017, 17; Pelaz 2017a, 96–98, and 2017b, 150–52). Moreover, annulments came at no small price, both in terms of the gifts of money which the Church expected in return, but because it normally meant breaking the alliance with the bride’s family, offending their honor and provoking their wrath. The most common way to obtain an annulment was on the grounds of consanguinity—when the couple were considered to be too closely related by the Church. Over the centuries, as the European dynasties consolidated and kings looked to marry into other royal families (rather than among their own nobility), it became increasingly diffcult to fnd a licit partner. Thus, royal couples would often obtain (or purchase) a papal dispensation, allowing them to marry. Without this their children would not be considered legitimate. However, once this was granted, an unscrupulous husband might later try to obtain an annulment on the very grounds that his marriage was consanguineous. However, in principle, royal marriages were expected to last, and the royal couple was supposed to constitute a model matrimony for their subjects. As Alfonso X’s Partidas put it:“Onde el rey que desta guisa onrrare e amare e guardare a su muger sera el amado e onrrado e guardado della: e dara ende buen enxenplo a todos los de su tierra” (Partida II, 6–2) [Therefore, a king who honors, loves, and watches over his wife in this way, will be loved, honored, and cared for by her, and, for that reason, will offer a good example to the people of all his country (Parsons 299)]. Clearly, this rather rosy vision of a royal marriage based on affection and reciprocity was an ideal that seldom refected reality. Nevertheless, even in bad marriages the dignity of queenship and the queen’s own family connections offered her protection against an unwilling or abusive spouse. 315
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While Christian marriage reinforced monogamy and indissolubility, polygyny was the customary model of reproduction outside Europe and in al-Andalus (Duidam 2015, 89). Islamic marriage is polygamic; a man can have up to four wives and an unlimited number of concubines.Therefore, in theory a sultan could have an “infnite” number of children and all, regardless of their mother’s status, were considered legitimate and all the males were potential heirs to the throne because succession was elective. Divorce was easily achievable, women did not require a dowry to marry, and endogamic marriages with a frst cousin were customary.This meant that the role of “sultanas” in the Islamic context was based on her relationship with her family of origin if they belonged to a prominent lineage, but mostly as the sultan’s wife or partner or, even better, as the sultan’s mother. Interfaith sexual mixing among Christian and Muslims was not uncommon in al-Andalus, although it changed over time, as a reaction to local circumstances as much as to general trends. For instance, in early medieval Iberia (eighth to eleventh centuries) Muslim lords took Christian women as wives and concubines. As Barton (2015) has shown, this was not only a tactic for building diplomatic alliances, but also a way a Muslim ruler could demonstrate his superiority, and even a tool for psychological warfare. On the other hand, by 1050 interfaith marriage of this type was a thing of the past. Christian religious and secular authorities prohibited interfaith unions and sex—a development that came partly as a consequence of the new balance of power, as much as because of the reform of the papacy, and the development of canon law. From the twelfth century onward, sexual intercourse between Christian women and “outsiders”, which is to say, Muslim and Jewish men, provoked great anxiety, not only in Iberia, but also across the Latin West. In the Late Middle Ages, there was a progressive shifting of power in favor of the Christian-ruled realms that eventually manifested itself at the end of the ffteenth century with the conquest of Granada.The reign of the Catholic Monarchs was marked by conversion and/or expulsion of religious minorities (in 1492 the Jews in Castile and Aragon and in 1502 the Muslims of Granada), and the establishment of the Inquisition (1478), while the 1490s saw the expulsion of the Muslims of Portugal and the conversion of the kingdom’s Jews. The two objectives of royal marriages were to produce legitimate and preferably male heirs, and thereby ensure dynastic stability, and to establish political alliances. Therefore, royal brides were sought out from among the royal families of neighboring kingdoms; prior to the twelfth century the ruling families of the rather isolated peninsular kingdoms tended to marry among each other, but as Iberia was drawn into the political and economic orbit of Christian Europe, brides were sought from further afeld. Occasionally, a prince would marry a local noblewoman, but usually only when his succession was already secure in the form of a son from a previous marriage.“Second sons” were often married to local noblewomen to cement domestic alliances, and occasionally these women became queen when their husband unexpectedly came to the throne (for instance, as happened to Enrique Trastámara, who was married to Juana Manuel of Castile, and to Martí I, who was married to Maria de Luna). Local queens could be problematic because they could upset the delicate balance of noble power, by favoring one family or faction over others, and thus provoke intrigue or even war. A foreign princess tended not to have ties or loyalties to any aristocratic lineage in her adoptive kingdom and helped to reinforce the monarch’s status as being above the nobles of his realm. The role of a foreign queen was to serve as a bridge between her blood dynasty and that of her marriage—her offspring could even potentially unify two kingdoms if one of the dynasties were to fail, as happened in the case of Petronila and the Crown of Aragon, and with the rise of the Trastámaras in Castile and Aragon, and numerous times in Navarre. A royal marriage of this type dramatically inserted a foreign princess at the apex of a kingdom’s social and political order, which together with the patronage they wielded made these 316
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women potentially powerful trendsetters in terms of religious and secular culture.The incoming princess would have been raised within a distinct court culture with its own language, tastes, customs, and literary, artistic, and religious traditions, and when she came, she typically brought with her a retinue of servants, clerics, and courtiers, together with distinctive clothing, books, and objects, thus making these queens potent vectors of cultural cross-pollination. For instance, in 1380, when Joan I of Aragon married Violant de Bar, the daughter of Robert I Duke of Bar and Marie of Valois, the bride introduced a strong French infuence into the Catalano-Aragonese court—so strong, in fact, that her successor, Maria de Luna, deliberately distanced herself from it, noting in a letter she wrote to Richard II of England, that Joan I “had a French wife and was completely Frenchifed” (Silleras-Fernandez, 37–40). Scholars like Antonio Cortijo have seen Violant’s Gallic infuence in the development of sentimental novels in Catalan in this period (2001, 18–23; 1998, 7–20). As it happened, the infant Joan married Violant de Bar against the express will of his father, Pere the Ceremonious. The king had favored a union between his frst-born son and his granddaughter, Maria, who was the ruling queen of Sicily (1377–1401) in her own right. Such a marriage would have led to the incorporation of the kingdom of Sicily into the Crown of Aragon. The aging monarch was furious, but accepted his loss with some grace, and even composed a poem (a coble) lamenting his son’s poor choice of wife (Riquer 1987, 23; Ferrer Malloll 1992, 38–39). Similarly, when Juana of Portugal arrived in Castile in 1454 to marry Enrique IV, her retinue of Portuguese ladies scandalized her new subjects with their revealing dresses, excessive use of cosmetics, and “inappropriate behavior”.The chronicler, Alonso de Palencia, was not a fan of the group because, in his opinion, “Ninguna ocupación honesta les recomendaba; ociosamente y por doquier se entregaban a solitarios coloquios con sus respectivos galanes” [No virtuous pastimes appealed to them; without care and wherever they pleased, they firted alone with their respective suitors (Marino 2001, 43–44)].
Concubine-queens: limits and possibilities Joan I of Aragon’s refusal to do his duty and marry Maria of Sicily was a rare occurrence. In principle, royal princes and princesses were obliged to sacrifce their own preferences and desires in favor of the greater dynastic good, but even those who did sometimes made their displeasure known. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this dynamic can be seen in the case of the infant Pedro of Portugal (later Pedro I, 1357–67). In 1345, after the death of his Castilian wife, Constanza Manuel, he intended to marry his lover, Inês de Castro (1325–55). She was a Galician noble woman of illegitimate birth who had come to Portugal in 1339 as Constanza Manuel’s lady-in-waiting. Pedro’s father,Afonso IV, prohibited the union and went as far as to frst seclude her and then order her assassination. Pedro’s rage was such that when two of the three assassins were captured, he had them brutally executed. As the legend goes, once he became king, he had Inês’s twelve-year-old corpse exhumed from her grave, so she could be sworn allegiance as queen by the court—a “posthumous queen”, or as Luís de Camões put it “Que depois de ser morta foi Rainha” (Os Luisíadas, canto III, 118). Legends aside, it is certain that Pedro claimed that he had married Inês in secret and tried in this way to legitimize their children. There were other monarchs who preferred their paramours over their lawfully wedded wives to an extent that provoked both scandal and instability.The effects could be catastrophic, as happened with Alfonso XI of Castile (1312–50), who blatantly rejected his legitimate wife, Maria of Portugal (1328–57), the mother of his heir, Pedro (later Pedro I the Cruel), in favor of Leonor de Guzmán, a noblewoman who had been his lover prior to his marriage and remained his partner for 23 years.Alfonso’s inconstancy would spell the end of his dynasty. It was his illegitimate son, Enrique, who would wage war against his unpopular half-brother Pedro, killing him with his 317
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own hand, and coming to the throne as Enrique I Trastámara. Leonor and Alfonso’s relationship encapsulates both the possibilities and limitations of the concubine-queen. In the chivalric spirit of the time, Alfonso wrote Leonor a poem in which he called her “my lady” (mi señora), and confessed his passion and his desire to serve her: Yo con cuidado d’amores vos lo vengo a dezir, que he d’aquesta mi señora que mucho deseo servir. I, so in love, I come to say to you, That in this respect, my Lady I desire greatly to serve you. Literary critics, like Brian Dutton (1990), have cited Alfonso’s poem to Leonor as one of the frst examples of cancionero, or “songbook” poetry (VII–VIII)—a new genre that took the courts of the peninsula by storm and was adapted by several linguistic traditions. But Alfonso’s verses were not empty words: he did indeed serve her, and at no small cost. Maria’s title notwithstanding, Leonor occupied the role of the Queen of Castile; she had the attention of the king and the power that came with this association. Alfonso provided for her and their ten children to the extent that he dissipated the royal patrimony granting them lands, rents, and titles, even as his father-in-law,Afonso IV of Portugal waged war against him (González Crespo 1991, 203–219). It is diffcult to explain Alfonso’s irresponsible and damaging behavior as anything except true passion and love. The relationship of Alfonso XI and Leonor also refects the gender rules that characterized medieval society. A king could openly have a lover and father children with her, but this was out of the question for a queen (with rare exceptions, like Urraca of Castile-León). Queens were supposed to be (or at least pretend to be) pious, modest, and chaste women and mothers. However powerful a concubine-queen may have been, she was not a ruling queen and this contingency meant that did not enjoy the full prestige or protection of the institution of the monarchy. Concubines, for their part, like royal favorites, were at the mercy of their relationship with the ruler should they lose his favor, or should he die.Thus, when Alfonso XI suddenly died on 26 March 1350, Leonor was left alone and at the mercy of the new king, Pedro I, and his mother, Maria of Portugal. Two weeks after Alfonso’s passing, a grieving and worried Leonor requested King Pere the Ceremonious of Aragon’s help, portraying herself as “yo la desventurada et sin ventura que non deviera nacer” [I, the unfortunate, and hopeless one, who ought not to have been born].The Aragonese king responded to her with kind, but empty consolation:“vos rogamos e vos consellamos que lexada toda materia de ploro vos querades consolar en Dios, e fer por ánima del dito rey, almonas e donaciones et otras obras piadosas” [you beseech Us, and We advise you should you wish to console yourself in God, to read all that has been written of grief, and make alms and donations and other pious works on behalf of the soul of the said king (Ballesteros-Beretta 1932, 635)]. But Leonor was left with little time to pray or fnd consolation; in 1351 the vengeful Maria and Pedro had her imprisoned and then executed. With this, her own children fearing for their lives, gathered their noble allies and raised a rebellion against Pedro the Cruel, with the help of Pere the Ceremonious. And so it was that her son, Enrique, came to assassinate Pedro with his own hands at Montiel, taking the throne in 1369. As it was, Pedro’s love-life had been 318
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no less complicated than that of his father. In 1352 he had secretly married his true love, the noblewoman María de Padilla. However, the same year he had been betrothed to Blanche de Bourbon, a princess who it was hoped would seal an alliance with France. However, when Blanche arrived in Castile, without a dowry but bringing rumors of an affair with one of Pedro’s half-brothers, the king had her imprisoned and eventually assassinated in 1361.This prompted diplomatic imbroglios with both the papacy and the French crown and hastened Pedro’s own downfall at the hands of his illegitimate half-brother, Enrique Trastámara (Valdeón Baruque 2002). Her illegitimate status notwithstanding, María de Padilla served as the queen “in function” until her death in 1361. Such affairs were repeated throughout the Iberian kingdoms, across the Middle Ages, demonstrating that the religious and moral ideals associated with kingship and queenship were, as often as not, unattainable. Passions simply did not conform to the demands of politics and society, and the chastity and restraint the monarchs were supposed to embody ran up against the aristocratic ethos of unrestrained appetites.
Fashioning queenship and queenly self-fashioning According to Alfonso X’s Siete Partidas,“el rey debe catar que aquella con quien casare haya en sí quatro cosas; la primera que venga de buen linage, la segunda que sea fermosa, la tercera que sea bien costumbrada, la quarta que sea rica” (Partida II, 6–1) [a king ought to bear in mind that she whom he marries should be endowed with four qualities. First, she should come from a good family; second, she should be handsome; third, she should have good habits; fourth: she should be wealthy (Parsons 298)].The Partidas went on to specify the importance of these four indispensable traits. Beauty would not only make a queen more appealing to her husband, it could also be transmitted to her children “lo que conuiene mucho a los fjos de los reyes que sean tales que parescan bien entre los otros onbres” [which is very ftting for the children of kings, in order that they may make a good appearance among other persons (Parsons 298)]. Nonetheless, good lineage, character, and education were more important than ephemeral qualities such as beauty and wealth. Beauty may fade and fortunes dissipate, but good character/good habits and the pedigree of a prestigious lineage and the connections that it entails remain. “E quanto de meiores costunbres fuere tanto mayores plazeres reçibia della e sabra meior guardar la onrra de su marido e de si misma” [And the better habits she has, the greater pleasure he will receive from her, and the better she will know how to maintain the honor of her husband and her own (Parsons 298)]. The Partidas also underlined the queen’s role as the king’s “conpañera en los sabores e en los plazeres, otrosi ella ha de ser su aparçera en los pesares e en los cuydados” (Partida II, 6–2) [she alone should be, according to law, his companion in joys and pleasures: and, on the other hand, she should be his partner in affiction and care (Parsons 298)].These, of course, represented ideals; and the gulf between ideal and experience was often quite wide. None of the law codes of the Crown of Aragon were as comprehensive as the Siete Partidas, and it was for that reason Pere the Ceremonious—a king very much interested in courtly protocol—ordered it translated into Catalan (Riquer 1987, 22). In 1353 Pere wrote an appendix to his ordinances of the Aragonese court, its offces and ceremonial, laying out among other things, the coronation ritual (Palacios Martín 1975, 259–260).The text survives in Catalan, Aragonese, and Latin versions. This was an era when kings were establishing themselves as generically superior to the nobility, and this is refected in Pere’s ceremonial, which places king and queen above both the frst and second estates of the realm. According to the ritual Pere established, the king would not receive the crown from anyone; he would place it on his own head, before personally crowning the queen. No longer primus inter pares, the king was now sui generis, as 319
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refected in the rubric of the Protocols: “Ordinació feta per lo molt alt e molt excel·lent príncep e senyor lo senyor en Pere Terç, Rey d’Aragó, de la manera com los Reys d’Aragó se faran consagrar e ells mateys se coronaran” [The Protocol made by the very high and most excellent prince and lord, the lord Pere the third, King of Aragon, regarding how the kings of Aragon consecrate and crown themselves] and “Ordenació feta per lo dit senyor Rey de la manera con les reynes d’Aragó se faran consagrar e los reys d’Aragó les coronaran” [The Protocol made by the said lord-king regarding how the queens of Aragon are consecrated and how the Kings of Aragon should crown them (Silleras-Fernandez 2015b, 111)]. This refected long-standing Aragonese practice. Pere the Ceremonious had crowned himself in 1336, and eight years earlier, his father, Alfons the Kind (1327–36) had done the same (Aurell and Serrano-Coll 2014, 66). Self-coronation was not unique to Aragon; Alfonso XI was the frst king to adopt the custom in Castile in 1332 (Ruiz 1999, 110). As Teo Ruiz has noted, the peninsular kingdoms did not develop the notion of sacral kingship that became so important in France and England (110). Although Iberian rulers saw themselves as holding their offce as kings by the grace of God, they did not claim to have a particular personal relationship with Him. Unlike their English and French counterparts, for example, they did not claim the power to heal the sick by touch. Perhaps because of the monarchy’s essentially secular conception in the peninsula, many kings and queens here simply took the throne with no particular coronation ceremony, unless it was seen as necessary to reinforce their authority at the time of their accession. In fact, only fve queens of Aragon were formally crowned, and in each case the ritual was intended to put to rest some dispute regarding their legitimacy or to publicly reinforce royal authority. Nor did the Portuguese have an elaborate coronation ceremony.They simply stood up before their assembled nobles (the levantamento) who then acclaimed them king (the aclamação). Some petitioned the pope for recognition—notably,Teresa of Portugal, and her son Afonso Henriques, but this was to counter Castile’s refusal to recognize their kingdom. Both João I (1385–33) and Duarte I (1433–38) petitioned the popes to authorize their anointment as king, but there is no evidence this ever took place (Seabra Rodriges 103–104). As for the Portuguese queens, there was no ceremonial whatsoever; their marriage to the ruler was what marked their offce. Pere the Ceremonious’ coronation ordinance for the queen cites Genesis and the ideas of theologians like Peter Lombard, who saw the queen’s role as the king’s companion: “axí con Nostre Senyor Déu deputà e ordonà per companyona Eva a Adam, que les reynes d’Aragó companyones sien dels reys d’Aragó” [just as Our Lord God assigned and ordered Eve as companion to Adam, may the queens of Aragon be companions of the kings of Aragon (Ordinacions 166; Lombard 1971–81, 687–88)]. Eve was created from Adam’s rib—from the middle part of the body, and not from his feet or his head—which means that she is neither inferior (his subject) nor superior (his sovereign), but a companion:“E axí apar que Eva fon dada a Adam per companyona, cor del mig loch del cors de l’hom fo presa e formada, e no de les parts jussanes, a dar entendra que no fou súbdita a l’hom, ne axí mateix fo presa o formada de les parts sobiranes, per tal que no fos entés ella ésser sobirana de l’hom” [Just as it seems that Eve was given to Adam, as a companion, and was taken and made from the middle part of a man’s body, and not from the lower parts, it is given to understand that she is not a subordinate of the man, and just as she was not taken or made from the upper parts, for that reason it is understood that she was not intended to rule over man (Ordinacions, 266; Genesis 2:18)]. Thus, the queen-consort was seen as an aide to the king and an intercessor for her subjects— much as the Virgin Mary served as an intermediary between the believers and her son, the king in Heaven. Another Biblical model was Esther, who saved the Jews from annihilation by calming the wrath of her husband, the Persian king, Ahasuerus or Xerxes.3 Intercession was seen as an acceptably passive role for women in medieval society; one that did not challenge masculine 320
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primacy. Hence, the oft-cited example of Esther, who only intervened with the king when it was absolutely necessary, and always in a submissive tone.When Ahasuerus, under the infuence of his scheming counselor Haman, had decided to kill the Jews of his kingdom, Esther did not confront him, but instead charmed him into promising her in public to grant her one desire, which she then revealed to be the pardoning of her people. In other words, she used her beauty and wiles rather than confronting the king with anger or threats and thereby upsetting the established order. Of course, queenly beauty could cut both ways, and the Biblical counter-example was Jezebel (Kings 16:31), a queen who used her charms to convince her husband, Ahab, to kill several prophets of God. Although, as a consequence, she suffered a brutal and ignominious death, but nevertheless she was buried with the royal honors. After all, whatever she may have done, a queen was always a queen.
Conclusion While queens had many different models to look to, whether in the Bible or from among their predecessors or contemporaries, these were frmly patriarchal societies, and both the religious and “scientifc” thought of the time, rooted in misogynistic Classical philosophy and the equally chauvinistic writings of the Church Fathers emphasized women’s supposedly feeble physical, intellectual, and moral natures.While most men might have felt uncomfortable with the notion of women wielding authority and agency, inheritance customs and succession laws both tended to reinforce this. Nevertheless, queens—not only because of their crucial biological role but because of their station, their wealth, and their family networks—were a key element of medieval monarchy. Even though sometimes she might not have had any formal authority, to trife with, neglect, or abuse a queen was a risky venture; to do so might provoke the wrath of her husband or kin, or undermine the reputation and integrity of the monarchy—an institution which was seen as providing the foundation of medieval society. Queenship—the state of being a queen — was not an offce per se, and the competencies and authority that came with it changed according to time, place, and circumstances.These, together with the opportunities with which a queen was presented, combined with her own acumen and abilities, and her determination to pursue her own agendas, were what contributed to whatever power each queen could wield. Queens (like kings) could rarely only rule by force or fat; instead they had to do so through coercion and co-option, by presenting themselves as unthreatening and using their accepted intercessionary role to push for change. Even those queens who inherit the crown and ruled in their own right were subject to limitations, and were expected to marry and even encouraged to take up a subsidiary wifely role. But many queens and queen consorts were well equipped to meet the demands of this masculine world, having been raised in royal or noble courts, and trained since childhood to navigate this environment and to master the mechanisms of gift and favor exchange (Silleras-Fernandez 2015c).They had resources and knew how to use power; they could engage in court politics and govern if necessary, while appearing to adhere to the expectations of society. Although until recently historians have all but ignored queens, except those who wielded formal authority, we know now that medieval monarchy cannot be understood merely in terms of the king—it was a collective venture, in which together with the king, other members of the royal family collaborated, of whom the queen was often the most powerful partner.
Notes 1 This example is an adaptation from Petrus Alfonsus’ Diciplina Clericalis,“Exemplum de puteo”, but the original one does not mention a queen, only an old man who has a young wife who he cannot satisfy (147–48).
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Núria Silleras-Fernández 2 Queenship is translated in Spanish as reginalidad, in Catalan as reginalitat, and in Portuguese as reginalidade (Silleras-Fernandez 2003, 129–133; Seabra Rodrigues 104). 3 A more prosaic model could be found in Celestina-like fgures of fction who mediated, as it were, between “johns” and their own desires.
References Andrade, Maria Filomena. 2014. Isabel de Aragão, Rainha Santa, Mãe Exemplar. Lisbon:Temas e Debates. Aram, Bethany. 2005. Juana the Mad. Sovereignty and Dynasty in Renaissance Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Aurell, Jaume and Marta Serrano-Coll. 2014. “The Self-Coronation of Peter the Ceremonious (1336): Historical, Liturgical, and Iconographical Representations”. Speculum 89–1: 66–95. de Azcona, Tarsicio. 1993. Isabel la Católica: Estudio crítico de su vida y su reinado. Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos. Ballesteros-Beretta, Antonio. 1932. “Doña Leonor de Guzmán a la muerte de Alfonso XI”. Boletín de la Academia de la Historia 100: 629–636. Barton, Simon. 2015. Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines. Interfaith Relations and Social Power in Medieval Iberia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. de Beauvoir, Simone. 2011. The Second Sex. London:Vintage. Bianchini, Janna. 2012.The Queen’s Hand: Power and Authority in the Reign of Berenguela of Castile. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bisson,Thomas N. 1986. The Medieval Crown of Aragon:A Short History. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Boloix Gallardo, Bárbara. 2013. Las sultanas de la Alhambra: las grandes desconocidas del Reino Nazarí de Granada (Siglo XIII–XV). Granada: Patronato de la Alhambra y del Generalife. Boloix Gallardo, Barbara. 2016. “Mujer y poder en el reino nazarí de Granada: Fatima Bint Al-Ahmar, la perla central del collar de la dinastía (Siglo XIV)”. Anuario de Estudios Medievales 46–1: 269–300. Butler, Judith. 1988. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory”. Theatre Journal 40–4: 519–531. Calderón Ortega, José Manuel, Díaz Gonzáles, and Francisco Javier. 2015. El proceso de redacción del último testamento de Fernando el Católico, el 22 de enero de 1516. Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, CSIC. Carmona Ruiz, María Antonia. 2005. María de Molina. Barcelona: Plaza y Janés. Catlos, Brian A. 2014. Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c. 1050–1614. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cortijo Ocaña,Antonio. 1998.“Women’s Role in the Creation of Literature in Catalonia at the End of the Fourteenth and Beginning of the Fifteenth Century”. La Corónica 27–1: 7–20. Cortijo Ocaña, Antonio. 2001. La evolución genérica de la fcción sentimental de los siglos XV y XVI. London: Tamesis. Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1989.“Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex:A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics”. University of Chicago Legal Forum 1: 139–167. Duidam, Jeroen. 2015. Dynasties.A Global History of Power, 1300–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dutton, Brian. 1990. El Cancionero del Siglo XV, vol.VII. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca. Earenfght, Theresa. 2010. The King’s Other Body. María of Castile and the Crown of Aragon. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Earenfght, Theresa. 2013. Medieval Queenship. New York: Palgrave. Echevarría, Ana. 2002. Catalina de Lancaster: Reina Regente de Castilla 1372–1418. Madrid: Nerea Editorial. Elliott, J. E. 1992.“A Europe of Composite Monarchies”. Past & Present 137: 52–53. Ferrer Malloll, Maria Teresa. 1992. “La política siciliana de Pere el Cerimoniós”. In Els catalans a Sicília, edited by Francesco Giunta, Martí de Riquer, and Josep Maria Sans i Travé. Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 35–40. Fleming, Gillian. 2018. Juana I. Legitimacy and Confict in Sixteenth Century Castile. New York: Palgrave. Foucault, Michel. 1981.“Omnes et Singulatim:Toward of Criticism of Political Reason”. In The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, edited by Sterling M. McMurrin. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 225–254. Fuente Pérez, María Jesús. 2017. Violante de Aragón, reina de Castilla. Madrid: Editorial Dykinson.
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Núria Silleras-Fernández Pereda, Felipe. 2001.“El cuerpo muerto del rey Juan II, Gil de Siloé y la imaginación escatológica”. Anuario de departamento de historia y teoría del arte 13: 53–85. Perez, Joseph. 2014. Cisneros, el cardenal de España. Barcelona: Taurus. Pick, Lucy. 2017. Her Father’s Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in the Early Spanish Kingdoms. Cornell: Cornell University Press. Reilly, Bernard F. 1982. The Kingdom of León-Castilla Under Queen Urraca, 1109–1126. Princenton: Princenton University Press. de Riquer, Martí. 1987.“Pere el Cerimoniós”. In Pere III el Cerimoniós (1319–1987) en el sisè centenari de la mort d’un gran rei dels catalans. Barcelona: Nadala de la Fundació Jaume I, 31; 22–23. Roig, Jaume. 2010. The Mirror of Jaume Roig: An Edition and English Translation. Edited by María Celeste Delgado-Librero.Tempe:Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Rubiera Mata, María Jesús. 1996. La Princesa Fatima Bint Al-Ahmar, La ‘María de Molina’ de la Dinastía Nazarí de Granada. Madrid: Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Estudios Medievales 6, 183–189. Ruiz,Teoflo. 1999.“Unsacred Monarchy:The Kings of Castile in the Late Middle Ages”. In Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics since the Middle Ages, edited by Sean Wilentz. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 109–144. Salicrú i Lluch, Roser. 2011. Sultanas emergentes: Visualizaciones de la mujer cristiana en las fuentes cristianas”. In VIII Estudios de Frontera. Mujeres y frontera, edited by Francisco Toro Ceballos and José Rodríguez Molina. Jaén: Diputación Provincial, 477–483. Salvador Martínez, H. 2012. Berenguela la Grande y su época. Madrid: Ediciones Polifemo. Santos Silva, Manuela. 2017. “Reminiscências matriciais nos casamentos régios medievais”. In Casamentos da Família Real Portuguese, Diplomacia e Cerimonial, edited by A.M. Rodrigues, M. Santos Silva, and A. Leal de Faria, vol. 1. Lisboa: Círculo de Leitores, 17–34. Seabra Rodrigues, Ana Maria. 2012. As Tristes Rainhas: Leonor de Aragão, Isabel de Coimbra. Lisboa: Círculo de Leitores. Shadis, Miriam. 2009. Berenguela of Castile and Political Women in the High Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave. Silleras-Fernandez, Nuria. 2003. “Queenship en la Corona de Aragón en la Baja Edad Media: estudio y propuesta terminológica”. La Corónica 32–1: 119–133. Silleras-Fernandez, Nuria. 2008. Power, Piety, and Patronage in Late Medieval Queenship. Maria de Luna. New York: Palgrave. Silleras-Fernandez, Nuria. 2015a. Chariots of Ladies: Francesc Eiximenis and the Court Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Iberia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Silleras-Fernandez, Nuria. 2015b.“Creada a su imagen y semejanza: La coronación de la Reina de Aragón según las Ordenaciones de Pedro el Ceremonioso”. Lusitania Sacra, 2a Série 31: 107–128. Silleras-Fernandez, Nuria. 2015c.“Inside Perspectives: Catalina and João III of Portugal and a Speculum for a Queen-to-Be”. In Self-Fashioning and Assumptions of Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, edited by Laura Delbrugge. Leiden: Brill, 226–252. Silleras-Fernandez, Nuria. 2016. “The Queen, the Prince, and the Ideologue: Alonso Ortiz’s Notions of Queenship at the Court of the Catholic Kings”. Anuario de estudios medievales 46–1: 393–415. Ubieto Arteta, Antonio. 1987. Los esponsales de la Reina Petronila y la creación de la Corona de Aragón. Zaragoza: Diputación General de Aragón. Valdeón Baruque, Julio. 2002. Pedro I el Cruel y Enrique de Trastámara. Madrid: Santillana. Weissberger, Barbara F. 2004. Isabel Rules: Constructing Queenship,Wielding Power. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Woodacre, Elena. 2013. The Queens Regnant of Navarre. Succession, Politics, and Partnership 1274–1512. New York: Palgrave.
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PART VI
Languages and literatures
21 DIGITAL HUMANITIES AND THE IBERIAN MIDDLE AGES Susanna Allés-Torrent
Introduction Outlining a survey of the digital humanities (DH) and the Hispanic Middle Ages is not an easy task, and it invites some cross-disciplinary considerations. First, there are the nature and limits of this digital feld:What falls into the category of DH? What remains outside? Do DH include all digital projects? Thus, are DH inclusive of any digital research output, or does it imply an adoption of specifc hermeneutics employing digital methods and tools? The second consideration relates to a geographical problem in a not-always equally globalized world, divided by modern nation-states. Scholarly traditions in medieval Iberian Studies have been and still are heterogeneous from across the Atlantic and from Global North to Global South, and communication and reciprocal readings do not always occur.This heterogeneity affects not only Iberian Studies, where cultural or philological interests can diverge, but also the digital humanities themselves, where it has been suggested that “Humanidades Digitales are not Digital Humanities” (Del Rio 2014).The third consideration specifcally concerns the rich cultural and linguistic diversity of the Iberian Middle Ages, where multiple languages, traditions, cultures, and religions converge. The wealth of materials in Castilian, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician, Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin and the myriad surrounding projects mean that any account must always be incomplete. Defning the digital humanities has proven to be quite a challenging task,1 and we have moved forward from debates on what DH is and is not (Terras et al. 2013: 3–6); the discipline has demonstrated to be open and multidisciplinary, and the two Blackwell Companions to Digital Humanities, especially the most recent 2016 volume, showcases the variety of disciplines that can be included under DH’s famous big tent. Every geographical area and every discipline—as is the case with Medieval Studies—has tried to fnd its way into this tent, surveying the landscape, complying with best practices, and establishing conversations about the scholarly implications of working with digital surrogates of texts, images, or other physical objects. DH can be accessed from many perspectives: theories, methods, tools, projects. Consequently, the vision one has depends on the lenses one wears. Many debates in DH—such as the opposition between “do” and “talk”, or “builders” and “theorizers”—emerge precisely from the interdisciplinary nature of the feld.As McCarty (2016: 95) explains, DH practice is rooted in techno-scientifc instruments that bring to the table inheritances of both cultures: the techno-sciences and the humanities. This interdisciplinary blend sometimes has generated distrust and resistance for several reasons, 327
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including but not limited to the diffculties in conceiving of the objects of study in the humanities as “data”, and the assertion that digital labor as a technical and mechanical activity lacks theoretical and methodological basis. This distrust was partially emended in recent years by the publication of peer review and evaluation guidelines for digital work, providing a set of good practices and dealing with problems such as authorship and collaboration.2 In this regard, many institutions, especially in the United States, have already developed offcial guidelines for their faculty, and gradually the career path toward tenure is moving beyond the journal article and monograph to include digital scholarship. In the case of Medieval Studies, scholars have employed digital methods for many decades, and they are commonly known as early adopters of information technology (Unsworth 2012). In most DH conferences, medievalists are the natural fellows of other DH-ers; similarly, in many Medieval Studies conferences, there are full sessions devoted to digital technologies. Since 2017, the Medieval Academy of America has been awarding a Digital Humanities and Multimedia Prize,3 recognizing a digital research project or other contribution in digital form. Furthermore, several scholarly journals in Medieval Studies are devoted or sympathetic to DH, or have published special issues on it.4 Scholarly journals in DH have also often welcomed any digital research regardless of language or chronological period.5 In the years to come, we would also certainly hope that journals dedicated to medieval Iberia publish special issues on DH topics. In this chapter, I intend to survey the digital work conducted within the feld of medieval Iberian Studies, emphasizing some of the values of DH: openness, collaboration, collegiality and connectedness, diversity, and experimentation (Spiro 2012). First, I will take a step back and offer some key historical moments and publications relevant to a prospective history of digital Iberian Studies; then, I shall concentrate on three types of digital initiatives: digitization and bibliographical databases; digital libraries and textual corpora; and digital editions. Last, I will deal with other digital trends that go beyond the textual realm and which are vitally important for any holistic overview of Medieval Studies. My account—necessarily incomplete—aims to foster scholarly conversations between two communities that, beyond common goals, have not always shared the same level of digital understanding.
Some history, or … is there a digital Iberian medievalism? By the time medievalists were consolidating and exploring computer technologies, pioneered by Father Roberto Busa and his collaboration with IBM, and organizing the frst international encounters during the 1970s, Iberian medievalists were also beginning to join the digital paradigm shift.6 In truth, they shared the same mainstream interests as the Anglo-speaking community and, consequently, dealt primarily with applications involving textual sources which played a central role in the early days of humanities computing (Hockey 2004: 3). Medieval Iberian scholars notably designed and generated concordances of single authors and lexicographical tools; they performed different types of statistical analysis for linguistic studies and applied quantitative approaches to style. In creating concordances, glossaries, and indexes, scholars concentrated on one set of texts or specifc authors (Hockey 2004). Among these, we fnd concordances of some of the major works of Spanish medieval literature done by US-based, Spanish, and French scholars.7 As early as 1972, Franklin M.Waltman published a set of concordances to Poema de Mio Cid, in 465 print pages.Two French Hispanists also entered the scene: René Pellen went further and published a dictionary of lemmas and forms in 1979, and Jean Roudil, founder of the Séminaire d'Études 328
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Médiévales Hispaniques at Université de Paris-XIII, delivered a set of concordances for Poridad de las Poridades (1977) and Primera Crónica General (1979). Other works of this kind concerned the Libro de Alexandre and the Arcipreste de Hita’s Libro de buen amor. The use of statistical analysis made possible linguistic studies of vocabulary in particular authors, studying phenomena of orthography and morphosyntaxis, such as the use of prepositions or possessive pronouns in El Cid or conjugation in the prose of Alfonso X. Quantitative approaches to text also facilitated, since the very beginning of humanities computing, issues related to style (the currently so-called stylometry). In this sense, frst attempts were devoted to discovering how many hands were involved in the composition of the Poema de Mio Cid or to unearth the author of Lazarillo de Tormes (Sáez Godoy 1980). Much of these works are based on word frequency, which—it should not be forgotten—before computing words were hand counted. Undoubtedly, the year 1975 marks a turning point in the history of computing and medieval Iberian studies, with the incorporation of John Nitti as regular faculty at Wisconsin-Madison and the foundation of the Hispanic Seminar of Medieval Studies (HSMS).8 With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities at the beginning of the 1970s, it was decided at Wisconsin to establish a new method to create an electronic archive of lexicographical forms for the drafting of the Dictionary of the Old Spanish Language (DOSL). Hence, the frst task was to create electronic concordances and texts of medieval Spanish works. For this task, David Mackenzie drafted a set of guidelines for transcribing manuscripts for the DOSL (1977);9 and, fnally, early concerns regarding bibliographical management gave rise to the Bibliography of Old Spanish Texts (BOOST), a detailed bibliography of manuscripts and incunables from before 1500, and the ancestor of Philobiblon.10 John Nitti’s role during these years is key, and he can certainly be considered one of the pioneers in humanities computing, although he was not involved with the mainstream community. In an interview published by Nyhan and Flinn (2016), there emerges a fascinating portrait of Nitti engaged in core computing challenges. In 1978, he was already publishing in the journal Computers and the Humanities, the most signifcant venue for DH, with an article on “Computers and the Old Spanish Dictionary” (Nitti 1978). Otto Gründler also invited him to chair an ongoing session in the Kalamazoo Medieval Congress on computers in the humanities.11 Nitti’s contribution and the team’s labor at the HSMS was impressive for that time.They worked toward the advancement of concordance software; they set the ground for databases in the humanities; they built an international network of collaborators similar to the contemporary crowdsourcing to pursue the publication of medieval Spanish texts; they established guidelines for uniform transcriptions, underscoring the relevance of standards and the need for unifed practices; and they employed the cutting-edge technology available at that time. The mid-1980s ushered in a new generation, most of whom came from disciplines aligned with philology, and with them some new interests in even more complex challenges. In 1985, Faulhaber and Marcos Marín organized a session under the title “Hispanismo e informática”, during the 9th Congress of the Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas in Berlin, and published two articles in the Argentine journal Incipit the following year. Faulhaber’s (1986) contribution is one of the frst surveys to deal with computing—notably focused on the basics of computers—and Iberian Studies, which must be placed within the context of the arrival of the personal computer. Eventually, Faulhaber’s two main concerns were (1) the urgent need for reliable electronic texts, and (2) the development of bibliographical databases. By 1987 Faulhaber had received a grant from IBM to map “both BOOST and BOOCT [Bibliography of Old Catalan Texts] into the proprietary Revelation relational dbms [database management systems] running on a standard PC” (Faulhaber 2016: 78). 329
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Marcos Marín’s 1986 paper inaugurated a series of contributions dealing with computerassisted editing, through the use of UNITE software to compare different witnesses and create the critical apparatus automatically. His initiative to perform a computerized collation of the two extant manuscripts of the Libro de Alexandre was a pioneering effort, and—although it was always conceived to be published in print—it constituted the frst attempt to bring computer technologies to the feld of scholarly editing. By November 1987, Nancy Ide was organizing the celebrated meeting at Vassar College, considered by many to be the birthplace of the Text Encoding Initiative.12 The full version of the TEI Guidelines, however, was not published until 1994 (Hockey 2004).These types of parallel and disconnected efforts, although they might look discouraging, are historically relevant because they point to the same technical and methodological gaps. The 1990s offered Iberian Studies a fruitful landscape: there was a boom of databases for the most part allocated to bibliographies; the frst initiatives for archiving and maintaining electronic texts also arrived; and digital editing became one of the biggest interests, mainly in Peninsular Hispanism, as well as the creation of textual corpora. The 1990 Kalamazoo conference held the frst session entirely devoted to “Medieval Castilian Bibliography”, where “a demonstration of computer-organized bibliography by Dr. Faulhaber” was performed.The following year, Faulhaber was publishing in Literary and Linguistic Computing, reporting on the challenges and solutions of the Philobiblion database. In those same years—when personal computers had already entered everyday life—the HSMS continued its labor of amassing and publishing texts and started delivering by 1991 under electronic format (CD-ROMs), offering, besides the transcriptions, concordances and alphabetic and frequency lists, as well.The Archivo Digital de Manuscritos y Textos Españoles (ADMYTE) was also launched with the collaboration of the private company MICRONET, and became the frst digital archive of manuscripts and Spanish texts to offer in a CD-ROM format text and multimedia (basically scanned images in black and white).13 As for digital editing, scholars approached this task from different angles. A more theoretical perspective explored the implications of using digital methods (Marcos Marín 1994; Irizarry 1997); traditional felds like philology started blending with computing practices or appraising the digital text and the internet (Blecua et al. 1999).14 Other attempts in technical and methodological praxis were published, such as the application of textual markup using TEI (Faulhaber 1994), as well as a few other sporadic pedagogical proposals (Irizarry 1997). Indeed, the dynamism of digital editing was endorsed by a full session devoted to it at the 1999 Kalamazoo Medieval Congress under the title “Electronic Editions of Spanish Medieval Texts”, organized by Roxana Recio and presided over by Viçens Beltrán. On a global scale, the 1990s also marked the arrival of the internet, the World Wide Web, and the frst browsers (Mosaic launched in 1993; Netscape launched in 1994; Internet Explorer launched in 1995). The frst online digital libraries appeared, and libraries started digitizing their holdings on the internet. Publications about relations between hypertext, multimedia, and literature was an international topic of interest. Going online became much easier, and the possibility of adding images, audio, and video opened the doors to multimedia outcomes. Standards for different media were developed (i.e., JPEG in 1992), expanding new venues to work in digital imaging within disciplines like art history; audio and visual media made research easier in musicology and flm studies; and geographic information systems— ArcGIS, for example, which appeared in 1999—were adopted by many humanities scholars. With the arrival of the 2000s and the publication of the frst Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities (Schreibman et al. 2004), the evolution of the discipline increased at vertiginous speeds: “humanities computing” was renamed “digital humanities”, enlarging the scope of 330
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digital research, and multiple scholarship across nations adapted the label. Among Spanish scholars, the term “informática humanística” was very soon replaced by “humanidades digitales”.15 Around 2011, the discipline was consolidated by the creation of Spanish-speaking associations: RedHD in Mexico, created in 2011, and the Asociación de Humanidades Digitales Hispánicas, created in Spain in 2012 (Galina 2014: 311). A more detailed view of these developments follows.
Digitization, bibliographic databases: finding the Iberian cultural heritage online The aim of this section is to present aspects of some of the challenges in fnding Iberian cultural heritage online that are relevant for Medieval Studies and digital humanities. As a statement of principles, I will summarize some of the features that I consider when approaching any digital work. First, digital data and all the processes involved—capturing, processing, curating, storing, searching, sharing, analyzing, visualizing—are all part of the scholarly research. Therefore, the technologies employed are just as important as the method that is deployed, and both are deeply interrelated. As stated by the Modern Language Association: “No technical decisions are innocent of methodological implications and vice versa” (Committee on Scholarly Editions 2016: 1). Second, we must consider what’s at stake in terms of data curation, project sustainability and preservation, accessibility, interoperability, and data or infrastructure reuse. Digitization of holdings constitutes one of the biggest breakthroughs in humanistic research, especially valuable for those obliged to use primary sources. Libraries, archives, and museums have made major contributions to the feld of digital preservation. Digital surrogates have increased accessibility to holdings that before were only physically accessible and for a limited amount of time. Furthermore, these digital reproductions also offer new possibilities for using their cultural heritage for pedagogical or educational purposes. Their role is so crucial in fact that Bamford and Francomano argue that “Digitization and digital accessibility will be, if they are not already, the primary determinants of canonization in teaching and scholarly practice in Medieval Studies” (2018: 31). However, it is not only the overwhelming quantity of digitized objects now available to study the Iberian Middle Ages,16 but also the implementation of true digital methodologies that open up new ways to explore and reuse cultural heritage that are currently important. To illustrate this, I provide two real case-scenarios, both sponsored by the Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE). First consider the cases of the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica (BDH) and the Biblioteca Digital del Patrimonio Iberoamericano (BDPI). BDH, created in 2008, currently offers more than 218,000 titles, featuring 24,467 manuscripts and at least 10,102 documents published between the years 1000 and 1501. By the same token, the BDPI, created in 2012, offers a large collection with more than 14,000 manuscripts and incunables from different Latin American institutions. In addition to these troves of documents, in 2018 BDH and BDPI made available their Application Programming Interface (API), which means—in lay terms—that any user is able to launch a search in these two digital catalogues and visualize the results in any website or process that information through different techniques. It is a query system where one jumps the interface and goes directly to the data, made possible by the interoperability of metadata to query multiple databases simultaneously. Many humanities scholars have already come to understand its great potential. The second case-scenario is the use of the semantic web. Since 2011, BNE launched datos .bne.es, a platform that offers a different way of exploring bibliographical data providing access under four rubrics: People, Entities,Works, and Topics. Following the principle of the semantic 331
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web, catalogues have been transformed into Linked Open Data using the Resource Description Framework (RDF).This initiative gathers not only all information available at the BNE (bibliographical and authorities catalogue) but also external data from resources such as Wikipedia, the Library of Congress, DBpedia, and Virtual International Authority File. Additionally—and this is the best part—the user can download the RDF fle that contains all this information to reuse it for their own research purposes. I will now turn to databases developed with an eye toward material philological and bibliographical approaches and whose aim is to systematize primary sources, namely manuscripts and early print texts, as well as secondary bibliography. As noted, since 1975—the year of the frst publication of BOOST—the creation of databases was one of the main concerns of medieval Iberian scholars. However, it was in the late 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s when these projects experienced a moment of scholarly notice and prestige. Research groups have created invaluable resources for the study of the Peninsular Middle Ages: since 2003, Narpan has been publishing databases for Ramon Llull, Francesc Eiximenis,Arnau de Vilanova, Cerverí de Girona, and on medieval Catalan poetic manuscripts (Cançoners DB);17 Juan Manuel Cacho Blecua and María Jesús Lacarra since 2005 have published the Clarisel DB, focused on chivalric prose (Amadis DB), storytelling (Sendebar DB), and Aragonese medieval literature (Heredia);18 the Centro Ramón Piñeiro has the long-standing Base de datos de la lírica profana galego portuguesa, and another one devoted to archival references;19 at the Laboratorio de Innovación en Humanidades Digitales (UNED), with the collaboration of the Argentine IIBICRIT-CONICET, many initiatives on Castilian and Galician lyrical tradition have also been undertaken.20 Moreover, a comprehensive systematization has been organized with Iberian translations, such as the pioneer Boscan Project, created in 2002, that puts together all translations of Italian works in Spanish from the Middle Ages until 1939.The Catálogo Hipertextual de Traducciones Anónimas al Castellano de los siglos XIV al XVI has concentrated on a very specifc type of translation with a narrow chronological and geographical scope; and Translat DB is a census of medieval translations into Catalan up to 1500.These and other examples will serve to consider some aspects of this type of source from a digital point of view. All these initiatives are in fact databases and can be accessed under the form of different applications, for they can range from a simple fat model (spreadsheet) to a relational one. Consequently, documentation on how the database has been designed and implemented is always helpful.A project like Sciència.cat, devoted to the study of Catalan scientifc literature from the medieval and early modern period, offers a database and provides relevant information: it deploys a relational database, structured with interconnected tables (works, manuscripts, prints, documents, people, etc.). Some international projects, in addition, offer their database models and also the concrete database schema (tables, felds, values, and the relation among them). In a similar vein, descriptions of the standards and metadata, as well as the type of data storage (open repository or institutional server) would also be helpful and appropriate. Misinformation can give rise to a “black box project”, where technical details are ignored, and thus no other interaction beyond the search interface can be performed. The second aspect I would like to highlight—and this applies to all digital projects—is sustainability and preservation. Unfortunately, sites become outdated for a variety of reasons (lack of funding, outdated software, IT staff abandonment, etc.) that can lead to ruinous consequences, and digital scholarship unfortunately can be lost. In order for digital outcomes to be maintained, it is essential that scholars engage with the digital workfow in all of the processes.This is why contemporary scholars are choosing open repositories (versus personal or institutional servers) and minimal, low-cost technologies that make digital scholarship easier to maintain for any scholar in the humanities.21 332
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Several other important aspects related to databases became apparent after the appearance of two articles by Faulhaber (2014, 2016). The already mentioned Philobiblion—as he himself affrms—can “claim to being the oldest surviving Digital Humanities project in the Hispanic world” (Faulhaber 2016: 76). The problems that emerge from Faulhaber’s own critique are the use of standards, the need to update relational databases, the optimization and connection between database and web results, the urgency of permanent identifers of records, and the imperative to adopt semantic web standards. The use of standards—i.e., the ones approved by International Standardization Organizations or, at least, open formats—can be adopted at any level of the digital workfow, but some are more vital than others, such as the ones used for infrastructure (HTML, CSS, etc.), for database management (SQL and MySQL), for text encoding (Extensible Markup Languages), or for metadata (Dublin Core, Getty vocabularies, RDF). The use of open formats and standards, as opposed to proprietary ones, benefts long term interoperability22 regarding future projects and scalability, that is, they promote the capacity to grow. For projects started 20 years ago or more, the issue of updating is clearly more complicated, especially when they seek to adapt to new comprehensive database structures (O’Donnell 2007). At present, most of the efforts need to go into federating access to heterogeneous data stored of different provenance. For this reason, the use of descriptive metadata can help with these processes, because a metadata standard will always be easier to export and to harvest. As Susan Brown reminds us,“interoperability … is deeply dependent upon such banal matters as data and metadata standards” (Brown 2016: 50). In the end, the use of metadata and standards in general is one more way of being part of the digital ecosystem. In the humanities, the most popular type of database follows the relational model, because it best suits the nature of humanities data.The choice is not always clear, but open applications, such as MySQL, are more convenient than proprietary database software, because they enable scalability and interoperability with other standards.23 Additionally, databases need to be well connected to web interfaces and search results. Information inside a database is by defnition structured data, and we need to transfer this structure to users.When we have this data arranged with precise metadata schemas, we facilitate interoperability and the export of that data to other users and other repositories. Now, if we deliver that data to the browser/user in simple HTML fles, we are delivering the information without any structure; we are only sending a surrogate of what the old analog bibliographic slips were: simple text that cannot be processed or exported by anyone. As a style of information historically pervasive in humanities archives, many humanities scholars are certainly used to understanding such a result.Yet, a plain HTML does not speak to the web. Another urgent matter is the permanent naming of records.“The gold standard for long-term preservation”—explains Susan Brown—“is to assign Persistent URLs (PURLS) or Digital Objects Identifers (DOIs) so that datasets can be more easily indexed, retrieved, and cited” (Brown 2016: 51). Each record of the database entails a scholarly work, and, as such, each deserves to be cited properly. Citation is indeed one of the core values of scholarship, and thus all digital resources should prioritize it.Also, for the user, it is always better to have a relatively short URL, rather than a longer one that, in addition, after the session has expired, can no longer be linked or recoverable. Finally, and when possible, it is advantageous to adopt and comply with the basics of the semantic web. In other words, connecting our data to already existing data on the web will allow us to take advantage of standards and join ongoing initiatives, such as the one we have seen in datos.bne.es. To adapt and conceive projects with these practices and technologies in mind is, in the end, also a matter of long-term preservation, preparedness for future developments, and a matter of escaping technological obsolescence (O’Donnell 2007). 333
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Digital libraries and corpora: using and analyzing texts This section addresses issues related to the availability of online texts. Since the 2000s, we have seen the arrival of digital libraries conceived as digital text and image archives, as well as the creation of corpora, two notable accomplishments of medieval Iberian Studies. Obviously, their goals and levels of complexity are different, but both outcomes provide digital surrogates of textual primary sources. A digital library can take many shapes: some only digitize their holdings, some build a virtual collection harvesting from different locations and repositories, while others offer texts (with or without facsimile images).This last type is the one I shall consider. The frst digital library for Spanish texts was the well-known Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, a major digital and image archive created in 1999, at the Universidad de Alicante with private funding.Among its texts, listed by period,24 there are some Bibliotecas de autor devoted to single authors: Gonzalo de Berceo, Alfonso X The Wise, the Archpriest of Hita, Ramon Llull, Marquis of Santillana, Ausiàs March, or Joanot Martonell and his Tirant Lo Blanc.This library is a massive and impressive work, and it can serve as an example of the challenges that this type of resource faces. First, it is not systematic; some works have digital surrogates of old editions, while others do not. Second, BVMC is based in old editions, due to copyright problems, and texts are not always considered reliable (Faulhaber 2014: 26; Rojas Castro 2013: 32).Third, texts are encoded in XML-TEI, but on the website only the HTML version is available, a similar problem that we have already seen when dealing with web results in some databases. Finally, the texts—even if they no longer hold copyright––are not downloadable individually or in bulk. Connected to the BVMC, there is the Biblioteca Joan Lluís Vives, which offers hubs of information for medieval Catalan authors, many of them curated by renowned scholars in the feld, like Viçens Beltrán, Rafael Alemany, or Llúcia Martín. Also, for medieval Catalan poetry, Rialc launched at the end of the 1990s a pioneering database which offered a digital text of heterogeneous provenance (some of them belong to existing print editions, other are original transcriptions and editions).At an international level, and not focused exclusively on medieval, there are digital libraries with Spanish texts, such as Bibliotheca Augustana, which contains authors from the eleventh to the twentieth century, including—among medieval works—jarchas, Cantar de Mio Cid,Auto de los Reyes Magos, the Archpriest of Hita, Leonor López de Córdoba, and Columbus. In general, digital libraries can be highly varied, the quality of texts offered differs, and they do not provide functionalities beyond simple texts in HTML. Some persistent faws often encountered in digital libraries are: missing bibliographical information (year of creation, version, updates, clear editorial responsibilities); lack of documentation (both technical, about the use of standards, and philological details, such as the provenance of texts or the editorial criteria); uselessness of open repositories and open access to textual data; texts encoded in presentational languages (such as HTML) and not in semantic tagging, such as XML-TEI; the impossibility of downloading texts to perform text-analysis; and the absence of permanent identifers to cite and recover the online texts easily. Without doubt, in terms of digital libraries, the crown jewel for medieval Iberian studies is the Digital Library of Old Spanish Texts (DLOST), conceived by the HSMS and since 2015 directed by Francisco Gago Jover.This digital library offers a huge corpus of semi-paleographical transcriptions of specifc witnesses of medieval Spanish texts, among which there are prose texts from the scriptorium of Alfonso X, Navarro-Aragonese, biblical and poetic texts, the early versions of La Celestina, and the frst editions of Lazarillo de Tormes.This library also offers indexes by alphabetical order, frequencies, and concordances in KWIC format. One of the particularities of DLOST is precisely the high degree of codifcation of their transcription guide334
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lines that since the 1970s established a customized system.The texts are in open access and can be copied and pasted but are not individually or comprehensively downloadable, which would be ideal. In any case, DLOST, complemented now by the Old Spanish Textual Archive, has set the ground for many future developments in text reuse: natural language processing, such as lemmatization or named entity recognition, statistical analysis, text mining, topic modeling, stylometry, and codicological studies, to name only a few methods of potential interest (Gago Jover 2015: 10).25 DLOST is one of those examples that lies somewhere between a digital library and a textual corpus. Recently, large textual corpora and lexicographical works have been made available to medieval Iberian scholars, and they represent excellent resources for performing computational tasks related to natural language processing, for studying the history of language and its diachronic variance, and for conducting quantitative methods and macro-analysis across a whole body of works. Again, as in the case of digital libraries of online texts, there is a substantial variety of historical corpora. Among the most well-known examples for the study of medieval Spanish, there is the Corpus Diacrónico del Español (CORDE), sponsored by the Real Academia de la Lengua Española since the mid-1990s, as well as the Corpus del Español by Mark Davies and now the Corpus del Nuevo Diccionario Histórico del Español (Instituto Lapesa and RAE). For the study of Catalan, there are also some resources available: Corpus informatitzat del Català Antic (CICA), Corpus Digital de Textos Catalans Medievals (CODITECAM), and the in-between lexicographical project Diccionario del castellano del siglo XV en la Corona de Aragón (DiCCA-XV). Of special value are those corpora based on documentary collections, such as CHARTA: Corpus Hispánico y Americano en la Red, for the study of Spanish archival texts, and those devoted to the study of Peninsular Latin like Corpus Documentale Latinum Cataloniae and Corpus Documentale Latinum Gallaeciae.26 A different type of corpus is those that focus on a specifc topic or a genre, such as Corpus des Troubadours, Corpus of Hispanic Chivalric Romances, and the Celestina Early Editions (TeXTReD) by Ivy Cofs, and the ongoing Biblia Medieval Project (Enrique-Arias 2019). In an ideal world, a medieval Iberian scholar would be able to launch searches against each of these available corpora at once. Unfortunately, however, this is not possible due to the relatively isolated development of each corpus.Where collaboration does exist in these projects, it is the result of human interaction but not shared practices and standards.27 Particularly in the case of corpora, we need a more unifed roadmap to establish shared infrastructures, such as open repositories, formats, and markup of texts, as well as other efforts, such as medieval lemmatization initiatives for the medieval Romance languages.28 Recently, the quality of texts has also been questioned, and a very interesting initiative regarding CORDE has been published by Rodríguez and Octavio de Toledo (2017).They have elaborated on the “cordemáforo” (a combination of “CORDE” and “semáforo”, traffc lights in Spanish).The goal was to indicate the quality of the editions used in the corpus based on their philological reliability, with labels ranging from reliable (green) to relatively reliable (yellow) to not at all reliable (red) (Rodríguez and Octavio de Toledo 2017: 44).29 Among the other challenges of digital corpora, users greatly beneft from two features. First, that one can jump from the word in the concordance (KWIC) to the complete text; and, second, the fact that word searches are exportable in a structured format, such as a download option in a simple csv fle. Finally, emphasis must be placed on the preservation of texts in open repositories with persistent identifers. Having the texts freely available online is an excellent resource for pedagogical purposes and allows even lay users to explore texts with popular software for text analysis, such as Antconc or Voyant Tools, where, among other tasks, users can create their own concordances, alphabetical lists, and access to texts. 335
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Digital scholarly editions and medieval Iberian texts: editing the past Digital scholarly editing is another feld where medieval Iberian literary scholars have been active. In the past 20 years, textual scholarship has broadened its theoretical boundaries to include the digital dimension, trying to leave behind the instinctive conception of digital scholarly editions as reproductions of printed books. An impressive number of scholarly papers, monographs, guidelines, events, and training address the methodological and technical issues related to the modeling, creation, and implementation of digital editions. Pierazzo and Discroll (2016) pointedly ask: “Are we simply putting ‘old wine in new bottles,’ or are we doing something which has never been done—indeed, never been doable—before?” Fascinating questions on method and practice continue to emerge while a complete new conception of what digital editions even mean is still at stake.As the MLA has put it, a scholarly edition is a “much-larger-scale text archive” able to improve our textual research and to reimagine “the macro and micro scales” (Committee on Scholarly Editions 2016: 1–2). Editions have taken a new shape where centrality is shared by text and paratexts. It is not just the methodological execution of the (re)construction and presentation of the text which is rethought but also the role of all those surrounding materials traditionally connected with the primary source, used and consulted by the editor to undertake research, which now are added to this new editorial container and that were impossible to include in print formats. New ways of presenting critical apparatus, related materials, comments of any kind, collaboration and shared editorial responsibilities, textual analysis utilities, collation, and stemmatic tools, to name just a few, have appeared and are leading to new theoretical approaches to textual scholarship. Moreover, editorial interests in authorial intention have also evolved.The process of textual production and reception in the digital medium can be intertwined in a more complex and deeper way. As Lloret highlights, the digital edition conceived as archive represents “a regained dimension of medieval textual culture” (2014: 2) that brings back the centrality of the codex and the textual instability characteristic of medieval scribal culture. Traditionally, scholars have sided with different methods offering different outputs: the neolachmanian tradition with its critical editions, the documentary editing, the material bibliography, the critique génétique, or the social edition. The digital editorial paradigm is changing, and some procedures, like the markup process, blur the lines between different schools of textual criticism. For example, what is now called a paradigmatic edition, as proposed by Pierazzo (Pierazzo and Discroll 2016: 51–52), suggests a new methodological approach where a documentary perspective can coexist perfectly with neolachmanian criticism: we can offer a diplomatic edition of each witness at the same time that we reconstruct the “ideal” text. Different defnitions have been given for digital editions. For Peter Sahle,“a scholarly edition is the critical representation of historic documents”.30 Sahle also makes a very important distinction between a digitized edition and a digital edition.The frst stands for the mere publication in digital form and includes: digitized printed editions or digitization projects of libraries (even with the full and correct set of metadata), as well as “digital libraries, pedagogical resources, simple transcriptions or facsimiles” (Sahle 2008). Conversely, he notes that: a digital edition cannot be printed without a loss of information and/or functionality. The digital edition is guided by a different paradigm. If the paradigm of the edition is limited to the two-dimensional space of the “page” and to typographic means of information representation, then it is not a digital edition. (Sahle, 2008–2011) 336
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Many projects and notable digital editions have been published at an international level. However, some years ago, Dot Porter pointed out that “medievalists are using print editions more than they are using digital editions, and the use of digital editions has not grown over the past nine years, as it has, for example, for digital journals” (Porter 2013: 5). One of the questions behind this statement is whether digital resources are objects to be used rather than texts to be read.31 The above-mentioned transformation from the two-dimensional edition as a fnal product into a kind of textual archive allows for broadening precisely the contextual uses that go far beyond simple reading, leading to pedagogical and cultural explorations. Scholarly editing is one of the felds within DH that has been increasingly explored and systematized.We have guidelines, shared standards, and comprehensive catalogues of digital editions.32 The problem remains that, unlike print textual scholarship that has always offered a set of explicit rules for both method and presentation, digital textual scholarship does not have a clear paradigm either in the execution or the layout of the interface.Yet, some general lines have been formulated, like in the case of the MLA that since 2011 has been updating its Guidelines for Editors of Scholarly Editions. All criteria that exist for traditional scholarly editions apply to their digital counterparts, as well, with the goal of presenting a reliable text “established by accuracy, adequacy, appropriateness, consistency, explicitness” (Committee on Scholarly Editions 2011). In addition, from the digital perspective, the MLA takes into account at least four main requirements: use of standards, encoding of the text, use and manipulation of images, and digital documentation. However, this remains in the realm of theory; as Lloret put it, “No technical solution has yet been provided that fully represents texts as more than linguistic phenomena, as language attached to its material existence in the codex” (Lloret 2014: 3).This problem remains cumbersome as there seems to be a general practice to mark up texts, but there is a myriad of methods that may be used to carry out the infrastructure of the digital edition, which hinders the construction of a shared practice. Although the present-day panorama presents many contributions mainly written and devoted to texts in German, Italian, French, and English, Spanish textual scholarship has been scarce at the international level; and yet, especially in Spain, philology and textual editing, socalled crítica-textual, remain core areas of study. That said, a general overview of textual editing shows a richer panorama of digital scholarly editions of Iberian medieval works than ten years ago. Long-standing as well as new initiatives have emerged regarding medieval cartularies, such as the Becerro Galicano of San Millán de la Cogolla, which offers all texts encoded in XML-TEI available for download (2012), and the Cantigas de Santa María for singers, a project directed by Andrew Casson that provides a critical text, with the musical annotation and a set of resources for each of the songs. Stephen Parkinson has been also working on the Cantigas, publishing a print critical edition accompanied by an impressive database of materials. The song’s tradition is also enhanced by the rich database of the Galician-Portuguese Medieval Songs project, hosted at the Instituto de Estudos Medievais in Lisbon. In 2011, David Arbesú published a digital edition of La Fazienda de Ultramar that was structured folio by folio with a paleographical transcription and built with Weebly. In reference to the Catalan textual tradition, The Augsburg Web Edition of Llull’s Electoral Writings is an initiative at the University of Augsburg that offers a layout divided into iframes: facsimile image, transcription, comments, as well as English, German, French, and Catalan translations; and The Last Song of the Troubadours, directed by Anna Alberni, issues a collection of Occitan and Catalan lyrical texts, with a particular editorial layout accompanied by facsimile images, metadata information with collection identifcation, metric pattern and folios, the edited text, plus a critical apparatus, and an additional section for comments and notes. In some cases, digital editions have a hybrid nature; they are at once scholarly editions and corpora. This is the case with the Electronic Corpus of the 15th Castilian Cancionero Manuscript, 337
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directed by Dorothy Severin and built upon editorial work initiated by Brian Dutton in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Bordalejo et al. 2014). It is an ambitious enterprise that, as explained on the website, deals with “over 4000 original poems in manuscript sources and approximately 150 manuscript witnesses”.The most interesting approach offered by this project consists of records of extensive textual transmission, that is published with transcriptions and images, and the collation of witnesses managed with Collate, a specialized software to create phylogenetic stemmata. A team headed by Matthew Bailey took advantage of one of the canonical texts with the least history of transmission, the Cantar de Mio Cid, and published an online digital scholarly edition of it.The site offers the Castilian text in a normative and a paleographic transcription of the only extant codex, as well as an English translation.The text is also accompanied by audio content, including the listing of the entire poem with or without subtitles; the only problem is that some of the web content uses an old version of a Quicktime plugin, which forces users to seek adjustments in their browser.This project also has excellent images in different resolutions and the possibility of manipulating and downloading the information. There is detailed documentation about the technologies used, even if it lacks the particulars on text encoding. It does not offer, however, the possibility to download the paleographic, normalized, or English translation texts directly. There are two more digital editing projects that adopt interesting digital workfows which enhance the notion of scholarly editing.The frst is 7 Partidas Digital, directed by José Manuel Fradejas Ruedas. The project is still in progress, and so far it has a blog in Hypotheses (Open Edition), where the team offers basic documentation (such as description of XML-TEI encoding), a narrative about editorial methodology, a section for experiments on stylometric analysis, related resources, such as bibliography (gathered with Zotero), and a list of witnesses. All the textual data are stored on Github, the open repository, where they share the XML encoded texts and, in plain text, the format most suitable for their stylometric analysis. Each of these sections on GitHub has a DOI, assigned and published by Zenodo.33 In this way all scholarly work remains citable and organized during the entire editorial workfow. The second case concerns one of the few crowdsourcing editing initiatives in Spanish studies in general, the Estoria de Espanna Digital, a project run at the University of Birmingham directed by Aengus Ward. Recently, Ward’s team launched a collaborative initiative under the label Transcribe Estoria, inviting the audience to transcribe the text of a high-resolution image of a medieval Castilian codex (Biblioteca Nacional de España, MS 12837). For a brief period (ten weeks) they proposed to teach fourteenth-century gothic paleography and support collaborators through their blog and social media. These two initiatives are outstanding, the frst for its digital methodology and the second for its innovative approach to collaborative editing.
Other digital trends One could certainly go further and look through other felds and languages connected to Iberian Studies,34 but for the sake of brevity I will only mention some remarkable initiatives within the medieval Iberian realms of the GIS (Geographic Information System), scribal scripts, and music. GIS is one of the most popular technologies used in DH.When approaching mapping techniques from the past, scholars do not deal only with geographical or spatial data, they also deal with temporal data.The problem of analyzing and visualizing space and time is the lack of gazetteers, thesauri, or historical atlases that could be linked and used as reference. Problems with ancient and medieval names can range from misspellings in texts, imagined places, changes of 338
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name, to places that no longer exist.To fll this gap, projects like Pelagios Commons are providing open data methods to link and map historical places. One of these resources created by the Pelagios network is Recogito, an online platform for collaborative document annotation where users can edit text, create gazetteers, and link places with geographical coordinates. In the case of medieval Iberia, this platform was used to create a place-name gazetteer using the documents of the chancellery of Alfonso X published by the HSMS. The two main goals were to extend Pelagios to medieval Iberian places and to explore the possibilities of automatic geographical entities extraction (del Rio 2016). Another interesting project using mapping techniques and network analysis is Spiritual Landscapes, which focuses on the study of medieval religiosity in the Iberian kingdoms (twelfth to sixteenth) through the different forms and places of women’s religiosity. They have mapped male and female orders in different peninsular areas (Portugal, Catalonia, Andalusia); they have situated nunneries in the urban environment and applied network analysis to visualize social relations in medieval spiritual movements, as well as to explore traces of dissent. Mapping has been also adopted by the TrobEu project, which uses ArcGIS to visualize the circulation of the troubadour lyric through the courts and manuscripts with particular attention to the role played by the Crown of Aragon.35 In recent years, technologies for the study of medieval script have been developed under the umbrella of what is now called Digital Paleography.There have been breakthroughs for hyperspectral image analysis,36 and even identifcation of scribal hands for medieval writers (Birnbaum et al. 2017). Computing techniques are also applied to the study of Visigothic script (eighth to thirteenth century) and its regional variants, led by Ainoa Castro Correa. Her VisigothicPal project is part of the DigiPal framework, directed by Peter A. Stokes, and it offers a wealth of materials for research and teaching. As for medieval music, there have been projects consecrated to annotation (Music Encoding Initiative), Optical Music Recognition, and, obviously, to manuscript digitization, such as Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM), which hosts some medieval Iberian manuscripts with musical annotation. But what is most surprising is when music is blended with other subjects. For example, a 2015 team from the University of Seville (Rafael Suárez and others) merges architecture, liturgy, and music by reconstructing Romanesque spaces from the twelfth century and its physical acoustic conditions of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela which were concealed by Baroque architectural interventions.This is an initiative that recovers and protects an “intangible heritage” (Bamford and Francomano 2018: 34–35). All these initiatives are but a few samples of the many different disciplines that approach the Iberian Middle Ages through the application of computer technologies.
Conclusion Returning to some of the questions posed at the very beginning of this chapter, I would like to recapitulate some ideas. My frst concern deals with the approach adopted here to explore the relationship between the digital humanities and medieval Iberian Studies. This very broad perspective has considered basically only research outputs, instead of the specifc hermeneutics of the enterprise, and has insisted—by professional default—mostly on literary and linguistic projects. The reason behind this decision was the fact that a general overview on projects would give a better idea of the research interests and needs in Medieval Studies. In addition, a narrative about outcomes leads inevitably to digital methodological and technical discussions. The second question regards the issue of the heterogeneity of scholarly traditions and interests both in medieval Iberian Studies and digital humanities, which I have generally avoided.This is not only due to the need for brevity, but it also arises from the fact that—in the feld of digital 339
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scholarship—in many cases scholarly efforts have been simultaneously collaborative on a global scale. My third concern is with diversity and partiality.Although my purpose is to survey digital Iberian medievalism, the richness of projects, as well as the diversity of cultural and literary topics and medieval languages, prevent the formulation of any comprehensive account of the feld. The frst section of this chapter draws on the fact that there have indeed been digital Iberian medievalists since the beginning of the 1970s. Interests were aligned with the digital fow of the period, using mainly applications involving textual sources and focusing on the creation of concordances, lexicographical tools, and employing statistical analysis for the study of language and style.The brief historical account provided has insisted on facts and events that were already well known. My intention has been to underscore some key moments and fgures that represent signifcant steps forward in the still-to-be-written history of digital Iberian medievalism. Looking back, one can see the long-standing problems discussed up to the present, problems that have been met with the development of new technology and software, as in the case of text analysis.The methods of the past now seem overwhelmingly fraught, as those that we use today will doubtless seem to future scholars who will look back and see us, for instance, manually encoding our digital editions. Three major sections followed the historical survey of digital applications. First, issues concerning fndability, for which I dealt with the digitization of holdings of physical libraries and bibliographic databases. Second, the nature of online texts, in which I focused on existing corpora and digital libraries. Third, I examined digital editions of medieval texts. This distinction draws on an analogy with the traditional research workfow: access to primary sources leads to digitization, analog fnding aids to online catalogues, bibliography lists to bibliographical databases; close reading and exegetical analysis of texts gave rise to new digital research methods; reading and use of traditional and trustful scholarly editions resulted in new digital artifacts.The remaining part of this chapter reviewed other digital initiatives using different techniques, like the use of GIS, which helps to round up the general overview of the many shapes that Iberian digital medievalism is taking.
Notes 1 Some of the recent classic readings are Schreibman et al. 2016, and Terras et al. 2013. For DH and the Spanish-speaking community, see: Galina 2014, and Del Rio 2014.The well-known site https://wha tisdigitalhumanities.com/ contains 817 defnitions retrieved from DH Day (2009–2014). 2 See for example MLA’s Committee on Information Technology (2012); and, for the Spanish-speaking community, see Galina 2016. 3 For the Medieval Academy of America Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Prize, see www .medievalacademy.org/page/DHPrize 4 Some of these venues are: Digital Medievalist Journal, Digital Philology, Digital Scriptum, and the special issue of Speculum (2017) coordinated by Birnbaum, Bonde, and Kestemont. 5 Some signifcant Digital Humanities journals are: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Literary and Linguistic Computing, or Digital Humanities Quarterly. 6 Hockey registers the frst one-off event in 1964, the conference of Literary Data Processing, organized by IBM; in 1970 started the regular series of events on literary and linguistic computing (Hockey 2004: 6–7). As for medievalists, Dot Porter (2013) indicates that the frst gathering of medievalists dealing with computing was at Kalamazoo in 1971 with a session called “The Medievalist and the Computer”. 7 For the sake of brevity, I can’t give all publication details mentioned here; however, most of them can be found in Sáez-Godoy 1980. 8 For the HSMS’ history see www.hispanicseminary.org/index-en.htm. For other accounts, see Nitti’s interview (Nyhan et al. 2016: 144), Faulhaber (2016: 76) or Gago Jover (2015: 6–8). 9 For a list of all the editions of the Manual, see Gago Jover 2015.
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Digital humanities 10 Philobiblon is intended to fll a still-existing gap within the feld of manuscript and bibliographical studies, which is the creation of a complete digital union catalog of all texts, manuscripts, early printed books, and secondary bibliography for the study of the vernacular Romance cultures of medieval Spain. It currently registers more than 340,000 records (Faulhaber 2016: 75). 11 The sessions that Nitti coordinated were “Computer applications in Medieval Research III:Advanced Techniques” (1981), “The Medievalist and the Computer II: Intermediate Techniques” (1982), and “Choosing and using a micro computer with a demonstration of one of the most cost-effective micro computers systems currently available” (1983). All printed programs of the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo are available in the Congress archive: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu /medieval_cong_archive/ 12 The Text Encoding Initiative is a consortium that has developed a standard for the representation and encoding of any kind of digital texts. Since 1994, it publishes the TEI Guidelines, which are periodically updated on their site: https://tei-c.org/ 13 For a description of the CD content, see Marcos-Marín and Faulhaber (1992: 1011). 14 See, also, the many contributions of José Luís Lucía Megías, the last of which in González and Bermúdez Sabel 2018. 15 See Rojas Castro 2013: 40–44 for a brief history of the term. 16 See María Morrás (2019) for a detailed account of online catalogues, as well as the list of digital resources in pages 427–459. 17 All these projects are hosted at the Narpan project website: https://narpan.net/. For some of them, see the different contributions in the special issue of Digital Philology, vol. 3, num. 1, Spring 2014. 18 The different databases can be found at: https://clarisel.unizar.es/ 19 For multiple initiatives undertaken at the Centro Ramón Piñeiro, see www.cirp.es/w3/bdo/ 20 The LINHD website is available at: http://linhd.uned.es/investigacion/ 21 Some open repositories to publish research activity are Zenodo, HC Commons,Acata Académica, and to store code, GitHub. As for the concept of minimal computing, I suggest visiting the website of the GO:DH group https://go-dh.github.io/mincomp 22 Susan Brown defnes interoperability as: “the ability to share data, to allow it to be used for multiple purposes by different programs and within different environments, and to meet the diverse research interests of collaborators” (Brown 2016: 50). 23 In the case of Philobiblion, the digital roadmap seeks “to move PhiloBiblon from its proprietary database software to MySQL, optimized for compatibility with semantic web standards, i.e., RDF, LOD, and associated ontologies” (Faulhaber 2016: 93). 24 Some medieval authors can be found here: www.cervantesvirtual.com/portales/literatura/autores_fu ndamentales/#siglo_11 25 See, for example, the experimental uses in stylometry by Fradejas Rueda (2019) using texts from Juan Manuel, the Alphonsine Scriptorium, and Pero López de Ayala. 26 For the sake of brevity, see Enrique-Arias 2019: 350–51 for references and questions regarding corpora and their typologies. 27 See an example of collaboration among Biblia Medieval project, the Fazienda de Ultramar edition, DLOST, and Philobibliom (Enrique-Arias 2019: 346, n. 6). 28 Some of the projects that offer lemmatized texts are Corpus del Nuevo Diccionario Histórico, Biblia Medieval, Corpus del Español, DLOST. 29 The csv data can be downloaded from: www.scriptumdigital.org/documents/Octavio-Molina-Base-d e-datos-Scriptum.xlsx 30 See the defnition here: www.digitale-edition.de/vlet-about.html, and, for a more recent debate, see Sahle’s contribution in Pierazzo and Discroll 2016: 19–40. 31 See Krista Stinne Greve Rasmussen’s contribution “Reading or Using a Digital Edition? Reader Roles in Scholarly Editions” in Pierazzo and Discroll (2016: 119–133). 32 There are currently two main catalogues of digital editions: Franzini et al. (2016–), and Sahle (2008–). For Guidelines, see: Sahle et al. 2014, and the MLA 2016. 33 Zenodo is an open-access repository that allows the deposit of datasets and any digital research outcome assigning it a DOI. It is available at: https://zenodo.org/ 34 Many interesting contributions, dealing with different felds, have been published in González and Bérmudez Sabel 2018. 35 A description of the mapping goals is available at: www.trob-eu.net/ca/credits-i-criteris.html
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Susanna Allés-Torrent 36 An application of this technique was performed by Montaner Frutos 2009 retrieving some images and text hidden in the only extant codex of Cantar de Mio Cid.
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Webography All the following links were last accessed 21 May 2020. Base de datos da Lírica Profana Galego-Portuguesa (MedDB). Dir. Mercedes Brea and Pilar Lorenzo Gradín. Version 3.6.1. Centro Ramón Piñeiro. www.cirp.gal/meddb Becerro Galicano Digital. Ed. David Peterson and U. del País Vasco, 2013. www.ehu.eus.galicano Biblioteca Digital del Patrimonio Iberoamericano. www.iberoamericadigital.net Biblioteca Hispanica. Dir. Ulrich Harsch and Bibliotheca Augustana, 1996. www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/ augustana.html#hi Biblioteca Digital Hispánica. bibliotecadigitalhispanica.bne.es Biblioteca Virtual Joan Lluís Vives. www.lluisvives.com
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Susanna Allés-Torrent Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. www.cervantesvirtual.com Cantar de Mio Cid. Ed. Matthew Bailey. U of Texas at Austin miocid.wlu.edu Cantigas de Santa Maria for Singers. Ed.Andrew D. Casson, 2019. www.cantigasdesantamaria.com Clarisel. Bases de Datos Bibliográfcas. Dir. Juan Manuel Cacho Blecua and María Jesús Lacarra. U de Zaragoza. https://clarisel.unizar.es Corpus des Troubadours. Dir.Vicenç Beltran and Tomàs Martínez. IEC-UAI, 2009. https://trobadors.iec.cat Corpus diacrónico del español (CORDE). RAE. http://corpus.rae.es/cordenet.html Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM). U of Oxford. www.diamm.ac.uk Digital Library of Old Spanish Texts (DLOST). Dir. Francisco Gago Jover. Hispanic Seminar of Medival Studies. 2011. www.hispanicseminary.org/textconc-es.htm Electronic corpus of the Fifteenth-Century Castilian Cancionero Manuscript. Dir. Dorothy Severin. U. of Liverpool, 2007. https://cancionerovirtual.liv.ac.uk Estoria de Espanna Digital. Ed.Aengus Ward. U of Birmingham, 2016. https://blog.bham.ac.uk/estoriadigital Galician-Portuguese Medieval Songs. Coord. Graça Videira Lopes. Instituto de Estudos Medievais, 2011–2012. https://cantigas.fcsh.unl.pt/index.asp La fazienda de Ultramar. Ed. David Arbesú, 2011. www.lafaziendadeultramar.com Narpan.net. Espai de Literatura i Cultura Medieval. Coord. Sadurní Martí and Miriam Cabré, UAB, UB, U de Girona, 2003. https://narpan.net/index.php Old Spanish Textual Archive (Beta Version). Eds. Francisco Gago Jover and Javier Pueyo Mena. HSM, 2020. http://oldspanishtextualarchive.org/osta/osta.php Philobiblon. Dir. Charles Faulhaber. University of California Berkeley, 1997. https://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ philobiblon/ Portal CHTAC. Catálogo Hipertextual de Traducciones Anónimas al Castellano. Dir. Elisa Borsari. Madrid-Stein: More than Books. www.catalogomedieval.com Proyecto Boscán. Catálogo de las Traducciones Españolas de Obras Italianas (hasta 1939). Dir. María de las Nieves Muñiz Muñiz. U de Barcelona, 2002. www.ub.edu/boscan Recogito. Pelagios Network. https://recogito.pelagios.org RIALC. Repertorio informatizzato dell’antica letteratura catalana. Coord. Costanzo Di Girolamo. U di Napoli Federico II, 2000. www.rialc.unina.it Sciència.cat. Coord. Lluís Cifuentes and Antònia Carré. U de Barcelona, 2006. www.sciencia.cat 7 Partidas Digital. Edición crítica digital de las Siete Partidas. Ed. José Manuel Fradejas Rueda. U de Valladolid. 2017. https://7partidas.hypotheses.org Spiritual Landscapes. Dir. Blanca Garí and Núria Jornet. U de Barcelona, 2016. www.ub.edu/proyectopaisajes /index.php TeXTReD. Portal de recursos digitales hispánicos. Dir. Ivy Corfs, U Wisconsin-Madison, 2015. https://textred .spanport.lss.wisc.edu/index.html The Augsburg Web Edition of Llull’s Electoral Writings. Dir. M. Drton, et al. U Augsburg, 2016. www.math.uni -augsburg.de/htdocs/emeriti/pukelsheim/llull The Cántigas de Santa María Database. Dir. Stephen Parkinson. Centre for the Study of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, Oxford. http://csm.mml.ox.ac.uk The Last Song of the Troubadours. Dir.Anna Alberni. U de Barcelona, 2013. www.lastsongtroubadours.eu Translat. Base de dades de traduccions al català medieval (1300–1500). U Autònoma de Barcelona. www.narpan .net/translat-db.html TrobEu.Troubadours and European Identity. Dir. Miriam Cabré. U de Girona. 2015. www.trob-eu.net VisigothicPal. Dir.Ainoa Castro Correa, London, 2015–2017. https://visigothicpal.com
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22 THE GALICIAN-PORTUGUESE CANTIGAS, THE HISTORY OF EMOTION, AND LYRIC AS GENRE Henry Berlin
Em vós, ai meu espelho, eu nom me veerei. Pero Gonçalves de Portocarreiro,“Par Deus, coitada vivo”
Introduction: form and emotion in the parallelistic cantigas If the Portuguese literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance is characterized by an “anxiety of form”, nowhere is this clearer than in the Galician-Portuguese cantigas.1 These approximately 1,680 songs, composed ca. 1200–1350, have traditionally been divided into three genres: the female-voiced cantiga de amigo, male-voiced cantiga de amor, and satirical cantiga de escárnio e maldizer. This division is taken from the fragmentary Arte de Trovar found in the Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional; although the mid-fourteenth-century Arte is later than the texts it describes, manuscript evidence suggests that its tripartite genre division was already established among the troubadours by the second half of the thirteenth century (Oliveira,“A Galiza” 24–25).2 Indeed, the cantigas themselves evince not just consciousness but a playful self-consciousness about both their own genres and their most recurrent formal features (these latter being the principal subject-matter of the Arte’s surviving fragments). In some later cantigas de amor, such as Dinis’s well-known “Proençaes soem mui bem trobar” (47), this self-consciousness revolves around their inheritance from the Occitan tradition,3 and it is now the most common critical view that the cantigas de amor draw heavily on Occitan models, whereas the cantigas de amigo are largely autochthonous (Dias 100 and 104).These latter, especially those referred to as parallelistic, are the most formally arresting poems of the entire corpus, their poetics dominated by a kaleidoscopic array of techniques of repetition. And from the mid-thirteenth century on, the refective relationship between the cantigas de amor and de amigo—which, despite their different voicings, were composed by the same (male) authors—allowed for playful poetic experimentation that drew the cantigas de amor into a formal and thematic dialogue foreign to the Languedoc. In inverting the dramatic scenario of the cantigas de amor, the cantigas de amigo often slyly subvert, and sometimes openly mock, the poetic conventions of the imported genre.The anxiety of form in some Galician-Portuguese lyrics gives rise, one might say, to nervous laughter.
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The formal features of the parallelistic cantigas de amigo, and their interaction with a particular discourse of emotion, are exemplifed by the following brief cantiga, which has been attributed to both Alfonso X of Castile (r. 1252–1284) and Sancho I of Portugal (r. 1185–1211):4 Ai eu coitada, como vivo em gram cuidado por meu amigo que hei alongado; muito me tarda o meu amigo na Guarda. Ai eu coitada, como vivo em gram desejo por meu amigo que tarda e nom vejo; muito me tarda o meu amigo na Guarda. (Afonso X 39) Oh poor me, how I’m living in great sorrow For my friend, who’s far away from me. My friend is tarrying Very long in Guarda. Oh poor me, how I live with great yearning For my friend who’s tarrying and I can’t see. My friend is tarrying Very long in Guarda. (195)5 In the parallelistic cantigas, lines are paired across stanzas with small fnal variations, as in lines one and fve and two and six, above.6 There is some debate as to whether these lexical variations must be semantically synonymous; while earlier generations of critics tended to see the parallelistic cantigas as largely static, many, beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, have agreed with Eugenio Asensio’s view that they stage a subtle interplay between repetition and variation in which techniques of repetition nevertheless predominate (77). In “Ai eu coitada”, for example, in addition to the parallelistic verse structure, we encounter the annominatio (repetition of words with the same root) of coitada/cuidado in the frst line, and the heavily alliterative cluster “Muito me tarda / o meu amigo” in the refrain.7 Stephen Reckert has adduced a series of examples in which exact repetition of words produces semantic variation (Do Cancioneiro 33–58), and Bruce W.Wardropper has noted that such variation involves “intense emotional and cognitional development” on the part of the poem’s speaker (3).8 The emotional situation of “Ai eu coitada” is, like its verse structure, archetypical: a girl pines for her absent lover. And, following the suggestions of Reckert and Wardropper, we may indeed ask ourselves whether it is the same to live in cuidado and desejo (“sorrow” and “yearning” in Cohen’s translation). Coita (“sorrow” or “care”) has been identifed as the Galician-Portuguese counterpart to Occitan joi (Asensio108), the root emotion and poetic matrix of the cantigas de amor and de amigo.9 Yet it is broader than the “sorrowful desire” that might be implied by its parallel placement with desejo, in which the emotional and dramatic scenarios of the cantigas de amigo are fused: Ai madr’, o que bem queria foi-s’ora daqui sa via; desejá-lo-ei. (Paio Calvo 2, 1–3) 346
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Oh mother, the one I loved Went away from here now; I’ll be longing for him. (167) As this cantiga’s concise refrain reveals, desejo implies distance in the cantigas de amigo, whereas coita results from any obstacle to a lover’s desire, up to and including blunt rejection on the part of the object of that desire.The second strophe of “Ai eu coitada”—among the most compact of the parallelistic cantigas— is thus more precise than the frst and can plausibly be read as a development rather than a static repetition. Such a reading is nevertheless complicated by the refrain, which has already revealed any new information contained in the speaker’s reference to her desejo. In fact, it has revealed more information, since it reports her lover’s whereabouts: either the city of Guarda, in Portugal’s Beira Alta region, or, reading “guarda”, serving in a military guard corps (in either case, military service would be the cause of his absence). Repetition here is not purely iterative, but neither is it deployed in service of variation (as in “variations on a theme”): it is cognate with a form of poetic invention that knowingly revels in rhythmic and thematic convention. Similarly, the repetitive invocation of a focused emotional palette creates a heightened awareness of the formal expression of what is in reality a complex set of emotional states and circumstances.10
Form or emotion: troubadour subjectivity and modern conceptions of the lyric It is this foregrounding of poetic form, in its association with musicality, that has led many critics to celebrate the cantigas de amigo as outstanding achievements of lyric poetry, “fores del lirismo temprano” (Asensio 9), “la vena legítima del lirismo gallego, lo único verdaderamente poético que los Cancioneros ofrecen” (cited in Asensio, 10).Yet such celebrations sit uneasily alongside a subjective model of the lyric grounded in the frst-person expression of emotion:“La cantiga de amigo […] se inclina a un subjetivismo, lirismo concentrado, casi emancipado de las cosas exteriores” (Asensio 20).11 In this latter reading, the cantigas’ “subjectivism” is tied to a corresponding absence of images (Asensio 69; cf. Hart, En maneira 22–23 on the absence of images in the cantigas de amor).What is revealed in this tension between what could be called formalist and subjectivist readings of the cantigas is a tension inherent to post-Romantic theories of the lyric as such.12 On the one hand, it was during the romantic period that the lyric came to be considered one of three fundamental poetic genres:“Distinguished by its mode of enunciation, where the poet speaks in propria persona, lyric becomes the subjective form, with drama and epic as alternately the objective and the mixed, depending on the theorist” (Culler, “Lyric, History, and Genre” 66).This model of the lyric as subjective self-expression would eventually develop into the more capacious notion of the lyric poem as dramatic monologue (that is, not necessarily expressive of the poet’s own subjective experience), an apparently comfortable ft for the gender ventriloquism of the cantigas de amigo in particular.13 Recently, even this latter model, although still very common in pedagogy, has been heavily criticized by North American poetics scholars (Adams et al. 4–5). In fact, beginning as early as the 1940s and intensifying in the 1960s and 1970s, scholars of medieval poetics challenged the applicability of the Romantic, subjective model of lyric to the broad troubadour tradition: Intent on showing that the subject of poetry, with its accompanying voice, is not the poet but the poem itself, they [i.e., Robert Guiette, Roger Dragonetti, and Paul Zumthor] carefully identifed what rhetorical conventions helped create a song and how the marker for a singer, the infamous “lyric I”, could instead be understood as a 347
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je sans référant […] a poetic voice without reference to a personal poet, an “I” whose subjectivity is formed by the poem, for the poem. (Matthews 301) During the same period, but approaching poetry from the feld of structural linguistics rather than philology, Roman Jakobson—who was fascinated by Martim Codax’s cantigas de amigo, “verbal jewels” that he found “enthralling” (169)—described what he called a “poetry of grammar”, noting that language distinguishes between “lexical” or “material” concepts, on the one hand, and “grammatical” or “relational” ones, on the other. The latter tend to be dominant in poetry, “the most formalized manifestation of language” (“Poetry of Grammar” 89), and this is especially true in poetry (such as the parallelistic cantigas) lacking images (“Poetry of Grammar” 93). In line with the structuralist notion of poetic subjectivity, pronouns play an outsized role in Jakobson’s description because they,“in contradistinction to all other autonomous words, are purely grammatical, relational units” (“Poetry of Grammar” 95). In this way, the highly repetitive and, apparently, highly conventional (that is, dominated by shared and relatively intact tropes) poetry of the troubadours, in western Iberia and beyond, evinces their freedom from a “romantic need for original self-expression”, a poetic impulse that “is not an inspired response to the phenomenon of love but rather a compelling desire to fnd topics to just sing” (Matthews 302). This view, and particularly Jakobson’s articulation thereof, has been sharply criticized by one of the foremost cantigas scholars, Giuseppe Tavani, who argues that in the cantigas de amigo in particular, [I]t is obvious that iteration cannot be considered a pertinent feature […] [I]n parallelistic texts—or, at least, in some parallelistic texts—iterated features are not only not in fact privileged elements of the poetic texture, but do not even have the value of specifying pertinence and serve, at most, as a simple “neutral” support of the truly poetic form or as a musical “key”, as a general indication of the “tone” in which the text should be read. (34–35) For Tavani, then, the repetitive structures of the parallelistic cantigas are related to the musical interpretation of the text but not to textual hermeneutics or to the “truly poetic”, although, as he demonstrates with great richness and complexity, metrical rhythm itself is a key feature of the expression of “literary-linguistic” meaning (68). In this way, the formal features of the poetic text remain central to semantics, but their repetition is subordinated to the needs of (non-semantic?) musical expression. Convention and repetition would be “lyrical”, then, only in its most literally musical sense, and, paradoxically for a verbal form, would share the abstraction of music as a medium for the communication of emotion.Yet, as Judith A. Peraino has argued, troubadour music also frustrates our expectations for the aesthetic expression of emotion: We expect music to be in some way mimetic of the emotions expressed in words, either through iconic melodic gestures linked to words (“word painting”), or through a system of affective associations attached to certain modes (such as major and minor) or chord progressions (such as the twelve-bar blues). But medieval love songs do not show any systematic affective associations with modes, fnals, intervals, or pitch collections. In the Middle Ages, the relationship between music and words often seems purely structural […] Moreover, the lyrics of medieval love songs are notoriously moody—stanzas of praise follow those of blame, self-deprecation alternates with 348
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boasting—yet the music is most often strophic, repeating the same melody from one stanza to the next. (3–4) Thus, although troubadour song is replete with abstract, emotional vocabulary, the repetition and convention of both its words and its music clash with romantic notions of the lyric—yet it appears to be these very formal qualities that appeal to modern critics as lyric. Faced with this contradiction, we may be tempted to simply drop the question of genre altogether—a path recommended by several eminent critics14—yet if we agree with Jonathan Culler that generic categories “help relate a work to others and activate aspects of works that make them rich, dynamic, and revealing” (“Lyric, History, and Genre” 66), it behooves us to explore just what is revealed by the inclusion of those most formal of troubadour songs, the cantigas de amigo, in the category of lyric.
Conventionality, sincerity, and the history of emotion The very conventionality of troubadour poetry is a matter of dispute, and especially so in the case of the Galician-Portuguese corpus. In a 1974 review of Paul Zumthor’s Essai de poétique médiévale, Peter Haidu identifed not the mere existence of conventions as distinctive of medieval poetics, but rather a dominant conventionality in which “[e]ven when an element is newly introduced into the domain of literature, it is immediately ‘conventionalized,’ fctitiously treated as a pre-existing convention” (4). Haidu was one of several medievalists writing in the wake of Zumthor who sought to add nuance to the structuralist take on medieval literary subjectivity, carving out a place for the “self ” that was within subjectivity but not identical to the subject, so that careful readers could detect self-awareness, and not just an entirely depersonalized poetic subjectivity, in medieval song (Peraino 21).15 Yet, drawing a parallel with Neoplatonism, Haidu also insisted that each instance of medieval lyric merely restated general conventions, an “idealist” notion of conventionality criticized by Julian Weiss in the particular case of the cantigas de amor for fattening readings of what is actually a complex and often contradictory deployment of tropes in a way that masks “the ideological force that fction exerts […] in shaping the social world” (230). Indeed, as Culler has recently argued, lyric is an important mode of “the articulation […] of what become shared structures of feeling, or the social imaginary” (Theory 27). This mode of articulation is profoundly dialectical, as evident, for example, in Dinis’s “Proençaes soem mui bem trobar”, whose frst stanza sets forth an implicit antithesis of Provençal joi and Galician-Portuguese coita:16 Proençaes soem mui bem trobar e dizem eles que é com amor; mais os que trobam no tempo da for e nom em outro, sei eu bem que nom ham tam gram coita no seu coraçom qual m’eu por mia senhor vejo levar. (Dinis 47, 1–6) The Provençal poets sing well, and they say they do it with love, but poets who do their singing only in the time of fowers don’t know the pain my heart 349
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endures because of my lady. (Trans. Richard Zenith) Here, Dinis decries a conventional aspect of Provençal poetry, the association of springtime and song, as evidence of insincerity, asserting the comparative depth and persistence of his own coita. Yet, as Gregory B. Stone has argued, the very attempt to distinguish true from false lovers in song is a troubadour convention:“What makes the troubadour’s task impossible is that there is absolutely no objective distinction between the true and false languages of love: the troubadour’s I always sounds just exactly like them, just exactly like his rivals” (6).17 Dinis addresses this problem by locating a distinguishing factor outside of language, the time (or season) of singing, which is emphasized in the poem’s fnal stanza:18 Ca os que trobam e que s’alegrar vam eno tempo que tem a color a frol consig’e, tanto que se for aquel tempo, log’em trobar razom nom ham, nem vivem [em] qual perdiçom hoj’eu vivo, que pois m’há de matar. (47, 13–18) Those who rejoice and make poems when the fower is full with color and, once the season is over, forget their calling as poets, don’t know the hell I am living, this love that keeps on killing. (Trans. Richard Zenith) In Dinis’s account, the Provençal poets are not necessarily insincere in the emotions they feel, but rather in their poetic expression thereof: the spring’s colorful fowers make them feel joy, which inspires their poetry, but the poetic impulse fades along with the fowers’ color. Dinis subtly associates the inspiring color of the fowers with the rhetorical colores that embellish a poem.19 Yet his own comparative claim to sincerity, that (unlike the Provençals) he is relentlessly dying of love, had already been mocked as a boastful commonplace decades earlier by Pero Garcia Burgalês, a poet associated with Alfonso X’s literary circle (Weiss 239).20 Thus, the comparison Dinis draws with the Provençal poets, the juxtaposition of their seasonal joy with his own mortal suffering, evinces a self-awareness in which the poetic self in question is nevertheless already, and not without irony, dissolved into a foregoing tradition. It is unlikely that Dinis, who frequently looked to earlier Galician-Portuguese poets for inspiration, was unaware (or expected his audience to be unaware) of the fimsiness of the evidence chosen to sustain his claim of sincerity. As one of the preeminent scholars of the history of emotion, Barbara H. Rosenwein, has recently reminded us, sincerity is itself historically contingent as a criterion of emotion (Generations 6), and we often take to be sincere emotions expressed through formulaic phrases such as “I love you” (Generations 125–27). In an earlier book, Rosenwein examined this historiographic problem in its relation to literary genre, noting that a genre’s rules and expectations “themselves were ‘social products’—elaborated by people under certain conditions and with certain goals in mind—and they could be drawn upon and manipulated with some freedom” (Communities 27). In this sense, Rosenwein echoes Jauss,Weiss, and Culler in concluding that our awareness, as literary scholars and historians, of genres and their commonplaces should not lead us to understand the highly formalized expression of emotion in the cantigas and other medieval literature as “unreal” in relation to historical circumstances. 350
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The performance of emotion: questions of gender and music The question of the “reality” of emotions, both as part of the historical record and as a psychological phenomenon as such, again crosses paths with those of textuality and the nature of lyric in the concept of performance. Rosenwein has recently argued, in her reading of the consensus in contemporary psychological research on the emotions, that performance is an unsuitable basis on which to judge emotional “reality”: Many historians of emotions accept […] a distinction between “real” and “expressed” emotions, preferring to speak of the “performance” of emotions.They thereby (sometimes, perhaps, unintentionally) distance themselves from the claim that these are the same as “felt” emotions. But “performed” emotions are also felt. (Generations 5)21 In the specifc case of the cantigas de amigo, the question of performance is two-fold. There is, frst of all, what could be termed the “dramatic” question of the masculine performance of feminine voice and feeling.22 Second, there is the question of the musical performance of the cantigas, which complicates the frst question in that it is likely that female performers were common public interpreters of the cantigas. Furthermore, the surviving musical notation for Martim Codax’s cantigas de amigo calls into question the purely textual impression they give of highly distilled repetition. Does an oral tradition of woman’s song underlie the later, male-composed cantigas, and were these latter performed by female singers and musicians? Alan Deyermond has concluded that the parallelistic cantigas are reworkings of earlier songs by women, that is, that they are informed by an earlier tradition but do not incorporate it directly (45; cf. 47 and 49). Although this “reworking” has been described by Ana Paula Ferreira as “an ideologically invested, male appropriation of female voice that functioned to support the status quo by confrming women’s dependence on the sexual love of men” (37), other scholars have painted a more mixed picture; Esther Corral, for example, ascribes to the cantigas de amigo “a dynamic notion of femininity whose multiple and even contradictory roles, voices, and emotions contrast with the uniformity and monotony created for the female fgure in the male-voice cantigas de amor” (81). This dichotomy is reinforced in José Carlos Ribeiro Miranda’s reading of male–female dialogue in the earliest cantigas, which, for Miranda, dramatizes a “proximity” between men and women totally contrary to the social hierarchy essential to Occitan fn’amors (136).There is no need to adjudicate this question of appropriation defnitively—the answer would in any case be different for different poets—to see how the refective relationship between the cantigas de amigo and de amor draws the latter away from Occitan models, introducing an alternate affective discourse and new formal possibilities. This distance from Occitan models holds true in the case of the notation surviving for several of Dinis’s cantigas de amor and, in particular, the cantigas de amigo of Martim Codax. In Codax’s case, Manuel Pedro Ferreira has found an “obvious correspondence between the structural invariants of the text and the differentiation of musical sections”;“an almost total adequacy between musical and stanza accentuation”; and “a noticeable complementarity between musical repetition and poetic variation in the stanzas, and between musical variation and poetic repetition in the refrain”, all of which he contrasts with “the fimsy relationship between the music and the lyrics found in the troubadour repertory in langue d’oc or in langue d’oïl” (O som 172). In other words, Codax’s music at once stresses the regularity of the metrical accentuation of his verse and cultivates a creative tension with other metrical features: the stanzas, in which one 351
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fnds accentual variations in verse construction, are accompanied by rigidly repetitive music, whereas the verse refrains seem to have been platforms for the display of “some soloistic virtuosity” (Ferreira, Aspectos102).23 This aspect of musical performance is in fact alluded to in a cantiga de amigo by the Galician jogral Juião Bolseiro: Fez u˜a cantiga d’amor ora meu amigo por mi, que nunca melhor feita vi, mais, como x’é mui trobador, fez u˜as lirias no som que mi sacam o coraçom. (10, 1–6) Just now my friend made A love song for me, The best made I’ve ever seen, And since he’s really a bard, He made some lilies in the tune That take my heart away. (137–38) The metaphor of “lilies in the tune” refers not necessarily to the music as composed, but rather to the more improvisational realm of performance. One might in fact conclude that this cantiga’s refrain is an invitation to such improvisation, and that the cantigas of Bolseiro, Codax, and others, while remaining highly repetitive in their verse structure and concepts, in fact opened a space for the individuation of the female voice in performance. There is little doubt that questions of performance were inextricably linked to those of sincerity and meaning itself. One of the very few poems in the Galician-Portuguese corpus to use the term “cantar d’amigo”, Pedro Amigo de Sevilha’s “Um cantar novo d’amigo” (12), for example, associates hearing and understanding: Um cantar d’amig’há feito, e, se mi o disser alguém dereito como el é feito, cuid’eu entender mui bem, no cantar que diz que fez por mi, se o por mi fez. (7–12) He’s made a new cantar d’amigo And if someone will sing it for me Correctly, just like he made it, I think I’ll understand quite well In the song he says he made For me, if it’s made for me. (155) As the poem’s editors note, these verses provide evidence of the oral circulation of the cantigas and of the skepticism such circulation provoked with regard to verbal accuracy. But they also assert that the truth of a cantiga is discerned in its performance, which may deviate in its own way from the fxed “text” of the notation. In the following (and concluding) stanza, the amiga recognizes that this new cantiga is already renowned, “mui dito”, although she herself 352
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does not know the words (13–14). We have seen already that it is unlikely that words alone could serve to individualize poet or addressee; it is thus likely that the revelatory power of disser here includes performance, although there is no suggestion that the performer must be the composer himself for the truth to be revealed.The cantiga is being performed widely, and as long as the words have not been distorted through erroneous repetition, the amiga will recognize herself in it. Alongside expert analysis of surviving notation, these internal references to performance seem to confrm that, in large part, the cantigas de amigo exploited their status as instances of a broader pattern of both composition and performance to refect on singularity, sincerity, and repetition as such, in terms of both poetic creation and emotional expression.24
Galician-Portuguese poetics: staging the scene of composition Scholars seeking internal evidence for Galician-Portuguese poetics have traditionally cited two principal sources.The frst is the well-known but fragmentary Arte de Trovar found in B, a valuable resource that must nevertheless be approached with caution: while its poetics may be largely descriptive (Deyermond 50), there are important exceptions. For example, the prescription that masculine and feminine rhymes, when combined in the initial strophe, must be used in the same places in further strophes (CMGP II: 594–95), is only followed in 34 of the 95 cantigas de amigo in which such mixed rhyming occurs (Cohen, 500 Cantigas 44–46). Finally, while the Arte de Trovar’s nearly exclusive focus on technique is suggestive to those who view the cantigas through a highly formalistic lens, it could very well be the result of a historical accident, the survival of certain chapters instead of others. The cantigas de escárnio e maldizer constitute the other important source, since technical errors and poetic incompetence more broadly form the basis for numerous insults. The otherwise unknown Sueiro Eanes, for example, is criticized in three poems by Pero da Ponte (31, 40, and 45) and one by Martim Soares (23); he is facetiously defended in “Sueir’Eanes, um vosso cantar” by Afonso Anes do Cotom, who explains that any metrical regularity in Eanes’s poem must be attributed to the jogral’s mistaken performance (12, ll. 13–14).25 Ponte’s “Sueir’Eanes, nunca eu terrei” also employs false praise, playing on the difference between “knowing how” to compose and “understanding” composition: Sueir’Eanes, nunca eu terrei que vós trobar nom entendedes bem, pois entendestes, quando vos trobei, que de trobar nom sabíades rem; pero d’al nom sodes tam trobador, mais o trobar ond’estades melhor: entendedes quando vos troba alguém. (45, ll. 1–7) Sueir’Eanes, I will never maintain that you do not know how to trobar well, for you understood, when I wrote about you, that you know nothing of trobar; for you are never such a troubadour, as in that trobar where you are best: you understand when someone writes about you. (My translation) 353
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Although Eanes knows nothing of poetic composition (l. 4), it cannot be claimed that he does not understand it (ll. 1–2), since he always recognizes himself in mockery (l. 7). In addition to providing internal evidence for the Arte de Trovar’s distinction between cantigas de escárnio and de maldizer—in the former, the mockery and its target are obscured through “palavras cobertas que hajam dous entendimentos” (II: 591)—there may be a play here on the verb trobar itself, since Eanes can always “fnd” himself, no matter the equivocation. Soares’s attack, meanwhile, appears at frst to be unrelated to poetics: he mocks Eanes’s transparent lies about a supposed pilgrimage to the Holy Land.Yet it should be noted that Eanes’s mistakes, such as his claims that Marseille lies beyond the Mediterranean and Acre before it (ll. 5–6), or that he saw a Jew who had been present at Christ’s arrest (ll. 15–16), all revolve around distortions of time and space, both crucial ingredients in regular metrical disposition.26 Among the troubadours whose poems refect on the genre of the cantiga de amigo as such, the earliest were active in the middle third of the thirteenth century, many, such as João Baveca, João Garcia de Guilhade, Lourenço, João Airas de Santiago, Juião Bolseiro, and Pedro Amigo de Sevilha, at the Castilian courts of Fernando III,Alfonso X, and Sancho IV.27 As I have suggested, many of these cantigas refect on the differences between cantigas de amigo and de amor. João Baveca’s “Amigo, sei que há mui gram sazom” (12), for example, playfully stages the circumstances in which a courtier might be moved to compose a love poem: Amigo, sei que há mui gram sazom que trobastes sempre d’amor por mi, e ora vejo que vos travam i; mais nunca Deus haja parte comigo se vos eu des aquí nom dou razom per que façades cantigas d’amigo. (ll. 1–6) Friend, I know that for a long time You always composed love songs for me And now I see that they fault you for that, But may God never take my side If from now on I don’t give you Reason to make cantigas d’amigo! (161) Implicit in the girl’s account of her decision to give the poem’s addressee a “reason to make cantigas d’amigo” is the necessary basis of cantigas de amor in frustrated, unrequited love. Baveca’s poem at once bears out and refnes the later Arte de Trovar’s distinction between the two genres: whereas in the Arte (in its surviving fragments) the distinction is based exclusively on the gender of the poetic voice (or on which gender speaks frst, if both are present), here the nature of the love relationship is also relevant.28 Furthermore, the satirical genres are also equivocally present here, in a play on the verbs travar (to criticize) and trobar (trovar in modern Portuguese orthography). For, if the troubadour in question is being criticized for his cantigas de amor (“vos travam i”), it is likely that such criticism takes the form of the trobar to which, for example, Sueir’Eanes is subjected in Pero da Ponte’s above-cited cantiga de maldizer (“entendedes quando vos troba alguém”). In the following stanza, the girl specifes that she wants to give her amigo “razom d’amor / per que façades cantigas d’amigo” (ll. 11–12) “a passionate / Reason to make cantigas d’amigo”. As Cohen notes in his translation,“razon d’amor […] seems here to mean both ‘an amorous argument’ (in the sense of the ‘argument’ of a poem) and ‘an amorous reason,’ i.e. a reason based on 354
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love” (162).There may thus be an echo of this kind of wordplay in the Arte de Trovar, when it specifes that in a male–female dialogue,“se eles falam na prim[eir]a cobra e elas na outra, [é d’] amor, porque se move a razom dele” (II: 591, emphasis added;“if he speaks in the frst strophe and she in the next, it is a cantiga de amor, because it is driven by his argument/words”).29 Baveca’s poem thus plays not only with words but also with time: it portrays a moment at which the amigo was not yet an amigo in the sense meant by the poem, having no reason to compose the very cantiga the girl is apparently already singing. João Airas de Santiago’s “O meu amigo novas sabe já” (29) also portrays the anticipated origin of a cantiga de amor.30 Here, the amiga express her certainty that her lover will sing of her at the upcoming courts: Loar-mi-á muito e chamar-mi-á senhor, ca muit’há gran sabor de me loar; a muitas donas fará gran pesar, mais el fará, com’é mui trobador, um cantar em que dirá de mim bem; ou o fará ou já o feito tem. (7–12) He will praise me and call me senhor, for he desires greatly to praise me; it will upset many ladies, but he will compose, being such a troubadour, a song singing my praises; if he hasn’t composed it already. (My translation) This cantiga revolves around the predictability of its sister genre; the amiga foresees the occasion (the upcoming courts), content (the codifed praise of dizer bem), and reception (the sorrow and envy of the women present) of her lover’s song. Indeed, it is this very predictability that makes her lover mui trobador,“very much a troubadour”.31 At the same time, in the world of the poem, the amiga’s certainty derives not from poetic convention but from a shared emotional code, as the fnda (concluding couplet) makes clear: “Ca o virom cuidar, e sei eu bem / que nom cuidava já em outra rem” (19–20; “For he has been seen suffering, and I know well / that he was not suffering for any other thing [i.e., than his love for me]”). The lover’s coita sets in motion the inevitable and predictably iterative process of composition, which in turn gives rise to the amiga’s song. In this way, the lyric subject of the cantiga de amigo bookends that of the cantiga de amor, an inspiration and, in some cases, a threat: as João Peres de Aboim’s scorned amiga sneers in her refrain,“[O] poder, que sempre houvi, m’hei, / e eu vos fz e [eu] vos desfarei” (6, 5–6;“I have the power I always had, / And I made you and now I will unmake you”). Coita makes the poet and poetry all at once, and its creative (and destructive) power is projected across generic boundaries. One of the two surviving poems by Estêvão Coelho, active during the fnal years of the Galician-Portuguese school, shows how generic self-consciousness can, from the perspective of the modern critic, in fact complicate the questions of genre surrounding the cantigas de amigo: Sedia la fremosa seu sirgo torcendo, sa voz manselinha fremoso dizendo cantigas d’amigo. 355
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Sedia la fremosa seu sirgo lavrando, sa voz manselinha fremoso cantando cantigas d’amigo. —Par Deus de cruz, dona, sei eu que havedes amor mui coitado, que tam bem dizedes cantigas d’amigo. Par Deus de cruz, dona, sei [eu] que andades d'amor mui coitada, que tam bem cantades cantigas d’amigo. —Avuitor comestes, que adevinhades! (1) The lovely girl was sitting twining her silk, Her soft voice beautifully singing Cantigas d’amigo. The lovely girl was sitting working her silk, Her soft voice beautifully chanting Cantigas d’amigo. By God of the cross, lady, I know that you feel A great love-sorrow, since you sing so well Cantigas d’amigo. By God of the cross, lady, I know that you go Around with love-sorrow, since you chant so well Cantigas d’amigo. —You must have eaten vulture, to divine so well! (46–47) The opening strophes portray a beautiful young woman singing cantigas de amigo while twining her silken thread. As in other poems of the genre, they implicitly equate the verbs dizer and cantar,32 and in fact, even if we favor Asensio’s view that the cantigas explore both repetition and variation, it is hard to imagine in this case that the woman is alternately reciting and singing her cantigas.33 An unidentifed voice interrupts the scene to proclaim that the singer must be suffering in love, since she performs the cantigas with such skill. Here, then, depth and sincerity of feeling (“amor mui coitado”) are associated, if not with poetic composition, then at least with skillful performance. The singing woman’s voice only appears in the single line of the poem’s fnda, confrming the frst voice’s suspicions with a rustic turn of phrase: “avuitor comestes”, “You must have eaten vulture” (a reference, as Cohen notes [The Cantigas d’Amigo 47], to the popular association of vulture meat and divinatory practices). The frst voice, in addressing the singing girl as “lady”, appears (although hardly conclusively) to reveal itself as masculine. Is this, then, a cantiga de amor (according to the defnition found in the Arte de Trovar) about cantigas de amigo? What to make of the narrative voice that opens the poem? Coelho’s poem belongs to a relatively small group of cantigas typically classifed as de amigo that describe a simple narrative rather than featuring direct speech; the best known of these is Dinis’s “Levantou-s’a velida” (92), itself a reworking of Pero Meogo’s celebrated “Levou-s’aa alva, levou-s’a velida” (5). In all three cases, the historical judgment associating these 356
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poems with the genre of the cantiga de amigo, despite the dominant or exclusive presence of an unmarked lyric voice, responds to their formal features, especially their parallelistic structures. In Coelho’s poem, the questions of gender and of emotion are playfully subsumed into this structure, as “amor mui coitado” (8) is juxtaposed with “d’amor mui coitada” (11): coita links subjects masculine and feminine in song.34
Conclusion: coita and the reflective poetics of repetition “Amigos, cuido sempr’em mia senhor”, a cantiga de amor by João Servando (2), a Galician jogral whose compositions likely date from the mid-thirteenth century, positively revels in its hyperbolic annominatio on the verb cuidar, whose forms are repeated 19 times in a scant 20 lines.Yet the poem’s morphological variations all appear to insist on a single meaning, that of thought or refection, as the poet has not ceased to think about, and think the best of, his senhor since the fateful day he saw her (7–8). The poem’s refrain reveals the limits of this obsessive refection: “pero cuidando nom posso saber / como pudesse dela bem haver” (“But in refecting I cannot discover / a way to get my reward from her”). It is not until the poem’s fnda that the association of cuidar and coita creeps in:“Par Sam Servando, mentr’eu já viver, / por mia senhor cuid’e cuid’a morrer” (19–20; “By Saint Servando, as long as I live, / I will refect/suffer for my lady and refect/suffer until death”).35 The poem’s stanzas seek to collapse the very distinction between variation and repetition. The obsessive but fruitless thought provoked by the initial sight of the beloved is revealed to be the matter of the poem, flling each line’s syllables (and, presumably, each sung note) but never reaching the satisfaction that might end the song. When the specter of death by mal d’amor is fnally invoked at the poem’s conclusion, a primed audience will understand the implicit association of cuidar and coita, flling out the poem’s emotional world in a way that emphasizes coita’s centrality to the cantigas as an emotional phenomenon, poetic form, and social fact. Servando’s cantiga de amor—as Weiss notes (227), the genre Tavani and others most often reject as an exercise in derivative, empty rhetoric—rejects semantic variation as a necessary criterion of creativity.36 Rather, in the context of performance, its dense repetition of cuidar reveals the creative potential of repetition to express emotional experience through formal development. To conclude, let us consider another cantiga de amor, Pero Garcia Burgalês’s “Ai eu coitad’! e por que vi” (6), which will serve as a refection of the frst cantiga de amiga studied here,“Ai eu coitada, como vivo em gram cuidado”. As the poem’s frst stanza indicates, the poet’s exclamatory coita will be expressed through the exaggeration of a common technique of repetition in the cantigas, dobre, the repetition of the same word in fxed places in a given stanza (a different word will be repeated in the same places in subsequent stanzas): Ai eu coitad’! e por que vi a dona que por meu mal vi? Ca, Deus lo sabe, poila vi, nunca jamais prazer ar vi, per boa fé, u a nom vi, ca de quantas donas eu vi, tam boa dona nunca vi. (1–7) Oh poor me! And why did I see the lady who I saw, for my misfortune? For, God knows, after seeing her, 357
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I never saw another pleasure, I swear, where I did not see her, for of all the ladies I saw, I never saw such a good one. The poem’s 30 lines all manifest this almost perverse insistence on a repeated, unchanged outcome.The poetic ingenuity resides not in wresting semantic variation from apparent repetition, but in exemplifying poetic creation and meaningful emotional expression through literal verbal repetition.37 The poem concludes with not one but three fndas, which feature the same dobre and seem to tempt an audience to expect a twist that never comes. Pero Garcia Burgalês thus draws attention to the formal features of his poem as descriptive of the emotional phenomenon of coita, and the experience is communicated cumulatively as the poem proceeds, in its hyperbolic repetition and in the unfulflled promise of a change. As such, the poem’s full communicative potential can only be understood in the context of an established lyric genre, and the emotion it communicates, far from losing its meaning through monotonous repetition, can only be understood through the “impertinent” performative structural elements that link it to music as lyric. It is thus not only through the refected masculine and feminine voices of the cantigas de amor and de amigo that Galician-Portuguese poetic creativity can be discovered, but through the lyrical techniques of repetition that bridge the two genres and make visible the refective synthesis of coita and desejo in the refrain from one of Dinis’s most celebrated songs:“Ai Deus, e u é?” (“Oh God, and where is he?”; emphasis added).
Notes 1 The phrase “anxiety of form” (ânsia da forma) is taken from Manuel Rodrigues Lapa’s introduction to the Obras Completas of Francisco de Sá de Miranda, a Renaissance poet “tortured” by this anxiety (XV). The fgure of 1,680 cantigas, which excludes the devotional Cantigas de Santa Maria, is drawn from Cohen and Parkinson (25), who offer an excellent overview of the secular and religious GalicianPortuguese lyric of the Middle Ages. A somewhat more detailed, but still brief, overview, including a glossary of poetic terms, can be found in the frst volume of Graça Videira Lopes’s recent edition of the entire corpus (11–25). Giuseppe Tavani’s A poesía lírica galego-portuguesa offers a more detailed overview of the corpus as a whole, and Mercedes Brea and Pilar Lorenzo Gradín of the genre of the cantiga de amigo in particular. Finally, António Resende de Oliveira’s Depois do espectáculo trovadoresco offers a wealth of historical background about the lives of the troubadours and the formation of the cancioneiros. On the dates of the cantigas’ production, see Dias 100-101. I have chosen to translate cantigas as “songs”; in the Middle Ages, this term was used widely to refer to poems intended to sung or recited (Matthews 297–98). 2 Almost the entirety of the Galician-Portuguese troubadour corpus is preserved in three principal manuscripts.The oldest of these, dating from the turn of the fourteenth century, is the Cancioneiro da Ajuda (A), luxuriously illuminated but containing only 310 poems limited in their great majority to one genre, the cantiga de amor.A also contains spaces for musical notation, but these are, sadly, left blank. The other two manuscripts, the Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional (B) and the Cancioneiro da Vaticana (V), were both copied in early-sixteenth-century Italy under the direction of the humanist Angelo Colocci (B was formerly known as the Cancioneiro Colocci-Brancuti, after its compiler and the owner, Count Paolo Brancuti di Cagli, in whose private library it was discovered in 1878). Colocci’s copies were both made from an earlier, likely medieval manuscript, now lost.The only surviving musical notation for the Galician-Portuguese tradition is found in two medieval fragments: the Pergaminho Vindel contains notation for six cantigas de amigo by Martim Codax (a seventh lacks notation), and the Pergaminho Sharrer contains notation for seven of D. Dinis’s cantigas de amor. Images of A, B, and V are available in the online Cantigas Medievais Galego-Portuguesas database. Manuel Pedro Ferreira has published editions of the musical notation for Codax’s and Dinis’s cantigas in O som de Martim Codax and Cantus coronatus, respectively.
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The Galician-Portuguese cantigas 3 Throughout this chapter, I will cite individual cantigas by their numbering in Graça Videira Lopes’s recent edition of the entire corpus. This edition is complemented by the Cantigas Medievais GalegoPortuguesas online database (http://cantigas.fcsh.unl.pt/index.asp), which includes helpful notes and high-quality images of all manuscript witnesses for each cantiga.Where relevant, I have also consulted Rip Cohen’s 2003 edition of the cantigas de amigo. 4 The poem is attributed to both kings in its one surviving witness, B, on adjacent folia. Doubts about the poem’s authorship remain, with scholarly opinion tending toward Alfonso X; it would be the only cantiga de amigo attributed to the Castilian king, and the only poetic composition of any kind attributed to Sancho I. 5 Translations of cantigas de amigo are from Rip Cohen’s The Cantigas d’Amigo:An English Translation. All other translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 6 Here, I treat the specifc phenomenon of metrical parallelism in the cantigas; as Mercedes Brea and Pilar Lorenzo Gradín remind us, parallelism is in fact a much broader rhetorical technique, with roots in biblical, Latin, and liturgical literature, that can be deployed in a variety of tropes and syntactic structures (186–89).Asensio, noting also that parallelistic structures are hardly unique to the Galician-Portuguese corpus, associates them with “distant times when poetry was still intimately related to music, dance, and magic” (70). Nevertheless, as Stephen Reckert has argued, the various techniques of parallelism reach their apotheosis in the cantigas (Do Cancioneiro 12–13). 7 It is not certain that coita and cuidado are etymological equivalents (Blackmore 644), but the frequency with which they are juxtaposed in the Galician-Portuguese corpus leaves little doubt that the troubadours themselves associated them. 8 Wardropper refers here specifcally to Martim Codax’s “Ai ondas que eu vim veer” (7; this cantiga happens to be identical in its verse structure to “Ai eu coitada”), but his other examples also manifest emotional development in particular. 9 For an overview of coita’s historical roots and role in the cantigas, see Blackmore. 10 On the complex relationship between emotional and objective “facts” in the cantigas de amigo, see Ashley 36 and 43. 11 I quote Asensio because of his seminal position in studies of the poetics of the cantiga de amigo, but this subjective understanding of the lyric remains common among contemporary critics: “Así pois, as cantigas de Martín Codax—o conxunto do cancioneiro de amigo—ten o obxectivo, a fnalidade de transmitirnos momentos líricos, estados de ánimo” (Pena 156; emphasis added). 12 Vicenç Beltran has called the traditional cantigas de amigo “probably the closest to our own, still post-Romantic, sensibility of all medieval European lyric poetry” (14). Asensio, despite his confdent description of the cantigas as prototypically lyrical, perceptively decries the “lack of any literary theory applicable to the intentions and technique of parallelistic poetry”, specifying the inadequacy of the Romantic notion of “poem as biography” alongside those of realism, which values the quasiobjective refection of reality, and symbolism, which seeks to “reduce the world to metaphors” (120–21). 13 In his recent Theory of the Lyric, Jonathan Culler argues that already in Hegel’s poetics, “the fullest expression of the romantic theory of the lyric” (92), the defning quality of the lyric is not that it express the poet’s interiority but that its expression “be attributed to a subject” (95). 14 For the seminal expression of this point of view, see Wellek. 15 The other critics discussed alongside Haidu in Judith Peraino’s helpful synthesis are Sarah Kay and Gerald A. Bond, whose respective Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry and The Loving Subject are seminal texts in this feld of study. 16 Hans Robert Jauss discussed the dialectical nature of genre (and literary convention more broadly) in two seminal essays, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory” and “Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature” (both collected in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception). In the former, Jauss emphasizes the need to view all art “dialectically as a medium capable of forming and altering perception” (16), and in the latter, he describes change in genre as “a process of the continual founding and altering of horizons” in which readers’ expectations are both engaged and transformed (88). 17 This commonplace would arise frequently in later Iberian poetry, as in the Valencian poet Ausiàs March’s declaration to be “[d]iscarding the style of the troubadours, who are so infamed that they cannot speak without exaggeration” (XXIII, 1–2), or Jorge Manrique’s claim that the true lover, unlike the false, persists in love despite rejection (“Diziendo qué cosa es amor” 46–50). 18 Weiss, in a perceptive analysis of this poem, argues that the difference asserted by Dinis is “his own uncontestable experience” (239).Yet, as Weiss goes on to note (239), this mires Dinis again in the dif-
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19 20 21
22
23
24
25
26
27 28 29 30 31 32 33
34
fculty of asserting sincerity convincingly in troubadour language, which is why I prefer to emphasize the bare assertion of an object, circumstantial difference. Thomas R. Hart has argued that in this poem, Dinis contrasts his own sincerity with the “polished versifying” of the Provençal troubadours (“The cantigas” 31). See “Roi Queimado morreu com amor” (Pero Garcia Burgalês 47). Stephanie Trigg makes a similar argument in noting that all historians of emotion “must rely on textual and material traces and representations of feelings and passions: the emotions as they are processed, described, and performed by human subjects” (7; emphasis in original). It may be worth adding that even in the present, the perception of emotions (our own and those of others) is mediated by language. Indeed, António José Saraiva has suggested that the cantigas de amigo are not lyric at all, but rather dramatic poetry, owing not only to questions of gender but also to the ubiquity of dialogue among a familiar cast of characters (mother, daughter, friends, occasionally the amigo himself) and to what Saraiva takes to have been the highly gestural performance of the songs, which he calls “mímica” (182–85 and 188). The extent to which Galician-Portuguese meter can be described as “accentual” remains controversial. Along with Ferreira, scholars such as Martin Duffell (32) and Stephen Parkinson (“Métrica accentual” 41) have detected accentual patterns in the cantigas, which they attribute to survivals from folk verse or the imitation thereof.This view is rejected comprehensively by Cohen in his edition of the cantigas de amigo (44), but Parkinson has responded that “[t]he fact that the most cantigas de amigo can successfully be edited under an assumption of strict isosyllabism […] does not prove that it is a necessary universal assumption, or that syllabic and accentual metrics cannot coexist” (“Concurrent” 32). This logic of lyric instantiation is closely related to the medieval narrative exemplum, which seems to lurk behind Giorgio Agamben’s account of the example as a “concept that escapes the antinomy of the universal and the particular” and as “purely linguistic being” (9–10), the latter characterization cycling back to the purely textual subjectivity discerned by Zumthor in troubadour lyric.Yet the performance of the cantigas adds a layer of instantiation that defes this linguistic purity. This poem, among others, has given rise to scholarly debate about the meaning of cantar igual; for a revised interpretation and bibliography of earlier critical debate, see Cohen, “Cantar igual”. All three troubadours were active in the mid-thirteenth century and likely associated with Alfonso X’s literary circle. As Benjamin Liu explains, a group of cantigas de escárnio e maldizer mocks the venality of mendacious pilgrims who “either never even leave their homes, or never reach their destinations, or if they do, do so for all the wrong reasons” (59); this mockery is part of a broader satirical program that makes a burlesque of the “unattainable pursuit of an immaterial perfect world” (59).Taken together, the poems of Ponte, Soares, and Cotom reveal how questions of sincerity—in this case, spiritual rather than emotional—were tied to questions of poetic form in the satirical cantigas as well as in the cantigas de amigo and de amor. Asensio has suggested that the emergence of these “cantigas de cantigas” ca. 1250 demonstrates that the formal and thematic constraints of the cantiga de amigo were already beginning to chafe (64). As Ferreira notes (Aspectos 20), the Arte de Trovar can itself be distinguished from other European troubadour poetics on the basis of this attention to content rather than structure. In the cancioneiros, “razom” can refer to the central idea or concept of a cantiga, to ideas more broadly, or simply to a speaker’s words themselves. Associated, as I have noted, with the courts of Alfonso X and Sancho IV, João Airas is described in rubrics as a “burguês de Santiago”. Manuel Pedro Ferreira has argued that all medieval cultural production, including music such as Gregorian chant, had to be in some way predictable, manifesting “a conventional repertoire of possibilities and grammar” (O som 41).The phrase “mui trobador” also appears in Juião Bolseiro 10, 4, above. Cf. Pedro Amigo de Sevilha 12, 8, above. Cohen’s translation of “dizendo” and “cantando” as “singing” and “chanting”, respectively, captures this apparent semantic equivalence and also calls to mind what Andrew Welsh has called “the communal rhythm of chant” (181), appropriate to both notions of the cantigas de amigo as popular in origin and the depiction of these particular cantigas as work songs. In an important article on the coita d’amor, Josiah Blackmore makes a similar point:“[I]t is the angst-ridden coita d’amor that creates a bridge between men’s and women’s affect in the fctionality of gendered, poetic speaking” (641). What I am suggesting here is that from the point of view of the GalicianPortuguese troubadours, coita always speaks poetically, so that poetic speaking itself is inherent to the
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The Galician-Portuguese cantigas bridge’s construction. Finally, it is worth noting that the parallel development of coita in these lines is a powerful illustration of Sarah Kay’s reminder that subjectivity implies being both subject of and subject to (43). 35 As the poem’s editors note, the reference to San Servando here serves as a kind of signature. 36 It also rejects, in a move characteristic of late-medieval Iberian poetry, a hard distinction between cognition and emotion. 37 Celso Ferreira da Cunha uses precisely this poem to differentiate Galician-Portuguese dobre (as theorized in the Arte de Trovar) from Occitan rims equivocs, where semantic variation is defnitional (202–207).
References Adams, V. Joshua, Joel Calahan, and Michael Hansen. “Reading Historical Poetics”. Modern Language Quarterly 77.1 (2016): 1–12. Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Asensio, Eugenio. Poética y realidad en el cancionero peninsular de la Edad Media. 2nd ed. Madrid: Gredos, 1970. Ashley, Kathleen. “Voice and Audience: The Emotional World of the Cantigas de amigo”. Vox feminae: Studies in Medieval Woman’s Songs. Ed. John F. Plummer. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1981. 35–45. Beltran,Vicenç.“Tópicos y creatividad en la cantiga de amigo tradicional”. Santa Barbara Portuguese Studies 6 (2002): 5–21. Blackmore, Josiah.“Melancholy, Passionate Love, and the Coita d’Amor”. PMLA 124.2 (2009): 640–646. Brea, Mercedes, and Pilar Lorenzo Gradín. A cantiga de amigo.Vigo: Edicións Xerais de Galicia, 1998. Cantigas medievais galego-portuguesas: Corpus integral profano. Ed. Graça Videira Lopes. 2 vols. Lisbon: Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Instituto de Estudos Medievais, and Centro de Estudos de Sociologia e Estética Musical, 2016. Cohen, Rip. 500 Cantigas d’Amigo. Porto: Campo das Letras, 2003. Cohen, Rip.“Cantar igual: External Responsion and Textual Criticism in the Galician-Portuguese Lyric”. La corónica 38.2 (2010): 5–25. Cohen, Rip. The Cantigas d’Amigo:An English Translation. Lisbon, 2010. Cohen, Rip, and Stephen Parkinson.“The Medieval Galician-Portuguese Lyric”. A Companion to Portuguese Literature. Ed. Stephen Parkinson, Cláudia Pazos Alonso, and T. F. Earle. Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2009. 25–44. Corral, Esther.“Feminine Voices in the Galician-Portuguese cantigas de amigo”.Trans. Judith R. Cohen with Anne L. Klinck. Medieval Woman’s Song: Cross-Cultural Approaches. Ed. Anne L. Klinck and Ann Marie Rasmussen. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2002. 81–98. Culler, Jonathan. “Lyric, History, and Genre”. The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Virginia Walker Jackson and Yopie Prins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. 63–77. Culler, Jonathan. Theory of the Lyric. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Cunha, Celso Ferreira da. Estudos de Versifcação Portuguesa (Séculos XIII a XVI). Paris: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1982. Deyermond, Alan. “Some Problems of Gender and Genre in the Medieval Cantigas”. Estudios Galegos Medievais. Ed. Antonio Cortijo Ocaña, Giorgio Perissinotto, and Harvey L. Sharrer. Santa Barbara: Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2001. 43–59. Dias, Aida Fernanda. História crítica da literatura portuguesa (Idade Média). Lisbon:Verbo, 1998. Duffell, Martin J. Syllable and Accent: Studies on Medieval Hispanic Metrics. London: Department of Hispanic Studies, Queen Mary, U of London, 2007. Ferreira, Ana Paula.“Telling Woman What She Wants: The Cantigas d’amigo as Strategies of Containment”. Portuguese Studies 9 (1993): 23–38. Ferreira, Manuel Pedro. O som de Martin Codax: Sobre a dimensão musical da lírica galego-portuguesa (séculos XII–XIV). Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional – Casa da Moeda, 1986. Ferreira, Manuel Pedro. Cantus coronatus: Sete cantigas d’El-Rei Dom Dinis. Kassel: Reichenberger, 2005. Ferreira, Manuel Pedro. Aspectos da Música Medieval no Ocidente Peninsular. Volume I – Música Palaciana. Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda and Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2009. Haidu, Peter. “Making It (New) in the Middle Ages:Towards a Problematics of Alterity”. Review of Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale. Diacritics 4.2 (1974): 2–11.
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Henry Berlin Hart, Thomas R. “The cantigas de amor of King Dinis: em maneira de proençal?” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 71.1 (1994): 29–38. Hart, Thomas R. En maneira de proençal: The Medieval Galician-Portuguese Lyric. London: Department of Hispanic Studies, Queen Mary and Westfeld College, 1998. Jakobson, Roman. Selected Writings III: Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry. Ed. Stephen Rudy. The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1981. Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Trans. Timothy Bahti. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. Kay, Sarah. Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Liu, Benjamin. Medieval Joke Poetry:The Cantigas d’Escarnho e de Mal Dizer. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Lopes, Graça Videira, and Manuel Pedro Ferreira, et al. Cantigas Medievais Galego-Portuguesas (base de dados online). Lisbon: Instituto de Estudos Medievais, FCSH/NOVA, 2011. http://cantigas.fcsh.unl.pt/index.asp Manrique, Jorge. Poesía. Ed. Jesús-Manuel Alda Tesán. Madrid: Cátedra, 1981. March, Ausiàs. A Key Anthology. Ed. and trans. Robert Archer. Sheffeld:Anglo-Catalan Society, 1992. Matthews, Ricardo. “Song in Reverse: The Medieval Prosimetrum and Lyric Theory”. PMLA 133.2 (2018): 296–313. Miranda, José Carlos Ribeiro. Aurs mesclatz ab argen: Sobre a primeira geração de trovadores galego-portugueses. Porto: Guarecer, 2004. Oliveira,António Resende de.“A Galiza e a Cultura Trovadoresca Peninsular”. Revista de História das Ideias 11 (1989): 7–36. Oliveira, António Resende de. Depois do espectáculo trovadoresco: a estrutura dos cancioneiros peninsulares e as recolhas dos séculos XIII e XIV. Lisbon: Colibri, 1994. Parkinson, Stephen. “Concurrent Patterns of Verse Design in the Galician-Portuguese Lyric”. Proceedings of the Thirteenth Colloquium. Ed. Jane Whetnall and Alan Deyermond. London: Department of Hispanic Studies, Queen Mary, University of London, 2006. 19–38. Parkinson, Stephen. “Métrica acentual nas cantigas de amigo”. Do canto à escrita: Novas questões em torno da Lírica Galego-Portuguesa—Nos cem anos do pergaminho Vindel. Ed. Graça Videira Lopes and Manuel Pedro Ferreira. Lisbon: Instituto de Estudos Medievais and Centro de Estudos de Sociologia e Estética Musical, 2016. 29–42. Pena, Xosé Ramón.“En Vigo, eno sagrado. Ciclos e secuencias líricas no cancioneiro de amigo”. Ondas do Mar de Vigo: Actas do Simposio Internacional sobre a Lírica Medieval Galego-Portuguesa, Birmingham, 1998. Ed. Derek W. Flitter and Patricia Odber de Baubeta. Birmingham: Seminario de Estudios Galegos, Department of Hispanic Studies,The University of Birmingham. 147–157. Peraino, Judith A. Giving Voice to Love: Song and Self-Expression from the Troubadours to Guillaume de Machaut. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Reckert, Stephen and Helder Macedo. Do Cancioneiro de Amigo. Lisbon:Assírio & Alvim, 1976. Rosenwein, Barbara H. Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Rosenwein, Barbara H. Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Sá de Miranda, Francisco de. Obras Completas. 4th ed. Ed. Rodrigues Lapa. 2 vols. Lisbon: Livraria Sá de Costa Editora, 1976. Saraiva, António José. Poesia e Drama: Bernardim Ribeiro, Gil Vicente, Cantigas de Amigo. Lisbon: Gradiva, 1990. Stone, Gregory B. The Death of the Troubadour:The Late Medieval Resistance to the Renaissance. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Tavani, Giuseppe. Poesia eRitmo: Proposta para uma leitura do texto poético. Trans. Manuel Simões. Lisbon: Livraria Sá da Costa, 1983. Tavani, Giuseppe. A poesía lírica galego-portuguesa.Trans. Rosario Álvarez Blanco and Henrique Monteagudo. Vigo: Galaxia, 1986. Trigg, Stephanie. “Introduction: Emotional Histories – Beyond the Personalization of the Past and the Abstraction of Affect Theory”. Exemplaria 26.1 (2014): 3–15. Wardropper, Bruce W. “On the Supposed Repetitiousness of the Cantigas d’amigo”. Revista Hispánica Moderna 38.1–2 (1974–1975): 1–6. Weiss, Julian.“On the Conventionality of the Cantigas d’amor”. La corónica 26.1 (1997): 225–245. Wellek, René. “Genre Theory, the Lyric, and Erlebnis”. The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins. Baltimore:The Johns Hopkins University UP, 2014. 40–52. Welsh, Andrew. Roots of Lyric: Primitive Poetry and Modern Poetics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.
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23 ARABIC ALONGSIDE AND INTO HEBREW Andalusi Hebrew literary culture in meta-critical perspective1 Ross Brann
for Arabic, after Aramaic, is the language which most resembles ours2 Jonah ibn Janāḥ and as for the Arabic and Hebrew languages, all who know them both agree they are one language without a doubt.3 Moses Maimonides In The Book of Tradition (Sefer ha-Qabbalah c. 1160–61),Abraham ibn Daud (c. 1100–80), the philosopher and chronicler of rabbinic tradition, relates the legendary tale regarding the “discovery” of Samuel the Nagid, the celebrated Hebrew poet, grammarian, rabbinic scholar, communal leader of the Jews of eleventh-century Granada, and wazīr and political counselor to that Islamic kingdom’s Ṣanḥāja Berber rulers: One of his (R. Ḥanokh) outstanding disciples was R. Samuel ha-Levi the Nagid b. R. Joseph, surnamed Ibn Nagrela, of the community of Cordova. Besides being a great scholar and highly cultured person, R. Samuel was highly versed in Arabic literature and style and was, indeed, competent to serve in the king’s palace. Nevertheless, he maintained himself in very modest circumstances as a spice-merchant until the time the war broke out in Spain.With the termination of the rule of the house of Ibn Abī c Āmir and the seizure of power by the Berber chiefs, the city of Cordova dwindled, and its inhabitants were compelled to fee…This R. Samuel, however, fed to Malaga, where he occupied a shop as a spice-merchant. Since his shop happened to adjoin the courtyard of Ibn al-cArīf—who was the Kātib of King Ḥabbu¯s b. Maksan, the Berber king of Granada—the Kātib’s maidservant would ask him to write letters for her to her master, the Vizier Abu¯’l-Qāsim ibn al-cArīf.When the latter received the letters, he was astounded at the learning they refected. Consequently, when after a while, this Vizier, Ibn al-cArīf, was given leave by his King Ḥabbu¯s to return to his home in Malaga, he inquired among the people of his household:“Who wrote the letters I received from you?” They replied: “A certain Jew of the community of Cordova, who lives next 363
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door to your courtyard, used to do the writing for us”.The Kātib thereupon ordered that R. Samuel ha-Levi be brought to him at once, and he said to him: “It does not become you to spend your time in a shop. Henceforth you are to stay at my side”. He thus became the scribe and counsellor of the counsellor to the King. Now the counsel which he gave was as if one consulted the oracle of God, and thanks to his counsel King Ḥabbu¯s achieved successes and became exceedingly great. Subsequently, when the Kātib Ibn al-cArīf took ill and felt his death approaching, King Ḥabbu¯s paid him a visit and said to him: “What am I going to do? Who will counsel me in the wars which encompass me on every side?” He replied: “I never counselled you out of my own mind, but out of the mind of this Jew, my scribe. Look after him well, and let him be a father and a priest to you. Do whatever he says, and God will help you”. Accordingly, after the death of the Kātib, King Ḥabbu¯s brought R. Samuel ha-Levi to his palace and made him Kātib and counsellor. (Ibn Daud 1967, 72–73)4 This famous, richly narrated, legendary account of Samuel the Nagid’s (d. 1056) ascent from complete obscurity to the exercise of unparalleled political power in Islamic Granada and to distinction and status within the Andalusi Jewish community has deservedly garnered scholarly attention. Samuel Stern identifed the apocryphal tale of “discovery” underlying Ibn Daud’s story as a Hebrew variant of an Andalusi Arabic tradition regarding al-Manṣu¯r Ibn Abī cĀmir (d. 1002), the Umayyad ḥājib (chamberlain) turned dictator (Stern 1950). For his part, Gerson Cohen construed Sefer ha-Qabbalah’s account of Samuel the Nagid and his mastery of Arabic (“besides being a great scholar and highly cultured person, R. Samuel was highly versed in Arabic literature and style and was, indeed, competent to serve in the king’s palace”) as integral to Ibn Daud’s programmatic vision of the providential trajectory of Jewish history in which Sefarad occupied the center of the Jewish world from the tenth century forward.5 If we are mindful of the socio-religious and political crisis of mid-twelfth-century Andalusi Jewish life marking the end of its classical age, the tale of Samuel the Nagid also represents fdelity to and mastery of Arabic as the principal vehicle for both personal advancement and to occupying positions of infuence and power in service to the socio-political interests of the Jews of al-Andalus.6 Here, our interest lies specifcally in the signifcance Sefer ha-Qabbalah assigns to Jewish expert knowledge of the Arabic language, Arabic style, and Arabic learning beyond its instrumental individual and communal socio-political agency. Why would Jewish religious and literary intellectuals of the Almohad period like Ibn Daud assert the singular importance of Arabic for the Jewish culture and life they would reconstruct in the Christian Iberian kingdoms to the north and in Provence,7 places to which Andalusi Jewish rabbinic, theological-philosophical, scientifc, and literary discourses were transferred?8 Andalusi Judeo-Arabic tradition was a preeminent sign of “Sefardi exceptionalism”.9 For 200 years before Ibn Daud envisioned classical Sefarad reborn in Christian Castile, control of Arabic and Hebrew was a defning cultural touchstone for Andalusi Jewish intellectual elites. Andalusi Jewish literary and religious intellectuals were expressly identifed by Jewish and Muslim literati for their mastery of Arabic and Hebrew: the philologist Jonah ibn Janāḥ (“occupied himself with the science of the languages of the Arabs and Jews” according to Ṣācid al-Andalusī [Andalusī 1912, 88–89]), Samuel the Nagid (“he wrote in both languages: Arabic and Hebrew. He knew the literatures of both peoples”, according to Ibn Ḥayyān al-Qurṭubī apud Ibn al-Khaṭīb [1973, vol. 1, 438]); Solomon ibn alMucallim (“who performs sorcery in both the Hebrew and Arabic languages”, according to
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Ibn cEzra’ (1975, 78 [42b]); Isaac ibn Baru¯n culls “precious things from the Arabic and Hebrew languages”, according to Ibn cEzra’ (1975, 80 [43a]); Moses ibn Giqaṭilla “among the foremost authorities of discursive prose and poetry in both languages” (Ar. min ayimma l-khuṭabā’ wa-shshucarā’ bi-l-lughatayn), according to Ibn cEzra’ (1975, 68 [36a]); and naturally Moses ibn cEzra’ himself (“the learned scholar of Hebrew [cever] and Arabic [carav]”, according to Judah Halevi) (Abramson 1970, 404). Clearly, the Jews’ historical experience with the Arabo-Islamic environment is the requisite background for any interrogation of Andalusi Jewish literary culture.That foundational encounter had a profound impact on the Jews’ linguistic, aesthetic, and religious intellectual values and ventures. By 900 all of the Jews west of the Iranian plateau spoke Arabic as their mother tongue. It was spoken and written for most purposes in daily life, and their scholarly and literary production, including on strictly religious matters, was conducted primarily in Arabic.10 As is well known, the Judeo-Arabic culture signifed in the valorization of Arabic and Hebrew, jointly, originated in the Islamic East and reached North Africa during the ninth century. It spread to al-Andalus in the tenth century where it progressed and matured.Arabized Andalusi Jewish religious intellectuals were steeped in the discourses of Arabo-Islamic culture and deeply engaged with its implications for their own understanding of Judaism (see Brann 2000a; Scheindlin 2002).To cite three outstanding examples: scholarship has come to read the Judeo-Arabic prose works of the eleventh-century thinkers Baḥya ibn Paqu¯da and Judah Halevi in light of contemporary discourses of Islamic piety in general and Sufsm in particular (see Lobel 2000, 2007; Krinis 2014); and the twelfth-century master Moses Maimonides has been studied recently as an “Almohad thinker” (see Stroumsa 2009). In particular, Arabo-Islamic culture’s contemporary concerns regarding the nature of divine revelation and language and its resultant idealization of Arabic inspired a linguistic-aesthetic turn in thinking and research that Jewish scholars absorbed and applied to their own work on the Hebrew Bible and Jewish tradition.11 In so doing they laid the foundation for emergence of a new class of Jewish literary-religious intellectuals in al-Andalus. A case in point is Moses ibn cEzra’, born in Granada around 1055 (d. c. 1138). Ibn cEzra’ is frequently cast as the “most Arab” of the Hebrew poets of al-Andalus during the classical age of Islam.What exactly does this characterization mean? He certainly cultivated for himself the practices and image of a neo-classical Arab poet, adhering strictly to the canons of Arabic rhetoric, poetics, and aesthetics, except that he wrote social and liturgical verse in Hebrew.12 But Ibn cEzra’ was not altogether unique in these respects except for his critical physical, intellectual, and emotional distance from al-Andalus refected in Kitāb al-muḥāḍara wa-l-mudhākara (The Book of Conversation and Deliberation) written late in life during Ibn cEzra’s exile in the Christian kingdoms of northern Iberia.13 This work contributed mightily to the sense of Ibn cEzra’s devotion to Arabic as pivotal to, and a defning element of,Andalusi Jewish culture. It conveys his uncanny historicizing appreciation of Arabic as a Jewish language and as the force inspiring the revival of the study of biblical Hebrew and the production of Andalusi Hebrew poetry.The excerpt to which I draw our attention is from the beginning of chapter fve entitled “The translucence of the exilic [Jewish] community of al-Andalus in composing poetry, and Hebrew rhetorical discourse and prose”: When the Arabs conquered the peninsula of al-Andalus from the aforementioned Goths who themselves had been victorious over the Romans, its former masters, around three hundred before the Arabs conquered it during the period of al-Walīd bin cAbd al-Malik bin Marwān of the Umayyad dynasty from Syria in the year 92 according to their
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calendar called al-Hijra, after a period of time our exilic community made an effort to understand their tendencies and fnally grasped their language, mastered their speech, fathomed their precise objectives, became accustomed to the true sense of their patterns, were mindful of their poems’ sweetness, until God revealed to them the secrets of the Hebrew language and its grammar (ḥattā kashafa (a)llah ilayhim min sirri l-lugha l-cibrāniyya wa-naḥwihā), the weak letters, inversions, short vowels, the glottal stop, substitution, permutation and assimilation of letters and other grammatical features, on which the proof of truth was adduced and by which the power of veracity was endorsed by Abu¯ Zekhariah Yaḥyā b. David al-Fāsī known as Ḥayyu¯j and his followers, may God have mercy upon them.They quickly acquired rational methods of inquiry and understood that of which they were previously ignorant. The determination to investigate the speculative sciences and acquire reason-based knowledge stirred in a few of them. But their discursive eloquence was not strong and they were unprepared to compose poetry; they appreciated its sweetness and awakened to its marvels only after the seventh century of the fourth millennium since the Creation with the initial appearance of Abu¯ Yu¯suf Ḥasdai ibn Iṣḥāq b. Shapru¯ṭ, originally from Jaén, the communal leader, of Cordoba, may God have mercy upon him. (Ibn cEzra’ 1975, 54–56 [28b–30b]) For our purposes it is important to observe that Ibn cEzra’ regards the Andalusi–Jewish encounter with Arabs and Arabic and the Umayyad Jewish courtier Ḥasdai ibn Shapru¯ṭ’s socio-political authority (and largesse) as instrumental in initiating divinely orchestrated historical developments: mastery of the Arabic language, intimacy with Arabic poetry,Arabic learning, and patterns of rational thought advance the Jews’ knowledge of Hebrew and their production of Jewish culture. Through their intimate encounter with Arabic as a principal language in which Jewish life was lived and conducted and Jewish culture produced and consumed, religious and literary intellectuals embraced as virtuous the rhetorical ideal of life that underpinned both Andalusi rabbinic scholarship and literary culture. The Arabic language transmitted modes of thought, a constellation of discourses, and a set of cultural assumptions and experiences educated Jews shared with like-minded Muslims who believed that the scientifc-philosophical orientation of Islamic civilization was essential to the attainment of wisdom, the appreciation of beauty, the realization of social harmony and the attainment of individual human perfection. Avid interest in scientifc and philosophical knowledge in the Islamic world, including among minority communities such as the Jews, stemmed from the Muslims’ early encounters with older Near Eastern cultures touched by Persian and Indian civilizations. They engaged the legacy of Hellenistic learning preserved by learned Syriac Christians and Zoroastrians.As for the Jews of al-Andalus, the rational study of language and inquiry into its aesthetic properties were the critical elements propelling the entire cultural system including its religious dimensions. Another relevant text is drawn from a rhetorical anecdote in Taḥkemoni, the Hebrew maqāma collection by Judah al-Ḥarīzī, a Jewish literary intellectual of late twelfth-century Castile. Al-Ḥarīzī was the author of important collections of Judeo-Arabic maqāmāt and Arabic poetry who traveled to and remained in the Islamic East in quest of a cultural home that appears to have eluded him in Arabophone Toledo as well as in search of patronage and social status as Hebrew and Arabic literary intellectual. This passage pinpoints the origins of Hebrew poetry during the classical age of Islam: 366
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So after our religious community was exiled from its land many came to reside with Arabs in their realm and became accustomed to speak their language and articulate as they do. By intermingling with them and Arabizing (u-v-hitcarvam cimmahem) they learned the craft of poetry from them, as Scripture attests: “they mingled with the nations and learned their ways” (Psalms 106:35). (Harizi 2010, 210–11 [12: ll. 42–47]) The Taḥkemoni’s play on words inverts and subverts the meaning of the biblical passage and draws ironic attention to the Jews’ ineffable engagement with Arabic,14 its signifcant allure in Jewish literary and intellectual life, and we would say, for establishing the Arabic language as the fundamental vehicle for textualizing Andalusi Jewish culture in the form of Arabicized Hebrew poetry. Ironically, then, one of the most signifcant manifestations of the valorization of Arabic in Andalusi Jewish life was its role in the transformation of cultural production in general and Hebrew poetry in particular, which was never a discrete literary activity but a fundamental part of a cultural system.15 The turn of Jewish scholarly attention to the language and style of the Hebrew Bible, that is, through philological and aesthetic inquiry, produced biblical Hebrew lexicons, grammars, and commentaries in Arabic, in the process inspiring a newfangled Arabic-style Hebrew verse in which were to be found Arabic prosody, styled form, poetics, and conventional content (themes and genres). Du¯nash ben Labrāṭ (920–90), one of the poet-philologists in the circle assembled by the aforementioned Umayyad court secretary Ḥasdai ibn Shapru¯ṭ in the 950s, is credited with inventing the scheme for adapting Arabic monorhymed verse with quantitative meters (based on patterns of alternating long and short syllables) to biblical Hebrew. So too, Ben Labrāṭ introduced to Hebrew the staple themes of Arabic-style social verse,16 notably panegyric and the wine song in the classical and neo-classical Arabic form of the ode (qaṣīda), as well as poems or segments of poems devoted to the themes of nature, communal lament, and wisdom. This frst effort to compose Arabic-style Hebrew verse with its Arabizing syntax and calques can mislead the reader into thinking of this subcultural adaptation as a mechanistic undertaking. One who engages lyrics by Du¯nash certainly senses the manufactured “feel” of the ingenious adaptation of Arabic prosody to Hebrew he devised as well as the poet’s frequently formulaic efforts to transpose conventional Arabic motifs into Hebrew.Within two generations, however, Samuel the Nagid’s poetry revealed a mature poet’s complete mastery over the new prosody and the transformation of nearly the complete repertoire of neo-classical Arabic poetry’s genres and themes (including love, elegy, boast, invective, refective and martial verse) into brilliantly rendered, intertextually rich classical Hebrew. By the Nagid’s time, Andalusi Hebrew poets such as Solomon ibn Gabirol (d. c. 1058) also customized for Hebrew the rhetorical embellishments (various forms of wordplay) preferred by neo-classical Arabic badīc (ornate) style. In light of its rapid development, I propose we consider the Andalusi Jewish subcultural adaptation of Arabic poetry to Hebrew as a highly creative undertaking of “artistic translation” such as Willis Barnstone defnes it for an individual composition in which “the measure of success or failure in translation of literary texts is determined by the extent to which an equivalence of the entire cognitive and aesthetic elements is transferred and re-created in the new text”.17 Arabic style, prosody, poetics, and content were so thoroughly integrated into the inner literary lives of Andalusi Jewish poets, in imaginative recombination with their written command of the entire Hebrew Bible, that they even penetrated Hebrew liturgical verse in new devotional genres, especially in lyrics addressing individual religious experience and portraying the spiritually amorous relationship between God and Israel or the soul and God (see, for example, Scheindlin 1991; Tanenbaum 2002). 367
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The Andalusi Jews’ devotion to the study of language, their enchantment with words, invites us to reconsider the place of philology in the academic study of their Hebrew literary culture. In The Powers of Philology Hans Gumbrecht formulated modern philology’s three basic pursuits as “identifying texts, editing texts, and writing historical commentary” (Gumbrecht 2003, 2–4). These days, philology, in its premodern sense of text curatorship and in its classical nineteenthcentury incarnation as the desire to recover a textual past, has lost its signifcant place in intellectual history. With the exception of Semitic studies and Classics, the study of literature was divested of the study of language early in the twentieth century after which practitioners of literary studies came to regard its parent discipline with considerable disdain and condescension; philology is panned as passé in post-modernist humanistic circles.18 For the study of Andalusi Hebrew culture, however, philology, remains an indispensable tool for aesthetic and critical inquiry. It has come to encompass so much more than the study of language and the meaning of words, textual curatorship, or recovery of a textual past. The earliest modern research into Andalusi Hebrew literature by twentieth-century luminaries such as David Yellin, Heinrich Brody, Israel Davidson, Jefm Schirmann, and Samuel M. Stern, was, of course, dominated by textual stewardship and recovery, and in Schirmann’s and Stern’s cases equally extensively on “historical commentary”.19 The great philologist Angel Sáenz-Badillos continued this important enterprise and broadened both of its aspects in scores of studies as well as in making texts available in Spanish translation. With the exception of Schirmann, who downplayed the signifcance of Arabic for appreciation of the Hebrew, these scholars, especially Yellin and Stern, among others of their respective generations, noted that Arabic templates, paradigms, and patterns inspired and served as the requisite background to reading Andalusi Hebrew verse; and yet, they rarely refected on the historical, literary-historical, or theoretical implications of its signifcance. Yet critical considerations matter in assaying the complex nature of the intricate relationship between Hebrew and Arabic in al-Andalus. Modern scholarship on Andalusi Hebrew poetry, especially when it is restricted to synchronic methods of research, can lull the student into viewing the relationship between it and Arabic verse as overdetermined and technicalprocedural, just as the mechanistic appearance of Ben Labrāṭ’s Arabizing prosody can interfere with the reader’s sense of the entire enterprise of Hebrew poetry in al-Andalus.Yehuda Ratzaby produced an immensely erudite catalogue of motifs he perceives Hebrew literature “borrowed” from Arabic (Ratzaby 2006). Arie Schippers also compiled a register of “Arabic Themes in Hebrew Andalusian Poetry” in a learned work that suggests the derivative dependence of Hebrew on Arabic despite his observations of some of the ways in which they diverge (Schippers 1994). For his part and in even greater detail than Schippers, Israel Levin presented a monumental multi-volume study of the genres of Andalusi Hebrew poetry with detailed reference to its Arabic models which it follows or from which it departs (Levin 1994). Joseph Dana’s meticulous examination of Andalusi Hebrew poetics as set forth in Moses in cEzra’s Kitāb al-muḥāḍara identifes the Arabic sources he drew upon in formulating the rhetorical tropes of Andalusi Hebrew verse (Dana 1982). Even the masterful Dan Pagis’ frst book devoted to Ibn c Ezra’s social poetry unduly essentialized “normative” Hebraicized Arabic poetics over literary creativity in the making of Hebrew poetry (Pagis 1970). In subsequent diachronic studies, Pagis reversed himself and revealed the dynamic artistic originality of the Andalusi Hebrew poets and their successors in the Christian kingdoms, Provence, and Italy (Pagis 1976, 1991). Modern literary historians practicing what I will call “religious-nationalistic philology” did engage larger diachronic questions surrounding the emergence and accomplishment of Andalusi Hebrew poetry. They tended to construe social Hebrew poetry as a Jewish religious protest against Islam and minority life under Islamdom in the subversive form of an intense competi368
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tion with Arabic internal to Jewish intellectuals, that is, as a Jewish literary battle against the prestige of Arabic in Islam and the Arabs in Islamdom,20 an assertion with a legitimate basis in liturgical poetry and in occasional and highly personal poems by fgures such as Judah Halevi (see Brann 2000b). Alternatively, they deemed Arabic-style Hebrew social verse to be purely imitative and derivative of what is “foreign”, its consumers confned to courtly circles, and they dismissed it as “inauthentically Jewish” (for example, Fleischer 1979). Of the generation that produced those critical assessments, Dan Pagis emerged as uniquely attuned to the magnifcent artistry of Andalusi Hebrew literary creativity although its dialectical relationship to Arabic literature was outside the bounds of his work (Pagis 1976, 1991). Like Yellin, Stern, and Ratzaby before him,Yosef Tobi is steeped in Arabic language and literature and his research thoroughly engages the Arabic environment of Andalusi Hebrew poetry as the titles of his works indicate clearly.21 Tobi (as well as Joseph Yahalom, who works in partnership with Arabists when necessary) is inclined to read Hebrew poetry as an imitative “Judaization of Arabic culture”.22 Scholarship typically progresses dialectically, with successive generations building upon, expanding, and challenging the suppositions, work, and conclusions of its predecessors.To illustrate the most stimulating new directions scholarship into Andalusi Hebrew poetry has taken, I would like to turn our attention to three contemporary scholars that merit consideration as astute students of language, words and their semantic range, conceptual nuances and history, their rhythms, sounds, and their inter-textual resonances, that is, as philologists. At every turn in their studies of Andalusi Hebrew literature, they have remained acutely interested in and sensitive to what Gumbrecht deems “the differences between different historical periods and cultures, that is, the capacity of historicizing” (Gumbrecht 2003, 3).The late Rina Drory’s groundbreaking work endeavored to defne the distinctive positions occupied by the Jewish text composed in Arabic and Hebrew respectively. An Arabist by training, she proposed a new taxonomy of the Jews’ two distinct linguistic-literary systems during the classical age of Islam, with Arabic employed for communicative purposes and Hebrew reserved for ceremonial expression (Drory 2000b; see also her comparative essay, 2000a). Drory’s functional-instrumentalist scheme is extremely insightful and represented advanced inquiry into the questions before us.With its neat division of discursive labor, Drory’s design encourages us to account for the complexity of Andalusi Jewish literary identity informed by divided linguistic practice and by hyper-consciousness of the distinct places Arabic and Hebrew occupied in Andalusi Jewish life and culture in which Hebrew and Arabic were nevertheless in close contact.23 Tova Rosen and Raymond Scheindlin, two of Drory’s contemporaries who are likewise comparatists,24 exercise what I will call a critically minded humanistic philology central to the venture of the modern humanities itself.To put it another way, philology is a principal instrument of their historically, aesthetically, and critically informed literary study. In recent work Rosen relies extensively on feminist, psychoanalytic, and literary theory to study the language of medieval Hebrew literature as a critical category with its gendered representational practices as the subject of critical scrutiny. In the process, she provides innovative and unsettling (for many of her colleagues in the feld) readings of Hebrew texts with ample reference to associated usages in virtually every genre of Jewish writing, including theological, rabbinical, and exegetical discourse, uniformly composed by male authors (Rosen 2003). In this respect Rosen’s inspired philology of what language reveals and conceals employs the study of representation as a lens for understanding cultural production, power relations, and the psycho-social lives of those from another time and place who produced and consumed it.Yet Rosen’s body of work is by no means defned by feminist readings. She produced important comparative literary historical and literary critical studies on the Hebrew and Arabic muwashshaḥ (“girdle poem” in stanzas), the singularly Andalusi strophic and macaronic lyric form frequently punctuated with 369
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a colloquial (Arabic or Romance) kharja (exit/envoi) (Rosen[-Moked] 1985; Rosen 2000). She astutely examines the resonant interface of Andalusi Arabic and Hebrew songs, how “families” of muwashshaḥāt “may include Arabic and Hebrew, secular and religious, early and late,…poems… with intertextual levels potentially vast, crossing the borders of genres, languages and cultures” and how “the muwashshah is both the product and a microcosm of the cultural conditions peculiar to al-Andalus” (Rosen 2000, 173, 166). For his part, Scheindlin draws on all of Hebraica and Judaica to engage the Andalusi Hebrew poem while he embraces Arabo-Islamic learning as a subject of inquiry in its own right rather than as an accessory to reading the Hebrew text. Scheindlin’s accomplishment in this regard is that his performance of Arabic and Hebrew philology transcends literary history and criticism, the history of religion, intellectual history, and social history, engaging elements of each discipline as required by text, subtext, and context in order to defne the imaginative interiority and array of the Andalusi Hebrew poets’ literary identities.We learn from Scheindlin to apply philology carefully to read the Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic text as a document of culture originating at a specifc historical moment in a particular social context, to consider how it functions in vibrant conversation with other Arabic and Hebrew texts from the Islamic East as well as al-Andalus and how it relates to broader historical and cultural patterns.25 Finally he draws our attention to a central paradox of Judeo-Arabic culture in al-Andalus as in the Islamic East: mirroring the Islamic veneration of Arabic, it employed the Arabic language to express the highest reverence for Hebrew and then demonstrated in poetry the imaginative capacity and surpassing splendor of Hebrew. The imbrication of Arabic and Hebrew in Andalusi Jewish life and culture and in its academic study draws our attention back to the Jews’ curious linguistic situation and how we understand it. Consider that religious identity and literary identity are subjective categories and consciously projected and encoded in discourses; whereas linguistic identity, based on the spoken and written word and including use of script, is refexive in nature, that is, derived from education and practice. In their unique form of self-fashioning, Andalusi Jewish literary intellectuals can appear to cast themselves as bilingual in their discursive practices (see LópezMorillas 2000, 41–46; Wasserstein 1991, 3–4, 11–12, 14). In fact they were trilingual insofar as they were conversant in Romance and, from the eleventh century, poets availed themselves of Romance kharjāt in some of their muwashshaḥāt. Although they never employed the modern term of course, we know with certainty that Arabic served as what we would term their “mother tongue”. They spoke the Andalusi dialect of Middle Arabic and wrote in various Arabic registers using Hebrew script for communication with other Jews and in discourses (rabbinic legal thinking, commentaries, digests and jurisprudence, theology, philosophy, scientifc research, biblical philological, grammatical and exegetical works) designed for Jewish audiences. Hebrew by contrast was “acquired” and cultivated as a ceremonial and liturgical but not spoken language (except in special circumstances). But how could they conceivably think of Hebrew as a “secondary language” in modern parlance? The peculiar duality of their linguistic situation with its cultural esteem for Arabic and religious esteem for Hebrew posed a problem for the Jews’ consciousness, precisely because Arabic was so closely associated with Islam and the “inimitable wondrousness” (icjāz al-qur’ān) of its rival divine revelation (see Sadan 1994).And yet ironically the Arabo-Islamic cultural environment in which Jewish elites were comfortably ensconced interfered creatively with Andalusi Jewish culture: it stimulated and multiplied literary activity in Arabic for Jewish purposes and catalyzed Hebrew literary creativity in the form of artistic translation of Arabic poetry into Hebrew. Because Hebrew served as a “mother tongue” of a discursive sort in devotional and social poetry in a sociocultural context in which poetry was conceived as the most prestigious art form, producing 370
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and consuming Hebrew verse also provided Andalusi Jewish literary intellectuals an important psycho-social beneft that enabled them to inhabit two cultures, living in and between two languages simultaneously.
Notes 1 For purposes of this chapter I concentrate on study of social Hebrew poetry and its relationship to Arabic during the classical Andalusi period (950 to 1150) and for the most part exclude the more voluminous corpus of Andalusi Hebrew piyyuṭ (liturgical poetry) as well as elevated rhymed prose which does not appear in the Hebrew until the early twelfth century.The reference to research is selective and, wherever possible, favors scholarship available in English. For the most comprehensive presentation of Andalusi Hebrew poetry in poetic English see the frst part of Cole (2007). 2 Ibn Janāḥ (1886, 8). 3 Maimon (1972, 150). 4 Abraham ibn Daud studied with his highly esteemed uncle Barukh ben Isaac ibn al-Balīya (1077– 1126). For his part Maimonides was tutored by his father Maimon ben Joseph who was a disciple of Rabbi Joseph ibn Migash (d. 1141; himself a student of R. Isaac ibn al-Balīya), the luminary head of the famous rabbinical academy of Lucena whom Maimonides referred to as “my teacher”. Maimonides and Ibn Daud were reared in the traditions of the classical Andalusi Judeo-Arabic curriculum outlined in Ṭibb al-nuf u¯s [passage translated by Jacob Rader Marcus (Marcus 1999, 374–77)] by their near contemporary Joseph ben Judah ibn cAqnīn. 5 Ibn Daud 1967, 71–72 [Hebrew: 53–55] and Cohen’s comments, 269–273. 6 Elsewhere, I read this text in relation to a cluster of Andalusi Arabic texts reporting on the exceptional nature of Ismācīl ibn Naghrīla, the Jew (Samuel the Nagid), alongside Jewish texts portraying benefcial relationships between Andalusi Jews and Muslims. See Brann (2001, 129–130). 7 On the transition to the Christian kingdoms where Andalusi Jewish culture encountered and engaged Romance culture, see Septimus (1982);Assis (1995); and Decter (2007). Samuel ibn Tibbon, who cast Samuel the Nagid as a model for Sefardi intellectuals relocated to Provence, strikes the identical note regarding Jewish advancement through mastery of Arabic in his famous ethical will to his son Judah. On Ibn Tibbon and the transfer of Andalusi Judeo-Arabic tradition to Provence, see Pearce (2017). 8 Andalusi Jews and their traditions also found refuge in the sanctuary of Islamic lands in North Africa and the Levant but that development lays beyond the focus of this chapter. 9 This trope is studied in my forthcoming monograph, Andalusi Moorings: Andalusi and Sefardi Exceptionalism as Tropes of Islamic and Jewish Culture. 10 Hebrew poetry represented the very signifcant exception to the rule. See later in this chapter. 11 The role of Arabic in the process and trajectory of the Hebrew revival in al-Andalus are neatly reviewed by Martínez Delgado (2013). 12 Ibn cEzra’ acquired the reputation in tradition as a stellar liturgical poet especially on account of his considerable corpus of penitential compositions. 13 On the poet and literary critic, see Scheindlin (1976, 2000). 14 The biblical text is also cited by Ibn cEzra’ in Kitāb al-muḥāḍara (1975, 48 [25b]).The Taḥkemoni’s double entendre (“they mingled/they Arabized”) redeploys the Psalm’s allusion to ancient Israel’s turning to idol worship. 15 Apart from Samuel the Nagid, Solomon ibn Gabirol was a theologian-philosopher, Hebrew grammarian and poet; Moses ibn cEzra’ was a philosopher, literary historian and critic, and Hebrew poet; and Judah Halevi was a physician, theologian, and Hebrew poet. Abraham ibn cEzra’, who wrote solely in Hebrew, was a grammarian, biblical exegete, scientist, translator of texts from Arabic into Hebrew, and a Hebrew poet. 16 I employ “social” poetry in place of “secular”, a usage now understood to be anachronistic. Social Hebrew verse differs from the Arabic in subtle ways and was highly creative in its own right above and beyond its nexus with Arabic models. 17 Barnstone (1993, 47). It should be noted that Hebrew poets occasionally translated (in the literal sense of the word) Arabic verse into Hebrew. 18 The history of philology and its signifcance for the intellectual history of the humanities is related by Turner (2015).
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Ross Brann 19 Textual recovery continues research through ongoing discoveries in the literary remains of the Cairo Genizah. For a fuller account of the nineteenth-century origins of modern research and its subsequent evolution including the importance of Genizah fndings, see Rosen and Yassif (2004). 20 For example,Allony (1972) and Roth (1983) identify this response as parallel to the non-Arab Muslims’ shuc u¯biyya “movement”. 21 Tobi (2010), Between Hebrew and Arabic Poetry: Studies in Spanish Medieval Hebrew Poetry, and Tobi (2000), Proximity and Distance: Medieval Arabic and Hebrew Poetry, also published under the same title in English translation (Tobi 2004). For an example of Yahalom’s work in this regard, see Yahalom (2009). 22 I borrow this characterization from Rosen and Yassif (2004, 263). 23 Drory’s thesis applies perfectly for the Jews’ cultural situation at the end of the classical Andalusi period and its immediate aftermath in the Iberian Christian kingdoms and Provence. 24 The work of several younger literary-historical comparatists merit mention here in addition to those already cited: Decter (2018);Alfonso (2008); Elinson (2009); Lowin (2014); and Kfr (2018). 25 See, for example, Scheindlin (2008) and his essay cited above (Scheindlin 2002). He also refned the practice of literary translation of medieval Hebrew poetry. See previous references to his other studies and translations.
References Abramson, Shraga. 1970.“A Letter of Rabbi Judah Halevi to Rabbi Moses ibn Ezra” [Hebrew]. In Ḥayyim Schirmann Jubilee Volume, edited by Shraga Abramson and Aharon Mirksy, 397–411. Jerusalem: Schocken Institute for Jewish Research. Al-Andalusī, Ṣācid. See Andalusī, Ṣācid al-. Alfonso, Esperanza. 2008. Islamic Culture Through Jewish Eyes: Al-Andalus from the Tenth Through Twelfth Centuries. Abingdon: Routledge. Al-Harizi, Judah. See Harizi, Judah alAllony, Nehemiah. 1972.“The Reaction of Moses ibn Ezra to cArabiyya (Arabism)” [Hebrew]. Tarbiẓ 42: 97–112. Andalusī, Ṣācid al-. 1912. Ṭabaqāt al-umam. Edited by Louis Cheiko. Beirut: Imprimerie Catholique. Assis, Yom Tov. 1995. “The Judeo-Arabic Tradition in Christian Spain”. In The Jews of Medieval Islam: Community, Society, and Identity, edited by Daniel Frank, 111–124. Leiden: Brill. Barnstone, Willis. 1993. The Poetics of Translation: History,Theory, Practice. New Haven:Yale University Press. Brann, Ross. 2000a. “The Arabized Jews”. In Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Al-Andalus, edited by María Rosa Menocal, Raymond P. Scheindlin and Michael Sells, 435–454. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brann, Ross. 2000b. “Judah Halevi”. In Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Al-Andalus, edited by María Rosa Menocal, Raymond P. Scheindlin and Michael Sells, 265–281. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brann, Ross. 2001. Power in the Portrayal: Representations of Muslims and Jews in Islamic Spain. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cole, Peter. 2007. The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950–1492. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dana, Joseph. 1982. Poetics of Mediaeval Hebrew Literature According to Moshe ibn Ezra [Hebrew]. Jerusalem: Dvir. Decter, Jonathan P. 2007. Iberian Jewish Literature: Between al-Andalus and Christian Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Decter, Jonathan P. 2018. Dominion Built of Praise: Panegyric and Legitimacy Among Jews in the Medieval Mediterranean. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Drory, Rina. 2000a. “The Maqama”. In The Literature of Al-Andalus, edited by María Rosa Menocal, Raymond P. Scheindlin and Michael Sells, 190–210. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Drory, Rina. 2000b. Models and Contacts: Arabic Literature and its Impact on Medieval Jewish Culture. Leiden: Brill. Elinson,Alexander E. 2009. Looking Back at al-Andalus:The Poetics of Loss and Nostalgia in Medieval Arabic and Hebrew Literature. Leiden: Brill.
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Arabic alongside and into Hebrew Fleischer, Ezra 1979. “Refections on the Character of Hebrew Poetry in Spain” [Hebrew]. Pecamim 2: 15–20. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. 2003. The Powers of Philology: Dynamics of Textual Scholarship. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Harizi, Judah al-. 2010. Taḥkemoni. Edited by Joseph Yahalom and Naoya Katsumata. Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East and the Hebrew University. Ibn Daud, Abraham. 1967. Sefer ha-Qabbalah [The Book of Tradition]. Edited and translated with notes by Gerson D. Cohen. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society. Ibn cEzra’, Moses. 1975. Kitāb al-muḥāḍara wa-l-mudhākara. Edited by Abraham S. Halkin. Jerusalem: Mekize Nirdamim. Ibn Janāḥ, Jonah, 1886. Kitāb al-lumac. Edited by Joseph Derenbourg. Paris: F.Vieweg. Ibn al-Khaṭīb. 1973. Al-Iḥāṭa fī akhbār gharnāṭa. 2nd revised ed, 4 vols. Edited by Mohamed Abdulla Enan. Cairo: al-Khāngī Bookshop. Kfr, Uriah. 2018. A Matter of Geography:A New Perspective on Medieval Hebrew Poetry. Leiden: Brill. Krinis, Ehud. 2014. God's Chosen People: Judah Halevi’s ‘Kuzari’ and the Shīʻī Imām Doctrine.Turnhout: Brepols. Levin, Israel. 1994. The Embroidered Coat:The Genres of Hebrew Secular Poetry in Spain. 3 vols. [Hebrew].Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House. Lobel, Diana. 2000. Between Mysticism and Philosophy: Suf Language of Religious Experience in Judah Ha-Levi’s ‘Kuzari’.Albany: State University of New York Press. Lobel, Diana. 2007. A Suf-Jewish Dialogue: Philosophy and Mysticism in Baḥya ibn Paqu¯da’s ‘Duties of the Heart’. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. López-Morillas, Consuelo. 2000. “Language”. In The Literature of Al-Andalus, edited by María Rosa Menocal, Raymond P. Scheindlin and Michael Sells, 33–59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lowin, Shari L. 2014. Arabic and Hebrew Love Poems in al-Andalus. Abingdon: Routledge. Maimon, Rabbi Moshe ben. 1972. Iggrot. Edited by Joseph Qafḥ. Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook. Martínez Delgado, José. 2013.“Secularization through Arabicization:The Revival of the Hebrew Language in Al-Andalus”. Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 12: 299–317. Marcus, Jacob Rader. 1999. The Jew in the Medieval World:A Source Book. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press. Pagis, Dan. 1970. Secular Poetry and Poetic Theory: of Moses ibn cEzra’ and His Contemporaries [Hebrew]. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute. Pagis, Dan. 1976. Change and Tradition in the Secular Poetry: Spain and Italy [Hebrew]. Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House. Pagis, Dan. 1991. Hebrew Poetry of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pearce, Sarah J. 2017. The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition:The Role of Arabic in Judah ibn Tibbon’s Ethical Will. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ratzaby,Yehuda. 2006. Borrowed Motifs in Jewish Literature [Hebrew]. Ramat-Gan: Bar- Ilan University Press. Rosen(-Moked), Tova. 1985. The Hebrew Girdle Poem (Muwashshaḥ) in the Middle Ages [Hebrew]. Haifa: Haifa University Press. Rosen, Tova. 2000. “The Muwashshah”. In The Literature of Al-Andalus, edited by María Rosa Menocal, Raymond P. Scheindlin and Michael Sells, 165–189. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosen, Tova. 2003. Unveiling Eve: Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Texts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Rosen,Tova, and Eli Yassif. 2004.“The Study of Hebrew Literature of the Middle Ages: Major Trends and Goals”. In The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, edited by Martin Goodman, 241–294. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roth, Norman. 1983.“Jewish Reactions to the cArabiyya and the Renaissance of Hebrew in Spain”. Journal of Semitics Studies 28: 63–84. Ṣācid al-Andalusī. See Andalusī, Ṣācid alSadan, Joseph. 1994. “Identity and Inimitability: Contexts of Inter-Religious Polemics and Solidarity in Medieval Spain, in the Light of Two Passages by Moše ibn ʿEzra’ and Yaʿaqov ben Elʿazar”. Israel Oriental Studies 14: 325–347. Scheindlin, Raymond P. 1976. “Rabbi Moshe Ibn Ezra on the Legitimacy of Poetry”. Medievalia et Humanistica 7: 101–115. Scheindlin, Raymond P. 1991. The Gazelle: Medieval Hebrew Poems on God, Israel and the Soul. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society.
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Ross Brann Scheindlin, Raymond P. 2000. “Moses ibn Ezra”. In The Literature of al-Andalus, edited by María Rosa Menocal, Raymond P. Scheindlin and Michael Sells, 252–264. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scheindlin, Raymond P. 2002. “Merchants and Intellectuals, Rabbis and Poets”. In Cultures of the Jews: A New History, edited by David Biale, 313–386. New York: Schocken Books. Scheindlin, Raymond P. 2008. The Song of the Distant Dove: Judah Halevi’s Pilgrimage. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schippers, Arie. 1994. Spanish Hebrew Poetry & the Arabic Literary Tradition:Arabic Themes in Hebrew Andalusian Poetry. Leiden: Brill. Septimus, Bernard. 1982. Hispano-Jewish Culture in Transition: The Career and Controversies of Ramah. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Stern, Samuel M. 1950.“On the History of Samuel the Nagid” [Hebrew]. Zion 15: 135–138. Stroumsa, Sarah. 2009. Maimonides in his World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tanenbaum, Adena. 2002. The Contemplative Soul: Hebrew Poetry and Philosophical Theory in Medieval Spain. Leiden: Brill. Tobi, Yosef. 2000. Proximity and Distance: Medieval Arabic and Hebrew Poetry [Hebrew]. Haifa: University of Haifa and Tel Aviv; Zemorah-Bitan. Tobi,Yosef. 2004. Proximity and Distance: Medieval Arabic and Hebrew Poetry. Leiden: Brill. Tobi,Yosef. 2010. Between Hebrew and Arabic Poetry: Studies in Spanish Medieval Hebrew Poetry. Leiden: Brill. Turner, James. 2015. Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities. The William G. Bowen Memorial Series in Higher Education, Book 88. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wasserstein, David J. 1991. “The Language Situation in al-Andalus”. In Studies on the Muwaššhaḥ and the Kharja, edited by Alan Jones and Richard Hitchcock, 1–15. Reading: Ithaca Press. Yahalom, Joseph. 2009. Yehuda Halevi: Poetry and Pilgrimage. Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press.
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24 FROM HEROES TO COURTLY KNIGHTS The rise and development of chivalric narrative in medieval Iberia1 Axayácatl Campos García Rojas
Writing about medieval chivalric literature involves thinking about a genre—or a cultural mode, really—with repercussions far beyond the Middle Ages and well into our current days. Chivalry’s scope was not purely literary but encompassed a vast variety of phenomena carrying unique social, political, economic, and cultural implications. In the Hispanic context, the nature of chivalric fction is multifaceted and speaks to a wide range of outlooks and perspectives. Here, however, I will focus specifcally on the literary traits of chivalry insofar as they shed light on the social world that characterized it. Chivalric narrative responds, frst and foremost, to military concerns. Had chivalry not existed as a medieval social institution, it would have made little sense to narrate the deeds and exploits of knights, a “reasonably identifable socio-political group made up of military men who rode horses” (Rodríguez Velasco 2006, xi). Indeed, this social group appears to have originated in the Roman equites and their subsequent medieval offshoots, the miles and the militia, select warriors that would, in time, become chivalric orders (Fleckenstein 2006, 38–52; Flori 2001, 15–31, 62–68; Rodríguez Velasco 2006, xiii–xiv).2 A thorough or exhaustive account on the history of chivalry is impractical here; a number of scholars, such as Josef Fleckenstein (2006), Jean Flori (2001), and Maurice Keen (2008) have written admirably on the subject. Additionally, on chivalry in medieval Castile, the works of Jesús Rodríguez Velasco (1996, 2006) have proven illuminating contributions.
The background of chivalry and its way into fiction In the medieval Castilian context, Rodríguez Velasco notes that prior to Alfonso X (the Wise), “no text that defnes, regulates, comments, or theorizes chivalry can be said to exist whatsoever” (2006, xi), but this does not mean, of course, that chivalry did not exist previously.The scholar also maintains that the time comprised between the tenures of Alfonso VIII of Castile and Alfonso IX of León, as well as Alfonso X and XI of Castile and León (1158–1350) consolidates the development of Hispanic chivalry and that, given the lack of archival evidence, it is diffcult to know how the institution might have worked before then (2006, xiii).With Alfonso X’s Fuero 375
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Real (Royal Jurisdiction), Especulo (Speculum), and Siete Partidas (Seven-Part Code), a clearer picture emerges on how to control, defne, and legislate chivalry in Castile from both a political and ideological standpoint: The discourse on chivalry applies primarily to its carriers and likely protagonists: knights. After all, chivalry was a monarchic invention to model social, ethical, and political ideals for nobility, particularly for the so-called ricos-hombres, who, according to Alfonso X, were to embellish courts. (Rodríguez Velasco 2006, xxxi) To categorize the study of Castilian chivalry better, Rodríguez Velasco identifes three defning principles: the noble chivalric discourse, the non-noble chivalric discourse, and fnally, the antichivalric discourse (2006, xxxv).The frst principle refers to a kind of chivalric nobility that had to compete with its lineage-based (and theological) counterpart; a nobility that stemmed from political and civil considerations arising from feudal crises (2006, xxxv–xxxvi). This civil—or chivalric—nobility was accessible to all social groups and commoners in particular. As such, members of this group needed to validate their presence in society by performing daring or heroic feats that were later recognized and lauded by the king. It is in this context that we fnd what Rodríguez Velasco calls the chivalric fabula (fable), a genre rooted in the literary works of chivalric narrative that confrmed the idea that a system existed whereby access to nobility was not only allowed but possible, or the fact that, for nobility to exist, it was not only crucial to belong to a certain lineage but in fact, to renew it constantly […] by performing a virtuous deed, which, in most cases, was effectively an act of chivalry in and of itself. (2006, xxxvi) The non-noble discourse has to do with warriors and fghters who would be often called knights but were otherwise not noble or privileged: “these are commoner knights, villains, simple councilmen, minor administrators” (Rodríguez Velasco 2006, xli–xlii) that, nonetheless, amassed signifcant political, military, and economic power and would frequently come together as a group in order to protect their interests: Villain-knights also fulfll a purpose of representation. For the House of Trastámara, they were considered a kind of permanent army who needed to keep their arms and horses in perfect order. Non-noble knights had to demonstrate their power once a year before their king or their noble representative and perform an alarde (a boast); i.e., a proof of their military might and/or valor in the form of jousting, tournaments, a feast, or bullfghting. (Rodríguez Velasco 2006, xliii) The third and last modality, the anti-chivalric discourse, was primarily represented by Don Juan Manuel and his work. Don Juan Manuel came from the highest ranks of Castilian nobility, but he quickly realized that, for politics to be effective, chivalry was to be given a central place, and instead of fghting against this social institution, he proposed his own model (Rodríguez Velasco 2006, liii): Don Juan Manuel provided the frst examples of a clearly anti-chivalric discourse, but also acknowledged that chivalry was crucial in cultural and political terms. As such, 376
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anti-chivalry did not necessarily imply fghting against the institution as a group or even as a system, but instead, it meant revising its roles, functions, virtues, and of course, its modes and routes of access. (Rodríguez Velasco 2006, liii) Don Juan Manuel devotes a major portion of his work to discussing anti-chivalry, especially in the now lost Libro de la caballería (The Book of Knighthood) and in the remaining fragments of the Libro del cavallero et del escudero (The Book of the Knight and his Squire). Other works in which chivalry features prominently include the Libro de los Estados (The Book of Government) (1991) and the Libro de las tres Razones (The Book of Three Reasons) (AyerbeChaux 1986; Gómez Redondo 1998, 1110; Gómez Redondo and Lucía Megías 2002a, 718–724; Rodríguez Velasco 2006, xxxii).3 These texts by Juan Manuel and other authors are relatively theoretical in nature; they refect on the status and conditions of chivalry, and importantly, aim to reorient it. “[These works] do not, at any rate, question the existence or the validity of chivalric models, but they certainly do view chivalry in a different light (Rodríguez Velasco 2006, liv). These contexts provided the literary basis for chivalric narrative in medieval Castile. However, in order to have a fuller understanding of the genre’s functions and implications, it would be important to consider chivalry’s earliest textual manifestations: historiography and chronicles. Traditionally, the frst autonomous works of chivalric literature in Spanish are thought to be The Book of the Knight Zifar (c. 1300),“The Knight of the Swan”, included as part of the The Great Conquest of Overseas, and the later Amadis of Gaula.4 It should be noted that chivalric narrative frst existed in prose form and intended to distinguish fact from what we would later call “fction”.The so-called historical matter was mostly described in medieval chronicles that dealt with themes and subjects from classical Antiquity.Take, for instance, the immensely popular chronicles about the War of Troy, widely replicated throughout the thirteenth century at Alfonso’s court and that would later blur, in a fctional manner, events and episodes related to Troy. Gómez Redondo maintains that: this was fction at its fnest; we are talking about works intended to portray historical material, a subset of didactic and moralizing texts that would generally interest the courtly classes. Only then can we understand this fascinating mix of mythology, military might, historical events, and love affairs. (1998, 796) It is impossible to understand how these stories became “fctional” without frst mentioning the Trojan histories recounted by Daris Phrygius (sixth century) in De excidio Troiae historia, and Dictys Cretensis (fourth century) in Ephemeris belli Troiani, two seminal works that medieval authors considered the narrative basis for all things Trojan (Curtius 1955, 252; Marín Pina 1994, 542n4). Because these narratives needed to be read as factual and/or “historical”, Dares and Dictys would add elements and strategies that resonated among medieval audiences centuries later (Haywood 1996, 7). These rewritings proved enduring in medieval European literature because they were generally more accessible than the Iliad itself. The Matter of Troy and its related narratives were, as such, ideal examples to appreciate the process of “fctionalization” of events deemed real and/or historical, and that, in turn, provided fertile ground for chivalric authors in the sixteenth century. It was thanks to these adaptations, for instance, that late medieval writers of chivalric fction could employ powerful narrative tropes such as the found manuscript or the false translation, or the so-called ecdotic motive (Fogelquist 1982; Marín Pina 1994; 377
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Campos García Rojas 2008).What we fnd in these Trojan stories (Summae) then, set a remarkable precedent for what was to come in later chivalric narratives in Castile: These Trojan compilations, of course, do not seek to authorize mythology because the Greek subtext does not need authority. However, the medieval author would still fguratively paraphrase or explain these narratives because truth could not be, in essence, distorted.As such, when speaking about, say, the dragon that guarded the golden feece at Colchis and that Jason would have to rescue, the chronicler or historian (estoriador) passionately uncovers the auctores who had sanctioned the story, obliterating any kind of truthful judgment or opinion. (Gómez Redondo 1999, 1637) Because their goal was to fx memory and, at the same time, replicate historical events that were previously known, heard, or witnessed, chroniclers and historians would revise history by adding fantastical or otherwise “unreal” content, and this would establish the birth of chivalric narrative as we know it (Cacho Blecua and Lacarra 2012, 494). During the ffteenth century, we see the appearance of chronicles dealing with famous individuals (that is, people who had lived lives interesting enough to be considered memorable) known as chivalric biographies, and these are equally refective of the development of fctional genres, what Juan Manuel Cacho Blecua and María Jesús Lacarra have labeled literaturización (2012, 497), or fctionalization: [authors of chronicles] lacked fxed patterns, but they could repeat a number of motifs or strategies if they deemed useful; they had considerable freedom in using and adapting previous material, and, at the same time, their content could delve on unimportant details, customs, or activities that spoke to an everyday world that was closer to reality than to fction. (2012, 494) These works were set up, therefore, to be a combination of archetypal modes with heroic content with a wide range of disparate, subjective judgments that greatly deviated from history: “Love and war, deeds and feats. These were the staple traits of fctional chivalric characters, which were retold by reputable chroniclers seeking to imitate but also to innovate” (Cacho Blecua and Lacarra 2012, 497). What we have thus established is the development of chivalry as a social and military institution, and later as a literary and courtly code throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Concretely, we deal with narratives that immortalize and validate the exploits of noble Castilians based on a frmly established idea of lineage (Cacho Blecua and Lacarra 2012, 509; Rodríguez Velasco 2006).
Chivalric fiction in Spain Alan Deyermond frequently and fervently insisted that fctional narrative in medieval Spain lacked a concrete, generic label (1975). As opposed to English romances and French romans, Spanish did not have a term that readily identifed the kind of text that dealt with knightly exploits:5 Romance is an adventure story flled with fghting, quests, love and longing, encounters with the Other and other worlds. The formula repeats itself in varying degrees. The 378
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world of romance seems distant to the reading public in time, space, or social class. But we must not mistake it with the novel even if the Spanish tradition itself lacks a defnite term to distinguish both textual typologies, particularly when it comes to fctional prose. (Deyermond, 1980, 351) Medieval Hispanic studies have tended to neglect romance as a genre in its own right. Therefore, romances have been studied primarily in terms of what they lack, and not as representative of similar European genres and their subsequent critical scholarship. (Deyermond 1980, 353) This issue has long been a nagging scholarly pursuit. Critics have focused primarily on the specifc terminology or labels to apply to the genre in Spain, especially because medieval genres do not always have neat modern equivalents.Tacitly, academic convention dictates that the works I focus on in this chapter be called novels or romances of chivalry. Such a choice remains determined by a variety of literary, intertextual, and even commercial narrative factors due to the role that the printing press played in the development of this literature in the late medieval period, but especially toward the early sixteenth century (Lucía Megías 2000; Lucía Megías and Sales Dasí 2008). However longstanding, discussions on what and how to call the genre are still important to be had, and we could refer to Deyermond (1975, 1980, 1984) to revive the debate with regards to several different genres and modes.6 It is precisely the complex and unique nature of chivalric fction that allows for and explains the lack of specifc labels to call these narratives. The close links between fctional literature and historical chronicles could have no doubt contributed to the blurring of the boundaries between history and fction.This would go beyond the medieval period and continue well into the Golden Age. If chivalric narratives were so important in medieval Hispanic contexts, it was probably due to the fact that Alfonso X bestowed a crucial role on chivalry in validating his own regal power. Consider the Second-Part Code, in which the king notably understands and performs all knightly dealings and procedures, so much so that he makes sure chivalry and monarchy appear to be closely knit, with strict social codes to follow in each case. Regarding the relevance of chivalry in medieval Spanish prose, Fernando Gómez Redondo and José Manuel Lucía Megías note that: in the Second-Part Code, the social order is not fundamentally overseen by the king but by chivalry itself.This echoes principles that would go against established norms in the Royal Jurisdiction and the Speculum, and shows the extent to which Alfonso sought to integrate chivalry even in dealing with his enemies.That is why, for example, he gives his “word” to sustain and ratify new meanings and creations. (2002b, 16) Chivalry was extremely important in the social and political life of all medieval Iberian kingdoms, and this is seen in the development of fctional and non-fctional literature alike. Even hagiography combines elements of chivalric fction, especially during the time of Sancho IV, which explains, for instance, the potency of legends such as The Knight Plaçidas (1982), of which Zifar is a derivative. The Book of the Knight Zifar exemplifes how fourteenth-century social discourse illustrates the wide-ranging infuence of manorial-lordly chivalry in light of what scholars have called molinismo, i.e., the political and cultural program initiated and endorsed by Doña María de Molina, the queen regent and mother of Fernando IV. In order 379
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to assure and consolidate Fernando’s son’s right to the throne, the queen fostered cultural and political initiatives that culminated in the writing of numerous important works such as Zifar, in which we can markedly hear echoes of Doña María’s ideology and thought (Gómez Redondo 1998, 856–863). The Book of the Knight Zifar (1983) seeks to establish and embody the power of lineage and the crucial role female rulers played in fourteenth-century Castile. It is divided into four segments: “The Knight of God”,“The King of Mentón”,“The Instructions of the King of Mentón”, and “The Adventures of Roboán” (1983). Here, Zifar is on a quest to recover his kingdom while demonstrating that he descends from a “line of kings”. His origins are of utmost importance to knightly performance and endeavors; he knows this, and, as often happens in chivalric romance, it is also the primary driving force behind his mission: “Dear wife”, said the Knight Zifar,“when I was a small boy in my grandfather’s house, I heard that his father had said that he came from royal ancestry. I audaciously asked how that royal lineage had been lost, and he told me that it had been lost through the wickedness and wrongdoings of a king in his family line. He was deposed and they made a simple knight king. However, he was a very good man, of good common sense, a lover of justice, and a complete gentleman in all ways […]. ‘And if I were so exemplary,’ I said,‘would I be able to reach such high estate?’ “He answered me with a smile,‘My very young and wise friend, I say that you can, with the grace of God, if you strive hard and do not tire of doing good. By doing good, a man can surely rise to high position.’ […] These words that my grandfather said to me touched my heart in such a way that I proposed then to reach that goal from that day forward”. (The Book 1983, 21) The knight has lost it all: kingdomless and lordless, his enemies conspire against him and demean him before the king, whose favor he has lost. Additionally, he must bear a family curse because of his ancestors’ misdeeds (The Book 1983, 8–9, 20–21). These misfortunes urge him to seek adventures and recuperate his lineage and kingdom, and, as is ftting, with the understanding that he lives under God’s graces and blessings. The frst section of the book “The Knight of God” (1983, 7–100), responds to this paradigm. Zifar travels alongside his family and endures multiple trials that reinforce his commitment to chivalry and God: he loses both his sons, Garfín and Roboán, and his wife Grima is abducted by lustful seamen, leaving him entirely disgraced. (The Book 1983, 53–58). Zifar manages to conquer the kingdom of Mentón through a second marriage and good deeds as a knight and politician (The Book 1983, 155–189). His second wife, the daughter of the king of Mentón, dies, and Zifar is able to reunite with his frst wife, who had escaped her abductors after leading a saintly life at a nunnery (The Book 1983, 60–65). They gather at Mentón, where Grima becomes queen, and their children eventually make their way back to the kingdom after surviving countless ordeals.As a king, Zifar holds a grip on power and consolidates a dynasty. As a whole, the text is conceived to justify the political project of Queen María. “The Instructions of the King of Mentón” is the third part of the text and is devoted to telling us the education that Garfín and Robán must complete as Zifar’s sons and, therefore, legitimate heirs to the throne.They must not only be educated but, indeed, they must be well versed in governance when the time comes (The Book 1983, 154–226). As a frstborn, Garfín is frst in line. Roboán, however, must leave the kingdom and prove his worth as a knight just as his own father did. He has, in short, to demonstrate he is ft to govern. At any rate, a princely education comes as 380
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a natural requirement, and this young man’s adventures are thoroughly recounted in the text’s fourth segment:“The Adventures of Roboán” (The Book 1983, 227). “The Instructions of the King of Mentón” are a collection of Eastern exemplary tales.They have generated signifcant scholarly interest for their importance in relation to chivalry, but in also as exempla in and of themselves (Armijo 2015; Burke 1972, 104–114; Cuesta Torre 2015; Gómez Redondo 1999, 1439–1444; Lucía Megías 1999;Walker 1974, 116–134). It is important to note that the exemplary tales concern not only the “Instructions” section, since throughout The Book of the Knight Zifar we do fnd similar relevant material. Consider the part where Zifar reveals the reasons for his unhappiness to Grima and why he wants to seek a kingdom. He specifcally asks her to be sensible and discreet and proceeds to tell her two tales:“Of the parables that the Knight Zifar told his wife in order to persuade her to keep his secret; the frst parable is that of the half-friend” (The Book 1983, 12, 12–15) as well as “Of the parable that the Knight Zifar told his wife of how the other friend was tasted” (The Book 1983, 15, 15–20). Strictly speaking, the tales contained within The Book of the Knight Zifar, and particularly the ones belonging to the “Instructions” segment, cannot be considered examples of chivalric literature.Though they occur at a time when the king provides chivalric and princely instruction to his sons, we cannot identify, in general terms, elements that might point toward the mode of chivalry, as Deyermond convincingly explains: “there really isn’t an adventure-flled story; no fghting, love, quests, travels, encounters in any combination whatsoever” (1980, 351). We can, nonetheless, fnd some indication that the “Instructions” belong within the larger literary, political, cultural, and educational program conceived for Zifar in light of Doña María’s broader ambitions to legitimize regal power. Tellingly, the chivalric narrative built around The Book of the Knight Zifar is a kind of fctional prose that, although bearing upon the body politic, exhausts and exacerbates many of the motifs and strategies found in similar texts.We have, in this sense, the life of Saint Eustace originating in The Knight Pláçidas, in addition to a variety of texts that closely echo models of exemplary literature. The Book of the Knight Zifar’s fourth section is devoted to the prince Roboán’s adventures.“The Adventures of Roboán” (The Book 1983, 227) is, again, a narrative that decidedly fts into the chivalric scheme given the abundance of themes and formulae that we fnd in this kind of texts: Roboán becomes an accomplished knight and he displays considerable political might as he goes on conquering kingdoms and experiencing love along the way. Throughout the account, additionally, the young knight witnesses multiple fantastic and even magical events. In this section, young Roboán travels from the kingdom of Trigrida to the Islas Dotadas (Plentiful Isles), an exotic otherworldly paradise where he meets empress Nobleza (Nobility), with whom he happily falls in love (The Book 1983, 455–480; Lacarra 1993). However, Roboán displays greed and must leave that paradise and is sent back to the earthly kingdom where he completes his quests (he conquers a kingdom, marries, and leaves offspring) (The Book 1983, 480–516). In all this process, Zifar’s advice is patently featured, and the young knight is able to succeed due to his father’s sound teaching, thus eventually legitimizing his right as a king. Of course, the repetitive nature of this narrative would, in practical terms, serve to justify María’s political plan and ideology. The Great Conquest of Overseas is a thirteenth-century chronicle of debatable authorship, although it has been frequently said to be one of Alfonso’s cultural projects and interests. His imperial plan would have no doubt been persuasively explained through such a work, because “Alfonso cared deeply about expansionist matters. Indeed, the General History would genealogically explain his imperial obsessions by evoking a conquest of Jerusalem that had been largely orchestrated by his ancestors, and that he wished to replicate himself ” (Gómez Redondo 1998, 1035). 381
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Recent scholarship shows that this text would have been relevant in the context of Sancho IV, whose crusading ideals had been actualized at Tarifa in 1292, thus continuing the Alfonsine project by writing historiography in the mode of the History of Spain or the General History, if a bit differently (owing, perhaps, to French narrative and compilation techniques). The Great Conquest of Overseas would prove, then, that Alfonso’s cultural program was alive and well (Gómez Redondo 1998, 1036).We can therefore assume with some certainty that the text could have been composed between 1291 and 1293 (Ramos 2002, 604; Cacho Blecua and Lacarra 2012, 410–11; Gómez Redondo 1998, 1029–1092). Deyermond considered The Great Conquest of Overseas to be a “novel-like Crusaders’ chronicle” in which “the hero, Geoffrey of Bouillon was to be linked with his formidable legendary antecessor,The Knight of the Swan, thus echoing God’s will and in several different generations” (1984, 283). Recently, Gómez Redondo has aptly established the work’s relationship to the French legend of The Knight of the Swan in keeping with molinista trends in thirteenth-century Spain (1998, 1029–1092). Indeed, the Spanish version of The Great Conquest of Overseas is rooted in historiography (William of Tyre’s Historia), and we fnd numerous French chansons de geste dealing with similar versions of the tale.Additionally, later accounts in Castilian include, for example, texts that recount the story of The Knight of the Swan and Charlemagne’s youth and lineage (Ramos 2002, 601). For the purposes of this chapter, we are especially interested in highlighting two key aspects of this text: frst, The Great Conquest of Overseas’ role in confguring and consolidating chivalric fction in Spain is indisputable; and, second, its existence fts nicely within the larger cultural context favored by María de Molina. The Great Conquest of Overseas is, thus, a clear example of how a text originally considered to be factual and “historical” became adapted in favor of fctional and literary schemes, as maintained by Rafael Ramos:“the earliest manifestations of prose novels in Spain could only be understood in light of the chronicles” (2002, 604). In this sense, the legend of The Knight of the Swan within the larger Conquest is a good proof of the mixing of different narrative modes, typologies, and genres. Specifcally, the text features a mixture of chronicled historical events with frequent gaps and interruptions in order to rememorize or highlight, say, the noble or mythical origins of the text’s heroes: if Geoffrey is an exceptional crusader, then it is key to establish his lineage clearly, powerfully, and convincingly. In this kind of text, a plot exists that combines familial histories with epic and/or folk-like undertones that speak to a knight’s fghting abilities. Such a combination, naturally, only strengthens the notion of a noble, unique lineage and fghting system (Cacho Blecua and Lacarra 2012, 411). A text such as The Great Conquest of Overseas is also associated with folkloric material. Signifcantly, stories where humans turn into animals or where women or queens are falsely accused and must prove otherwise feature prominently (Deyermond 1984, 283–84; Gómez Redondo 1998, 1059–1060). Consequently, the text stresses knightly virtue as a result of God’s graces, and, when this happens, the story’s protagonist not only recovers a kingdom, but indeed, a woman’s fate can be reversed.“The Knight of the Swan” can therefore be considered a primal form of fctional chivalric narrative. Gómez Redondo has studied The Great Conquest of Overseas and “The Knight of the Swan” at length. When Sancho IV died, Fernando IV’s right to the throne had to be established frmly, given political instability and dynastic intrigue. In The Great Conquest of Overseas, and more specifcally, in “The Knight of the Swan”, the historical association with Fernando IV was made abundantly clear: In sum, what could have been a frst translation composed at an Alfonsine court or scriptorium became, in reality, a historiographical compilation about the kingdom of Sancho IV seeking to demonstrate the king’s political project. Upon his death, the 382
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king’s legacy would be most strongly felt in the model of chivalric fction that established the basis for his son’s education. (1998, 1037–1038) Given its contents, structure, and plot development,“The Knight of the Swan” allows for a greater understanding of fctional narrative and shows a marked shift from the concerns of historiography, “which mingles with fction and is sustained by its very narrative framework” (Gómez Redondo 1998, 1037–1038). In this legend, everything is justifed for the sake of establishing a lineage, both fctive and historical; especially if we consider that Geoffrey conquered Jerusalem and was the legendary fgure with whom Castile wanted to associate its noble past.As a result, this legend is closely linked to The Book of the Knight Zifar insofar as this romance, too, aims to stress ethics, knightly virtue, exemplary behavior, and the idea of ancestral nobility.As Gómez Redondo notes: In this sense, the text can be markedly said to belong to this frst, early group of chivalric texts […] in which women prove fundamental to narrative development and heroicness.Women would presumably identify with female protagonists by virtue of their wit, prudence, sensibility, and silence. If or when these traits are lost, they would be equated to Eve, a problematic fgure associated with indiscretion, power, and curiosity. In order to become worthy of noble lineages, women would have to undergo trials to prove their fawless behavior even in spite of all odds.This, in turn, would prove valuable for their offspring. (1998, 1059) In “The Knight of the Swan”, female characters are primarily guided by a model of ideal, virtuous behavior in keeping with their lineage. Like Grima in The Book of the Knight Zifar, in “The Knight of the Swan” Isomberta, Beatriz, and Ida must experience ordeals and trials. Isomberta and Ida, for instance, are to become mothers of ideal knights in order to initiate and secure a lineage and legacy. Beatriz, however, is an exemplum ad contrarium: a worthless, imprudent, curious woman that cannot seem to keep her husband by her side.7 The infuence of “The Knight of the Swan” in Hispanic literature is notable. Ramos identifes a wide range of similar and related works such as Pedro del Corral’s Saracen Chronicle and João de Barros’s Clarimundo. Similarly, its presence in libraries and inventories is proof of its enduring infuence.This is clearly felt in later adaptations, artistic and non-artistic alike (tournaments, masquerades, etc.), in addition to the symbolic image of the swan in medieval European heraldry (2002, 605). Later, during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, the Spanish nobility would resent the advancement and infuence of chivalry and its related social groups not because it was necessarily linked to ancestral dynasties or lineages, but because it eventually gave way to a “popular chivalry” of sorts that was made up by “citizen knights” (Rodríguez Velasco 2006, xli–xlii; Cacho Blecua and Lacrarra 2012, 510–11, 522). In that context, a chivalric narrative that sought to recuperate the privileges of a fading social estate would be especially prominent toward the late ffteenth century. It was then that Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo mingled the so-called Amadís primitivo in his seminal work, Amadís of Gaula, and its derivative works and continuations such as Las sergas de Esplandián (The Deeds of Esplandián), also penned by him (2003).These works signaled a shift in trends and modes for chivalric literature that would be closely imitated by early modern Spanish authors. It should be noted, however, that the textual tradition of the Amadís is complex, and therefore, hard to establish and tackle defnitively. In fact, the origins of the text can be dated as early as the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, when a primitive, early 383
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version is said to have been possibly written.We do know that by the late fourteenth century there existed an alternate version in which Amadís died at the hands of his son Esplandián, and this caused Oriana to commit suicide. Later, with Rodríguez de Montalvo (1492–1497) (Cacho Blecua 2002, 192), this would become the Amadís of Gaula that frst saw light in print in 1508, a fact that revitalized the work’s reception. Concomitantly, Arthurian literature had been introduced in Iberia as early as the thirteenth century via translations and adaptations. Chrétien de Troyes’s works proved fundamental in order to reconceive the nature of fctional narrative with his rhymed romans (Alvar 2015; Cacho Blecua and Lacarra 2012, 511–12; Hook 2015)8 and it was partly thanks to Alfonsine writers that Arthurian literature was disseminated across the Peninsula, especially during the fourteenth century (Cacho Blecua and Lacarra 2012, 513). The Amadís of Gaula is an excellent case in point to study a type of chivalric narrative that bore similarities to earlier European medieval texts, but that was, nonetheless, fundamentally Spanish in structure and origins. Though not the purpose of this chapter, the genre would become notably transformed during the early modern era, and, as such, it would be instructive to mention some of the Amadís’s traits insofar as it is a foundational work of late medieval/early modern Hispanic chivalry.9 In this ultimate adaptation, Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo heavily commented on and revised a traditional, popular story.This meant, effectively, that the author was “at least partially making an independent text entirely his” (Cacho Blecua and Lacarra 2012, 522). Evidence of these narrative and stylistic interventions is most profoundly felt in the frst and second books (less revised) and then in the third and fourth books (heavily revised).The ffth book on Esplandián, was, as we have established, authored by him. His compiled work would closely echo the Catholic Monarchs’ social, cultural, military (knightly), and political anxieties, particularly when it came to the idea of empire and the dying institution of chivalry (Cacho Blecua 1979; Cacho Blecua and Lacarra 2012, 522). From a purely literary standpoint, the Amadís of Gaula synthesized the nature and ethos of chivalric narrative in Spain, as it showcases and transcends all the textual strategies that we have thus far mentioned. But it also heralded the development of a new way of narrating history and fction.The text maintains, for example, a direct, simple discursive structure, as well as the traits that would link this text with folklore. In addition, Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo innovated with “a wider, more rhetorical, slower more paused writing style and rhythm” (Cacho Blecua and Lacarra 2012, 523), which accompanied an already complex and dense apparatus of moralizing glosses that refected the ideological needs of chivalry in the ffteenth century. At the same time, Rodríguez de Montalvo remained faithful to what we can call historical intentionality in his use of widely known motifs such as the “found manuscript”, the “false translation”, and the “sage chronicler”, all of which found fertile ground in late medieval chivalric narrative and would become defnitive staple straits of an entire genre.Through these strategies, the Amadís stressed the valuable link between history and fction that had so vigorously characterized chivalric prose, but also renewed the idea of fction itself in terms of its aesthetic, rhetorical, and communicative capabilities.10 Amadís is the knight par excellence. He follows the traditional archetypal heroic model (he, as well as other knights throughout the text). Oriana, the female protagonist, is a stock character in terms of courtly love traditions. Nonetheless, they both fnd a way to showcase the moral necessities of the ffteenth century.As Cacho Blecua and Lacarra observe: The main characters all follow traditional, expected behaviors and social models: young, noble knights, unmarried and in love. Far from their fatherland, they have 384
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to experience adventure and undergo trials if they want to be considered legitimate knights and, therefore, heroes. (2012, 524) This particular confguration of characters responded, of course, to the protean presence and infuence of the Arthurian legend in medieval Iberia:“both Amadís and Esplandián are inserted within a bigger cycle of narratives stemming from familial and dynastic succession like Lancelot, Galahad, or Rodrigo and Pelayo” (Cacho Blecua and Lacarra 2012, 524–25), but the treatment of the love story might be a fresh, innovative feature. For example, the love scheme in this text shies away from what Tristan and Iseult represented, or Lancelot and Guinevere would adopt as courtly lovers, because they exercise and celebrate adulterous love, whereas Oriana and Amadís are fercely loyal to one another and marry in secret—religiously, of course (Alvar 2015, 39–62; Rodríguez de Montalvo 1988–1991, 792–95). Imagining marriage as a secret commitment was hardly groundbreaking in this sense; Rodríguez de Montalvo would have been familiar with stories with the same narrative model and this is evident in the prefatory episodes of the frst book during the encounter between Perión and Elisena (Campos García Rojas 2001),Amadís’s parents, whose bond is facilitated by the exchange of symbolic objects that would foretell the subsequent epiphany experienced by Amadís concerning his lineage and heroic destiny (Rodríguez de Montalvo 1988–1991, 227–248). At the same time, critics have also pointed to the evident degree of moralization found in Rodríguez de Montalvo’s interventions, especially when discussing themes like adultery or suicide, which appear as eminently Christianized in the text and in the characters. The same applies, for instance, to Esplandián’s parricide in the story’s early versions, only here, a similar issue would have come across as morally inconvenient. In The Deeds of Esplandián, this episode is substituted by a combat scene and a symbolic death (Rodríguez de Montalvo 2003, 248–255; Cacho Blecua 1979, 389–394; Gili Gaya 1947). In terms of Amadís’s heroic development, three episodes seem important to mention: the adventures on Firm Island, the fight to the isolated The Poor Rock, and the Defeat of the Endriago. In the frst case, Amadís manages to become lord of the isle and complete all the fantastic trials devised by the sage Apolidón: he passes under the Arch of the Loyal Lovers (Oriana would later do this as well), and the conquest of the Defended Chamber. All these feats make him the most faithful of all lovers, and the most competent among all knights (Rodríguez de Montalvo 1988–1991, 663–677, 792–801).These are courtly and knightly trials for all heroes.Through his deeds, Amadís wins the lady, becomes a governor, and also proves his worth as a warrior when he faces Oriana’s father, King Lisuarte, ultimately becoming his legitimate successor. The fight to The Poor Rock occurs amongst chaos after Oriana’s romantic rejection (Rodríguez de Montalvo 1988–1991, 678–684, 699–714). The hero, previously a conqueror on Firm Island, driven by madness and dejection becomes a hermit on the island of The Poor Rock, living in spiritual penance. He only returns to the world when Oriana corrects her mistake. The third trial is marked by the Defeat of the Endriago on the Isle of Devil, a chivalric, but also eminently religious episode (Rodríguez de Montalvo 1988–1991, 1129–1151; Cacho Blecua 1979, 275–79). In a way, this segment combines all the previous ones because it has moral and social dimensions. The hero is to face the doer of all evils, of sin, and, in religious terms, the devil.This monster is the result of incest and is entirely surrounded by greed, murder, evil, and incest. Amadís faces the monster, of course, and liberates an entire island marked by sin; he changes its name to the Isle of Holy Mary. It is a trial in which a courtly knight defeats evil, and reestablishes order and the state of grace. The challenges that defne Amadís are, then, three: a romantic courtly love one, a knightly one, and a religious one.These feats validate his place in the world and confrm his sacred and chivalric fate. 385
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Beyond this work’s literary value, one should mention that the Amadís of Gaula effectively immortalized the needs and functions of a “modern” chivalry, which sought, in a knight, an “individual, heroic, errant hero, capable of conquering a kingdom through his virtue and his virtue only” (Rodríguez Velasco 2006, li): Evidently, this is what makes non-noble chivalry important in literature, because its existence is dependent upon services to nobility and monarchy. Monarchies would later reclaim and validate the importance of these knights […] Felipe II was known to favor this villain-based chivalry and even reestablished its cultural representations, like the alarde, key until the tenure of the Catholic Monarchs. (Rodríguez Velasco 2006, li) We can therefore affrm that the Amadís of Gaula played a fundamental role not only in the development and transformation of chivalric narrative in medieval Iberia, but indeed changed the nature of chivalry itself and heralded its way into modernity. Its diffusion and popularity were unparalleled, both for early modern writers, and indeed, in the broader everyday Spanish culture of the late medieval era and the Golden Age period.11 As Cacho Blecua and Lacarra note: This extended persistence, evidenced by the fact that there are more than 27 allusions to the Amadís during the sixteenth century demonstrates that this important chivalric work was of great importance in all Iberian kingdoms: in Castile, Portugal, Catalonia, noble people and royal pets were often named after characters in the Amadís, or at the very least, they reference the manuscripts that propagated the story. (2012, 521) The Amadís also permeated other genres such as chivalric drama, the romancero (balladry), and even lyrical chivalric poetry, not to mention that it provided the structural basis for Cervantes’s Don Quixote.12 This chapter cannot end without a word on Tirant lo Blanc by Joanot Martorell (1990). It is composed in Catalan, and this fact alone introduces a different perspective from the one that guides the study of the Castilian chivalric narrative. However, setting those differences aside, the Tirant, in its cultural and historical context, has signifcant aspects that place it within the common framework of the studies of the Hispanic chivalric narrative, especially if we look at its historical, social, and political context. Joanot Martorell fnished writing Tirant lo Blanc in 1466, and it was not printed until 1490 in the city of Valencia. It is worth mentioning that it was translated into Spanish very early in 1511 (Riquer 1990, 94).There are two features that characterize the context in which Tirant was written: a literary and cultural one, and another that is historical and political. In the frst one, the fact that this work was written in the ffteenth century stands out: this is the golden age of Catalan literature. In this regard, Jean Marie Barberà points out that Tirant has a prose varied, sometimes solemn, rhetorical and pompous, sometimes familiar, alive and nuanced, peppered with expressive dialogues; and it is a sample of the reality in which the author lived—that of the exuberant Valencia of the middle of the XVth century—; that gives Tirant a true greatness as a literary creation. (1997, 28) 386
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These characteristics show the signifcant place of Tirant within the narrative of chivalry in Catalan. Thus, Tirant, like all medieval works, has features stemming from various literary traditions, such as the Arthurian, or the one developed by Chrétien de Troyes in French narrative. On the other hand, it is necessary to recognize other works that served as literary sources for Tirant, like Guy of Warwick or Curial and Güelfa (Riquer 1990, 79–80). In addition, and in contrast to many of the romances of Castilian chivalric narrative, realism in Tirant’s prose is also relevant: “Martorell […] lived through novel events, experiences that gave his work a special tone of verisimilitude and total familiarity with chivalrous attitudes, phraseology and situations” (Riquer 1967, 49). The other feature of the context in which Tirant was written is historical and political. In it, we can identify that Martorell's purpose was to offer the biography of an imaginary knight who, due to his courage and talent, succeeds in defending the Greek Empire from the Turkish threat (Riquer 1990, 80). It was a formidable military feat for the whole of Christendom, very close to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and the year when Martorell wrote Tirant in 1466.That fact was a genuine concern, and during those years it was still seen as a reconquest of the Byzantine capital (Riquer 1990, 81). In this way, the character Tirant, and the work itself, were also inspired by historical fgures of knights, whose exploits had been exemplary in the same sense: Roger de Flor, Geoffrey de Thoisy, János Húnyadi, and Pedro Vázquez de Saavedra (Riquer 1990, 43–44, 70–73). Overall, medieval chivalric narrative must be understood as the happy marriage between historiography and literature, but which became diffused in favor of a greater degree of fction: artistic, innovative, but also representative of a vast array of social ideologies and cultural programs and projects. Thus, medieval chivalric narrative had its origins in a purely military and historical interest, which sought to relate deeds of historical knights, who had an infuence in social, political, and historical aspects. Gradually the chivalric narrative developed to lay down organized rules, means of control, and a legislation to defne its assignments, as well as its political possibilities.This was made through a narrative discourse increasingly impregnated with elements from fction. In this sense, the particular development of chivalric narrative in the Iberian Peninsula also had political implications to consolidate and legitimize dynastic rights, royal doings, or regency procedures, as happened with Alfonso X and the so-called cultural politics of molinismo in Castile. The narrative works, therefore, went from being only historical and testimonial texts, to become expressive literary works through fction.Thus, this can be observed in works such as The Book of the Cavallero Zifar,“The Knight of the Swan” in the Great Conquest of Overseas, the Amadis of Gaul, and, with its particularities, the Tirant lo Blanc. In the frst two, it is possible to identify the link between creation of fctional texts with a political and ideological program to picture a powerful nobility in open rivalry with the crown.Therefore, it is important to point out that works such as The Book of the Knight Zifar and “The Knight of the Swan” share similar aspects, resources, and narrative forms with other European traditions, as well as with the epic, folk-tales, legends, or the Arthurian and Carolingian traditions. Similar social circumstances extend to the Hispanic ffteenth century when Amadis of Gaul and, in its own way, Tirant lo Blanc, were written taking previous narrative models, and adapting them to the socio-political contexts of the kingdoms of Castile and the Crown of Aragon. It is also possible to identify in these works a nobility that seeks the preservation and strengthening of its privileges, and also the sponsoring of a spirit of crusade and conversion to Christianity. This brief survey of the development of chivalric narrative in the Iberian Peninsula allows us to observe the social, political, historical, and cultural elements that served as the broader context for the growth of fctional narrative in Spanish and Catalan in early modernity. In summary, 387
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this a process that led chivalric narrative in the sixteenth century to lay the groundwork for the development of the modern Hispanic novel at the hand of Cervantes in the seventeenth century.
Notes 1 I would like to thank Raúl Ariza Barile for his help with the English translation of this chapter. 2 On the Germanic elements of chivalry, see Flori (2001, 22–25). 3 Don Juan Manuel’s work has been extensively and excellently studied. For a general approach, see, in particular, the work of Fernando Gómez Redondo (1998, 1093–1204; 2000). 4 The Amadís of Gaul has a complex textual history, and, regarding its date of composition, Juan Manuel Cacho Blecua notes a frst version around the thirteenth century, and one from the early fourteenth. Fragments of what scholarship calls the Amadís primitivo are, however, dated in the early 1500s. Between 1492 and 1497, Rodríguez de Montalvo compiled his own version, which was printed around 1508. See, in particular, Lida de Malkiel (1969) and Cacho Blecua (2002, 192). 5 For a better understanding of the difference between these terms, we should point out that in English each genre has a name which distinguishes them: ballad and romance; while in Spanish the word romance refers to those narrative poems that in English are called ballads, and there is no specifc word for translating romance. Therefore, there is a complete confusion. 6 Recent critical work on the Digital Humanities has opened a vast variety of perspectives in this regard. See, especially, Daniel Gutiérrez Trápaga (2018). 7 For an exhaustive analysis of these female characters in “El Cavallero del Cisne”, see, in particular, Gómez Redondo (1998, 1059–1092). 8 For a recent study of Iberian Arthurian literature, see the collected essays edited by David Hook (2015). 9 Within this same work, but in the section devoted to the Golden Age, Daniel Gutiérrez Trápaga extensively discusses the development of chivalric fction around the sixteenth century. See, in particular, Gutiérrez Trápaga, Daniel. Forthcoming. The Routledge Companion to Early Modern Spanish Literature and Culture, edited by. Rodrigo Cacho y Caroline R. Egan. London: Routledge. 10 The chivalric motives that nourish the romances of chivalry have been extensively studied, by Bueno Serrano (2007). For the topics of the manuscript found, the false translation, and the wise chronicler, see Cacho Blecua (1979, 91–107), Campos García Rojas (2012), Lucía Megías & Sales Dasí (2008, 110– 163), and Marín Pina and Carmen (1994, 1999, 2011). 11 Simone Pinet (2007, 2008) has studied representations of the Matter of Amadís in tapestries, especially one where it is possible to appreciate buildings on the Firm Island, and a Flemish one depicting episodes of magic, courtly love, and combat fghting. 12 The Amadís of Gaul has a post-medieval afterlife. Consider three operas: Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Amadís (1684), Händel’s Amadigi di Gaula, and Bach’s Amadís de Gaules (1779). On this issue, see, generally, López Verdejo (2012). Later (and equally important) representations include the graphic novel Amadís of Gaul based on Rodríguez de Montalvo’s text, which features anime-like illustrations (2009).
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25 REFLECTIONS OF THE LONG THIRTEENTH CENTURY Curiosity, the politics of knowledge, and imperial power in the Libro de Alexandre E. Michael Gerli
Est ergo tyranni et principis haec differentia sola, quod hic legi obtemperat, et ejus arbitrio populum regit, cujus se credit ministrum. [Between a tyrant and a prince there is but one difference, that the latter obeys the law and rules the people by its dictates, accounting himself as but their servant.] John of Salisbury, Policraticus The Libro de Alexandre is far more than a philological artifact to be scrutinized under the narrow gaze of antiquarians, formalists, source hunters, and linguists. It is an imposing work of art that raises large and vital questions about medieval social institutions, the politics of knowledge, the cultural logic of thirteenth-century Castile, and by extension the rest of Europe. Far more than a tale of the exploits, deeds of arms, conquests and feats of courage performed by the valiant, noble king Alexander, and much more than a rhetorical dialectic between poetic forms, there is a critique of knowledge, curiosity, and learning in it that aligns with a distinctive moral, ethical and political vision that was being debated precisely at the moment of its composition.The Alexandre poet’s assertion that his “mester es sen pecado” [craft is impeccable] is not just an allusion to perfect scansion and regular rhyme, but a declaration that his book is worthy, righteous, and pure. It is the poet’s—indeed, the intellectual’s—moral obligation to share generously of this kind of faultless knowledge (Anonymous 2000): deve de lo que sabe omne largo seer, si non, podrié en culpa e en riebto caer (1c–d) [one should be generous with what one knows, if not, one could fall into blame and be challenged for it] In a signifcant reversal, at frst glance knowledge as subject from the outset of the Libro seems to be preeminent, placed within an accommodating ethical framework, and redeemed from its ancient biblical stigma—its legacy of shame—just as the poet intimates the important role it will
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play in the tale that is about to unfold.To be sure, nothing could be more central to the ethics of the mester de clerecía (cleric’s craft) than the proposition that knowledge is to be pursued and shared.Taken out of their larger moral context and considered unconditionally, these two lines seem to convey a universal truth. But it would be naïve to think that knowledge by itself was enough. Without wisdom, virtue, and the fear of God, especially as they pertain to kings and emperors, self-suffcient knowledge fails to fnd legitimacy. It is clear from the outset of the Alexandre that the poet sees himself as a member of an intellectual élite, conscious of a debt to pay and a moral obligation to spread learning, since to do otherwise would cause him to fall into wrongdoing (culpa) and be admonished (en riebto caer) for his omission.Yet knowledge and scholarship, sustained solely by curiosity, as we shall see, do not enjoy unfettered freedom in the world of the Libro de Alexandre. They are placed within a clear-cut framework that ties them to political power, imperial ambition, theology, and ideology (see Weiss 2006, 129), and therefore to the need for a principled sense of temperance that invokes the historically tenuous status of curiosity and knowledge dating back to Genesis and the Fathers of the Church, but most especially and immediately as they were being debated by the Scholastics in the context of emergent Aristotelian Natural Philosophy and the legitimacy of empirical inquiry during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. In its extreme form, the new Aristotelian philosophy discounted the authority of Scripture and the existence of Divine Providence, positing a world ruled only by Nature whose secrets could be unlocked by means of methodical frst-hand observation governed by dialectical thinking. When examined from this larger European perspective, the Libro looks out and away from its strictly formal, literary context to engage two of the abiding anxieties of thirteenth-century life and cultural history: the place and validity of knowledge and curiosity in the world, and the nature of nascent imperial power in Castile in relation to scientifc inquiry and its limits, setting up a confict between Church, state, theology, ethics, and the law. The Alexandre poet conceived of himself as both an intellectual and a moralist, as a clerk who was both a scholar and a pious man of the Church; as a person who saw the very work he crafted as both an admonition on, and a self-refexive exercise in, the responsible use and limits of secular power and knowledge. Knowledge of the ancient world and the relevance of its examples to the on-going dispute regarding the utility, but most importantly the legitimacy, of unrestricted curiosity and knowledge at the service of power, applied now specifcally to politics, the emerging world of empire in Castile, and the secular ambitions of its royal family beginning with the aspirations of Alfonso VIII and culminating in the frustrated quest for empire at the end of the reign of Alfonso X in the second half of the thirteenth century. The critical consensus from Ian Michael (1960) forward regarding Alexander’s ruin is neatly rehearsed by Ivy Corfs, who notes that The overreacher is brought down by God in the end: man must pay for his sin of pride, for thinking he could act as God himself. Natura, the divine agent, takes Alexander to task for his desmesura [lack of moderation, 2329c] and metes out his punishment and death. (1994, 482; see also Brownlee 1983) Alexander’s desire to “conquerir las secretas naturas” [conquer the secrets of the different forms of nature] (2325d), points to the disclosure of the inscrutable secrets of the natural world, leading to the narrator’s observation that Alexander’s yearning was such that “nin mares nin tierra non lo podién caber” [neither the seas nor the earth could contain him] (2672b), revealing his overweening pride and serving as a direct lesson to all seekers of arcane knowledge and 392
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aspirants of empire who might fail to balance the pursuit of power and learning with wisdom, self-discipline, and the fear of God. However, little has actually been done to place this interpretation of Alexander’s portrayal and the Libro within the larger European intellectual and cultural milieu that uncovers the broader reaches and foundations of the work’s ethical and eschatological posture, and its clear relation to secular politics and the rise of Aristotelianism and the New Science in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the Schools—i.e., the developing universities—the Church, and the Iberian Peninsula. In what follows, I wish to trace the background of this relationship by exploring the uneasy association between knowledge, power, curiosity, and political ambition in the Libro, while highlighting the work’s far-reaching connection to the intellectual environment of what historians now call scholastic humanism and the long thirteenth-century (c. 1150–c. 1350).1 When placed within a greater European context, it is evident that the Libro refects an anxiety about knowledge, inquiry, and power, plus an awareness of the larger polemic that was being waged in the Schools before, during, and after the time of its composition. In this way, the Libro de Alexandre brings to its Castilian vernacular audience a scholarly ethical and political problematic that points to its links with the wider cosmopolitan world of the universities, European statecraft, and the affairs of the royal court. Although anchored in the historical moment that coincides with the rise of Castilian imperial ambitions, the very politics of empire and the role played by knowledge and power in relation to it refect the tension that structured the on-going debate in European learned circles regarding the newly emergent Aristotelian science, the strength of human reason, divine revelation, and the exercise of imperial sovereignty. Contrary to its most immediate source,Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis (1978), which was composed in Latin ca. 1170 and a widely disseminated “school text,” the Libro de Alexandre (ca. 1236) as Ian Michael observes, underscores the fact that Aristotle was Alexander’s historical tutor (1970, 42). It stresses that Alexander acquired from the philosopher his curiosity about the world and about nature, and the desire to explore them both and learn. Alexander’s talent for and love of formal knowledge is emphasized by the Castilian poet in a lengthy passage taken from the French Roman d’Alexandre dealing with the hero’s youth (see Willis, 1935, 6–12). Departing markedly from the Alexandreis, the poet takes pain to portray Alexandre as a prodigy of thirteenth-century Scholastic learning and disputation, refecting the values of the poet’s own, contemporary academic world: Aprendié de las artes cada dia liçion de todas cada día fazié disputaçion tant’ aviá buen engeño e sotil coraçon que vençió los maestros a poca de sazon (17) [He learned each lesson of the arts every day, He debated about each one every day, He had such a good intelligence and subtle heart That he vanquished all the masters in short time] From the earliest age Alexander is able to compete in the pursuit of knowledge and learning with all but his master, Aristotle. His command and pursuit of scholarship is driven by a fundamental inquisitiveness that in the course of the poem will be transformed into a cupiditas scientiae that leads him to seek knowledge of the entire universe, even its most arcane, inviolable secrets.The callow Alexander stresses his ambition for conquest and power plus his mastery of clerecía (clerisy) while Aristotle seeks to mitigate them with ethical arguments that invoke God 393
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and traditional Christian morality structured on the Seven Deadly Sins, repeatedly admonishing against all forms of covetousness: Si quisieres por fuerça tod’el mundo vençer, Non te prenda cobdiçia de condesar aver; Quanto que Dios te diere pártelo volenter; Quando dar non pudieres non lexes prometer. (62) [If you wish to conquer the entire world by force, Don’t fall prey to cupidity for gathering wealth; What God gives you share it willingly; When you cannot give don’t fail to promise.] The tension between knowledge, ambition, power, and ethics that shapes the rest of the Castilian book is thus prefgured in Alexander’s encounter with Aristotle at the very beginning. While he studied with Aristotle, Alexander focused on transcending the achievement of all others in the pursuit of personal excellence. To realize this goal, he assimilated two principles from his master: one is that power can only become a good when put to work for worthy goals. The second principle is that the fundamental goal of life is to achieve knowledge, and hence that life’s chief activity is the pursuit of knowledge, which is the indisputable foundation of power and should be freely shared (“pártelo volenter” [share it willingly]). Alexander discovers that questioning the utility of knowledge is foolish, and that knowledge in its purest form is the ultimate good of human achievement.This principle rouses his ravenous desire to know the world and to master all its secrets.Aristotle also conveyed to him that understanding (what the Greeks called phronesis) was the most powerful possession of all.The human intellect exercised without understanding leads to misapprehension and overweening pride.The poet portrays Alexander’s career of conquests as a pursuit of both political power and secular knowledge, as he situates his hero in the midst of the debate between philosophers and theologians stemming from the rise of Aristotelianism in the late twelfth century. There are several key moments in the text that bring it into close contact with thirteenth-century Scholasticism and the disputes on Aristotle’s science and Natural Philosophy. In boasting of his mastery of the Seven Liberal Arts, Alexander makes a crucial substitution among them: he replaces mathematics and law with medicine and Natural Philosophy (43– 45), reconfguring the components of the traditional curriculum to emphasize the close scrutiny of humankind and his personal methodical interest in the empirical world (proponents of Aristotelian Natural Philosophy and the New Science were most interested in the natural sciences, of which medicine, studied in conjunction with celestial infuences, was one. See Birkenmajer 1970). As he replaces the lower disciplines with these new ones, conspicuously excluding theology from the list while privileging the empirical sciences, he also emphasizes his mastery of the New Logic, or logica nova, based on the texts of Aristotle recuperated during the latter part of the twelfth century, the Topics, the Sophistical Refutations, and the First and Second Analytics. Bien sé los argumentos de lógica formar, los dobles silogismos bien los sé yo falsar, bien sé a la parada mi contrario levar (41a–c) [I know how to form logical arguments, Double syllogisms I know how to refute, I know how to take my adversary to the point of decision] 394
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The Libro de Alexandre departs from the Alexandreis yet again to incorporate two key episodes from another source that links it to Natural Philosophy, in this instance the Historia de proeliis. Both of these accentuate Alexander’s curiosity, his predilection for scientifc observation, and his mastery of technology, once again aligning him with philosophy, the New Science, and its interests in understanding and conquering the empirical world.The frst of these is Alexander’s fight to the empyrean drawn by a pair of methodically controlled fying griffns.The second is the hero’s descent into the Red Sea as he is driven by his curiosity to investigate life among the fshes (on the incorporation of these episodes from other sources, see Willis 1934, 49–51; Surtz 1987, 268–69).The most meaningful part of these episodes comes as Alexander takes fight and gazes down from the heavens to see the world below shaped in the image of man. Although a topos since antiquity (see Rico, 1986, 50–59), the conceit of the world in the form of a man is given new purpose here as it plays on another well-known medieval topos, Imago Dei, which highlights the symbolic relationship between humanity and God. As Alexander looks down from above, he does nothing less than appropriate God’s privileged perspective on the world to behold the being whom He had created in his own image (“et creavit Deus hominem ad imaginem suam” [And God created man in his image] Genesis I, 27). To be sure, this image in the context of Alexander’s two expeditions, or experiments for want of a better name, are what spark the indignation of Natura, who hurries before her Creator, the Almighty, to denounce Alexander for invading her kingdom.Aggrieved by the trespass, the poet is careful to register God’s angry reaction: Pesó al Criador que crió la Natura, Ovo de Alexandre saña e grant rencura. Dixo:“Este lunático que non cata mesura, Yol tornaré el gozo todo en amargura” (2329)2 [It grieved the Creator who created Natur, He was furious and felt rancor toward Alexander. He said:“This lunatic who does not observe moderation, I will turn all his pleasure into bitterness”] Natura then journeys to Hell to confer with Lucifer. Like all mortals, Alexander’s death is prepared by Nature, but not before consulting with two higher authorities, God and Lucifer, placing events in a metaphysical eschatological framework absent from the Alexandreis that stresses the existence of a Providence beyond nature actively interested in human affairs. To be sure, as it invokes Lucifer’s role in the equation, it establishes a moral symmetry between him and Alexander since Lucifer was the frst victim of his own pride and curiosity before God. Bernard of Clairvaux understood this well, when he commented that Lucifer was the frst to seek to know the extent of Divine tolerance, but never foresaw the consequences. Lucifer’s primordial curiosity is thus deemed the sin of sins, born as it were before time, before Adam and Eve, and continues to provoke humankind to stray from the path of righteousness in the orthodox twelfth- and thirteenth-century Christian imagination. Bernard’s conclusion regarding Lucifer is succinct: he fell from Heaven because, driven by curiosity, he tested something forbidden that he arrogantly desired “(spectavit curiose—affectavit illicite—speravit praesumptuose” [idle speculation led him to unlawful desire and thus to presumptuous aspiration]).3 Like Lucifer himself, the poet tells us,Alexander overestimated Divine forbearance blinded by his inquisitiveness and an illusion of his own omnipotence. In this way, Natura’s petitioning of God marks yet another meaningful departure from Walter’s Alexandreis, just as it affrms Natura’s subjugation to the Deity who created her (in philosophy a God-made natura naturata, as opposed to a limitless, 395
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self-governing natura naturans), explicitly countering the Aristotelian belief that the world was ruled solely by the forces of an autonomous Natura.The poet thus announces God’s condemnation of Alexander’s pride and absence of self-knowledge, dooming him to suffer the very same judgment Alexander had passed on the fshes (2329–2330). In God’s censure of Alexander’s pride, there can be no doubt that the poet’s departure from the Alexandreis constitutes a reproof of Alexander’s arrogance stemming from his desire to penetrate, scrutinize, and master the mysteries of the Almighty’s natural world. Although these events have rightly been seen to affne the Alexandre with Christian orthodoxy, constituting the conclusive cause and essence of Alexander’s fall, mutatis mutandis, it appears more than signifcant that Alexander’s trespass is couched in terms of the violation of nature by a spirit of empirical inquiry, which could not help but evoke the polemic regarding Aristotelian Natural Philosophy and the ethical limits of human reason. In short, the intellectual portrait that emerges of Alexander in the Libro is one which exposes his worldly spirit of inquiry as the antithesis of Christian orthodoxy, linking him to the theological censure of curiosity that lay at the center of the reaction to the rise of the New Science and Aristotelian Natural Philosophy in European academic circles during the thirteenth century. The poet’s interpolations drawn from sources other than Walter are signifcant, then, since they unmistakably identify Alexander not just as Aristotle’s celebrated disciple but as a committed partisan and practitioner of Aristotelianism and the new learning, just when the philosopher’s writings were beginning to be openly debated, and at a time when his methods were threatening theology, causing suffcient alarm amidst traditional theologians to lead to the prohibition of Aristotle’s teachings for heterodoxy in the series of proscriptions of his thought that stretched the length of the entire thirteenth century. The expanding world of the universities produced radical changes that involved enthusiastic defenses of positions which troubled ecclesiastical authorities, leading to the formal condemnation of thinkers and philosophers whose end was the rationalist pursuit of human knowledge. On 7 March 1277, the bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, would famously condemn the teachings of these Naturalist Philosophers.When confronted with Aristotle and the advent of Averroism at the University of Paris,Tempier issued a list of 13 theses that he denounced as heretical. To preserve its preeminence, in the thirteenth century revealed truth had to keep philosophy at bay, subordinate to itself, portraying it and its methods as mere servants of theology, since disinterested rational inquiry, the bedrock of natural science, was itself unable to afford any viable way toward a better understanding of the tenets of faith or the mysteries of Creation. In short, the prevailing view was that it was both unwise and impossible to scrutinize, let alone predict, the divine nature of Creation by means of observation, ratiocination, or calculation. What might seem inevitable and contradictory from the perspective of human reason was not necessarily inevitable or impossible from the perspective of God’s omnipotence. Consequently, the orthodox position maintained that philosophical deduction remained useless, and could easily become a form of sinful arrogance, with respect to theological understanding, unless it was totally subjugated and subordinated to revealed doctrine. While dialectics and Natural Philosophy could be helpful to a point, the teachings of faith and dogma could never be submitted to them. Because of this, heresy in particular was believed to be the child of philosophy, as it emerged from the philosophical methods, concepts, and theories associated with the schools and universities in futile attempts to achieve a better understanding of the ultimate revealed truth through fallible human interpretation. In light of these polemics in the Schools we can see that the Alexandre poet’s choice of sources and his adjustments to Walter’s Alexandreis were likely not idle ones. As Willis observed long ago, the Libro is much “more than a servile translation of the main source: the author made his selections from the Alexandreis intelligently, and added 396
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material from sources of widely divergent character with a view to attaining a homogeneous and coherent narrative” (1934, 79). Unmistakably, the Alexandre poet drew on meaningful texts for material that accentuated what he perceived to be most at stake in his characterization of the hero: namely, the limits of Natural Philosophy, curiosity, and rational inquiry vis-à-vis the superior authority and wisdom of a supernatural God. In addition to its eschatological design, the moral symmetry of the Libro is clear.Alexander’s fall by means of his own unbridled, dissatisfed curiosity is ominously prefgured near the middle of the book in the speech by the Cythian elder who challenges the hero’s ambitions now that God has granted him the defeat of Darius. The Cythian portends Alexander’s fall and counsels him to stop and fnd fulfllment in his achievement, lest he be overcome by mad ambition that leads to self-destruction (1920–22). Likewise, the poet emphasizes the anxiety among Alexander’s men as they rue the day he was born when they observe his efforts to conquer the world and Nature’s domains, defying God’s will: Dezién:“Rey Alexandre, nunca devriés naçer, que con todo el mundo quieres guerra tener, los çielos e las tierras quieres yus tí meter, lo que Dios non quiere, tú lo cuidas aver” (1204) [They said:“King Alexander you should never have been born, Because you wish to make war with all the world, The heavens and the earth you want to bring under your subjection, What God does not wish, you wish to have”] From the patristic period to the beginning of the seventeenth century in Europe curiosity was regarded as an intellectual vice.To seek knowledge with no particular end other than itself was to indulge in fruitless speculation, while the desire to know was associated with those catastrophic events that took place amidst the angels in Heaven before time and later at the dawn of Creation in the Garden of Eden, with the ensuing curse that fell on humankind. In the writings of the Church Fathers, inquisitiveness took on a sinister aspect and was frequently singled out for specifc censure. For the Fathers, human curiosity was distinguished both by its objects and by its underlying motivations. The curious mind aimed at a knowledge that surpassed human capacities or that that was forbidden,“worldly”, dangerous, or idle.As to its motivations, curiosity was prompted by pride, vanity, or the desire to be like God, the very shape it takes in the Libro de Alexandre. The most comprehensive analysis of curiosity among the Fathers was produced by Augustine. In The Confessions, he sets out its phenomenology, and says that it is at work “when people study the operations of nature which lie beyond our grasp, when there is no advantage in knowing, and the investigators simply desire knowledge for its own sake” (1991, 10.35. See Blumenberg 1961 and 1962). Curiosity for Augustine was the lethal sin of pagan priests, philosophers, and Manichaean heretics. In various ways they had all succumbed to a “form of temptation”, a “lust for experimenting and knowing”, a “diseased craving”, a “vain inquisitiveness dignifed with the title of knowledge and science”. Linking the objects of curiosity with its base motivations,Augustine inveighed against those who, forsaking virtue,“imagine they are doing something great, if with surpassing curiosity and keenness they explore the whole mass of this body which we call the world”. Oracles, necromancy, and pagan religion in general were all associated by Augustine with curiosity. Augustine also provided curiosity with a genealogy: curiosity was nothing more than a form of concupiscence refracted through the mind rather than the body (“concupiscencia oculorum”, in his turn of phrase [the “lust of the eyes”]). Most 397
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damning of all, however, curiosity was associated with the frst and greatest of all sins pride, the sin of Satan. Almost exactly contemporary to the composition of the Libro de Alexandre, the effect and importance of Aristotle’s reintroduction into Western thought is diffcult to overstate.With the rise of dialectic in the Schools in the late twelfth century, a new analytical method emerged for scholars to use. At the same time, translations arriving from Toledo and Córdoba provided them with a model of application, and a guide for further exploration.The conjunction of these events in the context of the early university culture, but especially at Paris and Oxford, created a century of polemical unrest among European intellectuals as they interrogated traditional teachings using the tools of the New Logic aided both by theory and direct observation.4 This questioning often led to accusations of heresy, as in the notorious cases of Siger de Brabant and Boethius of Dacia, resulting in a conservative swing of the pendulum around the middle of the thirteenth century, one that would espouse an intellectual posture entrenched within an Aristotelian legacy but tempered by a Christian moral consciousness. In the Iberian Peninsula, things took a dramatic turn. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,Toledo was the center for the translation and transmission of Greek philosophy, as well as other disciplines, as mediated by the Muslim world. It was via the translations undertaken at Toledo by scholars like Gerard de Cremona, that Aristotle frst found his way to Paris. However, Ángel Martínez Casado (1984) reveals a striking polemical work by Lucas de Tuy that cultural historians have virtually ignored or failed to appreciate in terms of its relevance to thirteenthcentury Iberian intellectual history. Lucas’ De altera vita fdeique controversiis, composed ca. 1236, focuses on scholars who delight in calling themselves “natural philosophers” (“qui philosophorum seu naturalium gloriantur”, 2009, 191).These thinkers, Lucas says, judge the Fathers of the Church to be “idiotas vel imperitos” when compared to Plato and Aristotle (2009, 112).They fail to believe in Divine Providence and remain certain that the world is guided only by Natura in the absence of an engaged deity.They assert that omnia inferiora is moved only by the planets, never secundum voluntatem divinam. Scripture for them is nothing more than a collection of vague allegories to be read through the rational lens of philosophy. Anticipating many of the propositions which ultimately inspired the prohibitions by Tempier at Paris in the 1270s, they reject a created world and the existence of the soul independent of the body. Lucas and the Churchmen clustered around him at León were, according to Martínez Casado, an autochthonous breed, inhabitants of an intellectual island in a rapidly changing scholarly universe.Their type of insulated, reactionary thinking arose as a response to the presence of Aristotle and Natural Philosophy in León, Castile, and Galicia, which had arrived there via the University of Palencia and the diffusion of scholastic learning by means of the books that traveled along the Camino de Santiago during the frst part of the thirteenth century. As García Ballester has shown in his research on the studia of Santiago, both the Franciscans of Val de Dios and the Dominicans of Bonaval, each aligned with Oxonian methodical scholasticism as practiced by Robert Grosseteste, utilized between the years 1222 and 1230 a large collection of scientifc books that belonged to the bishop’s library.This was a collection of books assembled under the patronage of two noteworthy archbishops, Pedro Muñiz, signifcantly called the Necromancer because of his pursuit of science (+1224) and Bernardo II (+1240), which attests to “una intensa actividad intellectual, una pequeña comunidad de maestros y de discípulos integrantes de sus respectivos studia” [an intense intellectual activity, a small community of masters and disciples that were part of the respective schools] (158), who studied the libri Aristotelis de naturali philosophia (Aristotle’s Books on Natural Philosophy), the same books scrutinized by the physician-philosopher David Dinant in his Quaternuli (Little Notebooks) which resulted in the frst condemnation of the teachings of Aristotle at Paris in 1210 (García Ballester 1996, 155). 398
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Consequently, as Adeline Rucquoi asserts, “the existence of a school of natural philosophy in Castile during the frst half of the thirteenth century should be nothing of a surprise, nor that encyclopedists there should include and even surpass Aristotelian logic” (1998, I, 758–59. See also Martínez Casado, 1997).5 To be sure, by the second half of the thirteenth century Alfonso X’s production and dissemination of profane knowledge as well as the king’s demonstrated preference for scientifc or “natural” over theological knowledge, was denounced in 1279 to the pope by a group of Castilian bishops.The Castilian episcopate complained that unlike the kings of old,Alfonso did not look to them for guidance and that he had replaced them with evil counselors who encouraged the king to commit heresy.According to Linehan, the Castilian episcopate’s complaint [claimed] that astronomers, augurs, and “aisperiti” held sway at Alfonso X’s court, denying the existence of God (“asserentes Deum non esse”) and concerning themselves not with the Godhead (natura naturans) but with the creation (natura ab ipso naturata). (1993, 435–36) The New Science, plus negative assessments and condemnations of it, Aristotle, Aristotelian Natural Philosophy, politics, and curiosity thus form part of the immediate cultural milieu and intellectual horizon of the Libro de Alexandre. When we survey the state of Natural Philosophy, theology, and literature during the long thirteenth century, it becomes clear that intellectuals across Europe were broadly divided into two irreconcilable, equally infuential ways of conceiving knowledge and power, one philosophical and the other theological, or ascetic, for want of a better word. During this extraordinarily creative period, the interaction between theology and philosophy led also to the formation and cultivation of potent and fexible civic and cultural institutions based on aspirations of a New World Order stemming from Aristotelian science and politics. As such, it was as well a time of political troubles, with deadly confict between the Church and state, but especially the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire in the form of the Hohenstaufen, a dynasty known since the time of Henry IV for its deep secularism, multifaceted love of worldly learning, and devotion to empirical science.The problematic of the circulation, possession, and use of knowledge and scholarship, and the dangers they posed for the Church, lies at the very heart of this transformative period and also at the very core of the politics of the Libro de Alexandre. To investigate by reason beyond the point of adequate knowledge is to move away from divine wisdom and be guilty of vana curiositas, according to Bonaventure, who prospered just at the time the Alexandre was written and struggled mightily against the New Aristotelian Science at Paris.Amidst a world awash in Aristotelianism, Bonaventure saw the need to re-energize the age-old debate regarding human curiosity arguing that God had provided humanity with as much knowledge as it needed to join together and live the pious Christian life. In his Opusculum de reductione artium ad theologiam (Retracing the Arts to Theology) all the world, its knowledge, and human society remain subservient to theology.While reason can partially discover some of the moral truths that lie at the core of Christianity, it can only receive and apprehend truth through divine illumination (Bonaventure, 1882–1902, Opera,V, 1). All this led to a period of intensifed dispute in all felds of culture, especially as regards the connection between religion, rationalism, and statecraft. Medieval kingship, which had been largely the creation of ecclesiastical ideals and personnel, began to develop new institutions and sanctions. The result during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was the appearance of secular bureaucratic states strongly infuenced by Aristotelian principles with broad territorial pretensions and transcultural imperial ambitions. 399
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Exactly at the time the Libro de Alexandre was being composed, the Emperor Frederick II, cousin to Alfonso X el Sabio, and stupor mundi, vir inquisitor et sapientiae amator [wonder of the world, investigator, and lover of wisdom], as he proudly calls himself in the prolog to De arte venandi cum avibus (On the Art of Hunting with Birds) (1942, I, 1), strived to fnd the “naked truth”, to “demonstrate things as they are”, manifestare ea que sunt sicut sunt. This, as we now know, was the ordering principle of Frederick’s civic vision as well as a crucial part of his great European cultural project. (It led Nietzsche to call him “the frst European”, 2002, 200). But it was also the main reason why Dante (Alighieri 1970) places the twice-excommunicated emperor in hell among the heretics (Inferno VI, 10) despite his praise for Frederick in De Monarchia and De vulgari eloquentia (Alighieri 1878, 1.12.4). Likewise, the Franciscan Salimbene de Adam, one of Frederick’s contemporaries and notable frenemies, along with many of his fellow clerks, condemned Fredericks’s secular enterprise as a whole, noting that the emperor’s false “experimenta, superstitiones et curiositates et maledictiones et incredulitates et perversitates et abusiones” [experiments, superstitions and curiosities and maledictions and perversities and abuses] (1905, I, 351) led him, and his followers, to nothing less than “epicureanism”, the code word for free-thinking, pagan materialism.6 Like Dante, Salimbene saw Frederick’s secularism in science and politics as anathema, and reviled him for it, especially his worldly intellectual sins and his radical persecution of the Church, yet he considered Frederick an exemplary statesman and admired his ambitious imperial vision and approach to governance. To be sure,Amaia Arizaleta and María Rodríguez Porto (2015) have recently forged a material textual link between the Hohenstaufen family and MS O of the Libro (Biblioteca Nacional de España,Vit. 5–10). Held by the BN since 1886, MS O dates from the second half of the thirteenth century and suggests that it was intended for a royal audience, most probably for Alfonso X. One of the illuminations in it depicts Alexander’s rescue from his disastrous immersion in the River Cydnus, in which his attendants lift him up from his near-fatal adventure in a pose clearly calculated to suggest Christ’s descent from the cross. Indeed, the image is so arresting that the authors note that “the Christological character of the scene of the Cyndus is striking to us” (261). Like the sacrifced Christ, Alexander appears nearly naked, vulnerably human and exposed, at the lowest moment of his mortal powers, suggesting that the MS was confected to be used in a courtly clerical environment and to resonate with inferences of both mortality and messianic empire. MS O comprises a work that seeks to convey “the complex representation of a sinner, lay king that is transfgured into a Christ-like image”, as Arizaleta and Rodríguez Porto put it (2015, 267). Arizaleta’s and Rodríguez Porto’s detailed analysis of the illuminations in MS O proposes that the images were conceived in the spirit of translatio imperii “tout en développant visuellement la chevalerie et la clergie du roi” and “la dimension géopolitique du mythe d’Alexandre” (2015, 261), just as all signs in them point to Alfonso X, the likely intended reader of the text and beholder of the pictures. The images insinuate a clear genealogy of empire designed to evoke a visible line of continuity running from Christ, to Alexander, and then to Frederick the Great in a discourse of universal dominion. Connected imaginatively to an iconographic tradition depicting the drowning of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa in the Saleph River on 10 June 1190, as seen in for example an illumination found in Petrus de Ebolo’s Liber ad honorem Augusti, the image in O reveals a convincing pictorial palimpsest conjoining the Hohenstaufen emperor and the Castilian pretender to the Crown of the Romans—a bond that would easily have been recognized and appreciated by all members of the court.The Castilian monarchy was, of course, closely related by blood and marriage to the House of Hohenstaufen, but especially Alfonso X, who for the better part of his life aspired to the Imperial crown, and whose mother was Beatrice (née Elizabeth) of Swabia, one of Barbarossa’s granddaughters (264). 400
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Since the events leading up to Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII at Canossa in 1077, politics, the Church, and the exercise of secular power, especially universal, transcultural imperial power, had been one of the dominant themes of medieval intellectual and political life. Popes and Church offcials repeatedly sought to challenge the authority of monarchies, and exercise what they believed to be legitimate ecclesiastical intervention in secular, monarchical, but especially imperial, affairs.Throughout the late eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, a series of popes challenged the power of European kings as reiterations of the Investiture Controversy continued to defne relations between Church and State throughout Europe. As Norman Cantor notes, “The investiture controversy had shattered the early-medieval equilibrium and ended the interpenetration of ecclesia and mundus. Medieval kingship, which had been largely the creation of ecclesiastical ideals and personnel, was forced to develop new institutions and sanctions” (1993, 395), just as much as the Church needed to reassert itself in civil affairs.The patent contradictions in Dante’s and Salimbene’s observations regarding Frederick II distill the conficts, incongruities, and intellectual undercurrents of the long and turbulent thirteenth century vis-à-vis empire and need to be recalled when seeking to defne the larger sense and cultural milieu of the Libro de Alexandre.All refect an unfnished moral and theological discussion involving politics, eschatology, and Natural Philosophy that carried over into early modern times and, to be sure, even on into modernity. In the Alexandre, the story of Alexander the Great serves as a lens through which to examine critically in the vernacular secular empire in a Castilian setting, and it is thus very much to the poet’s credit that we see something far larger than just a roman antique. We fnd in it the stirrings of a political philosophy linked to a meditation and admonition on secular power which captures the moment in Castile when power was changing from something principally affective into something secular, nonspiritual, and institutionalized; where talk of the state was still anachronistic, even if glimmers of state-like behavior began to appear in the late twelfth century, but where the key phenomenon of power had been lordship.The Alexandre harbors a preoccupation with lordship and an emerging sense of public affairs, res publica, not unlike that discernable in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus (1993), as it confronts the central and lasting importance of secular sovereignty in Western Europe, the un-governmental character of many medieval polities, and the signifcance of the emergence of what was rapidly becoming if not a political society, at least a society with politics. In the end, the Alexandre poet via his fable proposes the construction of a reformed imperial auctoritas [authority], one that envisions a broad cultural purview that justifes and stabilizes the nature and uses of power based on knowledge in the secular world, but also one necessarily mitigated by piety, personal virtue, and humility before the mysteries of Creation. Although it would be an overstatement to call the poet reactionary in his anti-Aristotelian propensities since he does not espouse a spirituality or a politics that favor an unquestioning return to the status quo ante—the previous spiritual and political order of society—he does not fully accept a completely lay politics, philosophy, or political philosophy; even as he expresses a nostalgia for something absent in his portrayal of Alexander’s pagan society. The Libro de Alexandre seeks to advance both a model of knowledge and a norm for its civic uses, as it builds upon the ancient Christian taboos of self-suffcient knowledge and vana curiositas to construct a scheme in which knowledge can be legitimated, but only in so far as it might serve God and a higher moral order. In his apologia of knowledge the poet thus also reveals its dangers and ambiguities, especially when it is in and manipulated by the hands of the powerful, as he proposes a new imperial ideal that recognizes its utility but calls for its accommodation to piety and faith. In the Alexandre, knowledge, education, and wisdom are the guiding forces that may privilege and justify monarchy and an imperial vision, and be capable of transforming a pagan into 401
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almost a secular saint:“Se non fuesse pagano de vida tan seglar/deviélo ir el mundo todo adorar” [If he weren’t a pagan of such secular life/ the entire world would go and adore him] (2667).Yet the wisest king without Christian virtue, humility, Grace, and respect for the mysteries of God is nothing but a fallen, pagan man whose potentiality for righteousness can never be achieved. The Alexandre in this way exposes what Ian Michael calls an “inbuilt tension” that constitutes both “an inspiration and a warning to contemporary rulers” (1970, 286). The Alexandre’s plot is thus richly nuanced by the dark forces of godless curiosity and ambition, complicating the formation of the hero, the Iberian expansionist imaginary of the mid-thirteenth century, and its secular apology for empire. The work is saturated with, and undermined, by hesitation, punctuated by an attendant pessimism that points to the existence of an epistemological break which marks a rift between secular empire, ambition, and virtue that points to an anxiety about tyranny, betrayal, and death as the fnal wages of imperial ambition. In short, as Weiss has proposed (2006, 109–142), there is a fundamental ambivalence that complicates the affrmative rhetoric that depicts conquest and hegemony. As the exaltation of the conjunction of empire and worldly learning progresses, there is an undertone of restiveness and resistance in the Libro as it depicts the ethical effects on the person of the use of profane reason and the acquisition of unlimited secular dominance.There is trepidation, which subverts the assertions of ascendancy and patterns of order and constraint, even at those moments when this unenthusiastic posture seems to be disciplined and domesticated. Even as the undercurrent of uncertainty is sometimes contained in the poem, the containment proves little more than a deferral, a postponement of an inevitable confrontation with death and perfdy set in motion by the very secular imperial gestures and ambitions of the hero. In this regard, the Alexandre should be looked to as a touchstone when tracing the genealogy of the Iberian empire and how it was imagined and textualized, but most especially confuted by the larger intimations of failure and fatality interspersed throughout it. The work outlines the presence and signifcance of conficted discourses on empire in Iberian vernacular writing starting at the time it was written; an attitude that will prevail well into the sixteenth century, the Golden Age of Iberian Empire as shown by Vincent Barletta’s study of Alexander in the early modern Mediterranean (2010). Beginning with the thirteenth-century Libro de Alexandre, the Iberian empire’s triumphalism is countered by frissons of disquietude, an awareness of the everpresent reality of moral and mortal danger, and the dread of failure that circumscribes all human encounters with limitless ambition and unbounded power. As Weiss concludes, the Alexandre arrives at a stalemate, demonstrating that the pursuit of empire is a double-edged sword that leads to an impasse between secular and spiritual ideals since, in the end,Alexander’s “attachment to God makes him betray political ideals; [and his] attachment to political ideals is a betrayal of God” (2006, 142). The poet’s vision of imperial power is held together by his particular organization of, and orientation toward, the kind of knowledge necessary for achieving human good in both its moral and political dimensions, eschewing the possibility of any legitimate form of autocracy arising from any kind of power that rests on self-suffcient knowledge. Stated succinctly, the poet posits the practical union of ethics, theology, and politics in the pursuit of empire, and the value of such knowledge only insofar as it may serve as a guide to civic action. The contemplation of divine truth remains the aim and end of all intellectual endeavor. To not seek beyond the immediate and the immanent is illicit, a form of pride and sinful blindness that can only lead to tyranny, treachery, and death. The main thrust of the Alexandre points to a desire both to encourage and regulate secular power, but most especially imperial power. Just as absolutism was emerging throughout Europe, characterized by an ending of feudalism, a consolidation of authority in an absolute sovereign, 402
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the appearance of elaborate transcultural state apparatuses, the establishment of professional standing armies, the codifcation of state-wide laws, and the rise of ideologies that justifed all of these things (see Bisson 2009), the Alexandre poet employs the vernacular to admonish and remind the secular establishment of a higher order.While absolutism was rapidly materializing, the clergy sought if not to contain its development at least to reassert their own authority over it and that of imagined, loftier, metaphysical powers, seeking to counterbalance the political power of a uniquely worldly state which relied on science and a belief in the possibility of a human sapience that omitted the Almighty from its equation. The Alexandre’s composition in the vernacular at a time when both secular science and Castilian empire were fully materializing almost hand in hand, make it a clerical response to, and caution on, the perils of political ambition not tempered by moral understanding, especially humility and self-knowledge that arise from introspection and an awareness of God.The interplay of unregulated curiosity, knowledge, and power in the Alexandre reveals a competition between Church and State for control at a critical moment in the transformation of social institutions in thirteenth-century Castile, when a puissant monarchy led by Alfonso VIII and Fernando III began to articulate its dreams of empire, and the Church was aware of its own waning power driven by the forces of science, logic, and materialism. In this way, the book constitutes the clerical response to a rapidly secularizing world in which reason and sovereignty had, in the eyes of many, become dissociated from morality, ethics, and ecclesiastical authority. The Church as an institution of waning intellectual and political authority could not be left behind. Seeking to impose limits, its intellectuals decried the unconstrained bounds of secular power, as it sought to check it by framing it in a principled context consonant with traditional Christian values, and therefore subject to ecclesiastical regulation. In the Alexandre, although it takes place in a pagan world and Christianity and the Church are never explicitly mentioned, the ethics that the Church espouses possesses a spiritual authority that sets it apart from the secular universe. For its contemporary audience, Macedonia could easily have been taken for contemporary Castile. Despite Alexander’s political merits, at the end the poet raises the specter of a proud tyrant unaware of moral obligation or of a superior power.To be sure, the Libro de Alexandre, with its Babylonian denouement, refects what Joseph Campbell calls the archetypical tale of the tyrant: The tyrant is proud, and therein resides his doom. He is proud because he thinks of his strength as his own; thus he is in the clown role, as a mistaker of shadow for substance; it is his destiny to be tricked. The mythological hero, reappearing from the darkness that is the source of the shapes of the day, brings a knowledge of the secret of the tyrant’s doom. (1968, 337) Because the sin of Babylon involves the prideful imitation of God, in his arrogant tyranny Alexander, like Nebuchadnezzar (“el que se fazié Dios a los omnes dezir” [the one who made men call him God] 1531cd) before him, provokes the Almighty’s wrath, just as he imitates His character. In this way, the Alexandre deals decisively with the question of the limits, nature, and experience of knowledge in relation to worldly political power. In the end it treats the sin of intellectual pride that leads to the sin of pride and to despotism through the story of the emperor who had sought to usurp the Almighty’s prerogatives, just as it suggests the retribution of a jealous deity. When viewed from this perspective, we are not far from John of Salisbury’s Policraticus and the ideas on tyranny he and his most immediate intellectual circle embraced; nor are we so 403
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distant from John’s Metalogicon, which offers valuable insight into the rediscovery of Aristotle at the University of Paris and the contentious academic life there. In the Metalogicon (1991) John advocates a middle ground that, I would venture to say, concurs with the perspective of the Alexandre poet. Knowledge and virtue are not incompatible when curiosity in the pursuit of knowledge is a kind of morally informed “natural philosophy” rather than an objective, disinterested “science”. For John, it is of no value to be well educated if one is not able to apply knowledge and learning in the service of ethics and moral rectitude. He advocates the principle of fnding a compromise between an absence of intellectual curiosity and an overzealous, selfsuffcient pursuit of knowledge (“Si autem moderatio desit, omnia haec in contrarium cedunt: subtrahitu namque subtilitati ultilitas” [If moderation is lacking, everything opposite yields for lack of subtlety] Metalogicon,VIII.8 “Quod eos Aristoteles compescuerat, si audiretur”. On John’s moderation, see Nederman 2005). Babylon, the scene of Alexander’s death, is traditionally recognized as the symbol of humanity’s overweening pride.Alexander’s throne, placed there in its central plaza, is evocative of materialism, sensuality, pride, and godlessness, just as it is raised over the site of another blasphemous structure which fgures prominently in Judeo-Christendom’s most familiar parable of human presumptuousness: the Tower of Babel. Conspicuously, the poet stresses that Alexander arranges his throne on an elevated mound, an alto poyal [a high mound] (2538c), traditionally taken as the vestiges of the Tower of Babel that lay just off the main market square of the city.That edifce, whose original name meant “gate of God”, is virtually synonymous with human arrogance and folly; a fttingly ironic place for the lord of all the world to hold his council just prior to meeting his end at the hands of a traitor. Babylon and the Tower of Babel, said to have been erected in the central square at Babylon, share the symbolism of the Sacred Center. In the Libro, Alexander’s throne thus sits ironically at the center of the Gate of God and is directly implicated in the reedifcation of the Tower of Babel, which God had demolished to punish human audacity that had dared seek to reach the heights of the Creator. As the poem progresses, the relationship between knowledge and power is shown to become complex, affected by ethical considerations and the character of those who exercise and possess them. In the end, the poem is not simple imperial propaganda as it does not fail to offer an unproblematic image of the empire and the emperor, since it is curiosity and the very quest for knowledge and authority that destroys Alexander and the empire he has forged. In this way, the Libro comprises a potent admonition to those who fail to recognize the human limits of power and seek to equate themselves with God. Viewed from a broader European perspective, it is clear that, as R.W. Southern’s lamentably unfnished study of the unifying role played by scholastic humanism maintains, scholasticism was to bear a major infuence on all Western culture signifcantly beyond the confnes of the universities.Throughout Europe during the long thirteenth century, scholars and school-educated men moved out of the universities and the studia to carry out important roles in government and the Church. As they labored “in mundo … in agone … in lucta” [in the world … in confict … in struggle] (Diego García de Campo, Planeta, cited in Rico 1985, 7), they sought not just to infuence the spiritual life of humankind, but to shape its political and social destiny. Like the later humanists of the ffteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Alexandre poet had no trouble appealing to classical pagan fgures and ideas alongside pious arguments that found their origins in the Fathers and Church doctrine. The scholastic humanism of the author of the Libro de Alexandre is thus religious and spiritual but also in direct opposition to any kind of asceticism or spirituality that fatly turns its back upon the world; it recognizes the human ability to attain knowledge and achievement in life through active engagement in human affairs so long as humanity remains cognizant of a higher moral realm and responsibility.What Southern calls 404
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scholastic humanism is thus pious and religious but also in opposition to any kind of austerity or faith that rejects earthly undertakings; it recognizes humanity’s ability both to attain knowledge and to have an infuence in life through active political engagement, while stressing righteous ends and the existence of a metaphysical reality to which humanity remains responsible.To say this is to move beyond formalism and to begin to understand the role played by knowledge in the Libro de Alexandre, the poet’s own use of it, and the deeper resonances of his words that his “mester es sin pecado” [craft is impeccable].
Notes 1 Some 35 years ago Rico called for prioritizing an “imprescindible enfoque panrománico” (1985, 5, n. 9) in the study of the mester de clerecía.With few exceptions, namely Weiss, that challenge still needs to be taken up and, in fact expanded to include a pan-European cultural perspective in the context of specifc themes and practices. Charles Homer Haskins’s The Rise of Universities (19321923), and his fundamental The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1976), plus R.W. Southern’s equally notable Scholastic Humanism and the Unifcation of Europe (1997–2001) serve as fundamental points of departure for connecting the mester de clerecía, but the Libro de Alexandre in particular, to a larger cosmopolitan intellectual and political environment. In Southern’s title “scholastic” refers to the curriculum and debate in the cathedral schools and universities during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, while “humanism” points to medieval scholars’ fascination with human nature, but especially with the power of human reason to seek to discover the disposition of divine will. Southern posits that this combination was the major cultural force that unifed Christian Europe across frontiers. “The schools”, Southern observes, “not only laid down the foundations of one of the most remarkable intellectual structures in European history, but also laid down the rules of life and government which have had a continuing infuence until the present day” (II, 5). See also Murray (1978), Bartlett (1994), Reynolds (1997), and Bisson (2009), all of whom contribute as well to the idea of a unifed European scholastic culture. 2 The striking use of the term “lunático” in God’s judgment of Alexander is both signifcant and ironic. According to Corominas and Pascual (1980–1991) it is the frst attestation of the word in Castilian (Diccionario crítico etimológica de la lengua castellana, vol. 3, 713). At the same time it belonged principally to Aristotelian medical discourse. It derives from the Latin lunaticus, a term originally applied to describe the victims of epilepsy and other forms of mental illness, or forms of “lunacy”—diseases thought to be caused by the moon through its persistent infuence or observation. Pliny the Elder and Aristotle believed that gazing at the moon affected certain individuals directly and caused them to go mad. See Harrison (2000), McCrae (2011), Gerli (2018), and Riva (2019). 3 “totius disputatiunculae haec summa sit: quod per curiositatem a veritate ceciderit, quia prius spectavit curiose quod affectavit illicite, speravit praesumptuose”. De gradibus humilitatis et superbiae (Bernard of Clairvaux), bk. 10, chap. 38, Patrologia Latina 182: 0963A. 4 For a discussion of the politics of science in the context of the growth of the universities during the thirteenth century, see Borst (1991, pp. 167–175), also Haskins (1923, pp. 1–21). 5 I am grateful to Amaia Arizaleta for calling my attention to García Ballester’s important study. On the possible connection of the Alexandre to the University of Palencia, see Uría Maqua, (1987). Palencia served as the focal point for the propagation of the Lateran reforms in Castile after 1215. Arizaleta (2010) studies the interrelationship of university-trained clerks at court and the monarchy. 6 “Fridericus et sapientes crediderunt, quod non esset alia vita nisi presens, ut liberius carnalitatibus suis et miseriis vacare possent. Ideo fuerunt Epycuri, quibus convenit quod ait Iacobus V: Epulati estis super terram et in luxuriis enutristis corda vestra” (I, 349). See also Federico II e le scienze (1942).
References Alighieri, Dante. 1878. Opere Latine. I. De vulgari eloquentia. De Monarchia. Ed. Giambattista Giuliani. Firenze: Successori Le Monnier. Alighieri, Dante. 1970. The Divine Comedy.Trans. and Commentary by Charles Singleton. Inferno. Italian Text and Translation. Bollingen Series, 80. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Anonymous. 2000. Libro de Alexandre. Ed. Jesús Cañas. Madrid: Cátedra.
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E. Michael Gerli Arizaleta, Amaia. 2010. Les clercs au palais. Chancellerie et écriture du pouvoir royal Castille, 1157–1230. Paris: SEMH-Sorbonne – CLEA. Arizaleta, Amaia and Rosa María Rodríguez Porto. 2015. “Le manuscrit O du Libro de Alexandre dans son context littéraire et artistique: l’activation d’un réseau de signes”. In Alexandre le Gran à la lumière des manuscrits et des premiers imprimés en Europe (Xiie–XVIe siècle), Ed. Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas. Turnhout: Brepols, 251–268. Augustine of Hippo, Saint. 1991. Confessions.Trans. H. Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bartlett, Robert. 1994. The Making of Europe Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950–1350. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Barletta, Vincent. 2010. Death in Babylon: Alexander the Great and Iberian Empire in the Muslim Orient. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bernard of Clairvaux. 1854. De gradibus humilitatis et superbiae. In Patrologia Latina 182, edited by J.P. Migne. Paris: Migne. Birkenmajer, Aleksander. 1970 [1930]. “Le rôle joué par les médecins et les naturalistes dans la réception d’Aristote au xiie et xiiie siècles”. In Etudes d’histoire des sciences et de philosophie au Moyen Âge. Wroclaw: Wydawnictwo Polkiej Akademii Nauk, 73–87. Bisson,Thomas. 2009. The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship, and the Origins of European Government. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Blumenberg, Hans. 1961.“Augustins Anteil an der Geschichte des Begriffs der theoretischen Neugierde”. Revue des Etudes Augustiniennes 7: 35–70. Blumenberg, Hans. 1962. “Curiositas und Veritas: Zur Ideengeschichte von Augustin, Confessiones X 35”. Studia Patristica 81: 294–302. Bonaventure, Saint. 1882–1902. Opera omnia. 9 vols. Ed. the Fathers of the Collegii S. Bonaventura. Florence: Quaracchi. Borst, Arno. 1991. Medieval Worlds: Barbarians, Heretics and Artists in the Middle Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brownlee, Marina S. 1983. “Pagan and Christian: The Bivalent Hero of the Libro de Alexandre”. Kentucky Romance Quarterly, 30: 263–270. Campbell, Joseph. 1968. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cantor, Norman. 1993. The Civilization of the Middle Ages. New York: Harper Collins. Corfs, Ivy. 1994.“Libro de Alexandre: Fantastic Didacticism”. Hispanic Review 62: 477–486. Corominas, Joan, and José A. Pascual. 1980–1991. Diccionario crítico etimológica de la lengua castellana. 6 vols. Madrid: Gredos. Federico II le scienze. 1942. Ed.A. Paravicini Bagliani, and P.Toubert. Palermo: Sellerio Editore. Fridericus II. 1942. De arte venandi cum avibus. Ed. Karl A.Willemsen. 3 vols. Leipzig: Haag-Drugulin. García Ballester, Luis. 1996.“Naturaleza y ciencia en la Castilla del siglo XIII. Los orígenes de una tradición: los Studia franciscano y dominico de Santiago de Compostela (1222–1230)” Arbor: Ciencia, pensamiento y cultura 604–605: 145–169. Gerli, E. Michael. 2018. “Mester es sen pecado”: Libertas Inquiriendi/Vitium Curiositatis en el Libro de Alexandre”. Miriada Hispánica 16: 35–45. Harrison, Mark. 2000.“From Medical Astrology to Medical Astronomy: Sol-lunar and Planetary Theories of Disease”. British Journal for the History of Science 33: 25–48. Haskins, Charles Homer. 1923. The Rise of Universities. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Haskins, Charles Homer. 1976. The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. New York: New American Library. John of Salisbury. 1991. Metalogicon. Ed. J.B. Hall and K.S.B. Keats-Rohan. Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis, 98.Turnhout: Brepols. John of Salisbury. 1993. Policraticus I–IV. Ed. K.S.B. Keats-Rohan. Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis, 117.Turnhout: Brepols. Linehan, Peter. 1993. History and Historians of Medieval Spain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lucas, Bishop of Tuy. 2009. Lvcae Tvdensis “De altera vita, fdeique controversiis adversus Albigensium errores libri II”. Ed. Emma Falque Rey. Lvucae Tvdensis. Opera Omnia, tomus 2, Corpvs Christianorvm, Continuatio Mediaeualis 74 A.Turnhout: Brepols. Martínez Casado, Ángel. 1984. “Aristotelismo hispánico en la primera mitad del siglo XIII”. Estudios Filosófcos (Valladolid) 33: 59–84. Martínez Casado, Ángel. 1997. “La escuela aristotélica de León en el siglo XIII”. In La flosofía en Castilla y León. De los orígenes al Siglo de Oro, Ed. Maximiliano Fartos Martínez and Lorenzo Velázquez, 87–96. Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid.
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The long thirteenth century McCrae, Niall. 2011. The Moon and Madness. Exeter. Michael, Ian. 1960. “Interpretation of the Libro de Alexandre: The Author’s Attitude Toward the Hero’s Death”. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 37: 205–214. Michael, Ian. 1970. The Treatment of Classical Material in the Libro de Alexandre. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Murray, Alexander. 1978. Reason and Society in the Middle Ages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nederman, Cary J. 2005. John of Salisbury. Tempe: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2002. Beyond Good and Evil. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy.Trans. and Ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rico, Francisco. 1985.“La clerecía del mester”. Hispanic Review 53: 1–23, 127–150. Rico, Francisco. 1986. El pequeño mundo del hombre.Varia forntuna de una idea en la cultura española. Ed. corregida y aumentada. Madrid:Alianza Editorial. Riva, Fernando. 2019. ‘Nunca mayor sobervia comidió Luçifer’ Límites del conocimiento y cultura claustral en el ‘Libro de Alexandre’. Madrid:Vervuert. Rucquoi, Adeline. 1998. “Contribution des Studia Generalia à la Pensée Hispanique Médiévale”. In Pensamiento medieval hispano. Homenaje a Horacio Santiago Otero. Ed. José María Soto Rábanos. 2 vols. Zamora: Junta de Castilla y León, CSIC I, 737–770. Salimbene, d’Adam. 1905–1913. Chronica. MGH, Scriptores, Band 32. Ed. O. Holder-Egger. Leipzig: Hannover. Southern, Richard W. 1997–2001. Scholastic Humanism and the Unifcation of Europe. 2 vols. New York: John Wiley. Surtz, Ronald. 1987.“El héroe intellectual en el mester de clerecía”. La Torre, 1(2): 265–274. Uría Maqua, Isabel. 1987. “El Libro de Alexandre y la Universidad de Palencia”. In Actas del Ier Congreso de Historia de Palencia. Palencia: Diputación Provincial. IV, 431–442. Walter of Châtillon. 1978. Alexandreis. Ed. Marvin L. Colker.Thesaurius Mundi 17. Padua:Antenore. Weiss, Julian. 2006. The Mester de Clerecía. Intellectuals and Ideologies in Thirteenth-Century Castile. Monografías, 231. London: Támesis. Willis, Raymond. 1934. The Relationship of the Spanish Libro de Alexandre to the Alexandreis of Gautier de Châtillon. Elliott Monographs, 31. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Willis, Raymond. 1935. The Debt of the Spanish Libro de Alexandre to the French Roman d’Alexandre. Elliott Monographs, 33. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Willis, Raymond. 1956–1957. “Mester de Clerecía. A Defnition of the Libro de Alexandre”. Romance Philology 10: 212–224.
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26 MEDIEVAL IBERIAN TRAVEL LITERATURE Michael Harney
Medieval Iberia produced many works which may be classed as travel literature in the broadest sense, that is, as texts in which itineration fgures prominently.Travel literature thus defned would parallel in its thematic variety the functional multiplicity of travel itself, whose numerous motives may include—singularly or in combination—trade, war, pilgrimage, missionary endeavor, diplomacy, exploration, conquest, and tourism. However, such themes do not of themselves defne travel writing as a coherent genre. In the Cantar de Mio Cid (“Song of My Cid”, ca. 1207, hereafter: Cantar), for example, considerable attention is paid to the movements entailed by the Cid’s journey into exile, by his several campaigns, and by his attendance at the king’s court. These spatial displacements, moreover, are marked by a historically specifc and more or less accurate toponymy. However, what matters in the Cantar is the protagonist’s story; the geographical setting is an incidental backdrop. Analogous observations apply to chronicles, diplomatic accounts, military annals, and other texts in which travel functions mainly as a background element. By contrast, the thirteenth-century Libro de Alexandre (“Book of Alexander”, Casas Rigall ed., 2007; hereafter: Alexandre), while similar to the Cantar in its account of extensive military campaigns, sees its protagonist as a traveler as well as a warrior and a conqueror.The Alexandre shows a pronounced tendency to digress—a frequent if not essential trait of what has come to be called travel literature. These incidental asides are devoted to pseudo-geographical exposition, remarks on mythic ethnography, and quasi-historical commentary. Substantial digressions are prompted by Alexander’s visits to various locales (e.g., the lengthy account of the Trojan War, stanzas 333–762; the interlude in Babylon, stanzas 1455–1546). Dramatic encounters with exotic personages and creatures include Alexander’s meeting with the queen of the Amazons (1863–1888) and his consultation with the oracular Trees of the Sun and Moon (2482–2494). If the literal depiction of travel, as in the Cantar, does not of itself make for travel writing, it is also conversely true that the infrequency or even absence of actual travel references does not necessarily disqualify a work as an example of the type. For instance, Marco Polo’s book (2001–2009), composed in the last decade of the thirteenth century, pays little attention to the narrator’s real travels. Nevertheless, its extensive array of named places; its many profles of personages and peoples; its numerous geographical, ethnographic, or historical vignettes; its preponderant infuence on subsequent geographers, explorers, and travelers over the centuries, place it, if only by a consensus of scholars and readers, among the classics of travel writing.The 408
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various topics, genres, and discursive modes represented by Marco’s book—at times it provides a detailed travel account, at others it resembles a gazetteer, at still others a quasi-encyclopedic ethnographic survey—would seem to support a very broad defnition of this kind of literature. Within this inclusive category of travel-relevant texts, certain works stand out as straightforward accounts of actual journeys.This more specifc type of travel narrative became a staple of the publishing industry in the modern age of Western exploration and colonial expansion. As travel methods and technologies improved and travel networks continuously widened, travel in general and tourism in particular became increasingly democratized (Buzard 2002, 47–49). In the modernizing environment, travel writing intersected with other book types devoted to exploration, ethnography, history, missionary activity, geography, archaeology, and natural history, each with its concomitant publishing sector.These interlaced multiple trends conduce to defne modern travel writing as, in Roy Bridges’ formulation, “a discourse designed to describe and interpret for its readers a geographical area together with its natural attributes and its human society and culture” (Bridges 2002, 53). In a similar vein, Mary Louise Pratt (1992, 204), discusses Victorian travel writing in terms of a pervasive “discovery rhetoric” and a generalized effort to generate densely aestheticized descriptions of the numerous locales visited by the traveler-author.This descriptive aspect, summarizes Pratt,“constitutes the value and signifcance of the journey”; the discovery is validated through a cluster of texts—geographic or diplomatic reports; diaries; lectures—whose paramount element is a travel book (204). Allowing for the gradual downplaying of exploration and empire as guiding themes, along with the concomitant expansion of a touristic purview (as when Victorian ethnocentrism segues into a growing tolerance of, or even an eventual preference for, cultural diversity), this kind of travel account remains a factor in present-day publishing. Emphasizing aestheticized description as a primary generic marker, we note that, from the viewpoint of literary taxonomy, the travel book’s scientifc verifability as a geographical, historical, or ethnographic source is a secondary issue; what matters most is a given work’s stylistically satisfying recreation of the traveler’s specifc experiences, supplemented by commentary on human and physical geography, local history and customs, etc. A history of books conforming to these criteria would therefore include medieval works that seem to be early specimens of the type. Before the ffteenth century, such specimens are not produced by medieval Iberian and Western-Christian authors. Books on travel-related themes generally adhere to folkloric or downright fantastic notions of human and physical geography inherited from antiquity, especially those embodied by a Roman geographical tradition typifed by Pliny and Isidore of Seville (Friedman 1981, 61–86, 183–195; Harney 2015, 52–53).As Mary B. Campbell has demonstrated, the earlier European Christian tendency is to present travel descriptions in terms of spiritual meaning on the one hand, correspondence to Holy Scripture or to formulaic conventional geography on the other. Even authors who might actually have journeyed focus not on real-world experiences, but on mastery of the inherited array of stock concepts and images (Campbell 1988, 18–19). In sum, earlier medieval Christian writing on travel and geography, in Iberia as in the rest of Western Europe, embraced the commemorative world view summarized by Campbell.The focus in this context is on fdelity to a set of common-places; even when an account seems to follow an itinerary, details are minimal and vague, and alleged episodes along the route are often borrowed from treasuries of tales and conventional geographical compilations (Zumthor and Peebles 1994, 811–13). In Christian Iberia, works of this type include the previously mentioned Alexandre; the Libro de las maravillas (“Book of Marvels”, hereafter: Maravillas), a Spanish-language rendering of the famous late-fourteenth-century work attributed to the probably fctional Sir John Mandeville (Deluz, ed., 2000); and Rodrigo de Santaella’s late-ffteenth-century version of 409
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Marco Polo’s work, El Libro de Marco Polo (“The Book of Marco Polo”, hereafter: Santaella).The Alexandre substantially borrows from Old French and Latin works; the Maravillas and Santaella (the latter two edited by Rubio Tovar, 2006), are ostensible translations of Old French originals. Remakes rather than translations in the strict sense, all three effectively perform as works in their own right; the Maravillas and Santaella remain popular among Iberian readers well into the sixteenth century. Of apparently native-Iberian origin is the late-fourteenth-century Libro del conoscimiento de todos los regnos e tierras e señoríos (“Book of Knowledge of all Kingdoms and Lands and Domains”; hereafter: Libro).Although presented as a travel itinerary, this work (Rubio Tovar, ed., 2006), frequently paraphrasing conventional geographical material, more closely resembles a dryly informative gazetteer (see Biglieri 2012, 17–24). The persistently popular Mandeville account has been characterized as a “plotless verbal journey”, resembling a standard pilgrim’s guide but “thickly feshed out with lore and stories” and clearly aimed at “vicarious travelers” (Higgins 1997, 64); it is a travel narrative “recalled from learning and study rather than from actual experience” (Tobienne 2016, 3). Marco Polo’s book and Santaella’s version of it, by contrast, are relatively free from, or even somewhat ignorant of, the inherited pseudo-geography. Polo’s detailed contrast with the traditional European literary and folkloric vision of Asia might well have appealed to readers by virtue of its sheer novelty (Harney 2015, 29–30; see also Heers 1983, 231–243; Larner 1999, 176–77; Chaunu 1979, 72–76; Critchley 1990, 130–148).The commemorative formulaic works, meanwhile, for the most part dutifully invoke such biblical concepts as the Terrestrial Paradise and its four rivers (Santaella, Rubio Tovar 2006, 337–338); the usual array of monstrous races and bizarre personages (e.g., the Libro’s Gog and Magog, the dog-headed men; Rubio Tovar 2006, 390); the occasional post-classical element, such as the legendary Prester John and his fabulous EasternChristian empire, referred to in Santaella (Rubio Tovar 2006, 324–28). Marco’s account, to be sure, occasionally mentions such standard fantastic elements, which continued to fascinate even real-world explorers and conquistadors, ever on the lookout for Amazons or Prester John’s kingdom. However, when Marco does so, he complicates their profle considerably, as when the dogheaded men become cannibalistic, sexually promiscuous islanders (Rubio Tovar 2006, 107); or recasts a familiarly named personage in a new role, as when Prester John becomes a central Asian dynastic rival of Genghis Khan (Rubio Tovar 2006, 55–56). Such departures from the standard travel narratives presumably supported the overall impression of plausible novelty that charmed so many of Marco’s late-medieval European readers (including Columbus). Medieval Iberian Jewish and Muslim travel authors, largely contrasting with their European counterparts, seem less encumbered by cultish orthodoxies.They are capable of producing travel memoirs plausibly grounded in real-world experience—in other words, fairly close approximations of the modern travel book.To be sure, non-Christian Iberians, particularly Muslims, have their own notions of folkloric and legendary geography and produce substantial works analogous to those of the fantastic Christian type. Before the appearance of actual Christian travel accounts in the ffteenth century, the principal difference between Christian and non-Christian Iberian travel writing is that the latter supports the composition of both fanciful and realistic works. An additional contrast with the fantasist Christian tradition is that Muslim and Jewish accounts of strange phenomena or bizarre legends often report such matters without necessarily endorsing their veracity; indeed, they often include disclaimers regarding their more outlandish reports.They also alternate their references to the obviously fantastic with more believable observations of the human and natural worlds. A prominent example of this alternately folkloric and realistic travel writing by a Peninsular non-Christian is the Grenadine Muslim Abu Hamid al-Gharnati, ca. 1080–1170 (LéviProvençal 2012b). Widely respected as a scientifc and theological authority (Ramos 1990, 2), 410
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Abu Hamid authored two works still extant, the al-Mu’rib ‘an ba’d ‘aja’ib al-Maghreb (“Praise of Certain Wonders of the Maghreb”) and the Tuḥfat al-Albāb (“Gift of the Spirits”).The former (Dubler, ed., 1953), considered a prime example of the genre known as the kutub al-‘aja’ib (“book of wonders”), is presented as a series of geographical vignettes, not unlike those profled in the Maravillas. Although Abu Hamid was a widely traveled scholar and merchant who probably visited many of the places he refers to, this account is intended (Ducène 2006, 37–38) as an exposition of numerous phenomena with which Allah has seen ft to populate the world. Thus, in the section on al-Andalus, Abu Hamid describes, with perhaps a hint of skepticism, a “city of copper” constructed by djinn in honor of King Solomon; from within this fortifcation strange voices call out, mysteriously luring the unwary (Ducène 2006, 43). Other memorable places depicted include Alexandria, with its renowned lighthouse, whose fabled mirror allowed observation of events far out to sea (56–57); the impressive ruins of the Pharaoh’s palace (62– 63); the famous Pyramids, also described in considerable detail (64–66). Alternating with such accounts, often embellished with fabulous or legendary touches, are more realistic renderings of natural phenomena and climatological conditions, such as Sicily’s Mt. Etna, whose eruptions are described with something approaching geological accuracy (53); the region around Baku, on the Caspian Sea, with its adjacent tar pits and nearby offshore islands inhabited by birds and reptiles (75–76); the extreme conditions of the Bulgarian region, with its inordinately long days and short nights in summer, matched by similarly long nights and short days in winter (83). Other passages, closely resembling the thumbnail portraits in medieval European bestiaries, are devoted to elements of what later centuries would call natural history, with certain animals, such as the lobster, the swordfsh, or the octopus, described more or less realistically (53–54). A highlight of this zoological mode is Abu Hamid’s portrait of the Nile crocodile (63–64), reminiscent of Herodotus (bk. 2, chap. 68) in its mix of fairly accurate details regarding the animal’s size, dentition, and feeding habits, and its dubious reference, conveyed as factual, to the crocodile's alleged tooth-cleaning symbiosis with certain birds. More purely fctive are the dangerous sea beast called the tinnin, as long as a palm tree and sporting a maw flled with spear-like teeth (55), and the vaguely whale-like but impossibly enormous al-manara, a bane to mariners and chronic destroyer of ships (56). Concerning the customs and beliefs of exotic peoples,Abu Hamid recounts how the people in the region of the Persian city of Darband, eschewing all agricultural labor, make their living solely from the fabrication of weapons; their only use for fre is in furtherance of this communal vocation. Neither Christian nor Muslim, Jewish nor Zoroastrian, they regard the wealth garnered from this way of life as their only religion (77). Later, Abu Hamid characterizes the polyglot Khazar people of the Volga region in terms of shared practices, such as their common method of preparing and eating a particular type of fsh, or their general use of white lead as a type of currency (81–82). Abu Hamid generalizes similarly with respect to certain Slavic peoples, noting their peculiar exchange system employing grey squirrel pelts as currency, and characterizing them as a “well organized” and generally courageous folk, scrupulously adherent to their own notions of justice (91–92).This minimal ethnographic impulse, whereby the author summarizes the nature of an entire people with reference to a shared character trait or notable attribute, is likewise expressed in the narrator’s assessment of the Hungarians as “courageous and innumerable” (94). At one point in the Al-Mu’rib, Abu Hamid declares his principal criterion for selecting the matters he refers to: he is, he declares, chiefy concerned with the description of marvels (70). This concentration on exotic phenomena makes his account a catch-all tabulation of curiosities rather than a memoir of experiences. This catalogic tendency is still more evident in his Tuḥfat al-Albāb, presented as a survey of numerous countries and regions structured into four 411
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substantial sections: one devoted to a description of the world and its inhabitants, including the djinn; another describing marvels in various countries as well as notable architectural works; an account of the seas and islands, and some of the fantastic animals they contain; descriptions of caves and tombs. Distinctly differing from the regional outline of his Al-Mu’rib, this topical organization, notes Ingrid Bejarano (1991, 31), highlights the Tuhfa’s bookish orientation. Resembling in this the Alexandre and Mandeville's Maravillas, al Hamid includes inherited pseudo-scriptural artifacts like Gog and Magog, and a legendary eastern version of Alexander the Great having little to do with the historical personage. Interspersed with such imaginary elements, at the same time, are numerous instances of geographical and historical realism, such as the description of the salt and gold trade between the Maghreb and Ghana (Ramos 1990, 23–24). Al Hamid’s method, in effect, is to alternate between the fabulous or legendary, the plausible and realistic.Thus, far-fetched descriptions of snake-charming techniques among black African tribesman are juxtaposed with credible accounts of hunting procedures and dietary habits (25–26); hearsay reports of headless black men with eyes in their shoulders and mouths in their chest are conveyed without comment (28–29); followed by an accurate account of India’s production of cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg, as well as China’s trade in porcelains and brocades (30); and in turn by an account of the creation of djinns, ghouls, and other fantastic creatures, a report based, the author assures us, on “ancient books, guaranteed by the wisdom of wise men” (31–32). In striking contrast to Abu Hamid is his contemporary, the Navarrese Jewish author Benjamin of Tudela (1130–1173), whose wide-ranging Hebrew account (conventionally titled The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela; hereafter: Itinerary) encompasses numerous places visited in Europe,Africa, and the Near East. Combining the functions of a travelogue, a gazetteer, and a literal travel narrative, and incidentally documenting the existence of an interconnected network of Jewish communities in the many territories traversed, the Itinerary’s generally matter-of-fact, tersely newsy reportage, interspersed with occasional longer passages, focuses on local possibilities for travelers in need of hospitality; descriptions of noteworthy monuments or sites, frequently with concisely articulated ethnographic, historical, or political information; occasional anecdotes aimed at illuminating the background of personages and events. The overall effect is touristic. Like a Michelin guide avant la lettre, the Itinerary informatively opines on local folk ways, or on the social, economic, political, historical, or aesthetic signifcance of the phenomena observed.Thus, the description of Barcelona, “where there is a holy congregation, including sages, wise and illustrious men”, juxtaposed with an aesthetic thumbnail of the nearby coastal town of Tarragona: “a small city and beautiful” (Adler 1907, 2). In Pisa, the narrator comments on the city’s system of governance: “They possess neither king nor prince to govern them, but only the judges appointed by themselves” (8). In Rome, the reader is treated to brief descriptions of such architectural highlights as the Palace of Vespasian, the Colosseum, and the Catacombs (13). Constantinople is portrayed as “a busy city” where merchants come “from every country by sea or land, and there is none like it in the world except Bagdad” (21). The Byzantine capital’s famous Hippodrome is the site of a yearly Christmas celebration, attended by “all the races of the world” and offering entertainments such as juggling or combats between wild animals (22). Economic and commercial particulars are frequently noted (e.g., Constantinople's annual tax income of 20,000 gold pieces, deriving from the rents of shops and markets, and from fees paid by merchants entering by land or sea (23). Social and political commentary is likewise frequent, as in the narrator’s observation regarding the hatred of the Greeks toward the Jews, who, “good and bad alike”, are subjected to “great oppression”, yet remain “kindly and charitable, while “[bearing] their lot with cheerfulness” (25). 412
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Ethnographic or political commentary generally takes the form of concise and often judgmental profles, as when the narrator refers to the cult of “a people called Al-Hashishim” (the Assassins), who do not follow Islam but rather their own prophet, whom they obey in all things (Adler, 28). “Faithful to each other, but a source of terror to their neighbours”, they fearlessly attack whomever their leader tells them to, “even kings” (28).The Druzes are characterized as mountain-dwelling, lawless pagans who “have no king or ruler” (29). These people, Benjamin elaborates,“are steeped in vice, brothers marrying their sisters, and fathers their daughters”; the men, moreover, occasionally “interchange their wives”. Portending the often censorious outlook of Victorian travel writers, the narrator dismisses such practices as “foolish” (30). In a less critical vein, the inhabitants of the west-coast Indian port of Quilon (present-day Kollam) are portrayed as black-skinned, sun-worshipping readers of the stars, yet “honest in commerce” (Adler 1907, 90).Their probity is confrmed by the custom of assuming responsibility for the goods of all foreign merchants and insuring the return of any lost property (91).This seemingly positive profle is somewhat tempered by the narrator's description of local funerary practices, whereby the spice-embalmed, fnely clothed corpses of family members, seated on chairs, are preserved for posterity (92). Along with their sun-worshipping, such customs are summed up as “superstitious” by the narrator (93). The Itinerary is sometimes capable of substantial digressions. One such (Adler 1907, 39–41) relates a folkloric anecdote, recounted without comment as to its plausibility, concerning two workmen who seek plunder in a cave, the supposed site of the sepulcher of King David, King Solomon, and their successors. Thrown to the ground by a ferce wind and hearing a mysterious voice warning them to leave, they consult the Patriarch of Jerusalem and a local rabbi, who inform them that the cave indeed contains the tombs of the House of David. When the Patriarch and the rabbi propose to investigate the cave, the two terrifed workmen declare that the eerie voice had indeed conveyed a divine warning; the Patriarch then closes up the cave, which remains hidden, the narrator declares, to this day. Another instance of legendary hearsay is the narrator's reference to the land of Zin (China), a realm “in the uttermost East” adjacent to a sea “where the star Orion predominates and stormy winds prevail” (94). Driven into this sea by the winds, ships are becalmed and their crews die of slow starvation (95). Having stated a disclaimer (“some say” [94]), the narrator recounts how sailors armed with knives wrap themselves in waterproofed ox hides and jump into the sea; a griffn then snatches them up and conveys them to land.As the winged monster attempts to devour its prey, the men slay the creature with their knives, then make their way to an inhabited place (96). Such substantial interludes notwithstanding, the Itinerary is generally concise in its many references to peoples, places, and local customs, histories, and folklore. Mostly focused on plausibly informative descriptions of geographical particulars, rather than on dutifully paraphrased textual precedents or folkloric hearsay, Benjamin’s account, even if occasionally inaccurate by later standards, must be seen as a forerunner and analog of the present-day guide book or travelogue on the one hand, the full-blown modern travel book on the other. Iberian Islamic travel authors, similarly oriented toward the factual rather than the bookish, beneftted from a medieval Islamic geographic tradition inspired, directly or indirectly, by the realism of Hellenistic geography, with its generally Herodotean emphasis on direct observation, ethnographic objectivity, and judicious consultation of local sources.As Houari Touati observes (2010, 146–47), Herodotus, while not strictly speaking a travel writer, frequently refers to his extensive journeys while pointedly distinguishing between his own “observation, judgement, and investigation” (Waterfeld 1998, 2.99) and the various accounts of local informants. Readers, declares Herodotus, may make of cited folkloric or legendary material what they will; his function is to faithfully record whatever his sources tell him (2.123). 413
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This Hellenistic/Herodotean heritage implies neither a systematically direct Greek infuence on Islamic geographers or travel authors, nor a generalized Islamic immunity to ethnocentrism or ideological prejudice.The Muslims’ intellectual heritage, at the same time, was more capable of fostering a relatively ecumenical outlook, as compared to the elaborate preconceptions of the parochial early-medieval Christian geographical tradition. Islamic geography was largely unknown to medieval Christians, a lacuna confrmed by a scrutiny of Moritz Steinschneider’s annotated catalog of European translations of Arabic works (1956). Notably absent are such prominent authors as Al-Mas‘udi, Al-Biruni, al-Idrisi, Abu’l-Fida, Al-Dimashqi, and the Andalusian Al-Bakri (c. 1040–1094), this last described by Évariste Lévi-Provençal (2012a) as the greatest geographer of the Islamic West. The only known exception to this medieval European ignorance of Arab geography is the early-fourteenth-century chivalric romance El libro del caballero Zifar (“The Book of the Knight Zifar”), which shows both general knowledge of Arabic toponymy (Walker 1974, 37–39) and specifc knowledge of Al-Bakri,Al-Mas‘udi, and possibly others (Harney 1983, 213–16, and 1988, 77–81). How the Zifar (González, ed., 1983) came by this knowledge remains a matter of speculation; its familiarity with at least some Arabic geographical works is perhaps explained by its author’s deducible association with the multicultural scholarly environment of Toledo (Wacks 2019, 75–77). The Herodotean outlook is prominently typifed by the Iranian Al-Biruni (970–after 1050). In his monumental study of Indian religion and society, the latter author extensively discusses, for example, the idolatry of the Hindus. In relating several illustrative tales and citing explanations and opinions offered by native informants, he declares (Sachau 1910, 1:112) that his objective is “to explain the system and the theories of the Hindus”. While dismissing these Indian views as “ludicrous”, Al-Biruni nonetheless exhaustively surveys them. Another passage applies the same method, dismissing Indian witchcraft and alchemy as false science,“a gross deception” (1:187), while providing a wealth of information concerning Indian notions of these matters (1:188–195). Other, similar discussions explore Indian cosmology, astrology, and physical geography (1:264ff.); the complexities of the Indian caste system (2:130ff.); the intricacies of Hindu law (2:158ff.). Likewise impressive in its verisimilitude is the Andalusian Al-Bakri’s geographical description of North Africa, as exemplifed by his depiction of the Kingdom of Ghana (Slane 1913, 328–332). In keeping with a multi-topical pattern observed throughout this substantial survey of many regions and peoples, Al-Bakri refers to local customs, religion, laws, history and topography; provides circumstantial profles of signifcant personages; describes the architecture and layout of towns, cities, and villages; summarizes economic and agricultural practices. The author’s ethnographic objectivity—a signifcantly Herodotean attribute—is confrmed by his portrait of the virtuous pagan prince Beci, notable for his zealous commitment to justice, his generous tolerance toward his Muslim subjects, and his altruism in keeping his blindness a secret for the good of his subjects (Slane 1913, 328–29). In addition to an enlightened geographical tradition, Islamic travel authors were additionally supported by the Islamic tradition of the riḥla.The latter concept is explicated by Touati (2010, 2–3) as, frst of all,“a voyage in search of knowledge”, and, second, as a type of travel narrative.As a literal journey, the riḥla voyage,Touati argues, symbolizes “a high intellectuality”, and conduces to acquisition of “cognitive, discursive, and narrative results” (2). In contrast with the Christian West, this view of travel imperatives is not defned in terms of a seeking-out of the exotic or a confrontation with the Other. Meaning and identity are derived not from a perspective on cultural or historical alterity, as is usual with Western travel writing; rather, argues Touati, they emerge as an “exegetic construction of sameness” (3). The aim is not to expand the boundaries of the oikoumene but to confrm the Islamic sphere as a spiritual community paradoxically 414
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various yet united (see also Netton 2012; Dunn 2012, 3–4).The riḥla as an itinerative and narrative tradition may sometimes coincide with religious motives associated with the pilgrimage to Mecca. However, religion, though never entirely absent as a theme, is a separate motivational system from that of the riḥla, whose purview accommodates many topics not directly relevant to the hadj (Touati 2010, 6–7). The riḥla tradition and the Islamic Hellenistic legacy are represented by the Valencian Ibn Jubayr (1145–1217), a highly respected and widely read travel author (Pellat 2012). Although his account of extensive travels in North Africa, Sicily, and the Near East differs in many ways from modern travel books—for instance, attention is seldom paid to the natural history or physical geography so often lavishly described by modern authors—his work prefgures the descriptive opportunism of modern travel accounts. Like them, he profles signifcant personages; observes local mores and institutions; comments on social, political, and economic conditions. Although much of his book concentrates on the journey to Mecca, the range of his travels and observations goes beyond a topical agenda and spatial trajectory strictly connected with pilgrimage. Ibn Jubayr’s scrupulous specifcity and penchant for digression are typifed by his account of the Red Sea pearl-fsheries. He minutely depicts the divers’ methods; the look and structure of the shells; the color and texture of shellfsh innards. Anticipating later European travel authors, he is usually objective in his descriptions of people, but occasionally judgmental, as when he invidiously profles the lives and racial character of peoples encountered along the way: “they [live] in a country which has no [produce] fresh or dry, and live therein the lives of beasts” (Broadhurst 2001, 64). Shortly thereafter, he amplifes this appraisal of their primitivism and corruption, describing them as a tribe who wander “astray from the [right] path” and have “less reason … than the animals”; men and women go about naked, “wearing nothing but the rag which covers their genitals” (66). As noted, Ibn Jubayr only occasionally refers to physical geography or natural phenomena. When he does so, he can strikingly resemble modern novelists, as in his vivid recreation of a terrible storm at sea, showing darkening skies and furious winds; stars briefy glimpsed through gaps in the clouds; the fear and despair of all those on board; the eventual calming of the tempest and the vessel's subsequent circuitous navigation of reef-flled waters (Broadhurst 2001, 67–68). For the most part, however, he focuses on the human world, often characterizing entire peoples.The inhabitants of Baghdad, for instance, generally affect humility but variously succumb to vanity and pride. Despising all strangers, they see other lands as “trivial”, with their divinely favored country the only one constituting a “noble place of living” (226–27).To this arrogance is added a general duplicity in business matters: resorting to “honest truthfulness”, declares Ibn Jubayr, is a waste of time with them (226–27). Conversely, the people of other towns, such as Harran and Mosul, are characterized as “men of goodwill who are just, kind to strangers, and generous toward the poor”; the people of adjacent villages likewise display “a hereditary inclination to generosity” (255). Ibn Jubayr frequently engages in social and ethical critiques. Harsh judgments, for example, are reserved for local Muslims who exploit fellow Muslims on their way to pilgrimage sites. Thus, his indictment of the people of a Red Sea town who, prompted solely by avarice, overload the ferries until the passengers are piled one on top of the other, “like chickens crammed in a coop” (Broadhurst 2001, 65).The inhabitants of the Hejaz, subjecting Muslims to worse treatment than “Christians and Jews under tribute”, confscate the pilgrims’ goods and provisions, while imposing unjust customs duties.They are only held in check, observes Ibn Jubayr, by the intervention of Saladin, who has abolished the customs duties while providing the pilgrims with “money and victuals” (71). In short, the very heartland of Islam is controlled by “people 415
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who use it as an unlawful source of livelihood”, reducing pilgrims to humiliation and “abject poverty” (72–73). Alternating with such comments are extended descriptions of architectural works, such as the Sacred Mosque in Mecca. Ibn Jubayr notes the size, placement, and exquisitely worked inlaid silver of the main door; the variegated marble of the interior walls; the impressive height of the teak pillars; the ceiling adorned with colored silk; the silver plating of the entire outer circumference of the building’s upper half (Broadhurst 2001, 77–79).Another mosque is praised for its impressive dimensions, fne construction, and numerous decorative embellishments, both interior and exterior; also referred to are the particulars of personnel assignments and liturgical practices (198–99). Similarly, the Cathedral Mosque of Damascus is commended for its brilliant design and the admirable workmanship of its thousands of contributing craftsmen; the splendor of its doors, domes, mosaics, colonnades, and minarets (272–79).The city of Damascus is treated as a monument and spectacle in its own right (295–97), with its many gates, numerous colleges, renowned hospitals, and palatial convents, all represented with abundance of details.The markets of Damascus are praised as “the fnest in the world and the best arranged” (302). In his earlier description of the marketplace at Mecca, the author had already expressed a lavish appreciation of commercial abundance and variety, carefully detailing the precious stones such as pearls and sapphires; the perfumes of musk, camphor, amber, and aloe; Indian and Ethiopian medicines; fruits and delicacies of all kinds are listed, including fgs, grapes, pomegranates, quince, peaches, lemons, walnuts, watermelons; eggplant, pumpkin, carrot, caulifower, cucumber, and dates, and various savory meats (117–19). Contextually prompted anecdotes abound, such as that recounting how a wealthy foreigner, shrewd yet God-fearing, tricks a greedy caliph into restoring a sacred building (Broadhurst 2001, 125–26); another relating a complex grammatical disagreement between a young student and his teacher (134); another describing a riot between the black inhabitants of Mecca and the Turks of Iraq (184–85); and still another telling how a grateful black man, sick and abandoned, rewards a pious benefactor by revealing the location of a buried treasure (302–303). Ibn Jubayr, an author with axes to grind, does not shrink from portraying the negative side of religion. In one episode, a throng of the Muslim faithful hysterically hurl themselves at the door to a shrine, a frightful event that leads to “destruction of life and breaking of limbs” (186). In another instance, a greedy preacher exploits his followers, heretically soliciting contributions down to “the last drop of their alms” (211). Another example of religion subverted to selfsh ends is conveyed by Ibn Jubayr’s perspective on the infamous Assassins, ruled over by a false prophet, “a devil in man’s disguise”, who deceives his obedient followers “with falsehoods and chimeras embellished for them to act upon” (264). A noteworthy example of Ibn Jubayr’s observant style in service to ethical criticism is his account of the Muslim subjects of the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem.The latter’s inhabitants, “living comfortably” among the Franks, represent a paradoxically deplorable situation. “God protect us from such temptation”, declares the author, as he scrupulously reports that, aside from rendering half their crops and paying a moderate poll tax, the Muslims of this Christian domain are mostly left alone, with their property in “their full possession” (Broadhurst 2001, 316).This comparatively benign treatment accorded to Muslims under Christian rule justifes resentment of unjust landlords of their own faith, while prompting a grudging approval of “the conduct of its opponent and enemy, the Frankish landlord” (317). It would be more than two centuries before Iberian Christendom produced a travel book approximating the informative realism of Benjamin of Tudela’s account, or the descriptive eloquence and sociological candor of Ibn Jubayr’s intensely observant riḥla. During that time, the later age of the Crusades, European soldiers, merchants, diplomats, and missionaries traveled to 416
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and from the Islamic Middle East and beyond, promoting, however ftfully, an increased awareness of the quotidian experience of actual itineration and of contact with different peoples.This on-the-ground expansion and refnement of the Western European view of the world at least partially accounts for the popularity of Marco Polo’s book; the latter, meanwhile, contributed to a gradual upgrading of European geography and related sciences that would become one of many confuent intellectual trends eventually leading to the Western European scientifc revolution. Around the turn of the ffteenth century, we begin to see genuine travel books by Christian Iberian authors—that is, works more or less akin to the Arabic riḥla in their careful description of real travel experiences, their relative ethnographic precision, their comparative disregard of the old geographic commonplaces. This rough analogy to Islamic travel writing cannot result from direct imitation or infuence; Arabic geographers, as noted, were generally unknown to medieval Europeans, including the specifc ffteenth-century authors discussed here. In their wealth of detail, their digressive propensities, and their occasionally intricate reportage of local customs, histories, and lore, these authors more probably refect the same intellectual climate that inspired Lorenzo Valla’s mid-ffteenth century Latin translation of Herodotus. Already long revered in the Latin West, as shown by multiple references to him in classical authors such as Cicero, Seneca, and Quintilian (Foley 2016, 213; 216–17), Herodotus was textually rediscovered in the latter half of the century. Like Marco Polo’s book at the end of the thirteenth century, the Histories beneftted from the enhanced geographical knowledge of potential readers. Since Herodotus’s textual debut responded to a pre-existing audience, his book—whether through actual reading or through word-of-mouth reputation—might well have presented a stylistic paradigm for the production of convincing travel accounts. The authors of such accounts, in other words, would not have had to actually read him, or even be fully aware of his literary standing, in order to be Herodotean narrators. The earliest of the three ffteenth-century travel books in question is a diary of the embassy sent by the Castilian king Enrique III to the court of Tamerlane (hereafter: Embassy). Attributed to the expedition’s leader, Ruy González de Clavijo, and probably completed in 1406 (López Estrada 1999, 35), the narrative records the experiences and observations of the expedition’s members in the journey to central Asian monarch’s court and back. Although the mission is offcially diplomatic, the narration very frequently diverges from its supposed mandate. Despite its general concentration on geographical realities, the Embassy occasionally refers to elements of the old notional pseudo-geography. However, when it does so, its depictions more resemble those of Herodotus than the fantastic images of the Alexandre or of Mandeville’s book. Like Marco Polo’s book, the Embassy amplifes and modifes apparently conventional concepts. Thus, it specifcally profles a people it calls “Amazons”, referring to their marital customs and kinship concepts in a manner highly suggestive of Herodotean ethnography (López Estrada 1999, 318). The Embassy’s narrator feels obliged, based on the hints and details provided by his informants, to apply a classical name to a possibly real people who might be classed as matrilineal by present-day ethnographers. Avoiding the violent simplicity of formulaic classical and early-medieval portrayals of the infamous man-slayers, the Embassy describes these “Amazons” as subjects of Tamerlane and Christians of the Greek faith (318). In general, however, the Embassy eschews classical references while closely observing the immediate realities of its journey. Participating in the late-medieval cosmopolitan geographical trend, it describes, often expansively, personages, locales, buildings, races, and customs. Clearly enunciating a principle of empirical inclusiveness, the author declares the need to put in writing all the places and lands traversed by the ambassadors, as well as recounting all the signifcant events that transpire along the way (López Estrada 1999, 79). Considerable attention is devoted, 417
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for example, to the variable practices of Eastern-Christian sects (166). There are expansively particular depictions of cities and towns, notably Constantinople (e.g., 82–83; 142–44) and the religious divisions of their populations (e.g., 180).The Embassy, like Herodotus and Ibn Jubayr on the one hand, and later ethnographers on the other, most frequently characterizes alien peoples by their collective way of life, such as the Alabares, a nomadic people who live by herding (226), or the Chacatays, who take with them their families, possessions, and herds everywhere they go (237).The dress and person of local chieftains are lavishly accounted for (e.g., 175), as are the diet, table manners, and drinking habits of the many peoples visited.The latter aspect is especially typifed by extended descriptions and substantial anecdotes of daily life at Tamerlane’s court (262–68). The Embassy’s offcially diplomatic account may be seen as incidentally touristic, since, despite the journey’s offcial purpose, most of the narrative describes matters having nothing to do with diplomacy. By contrast, Pero Tafur’s Andanças e viajes (“Travels and Voyages”; hereafter: Travels), probably composed in the 1470s, is a more straightforwardly touristic account of journeys undertaken by the narrator in the 1440s.Announcing itself as the frst-person chronicle of a pious pilgrimage combined with sightseeing side trips, his account begins with a declaration of the many benefts conferred by the traveler on his home community (Pérez Priego 2006, 215). Even more than the Embassy, Tafur transcends the ostensible chief motive of his journey, presenting a highly digressive and often anecdotal sequence of preponderantly secular experiences and encounters. The effect is of a chatty and highly miscellaneous array of randomly exotic phenomena.Tafur is sometimes judgmental regarding alien ways, as in his account of extremist Islamic cults (76–77). At other times, he is more equivocal, as in his account of the Black Sea slave-trading city of Kaffa (302), where he deplores the harsh conditions and distasteful procedures, including such iniquities as people’s selling of their own children, while at the same time purchasing slaves of his own. In the same passage, he expresses both cosmopolitan tolerance and even a certain degree of titillation at the spectacle of human diversity of the place (303).At other times he shows noncommittal objectivity with respect to exotic attitudes and practices.An example of this observational neutrality is his detailed description of the ancient, and distinctly pagan-seeming Venetian ritual of propitiating the sea as if it were a deity (323).Another moment in which Tafur allows his readers to make their own judgments is the extended summary of a conversation with the Italian traveler De’ Conti.The latter’s eventful tale of 40 years in the East, including his sojourn in a vaguely defned India and alleged encounters with Tamerlane and Prester John, are conveyed with scant commentary one way or the other (96–98). Unlike Tafur's serendipitous account of his mostly touristic peregrinations through countries known at least by name to his readers, the logs of Columbus’s voyages (hereafter: Logs) are presented as a highly focused and purposeful narrative of exploration. As is well known, this is a highly mediated work, complexly preserved by Las Casas, who at times serves as a parenthetical or marginal commentator; at other times as a summarizer of events; at others as a paraphraser of passages from the presumed original document; at still others assuming the role of the navigator himself in directly quoted passages. Even though the perspective of the editor, Las Casas, may be said to predominate over that of the author, Columbus, in the selection and modifcation of materials for this highly composite textual entity, the work, in variations, remains a vivid and widely read example of a travel narrative, despite its variant presentations and its legion of critics and detractors. Looked at purely as a specimen of travel narration, the account intended by Columbus for perusal by his royal patrons constitutes a signifcant element in the genre discussed here. In its often prolix depiction of the natural and human worlds traversed by the voyager and his shipmates, Columbus, like the other travel writers mentioned here, very frequently includes 418
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details and dense descriptions not directly relevant to the purported or offcial objectives of his voyage.A good example, one among many, is his novelistic comparison of an island’s vegetation and general environment to Andalusia in springtime (Pérez Priego 2006, 406–407). One may, of course, quibble with his portrayal of native populations and cultures—may, in fact, fnd his perspective downright offensive in present-day terms. Such issues are irrelevant to the question of whether or not his book belongs to the literary category discussed here.The stylistic analogy of his account to the other Iberian works discussed here, both Christian and non-Christian, confrms that Logs belongs to the same category. These ffteenth-century travel books clearly respond to the sophisticated tastes and expectations of their intended readers, whether these latter be royal patrons whom the authors are anxious to impress (the case of the Embassy or Columbus’s logs), or the more numerous genteel readership addressed by Tafur. In either case, the convincing exactitude of their observations and opinions is subject to verifcation; one could classify them as more or less accurate, in the strictly historical or scientifc sense. In terms of the development of travel writing as a literary type, perhaps more signifcant than the question of verifability—i.e., the utility of such works as historiographic, ethnographic, or scientifc source texts—is, as we have seen, the seemingly compulsive tendency of such works to engage in thick description. Seemingly animated by a spirit of accountability toward their readers, authors seek to reinforce the plausibility of the account with a plenitude of details.Very frequently, this descriptive proclivity entails a wide variety of subject matters not always directly or obviously relevant to the ostensible motive of the travel depicted. In all these aspects the books surveyed here prefgure—and, in some cases, particularly that of Columbus, probably directly infuence—the modern travel book.
References Adler, Marcus Nathan, ed., transl. 1907. The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela. New York: Phillip Feldheim. Bejarano, Ingrid, ed., transl. 1991. Abu Hamid al Garnati.Al-Mu’rib ‘an ba’d ‘aya’ib al-Magrib (Elogio de algunas maravillas del Magrib). Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científcas. Biglieri, Aníbal A. 2012, Las ideas geográfcas y la imagen del mundo en la literatura española medieval. Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt am Main:Vervuert. Bridges, Roy. 2002.“Exploration and Travel Outside Europe (1720–1914)”. In The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, edited by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, 53–69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Broadhurst, Ronald J.C., trans. (1952) 2001. The Travels of Ibn Jubayr. London: Cape. Reprint, Noida: Goodword Books. Buzard, James. 2002. “The Grand Tour and After (1660–1840)”. In The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, edited by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, 37–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Campbell, Mary Baine. 1988. The Witness and the Other World. Exotic European Travel Writing, 1400–1600. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Casas Rigall, Juan, ed. 2007. Libro de Alexandre. Madrid: Castalia. Chaunu, Pierre. 1979. European Expansion in the Later Middle Ages. Trans. Katherine Bertram. Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company. Critchley, John. 1990. Marco Polo’s Book.Aldershot:Variorum. Deluz, Christiane, ed. Jean de Mandeville. 2000. Le livre des merveilles du monde. Paris: CNRS Editions. Dubler, César E., ed., transl. 1953. Abu Hamid el Granadino y su relación de viaje por tierras eurasiáticas. Madrid: Maestre. Ducène, Jean-Charles, trans., ed. 2006. De Grenade à Bagdad. La relation de voyage d'Abû Hâmid al-Gharnâtî, 1080–1168. Paris: L’Harmattan. Dunn, Ross E., trans. 2012. The Adventures of Ibn Battuta. University of California Press. Foley, Adam. 2016. “Valla’s Herodotean Labors: Towards a New View of Herodotus in the Italian Renaissance”. In Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Herodotus in Antiquity and Beyond, edited by Jessica Priestey and Vasilik Zali, 212–231. Leiden: Brill. Friedman, John Block. 1981. The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
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Michael Harney González, Cristina, ed. 1983. Libro del cauallero Zifar. Madrid: Cátedra. Harney, Michael. 1983.“The Geography of the Libro del Caballero Zifar”. La Corónica 11(2): 208–219. Harney, Michael. 1988.“More on the Geography of the Libro del Caballero Zifar”. La Corónica 16(2): 76–85. Harney, Michael. 2015. Race, Caste, and Indigeneity in Medieval Spanish Travel Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Heers, Jacques.1983. Marco Polo. Paris: Fayard. Higgins,Iain Macleod. 1997. Writing East.The “Travels” of Sir John Mandeville. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Higgins,Iain Macleod. trans., ed. 2011. The Book of John Mandeville, with Related Texts. Indianapolis: Hackett. Hulme, Peter, and Tim Youngs, eds. 2002. The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Larner, John. 1999. Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press. Lévi-Provençal, Évariste. 2012a. “Abu¯ ʿUbayd al-Bakrī”. Encyclopaedia of Islam. 2nd. ed. Eds. P. Bearman,Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W.P. Heinrichs. Leiden: Brill. On-line resource: brillonline .com/browse/encyclopaedia-of-islam. Lévi-Provençal, Évariste. 2012b. “Abu¯ Ḥāmid al-Gharnāṭī”. Encyclopaedia of Islam. 2nd. ed. Eds. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W.P. Heinrichs. Leiden: Brill. On-line resource: brill online.com/browse/encyclopaedia-of-islam. López Estrada, Francisco, ed. 1999. Ruy González de Clavijo. Embajada a Tamorlán. Madrid: Castalia. Netton, I.R. 2012.“Riḥla”. Encyclopaedia of Islam. 2nd. ed. Eds. P. Bearman,Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W.P. Heinrichs. Leiden: Brill. On-line resource: brillonline.com/browse/encyclopaedi a-of-islam. Pellat, Charles. 2012. “Ibn Djubayr”. Encyclopaedia of Islam. 2nd. ed. Eds. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W.P. Heinrichs. Leiden: Brill. On-line resource: brillonline.com/browse /encyclopaedia-of-islam. Pérez Priego, Miguel Ángel, ed. 2006. Viajes Medievales.Vol. II. Embajada a Tamorlán. Andanças e viajes de Pero Tafur. Diarios de Colón. Madrid: Fundación José Antonio de Castro & Turner Libros. Polo, Marco. 2001–2009. Le devisement du monde. Eds. Philippe Ménard, Jeanne-Marie Boivin, Laurence Harf-Lancner, Laurence Mathey-Maille, Jean-Claude Faucon, Danielle Quéruel, et al. 6 Vols. Geneve: Droz. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes.Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Ramos,Ana, ed., transl. 1990. Abu¯ Ḥāmid al-Garnāṭī (m. 565/1169).Tuḥfat al-Albāb (El regalo de los espíritus). Fuentes Arabico-Hispanas, 10. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científcas. Rubio Tovar, Joaquín, ed. 2006. Viajes Medievales.Vol. I. Libro de Marco Polo. Libro de las maravillas del mundo de Juan de Mandavila. Libro del conoscimiento. Madrid: Fundación José Antonio de Castro & Turner Libros. Sachau, Edward C., ed., transl. 1910. Alberuni’s India. 2 vols. K. Paul,Trench,Tru¨bner & Company. Slane, William MacGuckin, ed., transl. 1913. Description de l'Afrique septentrionale, par el-Bekri. Rev. ed. Algiers: Adolphe Jourdan. Steinschneider, Moritz. (1904-05) 1956. Die Europäischen u¨bersetzungen aus dem arabischen bis mitte des 17. Jahhunderts.Vienna: C. Gerold. Reprint,Vienna:Akademische Druck. Tobienne, Francis. 2016. Mandeville's Travails: Merging Travel, Theory, and Commentary. Lanham, MD: University of Delaware Press. Touati, Houari. 2010. Islam and Travel in the Middle Ages.Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wacks, David A. 2019. Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Walker, Roger M. 1974. Tradition and Technique in “El Libro Del Cavallero Zifar”. London:Tamesis Books. Waterfeld, Robin, ed., transl. 1998. Herodotus.The Histories. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zumthor, Paul, and Catherine Peebles. 1994.“The Medieval Travel Narrative”. New Literary History 25(4): 809–824.
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27 INSCRIPTION, AUTHORSHIP, ITERATION The textuality of medieval Catalan literature Albert Lloret
In the late Middle Ages Catalan literature, like other vernacular literatures, was produced and disseminated orally, as well as through manuscripts and, nearing the Renaissance, also early printed editions. We are often faced with insurmountable challenges in recovering the oral dimension of medieval works, as our understanding of the oral features of medieval texts is subsidiary to their written preservation.The study of written textuality is not without diffculties either.Variation is inherent to manuscript culture, while print culture is by no means immune to it as well. In addition to examining and comparing iterations of particular works, manuscripts and early editions need to be studied as material artifacts.They are to be interrogated as objects, as to how they were made, on what occasion, by whom and for whom, according to what models, and how they have changed over time. Both the abundance and the quality of the witnesses to a particular work restrict our knowledge of its earliest conditions of inscription and publication, and thus its complex nature.The oldest surviving Catalan manuscripts, as in other Romance vernaculars, are coeval with the authors of the works they contain, making it possible to research the work’s early process of inscription.This situation creates in turn unsolvable riddles that would not haunt a classical Latinist, who can only document their textual traditions in manuscripts that are separated from the authors’ own by a gap of between four and fourteen hundred years. For example, in view of different degrees of textual variation in a work’s authorial inscription and the age of its oldest witnesses, to what extent can we say that the language of a text, as found in one particular manuscript or another, may better stand for the author’s “actual” language? Most of what we know about the material creation and textual form of medieval Catalan literature has resulted from modern initiatives to produce scholarly editions, and to inventory texts, manuscripts, and early prints.The study of medieval and early modern witnesses to particular works has also helped map their oldest readership, be it through the colophons recording a manuscript’s copyist, prefatory letters pointing to a patron, or evidence gathered from the material characteristics of a book (its watermarks, hand-script, or binding).Valuable data has also been found in archival documents, in correspondences, wills, and library inventories.All of these sources tell us a great deal about the readers of texts, the typology of the dissemination of literary works, and the circumstances in which texts were interpreted.The focus of the following pages, however, will not be placed on presenting a history of the medieval and early modern readership 421
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of medieval Catalan texts, nor the typology of its circulation.The goal rather will be to offer an overview of the textual forms of medieval Catalan literary works and the material processes of their inscription as represented in their oldest surviving witnesses. It should go without saying that authorship has been key to studying medieval Catalan literature.Works need to be ascribed to authors in order for us, modern readers, to be able to set hermeneutical boundaries to the interpretation of texts (what they may or may not mean), track the development of discursive formations (such as Lullism,Ausiasmarchism, the descendance of Jaume Roig’s Spill), and articulate a historical narrative of medieval Catalan letters. But the functionality of the authorial fgure cannot hide the fact that the authors’ personal involvement in the production of the actual texts that have come down to us is only an exception.The early processes of creation and transmission of medieval works grant different degrees of authorial agency to a number of characters that are intrinsic to the processes of inscription and iteration: copyists, stenographers, editorial correctors, and compositors.
Holographs and circles of authorial inscription Only a few autographs of medieval Catalan authors survive, and most bear no relation whatsoever to the literary output of their writers. Extant holographs include two dedicatory notes by Ramon Llull, receipts of loan repayments and chancery documents by Bernat Metge, a letter by Arnau de Vilanova, two letters by Francesc Eiximenis, one letter by Enric de Villena, documents of Jaume Roig’s work in hospital administration, and other documents related to the administration of a monastery by Isabel de Villena. A signifcant collection of autographed documents survives for King Peter III, who very actively employed writing in governing.Those documents include letters, marginalia, a parliamentary speech, and the king’s personal paper copy of the Ordinacions de la Casa i Cort, and a treatise establishing the administration and different offces of the royal household. King Peter’s copy preserves his own corrections and additions to the text (València, Universitat de València, MS 1501; see Gimeno Blay 2002, 2006; Alanyà Roig 2011, 150; Cátedra 1988, 133; Mandigorra 2012; Gimeno Blay, Gozalbo, and Trenchs 2009). Other than these, only seven or eight holographs of actual literary texts are known, though more may resurface.1 Up to fve of these holographs are parts of songbooks: that of Joan Berenguer de Masdovelles, which is a cartipàs poètic that also includes authorial corrections (Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya, MS 11), Joan Fogassot, or a close associate of his (Barcelona, Biblioteca de l’Ateneu, MS 1), Antoni Vallmanya (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS 225 and its copy Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya, MS 10), Francesc Galceran de Pinós (Montserrat, Biblioteca del Monestir, MS 991), and Mossèn Avinyó (New York, Hispanic Society of America, MS B2280).2 The sixth autograph is Lluís d’Averçó’s Torsimany, a treatise on grammar and rhetoric that includes a dictionary of rhymes and features authorial corrections (El Escorial, Real Biblioteca, MS M. I. 3).The last holographic text is the rough draft of a consolatory poem by a certain Bernat, preserved in a liber curiae dating ca. 1348. Holographs can supply unique evidence of a work’s compositional process, its interpretation, and original context of circulation. At the same time, if additional copies of the text remain (such as for some of Joan Berenguer de Masdovelles’s poems), the status of the authorially sanctioned iteration may be revealed as not the most correct, polished, or fnal form of the work.3 Copies of works that originated within close range of their moment of authorial inscription are also rare. The most signifcant case is that of Ramon Llull. Some 30 manuscripts that were related “directly or indirectly to Llull himself, since they belonged to him or to one of his collaborators” have survived. Over 20 more can be dated to approximately the same time as those 30. Of them, over 50 “frst-generation” codices (out of about 1,000 that transmit Llull’s 422
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works in multiple languages), 2 have been recognized to be working copies in which the creative process of Llull and his team of associates can be studied (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Lat. 3348A and Vatican City, MS Ottob. Lat. 405; both contain works in Latin). If so many manuscripts directly promoted by Llull have survived, it is only by exception, and thanks to his relentless efforts to preserve and disseminate his massive oeuvre by bequeathing copies of his books to important historical fgures or institutions, that they have been preserved. King Peter III’s scriptorium seems comparable to Llull’s in its resorting to translation as a means of preservation and dissemination. For instance, Peter III’s scribes produced copies of the Crònica general in Catalan, Latin, and Aragonese that were to be kept throughout his domains (in Aragon, València, and Catalonia) (Badia, Santanach, and Soler 2016, 166, 311–325; Pomaro 2005, 2011; Cingolani 2013, 193). In another case, that of Vicent Ferrer, a few codices can be linked to an authorial circle of production.A few of the manuscripts containing Ferrer’s works have been believed to be autographs, although recent studies have refuted most of these attributions. The corrections and re-elaborations included in one of Ferrer’s oldest sermonaries (València, Col·legi del Patriarca) are now believed to be the product of a stenographer close to Ferrer, rather than Ferrer himself. Three manuscripts with schemata of Ferrer’s sermons have also been preserved. In them he himself, or someone close to him, synthesized themes and main parts of the author’s sermons for Ferrer’s preaching. One of these, the Perugia manuscript, is a particularly old copy of a collection executed by one of Ferrer’s collaborators (Perugia, San Domenico, MS 477). It also contains a few corrections and additions that might after all be authorial (Perarnau i Espelt 1999; Gimeno Blay and Mandigorra Llavata 2002, 2006; Renedo 2014b). The process of authorial inscription of some texts may also be studied through archival documentation. King Peter III supervised the compilation of the Crònica de Sant Joan de la Penya (or Crònica general) in addition to his own personal chronicle. Several documents have survived from both processes, including contemporary copies of each work. A letter to one of his chroniclers, Bernat Descoll, contains the king’s instructions for the revision of his personal narrative, including specifc requests to develop certain parts, summarize others, consult archival sources, exclude events from the main narrative, and leave space for later additions. His interventions on his own copy of the Ordinacions de la Casa i Cort would even allow us to hypothesize King Peter’s eventual participation manu propia in the fnal stages of the writing of his chronicle (Gimeno Blay 2006, 150–56; Hillgarth 1992–1993, 54–59; Cingolani 2013, 191–94, 197–99). Regardless of this exceptionally heavy involvement, the authorial image that emerges from the documentation is one of teamwork, just as it does for Ramon Llull, whose intellectual pursuits and authorial fgure may elicit much less suspicion of intellectual surrogacy than those of the king. Textual inscription in the Middle Ages often began in the oral medium. Composition by dictation has been documented in archival documents of King Peter III’s government. Certain errors of phonetic origin in one of the surviving service copies of Ramon Llull’s works also indicate oral origin, while dictation has been posited for a very corrupt copy of Francesc Ferrer’s Romanç de l’armada del soldà contra Rodes (Hillgarth 1992–1993: 55–56; Gimeno Blay 2006: 106–108; Pomaro 2005: 186; Auferil 1989: 70–72). Other texts emerge as transcriptions of oral performances. One of those consists of the popular verses sung to King Peter III and Queen Eleanor by a certain barber named Gonçalvo in the Valencia riots of the War of the Union (1347–1348), followed by Peter III’s sinister response after the king retook the city and executed the rebels. Vicent Ferrer’s popular sermons were also transcribed by stenographers and compiled in books. A comparison between several transcriptions of the same sermon, preached in different languages (Catalan, Castilian, or Latin) and on different occasions, shows a similar core structure as well as noticeable adjustments to different audiences. Naturally, the lin423
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guistic qualities of each text are strongly dependent on the language of the stenographer. Some of Felip de Malla’s could also show signs of deriving from reportationes (Romeu i Figueras 2000, 68; Soldevila 2014, 286–87; Martínez Romero 2007; Renedo 2014b; Madurell i Marimón 1963–1964; J. Pujol 1996). Nevertheless, the single most important example of oral composition in medieval Catalan letters is the Llibre del Rei en Jaume, the transcription of the oral narrative of King James I’s memoirs. Its paratactic syntax, fragmentary structure, code-switching, chronological mistakes, prevalence of direct speech, and digressive style point to an oral composition in front of an audience. Until the ffteenth century the work enjoyed limited circulation within the royal house of Aragon. It was treated as an heirloom, the instructive idiosyncratic witness to the life and voice of a venerated ancestor.A Latin translation of the text, commissioned by King James II, indicates that such was the perception of James I’s work in the fourteenth century. In order to shape the text as historiographical, the Latin translator, friar Pere Marsili, changed the text’s verbal forms from the frst to the third person, eliminated anecdotes, and added erudite and pious notes. James I’s book is a rare trace of what Walter Ong called “primary orality”—a purely oral act of creation, conceived in and for the oral medium, just like Vicenç Ferrer’s religious oratory or barber Gonçalvo and Peter III’s verses (J.M. Pujol 1996, 2008;Asperti 1982, 269–276). While these rare “primarily oral” texts have survived in writing, others have come down to us in a form that reveals their status as “secondarily oral”, that is to say, as written texts conceived for oral performance, which would be carried out by the author or someone on their behalf. In that category we fnd political oratory, in the form of royal parliamentary speeches. A number of opening speeches at the corts survive. Summaries of those have been preserved as well. Royal secretaries may have served as speech writers or at least assistants, but there is considerable evidence (particularly for Peter III, John I, and Martin I) that monarchs were personally involved in the writing of their speeches. King Peter III, for one, compiled a collection of his own.Though lost, his son Martin I consulted it to compose at least one formal address to the corts.4 Medieval verse was primarily composed for oral, public performance. Since it is now confned mostly to songbooks, its original conditions of publication may be easily forgotten, but abundant evidence of its orality can be gathered from Catalan sources.Ausiàs March’s verses, for example, feature numerous traces of orality. His poems’ tornades and exordia show how March intended to address his audiences. Rubrics in poems by Joan Fogassot,Antoni Vallmanya, Gabriel Ferrús, Joan Basset, and Joan Berenguer de Masdovelles reveal the listeners and circumstances in which they frst delivered their verses (Lloret 2014; Aramon 1947–1948; Auferil 1986, 40–43; Beltran 2006a). Recited in public performances, poetry was also sung and there is evidence of that too for the multilingual poetry produced in the Aragonese courts. In a passage of Ramon Muntaner’s chronicle, the author narrates the celebrations following Alfonso III’s coronation in 1328. In those festivities Prince Peter of Aragon (King Peter III’s uncle) sang a new dansa of his own creation while the servers in the banquet sang back the piece’s refrain. A jongleur named Ramasset also sang a sirventès composed by Prince Peter; another jongleur named Comí sang a song for the prince; and fnally a third jongleur named Novellet recited (“va dir en parlant”) 700 lines of verse narrative. The music of ars nova and the ars subtilior had been listened to in the royal court since King Peter III’s time, and increasingly after Prince John married Yolande of Bar in 1380. Occitan poet Joan de Castelnou, whose works have only been preserved in the Cançoner Gil (Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya, MS 146) was a chantre at King Peter III’s service. By New Year’s Day 1380, King John I composed a rondell.Around 1417 Villena narrated the ceremonies of the Consistori de la Gaia Ciència in Barcelona, in which the jury of the poetic contest is said to grant permission for the winning piece to be publicly sung and recited.We also know that Jordi de Sant Jordi created music for his own poetry, and there are examples of poems 424
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for which professional musicians composed melodies (L. Cabré 2005; Martí 2017; Marfany 2008;Torró 2009, 28; 2014, 267–68; Gómez Muntané 2001; Cingolani 2016). Unfortunately, no music has survived for medieval Catalan lyric poetry.The primary orality of that poetic culture is in part to blame for the lack of documentation. Melodies were more often committed to memory than scripted. Some manuscripts containing devotional poetry addressed to the Virgin Mary include indications as to how those lyrics were to be sung (“Al so de…”, i.e.,“to the sound of ”).We may only know the incipit of most of those pieces that were to supply the music for a different composition, but from those frst lines we surmise that the themes of the poems providing tunes are in many instances secular.Another fascinating instance of the memory of primary orality involves French epic poetry. At the end of his Crònica, offering military advice to King James II, Ramon Muntaner included a verse composition following the patterns of French chansons de geste. In the second line of this piece titled Sermó, Muntaner declares that the text is to be sung to the melody of the French epic poem Gui de Nantueil. Muntaner also writes that he had delivered it to the king through the jongleur Comí, and that the reader of the chronicle will now hear it (“lo qual oirets ací”), implying that the Crònica itself was expected to be read out loud (Romeu 2000, 110, 120–24; Badia 2016). All in all, the possibility of accessing documents directly linked to the process of authorial inscription of medieval Catalan literary works is extremely rare.The diffculty of their recovery is increased by the oral, sometimes also musical, dimension of medieval textuality, which can be documented but not reconstructed. Even when an authorially produced text is found, corrections confront the scholar with an artifact that was not intended for publication and may even be different from other non-authorial but possibly authorized iterations of the work. Ascertaining the kind of publication with which we are faced with every textual iteration constitutes a frst challenge.Another challenge involves assessing the variation that can be appreciated in the textual tradition of a given work, and understanding how much of that variation can be attributed to the author and how much to other agents of textual production.The result will not change the authorship of a given text but the elements that converge in it to authorize it, that is to say, to regulate its cohesion and meaning.
A constellation of manuscript phenomena Compared to the hand print press, which also played a key role in preserving medieval Catalan literature, manuscript technology was less than effcient in achieving a work’s wide dissemination. Although the number of copies ever made of a text obviously factors in a work’s chances of survival, attaining a wide dissemination was not necessarily the function of manuscripts in the frst place. In any case, the fact that a medieval work was hand-printed did not guarantee survival for many, or any, of the copies of a text. Only one copy remains of the fragmentary incunable containing the Tragèdia de Lançalot, and of a 1515 edition of Enric Villena’s Dotze treballs d’Hèrcules. Of the 715 copies of the frst edition of Tirant lo Blanc (1490), only three complete or almost complete copies have come down to us and just one survives of the 300 printed exemplars for the second edition of 1497. Sources attest to the existence of medieval Catalan works, both in manuscripts (particularly) and in print, that have been lost. Such an inventory would include texts by Ramon Llull, Arnau de Vilanova, Bernat Metge, Pere Torroella, Felip de Malla, and Joan Roís de Corella, to name a few (Cátedra 2002, 459; Madurell i Marimón and Rubió i Balaguer 1955, 243; Bonner 2002; Giralt 2016; M. Cabré, Martí, and Navàs 2010; M. Cabré and Martí 2012, 165; Perarnau i Espelt 1978, 82, 94–95; Martos 2008). A considerable proportion of the works that have made it to the present are furthermore unique, having survived in one manuscript. Most lyric and narrative poetry, for example, has 425
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come down to us in single witnesses, including the entire corpus of major authors like Andreu Febrer, Gilabert de Pròixida, and Melcior de Gualbes, and a signifcant measure of the known oeuvre of poets like Cerverí de Girona or Jordi de Sant Jordi. Some of Bernat Metge’s works, the entire chivalric romance Curial e Güelfa, some of Joan Roís de Corella’s prose and poetry, and Jaume Roig’s Spill are also found in just one single manuscript copy.The list could go on, and should also record sections of larger works that have been transmitted in one manuscript, such as the second part of Francesc Eiximenis’s Dotzè (València. Arxiu de la Catedral, MS 167), and the verse narrative Fraire-de-Joi, which is split between two manuscripts (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS esp. 487, and Palma, Societat Arqueològica Lul·liana, MS 4). Unique copies highly restrict our understanding of a work to the material contingencies of its only textual iteration. If not autographic, these single iterations could have been executed by faithful copyists or rather be the carriers of innovative or, less frequently, outright spurious versions, which would be very diffcult to detect. It was noticed that the unreliable copyist of the Cançoner del Jardinet d’orats, for instance, misattributed three poems that are unique to Joan Roís de Corella. But instances of heavy scribal intervention or plain rewriting are more easily spotted when it is possible to collate surviving witnesses. A rather extreme case is that of Paris, Bibliothèque national de France, Ms esp. 479, which for the most part transmits Ausiàs March’s works. Copied in 1541, its antigraph carried a heavily edited version of much of March’s poetry that created a moralized version of his verses. Such is the variation this text introduces in March’s textual tradition that the last critical editor of his poetry needed to devote a separate critical apparatus to arrange the many divergent readings from the manuscript.Two of Bernat Metge’s unica (the Medicina and the Ovidi enamorat) are also transmitted in a manuscript copied by a scribe who innovated in the other works contained therein, as shown in the other witnesses to those other works (Torró 1996; Archer 1997, vol. 1, 13; Cingolani 2006, 106; L. Cabré 2010, 59–71). Fragmentation poses another problem with single witnesses. The beginning of Bernat Metge’s Apologia is the only part of the text that we can read. The verse narrative La ventura del cavaller N’Huc e de Madona might have been considerably longer than the text surviving in Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya, MS 2922. Regarding lyric poetry, the way the authors’ unica poems appear to us in songbooks suggests their popularity in the milieu in which that collection of poetry was put together, which wasn’t necessarily close to the audiences that frst heard those authors or their associates perform the texts. The corpus of Andreu Febrer and Gilabert de Pròixida is narrowed down to the anthologizing program of, or to the compositions available to, the compiler of the songbook of which Cançoner Vega-Aguiló is a copy (Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya, MSS 7 and 8). Another widespread accident for lyric, as well as narrative, verse is anonymity. The Repertorio informatizzato dell’antica letteratura catalana inventories over 300 poems that have been transmitted anonymously, many of which are unica. Curial e Güelfa has also come down to us as an anonymous work (Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, MS 9750). The copyist of the codex left a couple of blank spots in the frst pages of the book, in places where he could not understand the antigraph.As a result, and on account of it being the only witness to the romance, we have now irremediably lost the name of protagonist’s father or the place where he, Curial, was born (Badia and Soberanas 1996;Alberni 2002; Badia and Torró 2011, 536). The textual condition of medieval Catalan literature further unfolds in traditions of works with multiple witnesses. In those, the complexities of manuscript transmission are foregrounded while, at the same time, it becomes increasingly evident how all texts feature an array of characteristics that are only attributable to moments of non-authorial inscription or iteration.The scribal footprint in the transmission of Catalan works stretches along idiolectal lines and, in spite of being pervasive, it still requires much more attention than it has so far deserved.The Occitan 426
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and Latin languages, different geographical varieties of Catalan, institutional writing habits (or lack thereof) such as those of the royal chancery, and the genre of the texts in question, have been recognized as having some bearing on the scribal forms of medieval Catalan literature (Ferrando 2001; Feliu, Ferrer, and Iglésias 2008; Torró 2014, 265, 269–279; Badia, Sanatanach, and Soler 2016; Zinelli 2013;Alberni 2016; M. Cabré and Martí 2018). A complex casuistry of scribal intervention can be appreciated in the textual tradition of King James’s book. In its written shape, the Llibre del Rei en Jaume obviously appears completely removed from the king’s vivid narrations of his memories in front of an audience.The fourteenth- and ffteenth-century copies of the work attest to a variety of codicological forms: the courtly book, the register book, and the humanistic codex. None of those codices is the very paper service copy that was employed as the archetype of the entire textual tradition. None of the transmitted texts is without fault either. Through textual criticism scholars have sought to reconstruct the work’s archetype in a variety of ways.An entire group of manuscripts shows signals of critical transcription having been carried out in the milieu of the royal chancery, which, for example, Latinized the text’s language.The illumination program of the oldest extant manuscript of the work, copied in 1343 in the Poblet monastery (Barcelona, Biblioteca Universitària, MS 1), seems to facilitate a reconstruction of the major narrative sections of the Llibre as featured in the lost archetype. However, the branch of the textual tradition represented in the royal chancery copies is indispensable for adumbrating a number of particularities of the king’s antigraph, from toponyms to missing words, some of which can be accessed thanks to the Latin and Aragonese translations of the work (Asperti 1984; Bruguera 1991; J. M. Pujol 2008; Gimeno Blay 2012; Ferrando 2014, 2014). The earliest copies of Ramon Llull’s works, particularly those labored on by one of the author’s close associates, Guillem Pagès, feature similar scribal footprints. In Pagès’s codices one can appreciate the copyist’s tentative search for a linguistic model for copying Catalan texts. Naturally, not all of Llull’s works are preserved in the so-called “frst generation codices”. Later copies of Lullian literature were penned down in completely different scripta. When compared to early surviving Catalan writings besides Llull’s (belonging to juridical, medical, historical, and religious genres, all dating to the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth), Pagès’s inconsistencies in writing and style (in the form of archaisms, dialectalisms, vulgarisms, and just plain features from the Occitan language) stand out. These hesitations are the consequence of writing conventions still in development. Such conventions varied from one textual genre to the next and kept developing over a few decades, well beyond Pagès’s time.Two copies of Llull’s Llibre de contemplació offer a unique example of these changes in the scripta of Catalan literature. One the one hand, the copy carried out by Pagès, which happens to be the oldest surviving Llullian manuscript, features the hesitating scripta of the earliest Lullian codices (the codex is today split in two: Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, MSS A 268 Inf. and D 549 Inf.). On the other hand, a copy of the Llibre de contemplació produced between 30 and 50 years after Pagès’s (Palma, Col·legi de la Sapiència, MS F-143) deploys completely different linguistic forms (none of which are adopted from Occitan) and regularizes all of the peculiarities of the Milanese codex. Pagès’s scripta also varied in other copies of Lullian works. It appears to be less hesitating in more technical treatises (e.g., Començaments de medicina) or philosophical writings (e.g., Art demostrativa), and since Occitan retained the utmost prestige in contemporaneous lyric poetry, his copies of verse works consistently combined Catalan and Occitan (Badia, Santanach, and Soler 2016, 163–174;Alomar 2015). Bernat Metge’s works help shed light on the relevance of changes in scribal performance dependent upon generic traditions. Prose dialogue Lo somni is preserved in four manuscripts. One of them is the only complete witness (Barcelona, Biblioteca Universitària, MS 17), but also 427
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one whose language was often un-Latinized in the copying process, thus blurring an essential color of Metge’s cultural background and creative practice. Other manuscripts better preserve the Latin glow of Metge’s classicizing pen, such as Barcelona, Biblioteca de l’Ateneu Barcelonès, MS 3 (which unfortunately lacks seven folios) or Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS esp. 305 (which modernizes verbal endings).The issues at stake completely change in the transmission of Metge’s verse works. In the only two witnesses to Metge’s verse narrative Llibre de Fortuna e Prudència (Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya, MSS 7-8 and MS 831), each copyist committed genuine mistakes that are intrinsic to the process of hand-scripted copying.Yet one of them innovated freely in many verses and modernized the author’s hybrid Catalan-Occitan language (MS 831), damaging the metrics of many verses. Further scribal variation along dialectal lines affects works such as those of Joan Roís de Corella.Witnesses to his mythological proses are split in the middle in terms of their scribes’ language variety.Two employ an eastern variety of Catalan (which is further from the author’s own), and two a western variety (the author’s own) (Cingolani 2006, esp. 105–122; L. Cabré 2010, 59–71; Martos 2001, 71–87). Copyists could compare copies of works that were available to them in order to produce what to the best of their knowledge could be considered better texts. These corrections can be detected when studying a work’s textual tradition, when readings from certain branches of the tradition appear in other branches, such as in Barcelona, Ateneu Barcelonès, MS 1 for the works of Pere March, Jordi de Sant Jordi, Lluís de Vila-rasa, and Pere Torroella.There could even be double-correction processes as in El Escorial, Real Biblioteca, MS L.II.18, which contains Andreu Febrer’s verse translation of Dante’s Commedia (L. Cabré 1993, 122; n. 279; Fratta 2005, 188;Torró 2009, 31; Rodríguez Risquete 2010, 455, n. 34; Parera 2018, 88–89, 98–106). If scribes are unavoidable mediators in our access to medieval Catalan literature, other agents hold a comparable status. The earliest translators are among those co-authorial agents. Llull’s corpus offers ample evidence of the importance of early translations as sources to an authorial text, precisely because of his investment in having his works translated into multiple languages in order for his ideas to achieve a wide dissemination. A chapter of Ramon Llull’s Blaquerna was added to the romance only after it began to circulate (i.e., was published hand-scripted) in Catalan.The Occitan translation of the romance is now its oldest extant witness.The oldest surviving witnesses (indirect witnesses) to the Doctrina pueril are its French and Latin translations, which were also most likely promoted by Llull himself.These translations, again, transmit a chapter of the one that was lacking when it was frst published (hand-scripted) in Catalan. A French translation of Llull’s Llibre de l’orde de cavalleria supplies the oldest witness to Catalan fragments that have not come down to us. Last, the Occitan translation of Llull’s Llibre de meravelles is a very faulty version in which the Catalan language often takes over the Occitan text. Nonetheless and yet again, on account of its status as a “frst generation codex”, it proves to be an invaluable witness for modern editors to correct scribal mistakes in the transmission of the book (Soler and Santanach 2009, 66–70; Soler 1988; Santanach 2005, xliv. 48–52; Badia 2011). These portions of Llull’s work, having been preserved in old translations that were promoted by the author himself, can be equated with a phenomenon that typically concerns historiographical works. It has been mentioned that King Peter III’s Crònica general has approximately coeval versions in Catalan, Aragonese, and Latin. Differences among these versions can be explained by a center of creation, material production, and dissemination that sequentially authorized different versions of a work while originally intending to further disseminate it in translation, just as in the case of Ramon Llull.5 The fuidity and intricacy of the textual transmission of translations always offers surprising cases of textual endurance.That would be the case of Guillem Nicolau’s 1390 Catalan translation of Ovid’s Heroides. Nicolau also appended marginal glosses that he had taken from the Bursarii 428
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Ovidianorum and other commentaries on the text produced in Orléans. None of these glosses has remained in the extant Catalan manuscripts, but still survived in an early-ffteenth-century Castilian re-translation of Nicolaus’s own translation, which is currently preserved in Seville, Biblioteca Colombina, MS 5-5-16. Re-translations of medieval Catalan translations can also preserve less corrupt readings of the original translation than any of the remaining Catalan texts, like, for instance, the Castilian retranslation of Ferrer Saiol’s translation of Palladius’s De re rustica, and a Catalan translation of Cicero’s Paradoxa (L. Cabré et al. 2018, 173, 179–180, 182–83). When certain works are found in remarkably distinct versions, the challenge for the modern scholar is to determine who is responsible for that degree of variation as evinced in the transmission, because it can on occasion be of authorial origin. Different versions are not uncommon in historiographical works, each progressively amplifying or reworking an earlier text. In addition to Peter III’s Crònica general, his personal chronicle and Bernat Desclot’s own each count two different versions: an earlier version and a later, more or less reworked, version.Textual sources belonging to the tradition of a historiographical work can be embedded as well within other longer, later works, normally challenging the reliability of the iteration with respect to the rest of the textual tradition. Royal archivist Pere Carbonell literally copied, but also reworked, Peter III’s personal chronicle for his Cròniques d’Espanya. Ramon Muntaner’s Crònica was added into the Crònica universal de 1425 (Barcelona, Biblioteca Universitària, MS 82).6 Double-authorial versions of some of Corella’s mythologic proses have been identifed as well. In Enric de Villena’s case, a second version of his Dotze treballs d’Hèrcules happened to be a self-translation into Castilian, of which many more witnesses survive (Torró 1996; Annicchiarico 1996; Cátedra 1991, 70–75). Multiple-authorial variation is infrequently deemed to be deserving of separate modern editions. Nevertheless, insofar as each version was published and circulated independently, these texts may merit particular editorial attention as they were complete and autonomous works at a certain time.Alternatively, texts may derive from multiple archetypes, whereby parts of a given witness are seemingly closer to the work’s best archetype, but not others. The frst book of the Catalan translation of Livy (London, British Library, MS Harley 4893) was translated from one source, whereas Books 2 to 7 derive from a different one.The frst part of Francesc Eiximenis’s Dotzè and his Terç both seem to exemplify this phenomenon too. In this case, the length of Eiximenis’s encyclopedia, composed over a long period of time, may have caused the archetype of each work to be split between copyists at some point with the goal of hastening their copying process (L. Cabré et al. 2018: 178–180; Martí and Guixeras 2002). Textual variation of shorter prose works can also mean authorial amplifcations. Authors have been noticed to develop shorter prose into larger texts as the earlier and shorter creations continued to circulate independently. Eiximenis’s Regiment de la cosa pública became part of his Dotzè (ch. 357–395), but was originally published on its own merit when it was made available for public reading at the Sala del Consell in València’s city hall by May 1384. The Guillem de Varoic was also integrated into the frst 39 chapters of Tirant lo Blanc. Existing Catalan translations were also often repurposed within longer translations. The Catalan translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron, fnished in 1429, included the 1388 translation of its last novella by Bernat Metge (who had actually translated Petrarch’s Latin version of Boccaccio’s text). One of Petrarch’s Familiares (12.2) was also translated into Catalan prior to 1460 and Joanot Martorell incorporated it into chapter 143 of his Tirant lo Blanc. Conversely, texts that were conceived as parts of larger works became popular and circulated independently, such as Llull’s Llibre d’Amic e Amat, which belongs to the ffth section of the romance Blaquerna.The embeddedness of a text into another has also served to guarantee its eventual survival. A stanza of a lost poem by Lluís de Vila-rasa and another one by Martí Garcia are only found as quotations in Pere Torroella’s Tant mon voler s’és dat a amors. Another stanza of one of the only two poems known by Pau 429
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de Bellviure can also be read within Francesc Ferrer’s Lo conhort (L. Cabré et al. 2018, 220–22; Puig i Oliver, 2009, 551–612; Renedo 2011, 209–211; Riquer 1990: 95–97, 255–271; Soler and Santanach 2009; Rodríguez Risquete 2011, vol. 1, 349–394;Auferil 1989, 217–253). The brevity of lyric compositions lends itself to specifc conditions of written preservation and dissemination.The typology of the circulation of verse works, for example, reveals a good deal of the readership that a given selection of poetry enjoyed in the time a songbook was assembled or copied.A verse collection can be telling of a milieu’s hierarchy of authors, as masters are better represented and/or open codicological units, whereas less-relevant poets are not as well represented or were used to fll codicological units in which space was still available. Songbooks can hint as well at the existence of generations of authors, chronologically sedimented in scribal and codicological strata. The tension between the poet’s languages and the language of the copyist is also at stake in verse collections. The Cançoner Vega-Aguiló (Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya, MSS 7-8), for one, transmits a stage of verse production spanning between the time when Prince John married Yolande of Bar (1380) and Alfonso the Magnanimous came back from his frst campaign to Naples (1424). It also contains earlier troubadours and later-ffteenthcentury poets.This linguistically diverse production is copied by a variety of hands performing different scribal renditions of their language of their antigraphs.A second example is that of the luxurious Cançoner Gil (Barcelona, Biblioteca de Cataluna, MS 146), which gathers a collection of fourteenth-century poets as well as troubadour verse composed between the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries. The original collection possibly harks back to James of Urgell, father of count Peter II of Urgell, who commissioned the codex (M. Cabré, 2011;Torró 2014, 274–79; Alberni 2002; M. Cabré and Martí 2010). Songbooks offer a trove of information about their readership and the history of the literature they contain, which are all instances of mediation between authorial inscriptions and us. It is striking that most of the surviving holographs of medieval Catalan literary texts are found in songbooks.7 These codices feature autographic texts among compositions by other poets. Though removed from the very frst authorial copies of each poem and their oral conditions of dissemination, certain features of the authorial inscription of verse works have also been discovered in later copies. One of those features is the actual make-up and disposition of poetic collections. Authorial organizations harking back to an author’s copy have been proposed for songbooks transmitting the works of Cerverí de Girona, Ramon de Cornet, Andreu Febrer, Lleonard de Sos, and Lluís de Vila-rasa.8 An authorial fgure has also been argued to stand behind the dispositio of 100 of the 128 poems attributed to Ausiàs March, as formal features of the transmission of March’s poetry point to a common antigraph for such a large number of poems. March’s poems were also believed to be copied in chronological order. Objections have, however, been raised to that proposition, ranging from the non-authorial ordering of the oldest extant collection of March’s poems (Saragossa, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS 210) to chronological inconsistencies in the poetic sequence.The apparent Petrarchist poetics underlying the sequencing of those 100 poems, furthermore, may perhaps more plausibly refect the work of a compiler, rather than that of an author who wrote over 10,000 verses within the formal tradition that harks back to the troubadours but, for example, not one sonnet (Beltran 2006b; L. Cabré 2014, 359–365). Rubrics can also record extremely detailed information about the exact date in which a poem was written or presented, its audience and circumstances, as well as additional information about its main themes. These unique rubrics are often found in (partially) holographic manuscripts, like those of Joan Berenguer de Masdovelles, Joan Fogassot, or Antoni Vallmanya, but also for Cerverí de Girona in the Cançoner Gil, which is not a holographic text, but rather likely gathered texts from an authorial compilation (see n. 2 and M. Cabré 2001, 290–95; Beltran 2006a, 51–55). 430
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The study of the manuscript iterations of medieval Catalan works reveals a complex scriptorial landscape. A myriad of non-authorial fgures, from scribes to translators and compilators, played a role in the very contingent form of literary works as they appear to us. Scribal versions of works are normally the only kind that have come down to us, scribes thus becoming coauthorial agents.The challenges for distinguishing authorial aspects of works pose diffculties in the absence of multiple testimonies as well as in large and diverse textual traditions.The coming of the hand print press added a roster of co-authorial agents that contributed to the preservation of medieval textuality as we know it, as well as new textual features that are intrinsic to the format of the printed texts.
The medieval author and the hand printing press There are a number of medieval Catalan works that either have come down to us exclusively in printed form or whose textual witnesses include early editions. The printed text is in any case just as embedded in the material conditions of this medium as hand-scripted texts are in manuscripts.When an author was not involved in preparing a work for the press, or participating in its subsequent correction, many of the features of the printed text need to be recognized as contingent upon the printing process itself and attributed to agents that the text met on its way to the printing shop and during the time it spent there. Medieval Catalan works surviving exclusively in early editions include Joanot Martorell’s Tirant lo Blanc, Isabel de Villena’s Vita Christi, Enric de Villena’s Dotze treballs d’Hèrcules, the Regoneixença by Francesc Carroç Pardo de la Casta, Francesc de la Via’s Llibre de Fra Bernat, the remaining fragments of Mossèn Gras’s Tragèdia de Lançalot, satirical verse like El procés de les olives and Lo somni de Joan Joan, certamen poetry like the contents of Cobles en llaors de la Verge Maria, or the Catalan poems of the second edition of the Cancionero general.9 Some medieval Catalan translations have also been preserved solely in printed copies, including París i Viana, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Curtius Rufus’s Historia Alexandri Magni, and Flavius Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities.Among the medieval texts that enjoyed a hand-scripted, as well as a printed, circulation are the book of King James, Ramon Llull’s Blaquerna (as well as many of Llull’s Latin works), the chronicles of Bernat Desclot, Ramon Muntaner, and Peter III, several works by a truly successful author like Francesc Eixeminis, Ausiàs March’s poetry, Francesc Moner’s prose and verse, Jaume Roig’s Spill, and Catalan translations of Boethius’s Consolatio philosophiae and Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum. It is in these later works, comprising both extant prints and manuscripts, that it can be very clearly seen how medieval literature was also profoundly shaped by the co-authorial agents inherent in the print medium. Although the role of print culture in shaping medieval Catalan textuality remains underresearched, the effects of the printing press in the publication of literary works was noteworthy. For a book to be printed, a clean manuscript copy was normally prepared for the press. Not only has this manuscript, called the printer’s copy, been documented for a work like Tirant lo Blanc, but one of these manuscripts has also, quite exceptionally, survived. Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, MS 2985 is the printer’s copy of Carles Amorós’s 1543 edition of Ausiàs March’s poetry.This codex, nonetheless, was not specifcally produced to serve as a printer’s copy (Lloret 2013, 129–156).The very making of a printer’s copy entailed major modifcations in the text as it had existed or circulated until that point.A comparison between the manuscript and the print tradition of Francesc Eiximenis’s Regiment de la cosa pública shows that the language of the 1499 edition was updated.This was far from an exception, as the three editions of Jaume Roig’s Spill evince (one from 1531, two from 1561).The second edition of Isabel de Villena’s Vita Christi, from 1513, was also edited by an anonymous “master in sacred theology” who de-aristocratized 431
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its language, corrected Castilianisms, or modernized words.Villena’s edited text was reprinted in the third edition of the work (from 1527).The language of a medieval work could even be more radically modernized, as were the editions of Ramon Llull’s Blaquerna (by Joan Bonllavi in 1521) and the 1523 edition of Eiximenis’s Scala dei. The perception of diachronic variation between the language current at that time and earlier forms of Catalan, which had then begun to be called llemosí, surely played a role in these heavy-handed editorial interventions. On account of this linguistic awareness, editors also included lists of obscure words in their editions, such as in that of the Llibre del rei en Jaume (1557) or most of Ausiàs March’s (1543, 1545, 1555, 1560) (Martí and Guixeras 2002, 213; Carré 2014, 64; Ferrando 1999, 128–130; Escartí 2011, 39; Schmidt 1988; Ferrando 1999; Colón 1978, 1983, 1997). Just as printed works were subject to editorial agents linked to their manuscript existence prior to going into print, printed texts were also subject to additional textual interventions in the print shop. For instance, it seems quite clear that the chapter division and the rubrics of Tirant lo Blanc were not authorial. Rather they would have been introduced either during the preparation of the printer’s copy or in the print shop. The chapters into which Ramon Muntaner’s Crònica is traditionally divided also hark back to its frst edition from 1558. In this case, by comparing the edition with the remaining manuscripts, the division by chapters clearly appears unrelated to any of the manuscripts that have transmitted the work and so, most likely, to any authorial division of the chronicle. Extensive and numerous, though small, variations in the three extant printed copies of Martorell’s romance indicate the existence of two different printings of the 1490 edition of Tirant lo Blanc. When mistakes were detected after the forms began to be printed, corrections could be introduced in entire quires of an edition, but not in those printed earlier, as happened in the editio princeps of Tirant lo Blanc (Aguilar 2015, vol. 1, 298; Hauf 1990, ix–xxxiv; Ferrando 1993, 39–51). Thanks to the printer’s copy of Ausiàs March’s 1543 edition, it can be documented frst-hand how a number of textual changes in early printed texts were performed at the printer’s shop. Spelling and punctuation, for example, were added by the press’s corrector. Both features were further modifed later on, once the text was composed in forms, since compositors would not strictly follow the corrector’s indications. Other textual changes genuinely occurred as a result of pages being printed not seriatim but by forms.The amount of text that was to ft one of the forms according to the book format had to be cast-off in the printer’s copy before the form could be composed. When the casting-off was not accurate, something that occurred quite often, it had to be corrected by the compositors. But when corrections were not possible, text had to be eliminated.Whole stanzas that are present in MS 2985 had to be deleted from March’s 1543 edition because of inaccurate cast-offs. Compositors also introduced their own spellings, which could vary from one page to the next, if there were more than one compositor working on the edition. In a very particular case, one edition of Ausiàs March’s poetry (València, Juan Navarro, 1539) features a Castilian translation of the Catalan text. But the original text was also emended in view of the translation (Lloret 2013, 80–88, 129–156). Beyond updating the language of the work, potentially introducing typos, along with text division and order, printing a medieval author often meant engaging in textual iterations that would hermeneutically appropriate the work for the modern reader. Texts could be edited according to censorial or ideological programs of sorts. For one, the sixteenth-century editions of Jaume Roig’s Spill contain 104 lines that deface Roig’s open views on the Virgin Mary’s immaculacy and disseminate a spurious endorsement of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. The 1539 edition of Ausiàs March’s works also transmitted substantially edited verses that could have been deemed disrespectful of Catholic beliefs and institutions, while the making of the 1543 edition of March’s complete poetry arranged his corpus in an order that 432
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sought to assimilate it to Petrarchist and classicistic poetics (Peirats 2010, vol. 1, 351, 359; Lloret 2013, 67–70, 157–210). Studying these books as unreliable iterations of authorially sanctioned texts is, then, disregarding them as signifcant artifacts through which new readers kept making texts worth reading for new audiences. Nevertheless, from the perspective of their authorial inscription and publication, that is what they often appear to be: descripti witnesses, at best, if we can examine them vis-à-vis the manuscript tradition (see, e.g., Martí 2010, for Eximenis’s Llibre dels àngels). Examples of additional appropriative devices linked to print technology can be noticed in title pages. Conceived as means for promoting the work, titles appearing in the frontispieces are also revealing of the distance between authors and printed texts. King James’s book is classicizingly presented as an equivalent of Caesar’s Comentarii de bello gallico in its 1557 edition, which is accordingly titled Comentaris del gloriosíssim e invictíssim rey en Jacme Primer.The title of the 1539 edition of March’s works enabled the moralized contents of the edition by referring to them as a higher matter, the works of a philosopher (Las obras del famosísimo philósofo y poeta Osias Marc). Roig’s Spill is in turn dubbed as Llibre de consells…, los quals són molt proftosos i saludables… (1531 and 1561), and Llibre de les dones, més verament dit de consells proftosos i saludables (1561), underscoring a moralizing reading of the work. The effects that the printed transmission of works had in their modern interpretation are thus not negligible. Ausiàs March scholars still call the Cant espiritual poem Puys que sens tu algú a tu no basta (CV) and the sequence of poems XCII– XCVII is also often referred to as the cants de mort following in both particulars the terminology employed by the frst editor of March’s works, Juan Navarro (1539). The Petrarchized version of March’s poetry represented in the 1543 edition has virtually endured until the present (J. M. Pujol 1996, 40, n. 8; Cingolani 2008b, 101–102; Carré 2014, 64; Lloret 2014). This is not to say that the printed transmission of literary works is always secondary to its manuscript dissemination in regard to understanding an authorially sanctioned publication.The 1484 edition of Francesc Eiximenis’s Dotzè is the only witness to transmit chapters 467 to 473 of the work.These chapters develop a palinodic rectifcation of Chapters 200 and 466, each containing prophecies on the disappearance of all royal houses but the French, and the coming of a system of popular justice and self-government akin to that of the Italian republics.The palinodial chapters set to counter these revolutionary ideas were introduced at the behest of King John I and as an answer to a surge in violence across the Crown of Aragon in 1391, frst against the Jews and then against some municipalities, which could have been synergistic with Eiximenis’s discourse.The additional chapters were originally published in manuscript form and, naturally, all the copies of the Dotzè or the Regiment that were already in circulation could not be updated. The 1484 print is the oldest documentation of that “second manuscript edition” of one of both of these works. Another edition of one of Eiximenis’s works contains texts that have not been preserved in earlier codices. The 1499 edition of his Regiment de la cosa pública is the only one to transmit the authorial prologue to the work before being merged with the Dotzè. This 1499 print, however, also transmits an interpolated text (Renedo and Martí 2005, xxxiv–xliv; Renedo 2014a, 217;Wittlin 1993). Joseph Grigely conceived of a textual work not as an immaterial ideal, or a sum of its texts, but rather as an event, a series of moments of inscription, some authorial, some not authorial (Grigely 1995, ch. 3). Each moment of inscription of a text is therefore not a circumstantial phenomenon tributary to the defnition of the authorial inscription of the work, but rather an autonomous and historically grounded iteration with particular meanings attached to its context of production and immediate reception.This chapter has sought to present many examples of the importance of examining the materiality of textual iterations as crucial informants of the history of the writers and readers of medieval Catalan letters.At the same time, we have distin433
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guished between the nature of different moments of inscription and iteration, and examined the role that the author and other co-authorial agents perform in those actions, and seen how this remains a cornerstone upon which any history, including the history of medieval Catalan literature, rests.
Notes 1 Joan Ramon Ferrer and Joan Fogassot undersign two poems as juries of Barcelona’s Consistori de la Gaia Ciència that have been preserved in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS esp. 225. Ferrer authored and penned down a glossed sirventès in the Cançoner Vega-Aguiló. 2 Beltran (2000, 372–77, 2006a); Aramon (1947–1948: 163-65); Rodríguez Risquete (2010: 456–57, n. 35); Auferil (1986: 68–77); Martí (1997); Ramos, Rodríguez Risquete, and Torró (2014). Badia proposed that the compilator of the Cançoneret de Ripoll could have been the author of some of the poems it contains (Badia 1983, 151). Following a similar argument, L. Cabré and Torró (2010, 206) suggest that the poem closing the Cançoner Estanislau-Aguiló was authored by its very copyist. See also n. 8. 3 Marfany and Cabré (2016); Beltran (2015). Medieval authors may even invite readers to correct their published texts. 4 As mentioned earlier, an autographed copy of one of Peter’s speeches has survived (Barcelona,Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó, Cancelleria reial, reg. 1529, 1st part, fols. 50r-53v); Cawsey (2002, esp. 35–51). 5 Cingolani (2013, 193). A specular case is supplied by the Gesta comitum Barcinonensium, a Latin work that survives in four different versions, each progressively reworked. Of the second Latin version, now lost, only the Catalan translation has remained; see Cingolani (2008a). 6 Hillgarth (1992–1993, 59–60, 98–99);Aguilar (2015, vol. 1, 276–77, 277–285).Aguilar argues that there is no such frst version of Desclot’s Chronicle (as held by Cingolani), but rather a later compilation of materials that could not be available to Desclot. 7 If all poets kept, as it seems reasonable to believe, at least one personal copy of their verses and those of their favorite authors, and only 24 songbooks have come down to us while the Repertorio informatizzato dell’antica letteratura catalana inventories poetry by over 200 writers, we can estimate the minimum amount of songbooks that are now lost. 8 M. Cabré (2001); Navàs (2013); Rodríguez Risquete (2005);Torró (2009, 214–15); L. Cabré and Torró (2015). See also the cycle of fve dansas opening the Cançoneret de Ripoll and staging a disputation (Badia 1983, 91–100). 9 Yet a few folia of a manuscript copy of Tirant lo Blanc have survived, and perhaps as well an earlier version of some passages of Isabel de Villena’s Vita Christi (chapters 142–167 and 178–228); see Hauf (2006).
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Inscription, authorship, iteration Mandingorra, María Luz. 2012. “Memoria de la gestión, gestión de la memoria: sor Isabel de Villena”. In Dones i literatura entre l’Edat Mitjana i el Renaixement, edited by Ricard Bellveser, vol. 2, 735–758. València: Institució Alfons el Magnànim. Marfany, Marta. 2008.“Balades, lais i rondells francesos en la literatura catalana del segle XV”. Mot so razo 9: 16–26. Marfany, Marta, and Lluís Cabré. 2016. “Un poème consolatoire inédite (c. 1348) et un fragment d’un planh perdu, attribué à Raimbaut de Vaqueiras”. Revue des Langues Romanes 120(1): 251–280. Martí, Sadurní. 1997.“El Cançoner del marquès de Barberà (S1 – BM1): Descripció codicològica”. Boletín Bibliográfco de la Asociación Hispánica de la Literatura Medieval 11: 463–502. Martí, Sadurní. 2010.“Notes sobre la tradició textual del Llibre dels àngels (1392) de Francesc Eiximenis”. Caplletra 48: 235–256. Martí, Sadurní. 2017. “Joan de Castellnou revisité: Notes biographiques”. Revue des Langues Romanes 121(2): 623–659. Martí, Sadurní, and David Guixeras. 2002.“Apunts sobre la tradició del Dotzè del Crestià I”. In Literatura i Cultura a la Corona d’Aragó (segles XIII–XV), edited by Lola Badia et al., vol. ii, 211–223. Barcelona: Curial-PAM. Martínez Romero, Tomàs. 2007. “De la construcció a l’execució dels sermons vicentins: un itinerari metòdic”. In El fuego y la palabra: San Vicente Ferrer en el 550 aniversario de su canonización, edited by Emilio Callado Estela, 77–88.València: Generalitat. Martos, Josep Lluís, ed. 2001. Les proses mitològiques de Joan Roís de Corella.València-Barcelona: IIFV-PAM. Martos, Josep Lluís. 2008. “La literatura perduda de Joan Roís de Corella: Les fonts”. Caplletra 45: 93–112. Navàs, Marina. 2013. “Le Registre Cornet: Structure, strates et première diffusion”. Revue des Langues Romanes 117: 161–191. Parera, Raquel. 2018. “La versió d’Andreu Febrer de la ‘Commedia’ de Dante: Biografa del traductor, estudi del manuscrit, anàlisi de la traducció i edició dels cants I-XX de l’‘Inferno’”, Ph.D. diss., UAB. Peirats,Ana Isabel, ed. 2010. Jaume Roig, Spill.València:AVL. Perarnau i Espelt, Josep. 1978. Felip de Malla. Correspondència política. Barcelona: Barcino. Perarnau i Espelt, Josep. 1999. Estudis i inventari de sermons de Sant Vicent Ferrer. Special issue of ATCA 18. Pomaro, Gabriella, 2005. “‘Licet ipse fuerit, qui fecit omnia’: il Cusano e gli autograf lulliani”. In Ramon Lull und Nikolaus von Kues: eine Begegnung im Zeichen der Toleranz, edited by Ermenegildo Bidese, Alexander Fidora and Paul Renner, 175–204.Turnhout: Brepols. Pomaro, Gabriella. 2011.“La tradizione latina del Liber contemplationis: el manoscritto Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 3348A”. In Gottes Schau und Weltbetrachtung. Interpretationen zum “Liber contemplationis” des Raimundus Lullus, edited by Fernando Domínguez,Viola Tenge-Wolf, and Peter Walter, 21–77. Turnhout: Brepols. Puig i Oliver, Jaume, et al. 2009. “Catàleg dels manuscrits de les obres de Francesc Eiximenis, O.F.M. conservats en biblioteques públiques: Primera part: Obres originals en català / 1”. ATCA 28: 455–612. Pujol, Josep. 1996. “Psallite sapienter: La gaia ciència en els sermons de Felip de Malla de 1413 (Estudi i edició)”. Cultura neolatina 56: 177–250. Pujol, Josep Maria. 1996.“The Llibre del rei En Jaume: A matter of style”. In Historical Literature in Medieval Iberia: Papers of the Medieval Research Seminar, edited by Alan Deyermond, 35–65. London: Department of Hispanic Studies, Queen Mary and Westfeld Colleges. Pujol, Josep Maria. 2008. “El programa narratiu del Llibre del rei En Jaume”. In El rei Jaume I: Fets, actes i paraules, edited by Germà Colón and Tomàs Martínez, 257–296. Castelló-Barcelona: Fundació Germà Colón-PAM. Ramos, Rafael, Francisco J. Rodríguez Risquete, and Jaume Torró. 2014. “Mossèn Avinyó, the Cancionero de Vindel and the Cançoner llemosí del siglo XV”. Digital Philology 3 (1): 142–161. Renedo, Xavier. 2011. “Notes sobre la datació del Dotzè del crestià”. Annals de l’Institut d’Estudis Gironins 51: 207–224. Renedo, Xavier. 2014a.“El Crestià: Una introducció”. In Jornades ‘Francesc Eiximenis, c. 1330–1409, edited by Antoni Riera i Melis, 189–231. Barcelona: IEC. Renedo, Xavier. 2014b.“Els sermons de Vicent Ferrer”. In Història de la literatura catalana (II): Segle XIV–XV, edited by Lola Badia, 59–81. Barcelona: Enciclopèdia Catalana, Barcino,Ajuntament. Renedo, Xavier, and Sadurní Martí, eds. 2005. Francesc Eiximenis. Dotzè Llibre del Crestià, I.1. Girona: U de Girona, Diputació. Riquer, Martí de. 1990. Aproximació al Tirant lo Blanc. Barcelona: Quaderns Crema.
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Albert Lloret Rodríguez Risquete, Francisco Javier. 2005. “El cancionero de Lleonard de Sos”. In Actas del IX Congreso Internacional de la Asociación Hispánica de Literatura Medieval, edited by Mercedes Pampín and Carmen Parrilla. vol. 3, 455–463. Coruña: U da Coruña. Rodríguez Risquete, Francisco Javier. 2010. “El Cançoner de l’Ateneu (ms. 1 de l’Ateneu barceloní)”. In Alberni, Badia and Cabré, 2010, 425–473. Rodríguez Risquete, Francisco Javier. 2011. Pere Torroella. Obra completa, 2 vols. Barcelona: Barcino. Romeu i Figueras, Josep, ed. 2000. Corpus d’antiga poesia popular. Barcelona: Barcino. Santanach, Joan, ed. 2005. Ramon Llull. Doctrina pueril. Palma: Patronat Ramon Llull. Schmidt, Beatrice. 1988. Les “traduccions valencianes” del Blanquerna (València 1521) i de ls Scala Dei (Barcelona 1523): Estudi lingüístic. Barcelona: PAM-Curial. Soldevila, Ferran, ed. 2014. Les quatre grans cròniques: IV. Crònica de Pere III el Cerimoniós, revised by Jordi Bruguera and M.Teresa Ferrer Mallol. Barcelona: IEC. Soler,Albert, ed. 1988. Ramon Llull. Llibre de l’orde de cavalleria. Barcelona: Barcino. Soler,Albert, and Joan Santanach, eds. 2009. Ramon Llull. Blaquerna. Palma: Patronat Ramon Llull. Torró, Jaume. 1996.“El mite de Caldesa: Corella al Jardinet d’orats”. Atalaya 7: 103–116. Torró, Jaume. 2009. Sis poetes del regnat d’Alfons el Magnànim. Barcelona: Barcino. Torró, Jaume. 2014. “La poesia cortesana”. In Història de la literatura catalana (II): Segle XIV–XV, edited by Lola Badia, 261–352. Barcelona: Enciclopèdia Catalana, Barcino,Ajuntament. Wittlin, Curt, 1993.“L’edició del 1499 del Regiment de la cosa pública. Les revisions i ampliacions al text, a l’endreça i al comiat escrits per Francesc Eiximenis el 1383”. Boletín de la Sociedad Castellonense de Cultura 69(4): 441–459. Zinelli, Fabio, 2013.“Les Històries franceses de Troia i d'Alexandre a Catalunyai a ultramar”. Mot So Razo 12 (2013): 7–18.
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28 THE ḤADĪTH DE YÚÇUF Reimagining a prophet in a world of “others’ words” Andrea Pauw
Once deemed “las Indias de la literatura española” and more recently “las antípodas de la literatura española tradicional” [the Indies of Spanish literature; the antipodes of traditional Spanish literature], Aljamiado manuscripts have long existed on the fringes of Hispanic studies (Estébanez [1848] 1955, 307; López-Baralt 2009, 41). Though often associated with the Moriscos, the production of Aljamiado texts began long before the forced conversions of the sixteenth century. This chapter offers a close reading of one of the earliest extant Aljamiado texts: the Ḥadīth de Yúçuf, alternatively referred to as the Poema de José or the Poema de Yúçuf.1 Because of its remarkable use of cuaderna vía strophic form and, albeit contested, early dating, the Ḥadīth is regarded as one of the foundational Aljamiado texts.Yet it is also one of the most misunderstood, due to critical approaches informed by misplaced expectations and canonical biases. In this chapter, I offer a new reading of the Ḥadīth that foregrounds the text’s remarkable intertextuality and experimentation with literary genres. Recontextualizing authoritative textual traditions—including the mester de clerecía poetic mode, qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā’ (“Stories of the Prophets”), and ḥadīth—enabled Mudejars and Moriscos to claim “transconfessional” prophets and to captivate listeners in a “world of others’ words”.2
Introduction “Aljamiado” comes from the noun “aljamía”, which is derived from‘ajamiyya, an Arabic term that denotes foreign or non-Arabic as opposed to ‘arabiyya, the Arabic language. In the kingdoms of medieval Iberia, “aljamía” referred to romance spoken by Mudejars, the Muslims who remained as subjects under Christian rule. Later, “Aljamiado” designated a Muslim who spoke romance.The discovery of hundreds of Morisco manuscripts in the nineteenth century precipitated the current meaning of “Aljamiado” texts: works in which a copyist employs the Arabic script to transliterate romance (Montaner 1993, 31).Aragonese Moriscos—Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity in the sixteenth century, many of whom continued to practice Islam covertly—produced the vast majority of extant Aljamiado texts.3 Increased persecution of New Christians spurred the production of texts that would communicate critical religious knowledge in a comprehensible register yet also preserve Islam’s sacred script. Nonetheless, the transliteration of romance with the Arabic alphabet did not arise 439
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ex nihilo. Mudejar notaries transcribed Christian names and other romance words in Arabic documents as early as the twelfth century (Viguera 1990, 19). As knowledge of Arabic faded among the Mudejars, the fuqahā’, or Islamic spiritual leaders, adapted to the fuctuating needs of their communities by translating salient texts into romance.4 In part catalyzed by Yça Gidelli’s infuential Breviario Sunni (1462), the systematized production of Aljamiado texts began in the ffteenth century to counteract the Mudejars’ acculturation to the Christian majority. By the end of the sixteenth century, amidst intensifed hostility and oppression, Aljamiado literature constituted a clandestine, at times perilous, form of resistance. Most works are translations from original Arabic texts that retain Arabic-infected syntax and lexicon. The texts’ close adherence to Arabic and predominately Islamic content prompts Ottmar Hegyi to defne Aljamiado as a “variante islámica del español” [an Islamic variant of Spanish] (1985). The corpus of roughly 200 extant works includes legal and instructive texts, Qur’ānic exegesis (tafsīr), poems, travel itineraries, prophecies (aljofores), and ethical maxims. Aljamiado manuscripts are considered “al revés de los cristianos” [in opposition to the Christian majority], meant to assert difference and to preserve a threatened Islamic identity (López-Baralt 2009, 37; Remensnyder 2011, 559). Due to the prevalence of religious themes in Aljamiado manuscripts, scholars cast Aragonese Muslims’“universe of discourse” in terms of Islamic beliefs, as the centrifugal counterpart to centripetal pressure (Coseriu as quoted in López-Morillas 1995, 200).
The Ḥadīth de Yúçuf: form, dating, and manuscripts Within this textual milieu, the Ḥadīth stands out as a curious anomaly. In particular, the text defes the Aljamiado corpus’s characterization through the use of cuaderna vía, a strophic form composed of quatrains of verso alejandrino—14-syllable verses divided into 2 heptasyllabic hemistiches with consonant rhyme. Cuaderna vía is associated with the mester de clerecía, a clerical and learned “mode of poetic practice” that serves religious and moralizing ends (Barletta 2005, 150). Often destined for recitation, works are meant to captivate, entertain, and instruct a broad audience. Authors display an ethical commitment to communicating knowledge in the vernacular through poems that constitute “un arte erudito para la difusión popular” [a learned art for popular diffusion] (Gerli in Berceo 1985, 18). Julian Weiss elucidates the ways in which clerical authorities adopted the role of intermediaries between the lay world of the unlettered and the secular wisdom and spiritual values which they had acquired through the privilege of their literacy (their “clerecía” or clerisy), adapting material from written Latin and French sources, but also from popular oral legend. (2006, 1) Notable texts of the mester de clerecía include thirteenth-century works such as the Libro de Alexandre, the Libro de Apolonio, and compositions by Gonzalo de Berceo (d. 1264). The fourteenth-century Libro del Arcipreste, more commonly known as the Libro de Buen Amor, is celebrated for its appropriation and subversion of the poetic mode. Due to its use of cuaderna vía, scholars have typically dated the Ḥadīth to the fourteenth century (Montaner 1993, 42–43). Gerard Wiegers (1994, 66) posits the earliest extant copy, preserved in folios 1–9r of Manuscript A (BRAH 11/9409 T-12), can be dated to the mid-ffteenth century. Measuring 140 × 200 mm, it contains the initial 95 stanzas although quatrain 33 is missing.The Ḥadīth precedes a compilation of 16 other texts of varying length and content—copied 440
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by numerous scribes and likely bound together in the sixteenth century (Barletta 2006, 520).5 Manuscript B (BNM Res. 247 [olim Gg. 101]) contains 312 stanzas but is acephalous; it begins with the tenth stanza and ends after Joseph offers his brothers forgiveness. Copied by a single scribe in the sixteenth century, Manuscript B measures 142 × 212 mm and comprises 50 folios. Numerous scribal errors in both manuscripts could be fortuitous, or could suggest derivation from a fawed original (Pidal [1902] 1952, 57; Johnson 1974, 11). An additional unbound folio of the Ḥadīth, redacted by Manuscript B’s scribe, indicates a third copy circulated in Morisco communities (BRAH Ms. 11/9416 [Caja #5] olim V-5).6 Irrespective of Manuscript A’s contested dating, what is important is the sustained interest in Joseph from Mudejar communities to Morisco ones, given the text’s Mudejar origins (whether they be fourteenth or ffteenth century) and its later Morisco renderings. I will discuss circumstances that affected both the Mudejars and the Moriscos in order to address the broader contexts that the poem both refected and shaped. In the kingdom of Aragon, where the Ḥadīth likely originated and was later copied, there were “less distinct social boundaries between Christian and Muslim … Many Aragonese Mudejars lived under non-Muslim lords.They were more integrated socioeconomically and linguistically than their Valencian counterparts” (Miller 2008, 8). In addition to the Mudejars’ socioeconomic and linguistic integration, we might add “literary” and offer the Ḥadīth’s poetic form as evidence. Because of its language and the author’s deft execution of cuaderna vía, previous scholars examined the Ḥadīth vis-à-vis coeval Christian poems. For instance, in a letter sent from Hispanist George Ticknor to his colleague Pascual de Gayangos in 1840, the former expresses surprise at “the tone of Christian morals which has intruded itself into the Moor’s work, even when teaching dogma of his own religion” ([1840] 1927, 9). In addition to the Ḥadīth’s espousal of “Christian morals”,Ticknor also praises the poem’s impressive aesthetic value: “The literary execution of it, too, is better than I had expected, though it would not be extraordinary if it came from a Spanish Christian of the same period” (1927, 9). Over a century later, Billy Bussell Thompson attributed the text’s original authorship to a Christian poet for similar reasons: En su estado original, no tenía nada de aljamiado el Poema de José. Es puro ejemplo del mester de clerecía de los siglos XIII–XIV en su lenguaje, en su regularidad métrica absoluta, y en especial en sus hemistiquios formulaicos. No es obra de ningún imitador morisco de una técnica de la poesía cristiana … En otras palabras, no hay diferencia alguna entre el método de Alixandre, Apolonio, etc.: es de la misma estirpe del mismo repertorio [In its original state, the Poem of Joseph had nothing to do with Aljamiado. It is purely an example of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century mester de clerecía in its language, in its absolute metrical regularity, and especially in its formulaic hemistiches. It is not the work of a Morisco imitating a technique of Christian poetry … In other words, there is not any difference between the method of the [Book of] Alexandre, or the [Book of] Apolonio, etc.: it is of the same lineage and from the same repertory. (1989, 170) As seen in Thompson’s and Ticknor’s analyses, regarding “Islamic” themes and “Christian” formal expression as an aporia causes the former to be subsumed in the latter’s purview. Perhaps scholars’ diffculty to reconcile the Ḥadīth’s content and form perpetuated its Hispanized title, Poema de José, a designation that highlights the text’s purported Christian origins. Rather than attempting to homogenize form and content in the Ḥadīth, this chapter foregrounds the entrenched intertextual strands that cannot be separated into multiple “looms”. 441
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After partial reproductions and transcriptions of the poem in the nineteenth and early twentieth century (Ticknor 1927 Morf 1883; Schmitz 1901), Ramón Menéndez Pidal published the frst critical edition of Manuscript A in 1902.William W. Johnson (1974) transcribes Manuscripts A and B in his study of the Ḥadīth; his is the most recent and only complete edition of the text. Vincent Barletta’s (2005) insightful analysis of the Ḥadīth in the fnal chapter of Covert Gestures draws upon theories of language ideologies and narrative engagement to shed light on negotiations of power and social interaction embedded in the poem. Building upon the Ḥadīth’s previous scholarship, I recur to the work of linguistic anthropologists Richard Bauman, Charles Briggs, and John DuBois, as well as their forerunner, the literary critic and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, in order to shed light on the Ḥadīth’s didactic effects, experimentation with literary genres, and intertextual interaction within the heterogeneous discursive web of medieval Iberian literature. Loosely based on the twelfth chapter (su¯rah) of the Qur’ān, the text versifes one of the popular versions of Joseph’s life that endured in Iberian Islamic communities: the prophet is betrayed by his jealous brothers, sold into captivity in Egypt, condemned to prison after attracting the unsolicited attention of his captor’s wife, Zulaykha (Zuleikha), and fnally liberated when the king relies on his divination expertise to save Egypt from famine. Joseph forgives his brothers and reunites with his father, Jacob, now cured from his grief-induced blindness. Joseph exemplifes knowledge, faithfulness, piety, and, like his father, patience. Post-Qur’ānic representations highlight the prophet’s proverbial beauty. As one early Islamic author writes: “‘Beauty is in ten parts; nine belong to Joseph and one to the rest of mankind’” (Wahb b. Munabbih quoted in al-Tha‘labī 2003, 184).
Alfaquíes and the story of Joseph: edification and ritual speech The Ḥadīth’s author was likely an Aragonese faqīh well versed in medieval Castilian works. Kathryn Miller shows how Mudejar fuqahā’ sought to fulfll their self-pronounced role as “inheritors of the prophets” and “guardians” of their focks (2008, 131, 28). Mudejar and later Morisco alfaquíes adjusted to the particular circumstances of their life in dār al-ḥarb, the abode of unbelief (literally, of war), as opposed to dār al-islām, the Islamic world. As Muslim leaders in “imperfect” dwelling places, the “Mudejar faqihs came to function as cultural mediators, affrming the principles espoused by a normative Islam while conscientiously adapting Islamic practices to meet the needs of a minority community” (Miller 2008, 43). Aragonese fuqahā’ defended their imagined position as spiritual shepherds through the Aljamiado texts they composed, copied, and recited. Though later rendered as Poema de José, because of the fragmentary nature of the extant copies, the only defnitive title of the work appears in Manuscript A:“Ḥadīth de Yu¯suf” (BRAH fol. 1r).The term ḥadīth designates a “tradition”, “tale”, or “narrative”, and refers to the corpus of Islamic teachings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad (Harvey 2005, 145). Barletta (2005, 115) cites the twofold nature of ḥadīth:“alongside the learned and authoritative ḥadīth tradition there has developed a parallel ḥadīth tradition that has reworked Qur’anic narratives into popular, even folkloric stories”. It appears that the Ḥadīth de Yúçuf is representative of the latter type. The text recalls previous representations of Joseph in qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā’, a storytelling tradition that had existed since Islam’s incipient phase.Though often rendered as “legends” or “stories” of the prophets, qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā’ encompass more than fctional tales. As Linda Jones explains, qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā’ “emerged as an independent genre of literature in the ninth century to embellish the Quranic narratives about the pre-Islamic prophets and the people of Israel, and is thus closely related to Quranic exegesis” (2012, 102). Qiṣaṣ is the plural form of qiṣṣa, from the root q-ṣ-ṣ: 442
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to narrate or tell a story. Qaṣaṣ, also derived from q-ṣ-ṣ and translated as “homiletic storytelling”, played an important role in other oratorical genres, including canonical sermons (khuṭba; pl: khuṭab) and admonitions (maw‘iẓa; pl: mawā‘iẓ) (Jones 2012, 18). Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā’ circulated widely in al-Andalus, including collections attributed to al-Ṭarafī (d. 1062), al-Ṭabarī (d. 923), al-Kisā’ī, and al-Tha‘labī (d. 1036) (Tottoli 1998, 144). Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā’ inspire and instruct. Stories spotlight pious paragons as well as disbelieving foes. As al-Tha‘labī explains in the introduction to his collection: [God] told [Muhammad] the stories to serve as an example of the noble traits exhibited by the messengers and prophets of old … and so that his community would refrain from those actions for which [previous] prophets’ communities had been punished. (Al-Tha‘labī qtd. in Klar 2006, 339) Al-Ṭarafī also stresses the edifying intent behind his work, which comprises:“what every highminded person should desire to know and be enthusiastic to read and to learn by heart” (qtd. in Tottoli 1998, 137). Indeed, the conclusion of the twelfth su¯rah underscores the instructive value of Joseph’s and other prophets’ lives:“Certainly in their stories is a lesson for those possessed of intellect. It is not a fabricated account; rather, it is a confrmation of that which came before it, and an elaboration of all things, and a guidance and a mercy for a people who believe” (Q 12:111).7 The Ḥadīth reinforces the didactic aspirations of su¯rah 12 and qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā’. Perhaps the Ḥadīth’s linguistic expression is the clearest indicator of its instructional intent: alfaquíes adapted Joseph’s story to verse and redacted it not in Arabic but in romance, the language spoken by Aragonese Mudejars and later Moriscos. In addition to its comprehensible linguistic register, regular metric and rhyme facilitate memorization of the poem’s message. Recitation motifs typical of the mester de clerecía and the juglaresca tradition capture the audience’s attention. Second-person plural address appeals to listeners through the poem:“Fagovos a saber— oyades, mis amados, / lo que conteçió en los [altos] tienpos pasados” [I’d like to tell you a story—listen, my friends— / to what happened in [glorious] days past] (BRAH fol. 1r).8 The Ḥadīth invokes the public in anticipation of dramatic moments throughout the narration. For example, in premonition of the brothers’ malicious actions, the lyric voice hints:“de que fueron apartados, bien veredes que fueron a far” [as soon as they left, you will see what they went to do] (BNM fol. 1v). When Zulaykha—the lustful woman who attempts to seduce Joseph—becomes ensnared in a dramatic tangle with the protagonist, the audience is cued to anticipation: “trabolo de la falda, como oireis dezir” [she grabbed him by the skirt, as you will hear it told] (BNM fol. 13r). Such communicative gestures attest to the custom of reading poetry aloud (Frenk 1980).We see similar appeals to listeners’ attention in the opening stanza of Berceo’s Milagros de Nuestra Señora: “Amigos e vassallos de Dios omnipotent / si vos me escuchássedes por vuestro consiment, / querríavos contar un buen aveniment: / terrédeslo en cabo por bueno verament” [Friends and vassals of the omnipotent God / if you would be willing to listen to me / I would like to tell you a fne story / you will fnd it truly good] (1985, 69). At times, the frst-person singular voice expands to include imagined and real listeners in professions of faith:“Varones e mugieres, quantos aquí estamos, / todos en ti creemos, e a ti adoramos, / e ti e a tu Madre todos glorifcamos, / cantemos en tu nomne el ‘Te Deu¨m laudamus’” [Men and women, all of us here / in You we believe, and in You we adore / we glorify You and your Mother / in your name we sing “Te Deu¨m laudamus”] (149). Berceo’s lyric “yo” affrms listeners’ beliefs and provides them with a spiritual identifcation.The Ḥadīth’s poetic voice also incorporates the audience with the 443
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use of frst-person plural possessive pronouns, such as:“porque nuestro Señor les quiso ayudar” [because our Lord wanted to aid them] (BNM fol. 11r). In addition to its linguistic expression, mnemonic aids, and engaging tone, the Ḥadīth instructs listeners through the incorporation of reported speech.Though narrated in the past tense, the poem’s temporal mode is punctuated by a plethora of reported speech. Consider, for instance, the conversation between Joseph and the wine-steward: “Dixo Yuçuf al escançiano aquesta rrazon: / ‘Rruegote que rrecuerdes al rrey de mi presión / que arto me a durado esta gran maldiçión.’/ Dixo el escançiano, ‘plazeme de coraçón’” [Joseph said this to the winesteward: / “I beg you to remind the king of my imprisonment / this awful curse has gone on too long”. / The wine-steward said:“it pleases me so”] (BNM fol. 17v). Characters construct vivid representations of past events by transporting the action to the present. Over half of the Ḥadīth’s extant stanzas include dialogue. The use of reported speech creates temporal synchronicity with the moment of recitation, enabling listeners to immerse themselves in the narration. Present dialogue supersedes narrated past through an unending parade of memorable characters. Not only are rulers and heroes afforded opportunities to speak, a myriad of minor, socially marginalized characters leave their textual periphery to propel the narration.A servant conspires privately with her mistress, passing merchants debate an appropriate selling price for their captive, swooning dueñas mistake their hands for grapefruits—even the accused wolf has a chance to tell his story (BNM fols. 11v; 5v; 4r). In a similar vein, Michael Gerli points to the motley crew of characters in the Libro del Arcipreste, arguing that when “unconventional, outlandish voices and accents” are rendered, even mimed, in live performance, they enhance the text’s dynamic appeal—one that is underappreciated in silent reading (2016, 99). Likewise, the Ḥadīth’s expression lends itself to performance; the compelling array of characters necessitates a dynamic reenactment diffcult to grasp through private reading. Anthropologist John DuBois’s explanation of “ritual speech” sheds additional light on the text’s plenitude of reported speech.9 DuBois divides the speaker of ritual speech into two categories: the “Prime Speaker”, the author or the entity originally responsible for the words, and the “Proximate Speaker”, the individual who actually utters or delivers the words (1986, 323). The roles become fused if the “Proximate” utters words she herself has authored. In the context of ritual speech, often the “Proximate” recites words of a remote—sometimes divine—“Prime”. In the Ḥadīth, reported speech entails a curious interplay of “Proximate” and “Prime” entities. This interchange relies on the concept of isnād, or reliable chain of transmission. Presented by the verb “qāla” (“he said”) in qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā’ and ḥadīth, the isnād provides a meticulous documentation of names that can extend for lengthy passages (Brinner in al-Tha‘labī 2003, xxxii). Human transmitters should be trustworthy “links” in this discursive chain. In Aljamiado texts, “dixo” (“he/she said”) often replaces “qāla” as a reference to authoritative sources.Yet in the Ḥadīth, “dixo” does not attribute recounted details to an ontologically remote, certifed informant. Instead, the verb invokes heterogeneous character voices, seeming to bestow this narrative authority on the characters themselves.The “Prime” is no longer Ka‘b al-Aḥbār or Wahb ibn Munabbih, but rather larger-than-life personalities vivifed in the act of reading aloud.When reenacted by a “Proximate” speaking in the present tense, character representations transcend the imaginary realm. Quotatives such as “dixo” and “dixeron” position the “Proximate” as mediator of direct speech and conveyor of an isnād. Established by the prevalence of present-tense discourse, the immediacy of the text’s diffusion ensures listeners’ active engagement, thereby facilitating the alfaquíes’ instructional goals. In sum, the Ḥadīth’s unique adaptation of generic conventions electrifes the story’s dramatic import in order to inspire and instruct listeners. 444
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Paragons of patience Though Joseph exemplifes many virtues, the prophet particularly illuminates the concept of ṣabr ()ربص, “a term that encompasses patience, self-command, fortitude and temperance” (Miller 2008, 145). Ṣabr is a semantically dense word that is diffcult to convey in translation. The Hans Wehr dictionary lists the following meanings for ṣabr: “fettering, shackling; patience, forbearance; composure, equanimity, steadfastness, frmness; self-control, self-command, selfpossession; perseverance, endurance, hardiness” (Wehr [1979] 2004, 585). In the Qur’ān, ṣabr denotes “endurance” or “tenacity” as well as patience during a time of suffering (e.g. Q 2:153; 2:177; 22:35; 31:17; 73:10). At the end of the twelfth su¯rah, after enduring fraternal betrayal, unjust imprisonment, and alienation in a foreign land, Joseph confrms that those who persevere with ṣabr will receive Allah’s reward:“Verily whosoever is reverent and patient [yaṣbiru]—surely God neglects not the reward of the virtuous” (Q 12:90).The prophet radiates this virtue in his Qur’ānic and narrative representations. Similarly, Jacob invokes the concept of ṣabr in the twelfth su¯rah when his sons present him with Joseph’s bloodied shirt (Q 12:18). He cries out: “‘Beautiful patience’ [ṣabru jamīlun]! And God is the One Whose help is sought against that which you describe” (Q 12:18). Mohammed Rustom interprets Jacob’s exclamation as an expression used at times of extreme grief to fnd solace in the fact that patience will triumph in the end and that the diffculty will eventually pass.“God is the One Whose help is sought against that which you describe” means that Jacob seeks God’s Help in bearing the lie that his sons were telling him concerning Joseph’s death. (The Study Qur’an 2015, 596) Though most English translations of the Qur’ān employ the noun “patience” for ṣabr,Wensinck (2012) explains that Jacob’s use of the term in verse 18 of su¯rah 12 expresses “resignation” in the following way:“[My best course is] ftting resignation”. In the Ḥadīth, Jacob’s response does not include an exact translation of ṣabr. He affrms his faith in God and cautions his sons with an ominous warning:“En-al Allāh creyo i fyo que aun lo veredes / todas estas cosas que aun lo pagaredes” [In God I believe and I trust that you will see / you will pay for all of this] (BNM fol. 4r).10 In contrast, the Aljamiado prose version of Joseph’s story (BNM 5292) incorporates a direct adaptation of Qur’ānic verse 12:18 (Klenk 1972, 15). Curiously, the faqīh who rendered Jacob’s expression into romance does not opt for “paciencia hermosa” [beautiful patience] as one might expect, but rather “sufrençia hermosa” [beautiful suffering] (Ms. 5292 BNM, fol. 45). The interpretation—common to other Aljamiado works that render derivatives of “sufrir” for ṣabr—reiterates ṣabr’s connotations of glorifed suffering as a means to know God. It isn’t diffcult to imagine how the virtue of ṣabr may have resonated with Aragonese Muslims. Joseph is cast into a well and a prison cell, where he struggles to comply with Islamic rituals, while Jacob endures separation from his beloved son.The story—replete with prophetic paragons who display ṣabr throughout their tribulations—would have provided solace to those oppressed by stifing impingements on religious expression. Perhaps the alfaquíes identifed Joseph’s story as a propitious subject for their instructional goals; the prophets’ pious example offers an attractive model for Muslims who seek to maintain their faith throughout times of suffering or persecution.11 Yet the Ḥadīth’s didacticism encompasses more than simple resonances between the plights of the prophets and Aragonese Muslims.As Linda Jones’s research reveals, the concept of ṣabr posed 445
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broader implications for the Mudejar fuqahā’ who attempted to fashion their followers into a “moral community” (2004, 453). Jones analyzes a series of exhortatory sermons delivered to Aragonese Muslims in the thirteenth century in which, she maintains, ṣabr played a critical role. The faqīh depicts his Mudejar focks as exemplars of patient endurance (ṣabr) and remembering God (dhikr) (Jones 2004, 453). Cultivating the virtues of ṣabr and dhikr would allow Muslims to retain their distinctive superiority over neighboring “people of the Book” (Miller 2008, 145). Attempts to redefne collective Mudejar identity in terms of ṣabr combatted local pressures to convert to Christianity, but also critiques launched from abroad. Legal scholars in dār al-islām questioned the religious viability of Muslims subjected to Christian rule. In dār al-ḥarb, Mudejars were obliged to coexist with non-Muslims and experienced varying levels of linguistic and cultural acculturation to the Christian majority. Ibn Rushd (d. 1198), for example, affrmed that the Mudejars were of “suspect credibility” for their decision to remain in Christian lands (qtd. in Nirenberg 2018, 60).Aḥmad b.Yaḥyā al-Wansharīsī (d. 1508), a ffteenth-century North African jurist, criticized the Mudejars’ decision to remain in Spain:“‘his residence is manifest proof of his vile and base spirit … he who does this is on the border of infdelity’” (qtd. in Nirenberg 2018, 60). In a response to a Muslim who wished to stay in Marbella after the 1485 conquest, al-Wansharīsī likewise affrmed: Dwelling among the unbelievers, other than those who are protected and humbled peoples (ahl al-dhimma wa’l-ṣaghār), is not permitted and is not allowed for so much as an hour of a day.This is because of the flth (adnās), dirt (awḍār), and religious and wordly corruption which is ever-present [among them]. (Qtd. in Verskin 2015, 16) It is worthwhile to consider how the emigration injunction might have contributed to the conception and transmission of the Ḥadīth de Yúçuf.Though we cannot ascribe a thirteenth-century faqīh’s consciousness and utilization of ṣabr to the impulses behind the Ḥadīth’s composition in subsequent centuries, the virtue’s rhetorical implications for Mudejar self-justifcation are undeniable. Joseph is the paradigmatic Muslim who exemplifes ṣabr to survive and ultimately thrive in non-Islamic lands. He and Jacob are prophetic embodiments of a virtue that the fuqahā’ strove to cultivate among their followers.The dramatization of Joseph’s story in verse provides not only moral guidance for Aragonese believers, but also a compelling defense of their life in Iberia. As a touchstone of Mudejar identity and Morisco resilience, the Ḥadīth represents the creative negotiation of the fuqahā’ as “cultural mediators” striving to edify and protect their followers.
An intertextual world of “others’ words” When a Mudejar faqīh composed the Ḥadīth and Moriscos later copied and recited it, Joseph’s story was by no means uncharted thematic material. Joseph fgures prominently in the Jewish and Christian traditions as well. His high regard among Muslims, Jews, and Christians is manifest in medieval and Renaissance Spain, where the plethora of laudatory texts leads Michael McGaha (1997, ix) to contend that the three faith communities “all claimed Joseph as their own and produced astonishing new interpretations of his saga in romance, poetry, and drama”.This heterogeneous discursive web includes sources such as the twelfth-century Jewish epic, Sefer ha-Yashar, Alfonso X’s General estoria, the fourteenth-century Hebrew Aljamiado text, Coplas de Yosef, and the sixteenth-century Aljamiado prose narrative, among others. The text’s notable intertextuality exemplifes Mikhail Bakhtin’s assertion that “Our speech, that is, all our utterances (including creative works), is flled with others’ words, varying degrees 446
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of otherness or varying degrees of ‘our-own-ness’” ([1952] 1986, 89). Indeed, “others’ words” abound in the Ḥadīth. At the same time, gestures of appropriation and adaptation infuse Mudejar and Morisco “our-own-ness”. Joseph’s nuanced portrayal in the Ḥadīth illuminates how Aragonese Muslim communities asserted their claims to this “transconfessional” prophet (Hutcheson 2012, 153). Self-expression in romance, rather than Arabic, expands the “otherness” of Mudejars’ and Moriscos’ semantic world. As Mercedes García-Arenal suggests, the mere use of the Spanish language “obligaba al que la hablaba o escribía a establecer un diálogo tácito con la cultura que rechazaba o de la que al menos se defendía” [obliged the person speaking or writing it to establish a tacit dialogue with the culture they rejected or, at least, from which they defended themself] (2010, 67). Intertextual strands intertwine to form the crux of this literary dialogue. The following discussion explores the “complexly organized chain” of discourse in which the Ḥadīth participates (Bakhtin [1952] 1986, 69). The Ḥadīth de Yúçuf infuses conventions associated with the mester de clerecía and content derived from qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā’ with vocabulary reminiscent of medieval Iberian literature. For instance, when Joseph reveals his identity to his brother Benjamin, he asks:“¿conoçesme, escudero?” [Squire, do you know me?] (BNM fol. 38v).12 His brother responds: “No, a la fe, caballero” [No, by faith I do not, knight] (BNM fol. 38v). Joseph is not only a caballero, but also the “señor de natura” [natural lord] responsible for a “condado” [earldom] (BNM fols. 24v; 23r) comprised of loyal “vasallos” [vassals] and more than one faithful “escudero” [squire] (BNM fols. 32r; 27v). In addition to feudal lexicon, emotive pleonasms such as “plazeme de coraçon” [it pleases my heart] and “llorando de sus ojos” [crying from his eyes] recall tropes characteristic of poetic texts such as the Poema de Mio Cid (BNM fols. 17v; 47v). Epithets for Joseph and his father include “la bella barba” [beautiful beard], “la barba donosa” [graceful beard], and “esa barba onrrada” [honorable beard] (BNM fols. 5r; 20r; 27r).These metonymic appellations cast the Ḥadīth’s protagonists as celebrated heroes of medieval literature. Moreover, ubiquitous mentions of Joseph’s mesura, the Cid’s quintessential virtue, pepper the Ḥadīth’s semantic landscape.The use of the term mesura fuses Joseph’s reputation of incomparable beauty—common to both the Islamic and Jewish traditions—with the word’s Cidian resonances. In addition to his self-command, mesura often refers to the prophet’s physical attributes, including his regal stature and somber composure. When Joseph learns of his kin’s arrival in Egypt, he adorns himself with exquisite jewels, luxurious perfumes, and sumptuous cloths “de oro i de seda i de fermosa labor” [of gold, of silk, and of beautiful embroidery] (BNM fol. 29r). Equipped with these accoutrements, Joseph summons his brothers for the frst time. The following stanza conveys the scene’s emphasis on visual elements:“i mandó que dentrasen a veyer su fegura / i dieronle salvaçión segun su catadura / i mandólos a sentar con bien i apostura / i maravillaronse de su buena mesura” [he commanded them to enter and observe his disposition / they greeted him as his appearance induced / he commanded them to sit kindly and with courtesy / his pleasing composure amazed them] (BNM fol. 29r).13 Joseph prepares himself for the second familial encounter with aromas “de gran mesura” [of great composure] (BNM fol. 35r). In this way, the Ḥadīth refashions the Cid’s poetic lexicon, highlighting mesura’s alternative connotations to emphasize Joseph’s exceptional physical appearance. The Ḥadīth maneuvers through both literary and religious worlds of “others’ words”. Rather than assigning doctrinal allegiances to the poem’s author, the following discussion stems from David Biale’s contention that “The issue is not infuence but interaction” (as quoted in Bernstein 2006, 1). Following the premise of “interaction” with the Christian tradition, the Ḥadīth’s protagonist exhibits qualities not only of an ideal Aragonese Muslim—capable of negotiating a foreign land with patience and trust in God—but also of a Christian, or even Christ-like, “Cid”—adept at serving an intellectually inferior king and ultimately overcoming his unjust 447
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exile and reborn to a new life after his spiritual martyrdom. The Ḥadīth seems to evoke the typological comparison between Joseph and Jesus, ubiquitous in Christian exegesis, in which the Old Testament prophet foreshadowed the Messiah. Joseph suffers the persecution of his brothers and Jesus of the Romans, both prophets confront and overcome temptation, both are falsely condemned alongside two prisoners, and both forgive their adversaries. In the Ḥadīth, Joseph pleads to God as “Padre mío” [my Father] as Jesus does throughout the Gospels (e.g., Matthew 26:39; John 8:49). After overhearing rumors about her improper advances toward Joseph, Zulaykha invites the gossipy women to a banquet in order to reveal Joseph’s unrivaled beauty. When the luminous prophet enters the dining hall, the women become so overcome by his gorgeous appearance that they mistakenly cut their hands instead of the citrus fruits on their plates. In light of their folly, the guests promptly encourage their hostess to pursue her advances with Joseph. In the Qur’ān (and some qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā’ [e.g., al-Ṭabarī 1987, 160]), the prophet calls to God—begging to enter prison rather than acquiesce to Zulaykha’s wish: “He said, ‘My Lord (rabbi)! Prison is dearer to me than that to which they call me’” (Q 12:33).The Ḥadīth includes an adaptation of this Qur’ānic verse. Rather than “My Lord”, the stanza reads:“Yuçuf cuando aquesto vido rreclamóse al Criador / dišendo, ‘Padre mío, de mí ayas dolor / son tornadas de una muchas en mi amor / pues mas quiero ser preso que no ser traydor’” [When Joseph saw this he called upon the Creator / saying,“My Father, have pity on me / one woman has become many in pursuing me / I would rather be a prisoner than a traitor”] (BNM fol. 16r). Not only is Joseph constructed as God’s son, he is also the “Lamb of God”, in accordance with his typological comparison to Jesus.The captive is compared to a lamb in captivity: “Allí jazi dieç años como fuera cordero” [There he lay for ten years as if he were a lamb] (BNM fol. 16r). Along similar lines, the Ḥadīth elaborates a sheep motif found in certain qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā’. Joseph’s brothers slaughter a sheep and use its blood to soil the prophet’s shirt; they present the blood-stained cloth to Jacob as proof of Joseph’s death (al-Kisā’ī 1997, 170).The poet extends this imagery to symbolize Joseph’s blameless victimhood. First, the conspirators visualize their brother sleeping on his side among a fock of sheep:“Pensaron que dirían al su padre onrrado / que-stando en las ovejas vino el lobo ayrado / estando durmiendo Yuçuf a su costado / vino el lobo maldito i a Yuçuf ubo matado” [They planned to say to their honorable father / that among the sheep an angry wolf came / Joseph was asleep on his side / the horrible wolf came and killed Joseph] (BNM fol. 2v). Likewise, the merchant who retrieves Joseph from the well likens his captive to a lamb:“Dišo el mercadero:‘Esto es maravella, / que ellos te an vendido como si fues ovecha [oveja]’” [The merchant said: “This is unbelievable, / they have sold you as if you were a sheep”] (BNM fol. 6r). Elements that identify Joseph with his Christian representation are inextricable from the web of discursive heteroglossia that pervades the text.Though it is possible to read Joseph’s lamb-like characterization as evocative of Christian typology, the comparison with sheep also recalls the Islamic prophet Ishmael (Ismāʾīl), Abraham’s son admired for his selfessness and submission to God (Tottoli 2017). In fact, the story of Ishmael’s sacrifce resumes the narrative thread after the Ḥadīth de Yúçuf’s abrupt end in Manuscript A (BRAH fol. 9r). Finally, we are remiss to approach the Ḥadīth’s intertextuality as an exclusive “Christian–Muslim” dialogue confned to the Iberian Middle Ages. The poem’s narrative largely derives from qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā’, a tradition with deep connections to Rabbinic commentaries of the midrash as well as their narrative elaborations, or aggadot (sing. aggadah). Indeed, Islamic stories of the prophets elaborate Qur’ānic material but also arise from “material based on Jewish scriptures and midrashic literature, as well as on Christian tradition, early Arab tales, and other sources” (Brinner in al-Tha‘labī 2003, xx). In the story of Joseph, for example, a dramatic aggadah conveys the prophet’s visit to Rachel’s grave 448
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when en route to Egypt. Upon arriving at his mother’s tomb, Joseph collapses with grief and laments his beleaguered state (BNM fols. 6v–7r; al-Tha‘labī 2003, 195; al-Kisā’ī 1997, 172).This scene is one of several that reveals the rich interactions that precede the Ḥadīth’s composition. The Hebrew Aljamiado poem entitled Coplas de Yosef represents another signifcant voice in the intertextual world of “others’ words”.Though Jews and conversos redacted works in romance with the Hebrew script, as Mudejars and Moriscos did with Arabic, facile equivalences between Hebrew and Arabic Aljamiado texts are misguided (Hamilton 2014, xiv–xvii).A “covert minority culture” did not engender the former phenomenon, nor did scribal workshops play a decisive role in its fulfllment (xiv). In some cases, Hebrew Aljamiado texts, such as Shem Tob’s Proverbios morales, arose in courtly contexts and their counterparts in romance found homes in royal and noble libraries of Castile,Aragon, Portugal, and France. Notwithstanding these broader distinctions, Girón-Negrón and Minervini (2006, 19) submit that the Coplas de Yosef share some of the social and ideological concerns manifest in Arabic Aljamiado compositions. Unlike earlier works in Hebrew Aljamiado, the Coplas constitute an affrmation of Sephardic identity and a tool of resistance against assimilation.The Coplas exist in three extant copies, of which the sixteenth-century version is most complete.14 Copied between 1533 and 1550, the manuscript is now preserved in the Biblioteca Vaticana (Neofti 48). It measures 14.2 cm by 10.5 cm, corresponding to a pocket-sized pliego de cordel as Girón-Negrón and Minervini note (21). Unlike Proverbios morales, the only extant manuscripts of the Coplas are redacted in Hebrew Aljamiado and thus imply the text’s destination for Jewish usage (17).15 As the poem’s Vatican copy and sixteenth-century fragments suggest, the Coplas circulated widely throughout the Sephardic diaspora (Girón-Negrón and Minervini 2006, 71). The content approximates the story of Joseph according to Genesis 37–50 as well as the traditions preserved in midrash and their attendant “narrative expansions” (Kugel as quoted in Bernstein 2006, 2).The Coplas belong to the poetic modality Paloma Díaz-Mas deems “clerecía rabínica” [rabbinical clerisy], a term that designates texts composed by Jewish authors in romance that are intended for recitation in liturgical settings, and inspired by the mester de clerecía (1993, 341–42). I will return to the Coplas de Yosef’s poetic form after discussing the text’s language and portrayal of Joseph. Sephardic literature associates Joseph’s story with the celebration of Purim, a festival that commemorates Esther’s heroic actions to save her people (Girón-Negrón and Minervini 2006, 71).The prophet serves as a heroic model of chastity, justice, and truthfulness. Similar to Joseph’s epic qualities in the Ḥadīth, Joseph’s construction in the Coplas utilizes a lexicon reminiscent of the Poema de Mio Cid’s epic hero.“Yosef ” also “llorava de los ojos” [cried from his eyes] during key moments of the action while his “cavalleros” engaged in ritual professions of loyalty (147; 157; 167; 181). The editors signal the epithets employed to describe various characters, such as “Yehudah el fuerte” [Judah the strong], “Ya’aqob el onrado” [Jacob the honorable], and “el sabio Yosef ” [the wise Joseph] (63).The tenuous distinction between discursive “otherness” and “our-own-ness” becomes more unstable in light of Girón-Negrón and Minervini’s compelling analysis of the poem’s protagonist.They contend that Joseph exudes mesura, the Cidian quality that denotes moderation, prudence, and noble resignation. Lines such as “Luego por mesura jurava Yosef ” [by his prudence Joseph pledged], contribute to Joseph’s Cid-like portrayal in the Coplas as a “dechado de virtudes caballerescas, un ‘Cid hebreo’” [model of chivalric virtues, a “Jewish Cid”] (185; 79). The Ḥadīth and the Coplas’s evocations of Iberian epic conventions are unsurprising given the heroic nature of Joseph’s life and the literary milieu the authors inhabited. The Poema de Mio Cid celebrates a Christian hero, yet Iberian Muslims and Jews nonetheless adapt its literary modes and vocabulary to memorialize their own beloved lodestars. Josephine-Cidian avatars in 449
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both Aljamiado poems reiterate Biale’s subordination of “infuence” to “interaction”.When one focuses on the latter, literary analyses circumvent unproductive equivalences and attributions. The following section explores the ways in which seemingly tacit intertextuality poses larger implications for the study of medieval Iberian literature. In particular, a critical return to both Aljamiado poems’ strophic forms challenges inherited presumptions about the mester de clerecía.
“Por la quaderna vía”: transconfessional expression in medieval and early modern Iberia Reconsidering the Ḥadīth’s form requires a return to the manuscripts themselves. The codices’ “production registers” offer critical insight into the copyists’ attitudes toward the text.16 Compared to Manuscript A, Manuscript B’s single scribe appears to devote much more care to his redaction; he displays painstaking effort to maintain the aesthetic regularity of cuaderna vía. The copyist attempts to create justifed columns by extending letters or, alternatively, sketching a mark to align the stanza (BNM fol. 22v). At times, the scribe forgets to indent a verse and compensates by squeezing two verses into one line of text or, alternatively, crossing out the partial verse and recopying it below (BNM fols. 15r; 7r). In another instance, the copyist begins a new quatrain without leaving a space between stanzas (BNM fol. 25r). Such examples suggest the possibility that he copied from a text redacted without clearly marked quatrains—perhaps in prose, as we see in Manuscript A’s layout. Manuscript B’s mise en page recalls certain manuscripts associated with the mester de clerecía. The scribe of a fourteenth-century copy of Berceo’s Milagros de Nuestra Señora completes each verse with a straight line in order to justify the text and underscore its impression of regularity (BRAH Archivo Digital).17 A pilcrow, or calderón, divides each quatrain. This effect underlines the poem’s use of cuaderna vía. Likewise, the scribe of Manuscript S, a ffteenth-century copy of the Libro del Arcipreste associated with the University of Salamanca, utilizes a red pilcrow to call attention to each four-verse stanza. Alfonso de Paradinas divides each quatrain with a space to clearly demarcate stanzas of cuaderna vía. Such redactions suggest the manuscripts were used for individual reading and glossing, perhaps destined for a wealthy patron’s library in the case of the Milagros. Indeed, not all works of mester de clerecía highlight their strophic form’s symmetrical pattern. For instance, Manuscript G (Gayoso) of the Libro del Arcipreste presents a continuous stream of text that could serve a performer as a memory cue, but might present an obstacle for a silent reader.Thus, Manuscript A of the Ḥadīth refects the text’s performative disposition while Manuscript B’s fastidious imitation of readerly copies indicates its destination as prized possession of a prestigious patron. The conscious perpetuation of cuaderna vía in Manuscript B prompts the question: why would a sixteenth-century copyist go to such lengths to ensure the manuscript’s physical resemblance to a strophic form associated with thirteenth-century Christian poetry? The scribe’s diligent attempts to emulate the aesthetic display of cuaderna vía recalls anthropologists Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs’s theory of genre.“Decontextualizing” a genre from one social context (be it medieval Christian manuscripts or the Islamic storytelling tradition), inevitably entails a process of “recontextualization” in another.The ability to decontextualize and recontextualize genres engenders critical implications for social contexts: “by invoking a particular genre, producers of discourse assert (tacitly or explicitly) that they possess the authority needed to decontextualize discourse that bears these historical and social connections and to recontextualize it in the current discursive setting” (Bauman and Briggs 1992, 148).The scribe of Manuscript B’s assiduous effort to imitate the visual effects of mester de clerecía poetry recontextualizes the 450
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mode’s prestige in aljamía.Transmuted to a Morisco setting, cuaderna vía’s overtones of erudition shroud the Ḥadīth’s message. Recontextualizing Christian manuscript layout is also an assertion of authority.Vincent Barletta (2005, 153) contends that use of cuaderna vía to transmit Islamic narrative enabled Aragonese Moriscos to value unique conceptions of the past:“These local theories of the past, neither fully Islamic nor Hispano-Christian, operate principally as a means of carving out a cultural niche for the Moriscos as Muslims dwelling in a nation-state openly hostile to them”.As Barletta explains, this “niche” is not diametrically opposed to a Christian “Other”. Barletta’s compelling analysis echoes Kathryn Miller’s (2008, 53) conclusion regarding Mudejar fuqahā’, whose “leadership drew its strength and ability to maintain Islam both from its community’s strong integration in the Christian environment and from its own carefully cultivated distance from it”. Yet Mudejars and Moriscos were not the only ones who decontextualized cuaderna vía after its usage waned. In fact, the metric pattern of the Coplas de Yosef resembles “cuaderna vía anómala: los versos son mayoritariamente alejandrinos … y se agrupan en estrofas de cuatro” [anomalous cuaderna vía: most verses are Alexandrine … and grouped in stanzas of four] yet the rhyme differs in that “los tres primeros versos son monorrimos, y el cuarto presenta en todos los casos vuelta en Yoçef” [the frst three verses share the same rhyme, and the fourth always ends with Yoçef] (Díaz-Mas 2001, 36).18 The innovation approximates the aural effect of cuaderna vía’s consonant rhyme but recalls the medieval Hebrew and Arabic strophic muwaššaḥāt (Girón-Negrón and Minervini 2006, 49; 51). Experimentation with the mester de clerecía’s poetic form in the Coplas de Yosef suggests that Jewish and later Converso poets were also attracted to its prestigious undertones (Girón-Negrón and Minervini 2006, 23). Poetic expression “por la quaderna vía” [through four-verse stanzas] in both Aljamiado poems obliges us to reassess the ethical and linguistic ideologies that informed the mester de clerecía (Alexandre [1988] 2013, 131). Cuaderna vía’s “curso rimado” [rhyming course] was used in clerical settings to indoctrinate in the vernacular (Alexandre [1988] 2013, 131). Not only did works of the mester de clerecía intend to showcase intellectual prowess and distinguish themselves from those of “joglaría” [troubadour poetry], they also aimed to communicate crucial knowledge to a public illiterate in Latin (Alexandre [1988] 2013, 130. Francisco Rico (1985, 4) attributes the nascent thirteenth-century poetic phenomenon to “un linaje de intelectuales que ahora sienten con creciente intensidad el deseo o conveniencia de difundir en vulgar las riquezas de la cultura latina” [a lineage of intellectuals who now feel with increasing intensity the desire or convenience to diffuse the richness of Latin culture in the common language].The decision to instruct in the vernacular does not compromise the erudition or sophistication of works of the mester de clerecía. Rather, such texts reveal their authors’ ethical commitment to sharing worthwhile knowledge. The Coplas de Yosef and the Ḥadīth demonstrate similar concerns.The former responded to “un fn primordialmente didáctico-religioso: acercar a los sefardíes al rico acervo de la tradición bíblica y rabínica en su vernáculo románico” [a primarily religio-didactic ends: to bring the rich heritage of biblical and rabbinical traditions to Sephardic Jews in the vernacular] (GirónNegrón and Minervini 2006, 71). The careful cultivation of Sephardic heritage is intricately linked to instruction in the vernacular. Likewise, the Mudejar and Morisco fuqahā’ surely felt with “growing intensity” the necessity to communicate the tenets of their faith in the vernacular, for reasons discussed previously.As David Nirenberg explains: The increasing use of Aljamiado has often been cited as a sign of cultural decline, a consequence of the erosion of Arabic. But it could equally well be studied as an
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example of the expansion of Islamic learning among Mudejars as of its contraction. The fact that the peculiar conditions of Christian domination on the Iberian Peninsula made it possible for Muslims to justify an extensive practice of glossing and translation may have meant that knowledge which was increasingly restricted to the “learned class”, the ulama, in more central Islamic lands penetrated further into the “popular” or “ignorant” classes in the peninsula. (2014, 31) Considering Aljamiado manuscripts as an “expansion” of knowledge resonates with the ethical preoccupations that subtend works of the mester de clerecía: clerics intent upon sharing knowledge rather than preserving it among a coterie of intellectuals. In this way, one could argue that the mester de clerecía and the phenomenon of Aljamiado itself refect related concerns, though scholarship tends to celebrate the former as a display of erudition and frame the latter as a lamentable decline. Aljamiado compositions that utilize cuaderna vía capitalize on the didactic and justifcatory functions of its associated poetic mode. The unforgiving rhyme scheme and regular alejandrino verses seem to counteract the “lowering” of a sacred language to a vernacular. Cuaderna vía bestows legitimacy on a text whose linguistic expression otherwise might engender its derision. With respect to the Ḥadīth de Yúçuf in particular,“recentered” cuaderna vía entails more than its didactic function, prestigious value, and justifcation for using the vernacular. As Bauman and Briggs recommend, “we must now determine what the recontextualized text brings with it from its earlier context(s) and what emergent form, function, and meaning it is given as it is recentered” (1990, 74–75). By redacting the story of Joseph in cuaderna vía, especially with Manuscript B’s physical layout, Aragonese Muslims elevate Joseph to the status of the Virgin Mary, Alexander the Great, and other eminent fgures whose lives were famously celebrated with this poetic form. Echoing McGaha (1997), what better way to “claim” Joseph than by enshrining his fgure to these heights? In fact, the Ḥadīth is not the only Aljamiado text that experiments with cuaderna vía.Various poems in praise of Muhammad and Allah employ this strophic form, including the Poema en alabanza de Mahoma, Alẖuṭba de Pascua de Ramaḍān, and the Poema en alabança ad-Allah (Fuente Cornejo 2000, 91). Eduardo Saavedra (1878) frst indicated direct correspondences between the Ḥadīth’s opening stanza, that of Berceo’s Vida de Santo Domingo de Silos (Book III), and the Poema en alabanza de Mahoma (see Fuente Cornejo 2000, 20). Both Aljamiado poems utilize adjectives applied to Santo Domingo and to the “Christian” God in order to praise the oneness and goodness of the “Islamic” God, recasting Dios as Allah. The Vida de Santo Domingo begins: “En el su sancto nomme, ca es Dios verdadero, / Et de su Sancto Domingo confessor derechero” [In His holy name, He is the true God / and of Saint Domingo His just confessor] while the Ḥadīth offers instead, “Loamiento ad Allah, el alto y es y verdadero, / onrrado y complido, señor dereiturero” [Praise to Allah, He is the mighty and the true / honorable and perfect, the just Lord], and the praise poem conveys similarly: “Las loores son aḏa Allah, el-alto, verḏaḏero, / onraḏo i cumplido, Señor muy derechero” [Praise be to Allah, He is the mighty and the true / honorable and perfect, the most just Lord] (as quoted in Fuente Cornejo 2000, 20). Not only do the poems “recenter” cuaderna vía within an Aljamiado context, they explicitly repurpose praise of Christian divinity and sainthood as a pious invocation of Allah.The shared poetic form facilitates this perspicacious act of claiming. In conclusion, Bauman and Briggs offer the succinct reminder: “Texts both shape and are shaped by the situational contexts in which they are produced” (1990, 76).The Ḥadīth de Yúçuf illuminates the intertextual discursive world of Mudejar and Morisco communities. Yet it 452
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also cultivates a unique “claim” to Joseph, no longer conceived of as a “religious boundary”, but rather, as a touchstone of cultural pride and a beacon of hope (Remensnyder 2011, 546). Considered “too Muslim” in Spain yet “too Christian” for dār al-islām, Aragonese fuqahā’ made sense of this paradox by appealing to the, in Bakhtinian terms, “authoritative utterances” that constituted their complex social reality ([1952] 1986, 88). Innovations of literary genres in the Ḥadīth enabled the fuqahā’ to shape their community’s consciousness and to refract Joseph’s virtues onto their fock.The text displays an ingenious negotiation of a world of “others’ words” and, in doing so, compels us to reconsider the preconceived assumptions we carry about that world and the meaning of “others’ words” in it. In particular, the Coplas de Yosef illuminates the complexities of the Ḥadīth’s discursive chain. When examined vis-à-vis the moralistic and literary mentalities that underlie their adapted strophic form, Aljamiado texts challenge canonical expectations and generic taxonomies. Employed by Muslims, Jews, and Christians, cuaderna vía responds to transconfessional “Iberian” motivations rather than “Christian” ones. Linguistic and ethical concerns inspire texts redacted “por la cuaderna vía”; distinct yet comparable anxieties inform Aljamiado compositions. By recognizing and refecting on such parallels, one glimpses the rich intertextual interactions of medieval Iberian literature. Appreciating Aljamiado poetry in terms of its seemingly irreconcilable nuances foregrounds the texts’ possibilities. A shift in focus, from our own preoccupations to the texts themselves, offers a fruitful reconsideration of what scholarship deems “peripheral” and “central”.A return to the former facilitates a critical examination of the latter, and, inevitably, of ourselves.
Notes 1 I will refer to the text as the Ḥadīth and to the protagonist as Joseph. (The Joseph of the text is the prophet whose story appears in the twelfth chapter (su¯rah) of the Qur’ān and in Genesis 37–50.) All transliterations and English translations are my own. I provide the corresponding manuscript foliation with reference to Manuscript A as (BRAH) and Manuscript B as (BNM). 2 Gregory Hutcheson’s insightful comments during a Kalamazoo panel in 2017 as well as subsequent correspondence with him elucidated the term “transconfessional”.The title of Bauman’s monograph (2004) derives from Bakhtin’s assertion that speech is flled with “others’ words”: A World of Others’ Words: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Intertextuality. 3 The extant corpus of Hebrew Aljamiado texts refects a distinct social and religious milieu.The differences between Arabic and Hebrew Aljamiado will be addressed below. 4 Fuqahā’ is the plural form of faqīh, from which the Spanish word alfaquí is derived. It is possible that Morisco alfaquíes also rendered works into romance (Castilla 2010, 34). Both Mudejar and Morisco alfaquíes took charge of indoctrinating their communities through the diffusion of Aljamiado texts, which were often read aloud among small gatherings of believers (Cardaillac [1979] 2004, 71–2; Barletta 2005, 139). 5 The codex was found in 1864 in a cave near Morés (Aragon), bundled with rusted frearms. 6 I am grateful to Juan Carlos Villaverde Amieva for calling my attention to two additional folios of the poem, which he has edited in a forthcoming publication. 7 All English quotes come from The Study Qur’an (2015). 8 The copyist of Manuscript A clearly writes then crosses out the adjective “alto” (see Barletta 2005, 147–48).All punctuation and emphasis are my addition. 9 DuBois (1986, 314) refers to Victor Turner’s defnition of ritual as “prescribed formal behavior for occasions not given over to technological routine, having reference to beliefs in mystical beings or powers.” Features of speech prevalent in circumstances in which ritual and language intersect include archaic elements, euphemistic circumlocution, grammatical parallelism, and mediation (314–19).Though the Ḥadīth does not necessarily fulfll these categories, the elucidation of “Prime” and “Proximate” is nonetheless apposite to the current discussion. 10 The extra “al” could be a “false start” for Allah (see Johnson 1974, 38). 11 Numerous Aljamiado-Morisco texts invoke Joseph as a model of forbearance when faced with unjust treatment. Muhammad de Vera’s Compendio islámico cites Joseph as an example of a Muslim who contin-
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12 13 14 15 16
17 18
ued to perform ritual prayers despite captivity (qtd. in Suárez García 2010, 545). Muhammad Rabadán highlights Joseph’s ability to carry out ablutions without water in his Discurso de la Luz (Ms. Esp. 251 BNP, fol. 67v). Hawkins (1988) analyzes the concept of suffering in a sixteenth-century Aljamiado codex (BNM 4953) but does not mention ṣabr. The foliation in BNM lists fol. 20r twice. Thus, fol. 38v is actually fol. 39v. I retain the manuscript’s (erroneous) foliation to aid the reader. McGaha’s translation reads:“He ordered them to enter and to look upon his face, / while appropriate greetings they struggled to trace. / Politely then he seated each one in his place. / They were amazed by this kindness and grace” (260). For an extensive description of the three extant manuscripts and a synopsis of recently discovered additional sixteenth-century fragments of the poem, see Girón-Negrón and Minervini 2006, 13–26. The manuscript entered the bibliographic holdings of Rome’s Casa dei Catecumeni in 1550. Due to the text’s calligraphy style, Girón-Negrón and Minervini surmise that a Spanish converso commissioned an Italian scribe to make the copy (2006, 25). In his discussion of the Libro del Arcipreste’s manuscript context, Dagenais designates the “design” or “production” register as “the factors that come into play in placing the text physically on the manuscript page: the layout of lyrics, the separation of stanzas … the leaving of space for initials and their rubrication, the scribe’s attempt to conform to a particular style sheet, signs used to guide binders, and running titles” (1994, 144–45). www.rae.es/sites/default/fles/Archivo_de_la_BCRAE_Milagros_de_Nuestra_Senora_Manuscrito_d e_la_RAE_web.pdf See McGaha (1997, 282) for a comparison of the meters of the Ḥadīth and Coplas.
References Bakhtin, M.M. [1952] 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist.Translated by Vern W. McGee.Austin: University of Texas Press. Barletta,Vincent. 2005. Covert Gestures: Crypto-Islamic Literature as Cultural Practice in Early Modern Spain. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Barletta, Vincent. 2006. “The Aljamiado ‘Sacrifce of Ishmael’: Genre, Power, and Narrative Performance”. Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 40: 513–536. Bauman, Richard. 2004. A World of Others’ Words: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Intertextuality. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Bauman, Richard and Charles Briggs. 1990.“Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life”. Annual Review of Anthropology 19: 59–88. Bauman, Richard and Charles Briggs. 1992.“Genre, Intertextuality, and Social Power”. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology: 131–172. de Berceo, Gonzalo. 1985. Milagros de Nuestra Señora. Edited by Michael Gerli. Madrid: Cátedra. Bernstein, Marc S. 2006. Stories of Joseph: Narrative Migrations between Judaism and Islam. Detroit:Wayne State University Press. Cardaillac, Louis. [1979] 2004. Moriscos y cristianos: Un enfrentamiento polémico (1492–1640). Translated by Mercedes García-Arenal. Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica. de Castilla, Nuria. 2010. Una biblioteca morisca entre dos tapas. Zaragoza: Instituto de Estudios Islámicos y del Oriente Próximo. Dagenais, John. 1994. The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the Libro de Buen Amor. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Díaz-Mas, Paloma. 1993. “Un género casi perdido de la poesía castellana medieval: La clerecía rabínica”. Boletín de la Real Academia Española 73 (CCLIX). Madrid: Imprenta Aguirre. Díaz-Mas, Paloma. 2001. “Poesía medieval judía”. In Judíos en la literatura española, coordinated by Iacob M. Hassán and Ricardo Izquierdo Benito, 29–55. Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha. DuBois, John. 1986.“Self-Evidence and Ritual Speech”. In Evidentiality:The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology, edited by Wallace Chafe and Johanna Nichols, 313–336. Norwood:Ablex Publishing Corporation. Estébanez Calderón, Serafín. 1955. “Discurso leído en la apertura de la cátedra de árabe del Ateneo de Madrid”. In Biblioteca de autores españoles: desde la formación del lenguaje hasta nuestros días: obras completas de
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The Ḥadīth de Yúçuf D. Serafn Estebanez Calderon.Vol. II, edited by Jorge Campos, 303–311. Real Academia de la Historia. Madrid: Ediciones Atlas. Frenk, Margit. 1980. “Lectores y oidores: La difusión oral de la literatura en el Siglo de Oro”. In Actas del séptimo congreso internacional de hispanistas, edited by Giuseppe Bellini, 101–123. Roma: Bulzoni. Fuente Cornejo, Toribio. 2000. Poesía religiosa aljamiado-morisca. Madrid: Fundación Ramón Menéndez Pidal. García-Arenal, Mercedes. 2010. “La Inquisición y los libros de los moriscos”. In Memoria de los moriscos: Escritos y relatos de una diáspora cultural, coordinated by Alfredo Mateos Paramio and Juan Carlos Villaverde Amieva, 57–71. Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales (SECC). Gerli, E. Michael. 2016. Reading, Performing and Imagining the Libro del Arcipreste. Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, UNC. Girón-Negrón, Luis, and Laura Minervini. 2006. Las Coplas de Yosef: Entre la Biblia y el Midrash en la poesía judeoespañola. Madrid: Editorial Gredos. Hamilton, Michelle. 2014. Beyond Faith: Belief, Morality, and Memory in a Fifteenth-Century Judeo-Iberian Manuscript. Leiden: Brill. Harvey, L.P. 2005. Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hawkins, John P. 1988.“A Morisco Philosophy of Suffering:An Anthropological Analysis of an Aljamiado Text”. The Maghreb Review 13 (3–4): 199–217. Hegyi, Ottmar. 1985. “Una variante islámica del español: La literature aljamiada”. In Homenaje a Álvaro Galmés de Fuentes, 647–656. Oviedo-Madrid: Universidad de Oviedo-Gredos. Hutcheson, Gregory S. 2012.“Islamic Traces in the Cancionero de Baena”. La Corónica 41 (1): 149–180. Johnson, William W. 1974. The Poema de José: A Transcription and Comparison of the Extant Manuscripts. University of Mississippi: Romance Monographs. Jones, Linda. 2004. “The Boundaries of Sin and Communal Identity: Muslim and Christian Preaching and the Transmission of Cultural Identity in Medieval Iberia and the Maghreb (Twelfth to Fifteenth Centuries)”. PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara. Jones, Linda. The Power of Oratory in the Medieval Muslim World. New York: Cambridge University Press. al-Kisā’ī, Muḥammad ibn ‘Abd Allāh. 1997. Tales of the Prophets (Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā′). Translated by Wheeler M. Thackston Jr. Chicago: Great Books of the Islamic World. Klar, Marianna. 2006.“Stories of the Prophets”. In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Qur’ān, edited by Andrew Rippin and Jawid Mojaddedi, 338–349. Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing. Klenk, Ursula. 1972. La Leyenda de Yusuf: Ein Aljamiadotext. Tu¨bingen: Beihfte Zur Zeitschrift Fu¨r Romanische Philologie. Libro de Alexandre. [1988] 2013. Edited by Jesús Cañas. 6th Edition. Madrid: Cátedra. López-Baralt, Luce. 2009. La literatura secreta de los últimos musulmanes en España. Madrid: Editorial Trotta. López-Morillas, Consuelo. 1995. “Language and Identity in Late Spanish Islam”. Hispanic Review 63: 193–210. McGaha, Michael. 1997. Coat of Many Cultures: The Story of Joseph in Spanish Literature, 1200–1492. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society. Miller, Kathryn A. 2008. Guardians of Islam: Religious Authority and Muslim Communities of Late Medieval Spain. New York: Columbia University Press. Montaner Frutos, Alberto. 1993. “El auge de la literatura aljamiada en Aragón”. In II Curso sobre Lengua y Literatura en Aragón (Siglos de Oro), edited by Aurora Egido Martínez, Tomás Buesa Oliver, José María Enguita Utrilla, 31–61. Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico. Morf, Heinrich. 1883. El poema de José, nach der Handschrift der Madrider Nationalbibliothek. Leipzig: Druck Von W. Drugulin. Nirenberg, David. 2014. Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nirenberg, David. 2018. “Muslims in Christian Iberia, 1000–1526:Varieties of Mudejar Experience”. In The Medieval World. 2nd edition., edited by Peter Linehan, Janet L. Nelson, and Marios Costambeys, 55–71. New York: Routledge. Pidal, Ramón Menéndez. 1952. Poema de Yúçuf: Materiales para su estudio. Granada: Colección Filológica de la Universidad de Granada. Remensnyder,Amy G. 2011.“Beyond Muslim and Christian:The Moriscos’ Marian Scriptures”. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 41 (3): 545–576. Rico, Francisco. 1985.“La clerecía del mester”. Hispanic Review 53 (1): 1–23.
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Andrea Pauw Saavedra, Eduardo D. 1878. Discursos Leídos ante la Real Academia Española en la Recepción pública. Madrid: Compañía de impresores y libreros. Schmitz, Michael. 1901.“Über das altspanische Poema de José”. Romanische Forschungen 11 (2): 315–411. The Study Qur′an. 2015. Edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, et al. New York: HarperCollins. al-Ṭabarī, The History of al-Ṭabarī (Ta’rīkh al-rusul wa’l mulu¯k). 1987. Prophets and Patriarchs. Vol II. Translated and annotated by William M. Brinner.Albany: State University of New York Press. al-Tha‘labī, Abu¯ Isḥāq Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm. 2003. “Arā’is al-majālis fī qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā” or “Lives of the Prophets”. Translated and annotated by William M. Brinner. Leiden: Brill. Thompson, Billy Bussell. 1989.“La poesía aljamiada y el mester de clerecía: El Poema de José (Yúçuf) y el Poema en Alabanza de Mahoma”. In Literatura hispánica, reyes católicos y descubrimiento, edited by Manuel Criado de Val, 164–170. Barcelona: PPU. Ticknor, George. 1927. Letters to Pascual de Gayangos. Edited by C.L. Penney. New York: Hispanic Society of America. Tottoli, Robert. 1998.“The Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā’ of Ibn Muṭarrif al-Ṭarafī (d. 454/1062): Stories of the Prophets from Al-Andalus”. Al-Qantara 19(1): 131–160. Tottoli, Robert. 2017.“Ismael”. In Encyclopedia of Islam, 3rd edition, edited by Kate Fleet, Gudrum Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, Everett Rowson. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15733912_ei3_COM_32 559. Verskin,Alan. 2015. Islamic Law and the Crisis of the Reconquista:The Debate on the Status of Muslim Communities in Christendom. Leiden: Brill. Viguera, María Jesús. 1990. “Introducción”. In Relatos píos y profanos del manuscrito aljamiado de Urrea de Jalón, edited by Federico Corriente Córdoba, 7–51. Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico. Wehr, Hans. [1979] 2004. The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic. 4th ed. Edited by J.M. Cowan. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. Weiss, Julian. 2006. The “mester de clerecía”. Intellectuals and Ideologies in Thirteenth-century Castile.Woodbridge: Tamesis. Wensinck, A.J. 2012.“Sabr”. In Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd edition, edited by P. Bearman et al. http://dx.doi .org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_6379. Wiegers, Gerard. 1994. Islamic Literature in Spanish and Aljamiado:Yça of Segovia (Fl. 1450), His Antecedents and Successors. Leiden: E.J. Brill.
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29 EXTEMPORIZING A TRANSLATION OF THE ARABIC INTO CASTILIAN Translation and the raciolinguistic logic of medieval Iberia S.J. Pearce1
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s novel El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, is a classic work in the sense defned by Italo Calvino in a 1986 essay on literary classics. One of the marks of such a work, according to Calvino, is that readers feel as if they have already read it. By the time they actually sit down to open the book they already know the plot and the characters and even the sentiment it is likely to provoke in them. Through its many transformations in modern and contemporary culture and the wide reach of its translations into languages other than its original Castilian, Don Quijote has become a part of a shared culture: even readers who have not approached the novel may have seen the musical Man of La Mancha or the pair of Terry Gilliam flms Lost in La Mancha and The Man Who Killed Don Quixote; may know of Orson Welles’ epic and appropriate failure to make a flm version of the novel; may have a poster of Pablo Picasso’s famous pen-and-ink silhouette framed in their offces; or perhaps just use the phrase “tilting at windmills” in their everyday speech. Don Quijote is a book known to a reader who is not yet its reader. It is a read book even unread. However, in leaving the book known but unread (translated into a cultural phenomenon from an incomplete text), most readers who know the book fnd themselves unfamiliar with perhaps the most interesting characters in the novel: the Arab writer and Morisco translator whose presence transforms the story from a child’s tale about a mad knight errant or a simple satire of the chivalric romance into a sophisticated commentary on the nature of literature and the role that translation plays in the creation of the most cherished, best-known texts, even those that ultimately come to be emblems of their target language, culture, and nation (Bistué 2015; and López Baralt 1999). In other words, Don Quijote is fundamentally a novel about literary translation in all the languages of medieval Iberia, even though that is not how most readers come to know it. The aspects of translation that fgure in Don Quijote refect the historical backdrop against which the novel was written: late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century diplomatic and 457
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military conficts between Spain and the Ottoman empire, debates within Spain about the status of converted Muslims known as Moriscos, their customs, languages, blood, and the impact upon these on the formation of an incipient Spanish national identity. Eric Graf goes as far as to describe the novel as “a multicultural manifesto on behalf of the Moriscos of Southern Spain” (Graf 1999, 69). And as in the historical reality, race and language are closely connected with translation as a way in which individuals could transgress both racial and linguistic categories. Current tendencies within linguistic research offer a path toward helping to understand this nexus and the role of translation as a bridge both in writing in Castilian and in the Aljamiado– Morisco variety of Ibero–Romance language: the concepts of raciolinguistics and translanguaging help us to understand Aljamiado–Morisco as a linguistic variety per se and as a coherent way of behaving in order to communicate both ideas and identity.2 Because of its emphasis on the socially constructed nature of the boundaries between languages it is also an approach that invites the consideration of other socially fashioned traits, such as race.Within the novel, translation and language help to illuminate these issues; and outside of it, from the perspective of the historical backdrop refected in the novel, writing by and about Moriscos allows two crucial topics, race and religion, through the lenses of literature and language in translation, raising questions about what it means to be medieval, modern, and Spanish and about the scope of translation as a practice itself.
The racial logic of language For the purposes of this discussion, I am taking for granted three principles. First, that the concept of race is, at its core, a system of categorization used for identifying and managing human difference: it is the “use of ideas about the biological reproduction of somatic and behavioral traits in order to create and legitimate hierarchies and discriminations” (Nirenberg 2013, 260). Second, that as a system of intersecting social hierarchies and exercises of state power, race was an operative category during the late medieval and early modern periods in Spain just as it is in the modern and contemporary ones; this idea is uncontroversial for the early modern Spanish context following the advent of the Inquisition with its imbrication of biology, classifcation, and state systems of power. However, it is imperative to note that for pre-Inquisition Spain, while there is doubtless a focus on genealogy, lineage, and the relative status of Arab and non-Arab Muslims and Jews, scholars are not yet in agreement about whether race is, in fact, the term or the framework in which to discuss the development of those ideas and their social consequences. And third, religion is a category that can be and often is treated as a racial one. Insofar as racial difference is identifed not only on the basis of phenotypical characteristics but also on the basis of other reproducible traits, religion can be and is one of those characteristics. Theodore Vial opens his monograph, Modern Religion, Modern Race, with the declaration that “race and religion are conjoined twins” (Vial 2006, 1) which he goes on by virtue of the joint history of those two categories both prior to and during the Enlightenment period, when modern defnitions and conceptions of those categories begin to take shape. Racial categories, and therefore race itself, are made up by the observations of difference, the sense of uncanniness those observations can yield, and the transformation of that uncanniness into a social or political order; their power is rendered bodily and derives from accumulating belief in the transmissibility and reproducibility of those traits within communities. Religion as a constitutive part of race in the medieval and early modern Iberian world has long been clear. In fact, within some of the earliest uses of the term raza—the Spanish word cognate with the English race—in the Iberian Peninsula,“the ‘Jewishness’ of the defects encoded in ‘raza’ soon became obvious” (Nirenberg 2013, 250), as in Sebastián Covarrubias’ 458
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canonical defnition: Raza refers to “the caste of purebred horses, those that are marked with an iron brand so they can be recognized … raza, in human lineage, is a bad trait, like having some Jewish or Moorish raza” (Corominas, ##; see also Covarrubias 1998, 494).3 This defnition is highly revealing: race is frst and foremost a way of classifying livestock, but it is not so obvious to the observer that it must be accentuated with a visible brand. But then, when it is a trait applied to human beings, for a person to have a race, as opposed to not being so marked, is to have a bad part. The specifc examples of races given in this defnition are the Moorish and Jewish ones; this defnition refects the notions of blood purity that grew up in and around the advent of the Inquisition and its ultimate separation from the Vatican over disputes related to those very ideas (Lewis 2012, 102–3). In fact, this relationship between race and religion then persisted through the modern era and spread from Spain into the rest of Europe and the world: the very term racism itself originally comprised religious discrimination, describing religiously based discriminatory laws and policies in the context of Germany in the late 1930s, associating religious characteristics with a racial identity (Rattansi 2007, 4). In addition to the blood-transmissibility of Judaism accepted by the Spanish Inquisition Islam, too, was a religious marker of otherness conjoined intellectually and socially to race in late medieval and early modern Spain. François Soyer has pointed out that studies of Islamophobia and the racialization of Islam, especially in contemporary European contexts, have tended to refer back to images created of the Saracen or Moor as the quintessential, racialized Muslim other; however, he argues that it is worth looking at the historical populations of Muslims in medieval and early modern Spain living under Christian rule in Europe as a more suitable background against which to explore the racialization and othering of Muslims in Europe than are the literary imaginings of people of the early modern world who were themselves doing the racial categorizing (Soyer 2013, 16). In other words, religious difference is often one of the traits subsumed by the category of race (Garner and Selod 2015; Kaplan 2003; Sheth 2017; and Uddin 2019). Major shifts in the study of languages in their social and cultural contexts help to show that not only are race and religion mutually constitutive but that those two categories, and language itself, are among the most observable and most important types of human difference. One of the really important—but also very underplayed—theoretical shifts regarding the study of religious minority groups in the Islamicate world, including Spain and North Africa, has been the shift from talking about the languages spoken in these communities as ethnolects toward talking about them as religiolects.The trouble with the term ethnolect, that is, a language particular to an ethnic group, is the same as the trouble with the term ethnicity itself: that it tends to exoticize, defne a community’s mythology from without, and generally has a less stable meaning than some of the other terminological choices we could make. Benjamin Hary explains the utility of the term religiolect and its superiority to the term ethnolect: The term “ethnic” is very problematic and has undergone several changes in meaning. In popular usage its meaning is close to “racial”, but the academic usage is very different … The term religiolect avoids the messiness of “ethnicity” and relates directly to the religious backgrounds of people who use this language variety.A religiolect is thus a language variety with its own history and development, which is used by a religious community. (Hary 2009, 12) In other words, while ethnicity can still be a useful concept as it is utilized as a term of art by historians and anthropologists, particularly in exploring the local distinctions within the Islamic 459
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world where state power is not a factor, by and large it serves to fatten out distinctions and divorce observed difference from its social consequences. And so for languages such as Judaeo– Arabic and Christian Arabic, both of which are described linguistically as being part of the “Middle Arabic” dialect bundle, linguists have more recently shifted toward the emphasis on the place of these languages within the religio-cultural life of their communities, and have begun to refer to them as religiolects rather than ethnolects, in order to newly characterize the community of speakers itself as a religiously unifed entity rather than an ethnic group and to more accurately refect the kinds of impacts that community life has upon the development of those languages—principally religious rather than “ethnic”—regardless of how that group’s identifying traits are categorized from the outside. More recently within the broader feld of linguistics—in other words, not particular to Arabic or to the languages of Spain, the Mediterranean, or the Islamic world—another shift is beginning to take place in how scholars think about the relationship between language and community identity seen from both within and without. In other words, there is now a greater interest than there has been in the past in enumerating and analyzing the ways in which language use and linguistic self-defnition help to create and reinforce categories of racial difference (Alim, 6). This approach is referred to as raciolinguistics and the languages studied as raciolects. Raciolinguistic analysis recognizes that as some of the most important markers of culture, race, and language jointly help to create categories of human difference; it does not simply use one as an analytic lens for the other, as scholarship prior to the last decade has tended to do. Selected goals of this approach include analyzing race and language as connected social phenomena; taking an intersectional approach to language within its socio-cultural context; comparative studies of ethnoracial contexts; emphasizing processes of racialization; and the joint theorization of race through the lens of language and of language through the lens of race (Alim; and Shohat and Stam 2012). In late medieval and early modern Spain, language can be a marker of race and can help shape perceptions of racial difference, while at the same time racial difference can shape perceptions of and choices about language use; translators act as the go-betweens, not only linguistically but as racial intermediaries.
Moriscos between religions, races, and languages Because racialized categorization of religious groups is such a signifcant mode of marking identity in the case of Spain, the space between these two linguistic approaches—the religiolinguistic and the raciolinguistic—is an important interpretive cipher for late medieval literature of racialized authors and subjects. Language—notably language choice and the representation of speech—can be an important factor in distinguishing selected religious and racial groups from others, both by people who see themselves as part of an in-group and by people who want to defne others; Samy Alim observes that “language is often overlooked as one of the most important cultural means that we have for distinguishing ourselves from others” (Alim, 5). In the case of medieval Spain it is a crucial means for doing just that. Nicholas Jones has demonstrated that both the speech and the representation of the speech of Black Africans in early modern Castile was a way to assert agency and subvert racial tropes (Jones 2019, 18–26).This is likewise true for the case of the literature produced in Morisco communities and regarding the use of multiple languages within those communities. Particularly in the case of Aljamiado–Morisco literature— where its speakers and writers are so clearly and explicitly racialized both along religious and phenotypical grounds, and which scholarship has struggled to defne—it may be productive to think of it as a raciolect. 460
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The term Morisco refers to Iberian Muslims who converted or who were descendants of converted Muslims, somewhere along the spectra from nominally to whole-heartedly and from forcibly to by choice, and assumed a wide variety of practices of acculturation and self-identifcation (López-Baralt 2000). Lexically, Morisco is a diminutive form of the Spanish lexeme moro, a word with a freighted racial history in the Iberian context and a broad and unstable semantic range that makes it not only a racialized insult but also a relatively meaningless term (Brann 2009; Fuchs 2009, 115–138; Sirantoine 2020). The Spanish -isco suffx often suggests “descent from”, and so at least on the face of the term, the Moriscos are those with roots in the communities of peninsular moros, or “moors”, although it can also be employed as the adjective “moorish” in contexts not necessarily relating to Moriscos. The term is much more specifc than is moro and the kind of racial animus inherent in it does not resonate in the diminutive form, although it, too, can be used in a derogatory way (Harvey 2005, 2–10). However, it is still an externally imposed and ultimately racialized category, as L.P. Harvey notes as he traces the etymology and history of the word, its uses, and its limitations: “To accept that an individual is correctly referred to as Morisco is by implication to go along with the proposition that it was justifable to redesignate him in that way against his own free will in the frst place. It is to reclassify him” (Harvey 2005, 4). Furthermore, additional meanings of Morisco, particularly in Inquisitorial and governmental contexts, can explicitly refer to individuals with dark skin or identifed as being of “mixed lineage” (Harvey 2005, 6). Thus, Moriscos are crypto-Muslims: converted, translated, and made to conform outwardly while always racialized as an Other at home (Woolard 2013, 64–6). Even as they were reclassifed racio-religiously, the crypto-Muslims of late medieval and early modern Iberia produced literature that foregrounded the identity that they might—in a logic of self-preservation—have been expected to want to hide. Rather than concealing their roots in and continued practices of Islam and their ongoing connections with Islamic lands in an increasingly globalizing world, they cultivated a unique language “in characters”, as the Cervantes’ narrative alter-ego tells us, “that I recognized to be Arabic”. Aljamiado–Morisco is a variety of Ibero–Romance that shares linguistic features in common with Aragonese, has more lexical borrowing from Arabic than other varieties of Ibero–Romance, reduplicates Romance and Arabic words in sequence, and is almost always written allographically, that is, in Arabic letters rather than the Latin ones that are more typical for rendering Romance languages in written form (Abdelsamie 2004). Educated Moriscos were writers, theologians, and translators of literature, culture, and state. Morisco literature exists in a liminal space between languages and cultures more traditionally defned and is, like many other types of medieval Iberian literature, shaped by the role that both cultural and textual translation play in the creation of the textual corpus. As noted previously, the language itself is marked by translation, as when it reduplicates words in Arabic and Romance. The text corpus, which is often erroneously considered to be of little literary merit (Barletta 2005), includes new compositions, literary or linguistic translations, and cultural translations. One example of a composition with major components of both linguistic and cultural translation includes the Morisco amalgamation and adaptation of various legends of Alexander the Great that draws upon both Latin and Arabic traditions and renders them legible to a Morisco audience by describing Alexander as a protector of oppressed Muslims and omitting the name of Alexander’s father in the European historical and literary traditions, namely Philip II of Macedon, so as not to refer even obliquely to Philip II of Spain (1527–1598), a monarch singularly repressive toward the Moriscos (Barletta 2010). It was his son, Philip III, who would ultimately implement his policy of expulsion. In a new biography, Geoffrey Parker does not shy away from referring to Philip II’s Morisco policy of resettlement, asset seizure, and cultural repression of all sorts as 461
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“ethnic cleansing” carried out in the service of the monarch’s ideas about Spain as an imperial power (Parker, 202).With respect to the role of translation in the Morisco textual canon, Luce López-Baralt writes that in rewriting classical literature “del arabí en aljamí”—from Arabic to Spanish in the Arabic script—they ended up reinventing themselves as authors and readers.The result was a profound innovation in Arabic belles lettres, Islamic religious treatises, and even practical works … even Arabic literature of entertainment (adab), when translated by the Moriscos, served the purpose of cultural self-affrmation in the face of extinction. (López-Baralt 2000, 473) Thus Morisco literature in aljamiado, on the face of it as the product of linguistic and cultural translation, helps to form a new racial, religious, and cultural identity worked out by Morisco writers, thinkers, and translators through their collective literary program. Moriscos were also important players in the translation of European and American medical materials for use and dissemination in North Africa and in diplomatic contexts (Zihri 2016). Figures such as Miguel de Luna and Alsonso del Castillo, for example, demonstrate the simultaneous participation in and subversion of the repressive raciolinguistic logic of the state: even while they were offcials in the employ of Philip II, they are believed to be the authors behind the historiographical deception known under the umbrella of the “Lead Books of Sacromonte” incident, in which lead disks were inscribed with an Arabic-language narrative that putatively attested to the antiquity of Arab Christianity in the Iberian Peninsula; the “lead books” were late-sixteenth-century creations that represented Morisco efforts to use their linguistic heritage to prove and justify their belonging in a modern Spain (Bernabé Pons 2001). Alim contends that “raciolinguistic practices have the potential to transform the oppressive logic of race itself ” particularly in contexts in which racial identity, either internally or externally imposed, is in fux (Alim 2016, 35).We certainly see that to be the case in Morisco writing about the Arabic language: by recognizing, challenging, and leveraging the racialization of the Arabic language, Morisco writers and statesmen used translation in particular to challenge and undermine the increasingly restrictive policies against Mudéjares (Muslim subjects living under Christian rule) and Moriscos. The twin obsessions with the purity of both language and bloodlines take on a new urgency during this period as Castilian thinkers and authorities grappled with and sought to justify Spain’s imperial project through every intellectual tool at their disposal; and ultimately this concern for twin purities is brought to bear upon the Morisco communities of the Iberian Peninsula (Woolard 2013, 61–76). And so in spite of the best efforts to establish the Arabic language and Script as inherently Spanish, the ink courses parallel to the blood: the language marks the literature as “Islamic” just as its authors are marked as secret, indelible Muslims by their lineage. If language is a trait that is at least partly constitutive of race, then translation, translanguaging, and allography all become a challenge to and a source of anxiety for authorities who have taken on the role of enforcing what they see to be both racial and linguistic purity. Just as religious conversion is suspect on racial grounds within the late medieval and early modern logics of race, so, too, is translation suspect on raciolinguistic grounds.
Raciolinguistics and translation Translation is a way of moving texts both between languages and cultures; that is to say, it can include not only transforming a text written in one language into another so that it can be 462
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understood by speakers and readers of the second language, but also “those practices of literary translation that mediate cultural difference, or try to convey extensive cultural background, or set out to represent another culture via translation” (Sturge 2009, 67).Andalusi literature in all of its languages is marked heavily by processes of linguistic and cultural translation, which was often a multiconfessional and multiracial affair. Family workshops of translators adapted philosophical, medical, and literary texts into Hebrew and varieties of Romance for readers who sought out Arabic materials but did not control the language; these translations often made their way beyond their original audience and across confessional lines and came to be seen as distinctly and unitarily Andalusi. Theologians often worked with interlocutors or informants of other faiths in order to refne their understandings of Scripture and interpretive traditions in order to proselytize and translate for the sake of proselytizing. And perhaps the most widely known and extensive example is the phenomenon of the multiconfessional workshop of translators is that of the court of Alfonso X of Castile, known as “el Sabio”, or “the Wise”, who sought to elevate the status of his vernacular mother tongue, Castilian, to the same level of intellectual and cultural prestige as occupied by the classical languages of Latin,Arabic, and Hebrew.Among his strategies for promoting Castilian as a language of learning was to act as a patron to translators who could adapt and update Arabic-language classics of science and philosophy into Castilian versions so that anyone desiring access to the greatest and most current body of work in the areas of science, technology, and philosophy would need to pursue their studies in Castilian.4 As he aspired to be Emperor of the Romans, he saw Castilian as his form of Latin, the idiom of his empire (Miguel Martínez 2013 46–7). Some of the translation activity is depicted visually in Alfonsine manuscripts in miniatures that offer some insight into the racialization of translators and their raciolinguistic identities (Patton 2008).The translation of the Bible and other literary and religious texts continued on following the Alfonsine period and form a crucial branch of medieval Iberian literature and to shape many others. Within a raciolinguistic context (as well as within racially unmarked multilingual contexts), translation also implies a process of translanguaging. In a foundational study, Ofelia García and Li Wei defne this concept as an approach to the use of language, bilingualism, and the education of bilinguals that considers the language practices of bilinguals not as two autonomous language systems as has traditionally been the case, but as one linguistic repertoire with features that have been societally constructed as belonging to two separate languages. (García and Wei 2014, 2) Translanguaging, then, looks at the linguistic consequences of translation and multilingual social contexts and considers those consequences to yield a culturally specifc and unitary target language that suits the audience. Walter Benjamin adopts a similar position, foreshadowing in a literary framework this development in sociolinguistic thought: “Translation is so far removed from being the sterile equation of two dead languages that of all literary forms it is the one charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the birth pangs of its own”. In other words, translation is a process that creates new texts and new languages that are culturally specifc and contingent.
Quixotic case studies in raciolinguistics Far more than being a children’s story of an adventuring petty aristocrat, Don Quijote is a complex narrative about storytelling, language, religion, origins, and identity. After the hidalgo 463
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Alonso Quijano loses his mind and comes to believe he is a knight errant as in his favorite chivalric romances, we watch his mistaken exploits until he raises his sword against a Basque fghter and—and the story suddenly ends, although not before the narrator comments upon the Basque’s poor command of Castilian. Graf shows that this comment leads into the nationallinguist questions raised by the chapter to follow when he refers to Covarrubias’ discussion of the history of the Basque language when he observes that “the episode’s humor derives as much from the parody of a military encounter as it does from the Basque’s inability to speak proper Castilian, but the scene also contains an abstraction for the popular imagination’s version of the prehistorical encounter between Cantabrian tribes” (Graf, 73–4).We learn that all along the narrator has been a fctional bibliophile whom readers often presume to be a persona of the author, who goes out into the city of Toledo in search of more pages of the story. He fnds them in an open-air market only after noticing some pages written in Arabic characters about to be sold for rag. He commissions a transcription of those pages from a young aljamiado boy, by appellation a speaker of Romance languages but always a foreigner in his own land. Angle the description a certain way into the light and the young translator is a crypto-Muslim, the son or grandson of forced converts to Catholicism who missed the old ways that he himself never knew and kept them alive by writing and reading his Spanish in Arabic letters.This is not merely the tale of a madman conjuring up giants, but rather a story about writing literature and cloaking identity in plain sight, each act recognizable only to those who know how to see it.Throughout the novel, language is a way of marking identity, with references to the cultural prestige of Italian, German, and Latin occurring regularly. But the Arabic language is inherent to and inseparable from the novel’s representations of Islam and racialized “moorishness”. When the narrator goes out to walk in Toledo, he describes his encounter with the manuscript containing the rest of the story of Don Quijote, worth quoting at some length because of the ways in which it illuminates the relationships between religion, race, language, and translation: This is how I happened to fnd it: One day when I was in the Alcaná market in Toledo, a boy came by to sell some notebooks and old papers to a silk merchant; as I am very fond of reading, even torn papers in the streets, I was moved by my natural inclinations to pick up one of the volumes the boy was selling, and I saw that it was written in characters I knew to be Arabic.And since I recognized but could not read it, I looked around to see if some Morisco who knew Castilian and could read it for me was in the vicinity, and it was not very diffcult to fnd this kind of interpreter, for even if I had sought a speaker of a better and older language, I would have found him. In short, fortune provided me with one, and when I told him what I wanted and placed the book in his hand, he opened it in the middle read for a short while, and began to laugh. I asked him why he was laughing and he replied that it was because of something written in the margin of the book as an annotation. I told him to tell me what it was and he, still laughing, said: “As I have said, here in the margin is written:This Dulcinea of Toboso, referred to so often in this history, they say had the best hand for salting pork of any woman in all of La Mancha”. When I heard him say “Dulcinea of Toboso”, I was astounded and flled with anticipation, for it occurred to me that those volumes contained the history of Don Quixote. With this thought in mind, I urged him to read the beginning, which he did, extemporizing a translation of the Arabic into Castilian and saying that it said: History of 464
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Don Quixote of La Mancha.Written by Cide Hamete Benengeli, an Arab Historian. I needed a good deal of cleverness to hide the joy I felt when the title of the book reached my ears; moving more quickly than the silk merchant, I bought all the papers and notebooks from the boy for half a real, but if he had been astute and known how much I wanted them, he certainly could have demanded and received more than six reales for their purchase. I immediately went with the Morisco to the cloister of the main church and asked him to render the journals, all those that dealt with Don Quixote, into the Castilian language, without taking away or adding anything to them, offering him whatever payment he might desire. … If any objection can be raised regarding the truth of this one, it can only be that its author was Arabic, since the people of that nation are very prone to telling falsehoods, but because they are such great enemies of ours, it can be assumed that he has given us too little rather than too much. (Cervantes, 67–8) In a lot of ways, this passage has been dissected for the information that it contains about Moriscos and their practices of reading and writing. But it still has more to yield in terms of raciolinguistic analysis, ultimately showing language to be one component of the ways in which early modern Spanish society racialized and totalized Islamic identity.The passage draws a contrast between the linguistic trustworthiness of the Arabic-literatre author of the story and the Morisco translator whom the narrator hired:The one is untrustworthy in his use of language by virtue of his supposed ethnoracial identity, whereas the narrator simply instructs the Morisco translator “to render all the journals … into the Castilian language, without taking away or adding anything to them” and trusts that he will do so; by using the matrix of language as a vehicle for truth, the text draws a distinction between an Arab text worker and a Morisco one, drawing the latter into the fold of incipient Spanishness while treating the former as a member of a different and sinister race. One of the debates in scholarship is over whether the reference to the text having been “written in characters I knew to be Arabic” suggests that the ur-Quijote was written in Arabic or Aljamiado; the present analysis would suggest that it was written in Arabic: the untrustworthy language of the untrustworthy racialized author rather than the natively Spanish and inherently reliable linguistic variety; this is one way to use the techniques of raciolinguistics to further the analysis of a text whose internal truths are notoriously diffcult to pin down. Barbara Fuchs points to Don Quijote’s declamation about the Arabic etymology of certain words in Castilian that begin with al- or end in í to suggest the novel’s interests in the relationship between language and national identity (Fuchs, 24–7). Following the intervention of the frame in the plot of the novel, readers are returned to the latter with another confation of linguistic and racionational identity, relying on ideas about language that were in current circulation at the time of the novel’s composition. Other episodes in the novel, too, show Spanish languages not to be only a curiosity, but rather to be an instrument of reinforcing traits associated with the members of distinct racial categories and demonstrates that translation is part and parcel of moving between categories; these examples allow for the exploration of languages and identities free from the question of canonicity (Graf) and the weight of nineteenth-century and earlier philological interpretations that sought to entrench languages as instruments of hegemonic national identities (Rajendran 2019). The episode in which the reader meets the Algerian emigrant Zoraida, who is in the process of converting to Christianity and has taken the name María is another one that connects racial identity and translation.When “a traveler who[se] … clothing indicated that he was a Christian recently arrived from Moorish lands”—a former captive in Algiers, one of the stable of characters 465
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based upon aspects of Cervantes’ own autobiography (Garcés 2002)—arrives at the inn where Don Fernando is staying, where the innkeeper and Sancho had been trying to cure the latest of Don Quijote’s delusions, “a woman came in after him, riding on a donkey and dressed in the Moorish fashion, her face hidden by a veil; she wore a small brocade cap and a long cloak that covered her from her shoulders to her feet”.5 The reference to dress is one among many racial markers in this scene (Irigoyen)and further draws the relationship between race and religion closer (Gerli 1995); but the racialization of Moriscos which is highlighted most by questions of language in this scene and others. Don Fernando’s wife, Dorotea, tries to make the pair welcome at the inn but is met with a silence and a lack of language that the narrator immediately racializes: The veiled lady did not say anything in response, but she rose from the chair where she was sitting, crossed both hands on her bosom, inclined her head, and bowed to show her thanks. From her silence they imagined that she undoubtedly was a Moor and could not speak Christian. Just then the captive, who had been attending to other matters, approached, and seeing that all the women were standing around his companion, but that she did not respond to the statements directed to her, he said: “Señoras, this maiden barely understands my language and does not know how to speak any other except the one spoken in her own country, and this is why she has not replied and will not reply to the questions you have asked her” … “Tell me, Señor”, said Dorotea,“is this lady a Christian or a Moor? Her dress and her silence make us think she is what we would rather she was not”. “She is a Moor in her dress and body, but in her soul she is a devout Christian because she has a very strong desire to be one”. (emphasis mine, Cervantes, 326–7) The observation that they “imagined that she undoubtedly was a Moor and could not speak Christian” is as clear an indication of the ways in which language helps to constitute the racialized religious categories of late medieval and early modern Spain: Zoraida could not speak the religiolect and so she must have belonged to a wholly distinct race. When Dorotea continues, speaking for the group at the inn saying that they “would rather she was not” a “moor”, she highlights in- and out-group dynamics as well as the undesirability of the racialized other amongst the in-group. And fnally, the captive, who acts as the linguistic and racial go-between by translating for her—while cutting a visually ambiguous fgure that leaves him in the space between an imagined Barbary and Spain—demonstrates that he has bought into a schematic of race that is in line with the Inquisitorial beliefs and practices of the day: when he comments that Zoraida has not yet been baptized (“she is a moor in dress and body”) but is a Christian because of her beliefs, actions, and desire to be one. In this respect, he defers to ideas about what makes a person Christian that evoke the statues of limpieza de sangre that held that those with Jewish and Muslim ancestors would always be suspect and never fully Christian because of their impure blood; the Vatican ultimately broke with the Spanish Inquisition because this attitude implied that Christian works were irrelevant and the sacrament of baptism ineffectual because blood would always determine religion, because religion was a race. Zoraida’s identity is determined by her silence, lack of language, and her exclusion from a religiolistic community, which is in turn encoded as a racial identity; the religiolect is thus also a raciolect.The body is the locus of racial identity, but belief and desire can outstrip that. Here translation is a part of an Inquisitorial process that transforms and queries both the religio-racial and linguistic identities of the subject. 466
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The whole racial issue is confounded by Cervantes in that, in Zoraida’s “pure white hands” (described in another part of the tale) he appears to deny the relationship of race and the body. We learn more about Zoraida and her raciolinguistic identity as the captive describes more of his experiences in captivity. He relates the circumstances under which he encountered Zoraida, and the letters they exchanged; and both halves of the exchange offer comment on the role of translation in the creation of raciolinguistic identities. The initial letter from Zoraida narrates her experiences and fears: When I was a little girl, my father had a slave woman who taught me in my own language a Christian zalá, or prayer, and she told me many things about Lela Marién,The Christian slave died, and I know she did not go to the fre but to Allah, because afterward I saw her two times, and she told me to go to a Christian land to see Lela Marién, who loved me very much. I do not know how to go. I have seen many Christians through this window, and none has seemed as much a gentleman as you … I wrote this; be careful who you ask to read it: do not trust any Moor, because they are all false. I am very worried about that: I wish you would not show it to anybody, because if my father fnds out he will throw me in a well and cover me over with stones. I will put a thread on a reed: tie your answer there, and if you do not have anybody who writes Arabic, give me your answer in signs; Lela Marién will make me understand. May she and Allah protect you, and this cross that I kiss many times, as the captive woman taught me to do. (Cervantes, 347) And then the response from the captive reads: Almighty Allah has given us a Christian captive who can speak and write your language, as you will see by this letter. Therefore, without fear of any kind, you can tell us anything you wish. As for what you have said regarding becoming my wife if you reach Christian lands, I give you my word as a good Christian that you will, and you should know that Christians keep their promises better than Moors. May Allah and His mother, Marién, bless and keep you, Señora. (Cervantes, 348) In both of these passages, both the letter from Zoraida and the reply from the Castilian captive, we see the overlapping of racialized religious identity with language in ways that literarily refect contemporaneous considerations of those three types of categories and their relationships with and built by each other.At the outset, we see Zoraida narrating her experience as a child of learning Christian prayers in a language we assume to be Arabic, showing that language is a medium through which religion is transmissible and in which it is transformed. Presumably, since Zoraida is avowedly monolingual the inclusion and subsequent translation of the word zalá (Ar. ṣalā) in the rendering of her letter is done by the captive, code-switching to use language as a marker of the prayer as foreign. Conversely, the letter uses the Arabic word Allah to refer to God in a Christian context, showing the possibility for separation between religion, race, and language. The use of Arabic lexemes in the correspondence between Zoraida and the captive shows the complexity of language as a marker of racio-religious identity and the distinct ways it can be used to make individuals belong or to place them on the outside of a community or a nation. The other racialized fgures whose use of language contributes to their transracial/translinguistic subjectivity is the Morisco, Ricote. His concern with religious identity and the correct 467
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practice of Christianity mixed with offhand musings about languages—not only Spanish languages but German and Italian, too—likewise show the ways in which their racialized identity and their language mutually inform each other, both from their own perspectives and from that of the narrator: Ricote, without slipping at all into his Moorish language [sin tropezar nada en su lengua morisca], said these words in pure Castilian … “No matter where we are we weep for Spain, for, after all, we were born here and it is our native country; nowhere do we fnd the haven our misfortune longs for, and in Barbary and all the places in Africa where we hoped to be received, welcomed, and taken in, that is where they most offend and mistreat us.We did not know our good fortune until we lost it, and the greatest desire in almost all of us is to return to Spain; most of those, and there are many of them, who know the language as well as I do, abandon their wives and children and return, so great is the love they have for Spain; and now I know and feel the truth of the saying that it is sweet to love one’s country”. (Cervantes, 813) This description of Ricote as speaking “pure” Castilian and not slipping, linguistically or morally, into a “moorish” or “Morisco” language is juxtaposed against his declaration of his own identifcation as a member of the Spanish nation, forging a link between language, race, and national identity: the explicit statement about Ricote’s language at the beginning of this passage implies that readers or Ricote’s fellow personages in the novel might have expected a Morisco not to be able to speak the Castilian dialect and that this would go along with the assumption that he was not fully identifed as Spanish.This case of Ricote is just one more example of what is consistent across the length of the novel even as it appears inherently contradictory: namely the idea that the diversity of language choice is a singular modality of late medieval and early modern race-making complicated by the act of translation and the very existence of multilingualism and multiglossia. In defning and describing raciolects and the foundations for raciolinguistic analysis, the linguist Samy Alim recognizes that both race and language are categories that are transgressed by a kind of exchange or even translation. He writes that “transracial subjects whose raciolinguistic strategies enabled them not only to move across racial groups but also to alternatively disrupt and exploit the process of racial categorization” (Alim, 24).This is precisely what we see refected in the novel with the role of translation helping both to form and transgress identity categories, refecting similar processes happening in the literary, linguistic, and racialized world which Cervantes inhabited and in which he wrote.
Race, language, and translation in Morisco texts Perhaps the best-known example of the use of language to establish both racial and religious identity in the face of an oppressive state apparatus is the late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenthcentury episode of the “Lead Books of Sacromonte”, a literary, material, and historical fraud designed to use the Arabic language to prove the inherent Spanishness of the Moriscos and to try to stave off their ultimate, impending expulsion. The Lead Books incident began when in 1595 construction workers excavating at the base of a tower in the Sacromonte neighborhood of Granada discovered a cache of icons of the Virgin Mary and lead discs containing Arabic text written in an extremely square type of Maghrebi script, often referred to as “Solomonic” script for its typical usage in amulets and other magical texts.The content of the texts tells an invented narrative history of Arab Christians in Spain beginning in the third century of the Common 468
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Era and leverages that fctitious history to argue for the Spanishness of the Moriscos and their ancestors.The role of translation and translators in this episode is crucial to the identity claims made in the texts (García Arenal and Rodríguez Mediano 2008). Other Moriscos confronted head-on the problems created by the racialization of the Arabic language as that of the crypto-Muslim outsider: Francisco Núñez Muley was a Morisco who came into the employ of the Catholic Church in his teens against a backdrop of the increasing repression of Morisco cultural customs, political and armed clashes, and an onslaught of new laws forbidding the use of the Arabic language (Barletta 2005). When he protests against the edict that disallowed the playing of zambra music amongst Morisco populations, he incorporates a raciolinguistic discussion in his defense of the music. In describing an archiepiscopal visit to a Morisco community in the foothills of the Alpujarra mountains in 1502 in the wake of Ferdinand and Isabel’s violation of the provisions of religious protection guaranteed to Muslims in the Capitulations of Santa Fe, or Granada, he mentions the prayers led by the archbishop and then attempts to utilize racial hierarchies to justify the continued use of Arabic by the Moriscos: Some words of Arabic were even spoken in Mass: when the archbishop said,“Dominus bobispon”, people responded with,“ybara fgun”6 … He ordered the New Christians to pray for rain in their own language, as they were accustomed to do so in Arabic. This occurred in the year 1506 or 1507. So then, truthfully informed by the authorities regarding the beliefs and practices of the Muslim faith, and of those beliefs and practices that were outside of it, why wouldn’t his Holiness consent to such things, being the saint that he was? He truly spoke to all people, and made them feel that he knew and understood things well. Can we say that there is a lower race than the black slaves of Guinea? Why are they allowed to sing and dance to their instruments and songs, and in the languages in which they normally sing them? In order to give them pleasure and consolation in terms they understand. (Núñez Muley, 80–1) Not only does Núñez Muley describe a Latin–Arabic, bilingually intercalated benediction-andresponse within the context of an archiepiscopal Mass, he tells us that the archbishop preferred Arabic-speaking Christians to continue to pray in Arabic, raising interesting questions about the nature and understanding of classical liturgical languages and their varied uses during this time period. He also recognizes the importance of separating Arabic from Islam—in effect, deracializing the language—in order to be able to make an argument that might have a chance of being accepted by state and religious authorities; as we shall see shortly, to try to preserve Morisco language and culture he goes on to argue that Arabic is as much a Christian language as an Islamic one (Constable 2018, 14).7 Finally, he tries to leverage the racial hierarchies accepted in Spain at the time in order to argue that Moriscos deserved to exercise at least as much linguistic agency as “the black slaves of Guinea”, thereby reinforcing their intermediate position in that hierarchy. He is not trying to subvert the racial logic of early modern Spain, but rather to argue that the Moriscos have been misclassifed within it. Subsequently within the memorandum he directly addresses the prohibition against the use of Arabic amongst Moriscos and continues to disconnect the Arabic language from Islam and strip it of its racialized connotation and racializing potential: We now turn to the section of the decree that speaks of the Arabic language. There are within it many problems that should be removed. And I say, although what I say is based on my humble judgment, that no ill effect can be caused by the continued 469
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use of the Arabic language for two reasons. The frst and most important reason is that the Arabic language has no direct relation whatsoever to the Muslim faith. This is so because, as I have said above, the Catholic Christians who live in the holy city of Jerusalem and throughout the Christian kingdom of that region speak Arabic and write their evangelical books and laws and all that has to do with Christianity and documents and contracts in that language. A ban on Arabic documents, contracts, and testaments such as that ordered by the aforementioned decree will not be found in that kingdom. As I have already spoken above about those Christians who reside in the holy city of Jerusalem and its surrounding areas, and because this example is well known, I will now speak of those who live on the not-so-distant island of Malta. Here there are Catholic Christians and nobles, and they likewise speak Arabic and use Arabic to write texts having to do with the Holy Catholic faith and other Christian matters. I also believe that they say Mass in Arabic, as is also the case in Jerusalem and its surrounding areas, and neither of these groups knows how to read or write in Castilian. If using Arabic were truly something that went against the Holy Catholic faith, then these priests and philosophers in Malta and Jerusalem would not use it, as they are Christians. (91–2) As we saw in the captive’s correspondence with Zoraida in Don Quijote, Cervantes was in fact refecting this linguistic realpolitik in which Arabic could sometimes signify Islamic identity and could sometimes, and equally strongly, signify Christian identity. In addition to attempting to neutralize the racialized connotations of the language by associating it with venerable Arabicspeaking Christian communities in the important religious centers of Jerusalem and Malta, Núñez Muley goes on to describe at considerable length the administrative problems that would result from the ban on Arabic. It is not, thus, a language of race but rather a language of prestige and good governance, and should therefore be permitted lest bureaucratic and documentary chaos ensue: There is an almost infnite number of people in the villages and places outside the city (and even within it), that speak popular varieties of Arabic that are very different from those spoken elsewhere, and it is nearly impossible for them to change the way they speak, due to years of use and habit. How much more diffcult will it be to get these people to learn Castilian, given that even in their own language they have been unable to learn to speak correctly? … Let us say that it is possible to translate all of these [economic, documentary] materials into Castilian. How long would it take and how many translators would be needed to translate all of the kingdom’s documents? Currently there is only one such translator, and it is thus inevitable that Arabic documents will be lost, and after three years these documents would be worthless, as the decree stipulates. (Núñez Muley, 91–4) Núñez Muley points out that translation would be a necessary component of shifting the administration of Morisco economies from Arabic into Castilian and shows that it is the act of translation that has the capacity to include or exclude Moriscos from Spanish civil society and to create or forestall social and economic chaos. Like Luna, Núñez Muley is a state offcial implicated in the bureaucracy and legal system oppressing Moriscos; and so rather than try to challenge the racial hierarchies that he fnds himself on the wrong side of (or doesn’t just by 470
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virtue of his job but knows full well he might), he tries to frame and deploy them in such a way that they serve his and his community’s interests. Making a similar argument, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Castilian Christian writer and diplomat who grew up in newly conquered Granada and whose works tended to be sympathetic toward the Morisco position, transcribed a speech given by Hernando de Válor, a Morisco leader and aristocrat, in the context of the rebellions based in the foothills of the Alpujarra mountains directed against Spanish oppression of legal transgressions against their communities, a speech in which Válor challenges the relationship between race, religion, and language by again connecting Arabic and Aljamiado–Morisco with Christian practice: Embraced by neither God nor men, treated as Moors among the Christians, only to be disdained; and as Christians among the Moors, only to be disbelieved, unaided and excluded from human life and conversation. They tell us not to speak our own language. But we do not understand Castilian; in what language can we communicate our thoughts, request or give things, if we are not allowed the conversation of men? Even animals are not forbidden to hear human voices! Who denies that a man who speaks Castilian can follow the law of the Prophet, and one who speaks the Morisco language the law of Jesus? (Woolard 2013, 65)8 In analyzing this passage and placing it in the context of parallel debates about the purity of blood and language in the early modern period, Kathryn Woolard moves in the direction of connecting race and language: Religious, cultural, and linguistic traces of Islamic origin were now nearly, fully established as intolerable in Spain, but the construction of difference as damning did not stop there. It continued into the domain of genealogy in a racializing policy of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood), in which a non-Christian ancestor was deemed to taint bloodlines irredeemably. By racialization, I mean an ideology that explicitly locates signifcant social difference in characteristics viewed as natural, essential, and ineradicable because [they were] biologically given. (Woolard 2013, 65) However, there is more to this passage than illustrating parallels between race and language; it also shows the way in which those two things were mutually constitutive by that time.Válor emphasizes the outsider status of Moriscos, both amongst Christians and Muslims, by highlighting the fact that their intermediary racio-religious status makes them appear untrustworthy to both religious communities. He shows that the Castilian remedy for this fear is to strip them of their language; again making languagelessness one of the characteristics of these intermediary people. In a wholly different type of text written by another eyewitness to the transformation of Spain’s Moriscos by virtue of their language choices, an anthropologically minded anonymous author known only as the Mancebo de Arévalo (the young man from Arévalo, a Castilian city about halfway between Ávila and Valladolid) composed a spiritual guide for his fellow Moriscos entitled El compendio de nuestra santa ley-sunna (Mancebo 2003), which contains descriptions of and prescriptions for a wide variety of practices and ideas related to religion (Harvey 1999). The eighth treatise,“En que se ponen las departencias lenguajes y maneras en que habla nuestro honrado al-Quran con otros cabos”,9 offers some insight into what the historical Morisco com471
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munities of Castile knew about the Arabic language; how they used, preserved, and transmitted that knowledge; and the relationship between their languages and the formation of their group identities. In one part of the treatise, he writes: I wished to collect certain similes in Aljamiado because some of my friends asked me why it was that in Arabic in certain passages sometimes one said Allāh, other times Allāhu, and other times Allāhi … one is to understand that saying Allāh without any other addition is to speak in absolutes. Allāhu is to speak in order to invoke some saying, as though to say “merciful” or “mercy”. Saying Allāh is like that man who suddenly wishes to entrust himself to Allāh; he goes directly to Allāh instead of asking his alrraḥma or pity.The man who says Allāhu goes more slowly in seeking pity. (López-Baralt 2000, 475) In this passage, the Mancebo is explaining a topic within Arabic grammar—specifcally the ways to use nominative and genitive case endings—in a way that is completely separate from grammar per se but instead refects actual usage. He does not portray the grammatical cases as such (perhaps because he does not even realize that that’s what they are) but rather based on the effect they have on sentences. For example, his explanation of the nominative case—“saying Allāh … is to speak in absolutes”—might be seen to refect a basic equational sentence, such as allāh(u) raḥmān(u), or simply “God is merciful”, describing the divine in what he calls “absolute” terms. In this way he transforms the grammar of Arabic into a grammar of the Islam that has been made the despised race of Spain. In doing so, he brings about a full racialization of the Arabic language: it is not something describable in linguistic terms but rather in terms of its use by believers in a racialized faith.To translate, here, is to interpret the theology of a racialized minority.
Conclusion In sum, whether we are looking at the translation of text into Aljamiado–Morisco, the creation of texts de novo in this linguistically liminal space, or the debates over the status and history of Iberia’s languages, raciolinguistic and translanguaging frameworks help us to understand the Morisco linguistic condition as a coherent way of behaving in order to communicate both ideas and identity. Both fction and non-fction from the period, created both within and without the Morisco community, demonstrate the ways in which translation is an important tool for maintaining and then transgressing an intermediary racial status.This is an emerging feld within linguistics and, therefore, also necessarily new to the medieval/early modern contexts with much work remaining.Yet even in these early days it suggests itself as a very fruitful way to attain a deeper understanding of both the social and cultural impacts of translation in late medieval and early modern Iberia.
Notes 1 I presented versions of this work twice during 2019, at the annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America and at a workshop at the Hagop Kevorkian Center at NYU. I am grateful to my interlocutors in both of those sessions—Maya Soifer Irish, Ross Brann, Hussein Fancy, Nicholas Jones, Pamela Patton, Sonia Zakrzewski, Mohamad Ballan, María Judith Feliciano, Rebecca Goetz, Antonio Feros, Seth Kimmel, Abigail Kranser Balbale, and Borja Franco—and to my friend and NYU colleague Benjamin Hary, who introduced me to the conceptual framework of raciolinguistics during my GRI Fellowship at NYU-Tel Aviv in the summer of 2018. Finally, this chapter is dedicated to my brother, Michael, who asked for something to read about Don Quixote; I didn’t forget.
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Translation of Arabic into Castilian 2 A good defnition of language as well as a history of Spanish languages in contact with others may be found in Julie Tetel Andresen and Philip Carter’s Languages In The World, in the chapter “All Languages Were Once Spanglish”. 3 “La casta de cavallos castizos, a los quale señalan con hierro para que sean conocidos … Raza, en los linages, se toma en mala parte, como tener alguna raza de moro o judío”. Joan Corominas, in his Diccionario Crítico-Etimológico, gives the frst attestation of the term in Castilian in 1438 and in Catalan, Occitan, and unspecifed Italian linguistic varieties as early as 1200 (abridged edition in two volumes, Madrid: Gredos, 1987). 4 On translation, religion, and culture at the court of Alfonso X, see recent works by Fierro (2009), Salvador Martínez (2003, 2013), O’Callaghan (2019), and Szpiech (2015). Simon Doubleday’s The Wise King (2015) is also a good introduction for the general reader. 5 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Don Quixote, trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Ecco Books, 2003. 325. (The quotation in the title of the present chapter is also drawn from the present translation, p. 67.) 6 This exchange refects the archbishop saying the Latin phrase Dominus vobiscum (God be with you) and the congregation responding in Arabic with all or part of the corresponding phrase in Arabic: wa-Allah yubariku fkum (and may He also bless you). 7 Olivia Remie Constable also writes about Núñez Muley’s decision to argue for this kind of separation in order to support his larger goals in her To Live Like a Moor; this book was originally intended to contain a full chapter on language and literature in the creation of “moorishness”, but the author died prior to its completion and that remaining chapter was left uncompleted. 8 It is interesting to note that Woolard implies a connection between race and language by including this anecdote in a chapter on the cultural history in Spain; however, she never makes the connection explicit. 9 Mancebo de Arévalo.“El breve compendio de nuestra santa ley”. Cambridge UL MS Dd.9.49. 72r.The text has not been published in full, but his anthropological autobiography has been edited by María Teresa Narváez Córdoba.
References Abdelsamie, M. “L’ecriture aljamiado: un écriture orientale avec un esprit occidental”, in Scripts Beyond Borders: A Survey of Allographic Traiditions in the Euro-Mediterranean World, eds. Johannes den Heijer, et al. Louvain-la-Neuve: Peeters, 2004. 441–452. Alim, Samy. Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas About Race. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Anderson, Julie Tetel and Philip Carter,“All Languages Were Once Spanglish”, in Languages in the World, eds. Anderson and Carter.West Sussex:Wiley and Sons, 2016. 1–21. Barletta,Vincent. Covert Gestures. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Barletta,Vincent. Death in Babylon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Bernabé Pons, Luis. Estudio preliminar, La historia verdadera del rey don Rodrigo de Miguel de Luna. Granada: Universidad de Granada, 2001. Brann, Ross.“The Moors?” Medieval Encounters 15 (2009): 307–318. Bistué, Belén, “Of First and Second Authors: Reading Don Quixote in the Context of Collaborative Translation Practices”, in Disobedient Practices, eds. Belén Bistué and Anne Roberts. Madrid: Juan de la Cuesta 2015. 165–182. Calvino, Italo, “Why Read the Classics?” New York Review of Books, 1986. www.nybooks.com/articles/ 1986/10/09/why-read-the-classics/, accessed December 2019. de Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel. Don Quijote de La Mancha, ed. Francisco Rico. Barcelona:Alfaguara, 2015. de Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel. Don Quixote, trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Ecco Books, 2003. Constable, Olivia Remie. To Live Like a Moor. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Corominas, Joan. Diccionario Crítico-Etimológico (abridged in two volumes). Madrid: Gredos, 1987. Covarrubias, Sebastián. Tesoro de la lengua castellana, ed. Martín de Ríquer. Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1998, reprint. Doubleday, Simon. The Wise King: A Christian Prince, Muslim Spain, and the Birth of the Renaissance. New York, Basic Books, 2015. Fierro, Maribel.“Alfonso X the Wise:The Last Almohad Caliph?” Medieval Encounters 15:2 (2009): 175–198. Fuchs, Barbara. Exotic Nation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Garcés, María Antonia. Cervantes in Algiers. Nashville:Vanderbilt University Press, 2002.
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S.J. Pearce García, Ofelia and Li Wei. Translanguaging. New York: Palgrave, 2014. García-Arenal, Mercedes and Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, “Miguel de Luna, Cristiano arábigo de Granada”, in ¿La historia inventada?: Los libros plúmbeos y el legado sacromontano, eds. Manuel Barrios Aguilera and Mercedes García-Arenal. Granada: University of Granada Press, 2008. 83–136. Garner, Steve and Saher Selod,“The Racialization of Muslims: Empirical Studies of Islamophobia”, Critical Sociology 41 (2015): 9–19. Gaylord, Mary. “Don Quixote’s New World of Language”, Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 27:1 (2007): 71–94. Gerli, E. Michael. Refguring Authority: Reading,Writing and Rewriting in Cervantes. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995. Graf, Eric. “When An Arab Laughs in Toledo: Cervantes’ Interpellation of Early Modern Spanish Orientalism”, Diacritics 29:2 (1999): 68–85. Harvey, L.P. Muslims in Spain, 1500–1614. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Harvey, L.P.. “El Mancebo de Arévalo and his Treatises on Islamic Faith and Practice”, Journal of Islamic Studies 10:3 (1999): 249–276. Hary, Benjamin. Translating Religion: Linguistic Analysis of Arabic Sacred Texts from Egypt. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Jones, Nicholas R. Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. Kaplan, Steve “If There Are No Races, How Can Jews Be A Race?” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 2:1 (2003): 79–96. Lewis, Laura. “Between Casta and Raza”, in Race and Blood in the Iberian World, eds. Max Herring Torres, María Elena Martínez, and David Nirenberg. Zurich: Lit Verlag, 2012. López-Baralt, Luce.“The Moriscos”, in The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature:The Literature of al-Andalus, eds. María Rosa Menocal, Raymond P. Scheindlin, and Michael Sells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 472–488. López-Baralt, Luce.“El calamo supremo de Cide Hamete Benegenli”, Sharq al-Andalus 16 (1999): 175–186. Mancebo, de Arévalo. Tafsira, ed. María Teresa Narváez Córdoba. Madrid:Trotta, 2003. Martínez, H. Salvador. El humanismo medieval y Alfonso X el Sabio. Madrid: Ediciones Polifemo, 2016. Martínez, H. Salvador. Alfonso X el Sabio: Una biografía. Madrid: Ediciones Polifemo, 2003. Martínez, Miguel.“Language, Nation, and Empire in Early Modern Iberia”, in A Political History of Spanish: The Making of a Language, ed. José del Valle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 44–60. Nirenberg, David. “Was There Race Before Modernity?” in The Origins of Racism in the West, ed. Miriam Eliav-Feldon, et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. O’Callaghan, Joseph. Alfonso X, the Justinian of His Age. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019. Patton, Pamela. “Constructing the Inimicable Jew in the Cantigas de Santa María”, in Beyond the Yellow Badge, ed. Mitchell Merback. Leiden: Brill, 2008. 233–256. Rajendran, Shyama. “Undoing ‘the vernacular’: Dismantling structures of raciolinguistic supremacy”, Literature Compass 16 (2019). doi:10.1111/lic3.12544, accessed 7/2020. Rattansi, Ali. Racism:A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Sheth, Falungi,“The Racialization of Islam and Muslims”, in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race, ed. Naomi Zack. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017 Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. Race in Translation. New York: New York University Press, 2012. Sirantoine, Helene, “What’s in a Word? Naming Muslims in Medieval Christian Iberia”, in Making the Medieval Relevant, ed. Chris Jones, et al. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020. 225–238. Soyer, François. “Faith, Culture and Fear: Comparing Islamophobia in Early Modern Spain and TwentyFirst Century Europe”, in Racialization and Religion, ed. Nasar Meer. New York: Routledge, 2013. Sturge, Kate.“Cultural Translation”, in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, eds. Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha. London: Routledge, 2009. 67–9. Szpiech, Ryan.“From Founding Father to Pious Son: Filiation, Language and Royal Inheritance in Alfonso X”, Interfaces 1 (2015): 209–235. Uddin, Asma. When Islam is Not a Religion. New York: Pegasus Books, 2019. Vial, Theodore. Modern Race, Modern Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Woolard, Kathryn A. “The Seventeenth-Century Debate Over the Origins of Spanish”, in A Political History of Spanish:The Making of a Language, ed. José del Valle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 61–76. Zihri, Oumelbenine. “The Task of the Morisco Translator in the Early Modern Magrib”, Expressions maghrébines 15:1 (2016): 11–27.
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30 CLERICAL SOUNDSCAPES Simone Pinet
non es todo cantar quanto ruido suena Libro de buen amor The genre or mode of clerical poetry, as we have taken to call this corpus after Julian Weiss’s key book (2006), better known by the debated phrase mester de clerecía, comprises a variety of themes from the classical to the popular, of registers and styles; it is marked by serious engagements with form, whether in syllable count and pronunciation, or in its concerns with innovation and elaboration. Many of the mode’s key texts and authors have inspired numerous studies, from investigations into sources and genre confgurations, to speculation on theories of authorship and hermeneutical procedures. Rather than attempting to summarize such a vast endeavor, or to attempt a general approach to the entire mode, I will sketch out a possible assemblage focused on a few key texts, making extensive use of recent overarching studies, such as Pablo Ancos’s important book on transmission and reception of these works (2012), and rechanneling classic studies. I want to study how from within the works themselves these texts show themselves to be products and producers of particular environments which fnd a way of pushing or pulling those strict engagements with form in distinctive directions, to other places, opening them up beyond or outside a strictly literary milieu. Assembling refections on particular texts—studies on their environments—I argue, we could perhaps then envision a clerical ecology of sorts, a living system in which problems and solutions are rehearsed in different ways by its components, fnding new ways of surviving, exploiting, depending on, working for one another in different emphases. My use of the word environment here is outright metaphorical (or strictly literal, exploring what surrounds the texts), not anchored explicitly in questions of biomes or ecology, terms that, nevertheless, are crucial in understanding the collaborative, interdisciplinary, and codependency that is the heart of this project. Similarly, the engagement with “the natural”—in all its complex allusions and historical reconfgurations—is certainly crucial to confguring such an ecology, which I address only in very specifc, constrained terms organized around the particular sets of questions that frame my analysis. Among the questions that have persistently concerned scholars from the frst grouping of these works by Milá y Fontanals (Uría Maqua 2000, 17), composition, diffusion, and reception have been central.These touch on questions of authorship, literacy, memory, performance, and audience, with complex oppositions and variations for each. Ancos has not only reviewed 475
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the extensive bibliography dealing with questions of transmission and reception, but also has summarized and underlined the specifc problems posed by the history of these discussions, from theories of orality to localized problematizations of specifc audiences for different works. Ancos’s emphasis on textual evidence for modes of composition, reception, and diffusion, along with references to sources and audiences, and specifc local and temporal mentions of vocal enunciations is indispensable for the consideration of any possible environment for mester de clerecía. Ancos summarizes clerical poetry’s primary mode of diffusion as follows: With the exception, perhaps, of very specifc parts of the poems (Milagros de Nuestra Señora, and Duelo de la Virgen), as well as of the Himnos, which are very brief, contain no indications of their mode of diffusion, and belong to a tradition sung in Latin, it does not seem that song was the primary form of diffusion of these works.The predominance of contar, decir and hablar, which correspond to the preponderance of oír and escuchar as indicators of a mode of reception points, however, to vocalization. Reading out loud to a group of people, suggested by the use of the verbs leer and rezar, and by the nouns leyenda and lección, is thus offered as the most probable mode of vocal diffusion, at least in some of the poems (Libro de Alexandre, Vida de San Millán, Vida de Santo Domingo de Silos, most of Milagros de Nuestra Señora, Sacrifcio de la misa, probably also the Libro de Apolonio). (2012, 194) Ancos’s exhaustive evidence of the aural as intrinsic to the mode’s diffusion and reception serves here as the basis for what I want to broaden to a wider, complex system of references, actualizations, allusions, hints of the aural in mester de clerecía through a term that considers questions of transmission and reception but that works also with sound as music, as theme, as reference: soundscapes. While the strict experience of mester de clerecía would have been auditory, I want to explore how much more of the aural the mode of clerisy exploits, demanding the listener complement from memory, from habit, urged by allusion or prompted by metaphor or onomatopoeia to aurally—imaginatively—enhance the auditory experience of the works. Ari Kelman notes that the term “soundscape” is attractive because of its evocation of both sound and place, because of its porosity between questions of environment, aesthetics, aurality, geography, open to both content and context (what sounds and how or where it sounds), source, and reception (intended or unintended); and because embedded in it are echoes of the relations between space, sound, and social life (2010, 220–22, 228). Similar to the scholarship on mester de clerecía engaging with questions of space, where the consideration of places of composition, diffusion, and reception are part of the argumentations on intentionality, literacy, authorship, thematics which have been complemented by work on rhetorical constructions of space/place, cartography, spatial theory, in what could be termed as “landscapes and seascapes of mester de clerecía” (Desing 2011; Parmley 2014; Pinet 2015, 2016), I want here to explore how the aural, understood at its most encompassing in the term soundscape, could help us hear this corpus anew. Things that sound in mester de clerecía are, obviously, things, people, and animals. In the Libro de Alexandre horns and trumpets, birds both natural and mechanical, set up contrasting environments for the production of sound.At the center of the description of Porus’s palace, the passage on the golden tree and the automaton birds surprise with the details of the machinic aural imitation of nature. Such idealized nature is artfully rendered as a cloistered garden with singing birds (“En medio del enclaustro, logar tan acabado” [In the middle of the cloister, a fne place], 2132a) so that the imitation comes duplicated, reinforcing the formulation of a soundscape that is both 476
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physical or architectural, and literary or rhetorical (for the musical references, see Michael 1997). In the Libro de Apolonio (1992), music, song, and riddles are all part of sound meant to cure the afficted king Apolonio: Luciana’s playing the vihuela for him as he arrives in Architraste’s court is meant to turn his emotions from sadness to joy (177), where son (sound) is music. Sound as music, songs, and riddles is also meant to cure Apolonio of his devastating losses as Tarsiana strives to bring him out of his depression, at Antinágora’s urging (“querrá Dios que seya por tu son guarido” [God willing he will be healed by your sound/song], 501d). In Berceo’s second miracle of the Virgin, the community becomes aware of the friar’s absence because there is no one to make the bells sound (“Cuando vino la ora de matines cantar,/ non avié sacristano que podiesse sonar”, 82ab).1 Men can hear the sounds of battle from far away in the Poema de Fernán González (“Tan grand’ era la priessa que avyén en lidiar,/ oyé omne a lexos las ferrydas sonar;/ espadas reteñir e los yelmos cortar” [They were so eager to fght, far away a man could hear the wounds, swords clanging and helms being cut], 2001, st. 310); and in the Arcipreste’s Libro de buen amor (Ruiz 1988) a sounding door announces to the feasting mice the arrival of the lady of the house, sending them scrambling (1376), horses make sounds like thunder (238b), and creepy natural noises set the stage for the exemplum of the fearful hares (1445c). Could we puzzle out a network, a map of sounds that interconnect, producing sets of meanings and combined systems of signifcation? Is sound a dimension of clerical literature that can produce new reconfgurations of works, that can allow us to reorganize the mode, drawing parallels across new directions for critical thinking? “Soundscape” is a keyword in the feld of sound studies, which can be loosely explained as the study of acoustic phenomena, the study of the social life of sound, of listening to sound, noise, technology, context, and meaning. Kelman, overviewing the uses of this keyword in different disciplines that study sound, establishes a distinction between the “exterior soundscape” and the “interior narrative”, paralleling it to “what we hear” and “what we mean”, an intersection between environment and literary practice that seems particularly apt for discussions of sound in mester de clerecía (Kelman 213).2 In the pages that follow, I arrange three possible soundscapes, attempting to recreate such an environment around “battle”,“garden”, and “language” in specifc texts.
Battle In the frst work of the corpus, the Libro de Alexandre, the initial aural cues take us to questions of transmission and reception referred to above, while thematically, the presentation of the story prompts in the audience other stories, aural memories of the hero’s adventures.Alexander’s birth is announced by reversals of nature, among them an aural one, in which a lamb speaks, signs that move people to whisper and murmur about the greatness of the hero to be born (8–13). Alexander’s education is markedly aural and oral, and after asking for and receiving Aristotle’s advice, knighted, the hero goes out in search of adventures. From this moment onward, calls for battle, yells, cries, the din of weapons clashing, the rumbling of horses, the moaning of the wounded, trumpets and horns surround the protagonist. Horns, in particular, have distinct connotations, linking them both to epic and to chivalric literatures, coded as much in the courtly as in the military:“As a producer of loud sounds, ivory horns communicate effectively across long distances, and were thus used in both hunting and warfare”, notes Michelle Warren, adding that “Hunting horns in particular were used to symbolize tenure of lands where hunting took place” (2004, 281). In a way, these rumors and horns and trumpets that surround Alexander from his frst battle are meant to anticipate and signify his conquering of new territories; the greater the noise as we follow Alexander, both his own and that of his enemies, the larger the empire he holds and the more resounding his victories. 477
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In the Alexandre, it is not only the poet (or his sources) who makes use of sound as meaningful; that is, sound is not only instrumental for the poet, but it is so for the characters as well, thematizing the aural. Isidore offered in his Etymologies (2006) a compelling account of varieties of sound and their effects: Music rouses emotions and it calls the senses to a different state. In battle, too, the sounding of the trumpet infames the fghters, and the more ardent its blast, the braver grows the spirit for the contest. Since song urges even rowers on, music also soothes the spirit so that it can endure toil. and the modulation of the voice eases exhaustion from individual labors. Music also calms excited spirits, just as one reads about David, who rescued Saul from the unclean spirit by the art of modulation. (Book III, xvi, 95) A fuller picture of contrasting soundscapes in the Libro de Alexandre would require its own study, one engaging also with the spaces of court and scriptorium, and different iterations of idealized landscapes, such as Babylon with its bird song that makes mothers forget their children (“quando empieçan sus sones a fer las aveziellas,/ las madres a los fjos olvidarién por ellas”, 1498cd), or the passage on Alexander’s marriage, where the rhetorical undergirding requires that birds and damsels sing (the birds “fazen las aves un solaz deleitoso”, the girls sing May songs and “fazen unas a otras buenos pronunçiamientos” (st. 1950b, 1951; see Haywood 2004).To give but an example of how thematized sound is in the poem, recall that Alexander seems to be not only familiar with sound as military strategy, but uses this general familiarity as a tactic, when, noting the habit of using horns and trumpets for calling armies, he devises a new, silent call to arms: smoke and fre signals: “Las gentes otro tiempo, quando querién mover,/ fazién cuernos e trompas e bozinas tañer … Mandó, quando otro día oviessen a mover,/ fumo fuesse por signo por ferlo entender;/ de noche, almenaras por çerteras ser” (1556ab, 1559abc). Sounds in the Libro de Alexandre—and in mester de clerecía in general—are mostly linked to human action, and perhaps because of the importance of their being meaningful, they are overwhelmingly verbal. News—stories recounting the deeds, the troubles, the glories of one or another character, good and bad rumors, resuturing sound to meaning in its verbal forms in all its registers, are what sounds verbally in works of clerisy, “¡ya son por todo el mundo vuestras nuevas sonadas!” (1342b) (these are most common in the Alexandre and the Apolonio, but see also Berceo’s Milagros (1985), for example 215a “Sonó por Compostela esta grand maravilla” [“This great marvel was sounded throughout Compostela”]; see Pinet 2016). These are all referred to as “resounding”, as making sound that travels distances, endures the passing of time, challenging sound’s most unique trait, its ephemerality. They are echoes—articulated, verbalized, harmonized—of the ruckus of battle, the commotion of war, the tumult of combat.The sounds of battle, whether made by instruments, weapons, or men, are often referred to as synonyms or complements of noise, of clamor, of lamentation, through the term voice:“¡Todos, de cada parte, daban bozes e gritos!” (538c, with the curious analogy that makes whistles of the excited horses’ whinnies, ¡las narices de los cavallos semejavan solvitos!, 538d; see also 501cd and 2049). Related to language, as synonym for rumor (as noise, and later, as murmurings that grow confusion, ending in an aural metaphor where the volume of the rumor is rendered as ‘boiling’), voice conveys the conspiracy against Darius: “Por amatar las vozes e quedar los roídos/ … fablaban entre dientes todos una razón/ los unos dizién ‘¡Sí!’, los otros dizién ‘¡Non!’/ ¡Era entre los pueblos fera la bulliçión!” [To put out the voices and quiet the noises/ … they all said one thing between their teeth/ … some said “Yes!”, others said “No!” …/ there was among the people a great racket] (1682a, 1685bcd). 478
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When Alexander’s men worry for their leader, following his bath in the Cydnus, voice is imbued with emotional meaning, “¡Todos, chicos e grandes fazién duelo e planto!/ ¡vozes e alaridos ivan de cada canto!” [All, young and old mourned and grieved, cries and shrieks came from everywhere] (889); and most often voice seems to be a synonym for crying out, either in joy, when the men cheer their leader:“¡Bozes dieron los griegos, fueron del rey pagados!” [The Greeks cried out, pleased with the king] (1010a), or in pain, as when they mourn him:“El gozo fue tornado en vozes e en planto” [Joy was turned into laments and grieving] (2648a). Voice is both collective and individual: men cry out in physical pain, or in fear, to the point that their noise creates confusion: “El pueblo de los griegos tovos’ por afollado: / ¡metieron todos bozes, plorando su mal fado!/ Paris, con el roído, parose desarrado” [The Greeks thought they were lost,/ and they cried out, wailing their bad luck!/ Paris, with the noise, stood up, puzzled], (487abc); while Paris, Menelaus, Achilles, and Alexander all react individually using loud voices, challenging each other, or demanding an answer with grandes bozes, or altas bozes (477d, 478a, 699c, 707cd, 1727a, 2079ab).What is most striking about the soundscape of battle in the Libro de Alexandre is the distortion of voice, in fact of most sound, either through volume or multiplication.Valerie Allen reads Priscian's classifcation of voice in his Institutionum grammaticarum to get at “voice noise”, the “sound that violates rational discourse” because it deviates voice from its intended course, its meaningful one (2004, 310). She studies this as something that noise does to voice, noise as the agent of that disruption, and turns then to how noise does this to music, producing dissonance. Allen writes about noise as what violates the distance between source and recipient (or subject and object), creating a synesthetic effect when speaking of the noise of farts (319). Inner voice, however, blurs the boundaries between these sensorial distances and properties, provoking synesthetic effects. But voice noise in the battle soundscapes of the Alexandre is still voice, it carries meaning, even if it is an immediate, almost physical one that does not become interiorized, or turned into knowledge. Especially signifcant is that the extreme is qualifed as deafness, as producing a form of non-hearing that still retains a sense:“¡Tan grant era la cosa … / ¡ensordién las orejas al son de los tromperos! (873a, d), “¡Fueron en tal manera mezcladas las feridas,/ que eran con los colpes las trompas ensordidas!”, and a couple of verses later, “¡Tant’eran las feridas frmes e afncadas,/ que eran de los cuernos las vozes enfogadas!” [The wounds were jumbled in such a way that the trumpets were deafened with the blows!;The blows were so hard and so relentless,/ the voices of the horns were drowned out!] (1003ab–4cd). Voice and sound are meaningful, used for communication, instrumental, and here indistinguishable from noise, reverberating both volume and meaning against each other. Burnett argues that neither Greek,Arabic, nor Latin has a word for undifferentiated noise, and that even in vernacular European languages the origins of terms signifying “noise” are obscure. But Johannes Affighemensis (eleventh century) distinguished a category of “indiscrete sounds”, which include human laughter, groaning, barking, roaring, whistles, and children’s instruments, complicating the idea of noise as meaningful in interesting ways, especially as deployed in literary texts (Burnett 1991, 46, 48; see Pinet 2018, esp. 38). In Spanish, the use of variations of “ruido” (from late Latin rugitus, roar or rumbling), as “rroído” or “rruydo” is frequent, and though it is most often used to convey a metaphorical meaning of “widely disseminated rumor” or “scandal”, it is also used to compare to sounds produced by nature, as in the Libro de Alexandre: “Tanto eran de grandes e feros los roídos:/ ¡semejavan las tierras e los çielos movidos!” [So great and ferce were the noises/ they resembled the moving earth and skies!] (848), “¡Firmes eran los colpes e grandes los roídos,/ cuemo quando los vientos andan desabenidos,/ fazen bolver las nuves e echar los tonidros!” [The blows were hard, and the noises great, as when the winds fall out, and they make the clouds turn and rumble!] (703). This is useful when contrasting a term such as voice with the numerous specifc words that refer to verbal soundings in specifc 479
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contexts, those related to prayer, song, chant, litany, clamor, as well as declamations, proclamations, harangue, speeches, sermons, fables, and sayings. These are not underlined through the generic words for sound, or specifcally marked as being listened to, or at least heard, either in the Libro de Alexandre, where these terms serve to stake out different spatial soundscapes—that of battle, that of the court, etc.—or in other works.These terms, in any case, resonate as the most crucial vocabulary cluster of all of mester de clerecía, calling attention, once again, to the mester’s hyperawareness of itself, its calculation of its modes of composition and dissemination, of its multiple engagements with the verbal, both in its written bits and in their vocalization.3 Taken in their pervasiveness, in their intereferentiality, these verbal sounds seem to not only dominate the mode, but to also point to the diverse framing of other sounds that reverberate within the works. How are the sounds of things and of language linked to one another? How do sounds imbue other representations of sensorial perception with deeper, or differing, meaning? The intimate connection of sound to the verbal, and the implications of meaning and truth in sound—even as noise—are what link in the soundscape what could be merely representational or mimetic to a complex cultural history of aural allusion, rhetorical practices, and newly crafted operations of meaning in poetic composition. Beyond questions of transmission or reception, consideration of the aural must look at formulations of the sense of hearing. And hearing or listening, as one of the fve senses, must also be considered in relation to other sensorial explorations in our texts as a sort of system, or sensorial environment. Domingo Gundisalvo, the twelfth-century philosopher of Toledo, emphasizes in his De anima that sounds “do not have names of their own but borrow them from the qualities of other senses”, an idea echoed by Albertus Magnus later on (in Burnett 1991, 63), underscoring the synesthetic language used to express sound in philosophy, as happens in literature. How might the soundscape of court revoice that of battle in the Libro de Alexandre or the Libro de Apolonio? How might we pitch Alexander’s harangues and Apollonius’s courtly speeches against each other as the sounds of royal speech? And is there a sensorial world to be investigated in these initial works of clerisy—as there is in the Vida de Santa María Egipciaca, where touch and taste are also explored—or is there a primacy of the aural in the Alexandre and the Apolonio?
Garden Three major works of clerecía have been expertly studied in their explicit engagement with music, noting their knowledge of both theoretical and performative contrasts: the Libro de Apolonio, Berceo’s Milagros, and the Arcipreste’s Libro de buen amor. In Berceo’s case, in particular, Devoto’s comprehensive study and Dutton’s precisions on the cleric’s musical knowledge as displayed, most evidently, in the introduction, already compose a soundscape to be complemented with a close analysis of the numerous calls to aural interpretation, from the appeals to the audience to the many noises, meaningful and not, and the diversity of language registers the miracles offer as clues for interpretation, types of singing and articulations of voice, from prayers to pleas, requests for clamor, cries, rumors, and whispers. Berceo opens his prologue asking to be heard, for he wishes to tell of a good event. The poet then introduces himself as a pilgrim arriving in a locus amoenus, where different sensorial experiences—smell, frst, then touch and references to taste, the green colors of the grass and the smell of fowers—are complemented by the tactile synesthetic reference to tempered favors of the trees and their shade, bringing refreshment to the pilgrim.The shade, smell, and temperature nudge the poet to take his clothes off, thus completing the setup for what will be the event: an allegorical concert, which Devoto and Dutton have minutely explained in its complexity of voices, musical theory, harmony, and instrumental references (see Gerli 1985).4 480
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Berceo uses variations of the verb to hear, oír, as the sense that is privileged to perceive this allegory, which comes to him as sweet, modulated sound, sones: “odí sonos de aves, dulces e modulados,/ nunca udieron omnes, órganos más temprados” [I heard sweet, modulated bird songs./ There never was heard music of organs so fnely tuned] (7bc; on organar, see Devoto 1980, 293–312).The allegory, moving between the shade, the trees, and the birds that perch on them, and the prayers, the miracles, and the series of prophets, saints, martyrs, virgins, clerics that sing Mary’s praises, symbolized by the landscape, is all mediated by sweetness: the shade is good, sweet, and healing; the miracles are sweeter than tasty sugar; the birds have sweet voices: “La sombra de los árbores, buena, dulz e sanía”,“Los árbores que facen sombra dulz e donosa”,“los santos miráculos que faz la Gloriosa,/ ca son mucho más dulces que azúcar sabrosa”,“Las aves … que an las dulces vozes” [The shade of the trees, good, sweet and healthful,The trees that make sweet and blessed shade, the holy miracles that the Glorious One performs/ for they are much sweeter than delicious sugar,The birds … with the sweet voices] (23a; 25a; 25bc; 26ab). These trees, Berceo clarifes, are the fruit-bearing kind, they are árbores fructales (26a), a characterization to which he returns in the last stanzas of the introduction to say that it of these fruit trees, so full of sweetness, that he wants to make a few verses (44cd). Mary Carruthers affrms that “no word is used more often in the Middle Ages to make a positive judgment about the effects of works of art” than sweetness (2006, 999). As a quality of experiences perceived by the senses, but also as a qualifer in aesthetic judgment, she investigates the underlying moral ambivalence of sweetness due to its links to knowledge, persuasion, and medicine. Catherine Saucier calls attention to the adjective dulcis as one that allows for “metaphoric transfer between the senses”, expressed in the literature as synesthesia, allowing for passage between the sense of taste, that of smell, and of hearing. Saucier goes on to note how sweet scents were associated with preservation and divinity, developed from a Graeco–Roman conceptualization of ambrosia, which Christianity elaborated as having a connection with salvation (2010, 16).This of course becomes manifest in Berceo’s miracle III, “El clérigo y la for”, where the fower that is found in the cleric’s mouth exudes a wonderful smell, “sabrosa olor”. A couple of stanzas later, this smell is echoed by the sweet sounds of speciosa, sung by those moving the body to hallowed ground. Related to the introduction, not only because of the space evoked, but through the overlaps in meaning produced by the allegory, are Carruthers’s notes on how the Genesis story exploits the associations between taste and knowledge, which in romance languages is rendered visible through the connections between saber and sabor that are then translated to sound and to rhetoric:“The metaphoric translation of gladdening the heart via song to the delight of learning, and from the sweetness of melody to the sweetness of oratory, is an ancient commonplace, as is the linkage of suavitas with dilectio” (2006, 1005).5 This association is particularly resonant with Berceo, for it is remarkable how often sabroso/a either substitutes or is paired up with dulce, further emphasizing the knowledge behind the tasting of sound. Compounded with knowledge is the medicinal property of words, for as both Aristotle and Cicero had claimed, the arts of oratory and of medicine were similar,“with the best orator serving as a kind of physician to the body politic” (Carruthers 2006, 1001).This property is the one invoked for music in both scenes of the Libro de Apolonio referred to above, and it echoes in Berceo’s sweet words/sounds. Sweetness links hearing and smell with the divine, and thus, with salvation. Saucier specifes how sound, because of its instability, was especially apt for metaphors of transition, of liminality, of transcendence (2010, 24), which explains why even if sounds often make an appearance in Berceo’s Milagros simply as marking time (82ab) they are also often the main indicator, instrument, and form of dissemination of a miracle:“Cuantos la voz udieron e vidieron la cosa,/ todos tenién que fzo miraglo la Gloriosa” [All who Heard the voice and saw this happen/ understood 481
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that the Glorious One performed a miracle] (Miracle IV, 131ab).This is most striking in Miracle V,“The Charitable Pauper”, in which the Virgin comes to retrieve the poor man’s soul as he is dying, and the words she speaks to him, praising him for his charity and announcing his payment in the form of eternal salvation, are framed as an auditory miracle. First, the Virgin is heard (but not seen):“udieron la palavra todos los del logar” [everyone in the town heard Her words] (134d), words spoken very pleasantly/knowingly, “fablóli muy sabroso”, and then, framing the miracle at the end of Mary’s speech, Berceo marks the audience: “Los omnes que avién la voz ante oída” [The men who had heard the voice before] (139a), closing the scene of pure presence via sound. Berceo drives the point home in the fnal two stanzas: in the frst, he insists that “Qui tal cosa udiesse serié malventurado/ si de Sancta María non fuesse muy pagado” [Unfortunate would be the one who heard such a thing/ without being extremely pleased with Holy Mary] (140ab), establishing the links between the aural experience of the miracle with that of Berceo’s audience, and then he loops in an explicit reference to the auditory experience of the locus amoenus of the introduction:“ca éstos son los árbores do devemos folgar,/ en cuya sombra suelen las aves organar” [for these are the trees in which we must take pleasure, in whose shade the birds are accustomed to sing] (141cd), the shade which is buena, dulz, e sanía, good, sweet, and healing.6 Berceo makes the sounds reverberate from the initial garden to the cloister, from the Virgin to our ears. Here, the aural serves not only as the subject of the miracle itself, as the experience of the miracle, but it in fact allows the listener to ricochet through diverse subject positions, as audience, as saved soul, and as pilgrim. Miracle XII,“The Prior and Uberto the Sexton”, makes use of the soundscape in a similar, if more elaborate fashion, for in it the sin, the virtue, and the miracle are coded in the aural.The prior—the sinner—has an “erring tongue”, lengua errada (283a), with which he says many a forbidden word. However, this sin of the tongue has a counterpart in the good habit of saying all his hours. A verbal/vocal sin is contradicted or counterweighted by verbal/vocal devotion, for he said the prayers with all his heart: de suo corde toto (285d).A year after the prior’s death, a sexton in charge of the sacristy’s chores, the Uberto of the title, is witness to an aural miracle. Hearing the voice of the frail prior, “Udio una voz de omne, faquiella e cansada” [He heard a man’s weak, tired voice] (291a), Uberto is struck with fear and tries to fee this haunting sound, but the voice calls him by his name—a clear moment of interpellation—reassures him, and wonders if Uberto has a question for him. In the name of his chapter, then, Uberto politely asks the disembodied voice how it has been faring.The prior embarks on a four-stanza tale of his initial misery and rescue by Holy Mary, who has taken him “into a sweet garden near a sweet beehive” (298c), with echoes of Berceo’s introductory landscape, to which are added notes of paradisiac salvation through mentions of abundance of food in the next verse.The voice turns silent, and the monastery awakes.This is a particularly effective silence, a resounding one, marking the miraculous. A series of aural references quickly follows, as the monks sing and say matins and prayers, prime and the litany, they read the lesson, and fnally the sexton tells them of his vision. In slow increase of volume, the monastery celebrates by singing a hymn, and Berceo brings the aural chorus to a close by reiterating that “Cuantos que la udieron esta tal visïón/ cogieron en sus almas mayor devocïón” [All who heard of this vision/ gathered into their souls greater devotion] (305), cuing in the opportunity for the audience once again to experience this as a character, in a deictic opening.The many aural prompts have also, by this point, created a devotional context for the inner ear to take over, allowing the poet to state that those who heard this tale have heard a vision, and from this, greater devotion has been made possible.7 Beth Williamson considers visual representations of sound in painting where, she argues, sound is experienced in a non-sounding way, that is, in a way that a “users’ experience of images can shift register in an analogous manner when the viewer’s experience changes from seeing 482
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an image clearly to seeing in a partial or compromised manner, or to not viewing it physically at all, but seeing it only in his/her mind’s eye” (2013, 5). Outside of performance, enunciation, or the physical experience of sound, these aural cues in the form of words—dixo, fablóle, sonó, udi, canto, etc.—work as triggers or prompts for the inner ear to conjure up an aural memory that completes the experience.8 As someone close to the Benedictines, Berceo would have been familiar with the idea that it is the heart that processes internally the corporeal information brought in by the sense of hearing, recalling how he himself would be prompted to use his heart as he listened to different texts read aloud in the refectory. As Williamson points out, the Rule of St. Benedict expanded on Augustine’s precisions on listening with the ears of his heart in the Confessions to elaborate on Jerome’s translation of Psalm 44.11, recommending that “Ausculta, o fli, praecepta magistri, et inclina aurem cordis tui” [Listen, my son, to your master’s precepts and incline the ear of your heart] (in Williamson 2013, 5). Berceo’s writing of his/m self in the introduction to his collection facilitates our identifcation with his character, all while demanding that we perform this exchange between the symbolic and the narrative, between the corporeal and the internal, in which the aural dimension plays a fundamental role. To closely follow Williamson’s analysis, this visible music of passages such as Berceo’s introduction, or of the miracles, along with the prompts for sounding out different voices and calls for listening might be considered as representations of sound encountered frst—at least by the reader—with the corporeal eye, experienced visually and aurally in vocalization, to be then contemplated and listened to with the inner sense, sounded out in the inner ear (2013, especially 15–21). But one might even take this further and wonder with Elizabeth Fowler if this garden soundscape is not meant for a more performative imagination, especially when the environment has been so carefully laid out for the listener to follow:“What if we see a garden not only as an aesthetic composition with referential meaning, but also as an aesthetic script for meaningful performances? An instigator of ritual? An ephemeral material that partners with the historically evolving practices of human beings?” (2017, 34). Similar physical soundscapes might provide such experimental ground.Valdez’s remarks on the soundscape of the cloister at Santo Domingo de Silos offers such a parallel. Her analysis, combining ambient sound, monastic practice, incidental noise, and the interpretation of sculpture in the cloister as activators of remembered sights and sounds, is close to what I argue through Berceo’s texts (73). In particular, the sculpture she analyzes includes aural cues such as various types of musicians/instruments, inscriptions, conversations, birds, and a sort of “speaking architecture” (columns, capitals) that could be productively considered not only as a context for the garden of Milagros, but alongside Oria’s visions, or, obviously, the Vida de Santo Domingo de Silos, referenced by Valdez through Lappin’s study (2012). The allegory of the introduction is set up as a backdrop to create not (only) pictures or verbal/visual cues for the audience, but as a point of acoustic origin, as aural key to the meaning of the many echoes heard across the collection, and as a pathway to the inner senses, linking public or communal religious expressions, such as the liturgy, or religious feasts, with private, contemplative, or meditative devotional practices (Williamson 2013, 1–3).While some of the miracles specifcally stage the protagonist or the audience in the miracle themselves as placeholders for the listener of the story—for us—insisting on the connections between what has been heard being just as sweet and healing as those sounds heard by the poet–pilgrim in the introduction, the collection is flled with resonance, with auditory cues, with aural scenes, soundbites to surround the listener with an experience parallel to that of the poet himself in that initial garden of sound. Moreover, by constantly exercising the audience in the practice of connecting the physical auditory experience of the verbal, while complementing the verbal cues for sound with the experience of (silent) sound with the inner ear, the soundscape provides support for similar paths for other senses. Hearing the visions of the Virgin and of her miracles, the audience might also 483
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be thus open to conjuring up an image of Her with the eye of the mind, rendering her visible for internal devotional practices. The setting of the garden—the spatial element embedded in the term “soundscape”—is, as Fowler argues, especially conducive to this delayed, or furthered experience of the interior, the meditative, the referred meaning: “[T]he medieval hortus conclusus, in all its paradoxical forms, is an instrument for producing resonance, for widening the gap between sensory perception and judgment, for roaming among the possible meanings of sensory experience as that experience is sustained.The acute ephemerality of sensory experience becomes instrumental, something to listen to in itself: the pattern of an acoustic delay” (Fowler 2017, 47). Fowler defnes this “acoustic delay” specifcally in relation to the medieval garden, whose physical structure plays with sound, either shutting it out or refecting it, creating echoes and reverberations:“The architecture of the cloistered hortus conclusus is like a medieval version of an electric guitarist’s delay box—generating repetitions that turn sound into a circuit, a pattern of return, a fading insistence … Sound created in the cloister (by the fountain, by voices in prayer or song) runs up to heaven but also pools along the edges of the green central space and in the arcaded walkways” (2017, 36–7). Berceo’s garden, an Eden or a glade or a rhetorical locus amoenus, is also, of course, the cloistered garden, one in which “acoustic delay” becomes a hermeneutic practice.
Language Not all works have such an orchestrated soundscape, which is not surprising when one considers the exceptional musical knowledge Berceo displays, to say nothing of the rich monastic aural experience he conveys through the different references to aural and verbal manifestations of spirituality. But what happens when the soundscape intentionally does not resonate in such rich rhetorically coded spaces, when there is no architecture—physical, or of the mind—to support auditory images and practices, when that space of sound is itself coded confned in its expression, such as language? The links between sound, words, and truth, seem to fracture when a devotional context is not explicit, that is, when between these there is instability, when in the space between hearing and listening meaning is subject to interpretation. In the Libro de buen amor, the lack of value of words said, pronounced, sounded out, is reiterated time and again, making the easy transaction of the spoken word in opposition to the written something suspect, its truth-value questioned. Its religious undertones sabotaged, or sublimated into a higher meaning, truth for the Arcipreste is withdrawn completely into the inner sense, where the sounds of the environment are cast out from the interiority of self. While the Libro de buen amor uses sound as a marker of time, very much like Berceo did, the spatial structure that sustained the architecture of Berceo’s soundscape dissolves in the work of the Arcipreste. Even the common space of battle gives up ground, and one can see sound and time and voice slip into the trappings of language itself. In stanza 372, for example, the Arcipreste begins a fght with Don Amor known as the “Parody of the Canon Hours” which lasts until 387. Quotations from the Latin psalms and hymns of the services (matins, lauds, prime, terce, etc.) seem to introduce a devotional temporal context that is transmuted into a seducer’s daily agenda, beginning with vespers and ending in compline the next day. Scholars often quip that the cleric follows his desire to the rhythm of the canon hours. As Bienvenido Morros rightly indicates, a real understanding of this parody of the divine offce requires a detailed study of the liturgy of the period (Morros 2004, 415).The complicated textual web was to be received aurally, and the audience would have been compelled to complement these Latin fragments of psalms and hymns, for better or worse, with an aural memory, only to fnd it interrupted by the Arcipreste’s 484
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double entendres, which pitch sound against meaning, instead of acting as its medium. The distinctive sound of the two languages and their conficting allusions, intentions, and interpretations is brought to a climax, unsurprisingly, in an aural image, in which the sexual encounter of the protagonists is summarized in the timely ringing of bells: “tañe a nona la campana” (383d; see Morros 2004, 406). Bilingualism is in the Libro an exploration of voice, both as authority and as sound, as quotation and as aurality: the seven “e çetara’s” that accompany some of these Latin fragments in the prose introduction explicitly point to the complementary function the reader must perform—one imagines, as a voice in one’s head. The Libro de buen amor uses the strategy several times, once without a parodic intent in the Ave María lyrical poem at the end, and in burlesque tones in the prose introduction and in the reception of don Amor, 1125 and onward, especially in the procession passage.The combinations of romance—as gloss, as commentary, as narration—and Latin fragments serve as triggers for the completion of a soundscape that is nevertheless interrupted, that is forced to remain incomplete, only partially heard. As Hugo Bizarri notes, bilingualism, between Latin and romance, between different romance languages, and between Arabic and romance, is a strategy meant in the Libro to elicit simultaneously erudite, text-based supplementation, as much as oral, popular, vocalized verbal memories (2006, 210–13). Of special interest are Bizarri’s remarks on the Arcipreste’s use of different jargons, from legal discourse to courtly love, in which vocalized language, framed as speech, saying, confession, etc., has a major role, a play with registers not only in terms of culture, or volume, or music, but of voice, both grammatical and musical (2006, 214–221). While I have been making use of the term as one of the manifestations of sound in the verbal, as the instrument for the singing of prayers, hymns, music of all sorts, voice here requires some qualifcation as sound.Voice is “a particular sound made by something with a soul and has a certain signifcance”, and it shares with instruments, which are also qualifed as having voices, the quality of pitch, which the sounds of nature lack (Burnett 1991, citing Aristotle, 46–7).Voice, as studied from the perspective of grammar and logic, as opposed to the perspective of music, is “signifcant sound”. Isidore himself conceives of languages as meaningful sounds, as when he characterizes the diversity of languages resulting from the tower of Babel episode, as “so that there arose a diversity of meaningful sounds” (2006, Book IX, I, 191). In philosophy, Burnett notes,“pitch is the primary differentiating factor in sound, rather than, say, brightness, volume, or sweetness” (48–9). In literature, it is meaning that is everything, and differences in pitch, volume, sweetness are subordinated to their conveyance of sense, which explains the primacy of voice (Burnett 1991, 47–8). Soundscapes, one might argue, are in mester de clerecía careful renderings of the many echoes of voice. From the linguistic (voice as tongue) to the intertextual (revoicing), the musical (science of sound), and grammatical (vox, letters as sounds, etc.), to the visual/verbal connection (voice as image, echo as refection), and the physiological (utterance, ear, and voice), from the register of rumor and noise to that of cries and laments, voices are arranged in mester texts as origin, instrument, medium, theme, subject (Lawton 2017, 39). In a recent book, David Lawton investigates ideas of medieval voice, which infuse the environment in which works of clerisy were composed and read, asking these questions: 9 How would literate late medieval readers have constructed voice? As well as the physiological explanations, they had easy access to voice, vox, as a standard grammatical term. Larger than a sound (so more than a phoneme or even most single words other than the imperatives of verbs), vox is the smallest free-standing unit of discourse, a phrase or clause, a snatch of conversation or text … An auditor will hear at least three subjects: the vox, the subject of vocality, and the textual subject … The act of hearing, or reading, becomes a series of questions: how many voices do we hear? Whose are 485
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they? Where do they come from? And that is just what we see classical and medieval readers asking as they read, with a grammatical notion of voice that leads immediately into questions of authorship, translation, revision, intertextuality, and performance. (2017, 27) This is but a way to hear again many of the critical claims on mester de clerecía; the fact that mester is so involved in its own task means that it is also constantly engaged in explorations of voice, as grammatical and musical, individual and collective, physical and internal. But how are these transitions between the external and the internal conveyed in mester texts? And how does this experience extend beyond the text? Faith or belief, and hearing or listening, are inextricably linked and, in fact, the two often appear together in mester texts, from Berceo to the Libro de Alexandre to the Libro de Apolonio: “Deves el Evangelio escuchar e creer” [You must hear and believe the Gospel], demands Berceo in the Vida de San Millán (88a),“Mas si tú a mí quisieres escuchar & creyer” [If you were to listen and believe me], begs Antinágora of Apolonio when he meets him (476);“mas, si a nós quisieres escuchar e creer” [but, if you were to listen to us and believe us] (1570);“¡Amigos, quien quisier’ creer e escuchar” [Friends, whomever wants to believe and listen] (1637) ask different characters in the Libro de Alexandre; and “Si tú a mí quisieres escuchar e creer” [If you wanted to hear and believe me], asks the Virgin of her groom (Berceo, miracle XV, 342a). Ryan Giles’s chapter on “Amuletic Voices” explores precisely this connection between voice and belief beyond the experience of these texts, by analyzing how the power of voice is distilled in amuletic texts, such as the tile of Villamartín de Sotoscueva. As analyzed by Giles, the tile is a sort of sound box in which echoes of the Poema de Fernán González and the Libro de Apolonio bounce off each other; and picking up on the blessings for voyagers they cite or reformulate, the tile revoices these texts of mester de clerecía in the powerful connection between sound and the sacred (2017, 86–108). Belief is a given when considering the Word of God, but what happens in these texts when it is a question of the simple words of others? The coupled “hear and believe”, when used to refer to common words, becomes a way to stabilize meaning, to make of the voice something apprehensible, unique, contained, understandable. This need for support, emphasized by the conditional in the references above, merely underscores the inherent instability of words as signs, their hermeneutic pliability, their porosity. That the Arcipreste stages scenes of the instability of signs unremittingly in the fourteenthcentury Libro de buen amor is no revelation, and it is perhaps precisely this constant that has kept the Arcipreste’s text relevant. The Libro de buen amor, as we all know, makes any and all suspicious in some way, even if only by contagion or through context. Thus, it is no surprise that the Arcipreste makes of words themselves something fuid, ambivalent, untrustworthy, staging sound, truth, and language in precarious relation to each other. If there are in Juan Ruiz numerous strategies to sabotage meaning and interpretation, I fnd in his statements of value and the instability of meaning a more profound search for and affrmation of the singularity of divine truth, an unequivocal statement of the one truth of God and faith and grace that language and its minions fail to capture by design.This one truth is, perhaps paradoxically, what sustains the play of echoes in which language and love speak and lie to each other, failing to resonate in the inner ear, in the heart. Introducing his Libro, Juan Ruiz toys with us by pretending to give precise instructions as to where one may fnd that truth:“Do coidares que miente, dize mayor verdat;/ en las coplas pintadas yaze la falssedat;/ dicha buena o mala, por puntos la juzgat;/ las coplas con los puntos load o denostat” [Where you think it lies, it says the greatest truth;/ in the painted stanzas lies falsity;/ judge a saying good or bad point by point;/ praise or scorn the stanzas with the points.] (69). 486
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At frst glance this is a simple paradox that seeks to confound the reader asking her to fnd truth in the book there where she thinks it is lying, but at the margins of this affrmation is this truth’s relation to sound, verbal sound:“dize mayor verdat”. If anything, it is in the visual metaphor that the Arcipreste points to lying or misrepresentation, falsehood, the colores rhetorici that paint verses, praise is to be credited to a musical metaphor rendered in the puntos, subtly underscoring that it is in sound that truth might be found.There is an explosion of aural references after the battle between Don Carnal and Doña Cuaresma, as don Amor and don Carnal make their entrance. Stanza 1210c announces their arrival as a great noise, “grand rroído”, followed by an entire world of sound, made by people playing instruments, animals bleating, bells ringing. Especially interesting is 1218cd, as Don Carnal kills a fat goat and the noise it makes is marked by musical notation, “al cabrón que está gordo él muy mal ge lo pinta:/ fázel fazer be quadrado en boz’ doble e quinta” [smearing the fatted goat/ he makes it bleat a natural in octave and perfect ffth] making this both a visual and an aural cue.A procession follows, which offers a long list of instruments and their sounds, while different orders sing in bilingual key (see, among many others: Álvarez Pellitero 1995, Di Camillo 1990; Hamilton 2009: 33–59; Rey 2002; and for general questions of orality and performance,Walsh 1979 and Filios 2011). Juan Ruiz stages the ambiguity of signs in relation to love and fction; however, in clearly destabilizing signs such as words or coins, whose ambiguity is precisely what makes them interchangeable, especially when these words are said, voiced, he simultaneously underscores a truth that holds it all together even when it seems elided from the present of reading. Distant, perhaps, unavailable to the corporeal sense of hearing, the truth of the divine love of God lies beyond the instability of corporeal love and bodily language. In two stanzas, the agent power of God, when paralleled to Love, turns into a power to equivocate, one founded on prevarication.The Arcipreste thus warns that this powerful love has a blemish: “Una tacha le fallo al amor poderoso … el amor sienpre fabla mentiroso” (161a, d). Love speaks in lies, its spoken words are not true, it cons and tricks with its external appearance, its language, its sound. Of its truth, Juan Ruiz does not say anything, but insists once more on the arbitrariness of value stated, pronounced, said, urging the lady to listen as a way to go beyond such instability of similitude:“Ca segund vos he dicho en la otra consseja,/ lo que en sí es torpe con amor bien semeja;/ tiene por noble cosa lo que non vale una arveja;/ lo que semeja non es, oya bien tu oreja” [As I told you in my previous counsel,/ what seems clumsy, with love looks right;/ love considers noble what is not worth a pea;/ what seems is not, lady, let your ear hear.] (162). As Juan Ruiz insists on appearances, on semblance as the process of valuing, he plays on language’s capacity for telling otherwise, for whispering things that pass for others, creating a series of echoes that loop into each other, love speaking lies, lies that make up fctions, fctions that serve love. However, in so doing he also stakes out an unsurmountable distance between words and things, between what seems and what is—what is seen and heard, and ultimately, between love and other fctions, and truth itself.The play of echoes between language and love loses its acoustic origin and cannot ground itself, while truth remains, at a distance, waiting in the heart, ears wide open, listening.
Notes 1 Citations for Milagros are from Fernando Baños’s edition (Berceo 1997a); for the English translation, I use Mount and Cash, 1997 (Berceo 1997b). All other translations are mine. All citations of primary works are by stanza number, letters for verses. 2 Kelman (2010) refects on what he sees as insuffcient engagement with the foundational work on the term “soundscape”, R. Murray Schafer’s The Tuning of the World (1977), reedited in 1993 as The Soundscape.While one might agree with the importance of the distinction between studying sound as
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produced and a focus on listening, I am interested not in acoustics per se but in fnding ways to interrogate the social production of meaning, which cannot take place without careful attention or even a focus on listening, so I follow Shaefer. Barry Truax (2001), a close collaborator of Shafer, focuses on communication or information in which there is a balance between sound, listener, and environment. I fnd Truax’s expansion of the term “soundscape” into environment not only logical, but productive, in contrast with Kelman (225). Ancos (2012) includes a useful series of Appendices listing both clear and dubious allusions to reception and diffusion of works of cleresy. The second appendix has extra categories, one of which lists allusions “to the diffusion of messages other than the works themselves in poems of cuaderna vía of the thirteenth century”, in which things that are “said” include different forms of song, psalms and hymns, proverbs, prayers, etc., and things that are “sung” include mass, proverbs, hymns, etc. (321–23). Devoto’s (1980) meticulous analysis of musical theory to explain different terms in the introduction is defnitive (if a bit dry), and it does not address an aural context in general. Dutton’s remarks in his edition (1971) are more useful to consider Berceo’s work as a whole.While not articulating a study on these matters, several of Baños’s notes to his edition speak eloquently of sound matters in the Milagros and point to relevant bibliography. See notes to verses 114c (on canon hours), 176d (on clamor), 302c and related 697c (on prosa and music), 742b (on roosters and time), 847b and 853c (on hymns and song). Suavitas is linked to rhetoric in its very purpose through persuasion, but it is infrequent in our texts. I can only fnd two occurrences, both in Berceo. In Loores de Nuestra Señora (Berceo 1992), which, however, presents all the other nuances of health, taste, and salvation, in 872, and in the Himnos, where it is language itself, a “biervo”, that is characterized as sweet and “suave” (II, 2b). For a contrasting analysis of “sweetness” as taste in the Libro de buen amor, see Francomano (2013). On the shade of the tree as the Virgin’s protection, taken from Eucherius, see Foresti (1957, 366); and on the Virgin as being sweet, and therefore healing or medicine, see Baños’s notes to verse 26c, 299 of his edition. The gender homogeneity of prior, sexton, Berceo, and the potential monk as audience allows for a fuidity of deictic experience here.The gendering of voice complicates the echoes and interpretations in other miracles, but especially in texts like Berceo’s Vida de Santa Oria, where the oppositions between sight and sound, male and female, oral and written are spatialized through the space of the cloistered saint and the “portal” in which Berceo writes, framing soundscapes that echo in different directions. See Julian Weiss’s 1996 article, gathered also in 2006; also Poole (2013) and Farcasiu (1986). On the inner ear, see Carruthers (2006, 27ff.), where she notes that there is no tradition for the ear equivalent to that of the “eye of the mind”, and also Jager (1996, 1–26), who studies Augustine’s elaboration of the ear and voice of the heart, embodying the inner sense of sound in a different organ. I have found Lawton’s study extremely useful, and though I do not refer to voice here in quite exactly the same way—perhaps my use of it is more restricted—I have beneftted from his deft weaving of the writerly in his analyses of voice and vocalization, of voice being both subject and mode of a text, of “the desire of text to become voice, and of voice to become text”. Lawton explicitly uses voice to stand in for what others have analyzed as subjectivity in texts, with biblio on 1 fn1:“Voice … is not a determinate order of signs like fgures or tropes but a volatile series of suggestions or cues that move between theme and address, between text and reader”. Lawton goes on to focus especially in what he terms “revoicing”, in the process of quotation in medieval English literature as demanding a new voice, the process of how an “echo is transformed into a voice”, a focus that diverges from mine (2017, 7, 2, 8).
References Allen,Valerie J. 2004.“Broken Air”. Exemplaria 16 (2): 305–322. Álvarez Pellitero,Ana María. 1995.“Puntar el Libro del Arcipreste: cc. 69–70”. Hispanic Review 63 (4): 501–516. Ancos, Pablo. 2012. Transmisión y recepción primarias de la poesía del mester de clerecía.Valencia: Publicacions de la Universtitat de Valencia. Ruiz, Juan. Libro de buen amor, edited by Gybbon-Monypenny. Madrid: Castalia, 1988. de Berceo, Gonzalo. 1971. Los Milagros de Nuestra Señora, edited by Brian Dutton. London:Tamesis. de Berceo, Gonzalo. 1985. Milagros de Nuestra Señora, edited by Michael Gerli. Madrid, Cátedra. de Berceo, Gonzalo. 1992. Obra completa, coordinated by Isabel Uría Maqua. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe. de Berceo, Gonzalo. 1997a. Milagros de Nuestra Señora, edited by Fernando Baños. Barcelona: Crítica.
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Clerical soundscapes de Berceo, Gonzalo. 1997b. Miracles of Our Lady, translated by Richard Terry Mount and Annette Grant Cash. Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky. Bizarri, H. 2006.“Un problema de estética en el Libro de buen amor: La heterogeneidad lingüística”. Revista de poética medieval 16: 203–223. Burnett, Charles. 1991. “Sound and its Perception in the Middle Ages”. In The Second Sense: Studies in Hearing and Musical Judgement from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century edited by Charles Burnett, Michael Fend, and Penelope Gouk, 43–69. London:Warburg Institute. Carruthers, Mary. 2006.“Sweetness”. Speculum 81: 999–1013. Desing, Matthew. 2011.“Luciana’s Story:Text,Travel, and Interpretation in the Libro de Apolonio”. Hispanic Review 79 (1): 1–15. https://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed 4 June 2018). Devoto, Daniel. 1980. “Tres notas sobre Berceo y la polifonía medieval”. Bulletin Hispanique 82 (3–4): 293–352. Di Camillo, Ottavio. 1990.“Libro de buen amor 70a:What Are the Libro’s Instruments?” Viator 21: 239–271. Farcasiu, Simina M. 1986.“The Exegesis and Iconography of Vision in Gonzalo de Berceo’s Vida de Santa Oria”. Speculum 61: 305–329. Filios, Denise K. 2011.“Performance Matters in the Libro de Buen Amor”. eHumanista 18: 171–185. Foresti Serrano, Carlos. 1957. “Sobre la introducción en los Milagros de Nuestra Señora”. Anales de la Universidad de Chile: 107–108. doi:10.5354/0717–8883.2011.10953 Fowler, Elizabeth. 2017.“Acoustic Delay: Body Technique and the Hortus Conclusus”. In Sound and Scent in the Garden, edited by Fairchild D. Ruggles, 31–51.Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2017. Francomano, Emily. 2013.“Este manjar es dulçe: Sweet Synaesthesia in the Libro de buen amor”. eHumanista 25: 127–144. Gerli, Michael. 1985. “La tipologia bíblica y la introducción a los Milagros de Nuestra Señora”. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies LXII: 7–14. Giles, Ryan. 2017. Inscribed Power: Amulets and Magic in Early Spanish Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hamilton, Michelle. 2009. “The Musical Book: Judeo-Andalusi Hermeneutics in the Libro de buen amor”. La corónica 37 (2): 33–59. Haywood, Louise M. 2004.“Spring Song and Narrative Organization in the Medieval Alexander Legend”. Troianalexandrina 4: 87–105. Isidore of Seville. 2006. Etymologies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jager, Eric. 1996.“The Book of the Heart: Reading and Writing the Medieval Subject”. Speculum 71: 1–26. Kelman,Ari Y. 2010.“Rethinking the Soundscape”. The Senses and Society 5 (2): 212–234. Lappin, Anthony. 2012. The Medieval Cult of Saint Dominic of Silos. Leeds: Maney Publishing. Lawton, David.2017.Voice in Later Medieval English Literature.Public Interiorities.Oxford: Oxford University Press. Libro de Alexandre. 2007. Edited by Juan Casas Rigall. Madrid: Castalia. Libro de Apolonio. 1992. Edited by Dolores Corbella. Madrid: Cátedra. Michael, Ian. 1997. “Automata in the Alexandre: Pneumatic Birds in Porus’s Palace”. In The Medieval Mind: Hispanic Studies in Honour of Alan Deyermond, edited by Ian Macpherson and R. Penny, 275–288. London: Tamesis. Morros Mestres, B. 2004. “La parodia de las horas canónicas en el Libro de buen amor”. Anuario de Estudios Medievales 34: 357–415. Parmley, Nicholas. 2014. “Medieval Mediterranean Travel as an Intellectual Journey: Seafaring and the Pursuit of Knowledge in the Libro de Apolonio”. In In and of the Mediterranean: Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Studies, edited by Michelle Hamilton and Nuria Silleras-Fernández, 49–73. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Pinet, Simone. 2015.“Between the Seas: Apolonio and Alexander”. In In and of the Mediterranean: Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Studies, edited by Michelle Hamilton and Nuria Silleras-Fernández, 75–98. Nashville:Vanderbilt University Press. Pinet, Simone. 2016. The Task of the Cleric: Cartography,Translation, and Economics in Thirteenth-century Iberia. Toronto: University of Toronto. Pinet, Simone. 2018. “Rumor and Noise: Notes for a Political Soundscape in Mester de clerecía”. Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 10 (1): 26–41. Poema de Fernán González. 2001. Edited by Itziar López Guil. Madrid: CSIC. Poole, Kevin. 2013. “On the Figure of Voxmea in Gonzalo de Berceo’s Poema de Santa Oria”. Modern Philology 110 (3): 289–312.
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31 RAPTURE AND HORROR Reading Celestina in sixteenth-century Spain Loreto Romero
The spread of lay literacy, silent reading, and the printing press at the end of the Middle Ages facilitated a more direct and personal engagement with texts, but especially imaginative, literary texts.Very soon close contact with books of the imagination translated into a noticeable increase in erotic and violent content, which marked the expression of a new, emerging subjectivity in the reading public.The sense of privacy that had begun to surround the act of reading stimulated the inclusion and more direct representation of carnal desire in lay texts, whose salacious realism bordered on pornography (Saenger 1997, 274). “Literacy admits us to reading so that we can take the full measure of our exclusion: its effect is to display the secretive knowledge which is always possible but never possessed”, notes Terry Eagleton (1976, 165).The movement toward interiority and eroticism was already perceivable in an incipient manner in Spanish sentimental fction, which fgured among Fernando de Rojas’s literary antecedents in Celestina. Written precisely at this transformative moment in the history of reading, Michael Gerli (2011, 36) argues that Celestina’s originality lies in its exploration of human subjectivity, which leads to the discovery and representation of desire as a non-transcendental force whose ultimate conclusion is annihilation. On account of its profound rethinking of desire, observes Gerli, “Celestina thus compels us to move beyond the boundaries of a reading that is content simply with subsuming and decoding a series of thematic and ideological tensions that situate it at the end of a textual tradition” (18). Before Gerli, Burke (1993) characterized Rojas’s work as a “map of misreadings” (43) that negates medieval and Renaissance literary discourses destined to preserve the well-being of the body.To be sure, Celestina breaks down received conventions and metaphysical discourses, which disintegrate under the force of a radical awareness of human desire. As it gives expression to human passions and drives, Rojas’s book mobilizes readers’ minds, which, enthralled in the pleasures and horrors of life, reach textual pleasure. This chapter approaches the reading of Celestina in a changing world where imaginative texts begin more and more overtly to engage in a dialogue with the unconscious. I suggest that Celestina’s popularity among sixteenth-century readers resides in its ability to expose the repressed energies at the margins of language and the civilized systems it structures, which Kristeva identifes with feelings of abjection. Abjection arises in the encounter with death, which the human subject fears most, and seeks to counteract through love and reproduction.“In the presence of signifed death—a fat encephalograph, for instance—I would understand, react, or accept”, observes Kristeva (1982, 3).These are the options faced by Celestina’s readers who, 491
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confronted by the text’s eroticism and violence, come face to face with the materiality of their own existence.Abjection, also explains Kristeva (1982, 4), is the space in-between:“[it is] not the lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, and order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules.The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite”. The in-between is the domain of ambivalence and surplus meaning.1 It is where sanctioned ideological and metaphysical discourses fuctuate between reassertion and subversion.This is the linguistic, social, and psychic space that Rojas and the old bawd Celestina mediate, at the same time negotiating the engagement between text and reader. In literature, abjection is a source of both pleasure and catharsis.The feeling of abjection is accompanied by both horror and jouissance, an ecstatic enjoyment comparable to sexual climax.Abjection, argues Kristeva (1982, 9), is a violent and painful passion that at once repels and attracts the subject. Only the immersion in the abject can provide a sense of protection against it. Celestina’s success in the sixteenth century, as remains to be shown, rests precisely on the dynamics of abjection, in which the potential for verbal pleasure resides. As Rojas expresses in his relation to Celestina’s frst reception, the book became an immediate sensation. As is well known, Rojas’s novel-in-dialogue frst appeared around 1499 and was re-edited and enlarged in the ensuing years. In a Prologue newly added to the extended version of Celestina (ca. 1502), Rojas relates how readers’ craving for more detailed romantic encounters between the two lovers, along with the pervasive dissension among his readers as to the comic or tragic nature of the work, moved him to include fve new acts and to change its generic affliation from comedy to tragicomedy.As a result, the new version appeared with the new title of Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea.Very soon, Celestina and, most of all its eponymous character, would go on to become the most imitated and published work of fction in sixteenth-century Spain. Celestina spawned an entirely new literary trend, the so-called celestinesca, inaugurated by Feliciano de Silva’s Segunda Celestina (1534).The aging bawd Celestina and the world in which she exists became a crucial part of the vogue for literary sequels, a consequence of the new market for books and an expanding public eager to read entertaining fction during time reserved for leisure. Celestina entered the collective imaginary and fgured frequently in a vast array of written works, from moral treatises to miscellanies of proverbs and works of fction, leaving a lasting mark in Spanish letters.Although its literary merit remained unimpeached, Celestina was simultaneously regarded as both pernicious and of great moral merit. On account of the dangers it posed for the moral well-being of common citizens, religious men of letters such as Juan de Mariana, Fray Luis de León, and Francisco de Osuna insisted upon its prohibition. Nonetheless, the book was never completely banned, only very lightly expurgated in 1632, when it was no longer a bestseller. Given its complex textual history, speaking about Celestina inevitably entails touching upon its reception.The scholarly corpus dealing with sixteenth-century responses to Celestina is ample and varied. In addition to numerous cursory mentions to its readership, approaches to Celestina’s reception in sixteenth-century Spain include ecdotic analyses of its printed editions and extant manuscripts (Faulhaber 1991, Botta 1997, Di Camillo 2005 and 2007, Marciales 1985); interpretations of its woodcuts as testimonials of its perusal (Rivera 1995, Montero 2015); the exegesis of its paratexts from the perspective of bibliographical history (Chartier 1989); approximations to its early historical, especially university, audience (Severin 2005, Botta 2005–2006); the study of readers in the text, from Rojas to the characters (Snow 1995, Deyermond 2001); comprehensive inventories of citations, allusions, and comments (Chevalier 1976, Snow 1997 and 2001), and, most recently, its positioning within a broader literary and cultural environment (Scott 2017).2 Celestina’s much forgotten and disparaged adaptions and continuations have been investigated by, among others, Lida de Malkiel (1962), Heugas (1973),Whinnom (1988), Gilman (1972), and 492
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Baranda (2017).All of the works mentioned above shine light on Celestina’s textual history, readings, perusal, sway, and ties to other works and genres. Nonetheless, they waver when it comes to accounting for the book’s actual appeal. Notwithstanding the intellectual achievements and worth of Celestina’s scholarship, the work still lacks theoretical approaches that could provide an answer to the question of its overwhelming popular and intellectual allure in the context of sixteenth-century Spain; a question that remains still largely unanswered. In order to come to a deeper understanding of its power to attract its most immediate audiences and the critical dissension regarding the nature of the work, the reception of Celestina calls for a broader contextualization and theoretical approximation. When dealing with the history of the best-selling works of literature in Early Modern Spain, Whinnom (1988, 196–97) points out that literary mastery alone does not suffce in order to assess a work’s value and virtues. For this reason,Whinnom acknowledges that “ultimately, perhaps, we can offer no more than pseudo-psychological and pseudo-sociological explanations which are largely unverifable” (189).Yet what Whinnom perceived as purely hypothetical and tenuous is in fact verifable, perhaps not in terms of empirical data, but in a dialectical argumentation centered on the dynamics of the self, the text, and the historical consciousness as the key elements which allow us to come closer to an understanding of the nature of literary enjoyment. Humans feel a deep-seated desire for narrative and fction, a desire that is connected to the constitution of the human psyche. For Kristeva, literature is a privileged space where the subject comes to terms with its own primordial lack and want: “On close inspection, all literature is probably a version of the apocalypse that seems to be rooted, no matter what its sociohistorical conditions might be, on the fragile border (borderline cases) where identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so—double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject” (1982, 207). Literature, which awakens recondite regions of the psyche, resides at the center of human subjectivity.The desire for literature, as Whinnom (1980, 196) notes, is demonstrated and realized in the production of myths, from ancient legends to popular magazines. Much like classical fables and today’s literary and flmic series, early modern “best-selling” titles such as Celestina came to satisfy the need for entertainment, to engage the imagination, and to provide an alternative world through which people could make sense of their own identity and the world around them. Simon (2017) has recently attributed Celestina’s success among sixteenth-century readers to its portrayal of traumatic events. Simon, who focuses on the affective mechanisms in Rojas’s work and the responses they elicit, attributes Celestina’s ability to capture its readers’ minds to the emotional effects of negative events, which in cognitive studies and social psychology is termed “negativity bias”. For Simon, the negative emotions that tragic stories spark shed light on the enjoyment of literary classics, which paradoxically nourish the soul by wounding it. The process is not unlike Freudian catharsis. When Rojas expanded his original story, argues Simon (618), he capitalized on scenes of violence in order to attract the unsophisticated lay public, who—as the author states in the Prologue—focus merely on the plot.3 On the contrary, Simon believes that intellectuals would have valued the book for its didacticism, as he makes a clear distinction between kinds of readers and shares the sixteenth-century intellectual’s misgivings about lay readers. Here I wish to move beyond distinctions of rank and education among readers in order to reach a sense of the pervasive and lasting allure of Rojas’s work.All readers, learned and popular, were reading the same book and experiencing similar emotions. Hence the fears of the intellectuals, who as Ife rightly contends in his introduction to Reading and Fiction (1985), only became concerned about the pernicious effects of literature when the body of silent readers grew exponentially.The two emotions that Simon intuits in the portrayal of tragic events but fails to name 493
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are rapture and horror, the extreme sentiments associated with the spectacle of Greek drama, and which Plato regards as harmful, whereas Aristotle perceives them as purifying.“Through the mimesis of passions—ranging from enthusiasm to suffering”, Kristeva (28) paraphrases Aristotle, “the soul reaches orgy and purity at the same time”. In its representation of the combined energies of eros and thanatos, love and death, Rojas’s book dwells on impurity and alienation enthralling the readers with a semblance of their own abjection. A tragedy in its own right, Celestina represents the sufferings of human life, the violation of family ties, and the horrors of dying.The haunting plot of Celestina moves in between the tragic world of ancient texts, where a cruel fate and excessive hubris cause the fall of heroes, and everyday life in a late medieval Spanish city in which a profound dissatisfaction leads the characters, in the grip of illicit desires and with the help of the old bawd Celestina, to shape their own destiny only to fall into their deaths.As Snow (1995, 256) perceives, “Rojas’s exploration of a seamier side of our own human nature indeed produces both a recognition and a loss”. Celestina contains a semblance of human desires and anxieties that return to the readers an image of their own abjection, either unsettling or reassuring them. In these dynamics of projection lies the seed for textual enjoyment. The go-between Celestina traffcs in desire and, as a result of her dealings, the text that very soon carried her name exhibits the power of language to procure contentment. In his writings, Lacan argues that the unconscious is structured like a language foreign to the self.4 Linguistic units fguratively contain impulses, desires, needs, and fears deferred and suppressed by the unconscious, but communicated in an unfettered and protean manner. On this account, language takes on a fetishistic function since only language has the power to provide a momentary relief through the verbal manufacturing and conveyance of pleasure.Through this simulacrum that the letter allows, material enjoyment—jouissance—is attained.What is more, words have the power to constitute themselves as their own end. The chasm between the word and its referent allows for the verbal representation of a fully imagined reality.The underlying structure of the text as a linguistic artifact prevents a straightforward attribution of meaning owing to the fact that the words on the space of the paper only point to something that still needs to be formulated, as Western thinkers from St.Augustine to Saussure have stressed.The related schism in language and in the unconscious involves an absence in the signifying chain, where the omission is nonetheless negatively felt as an elusive presence.The double interplay of presence and absence mediates representation and reception as Iser theorizes (1978), and is, according to Barthes (1975), the source of literary enjoyment. The space of intermittence between written words and their unrepresentable cores is the realm of textual pleasure, which arises according to Barthes (10) as an erotic perversion, focused not on what is manifestly erogenous, but on the fash between appearance and disappearance. Barthes distinguishes between two basic forms of texts: one kind a form of “pleasure” and another, of “bliss”. A text of pleasure “comes from culture and does not break with it” (14) while a text of bliss “imposes a state of loss … unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language” (14). Celestina is decidedly a text of bliss. In Celestina, language is manipulated at will in order to attain the craved object of desire through the verbal expression of pleasure, which becomes inseparable from death.The fetishistic quality of language is a fundamental component of pleasure, as the penetrating go-between makes clear when she points out to Pármeno that: El deleyte es con los amigos en las cosas sensuales, y en especial en recontar las cosas de amores y comunicarlas. “Esto hize, esto otro me dixo; tal donayre passamos, de tal manera la tomé, assí la besé, assí me mordió, assí la abracé, assí se allegó. ¡O qué habla, o qué gracia, o qué juegos, o qué besos!” (126) 494
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[Pleasure in sensual things comes with friends you can tell about your lovemaking: “I did this. She said that.We told such and such joke. I took her like this. I kissed her thus. She lay with me so.What a licker, what a repertoire, what foreplay, what smackers!”]5 Rojas’s bawd signals the vicarious pleasure attained through linguistic expression and the sharing of stories. Language, which—as fction confrms—has the capacity to generate, stirs desire and momentarily satisfes it. It is here that the appeal of literature resides.“Celestina’s genius lies not only in her acute sensitivity to the desires of her fellow human beings”, notes Gaylord (7), “but in her recognition of the fact that human desire—physical, sexual, metaphysical—is in large part a hunger for words, a hunger which seeks not only to express itself, but also to satisfy it verbally”. In Celestina, the word functions as a fetish whose protean nature allows for the transitory fulfllment of desire, the possibility of which is contained in language. However, as Gerli (96) rightfully perceives, the words of Celestina’s characters obliquely betray as well the threat of death in the midst of pleasure and love. Occluded under the guise of fguration, language in Celestina contains constant allusions to death, to which the characters fall prey as they seek to satisfy their appetites and aspirations. At the beginning of Act 1, the male lover had wished for death to take him in order to stop his suffering:“Cierra la ventana y dexa la tiniebla acompañar al triste y al desdichado la ceguedad. Mis pensamientos tristes no son dignos de luz. ¡O bienauenturada muerte aquella, que desseada a los afigidos viene!” (88) [Now shut my window and let darkness accompany this sad, blinded soul! My disappointment doesn’t deserve to see the light of day. Death that gives relief to sorrow is welcome].A little later, Celestina wishes Pármeno to die:“¡Mala landre te mate!” (120) [I hope a terrible illness kills you!]. In Act 6, it is Sempronio who does so when he wishes his confederate to burn in hell and be consumed by illness (178). In this same act, Calisto heedlessly predicts his own death when he cries out:“O maravillosa astucia, o singular mujer en su offcio … Agora doy por bienempleada mi muerte, puesta en tales manos, y creeré que si mi deseo no oviere effecto qual querría, que no se puedo obrar más, según natura, en mi salud” (183–84) [What a guile! What a genious when she’s playing her trade … I consider my death worth it, placed in such good hands, and of my desire doesn’t get what it’s after, nobody could have done more to cure me].As these examples paradigmatically attest, asides from eavesdroppers prefgure the tragic ending of the work, which is openly voiced by Sempronio when overcome by loathing he warns his master:“Que mucho fablando matas a ti e a los que te oyen. E assí que perderás la vida o el seso” (188) [That your rambling will be the death of you and all of us listening.This way you will lose your life or your brain]. Mumbled omens, curses, and allusions to death as the inextricable counterpart of love disclose, on the one hand, the abjection of human life, and on the other, the power of the word to generate what it expresses.Abjection is perceived in the literal and unrhetorical use of language, which by reducing the letter to its sheer materiality brings about both pleasure and annihilation. Celestina’s language moves in between the satisfaction of erotic desires and the presaging of death in order to communicate the morbid and unredemptive nature of life—in other words, the horrors of abjection and the pleasures derived from it to avoid fragmentation. In this manner, Celestina problematizes and departs from ethical views of reading, which collapse under the weight of heedless energies. In Celestina, beginning with its paratexts, abjection intertwines with didacticism in a cunning diversionary maneuver of misrecognition that sets it apart from the previous tradition of its source texts. Rojas inserts himself in the work against all medieval and humanistic notions of reading as a contemplative activity and an ethical journey.6 In the scholastic epistemological framework, built to a large extent upon St.Augustine’s doctrines and theories of language, read495
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ing was considered an inner quest of self-discovery whose fundamental mandate was to avoid surrendering to a lustful interpretation of the written word, which according to Augustine happens when words are deprived of the protective shield of symbolism. In Book Three of On Christian Doctrine (1958, 78),Augustine warns about confusing literal and fgurative expressions for, when interpreted literally, metaphorical language refects the servitude of Humankind to the body. According to Augustine, the main trap that readers encounter is, indeed, fgurative language, for when interpreted literally it makes the reader’s soul perish. In Augustine’s words, “nor can anything more appropriately be called the death of the soul than that condition in which the thing which distinguishes us from beasts, which is the understanding, is subjected to the fesh in the pursuit of the letter” (On Christian Doctrine III. v. 9, p. 84).The core of Augustine’s interpretative apparatus was charity, analogous to the love of God—caritas, as opposed to carnal love, cupiditas. While reading, subjects would project themselves inwardly, where they should fnd a prepossessed knowledge of God or veritas interior. Such is the central tenant of the Libro de buen amor, as Dagenais (1994) maintains. Reading as meditation permeated ffteenth-century Castilian literature.“Vernacular humanists practiced contemplation, the craft associated with literary composition, as a recollective journey through other texts or places stored in their memory to retrieve subjects and to create original compositions”, argues Miguel-Prendes (2004, 15). In the “Carta a un su amigo” [Letter to a Friend of His], frst printed in the 1500 Toledo edition of Celestina, Rojas describes the place from where the manuscript papers of Act 1 looked into him, stirring his consciousness. He recalls the times when, withdrawn to his bedchamber, head resting on his hand, he would free his thoughts and meditate on how to serve his fellow countrymen, who needed a moral defense against the perfdious workings of love.The original Act 1, Rojas claims, functioned as a mnemonic stimulus for the application of the Christian virtue of caritas, which translates into an exercise of social responsibility.As evoked in the medieval accessus ad auctores and rehearsed by Rojas in the “Carta”, the practice of meditative reading consisted in the removal of the kernel from the husk in seeking nourishment for the spirit. Beckoned by the elegant style and artifce of the fragment, which he compares to a weapon of mighty steel, the young jurist confesses in the epistle his compulsive need to reread the anonymous manuscript of Act 1 up to three or four times, each time uncovering new hidden meanings in the text. He relates how he works through the manuscript fragment, moving beyond his delight and enjoyment of the story in order to extract its teachings. Inspired by the text before him, Rojas would perform a philanthropic duty by continuing the story of the two lovers as a remedy against his fellow men’s romantic and spiritual disorder, a moral message that according to Rojas was already inscribed in the text, which he deemed a set of defensive weapons against the fres of love. Nonetheless, Rojas’s expressed intention is betrayed over and again, revealing a play on diversion that indicates the possibility of various interpretations. The libido triumphs in approaching Celestina and dismantles the Augustinian ideal of reading. Desire permeates the reader’s intellect and memory, which is no longer a storage place of prelapsarian knowledge and ethical exempla, but something synonymous with human life and consciousness, as pointed out by Severin (1970). Sempronio warns Calisto in Act 1 that his memory of his readings is faulty, clouded by his carnal appetite. Memory also fails Pleberio (Act 21) and Melibea (Act 20), who cannot fnd in the readings stored in their memories examples to enlighten their experience and alleviate their burdens.As Deyermond (2001, 24) observes, the literary culture of Celestina’s characters does not do them much good, quite the opposite.The insistence on the memory of reading and its failure highlights in an evasive manner the deterrents to reading as an exclusively ethical and contemplative exercise and highlights the inevitable victory of emotion over the rational mind. 496
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Celestina introduces a qualitative difference in regard to the preceding language of didacticism in religious and secular texts that resides in the movement from humanitarian values into abjection. Such a development connects with the more reactive subjectivity of the readers in the late ffteenth century. The text’s lack of a straightforward moral agenda becomes evident in Pleberio’s soliloquy, in which traditional consolatory topoi lose their comforting force as they fail to counteract the cruelty and arbitrariness of earthly life. Morality, which is repeatedly underscored in Celestina’s preliminary matter, is an essential component of Rojas’s plan of action, as Lawrance notes (1993b). Lawrance (92) perceptively observes that the work’s moral is neither religious nor spiritual, but social, as it was in the ffteenth-century development of Terencian humanistic comedy, one of Celestina’s literary siblings. He further argues that that struggle between charitable love and worldly passion, a trademark of late medieval erotological treatises, such as Breviloquio de amor y amiçiçia written by Alonso Fernández de Madrigal ca. 1440, is a red herring, and that the main focus of Celestina’s moral imperative is the civic unrest that ensues in the misdirection of sexual energies (Lawrance 1993b, 93). Celestina, I would argue, underscores the imperative of humanitarian values, only to undermine their universality by repeatedly falling into abjection, which manifests itself in violence and lubricious eroticism. Rojas’s twisted tale rehearses the struggle between ethical ideals and desired intellectual enjoyment, tilting the balance in favor of the latter while leaving it to the readers to draw their own conclusions. Rojas, like Celestina, was well aware that desire is unstoppable as is the pursuit of enjoyment, which can be attained not only physically, but also verbally. Rojas’s detour and interpretative openness are best typifed in the work’s verses, in which mortality and erotic pleasure inextricably coalesce, seemingly luring the reader into intellectual lust. Celestina’s stanzas, which duplicate the material introduced in the Letter in the form of poetry and builds upon it, herald salvation in God as much as delight in worldly enjoyment.A series of verbal portrayals of Christ’s sufferings, a prompt for contemplation known as imago rerum, alternates with a perceptive assertion of the ubiquitous presence of desire in the world and the text. Rojas plays with the readers’ heedless abjection by juxtaposing sexual contentment with the death of the mortal bodies of the book’s protagonists and the image of a dying Christ. In one concluding stanza in particular, Rojas encourages the readers to interpret, and to take pleasure in, the lewdness represented in the text: No dudes ni ayas verguença, lector, narrar lo lascivo, que aquí se te muestra: que siendo discreto verás ques la muestra por donde se vende la honesta lavor; De nuestra vil massa con tal lamedor consiente coxquillas de alto consejo con motes e trufas del tiempo más viejo: escriptas a bueltas le ponen sabor. (343–44) [Do not hesitate or be ashamed, reader, to read the lasciviousness that is shown here to you. Since you are discreet you will see that it is the sample from which honest work is sold.Accept jests of high counsel, made from vile substance, wrapped in old saws and jokes from olden times which often make it more favorful.] The phrasing of these lines is notably twisted, a contortion that is emphasized in the last line, in which the unnatural bending of old jokes and sayings is the spice that adds favor to the work. In light of the ambiguous formulation of the verses, Rojas’s “honest labor” takes on an ironic character. Rojas equates the poet to a vendor whose merchandise is lascivious. “As he confesses to 497
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this kind of false advertisement the author begins to reveal his uncomfortably close resemblance with that other jaded peddler, the bawd herself, whose propaganda conceals destruction beneath the promise of sexual delight”, notes Gaylord (23). Like his character Celestina, Rojas is a mediator who makes satisfaction possible through the mobilization of want and fear at the edge of consciousness. By admitting his desire for proft and juxtaposing it to images of death and salvation, Rojas reframes old literary patterns and breaks down the automatic perusal of the text. Although he claims to prefer the safeguard of anonymity, Rojas leaves a not-so-covert remainder of himself in the acrostic verses that bear his name following the epistle. Alonso de Proaza— possibly in compliance with Rojas, with whom he had a very close relationship (Gilman 1972, 53–54)—later reveals this trick in his own verses.The acrostic verses, both in form and content, are a trace of something secretly hidden, Rojas’s deliberately concealed identity. As such, they are a paradigmatic example of the dynamics of concealment and exposure of the abjection that characterizes Rojas’s work and serves as a testimonial to the nature of his authorial conscience. In brief, Celestina channels the desires of the young men of the nation, which according to Rojas are misdirected toward the pleasures of the fesh. However, instead of simply censoring them, it provides an outlet for the sexual and violent energies denied by social, religious, and epistemological codes.The book provides a venue to vent on feelings of abjection.The rhetorical ability of the old bawd to capitalize on the characters’ zest for sex and money is analogous to that of the text to the extent that, only a few years after its frst appearance, the go-between took possession of the book’s very title in the Seville edition of ca. 1502, whose title page reads Libro de Calixto y Melibea y de la puta vieja Celestina.7 Throughout Celestina’s preliminary texts, Rojas distinguished himself as an ethical reader, yet he cultivates a deliberately duplicitous authorial persona that becomes even more apparent in the Prologue to the Tragicomedia, in which he feigns an internal ethical battle, only to lay bare and exploit the voluptuous potential of language. In the Prologue, Rojas insinuates the sensuality of the text and, in so doing, he allures the readers into imagining. Here Rojas returns to an ethical and contemplative notion of reading in order to describe Celestina’s ideal reader. The perusal of Celestina, Rojas remarks, depends upon the reader’s age, for each stage of life entails a struggle of its own and a different linguistic and literary competence. Children, who cannot read, destroy the papers that make up the book.Youths only take pleasure in the narrative and nothing else, as if it were another common story that people tell when they travel for simple entertainment. Some others, although they spot the proftable wisdom it contains, do not take the time to make it useful to themselves through study. Contrary to these readers,“aquellos para cuyo verdadero placer es todo, desechan el cuento de la historia que contar, coligen la suma para su provecho, ríen lo donoso, las sentencias y dichos de philósophos guardan en su memoria para transponer en lugares convenibles a sus autos y propósitos” (80) [those who fnd everything amusing discount the heart of the story and tell it their way, select what they think is important, laugh at what is funny, and memorize the sayings and dicta of philosophers in order to repeat them at an opportune moment]. The utility of the teachings stored in philosophical commonplaces and proverbs is ambivalent and versatile since, as a product of language, they are easy to exploit, misinterpret, and misuse to put into the service of human desire. As it happens, proverbs and folksy commonplaces are often twisted in the book to the point they lose their authority, wisdom, and truth (see Shipley 1985 and Gaylord 1991, 14–9). Also, let’s not forget that, as noted above, ethical and textual memory often fails Celestina’s characters. Furthermore, at odds with the previous presentation of himself as an ethical reader of Act 1, Rojas characterizes himself as an amateurish reader when he admits that “mi pobre saber no baste a más de roer sus secas cortezas de los dichos de aquellos que por claror de sus ingenious merescieron ser aprovados” (77) [my poor wit is only ft to gnaw empty husks of the sayings of those who deserve recognition because of the brilliance of their minds]. 498
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As he playfully debases himself in an ironic captatio benevolentia, Celestina’s author casts a shadow over his interpretation of Petrarch and of Act 1, exposing one more time the malleability of meaning even as it springs from a consolidated authority.The simple and ignorant intellect that Rojas attributes to himself is one more indicator of his wry articulation of the force of the written letter to produce enjoyment by immersion in the abject. An awareness of the possibilities of language and linguistic abuse, even when authority seems to endorse meaning, is in fact the crux of Celestina’s rhetoric of reading and reception, in which an emphasis on exemplarity and didacticism soon gives ground to the plurality of language and its capacity to procure pleasure and enjoyment by creating a semblance of humankind’s heedless sexual and violent energies. Not only does the hollowness of words of wisdom betray the rightful engagement with the book, but also Rojas’s actions, which reinforce his authorial persona and betray his encounter with the text as a reader. Rojas establishes himself as a panderer to his readers’ fantasies, which he voices loud and clear. Referring to the dissension among readers of the Comedia about its nature, he declares that: assí que viendo estas contiendas, estos dísonos y varios juyzios, miré a donde la mayor parte acostava y hallé que querían que alargasse en el proceso de su deleyte destos amantes, sobre lo cual fui muy importunado, de manera que acordé, aunque contra mi voluntad, meter segunda vez la pluma en tan extraña lavor y tan agena de mi facultad. (81) [and seeing these tiffs, disputes and differences of opinion, I thought about what the majority was saying and realized they wanted the period of the lovers’ happiness to be extended, and this was very vexing for me, but I decided against my best will to set my pen to work a second time in this strange toil I was never trained for.] In these words, Celestina’s author seems to admit that this kind of “salacious” writing was strange, alien to him, yet nevertheless he pursued it, as if it were an involuntary fall into the sensuality of the words and the book.The reception of the Comedia had already been imagined and staged in the third stanza of the prefatory verses. In this case, the slaughter of a newly winged ant serves as a metaphor for the pain that the author of Celestina, slandered by all, is to suffer. The moment he surrenders to its readers’ desire for more sexuality, Rojas violates the edifying intention declared in the “Carta” and reproduced in the incipit.The erotic content that his readers demanded, and to which Rojas mischievously accedes bending against his own conscience, is one more stratagem that serves to blur the work’s meaning and intention. Rojas’s complaints against his readers’ desire for more erotic content have been widely construed verbatim by Celestina’s scholars. However, given Celestina’s breakaway from tradition and the attention given to heightened sexuality in the additions to the text, as much as to violence and interiority, one may read Rojas’s admission as a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment of a growing body of readers that craves more titillation and excitement.The readers’ wishes ft within Rojas’s rebellious program and he capitalizes on them in order to create a deeper and more riveting erotic story. The erotic content that his readers demanded and to which Rojas capitulates against his own conscience further erases the work’s alleged edifying intention and lets a heightened sense of abjection emerge in the form of surplus meaning.The enhanced abject wantonness of the additions may be one more authorial stratagem. Or maybe Rojas has now turned into a reader of his own work and, despite his best intentions, falls into his own abject reading of the text.The fve new acts and the various interpolations are suffused with an exacerbated pessimism that emerges from erotic, sociopolitical, and religious roots. In the climate of remorse, lust, and violence that follows the murder of the go-between and the execution of her confederates, the remaining 499
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characters—Melibea, Pleberio, and the prostitutes—communicate their interiority in a series of laments and refections on their position in the body politic.8 “The second garden scene, the only part of the fve-act addition that corresponds to the demand to extend the period of the lovers’ delight, turns out to be largely concerned with sociopolitical criticism and—briefy but memorably—the question of repentance in articulo mortis”, Deyermond remarks (1993, 19). The ability of the proletarian society to regenerate and to contribute incidentally through its schemes to the death of the lovers reinforces the denial of any cosmological order or fairness, expressed in Pleberio’s lament. Lawrance observes that in the Tragicomedia Rojas gives birth to a “dark comedy”, a calculated shattering of the molds that “square[s] the circle by carrying the comic tone and diction into the heart of darkness” (1993a, 90).The Tragicomedia not only seeks to be generically ambivalent (Lawrance 1993a, 92), it seeks to thwart any effort to fx or synthesize its meaning, therefore, the Prologue’s emphasis on the readers’ contention regarding the merits and title of the work.The enhanced black irony of the Tragicomedia lays bare the desiring nature of humankind, blind to the hazards and frailty of sex, ambition, and, of course, language. Rojas’s black comedy, as Lawrence (1993a, 87) insightfully describes it, creates a sense of abjection through an uneasy combination of violence and eroticism that simultaneously provoke ecstasy, laughter, and horror. The ubiquity of desire, violence, and death, in which abjection is rooted, is emphasized in the Prologue to the Tragicomedia, in which the disagreement among readers is one more facet of a universal confict and violent unrest. Picking up the thread of the animalistic analogy between the author and the ant, the Prologue opens with a reminiscence of Heraclitus, in whose maxim the theme of universal struggle as the very essence of existence and creation is confrmed. Heraclitus’s aphorism is just the frst recollection of the new Prologue, composed upon the commentary and application of textual authorities.Through a series of hunting metaphors that are glossed and extend from Pliny’s Naturalis Historia as it fgures in Petrarch’s De remediis, the Prologue refects upon the fundamental strife and disharmony that governs Creation.9 It portrays a brutal universe in which celestial forces, natural elements, and creatures are ensnared in an annihilating and pervasive confict overturning all known traditional notions of the power and grandeur of existence. Stars clash in the skies, the earthquakes, the seas ripple with waves, the wind roughly blows, and seasons contend against each other yielding extreme heat and cold. The strong and powerful elephant fees from the mere sight and sound of a little mouse while a small fsh is able to halt a sailing ship pushed by a mighty gale. Dominion no longer corresponds to strength and size, and even an act governed by love, as is conception, turns into a violent and deadly union, as illustrated by the breeding of vipers, or enraged snakes, serpientes enconadas. The female viper, when she conceives, grips the male so sweetly and tightly by his head in her mouth, that she annihilates him only to be killed herself by conception as her offspring bursts through her sides tearing her in two. In the universe described in the Prologue, mayhem and brutality govern all Creation, from planetary cycles to animal behavior. Rojas brings to mind a world in which mortality is a ubiquitous and capricious presence that terrorizes even the strongest, mightiest, and most lethal creatures, which in their ecstasies of pleasure inevitably confront their own extinction. The Prologue portrays an abject cosmos from which mankind cannot escape. From the images of pervasive, universal discord in the animal kingdom, Rojas moves into an account of destruction and mutability in the realm of humankind by asking the question: ¿Pues qué diremos entre los hombres a quien todo lo sobredicho es subjeto? ¿quién explanará sus guerras, sus enmistades, sus embidias, sus aceleramientos y movimientos y descontentamientos? ¿Aquel mudar de trajes, aquel derribar y renovar edifcios y 500
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otros muchos affectos diversos y variedades que desta nuestra faca humanidad nos provienen? (80) [So what can we say of men who suffer from all we have recounted? Who can explain their wars, enmities, envies, rages, quarrels and discontent? Such renting of clothes, destruction and rebuilding of houses and other diverse acts that derive from the weakness of mankind?] Murderous and capricious desire surfaces as the only historical constant, one that embroils humankind in an incessant struggle. “By way of abjection, primitive societies have marked out a precise area of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening world of animals or animalism, which were imagined as representatives of sex and murder”, notes Kristeva (12–3). Although the human subject tries to distance itself from all that represents the sexual and murderous instincts of the animal kingdom, it cannot get away from it. On the contrary, it fnds itself ineluctably plunged into its vicious ways, which magnify in humankind’s conduct. Humankind, which is subjugated not only by its natural drives, but also by the material fabric of the world, which is built upon language, is the most abject of all creatures.As the text makes apparent, the contention among humans surpasses the eternal dissension in the animal, natural, and heavenly regions given that the historical and cultural dimension of human life increases material desire and, along with it, feelings of abjection, which can never be completely expunged. Destruction and mutability are the result of human attempts to cancel out abjection. Constant change, unrest, and envy in the human realm make it impossible to secure lasting control over the word and its meaning. This situation translates into a perpetual confict between the literary work, its author, and its readers, which becomes one more aspect of a universal contention and disorder. In the Prologue, in which universal confict is inextricably tied to the reception of Celestina, Rojas foregrounds the presence of an ever-growing body of readers craving for texts that refect the desires and horrors of the world and of their everyday life, even though their particular existential agendas might differ. Rojas’s understanding of literature as one more locus of a ceaseless struggle, reveals a renewed tension between invention, transmission, and reception at a time when the printing press began to make texts available for an expanding, more heterogeneous body of readers that engaged individually and intimately with texts bringing to them their own inner struggles. Based on the conclusions drawn by Sarah Nalle on literacy and culture in sixteenth-century Spain (1989), Celestina’s audience most likely grew in number and diversity over that century, progressively including all kinds of readers, from clerics, nobles, and intellectuals to tradesmen, workers, and even literate servants. Celestina’s reading public probably did not differ much from the consumers of romances of chivalry. In fact, Feliciano de Silva was a prolifc writer of romances of chivalry before he composed the Segunda Celestina (Medina del Campo, 1534). Furthermore, although they are two very different kinds of literature, Celestina together with the romances of chivalry was simultaneously praised and condemned as pernicious and morally corrupt because of their effect upon readers, especially the female and uneducated public. In tune with Plato, Renaissance intellectuals feared the power of language to stage disruptive, shameful, and passionate human fantasies, which the public harbors and experiences vicariously through fction. Literature was feared not only because it was considered immoral and futile, but because of its power to move and captivate readers’ minds, mesmerizing and thrusting them into an alternative reality which was only a semblance of the truth.The act of reading was believed to perturb the soul and to suspend the rational operations of the mind in the process of interpretation.The irrationality and ecstasy of reading, of which Plato was aware, explains Ife (1985, 56), supported the arguments against literature. In his works, Cervantes, for example, problematizes 501
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the logic against reading.This is especially evident in Don Quijote, where an aging silent reader falls prey to the aesthetic truth of chivalric romances with ambiguous results that range from madness to the glory of self-realization. As Castillo puts it,“Cervantes’s novel would thus function as an anamorphic mirror that constructs oblique images of society’s ideals, especially those dependent upon chivalric and pastoral utopias” (2001, 87). Before Cervantes, Rojas attained this same kind of anamorphic glimpse into abjection. As it happens, Cervantes was an admirer of Celestina, to which he refers as “divine”, just subsequently to clarify “si encubriera más lo humano” [if only it concealed human faws a bit more], this humanness being abjection. This is so because Rojas exposes the frailty and arbitrariness of all symbolic systems, starting from language, and the potentials of literary representation. Through the superimposition of eroticism, humor, irony, violence, and death, Celestina gives central stage to the sexual and vicious impulses of humankind, distorting the ideals and conventions that had characterized previous texts to produce a recognition of alienation. In Celestina, as would also be the case in Cervantes’s works, the force of human desire is obliquely unveiled confronting the readers with a semblance of their fantasies, frailty, and mortality which provide a sense of relief through an immersion in abjection. At the same time, the oblique perspective into abjection against all appearance of order opens up the text to interpretation, thus requiring the readers’ active engagement, which was what was so much feared by sixteenth-century intellectuals (Ife 55). In sixteenth-century Spain, Celestina became an object of contempt among intellectuals, who struggled to reconcile the work’s double nature, simultaneously didactic and bawdy. As Gagliardi shows, Celestina’s merits as a moral and cautionary tale were perceived by the religious and secular learned men who, nonetheless, feared that the common reader would not be able to beneft from its morality or, worse yet, would take pleasure in its voluptuousness. Instead of reading it as a lesson on self-restraint and a bad example of amorous conduct, intellectuals were deeply aware that Celestina was also a book about seduction, where material desire was encoded. This is the reason why the youth enjoyed it so much, Juan de Pineda feared. In his Diálogo de la agricultura cristiana (1589), Pineda recalls the many times when he chastised young men for reading Celestina. In response, the youth argued that the book’s carnality served as a warning against bad women and other deceits (quoted in Gagliardi 2007, 65–6).The intellectuals and the non-educated readers of Celestina were equally aware of the work’s duplicity and of its inclination toward pleasure. Juan Luis Vives, who had referred to Rojas’s book as a nequitiarum parens (mother of wickedness) in his De institutione feminae christianae, emphasized in his De disciplinis the moral teachings contained in it (Gagliardi 2007 62). As these examples demonstrate, Celestina’s ambiguity could be easily perceived by one and the same reader. Celestina’s learned readers undoubtedly saw a profound faithlessness and debauchery under its didactic veneer. On this account, Celestina was considered both an admonitory tale against fornication and a medium to attain vicarious sexual pleasure.The men of letters who understood the text in its entirety feared that the uneducated masses, traditionally associated with the body and a lack of high moral standards, would be more susceptible to interpreting the text in a lustful way. As Vega (209) reminds us, the lust of the intellect or of the imagination, incited by the written word, was regarded as dreadful a sin as the sinful act itself.The intellectuals’ concern regarding Celestina is the direct result of the text, which foregrounds the realization of individual desire. Celestina’s author does not simply aim to warn the work’s readers about the spiritual and social perils of love, but about textual pleasure just as it provides a space for it. Nonetheless, the text’s inherent ambivalence and the multiple interpretations it allows precluded it from entering the Index. Rojas is aware of the circulating nature of texts and, therefore, is mindful that Celestina’s meaning will be established socially. In the Prologue, a shrewd Rojas once again complains 502
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that even the printers, the new intermediaries negotiating the space between text and public, had intervened in the creation of his work: “aun los impresores han dado sus punturas, poniendo rúbricas o sumarios al principio de cada auto, narrando en breve lo que dentro contenía; una cosa bien escusada según lo que los antiguos escriptores usaron” [even the printers have added their points, have put explanations or summaries at the beginning of each act, briefy stating what happens; something quite unnecessary if one considers how the ancient writers got by without them] (81). Printed books appropriated some of the characteristics of codices, such as tables of contents, indexes, running heads, or summaries, which facilitated the reader’s access to the text (see Saenger 267 and Lawrance 1985, 82–3). Nonetheless, by emphasizing the printers’ meddling, Rojas establishes a further contrast between the old and new literary ways. The extent of the printers’ contribution is unknown, in particular when it comes to the argumentos included at the beginning of each act (Gilman 1956, 212–16); but notwithstanding the degree of these interventions, the simple mention of printers attests to a new form of textual transmission that radically changed the production and consumption of literature.10 Celestina comes into being in a nascent print culture, at the crossroads between orality, manuscript culture, and print as alternative forms for the production of literary entertainment. In his Prologue, as introduced above, Rojas describes an audience of listeners whose personalities are varied. The diversity of readers and the inherent confict in all existence prompt Rojas to declare that “assí que quando diez personas se juntaren a oír esta comedia en quien quepa esta differencia de condiciones” (81). For Deyermond (2001, 32–3) the allusion to orality is a strange one since Celestina seems to have circulated primarily as a printed book, moreover, a book that sold many copies as its multiple editions certify. As it happens, although the printing press did not put an end to reading aloud for audiences, as Bouza (2004) demonstrates, vernacular authors from the late fourteenth century “increasingly assumed that their audience was composed of readers, rather than of listeners” (Saenger 273). Furthermore, some collective readings were indeed rather intimate.This is the case in La Lozana Andaluza, in which the young Andalusian woman asks Silvano to read Celestina to her for the pleasure of hearing it (Delicado 1985, 399).As it happens, the small size of Celestina’s editions, ranging from the quarto to the sextodecimo in the late sixteenth century, presupposes a private and solitary engagement with the book. The printed editions of Celestina testify to the collective construction of its meaning in early modernity. In the woodcuts of its printed editions, the clear presence of abjection confrms that this aspect of the text is the main attraction for the reader. Celestina’s woodcuts tell a story in themselves, a story that is neither totally independent from Rojas’s text nor ancillary to it. In a general overview, the book’s vignettes seem to give graphic expression to the surplus meaning of the text. Without entering into a discussion of Celestina’s printed iconography and its developments, suffce it to say that it moves between sexual innuendo and vivid representations of death.The negotiation and consummation of sexual desire is a central motif in the woodcuts of Basilea’s edition, which portray the old bawd as a “negotiator of thresholds” (Montero 2005, 42). Montero concludes that this is an expression of the ineffable that is latent in the text as a surplus of meaning, and that it represents the sexual penetration of the female body (52). In effect, sexuality together with death are the substance of a “primal repression” that precedes the subject’s entrance into the fabric of the world, before we establish a separation between human and animal, between culture and its absence. In the woodcuts of the printed editions of the Tragicomedia, eroticism and violence explicitly combine. Of the fve vignettes that they normally contain, four are violent images: the stabbing to death of the bawd, the grisly public execution of Sempronio and Pármeno, Calisto’s bloody fall to his death and his spilled brains on the cobblestones, and Melibea’s disjointed body resulting from 503
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suicide. One, which appears twice, in Acts 14 and 19, represents Calisto on his ladder ascending to Melibea’s garden. The emphasis on abjection is also a crucial component of the celestinesca tradition. Celestinesca, as noted, is a term that roughly serves to designate a series or a cycle of literary works that developed frst and foremost—but not exclusively—over the course of the sixteenth century from the combination of Rojas’s work and Feliciano de Silva’s Segunda Celestina, which initiates it. At a time in which the depraved and corrupted environment of Rojas’s Celestina might seem to have left the world of fction to resemble more and more the actual experiences of daily life in Spain, De Silva brings the old procuress back to life, stricto sensu, after her murder. Like the Biblical Lazarus (John xi, 1–5) and years before Lazarillo de Tormes, Celestina is given a second chance to live and redeem herself, a chance that she seemingly wastes. From this point on, Celestina’s sequels began to proliferate and to negotiate glimpses into abjection, some conferring upon their stories a Christian and normative form and a reading that warns about the dangers of living on the edge, others by doing the opposite, immersing the reader in unabashed eroticism and secularity. Gilman (1972, 363) divides the celestinesca tradition into two modules, “those which exaggerate eroticism and crude humor (La Thebayda, La Seraphina, La Loçana andaluza) and those which attempt to compensate morally for their subject matter—either by concluding the love affair with marriage (La Eufrosina, La Segunda Celestina, La Selvagia) or by underlying the relationship between transgression and punishment (La penitencia de amor or La tercera Celestina in which the alcahueta falls to her death)”.The diversity of Celestina’s imitations and continuations thus corresponds to the space of abjection inscribed in the text and to the heterogeneity of its readers. Notwithstanding their social class and identities, Celestina’s readers all seem to have reveled in the horrors and pleasures of the text in relation to their individual frm moral values or their voluptuousness. At a time when silent reading had opened the possibilities for interpretation and for the inscription of the readers’ subjectivity in the text, Celestina captures the sensuality of language and hints at leaving its readers to enjoy and individually refect on their own fall into abjection. By dismantling previous literary conventions and foregrounding the erotic and violent nature of humankind, Rojas inscribes the readers’ feelings of abjection in the text and breaks down the automatic production of meaning.As it happens, violence and sexuality are essential to Celestina’s composition and reception, as Rojas describes in its paratexts and its sixteenthcentury reception confrms. Rojas’s claim that his text has a doctrinal purpose conceals a profound awareness of the ambivalence of language, its semantic potential for pleasure, and its effects on the human imagination. Rojas fathoms the universal need for verbal pleasure that literature provides, especially at a time when silent reading was gradually making it more and more accessible. In the rise of literature as an extension of the human consciousness, Celestina obscures the scholastic and humanistic understanding of reading as an ethical and contemplative activity, confronting its readers with a shadow of their own abjection and sensuality. The portrayal of a world where language, reduced to its material core, has the power to satisfy desire and bring destruction opens the wound of abjection that institutions managed to close, but not to heal, and offer a temporary relief. Celestina, long before the works of modern authors that Kristeva analyzes (Céline, Kafka, Proust, Dostoevsky,Artaud, etc.), explores the abject by means of the reassertion and subsequent disintegration of the discourses and boundaries that, as Burke noticed, were meant to preserve the integrity of body and soul. By doing so, Rojas’s Celestina might have unsettled its readers, provoking feelings of rapture and horror. Celestina’s aesthetics of abjection would become predominant in the seventeenth century, when the works of Cervantes, Lope, Zayas, and Calderón, among others, more than ever before inquired into the human fear of loss and sense of lack. 504
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Notes 1 Celestina’s ambiguity has been widely noticed—from Severin (1989, 2), who recognizes a doublevoice that manifests in irony and parody, to Gerli (2011, 96), for whom the book’s language contains an anamorphic look into the Real. It is the experience of the Real that provokes feelings of abjection. Building on Gerli, I shall argue that Celestina’s glimpse into the Real and the excess of meaning it creates are key to understanding the book’s general appeal. 2 The scholarly works mentioned are just a small but relevant sample of the wealth of scholarship on Celestina’s reception. I exclude here Celestina’s larger European reception and focus only on its reception in Spain in the sixteenth century. 3 Bergman (2012) has also attributed Celestina’s success to its portrayal of violence. For violence in Celestina, see Sears (1992), Pattison (2001), Sutherland (2003), and Snow (2011). 4 In the Lacanian reformulation of the linguistic sign as developed by Saussure, the plurality and ambiguity of the human psyche correlates to that of language where the “structure of the signifying chain discloses … the possibility … to use it to signify something altogether different from what it says” (Lacan 2006, 421; Lacan’s emphasis). 5 All citations from Celestina in Spanish are taken from Severin’s edition (Rojas 1987).The accompanying English version is from Perter Burns’s translation (Rojas 2010). I have taken the liberty to modify the translation when I have considered it inaccurate.These modifcations are not signaled. 6 Rojas’s posture is characteristic of an ethical engagement with the book, discussed in the text that follows. See Carruthers 1998, 173–74. 7 Rojas’s text was often renamed on the basis of its characters, most often, the old bawd. See Snow (2001). 8 See Haywood (2001) for a survey of female laments, in particular, Elicia’s. 9 See Deyermond (1961, 56–7) for the chain of reminiscences and citations from Petrarch’s De remediis in Celestina. 10 Celestina’s summaries or argumentos are, as Gilman seeks to demonstrate, the work of its printers. Nonetheless, Gilman argues that there is a possibility that Rojas himself penned the argumentos of the later Tragicomedia.
References Augustine. 1958. On Christian Doctrine.Translated by D.W. Robertson, Jr. Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill. Baranda, Consolación. 2017. “Celestina’s Continuations, Adaptions and Infuences”. In A Companion to Celestina, edited by Enrique Fernandez, 321–338. London: Brill. Barthes, Roland. 1975. The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Hill and Wang. Bergman, Ted L. 2012. “La Celestina and the Popularization of Graphic Criminal Violence”. Celestinesca 36: 47–70. Botta, Patrizia. 1997.“El texto en movimiento (de La Celestina de Palacio a La Celestina posterior)”. In Cinco siglos de “Celestina”, edited by Rafael Beltrán and José Luis Canet Vallés, 135–159.Valencia: Universitat de València, Collecció Oberta. Botta, Patrizia. 2005–2006.“La Celestina como autoridad”. Íncipit 25–26: 57–66. Bouza, Fernando. 2004. Communication, Knowledge, and Memory in Early Modern Spain.Translated by Sonia López and Michael Agnew. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Burke, James. 1993.“The Insouciant Reader and the Failure of Memory in Celestina”. Crítica Hispánica 15, no. 1: 33–44. Carruthers, Mary. 1998. The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Castillo, David R. 2001. (A)wry Views: Anamorphosis, Cervantes, and the Early Picaresque. Indiana: Purdue University Press. Chartier, Roger. 1989. “Texts, Printing, Readings”. In The New Cultural History, edited by Lynn Hunt, 154–175. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chevalier, Maxime. 1976. Lectura y lectores en la España de los s. XVI y XVII. Madrid: Ediciones Turner. Dagenais, John. 1994. The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing the Libro de Buen Amor. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Delicado, Francisco. 1985. Retrato de la Lozana Andaluza. Edited by Claude Allaigre. Madrid: Cátedra.
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Loreto Romero Deyermond, Alan. 1961. The Petrarchan Sources of “La Celestina”. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Deyermond,Alan. 1993.“Female Societies in Celestina”. In Fernando de Rojas and “Celestina”, edited by Ivy A. Corfs and Joseph T. Snow, 1–31. Madison,WI: HSMS. Deyermond,Alan. 2001.“Readers in, Readers of, Celestina”. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 78, no.1: 13–37. Di Camillo, Ottavio. 2005.“The Burgos Comedia in the printed tradition of La Celestina: A Reassessment”. In La Celestina 1499–1999. Selected Papers from the International Congress in Commemoration of the Quincentennial Anniversary of La Celestina (New York, November 17–19, 1999), edited by Ottavio Di Camilo and John O’Neill, 235–323. New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies. Di Camillo, Ottavio. 2007. “Hacia el origen de la Tragicomedia: Huellas de la princeps en la traducción al italiano de Alfonso Ordóñez”. In Actas del Simposio Internacional “1502–2002: Five Hundred Years of Fernando de Rojas’ Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea”, edited by Juan Carlos Conde, 115–145. New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies. Eagleton, Terry. 1976. Criticism and Ideology:A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. London:Verso. Faulhaber, Charles B. 1991.“LC de Palacio: Rojas’s Holograph Manuscript”. Celestinesca 15, no.1: 3–52. Gagliardi, Donatella. 2007.“La Celestina en el Índice:Argumentos de una censura”. Celestinesca 31: 59–84. Gaylord, Mary. 1991. “Fair of the World, Fair of the Word:The Commerce of Language in La Celestina”. Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 23, no.1: 1–27. Gerli, E. Michael. 2011. Celestina and the Ends of Desire. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Gilman, Stephen. 1956. The Art of “La Celestina”. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Gilman, Stephen. 1972. The Spain of Fernando de Rojas.The Intellectual and Social Landscape of “La Celestina”. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Haywood, Louise M. 2001. “Models for Mourning and Magic Words in Celestina”. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 78, no.1: 81–8. Heugas, Pierre. 1973. “La Célestine” et sa descendance directe. Bordeaux: Institut d'études ibériques et ibéroaméricaines de l'Université de Bordeaux. Ife, Barry W. 1985. Reading and Fiction in Golden Age Spain: A Platonist Critique and Some Picaresque Replies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Iser, Wolfgang. 1978. The Act of Reading:A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror:An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 2006. Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: Norton.Translated into English by Bruce Fink. 2nd Ed. NY:W.W. Norton. Lawrance, Jeremy. 1993a.“On the Title Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea”. In Letters and Society in FifteenthCentury Spain: Studies Presented to P.E. Russell on his Eightieth Birthday, edited by Alan Deyermond and Jeremy Lawrance, 79–92. Llangrannong: Dolphin. Lawrance, Jeremy. 1993b. “The Tragicomedia de Calisto and Melibea and Its ‘Moralitie’”. Celestinesca 17, no. 2: 85–110. Lawrance, Jeremy. 1985.“The Spread of Lay Literacy in Late Medieval Castile”. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 62, no. 1: 95–111. Lida de Malkiel, María Rosa. 1962. La originalidad artística de La Celestina. Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires. Marciales, Miguel. 1985. Celestina:Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Miguel-Prendes, Sol. 2004. “Reimagining Diego de San Pedro’s Readers at Work: Cárcel de Amor”. La Corónica 32, no. 2: 7–44. Montero, Ana Isabel. 2005. “A Penetrable Text? Illustration and Transgression in the 1499(?) edition of Celestina”. Word and Image 21, no. 1: 41–55. Montero, Ana Isabel. 2015. “Reading at the Threshold:The Role of Illustrations in the Reception of the Early Editions of Celestina”. Celestinesca 39: 197–224. Nalle, Sara. 1989.“Literacy and Culture in Early Modern Spain”. Past and Present 125: 65–96. Pattison, David G. 2001.“Deaths and Laments in Celestina”. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 78, no. 1: 139–143. Rivera, Isidro J. 1995. “Visual Structures and Verbal Representation in the Comedia de Calisto y Melibea (Burgos, 1499?)” Celestinesca 19: 3–30. Rojas, Fernando. 1987. Celestina. 15th Ed. Edited by Dorothy Severin. Madrid: Cátedra. Rojas, Fernando. 2010. Celestina.Translated by Peter Burns with an introduction by Juan Goytisolo. New York: Penguin. Saenger, Paul. 1997. Space Between Words. The origins of Silent Reading. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Scott, Rachel. 2017. Celestina and the Human Condition. London: Tamesis.
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Rapture and horror Sears, Theresa Ann. 1992. “Love and the Lure of Chaos: Difference and Disorder in Celestina”. Romanic Review 83, no. 1: 94–106. Severin, Dorothy S. 1970. Memory in La Celestina. London: Tamesis. Severin, Dorothy S. 1989. Tragicomedy and Novelistic Discourse in Celestina. Cambridge: Cambridge University Presss. Severin, Dorothy S. 2005.“Celestina’s Audience, from Manuscript to Print”. In “La Celestina” 1499–1999: Selected Papers from the International Congress in Commemoration of the Quincentennial Anniversary of La Celestina, edited by Ottavio Di Camillo and John O’Neill, 197–205. Nueva York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies. Shipley, George. 1985. “Authority and Experience in La Celestina”. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 62, no. 1: 95–111. Simon, Julien J. 2017. “A Wild Fable: Affect and Reception of Fernando de Rojas’ Celestina”. In Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism, edited by Donald Wehrs and Thomas Blake, 609–625. New York: Palgrave. Snow, Joseph T. 1995.“Fernando de Rojas as First Reader: Reader-Response Criticism and Celestina”. In Studies on Medieval Spanish Literature in Honor of Charles F. Fraker, edited by Mercedes Vaquero and Alan Deyermond, 245–258. Madison: HSMS. Snow, Joseph T. 1997.“Hacia una historia de la recepción de Celestina: 1499–1822”. Celestinesca 20: 115–172. Snow, Joseph T. 2001. “Historia de la recepción de Celestina: 1499–1822. II (1499–1600)”. Celestinesca 25: 199–282. Snow, Joseph T. 2011.“Darkness, Death and Despair in Celestina:An Essay”. eHumanista 19: 317–327. Sutherland, Madeline. 2003.“Mimetic Desire,Violence and Sacrifce in the Celestina”. Hispania 86, no. 2: 181–190. Whinnom, Keith. 1980.“The Problem of the ‘Best-Seller’ in the Spanish Golden Age Literature”. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 57, no. 3: 189–198. Whinnom, Keith. 1988.“El género celestinesco: Orígen y desarrollo”. In Literatura en la época del Emperador, edited by Víctor García de la Concha, 110–130. Salamanca:Academia Literaria Renacentista.
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32 FRAMING INTERCULTURAL ENCOUNTERS IN THREE IBERIAN TRANSLATIONS OF KALILA WA-DIMNA Rachel Scott
Perhaps more than any other region in the Middle Ages, Iberia demonstrates the fuidity of the pre-modern world. Its position at a crossroads between East and West and the confuence of cultures and religions that inhabited the Peninsula created far-reaching connections that facilitated the dissemination of people, ideas, cultural forms, and material objects.1 A land of shifting borders and fuid confgurations, Iberia triggers questions about boundaries and power struggles and brings to the fore issues of identity, alterity, and intercultural relations. This chapter traces the journeys of a work that characterizes the dynamism and porosity of Iberian space and whose history in western Europe is inextricably linked with the Peninsula: the highly infuential Arabic collection of exemplary fables known as Kalila wa-Dimna. Kalila was partly based on a Sanskrit book of wisdom literature known as the Panchatantra (“Five Treatises” or “Five Chapters”), which originated in India in the fourth century and was translated from Sanskrit into Persian in the sixth century and then into Arabic in 750 AD. The Arabic Kalila wa-Dimna, by a convert to Islam called Abdallah Ibn al-Muqaffa‘, was hugely popular and infuential and was subsequently translated into Syriac, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Turkish, German, Spanish, Italian, French, and English, among many other languages.2 It likely arrived in Iberia via al-Andalus, and was one of many texts to be appropriated from Arabic in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as part of a systematic program of translation into Latin and the vernacular, among them treatises on astronomy and astrology, magic, and natural elements and their properties (Márquez Villanueva 1994). Kalila was translated into Spanish on three separate occasions between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries, frstly as Calila e Dimna (1251), secondly as the Exemplario contra los engaños y pelígros del mundo (1493) [Exemplary against the deceptions and perils of the World], and fnally as the Espejo político y moral para príncipes y ministros y de todo género de personas (1654, 1659) [The Political and Moral Mirror for Princes and Ministers and all Sorts of Persons].3 At each stage of its reception it arrived in Iberia via different routes and from discrete sources and languages—Arabic, Latin (via Hebrew), and Turkish (via Persian)—a fact that not only demonstrates the complexity of the work’s origins and transmission, but that highlights Iberia’s position as a point of intersection for global encounters. 508
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Each translation represents a unique encounter with the fables and the eastern cultures from which they originate; an encounter that, according to María Jesús Lacarra,“supone un esfuerzo de integración, resuelto con mejor o peor fortuna, en un contexto histórico, político y cultural diverso que obtendrá una respuesta distinta en cada caso” (2006: 129–130) [entails an effort at integration, resolved with greater or lesser success, in different historical, political and cultural contexts that in each case will yield a different response].4 It is the “esfuerzo de integración” of these three different translations, as well as the evolving perception of intercultural relations that they provide, that I address in this chapter.As Abdelfattah Kilito remarks, notions of the familiar and the foreign are implicitly relevant to this book, “which was never meant to leave India, its country of origin, but which came to be disseminated throughout the entire world” (2014: 20). For this reason, Kalila wa-Dimna is particularly relevant to Iberia, a space defned by complicated and often contradictory interactions between the three religious communities that coexisted there for over 700 years. Its presence in pre-modern Iberia spans 400 turbulent years in which the geo-political and ideological boundaries of the world were being recalibrated and the relationships between East and West re-contextualized.Although it is not explicitly about inter-faith or inter-cultural relations, it nevertheless explores these and other similar issues, albeit at times obliquely. Indeed, interactions between Christians, Muslims, and Jews were a fundamentally important part of the story of Kalila wa-Dimna’s transmission. The Iberian journeys of Kalila wa-Dimna make an excellent case study of how the movement of culture across borders (be they linguistic, religious, or national) as played out through translation is not only constitutive of the signifcance of the forms, practices, and material objects in motion, but of societies themselves.This idea has been theorized by scholars across a range of disciplines, from literary and postcolonial studies (Said 1978; Bhabha 1994; Steiner 1998) to social anthropology (Clifford 1997), who argue variously that “culture” and “identity” are not static or pre-existing but concepts constituted by displacement and encounters with an external Other.As scholars of translation studies have also proposed, translation provides a valuable means of assessing the perception of relations between social groups or cultures and the image a particular society constructs of itself; because it involves interaction and negotiation with an external presence, it is never neutral but rather exists within nexus of power and competition (Álvarez and Vidal 1996;Venuti 2005; Berman 2012).Translation is, after all, a form of storytelling: a conscious re-creation of previous perspectives through which the present moment is constituted as well as the past remembered. As we will see with the Spanish versions of Kalila wa-Dimna, the tales we tell shape how we perceive the world, our place in it, and our interactions with others.
Kalila wa-Dimna: a cross-period approach Kalila wa-Dimna was conceived as a textbook of statecraft, a manual for instructing monarchs in the art of ruling.5 As a framed narrative—a genre frequently associated with Oriental sources though of cross-cultural dissemination—it comprises a series of exemplary tales situated within an overarching story: in this case, a discussion between a king, who asks questions and has a problem to solve, and his advisor, who replies and who illustrates the issue and provides guidance or a resolution through the form of short exemplary stories, which are often interlaced with more exemplars that may themselves contain other nested stories. It is this emboxed structure that is characteristic of Kalila’s eastern origins (Döhla 2009: 55). Many of the fables in Kalila are recounted by animals—an ancient narrative technique used for religious–didactic purposes in many different cultures. The animal kingdom was often employed to examine the truth of the world by representing a fantastical parallel society built on the same rules and principles of government as the human and mirroring the view of dif509
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ferent classes or social groups (Olivelle 2009: xvii, xviii). The Sanskrit precursor to Kalila, the Panchatantra, addressed fve principal themes: losing friends, gaining friends, guile in warfare, loss of gains, and ill-considered action. Although subsequent translations, particularly the Arabic of Ibn al-Muqaffa‘, added a number of new chapters and sub-stories, the overall focus on these issues remained intact.At its heart, Kalila is a secular work that provides a blueprint for navigating society by teaching readers how to interpret situations and the motivations of others. As well as an interest in the pursuit of power and infuence and wisdom and knowledge, manifest in recurrent motifs about a quest into the unknown, and in addition to the problem of how to govern well, the fables address predicaments relevant to all levels of society, such as how to make friends and avoid bad infuences, and how to interact with different types of people and social groups. These issues are woven throughout the narrative of the fables. For example, chapter III (“The Lion and the Bull”) concerns the destruction of a friendship between a king and a companion at the hands of a jealous and politically ambitious minister; chapter V (“The Ringdove or The True Friends”) is an exploration of friendship between four different animals who work together to overcome adversity; and chapter VI (“The Owls and the Crows”) tells the tale of natural enmity between two groups, represented by different species of birds; not to mention the many sub-stories told within these chapters by animal protagonists about how to trick and deceive or make peace and friendship with others.They also appear in the three prologues included in the Arabic Kalila wa-Dimna, each of which provides different interpretive perspectives on these issues.The frst, by Ibn al-Muqaffa‘, discusses the function and aims of the tales and the acquisition of knowledge as being a journey. The Arabic translator intersperses his discussion with exemplars concerned with relations between friends who attempt to deceive or are deceived by their companion(s).The second is an allegorical origins quest that recounts the journey East (to India) undertaken by a Persian physician named Burzoe to fnd mysterious herbs that are able to bring a person back to life; it symbolizes how the acquisition of knowledge takes place through encounters across borders of culture and identity.This is followed by an account of the Persian physician’s life in which Burzoe describes his own personal journey to fnd truth in the world. While Calila e Dimna and the Exemplario contra los engaños y peligros del mundo have been the subject of considerable research, the Espejo político y moral has garnered much less critical attention.6 Previous scholarship has also largely eschewed comparisons between the three Spanish versions.7 I would suggest, however, that a cross-period, comparative approach provides a particularly productive methodology. After all, Kalila’s global popularity suggests a perceived element of universality and its fables deal with issues common to the human experience. David Wacks has argued this point, positing that medieval Iberian Christians, Muslims, and Jews (or at least those of the particular socio-economic level at whom Calila e Dimna was aimed: noble, educated) were united by a common culture and language, meaning that the work transitioned from one society to the other apparently unproblematically (2007: 86). Nevertheless, we should not assume that such cross-cultural appeal supposes similarity of signifcance. As Jennifer Summitt and David Wallace rightly contend, the circulation of texts “is a sign not simply of ‘continuity’ but also of cultural transformation” (2007: 448–49). A cross-period approach enables us to trace the evolution of cultural forms and their ideological signifcance across time and space as well as the shifts in perspective that occur.8 Perspective is critical to understanding the way in which the Other is conceived:“the fanciful and the exotic have different meanings depending on the level of real contact and knowledge”, notes Paul Freedman, which “builds on and shapes rather than simply displaces centuries of sedimentary layers of legend” (2012: 28).The importance of perspective is woven into Kalila’s structure: the emboxed arrangement of the fables, with their narratorial openness and numerous speakers, 510
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brings about a corresponding multiplicity of viewpoints and of potential signifcance.The morals of the tales depend on their context within the different layers of storytelling: sub-story, main nested story, or overarching discussion. In the same way, the specifc meanings that the work accrues depend on the perspective of the time and place from which it is viewed. The reception and production of books, manuscript or printed, are not abstract or ahistorical acts, however, but embedded in and determined by the socio-historical and ideological contexts in which they take place; signifcance is both preserved and created by formal aspects (paratexts, mise en page, and marginal annotations, etc.) as well as the agents involved their creation (scribes, editors, printers, translators).9 As such, in this chapter I consider how each iteration of Kalila was framed for new audiences through preliminary materials and its physical form.The layers of storytelling that make up the internal narrative of the fables are replicated by this outer structure, which over the centuries is amended and expanded.At each stage of Kalila’s reception ever more frontiers are placed between reader and text: introductions, justifcations, glosses, all of which re-contextualize the work and demonstrate a shift in the perspective from which the fables are viewed.The prefaces in particular become an integral aspect of the work itself, creating a second narrative that “is both outside and inside the text” (Patrick 2015: 156) and which acts as a metafctional commentary on the process of translatio studii et imperii.The development of Kalila wa-Dimna’s paratextual framework suggests a process of distancing that alludes to changes in the way intercultural relations are conceived over this period. The chapter begins its trajectory through the fables’ Iberian history with Kalila’s earliest translation in the mid-thirteenth century; it then moves to the late ffteenth century before concluding with a voyage into the seventeenth century. Although I refer to a select number of tales, I should state that my focus is not on the translation techniques used in each of the three versions or on critical analysis of individual fables.These are undoubtedly important elements in reception and much more work remains to be done on them, representing a potentially rich avenue for future studies. For the purposes of this chapter, however, they fall outside of the scope of its brief exploration.
Calila e Dimna: translating (in) a hybrid society The frst translation of Kalila wa-Dimna into Spanish, titled Calila e Dimna, was completed in 1251 at the behest of Alfonso X when still infante, a year before he became king. Calila e Dimna had a limited circulation amongst court and noble audiences and was not printed in the early modern period. No complete witness contemporary to its composition survives, a fact that complicates attempts to understand its thirteenth-century reception.The earliest near-complete versions of the work are found in two ffteenth-century manuscripts known as MS A and MS B.10 This later date means that our assessment of Calila’s reception is mediated by the lens of later material and textual practices and a different socio-political and ideological context. Although not contemporary to the translation itself, the material form and paratextual apparatus of these manuscripts nonetheless provide valuable clues to how the text was regarded at the end of the ffteenth century, a period of time that was crucial in terms of the way in which Christian inhabitants of the Peninsula thought about and interacted with their religious and cultural neighbors, and in which a second translation of the work was also to appear. Neither the timing of nor the reasons for Kalila’s appropriation should be attributed to chance. Calila e Dimna was produced after a period of signifcant military and political confict during the frst half of the thirteenth century in which Alfonso’s father, Fernando III, had undertaken a series of successful military incursions resulting in the massive expansion of Castile’s southern borders. By the time Alfonso came to power the Almohad caliphate in al511
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Andalus was considerably weakened and in a state of political chaos and the Emirate of Granada, all that was left of Muslim-ruled lands, now a tributary of Castile. Following Fernando III’s military campaigns, the Christian kingdom now comprised a far broader swath of the Peninsula and included a far greater number of Muslim subjects who had to be assimilated into a Castilian social order in which they were suddenly, in status at least if not always in number, a minority group (Burns and Robert 2001: xxxiii–xxxiv). With the cessation of ongoing military expansion and relative political and economic stability,Alfonso could turn his energies instead to defning Castilian culture.11 The spoils of war that the infante would inherit were not only material; there were also intellectual and cultural, and included, for example, such treasures as the body of learning housed in the libraries of Toledo, Seville, and Cordoba. It is signifcant that Alfonso chose to initiate his cultural campaign with a text borrowed from Arabic and not an original composition or an adaptation of an existing Latin work. Kalila wa-Dimna was well-known and highly valued throughout the Muslim world, including in al-Andalus, where numerous versions of the translation by al-Muqaffa‘ circulated in oral and textual forms prior as well as contemporaneously to the Spanish and Hebrew translations of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Cacho Blecua and Lacarra 1984: 13).This famous Arabic work represented one of many cultural and intellectual jewels the future king would inherit from al-Andalus. And the infante no doubt sought to take advantage of its prestige to elevate Castilian as a great literary and scholarly language and to unify the politically and linguistically diverse areas that comprised the kingdom (Wacks 2007: 98). But given the political situation of mid-century Castile, it is also striking that Alfonso chose to have translated a work that is so associated with the transmission of political power from one society to another, and so concerned with social relationships, the possibility of alliances and enmity between different groups, and issues of belonging and otherness.The future king’s interest in these matters can be seen in other legal, historical, and literary works commissioned by Alfonso or in which he had a direct part in composing and editing, such as the Estoria de Espanna and the Siete Partidas, both of which address issues of friendship and social interactions with members of other religious groups (Liuzzo Scorpo 2014: 70–80). Kalila’s appropriation by the future king has thus been interpreted by some critics (Wacks 2007: 86–107; Kinoshita 2008: 373–74; Nielsen 2010: 139–140; Patrick 2015: 41–2) as a conscious act of dominance, a display of hegemony and conquest of a subject group, and the enactment of a systematic transfer of Arabic culture and learning, with all its attendant symbolic value, from East to West. Yet its signifcance is, I would argue, more nuanced than this. This assertion of dominance was not only outward looking, toward a vanquished foe, but directed internally to the existing political structures of Castile. Alfonso was involved in a bitter rivalry with his younger brother Fadrique over the succession of part of their mother’s land—a contest that found expression in part through translation.12 For only a year after Alfonso’s patronage of Calila Fadrique would support the translation of the Libro de los engaños, from the Book of Sendebar. Alfonso’s reign would also see changes to the way in which vassalage and political alliances, both internal and external, were conceived and practically administered: not only would he later break and amend alliances with other Christian kingdoms and Muslim rulers, but he would put in place legislation that undermined the powers of the fueros by which the nobility’s privileges and rights were governed in a move designed to emphasize the king’s absolute dominance (Liuzzo Scorpo 2014: 64–8). By laying claim to Kalila, the infante was therefore staking a claim for his right to rule within the political (and familial) hierarchy of Castile, as well as positioning himself as a ruler of a mixed society comprised of different religious and cultural groups. Although brief, the mention of Alfonso in the colophon writes the infante into the history of Kalila wa-Dimna’s transmission and associates him with the long line of eastern rulers before 512
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him who secured their reputations as “great” sovereigns by acquiring this and other important texts—such as Abbasid caliphs like al-Mansur, who used texts from earlier civilizations to legitimize his rule and present himself as the legitimate successor of ancient Persian and Babylonian dynasties (Kinoshita 2008: 373). With the translation of Kalila wa-Dimna, the infante sought to similarly position himself politically as a wise ruler and patron of letters in the style of the kings of India, Persia, and the Muslim Caliphate.The political implications of this act of appropriation by or attributed to Alfonso are clear: upon ascending the throne Alfonso will usher in a period of greatness for Castile (Patrick 2015: 168). In the Alfonsine translation that has come to us via the later manuscripts, Kalila wa-Dimna’s existing preliminary material—the allegorical story of the Persian physician’s journey to India and his life story as well as an introduction by Ibn al-Muqaffa‘—all remain, although the latter is missing in MS A and the fragment P.The only addition is a colophon, which lists the date of completion and comments on the process of the work’s translation, which identifes Alfonso as the impulse for Kalila’s appropriation:“Aquí se acaba el libro de Calina e Digna. Et fuese sacado de arávigo en Latín, et romançado por mandado del infante don Alfonso, fjo del muy noble rey don Fernando” (Cacho Blecua and Lacarra 1984: 355) [Here ends the book of Calila and Dimna. And it was taken from Arabic (and translated) into Latin and translated into Romance by order of prince Alfonso, son of the very noble king Fernando].13 Otherwise, there is no new material that supplements, amends, or re-frames the existing prologues; no direct address to the reader, explanation of why the infante desired to have Kalila wa-Dimna translated (or why it was attributed to him), or how to read or interpret the resulting work.The lack of an additional framework means that thirteenth-century Castilian readers engaged with the Arabic and Persian prologues and the fables without the intervention of a scribe, translator, or other “authoritative” voice.The relative absence of a wholly new preliminary framework suggests that Kalila wa-Dimna needed no justifcation for a Castilian-speaking audience; that it was already suitably familiar for a reinterpretation to not be required. Because of its secular and pragmatic character and subject matter, the Spanish Calila e Dimna was easily received by noble Christian audiences in Castile, who found nothing contentious in its narrative or moral didactic program (Wacks 2007: 14–5, 87; Lacarra 2006: 130–31). Apart from the fact that potentially problematic references (e.g. to Hinduism) had been removed from the Persian and Arabic translations (Girón-Negrón 2005: 253; Lacarra 2006: 130), Christian and Muslim nobles lived within similar and complementary political hierarchies and structures of thought (Cacho Blecua and Lacarra 1984: 46–50). Calila e Dimna is wholly a product of the shared space of thirteenth-century Castile. Not only does it follow the eighth-century Arabic in using the two jackals from the story of the Lion and the Bull as its title, despite inhabiting a brand-new Castilian “coat”, the translation so closely follows its Arabic predecessor that many passages appear to be literal translations (Parker 1978: 6). Rather than a reinterpretation, Calila therefore suggests a continuum between the intellectual and cultural practices of the Almohad rulers and Christian Castile.The value placed on the cultural and intellectual legacy of al-Andalus can be seen in a small but signifcant detail. In the translation of the prologue by Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ the anonymous translator or scribe twice retains a reference to the work being a result of a translation from Persian to arávigo (Arabic) and not from this latter to Castilian (Cacho Blecua and Lacarra 1984: 98).We cannot know whether this represents a scribal omission or a conscious decision. Regardless, this slippage places Calila e Dimna in the past and the cultural and intellectual world of al-Andalus rather than claiming for it a wholly new “Castilian” identity in the present moment.The use of Arabic in Christian-held lands and by Christians who had previously been under Muslim rule was not unusual. Until the thirteenth century when Castilian emerged as a language of administration and literary pro513
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duction, Christians in Muslim-ruled territories such as Toledo had Arabic as their written and spoken language and maintained this situation for a signifcant period of time after they were conquered (Gallego 2003: 113–14).There was therefore nothing unusual or exotic about a work in Arabic to this audience, many of whom may have had knowledge of this language. This slippage suggests a state of familiarity. The cultural and religious Other for Christian Iberians in the thirteenth century was not located “over there” in a distant land but was instead an everyday, familiar presence.As María Rosa Menocal noted,“Alfonso X would no doubt have been startled by the suggestion that Arabic was not a vital part of the Castilian cultural universe or that Jews were not Toledanos or Sevillanos, nor citizens of his ‘Spain’”. (2006: 7) Alfonso’s openness should not be seen as evidence of a romantic sense of tolerance; in fact, the king was himself distrustful toward non-Christian groups, particularly in times of political and social crisis (Liuzzo Scorpo 2014: 161). Nevertheless, there was pragmatic, if at times grudging, acceptance of Jews and Muslims (Burns and Robert 2001: xxviii–xxix), and a recognition that although secondary in status due to their assumed (from a Christian perspective) religious inferiority, they were a vital part of Castilian society and economy. Not only did they bring income through taxation in return for religious rights and freedoms, the mudejars were seen as reliable and hard workers, as demonstrated by sayings such as “el que tiene moro, tiene oro” (Nirenberg 2001: 64) [he who has a Muslim has gold]. The continuum between Arabic source and Castilian translation is also refected in the aesthetic and formal aspects of the later medieval manuscripts. MS A in particular suggests an attempt to locate the work within a similar cultural horizon of expectations as the Arabic manuscripts that would have circulated in the Peninsula. It looks in many ways like an Arabic book, replicating what was presumably the layout of the Arabic witness in a single column of script. The codex includes over 70 pen and ink illustrations depicting aspects of the narrative which appear in blocks or bands across the page rather than at the margins of the work.While simpler and less ornate than those of the Arabic manuscripts, they nonetheless retain a considerable visual connection to this tradition; at times the layout of the drawings and details of the animals depicted align so well with those of Arabic manuscripts that it is evident the ffteenth-century scribe or illustrator was familiar with or working from a copy of Kalila wa-Dimna. Clearly, even two centuries later, this translation was associated with an Arabic cultural milieu; it is striking how different MS A is in formal and aesthetic character to the incunables and printed editions of the second translation, the Exemplario contra los engaños y peligros del mundo. MS B is not illustrated, but it does contain marginal annotations—manicules, highlighting, and comments—in a ffteenth-century hand attributed to Isabel I, who is documented as owning a copy of “otro libro de pliego entero, escripto en papel e en romance de mano que es de Calila e Dina” [another book in entire sheets, written on paper and by hand in Romance which is Calila and Dimna] in the 1503 inventory of books owned by the queen. Elisa Ruíz García refutes the attribution of these notes to the queen, arguing that palaeographical analysis demonstrates no relation to existing examples of Isabel’s script (2004: 120–22). Regardless of their authorship, these marginalia provide an indication of the late medieval reception of Calila at a point in time almost contemporaneous to the publication of the second translation, the Exemplario contra los engaños y peligros del mundo. Further analysis of the handwritten notes is required, and a comparison with the printed marginalia of the Exemplario, which I discuss below, could also provide a valuable indication of reception during a period when social relations between Christians, Muslims, and Jews had become increasingly fraught. It is noteworthy, for example, that the ffteenth-century annotator of MS B highlights passages that relate the possibility of friendship between individuals from two different groups and to the perceived danger of guests, i.e. those who do not belong to the dominant social group. 514
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This occurs on several occasions in Chapter III (“Del León et del buey”), where the Lion scoffs at his counselor Dimna’s concerns that the bull Sençeba would be able to harm him since he is a “grass eater” and therefore weaker than he, the king, a “meat eater”:“Et si Senseba fuese mi enemigo, commo tú dizes, non me podría mal fazer; ¿et cómmo lo podría fazer?, ca él comme yerva et yo commo carne, et él es mio comer y non só suyo” (Cacho Blecua and Lacarra 1984: 151–52) [And if Senseba were my enemy, as you say, he could not harm me. How could he? Since he eats grass and I eat meat, and he is my food and I am not his]. Dimna’s response is to counsel that those whom a king brings into his home as a guest should not be trusted because “tú non conoçieres sus costunbres” [you don’t know his customs], a moral that he supports with the tale of “El piojo y la pulga” [The Louse and the Flea]. The relationship between Sençeba and the Lion is not one of equality: the king’s status as the monarch confers political power and the bull is a guest in his lands—a foreigner and outsider bound by the rules and norms of the kingdom and allowed to remain thanks to the Lion’s good will. Later in the chapter, the same reader highlights Sençeba’s own ruminations on the inequality of his friendship with the king the danger likely to arise from such relations for him as the weaker party:“¿quién me metió en conpañía con el león, él comedor de carne et yo comedor de yerva, sinon entremediéndome yo con cobdiçia et con gula? Ca estas me echaron en esta tribulación” (Cacho Blecua and Lacarra 1984: 157) [who brought me into the lion’s company, he who is a meat-eater and I who am a grass-eater, if not me, interfering out of greed and gluttony, which have got me into this unfortunate situation]. As these annotations demonstrate, cross-cultural/cross-faith interactions and the dangers posed by those perceived as alien to the dominant social group were highly relevant and polemical issues in late-ffteenth-century Spain. And the example of the second translation of Kalila into Spanish later this century reveals that they remained so in this version.
Exemplario contra los engaños y peligros del mundo: moralising Kalila By the time Kalila wa-Dimna was translated again in 1493 the socio-political and cultural context of the Peninsula was considerably different. The events of 1492—the fall of Granada to the Catholic Monarchs, and the exile of Jews from the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon—had brought signifcant changes to Iberia’s social and religious character. In contrast to the fuidity and porosity of frontiers in early centuries, Iberia at the end of the ffteenth century was characterized by rigidity of ideological and religious borders. In the ffteenth century, the Peninsula was increasingly marked by an offcial turn toward policies and ideologies of “purity”, of religion, race, and language.What Barbara Fuchs calls the “project of imagining a unifed nation” involved regulating Otherness (2009: 3), which was achieved through oppressive regulation and institutions such as the Inquisition. These social and religious developments also demonstrate an evolution in perspective: while tolerated in Alfonso X’s time, toward the end of the Middle Ages Muslims, Jews, and converts from these faiths were increasingly viewed as a danger to the moral and spiritual health of the Christian church and the political stability of Peninsula’s kingdoms. At the same time as Iberia was contracting internally, the ‘discovery’ of the New World would expand its external boundaries substantially and bring it into contact with formally unknown cultures, languages, and systems of belief; and the Ottoman incursions and fall of Constantinople in 1453 had awoken powers in western Europe to the presence of a new threat on their borders. And yet, despite a movement toward oppression and persecution, the memory and legacy of the Peninsula’s multicultural, multilingual history were not totally rejected; instead there was still a demonstrable desire for the very thing it was attempting to exorcize from its history and heritage.The return to Kalila wa-Dimna represented by its second translation into Spanish, the Exemplario contra los 515
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engaños y peligros del mundo, demonstrates the ongoing popularity of the fables and late medieval admiration for oriental cultural forms and learning. The material and aesthetic form of the Exemplario, however, refects an ideological change. The Exemplario came to Iberia through the “western” branch of Kalila’s transmission, via Hebrew and Latin. Its direct source is the late-thirteenth-century Latin translation, the Directorium vitae humanae alias parabola antiquorum sapientium, which was translated by a converted Jew called Juan de Capua from the twelfth-century Hebrew version by Rabbi Joel.14 It is this path of transmission by which Kalila wa-Dimna was principally disseminated through early modern Europe. Capua’s Latin was the base for a German translation by Antonius von Pforr, Das Buch der Beispiele der alten Weisen (editio princeps 1480), and an Italian translation by Anton Francesco Doni, La moral flosophia del Doni (1552), which would later be translated into English by Sir Thomas North as The Fables of Bidpay or The Morall Philosophie of Doni (1557). An earlier Italian translation, La prima veste dei discorsi degli animali, was made from the Exemplario by Agnolo Firenzuola in 1541 and published posthumously in 1548. The fact that the Directorium and its German translation were both very successful (the latter with six known manuscripts and 16 incunables) was likely a factor in Hurus’ decision to print a Castilian translation of Capua’s work shortly afterward (Lacarra 2007: 20–1). Next to nothing is known about the circumstances of the Exemplario’s creation: the translator is unknown as it the original date of composition; we also do not know whether the witness used was a manuscript or print version of the Directorium. Although it was frst printed in 1493 by Pablo Hurus in Zaragoza, it is probable that it was composed earlier.The rapid reprints following the editio princeps suggest that the Exemplario followed its predecessors in capturing readers’ attention. A further two editions were printed in the late ffteenth century: another by Hurus in 1494 and a third by Fadrique de Basilea in Burgos in 1498; and there were seven further editions printed in the sixteenth century. By this point the tradition of Oriental exemplary fables had been assimilated into other European vernaculars and reworked by authors such as Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Juan Manuel.15 As such, the Exemplario would have felt familiar to an audience well habituated to the intellectual structures of thought and cultural references of such exempla. Furthermore, as I will discuss shortly, the aesthetic and formal elements of the Exemplario’s incunables and printed editions place the work within a very different horizon to that of Calila e Dimna, one far more aligned with northern European traditions. One of the noticeable differences between the Exemplario and translations in the “eastern” branch is the different emphasis created by the title. The title given to the 1493 incunable and all subsequent imprints follows the naming convention of Capua’s Directorium rather than the Arabic and Alfonsine, Syriac, Persian, and Hebrew versions, which feature the two jackals. Like the Directorium, the Exemplario contra los engaños y peligros del mundo underlines the moraldidacticism of the fables and points to the type of lesson that will be conveyed to the reader: practical wisdom related not to the religious sphere but the social (Haro Cortés 1992: 124).This change was likely instigated by the Directorium’s printer Johann Pruss rather than Capua himself, who refers to the work as “Liber Kelile et Dimne”, “nomine Kelila”, and “Liber Kalile et Dimne” (Lacarra 2007: 20). Nevertheless, with its evocation of the troubles and dangers of the world, the Exemplario’s title evokes the contemptus mundi tradition and religious sermonizing (Lacarra 2006: 129; 2007: 25), rather than the more political “mirror for princes” genre with which the eastern fables had previously been associated. Indeed, the second Spanish translation very closely follows its Latin predecessor in seeking to “cristianizar y a occidentalizar la vieja collección oriental” (Lacarra 2006: 132) [Christianize and westernize the ancient oriental collection] and very closely follows Capua’s translation of
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the introduction by al-Muqaffa‘.As in the Latin, in the Exemplario it is prefaced by an additional paragraph that includes a genealogy of the fables’ origins and transmission which notes that the book: fue originalmente inventado en la India y de aquella lengua fue transferido en la de los persas, y dende lo pusieron en la suya los árabes, y postreramente lo recibió la ebraica. E por ende ha sido nuestro propósito en nuestros días fazerlo latino. (Haro Cortés 2007: 63) [was originally invented in India and from this language was transferred into that of the Persians; from there the Arabs put it into their own, and Hebrew subsequently received it. Consequently, it is our aim now to make it Latin.] Although it provides a history of Kalila’s “journeys” through different languages, the description stops at Latin; there is no mention made of the Castilian translation that readers were holding in their very hands.The translator also retains the frst-person perspective of Juan de Capua when describing the reasons for undertaking the translation, rather than providing justifcations for the fables’ appropriation into Castilian. He informs us that “fui movido fazerlo latino” (Haro Cortés 2007: 63; my emphasis) [I was moved to make it Latin], and that deliberé yo, Juan de Capua, menor entre los otros letrados, discorrer no solamente las scripturas morales y las que algo tratan de medicina, más ahun las sagradas y divinas juntamente con ellas, para que por mi trabajo se pueda d’ellas gozar nuestra lengua latina. (Haro Cortés 2007: 63; my emphasis) [I, Juan of Capua, lesser amongst learned men, decided to reveal not only the moral scriptures and those that deal somewhat with medicine, but even the sacred and divine along with them, so that by my labor our Latin language might take pleasure from them.] Much in the same way that the Alfonsine translator portrays Calila as an Arabic work, the Exemplario is presented as a Latin one. It is striking that the translation is placed within a community of Latin readers (“nuestra lengua Latina”), and not Castilian. Unlike Calila, however, the Exemplario’s preliminary material uses terminology that is religious in tone—scripture, sacred, divine—much in line with the religious moralization of its Latin source.The Latinization of the work is dedicated to God (“su venerable paternidad”) [his venerable paternity] by a devoted “intérprete” [translator] so that its noble, benefcial, and magnifcent content may be passed on to a Christian audience (Haro Cortés 2007: 63). In contrast to Calila e Dimna, comments about the work’s perceived value are also added: the incipit calls attention to the fables’ long lineage and their journeys “por peregrinas naciones y lenguas de no poca utilidad y enseñança” (Haro Cortés 2007: 63) [through wandering nations and languages of no little utility and teaching] and the book is described as being “lleno de deleite y sabiduría y de información para los hombres muy necessario” (Haro Cortés 2007: 63) [full of pleasure and wisdom and very necessary information for men]. The term “peregrino” signifed a religious pilgrimage or a journey through foreign lands; it could also mean strange, unusual, and rare—a defnition that juxtaposes the “foreign” with “home”, key themes of the fables themselves. Here, the translator conveys an attitude of admiration for the “peregrinas naciones y lenguas” through which the work has voyaged, whose cultural and intellectual worth is acknowledged in the comment about them being “de no poca utilidad y enseñança”.
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However, while the ffteenth-century manuscripts of Calila e Dimna evidently looked back to Iberia’s Arabic heritage for visual clues, the Exemplario is situated within a far more Latin horizon by an aesthetic style that though widespread throughout European printing, originated in Germany. Hurus’ incunables are attractively formatted and feature a large number of woodcuts in a Germanic Gothic style (115 in the 1493 edition and 127 in that of 1494). Some were original pieces created specifcally for the Exemplario, while others had previously been used to illustrate the Directorium or in Spanish translations of German and Latin works of wisdom literature, such as the Epístolas of Seneca translated by Pedro Díaz de Toledo (Pablo Hurus, 1496), the Filosofía moral of Aristotle (Jorge Coci, 1509), or the German edition of Fasciculus temporum (Strasbourg, 1490) (Lacarra 2007: 29, 30). The Exemplario was associated with another work of exemplary fables, the Ysopete ystoriado, alongside which it was printed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (1541, 1546, 1550, 1621) (Lacarra 2007: 25). Aesopic fables were included in Kalila wa-Dimna and would have been known to audiences in medieval Iberia through Latin even before the later ffteenth-century Spanish translation, La vida del Ysopet cons sus fabulas hystoriadas (Keller and Keating 1993: 2), but it is not until the Exemplario that a direct textual link is made. As La vida del Ysopet was printed twice in the Peninsula prior to 1493 (an incomplete version in 1482, and a complete one in 1489) and once in Toulouse (1488), it is highly probable that the translator and/or printer of the Exemplario were aware of and had direct contact with at least one of these editions, particularly since the 1489 edition of La vida was the work of Juan Hurus, brother to Pablo Hurus, under whom the editio princeps of the Exemplario was published. In an apt demonstration of the fow of culture in the medieval and early modern worlds and of the intertwined history of these two works, the 1496 Burgos incunable of Ysopete ystoriado by Fadrique de Basilea, printer of the third edition of the Exemplario in 1498, included three fables from the latter (Lacarra 2007: 25). The moral didacticism of the Exemplario is underlined by a further paratextual element not present in manuscripts of Calila e Dimna.The incunables of the later medieval translation contain marginal annotations in the form of proverbs, a mix of well-known medieval sententiae and popular sayings, as well as new creations for the Exemplario (Lacarra 2006: 133), enclosed within scrolls and manicules that point to passages in the narrative.This was clearly a popular feature for these printed annotations appear in sixteenth-century editions printed in Zaragoza, albeit with differences in number and placement: the 1531 edition, for example, includes pointing hands but no commentary; and there are 110 manicules in the 1531 edition compared to 94 in the 1493 incunable (Lacarra 2007: 26–7).The fact that they are not present in the Latin or German translations of Kalila wa-Dimna would suggest that they were an addition for the Spanish market, since there are similarities between the sayings used in the Exemplario and other Spanish works of this type, such as the Flores de Filosofía (late thirteenth century), Libro del Caballero Zifar (ca. 1300), and the Seniloquium, a ffteenth-century manuscript collection of refranes (Lacarra 2007: 27). These marginal proverbs introduce and summarize the exemplary tales in such a way that concretizes their meaning (Haro Cortés 1992: 128). By attempting to control readers’“journeys” through the work, the printed annotations in the Exemplario function in a way contrary to the advice of Ibn al-Muqaffa‘. In his introduction, which discusses the links between gaining knowledge and putting it to use, the Arabic translator makes the reader an active participant in their own intellectual and spiritual development.Yet in the Exemplario they are relegated to a far more passive position as mere receptors of a pre-determined moral (Haro Cortés 1992: 129).The incunables and printed editions of the Exemplario are evidence of a reaction against the instability of narrative form and interpretative openness in Kalila wa-Dimna. The ffteenth-century Spanish 518
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translation is a far more “closed” interpretation than that of Alfonso’s Calila or the Arabic Kalila, in which Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ alludes directly to the fables’ hidden meaning:“hay dos intenciones o sentimientos: el uno manifesto: el otro oculto y subintelecto” (Haro Cortés 2007: 65) [there are two intentions and senses: one manifest, and another hidden and coded]. There is a subtle tension between the statements made by the translator—or rather, borrowed from Capua—and the material and physical form by which the Exemplario was transmitted to readers. On the one hand, the translator places the Exemplario into a community of Latinspeakers (“nuestra lengua latina”), an exclusive group of readers in late medieval society; on the other, the paratextual devices added by the printer suggests that the fables were marketed to a far broader section of society, one which was perhaps not so well educated and who, it was commonly believed, required guidance to read the fables “correctly”. Similarly, in the opening paragraph, the translator’s role in the process of transmission is furthermore glossed as “transferir de una lengua en otra las cosas que serán más luzidas, más nobles y de mayores provechos” (Haro Cortés 2007: 63) [transfering from one language to another the things that are most lucid, most noble, and of the greatest beneft].There is no suggestion of a hierarchy between the languages or suggestion that an additional intellectual or moral framework would be required in order to gloss the fables’ signifcance.The translator’s role has simply been to transfer across the best of the text.Yet this message is at odds with the material and formal character of the Exemplario’s incunables and printed editions, which manifest aesthetically and formally the changed ideological and intellectual context. Kalila wa-Dimna’s explorations of inter-group relations and friendship were undoubtedly a reason for the interest of Alfonso and his court; and it is likely that they remained a key focus for later medieval and early modern audiences in the Peninsula. However, in the context of the religious and social turbulence of the ffteenth and early sixteenth centuries, widespread fears about Judaizing and apostasy, the fealty of conversos to their new Christian faith, and the integration of these communities of “new” Christians into Spanish society, certain fables may well have gained an additional layer of relevance and signifcation.16 One discussion of this issue can be found in the chapter about “De los cuervos con las grajas” [The Crows and the Rooks; in other versions, Crows and Owls], chapter V in the Exemplario, during the debates about natural enmity. During his debate with the king of the Rooks, the crafty Crow, who has insinuated his way into the Rook’s kingdom in order to undermine and vanquish his enemies from within, announces his desire to become a rook, and claims to have heard how it can be achieved: Hoído he a ciertos astrólogos que qualquiere que voluntariamente çufre por servicio de Dios ser puesto en el fuego, qualquier gracia que en aquel momento pidiere le será ortorgada. Por ende, si pareçe bien a su magestad, yo me ofreceré en sacrifcio y pediré por merced sea fecho graja. (Hara Cortés 2007: 193) [I have heard certain astrologers say that whoever voluntarily suffers in the service of God [upon being] put in the fre, whatever pardon he should request in that moment will be granted. Consequently, if it appears pleases your majesty, I offer myself as sacrifce and will request by his mercy to be turned into a rook.] A distrustful counselor of the king, who sees the Crow for who he really is, argues that such as transformation is impossible, as he would always show his Crow nature:“si te quemasses mil vezes, otras tantas bolverías en tu misma natura y raíz” (Haro Cortés 2007: 193) [if you were to be burnt a thousand times, you would always return to your own nature and origins]. The distrustful Rook then exemplifes this warning by telling the sub-story about the mouse who is 519
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turned into a girl by the grace of God, but who later reverts back to her original nature when her adopted father wishes to fnd a husband “con el qual vivas en paz y concordia” (Haro Cortés 2007: 193–95, [p. 194]) [with whom you can live in peace and harmony].This story is accompanied by a proverb stating “Por mucho que se desmienta, cada qual torna a su natural” [However much it is denied, each returns to his nature], as well as a woodcut depicting a young woman and an old man entering a building while fying above them is a bird with a rat in its mouth.While the tale of reincarnation originated in Hinduism, it takes on a darker meaning when set against the background of the Inquisition and the burning of heretics and judaizers in an auto-de-fé. In chapter XII (“Del hermitaño e del peregrino”) [The Hermit and the Pilgrim], rather than an individual’s inability to escape their true nature, the tale focuses on the abandonment of one’s native customs and language for those of another. In Calila e Dimna, this chapter (here, chapter XIII) ends with a message that invokes issues of social mobility:“a las vezes acaeçe mucho mal a los omes en mudarse de la medida alta a la baxa, et así se derraman sus cosas et sus estados” (Cacho Blecua and Lacarra 1984: 304). However, the message of the tale in the Exemplario is more concerned with moving into a sphere of knowledge, a language, and a culture that was alien to one’s antepassados. The pilgrim in the tale encounters a hermit who speaks Hebrew, which the former expresses a desire to learn. In answer the hermit cautions him: “E dízese que es loco el que busca la sciencia de la qual no es digno ni la usaron sus antepassados.Y es cosa muy necia trabajar alguno contra su abilidad y esforçarse contra lo que la natura le niega” (Haro Cortés 2007: 246) [And it is said that he who searches for knowledge which is neither worthwhile nor used by his forefathers is mad. And it is foolish for a man to work against his abilities and endeavor to go against that which nature denies him]. The signifcance of this discussion evolves as the tales move from eighth-century Persia to late medieval Iberia and as the dynamic between the languages and cultures in question change from Hebrew/Arabic to Hebrew/Castilian. Against a background of Inquisitorial persecution, a desire to embrace Hebrew, and thus by extension Judaism, was dangerous. As the proverb that accompanies and concretizes the moral of the tale states, “Yerro es dexar su lengua y costumbres” [It is an error to put aside one’s language and customs].There is a certain paradox at work here: for not only were Spanish Jews undertaking this very act of transgression by converting to Christianity, often as a result of persecution in the late fourteenth and ffteenth centuries, they and their converso descendants were then subject to further suspicion and oppression for desiring to return to their previous faith and inciting others to do so. Thus far we have considered the two medieval Spanish translations of Kalila wa-Dimna, which were both, in their own ways, infuential upon European literary and intellectual culture. Kalila wa-Dimna, as we know, was a highly mobile “traveling text” and by way of conclusion I advance forward several centuries to end with a brief discussion of the last of the three translations into Spanish: the Espejo político y moral, para principes, y ministros y todo genero de personas.With this version of the fables we move from a textual space that existed on a continuum between East and West, to one that is confgured far more overtly as monolingual and monocultural.This last journey will bring with it another evolution in form and signifcance and a shift in perspective on intercultural relations.
The Espejo político y moral: an early modern framework By the time the Espejo político y moral is printed in 1654 the Iberian Peninsula was increasingly centralized politically under the Hapsburgs, as was much of western Europe at this point (Baldwin 2007: 103); more than this, it was defned far more overtly as an exclusively Christian and “European” space. No longer a familiar everyday presence, the cultural and religious Other 520
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was now located in a geographic place and an ideological space “elsewhere”; a memory and a legacy that in the seventeenth century was nonetheless still being dealt with.Yet although Spain had nominally excised this Other from within its borders, it remained an external presence due to the Ottoman Empire—another “familiar exotic”,“alien in language, religion and regime but situated partly within Europe” (Burke 2012: 141). And more so than in any other period, the Ottoman Turks “incarnated the Oriental and the Muslim in the European imagination” (Keller and Irigoyen-García 2017: 4). The translation of the Espejo político y moral was undertaken less than a century after a period of intense confict between Hapsburg Spain and the Ottoman Empire and at a time of ongoing competition between the two empires, as well as between the powers of western Europe. The memory of this confict would likely have still been strong in the minds of Spanish readers in the 1650s, for whom the appropriation of an important work of eastern literature from Turkish may well have held particular resonance; certainly, the Espejo político y moral appealed to Spanish audiences who were still interested in the “mundo legendario y exótico” [legendary and exotic world] represented by the Ottoman Empire (Lacarra 2006: 139). The Espejo político y moral was translated by a Ragusan dragoman in the service of Felipe IV called Vicente Bratutti (Lacarra 2006: 135–36). It was based on a rhymed prose version by Ali Çelebi called Humayun-Nameh (“Book of Humayun”, ca. 1540), which was in turn based on a ffteenth-century Persian translation, the Anwār-e Sohayli (“The Lights of Canopus”), which was itself a translation of a twelfth-century Persian reworking of the Arabic, Kelileh o-Demneh. Like its antecedents, the title of this translation places the work back in the genre of “Mirrors for princes”, appropriately so since it is dedicated to the Spanish king. Bratutti’s is an incomplete translation of Humayun-Nameh published over two volumes: of the 14 chapters from the Turkish, the prologues and frst chapter were printed in 1654 (Madrid: Domingo García y Morràs) with the next seven chapters appearing in 1659 (Madrid: Josef Fernández de Buendía); a proposed third volume containing the remaining six chapters was never published. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given its later date, the Espejo político y moral is the most far removed from the eighth-century Arabic translation and is different in both form and content to the two earlier Spanish versions.While Lacarra describes these differences as abysmal in both style and content (2006: 137), the transformations it underwent are not wholly due to the translator himself but are in part a natural consequence of the act of transmission from one culture to another over such a long period of time, as Lacarra herself acknowledges (2006: 137).The later Persian and Turkish versions on which the Espejo is based, for example, added to, amended, and removed material from the Arabic Kalila wa-Dimna (O’Kane 2012), supplementing the sixthcentury Persian prologue and that of Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ with entirely new prefaces.These prefaces, which Lacarra summarizes (2006: 139–141), locate the impetus for the fables’ dissemination with an Emperor of China, who sends one of his ministers in search of a book of wisdom, frst discovered by an Indian king Dapeselino and interpreted by a brahmin called Bidpai.Thus, as in the original prologues, this set of translations also represents knowledge and truth as objects of a quest that requires engagement across borders of culture and identity. The Espejo político y moral also adds new preliminary materials in line with early modern printing practices, including a license, privilege, dedication, a censor’s prologue and approbation, and a translator’s letter to readers.These materials have garnered very little critical attention, yet they are noteworthy for the entirely new intellectual and ideological framework with which they introduce the fables, for the way in which they justify their relevance to early modern Spain, and for the perspective they provide on intercultural relations.The censor’s prologue to the frst volume, written by a cleric by the name of Benito de Ribas, is particularly intellectually and ideologically rich. It is accompanied by printed marginal annotations that refer to a series 521
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of historical and biblical fgures and place this secular work of practical and political knowledge within a very different cultural and ideological context, one that is Christian and northern European in its reference points. Interestingly, Ribas’ censura not only serves as a critique of the suitability of the fables for Christian audiences, but as a rumination on the act of translation itself, both linguistic and of power and knowledge. Much more remains to be said about it, but my focus in this fnal section will primarily be the translator’s letter to readers.17 While Calila e Dimna and the Exemplario do not attempt to hide the work’s eastern origins, neither do they go out of their way to underline its “exotic” nature. In contrast, in his dedication to Felipe IV, Bratutti describes the fables as “una Oriental joya” [an Oriental jewel] that contains “cosas muy deleytables, y provechosas” [delectable and proftable things] as well as “documentos politicos y preceptos morales” [political documents and moral precepts] (Bratutti 1654: sig. ¶2r). In his letter to readers, he once again plays on the image of the East as a distant and exotic locus of material, intellectual, and spiritual wealth, describing the work as: un jardín de olorosas fores de doctrina, y de suavíssimos frutos de sabiduría.Y es de tal y tanta excelencia y utilidad que desde el principio de su publicación hasta estos tiempos siempre ha ilustrado y prosperado sus amadores y estudiosos, y nunca se ha visto ni oído otro libro semejante a este. (Bratutti 1654: sig. ¶7r) [a garden of fragrant fowers of doctrine and delicate fruits of wisdom.And it is of such great excellence and utility that from the beginning of its publication until now it has always educated and brought prosperity to its admirers and students, and never before has another book like it been seen.] Such descriptions “other” the work in a way that simply does not occur in Calila e Dimna or the Exemplario; and their allusions to spatial distance—as in Ribas’ emphasis of the fables’ origins in the “regiones tan remotas” [remote regions] of “China” (Bratutti 1654: sig. ¶3r)—place the work at an even greater remove from Spain and Europe, geographically, ideologically, and culturally. By the later seventeenth century, the ‘Orient’ had acquired other, different meanings. Persia, India, China, and Japan played a more important role in European knowledge and fantasies about the East, and the ideological, material, and political transformations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also led to a reconfguration of the Orient (Keller and Irigoyen-García 2017: 5). In addition to emphasizing spatial distance, Bratutti also has recourse to imagery that objectifes the “East” in line with contemporary depictions of the Orient and its people as effeminate. Toward the end of the letter, he describes the book as una hermosa esposa, mostrando su cara en diversas formas y semblantes, aora en el habito Indiano y Persiano, y aora en el vestido Arábico y Turco representó su belleza. Mas aunque mostrasse la cara de su excelencia con varias lenguas, sin embargo le faltava el ornamento del lunar de la lengua y idioma Castellano. Por lo qual yo me resolví de vestir, y adornar este libro con el manto Español y publicarlo en la lengua Castellana, para que assí los nobles como los plebeyos puedan gozar de sus infnitos bienes. (Bratutti 1654: sig. ¶8v) [a beautiful spouse [who], revealing her face through diverse forms and countenances, represents her beauty now in Indian clothing and Persian, now in Arabic dress and Turkish. But even though her face reveals her excellence through various languages, it nonetheless lacks the ornament of the beauty spot [that is] the Castilian tongue and language. And as such I became resolved to dress and adorn this book with the cloak 522
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of Spanish and publish it in the Castilian tongue so that nobles as well as citizens can delight in its infnite benefts.] The translator personifes the book as a beautiful spouse and depicts its transmission as a performance of beautifcation. But although the Indian, Persian, Arabic, and Turkish “clothes” she tries on do reveal something of her beauty, they are ultimately discarded as unsuitable. Castilian, in contrast, provides the ftting fnishing touch, completing her dazzling allure. This extended metaphor for the classical notion that language is rhetorical ornament functions additionally as a comment on intercultural relations.The depiction of the book as a wife who performs dressing and undressing, which is suggestive of the male gaze, clearly places the “hermosa esposa” (the “East”) in a vulnerable, inferior, and subservient position before the voyeur, her “husband” Spain. The depiction of unequal power dynamics points to a change in perspective. Bratutti’s attitude toward the East stands in contrast to the acknowledgment of the importance of, if not admiration for, Arabic culture and learning found in Calila e Dimna and even the Exemplario. The translator’s words instead reveal a sense of secular superiority (the religious superiority of Christians over Muslims and Jews having long been in existence). For Bratutti, the work’s journeys westward have led inevitably to Spain and to Castilian.While the imagery of marriage suggests (inter)dependency and therefore implicitly recognizes Spain’s inextricable bond with and debt to Indian, Persian,Arabic, and Turkish cultures and learning, this does not preclude Bratutti from simultaneously asserting the pre-eminence of a Spanish, Christian monoculture represented by the superiority of the Castilian language.The letter concludes with the statement that: esta Oriental joya de documentos Políticos, y Morales que he sacado a la luz de las tinieblas de tan peregrinas y ignotas lenguas para que desta clara fuente bevas doctrinas para la mejor política y gustes erudiciones para el mas acertado govierno. (Bratutti 1654: sig. ¶8v) [this Oriental jewel of political and moral documents that I have brought into the light from the shadows of such wandering and unknown tongues so that you may drink doctrines for the best politics from this clear fountain and taste knowledge for the most successful government.] Even as Bratutti praises the fables’ value as delightful and instructive he simultaneously disparages the medium by which it has thus far been transmitted, that is, the “peregrinas y ignotas” languages of the East. In order that the Espejo político y moral can be of beneft to readers in Spain, and above all, the king and his court, Bratutti claims that this “clara fuente” [clear fountain] of wisdom must be translated into a suitable tongue, namely Castilian, which alone is worthy of the “joyas” [jewels] the book contains. In acquiring the fables, Bratutti not only seeks to take possession of their wisdom to ensure the success of the Spanish empire under Felipe IV, as many other opportunistic rulers and translators had done before, but conversely to simultaneously elevate the book through Castilian, which by the seventeenth century had consolidated its place as a prestigious language of literature and scholarship.While it is granted authority by its status as an “oriental joya” with a long and distinguished line of transmission, in actual fact the translatio from Turkish to Spanish is what provides “el ornamento del lunar” [ornament of the beauty spot]—the fnal gloss of superiority lacking in the tongues of its providence. As the linguistic anthropologist Kathryn Woolard asserts, “linguistic ideologies are never just about language, but rather also concern such fundamental social 523
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notions as community, nation, and humanity itself ” (2004: 58). Bratutti’s claim for the superiority of Castilian reveals underlying attitudes and assumptions about Spain’s identity and place in the world, and about the way in which the Other was conceived. In the Espejo político y moral, the Other represents both a spatial and a temporal concept: the defnition of faraway exoticism and intellectual wealth, it also represents the Iberian Peninsula’s past. And it is by journeying to this past, a voyage undertaken in the process of translating Humayun-Nameh from Turkish to Castilian, that Spanish identity in the present and for the future is able to be constituted. Translation is conceived by Bratutti as more than the means of acquiring knowledge from an external Other in support of political advancement and prestige. Rather, it is a transformative process that brings beauty and value to an object which, for all of its renown, would otherwise remain ‘wandering’ and unknown. In Bratutti’s letter, as well as in Ribas’ censura, the term “peregrino” underlines the inherent mobility of this book, which by this point had traversed the world, and, implicitly, the fuidity of culture, knowledge, and power.Yet it is a mobility that Bratutti wishes to neutralize. In translating Humayun-Nameh he aims to stabilize and fx this traveling text and give it a prestigious “home” in a “civilized” land. Ultimately, as we know, his attempt to resist the inherent fuidity of Kalila wa-Dimna would fail for the fables would continue their journeys for many centuries to come.
Notes 1 Scholars who have investigated medieval and early modern networks of supranational exchange and cultural interactions on an East/West axis include Menocal (1987, 2002), Akbari and Mallette (2013), Wallace (2016), Hamilton (2017), and Wacks (2017). 2 For an overview of the Panchatantra’s complex transmission history, see Montiel (1975), De Blois (1990), and Grube (1991), who provides a detailed, if not altogether complete, genealogical table. 3 While this chapter focuses exclusively on translations into Spanish, a comprehensive study of Kalila wa-Dimna’s Iberian reception would need to include the two medieval Hebrew translations by Rabbi Joel and Rabbi Ya’akob ben El’azar which were roughly contemporary to the Alfonsine version and were key conduits for the fables’ entry into other European vernaculars. 4 Unless otherwise stated, English translations are my own. 5 For an introduction to the genre of “mirrors for princes” of which Kalila wa-Dimna is part, see Marlow (2013). 6 For an introduction to Calila e Dimna, see Cacho Blecua and Lacarra (1984: 9–70). Introductions to the Exemplario are provided by Haro Cortés (1992) and Lacarra (2007). 7 Lacarra is also the only scholar of whom I am aware to address all three translations comparatively (2006). 8 Greene (2013) provides an excellent example of the productiveness of this type of approach. 9 Several, now foundational, studies on book history are Chartier (1989, 1994) and McKenzie (1999). 10 For information about the manuscripts, their dating, and relevant scholarship, see Cacho Blecua and Lacarra (1984: 50–65). Döhla’s edition facilitates the comparison of MS A and MS B and their variants (2009). Fragments of two other Castilian translations survive, including one from 1270 included in Alfonso X’s General Estoria (1270). Because it differs from the versions in MS A and MS B, this fragment is consequently believed to have been translated from an entirely different Arabic source. The second fragment is based on the thirteenth-century Hebrew translation by Ya’akob ben Eleazar and is conserved in a ffteenth-century codex known as MS P alongside other works of wisdom literature. 11 The concepto cultural alfonsí has been explored by Márquez Villanueva (1994). 12 The rivalry, if not animosity, between Fadrique and Alfonso has been addressed by Ballesteros-Beretta (1963) and Kinkade (1992) among others; Kinoshita (2008: 377–78 and n.34) and Patrick (2014: 60–3) in turn view the siblings’ personal relationship as integral to their respective patronage of literary production and translation. 13 The phrase “Fue sacado del aravigo en Latín et romançado” is ambiguous and there has been some contention about whether the translation of Calila e Dimna was made via a Latin version. However, most scholars now agree that there is no internal evidence for this (López-Morillas 1971: 86–7).
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Framing intercultural encounters 14 Lacarra has addressed the Exemplario’s similarity to the Hebrew (2005) and the Latin (2007) versions. 15 The infuence of the fables on later European texts has been suggested by Gittes (1983), McWilliam (1995: lix), Lalomia (2015), and Torollo (2016). 16 On the converso question, and in particular the emerging category of raza as an indelible inherited quality during this period, see Nirenberg (2000, 2012, 2014: 114–168); and, more recently, Soyer (2019) and essays in García-Arenal and Glazer-Eytan (2019). 17 I explore the prologues to the Espejo politico y moral in more depth in a forthcoming article in the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies.
References Akbari, Suzanne Conklin, and Karla Mallette. 2013. A Sea of Languages: Rethinking the Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History.Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Álvarez, Román, and M. Carmen-África Vidal, eds. 1996. Translation, Power, Subversion. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Baldwin, Geoffrey P. 2007. “The Translation of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe”. In Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, edited by Peter Burke and R. Po-chia Hsia, 101–124. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Ballesteros-Beretta, Antonio. 1963. Alfonso X el Sabio. Barcelona: Salvat Editores. Berman,Antoine. 2012.“Translation and the Trials of the Foreign”. In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 276–289. London: Routledge. Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bratutti,Vicente. 1654. Espejo político y moral, para principes, y ministros y todo genero de personas.Traducido de la lengua turva en la castellana. Por Vicente Bratvtti Raguseo interprete de la lengua turca, de Felipe Quarto el Grande Rey de las Españas, etc. Parte primera. Madrid: Domingo García y Morràs. Burke, Peter. 2012. “Translating the Turks”. In Why Concepts Matter:Translating Social and Political Thought, edited by Martin Burke and Melvin Richter, 141–152. Leiden: Brill. Burns, S.J., and I. Robert, ed. 2001. Las Siete Partidas,Volume 5: Underworlds:The Dead, the Criminal, and the Marginalized.Translated by Samuel Parsons Scott. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Cacho Blecua, Juan Manuel, and María Jesús Lacarra, eds. 1984. Calila e Dimna. Madrid: Castalia. Chartier, Roger. 1989.“Texts, Printing, Readings”. In The New Cultural History, edited by Lynn Hunt and Aletta Biersack, 154–57. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chartier, Roger. 1994. The Order of Books: Readers,Authors and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Cambridge: Polity. Clifford, James. 1997. Routes:Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. De Blois, François. 1990. Burzōy’s Voyage to India and the Origin of the Book of “Kalīlah wa Dimnah”. London: Royal Asiatic Society. De Blois, François. 1991. “The Pancatantra: From India to the West – And Back”. In A Mirror for Princes from India: Illustrated Versions of the “Kalilah waDimnah”,“Anvar-i Suhayli”,“Iyar-i Danish” and “Humayun Nameh”, edited by Ernst J. Grube, 10–5. Bombay: Marg Publications. Döhla, Hans-Jörg, ed. 2009. El libro de “Calila e Dimna”: nueva edición y estudio de los dos manuscritos castellanos. Zaragoza: Instituto de Estudios Islámicos y del Oriente Próximo. Freedman, Paul. 2012. “Locating the Exotic”. In Locating the Middle Ages:The Spaces and Places of Medieval Culture, edited by Julian Weiss and Sarah Salih, 23–37. London: King’s College London. Fuchs, Barbara. 2009. Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gallego, María Angeles. 2003. “The Languages of Medieval Iberia and their Religious Dimension”. Medieval Encounters 9 (1): 107–139. García-Arenal, Mercedes, and Yonatan Glazer-Eytan (eds.). 2019. Forced Conversion in Christianity, Judaism and Islam: Coercion and Faith in Premodern Iberia and Beyond. Leiden: Brill. Girón-Negrón, Luis M. 2005.“How the Go-between Cut Her Nose:Two Ibero-Medieval Translations of a Kalilah Wa Dimnah Story”. In Under the Infuence: Questioning the Comparative in Medieval Castile, edited by Cynthia Robinson and Leyla Rouhi, 231–259. Leiden: Brill. Gittes, Katharine Slater. 1983.“The Canterbury Tales and the Arabic Frame Tradition”. PMLA, 98.2: 237– 251. www.jstor.org/stable/462048 [Accessed: 13 November 2019].
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33 EVIDENCE FOR AN UNDERLYING IBERO–ROMANCE VERNACULAR The Nodicia de kesos vis-à-vis its corresponding notarial act1 Omar Velázquez-Mendoza2
Introduction3 The Hispanic High Middle Ages (eighth to thirteenth century) can be characterized as a period during which texts exhibit a high degree of variation, with some documents taking a Latin (or Latin-like) form, others taking a more Romance appearance, and many lying in between.To a large extent, this broad variation was due to a lack of standardization of writing in the Iberian Peninsula during the period in question. In reality, standardizing practices were not adopted in Medieval Iberia, in a generalized and defnitive manner, until the ascent of Alfonse X (The Learned) to the throne of Castile-León in 1252.Yet, among such textual diversity, a state of linguistic unity, characterized by the use of a highly variable Iberian vernacular, can be envisaged for the Christian society of the time. The High Medieval documents whose language of composition looks like Latin to us today was, the possibility exists, a venerable register of Iberian Romance with a superposed varnish of Latinity—which could range from deep to superfcial depending on variables such as geography, text genre, text section, and scribal training, to name but a few language-internal as well as language-external factors. But testimonies of the Ibero–Romance vernacular do occasionally surface in the written records pre-dating the massive adoption of standardized writing in Medieval Iberia, in the mid-thirteenth century.This chapter traces such an emergent vernacular as it is refected in what arguably constitutes one of the most transparent documents as far as its writing-to-speech correspondences are concerned:The Nodicia de kesos. Now, the Nodicia poses a formidable challenge for the historical linguist. It was composed in a rather intimate, informal—and, therefore, almost transparently Romance—register on the back of a contemporaneous (or near-contemporaneous) notarial act of considerable formality; in turn, the formal nature of this act explains its superimposed veil of Latinity. Although the apparent discrepancy between the two texts seems irreconcilable, differing frequencies of two common syntactic constructions—namely < verb + direct object > and < de + noun >—as an expression of possession—exist between the two, pointing to Romance being the underlying language of composition.
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An underlying Ibero–Romance vernacular
Iberian texts of the High Medieval period Save some fortuitous documental survivors refecting, somewhat transparently, the Iberian Romance of the time, e.g., Kharjas, proto-Hispanic Glosses, etc., by in large the texts that have come down to us from the Hispanic High Middle Ages are of a legal nature. In particular, most of the extant documents belong to the notarial genre. But most of these texts disguise the spoken language of the day in what Blake and Sánchez Lancis (2016, 293) call “the straitjacket dictated by the Latin model and the highly formulaic legal genre”.While Romance was, most likely, the spoken medium of Christian Iberia from the eighth to the mid-thirteenth century, literacy in the Iberian Peninsula, as Wright (1982) puts it, meant writing Latin. But with many language changes having occurred in the several hundred years elapsing from the height of the Western Roman Empire to the Medieval period, the endeavor of writing Latin in the Peninsula entailed but attempts to follow, either successfully or unsuccessfully, the Latin textual models of (Late) Antiquity, and the Grammaticae, the Latin grammar manuals of the day.As Blake’s (1987) study has so lucidly shown, some scribal attempts at writing Latin during the Hispanic Early Middle Ages oftentimes inevitably led to “errors” as they “struggle to appear offcial” (Wright 1976, 185).This is especially true of morphology, as the following eleventh-century example illustrates (brackets denote what the corresponding normative Latin forms should be): “Sub[IN] Christi nomine[NOMINE CHRISTI] et individue[-DUAE] Trinitatis, Patri[-S] et Filii et Spiritu[-S] Sancti, regnantes[-IUM] in secula seculorum, amen.—Nos namque nominate, qui sumus concilium de[Ø] villa pronominata[VILLAE PRONOMINATAE] Villa de Eriezo, de minimus[-O] usque ad maximus[-UM] …” (Arlanza §XLII, year 1044; in Blake 1987, 2).4 If, to express possession for nouns, scribal “errors” such as de villa pronominata for VILLAE PRONOMINATAE appear in the written records, it was because certain morphological markers, such as -AE, as should have been the case of other linguistic forms as well, had probably already disappeared from speech long before the composition of this and other texts.That they had not disappeared from writing yet was due to the power of tradition, which called for a degree of reverence toward—and imitation of—the (Late) Latin textual past. As mentioned above, before 1252 standardization of writing was still nonexistent, which explains why Iberian texts dating from the High Medieval period show such broad instability. For example, intra-textual variability for the following words, each sharing—depending on the case—a common Latin or non-Latin etymon with its counterpart(s), is well documented in the written records, as shown in (1) in the following. For Ibero–Romance, this intra-textual variability encompasses not only common nouns (1a–c), but also proper nouns (1d–f) as well as verb forms (1g–j): (1) a. ganado ~ ganato:“Secundo idus may, festa sancti Isidori episcopi, leuaronse homines de Bonille cum suo ganato τ trocieron Aslanzon … Et si trociese ganado de Boniel aAslanzon, si trociere bez de bacas, che coman la uaca, et de grege de ouegas, che comant carneros” (Benedictinas, year 1100).5 b. puercos ~ porcos:“de uez de puercos, com[ant] porcos” (Benedictinas, year 1100).6 c. reyno ~ regno: “a todos los omnes de nuestro regno que vieren esta carta, salud y gracia. Mando que los ombres de Castroxeriz no paguen en mi reyno portazgo alguno” (Fernando III, §639, year 1241).7 d. Leone ~ Legione:“Regnante rex Adefonsus Raimundi in Toleto et in Legione et in tota Hispania … Rodericus Martiniz in Leone” (Sahagún, §1233, year 1127).8 e. Sancio ~ Santio: “Ego Santio Dei gratia rex … Sancio rex” (Cogolla, §87, year 970?).9 f. Sancho ~ Sancio ~ Sancius: “Nos quidem humillimum omnium servorum Christi Munnio Sancho et Anderazo Monioz … Facta carta sub era Ma., regnante Sancio rege 529
Omar Velázquez-Mendoza
g.
h.
i. j.
… et testes ad roborandum conscripsi: Sancius episcopus confrmans” (Cogolla, §176, year 1022).10 mandaret ~ mandauerit:“et promiserunt se esse facturos omnia que ipse mandaret in tantum ut eos faceret amicos hominibus de melgare … nostros cum litera nostra sigillis nostris roborata ut qui ipsa mandauerit et” (Sahagún, §1313, year 1152).11 saccare ~ saccauerit: “Et mancebo qui intraret de anno ad annum, si su amo saccauerit illum mensis de augusto, intret per .ii. menses … Qui bouem saccare … pectet .v. solidos” (Valfermoso, year 1189).12 ovieron ~ habuerunt:“Et illi de Villa Gundissalvi defesas non habuerunt devetatas de pascere … Tovia et Cogga defesa ovieron” (Cogolla, §231, year 1044).13 dieron ~ dederunt: “et uenerunt homines de Bonil τ dederunt fdiator por la baca por tal qual mandasen iudices de Castella … Et leuos miuida DiacAlbarez τfuit ad Bonil, τDixit ad totum concilium:‘Barones de Bonil, date mihi hominem cum quo accipiam iudicium’. Et dieron aFferrant Monnuz por manu” (Benedictinas, year 1100).14
Standardizing practices across Europe originally emanating from Charlemagne’s Court, the intellectual center of the Christian Empire of the day, do not fully and defnitively reach the Iberian Peninsula until 1252, the year of Alfonse X’s ascent to the throne of Castile-León. In the Iberian Peninsula, the Learned King was the frst to authorize, in a generalized way, a reformed use of writing, the fortuitous consequence of which was the elevation of the Romance vernaculars to the status of written languages (Wright 1982, 2002; Blake 1987; Penny 2004).15 As is only natural, the considerable degree of variation that pre-mid-thirteenth-century Iberian texts exhibit correlates with, among other parameters, the following: (i) Text section: both beginnings (especially invocatios) and closings (most notably, sanctios) of notarial acts, as compared to the less rigid middle sections (dispositios), tended to be composed in more formal registers, requiring more Latinate style than the remaining, less ceremonial passages; (ii) Genre: depending on their legal purpose, some notarial acts tended to call for more solemnity, and therefore for more Latinity, than others; (iii) Geography: in some monasteries educational standards were higher as compared to other centers of learning and legal practice; (iv) Scribal training: higherranking clergy tended to be better versed in the Latin textual models of (Late) Antiquity and the Grammaticae than lower-ranking scribes were. The customer embodied yet another variable in the context surrounding the composition of the notarial text: royal and noble parties who sought the services of notaries tended to hire higher-ranking clergy for their legal needs than the masses, a dynamic which in turn usually correlated with the production of more polished, i.e., more Latin, prose.To this equation one must add the attestation, across documents and diplomatic collections, of Latin formulae, whose incessant presence in notarial texts16 infused them with “ceremonial sprinklings … thus lending the performance an air of solemnity so appropriate for legal speech acts” (Blake and Sánchez Lancis 2016, 283).17 The Nodicia de kesos, as well as its notarial counterpart, then, are embedded within a scribal tradition characterized by a fuid coexistence between Latin (or Latin-like) language features on the one end of the spectrum, and on the other, vernacular, i.e., Romance, language patterns. Worth noting is that the coexistence of these features is attested on all linguistic levels, from lexicon to syntax. As the following fragments show, during the High Medieval period, vernacular forms lay on one end of a continuum encompassing what we, in retrospect, would now call Latin vs.—depending on the locale in question—the corresponding Romance vernacular. Undoubtedly, some texts (e.g., [2]) exhibit a considerably high degree of Latinity, while others (e.g., [3]) refect the spoken language of the day in a more transparent manner. Most texts (e.g., [4]), however, lie somewhere in between, making the Latin–Romance continuum a symbiosis of 530
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a highly complex, yet somehow socially accepted, nature in which tradition—the wish to follow the venerable Latin models of (Late) Antiquity and the Grammaticae—competed against, but also worked hand in hand with, innovation—the wish to capture the vernacular patterns that were emerging, or had already appeared, in speech: (2) Id est, consigno atque trado ut fant in stipendio monachorum in eadem deservientium eclesia iuxta adiacentes quarum hec vocabula sunt, videlicet, eclesia Sancti Andre Apostoli que loco extat prefato miliario ex integro cum omnibus undique adiacentibus dextris et quicquid utilitatibus in eadem fruuntur ex decimis et oblationibus fdelium ut rationem que iuris episcopalis debebatur prefata domo persolvantur cultores eiusdem; equidem et eclesia Sancti Fructuosi que est sita in rivo Sicco; itidem Eclesias que vocantur Albas; siquidem in rivo que vocatur Cinerosum Sancti Felicis et Sancti Christofori (Sahagún, §28, year 921).18 (3) Quod ego19 Maria Garcia a ty Iuan Lopez, meo / sobrino, fago cartam de perfliacionis20 pora vn auer e hen eredat / que yo ey en Sancti Iohannis eb ho quier que la yo aya, e por tal prec/to que me contiengas en mea uida de comer e de bouer, assi co/mo al to corpo, e de uestir de dos en dos annos una saya de / picote e de IIIa en tres annos una piel de XII sollos (Otero, §417, year 1216; in Blake and Sánchez Lancis 2016, 285). (4) Do / uobis illas casas quas fuerunt de domna Stefania, cum suo orto et cum sua hereditate quod illis / pertinet et cum suo exitu et cum sua diuisa et cum omnibus pertinenciis suis, scilicet, pro duas / terras quas datis michi in uilla nominata Carocera et iacet in loco nominato (Otero, §545, year 1249; in Blake and Sánchez Lancis 2016, 285).21 The complex coexistence between Latin, Latinate, and vernacular language patterns in the documental production of the Hispanic High Middles Ages is also relevant, on an intra-textual level, to the different parts of a document, with some sections (e.g., [5] and [7]) taking on a more Latin appearance, while others (e.g., [6]) a more vernacular shape: (5) Testamentum de Sancto Micael de rivo Sicco quod fecit Taion. In Dei nomine (Sahagún, §24, year 921).22 (6) Ego Taion facio cartam de mea hereditate propria quam habeo de dato de meo domno Ordonio rege et de sua uxore Gelvira regina; et dedi ego Taion in confrmacione ad ipso rege uno kavallo et duas mulas; et est ipsa hereditate in rivo Sicco vocabulo eclesia de Sancto Michaele de Bobatella; et sunt terminos de ipsa eclesia per Cancos et per Valle de Aboxoc et inde per Villa Citalfer et per Sancto Stephano (Sahagún, §24, year 921).23 (7) Quod si aliquis homo hoc meum testamentum infringere temptaverit a Deo sit excommunicatus per secula seculorum et in inferno cum Iuda Domini traditore dampnetur et pariat a Domnos Sanctos quinque talentos de auro; et hunc testamentum per secula seculorum sit frmum (Sahagún, §24, year 921).24 Interestingly, a parallel fuctuation between Latin and vernacular traits is captured also textinternally even at the clause level, as shown in (8): (8) Ego yo (< lat. ĔGO) [sic] Horo Micaelliz … offero sancto altario uestro uel patri nostro abbas domno Micahel (Sahagún, §851, year 1089).25 The highly complex nature of the coexistence between Latin and Romance patterns, as they are refected in the extant written records, is interpreted in two very different ways by the two 531
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most prominent, and seemingly irreconcilable, views on the sociolinguistic context surrounding the composition of High Medieval texts.Whereas for the traditional view the two ends of the Latin–Romance spectrum cited above entailed a conscious awareness of two opposing languages on the part of the Christian speech community, the alternative view, the complex monolingualism hypothesis, considers Latin and Romance as the extremes of one same language continuum. According to the traditional view (henceforth the two language [or 2L] hypothesis), the populace employed not Latin, but rather Romance, an evolved form of Latin, as their only means of communication. The clergy and the educated, on the other hand, spoke and wrote a historically related but archaic variety, Latin, which allegedly failed to undergo some, if not most, of the changes that Romance underwent on the historical axis. Following the 2L hypothesis, Latin’s conservatism, or limited development, principally stemmed from the isolation experienced by the clergy during the High Medieval period. Such a state of isolation entailed relatively little contact with Romance speakers, the few moments of contact being some services during which both social groups interacted, e.g., confession, notarial transactions such as the preparation, reading aloud, and confrmation of donations, permutes, wills, disputes, etc. Thus, the traditional view—most eminently expressed by Menéndez Pidal (1926), Ferguson (1959), and most recently by Gimeno Menéndez (1995), Walsh (1996), and Koch and Oesterreicher (2007)—maintains that Romance and Latin coexisted during the Early Middle Ages in a mutually exclusive, yet complementary, distribution known as diglossia to modern sociolinguists. Using Ferguson’s (1959) typological distinction, Latin was the High (formal) written and spoken variety, while Romance was the Low (colloquial) spoken variant. A corollary of the traditional view is that, as the populace was illiterate, all written records which have come down to us were originally composed in the High variety, Latin, by the literate minority of the time. A second corollary is that the writing system employed to compose the extant texts, as well as to read them aloud, supposedly followed, entirely, the phonographic principle.This isomorphic way of reading and writing was based on a faithful letter-to-sound correspondence.That is, the principle at hand dictated that one letter correspond to one sound in speech—or in reading aloud, at the very least. In practice, the 2L hypothesis postulates that when a word like dederunt (< Lat. DĔDĒRŬNT) surfaces in a text, which it does, as shown in (1j), this word would have been rendered [dedéɾun̠t] or [deðéɾun̠t], not [djéɾon]. Similarly, when an Ibero–Romance variant such as dieron (< Lat. DĔDĒRŬNT) is attested before the mid-thirteenth century, which it also is, as shown in (1j), the form would have been articulated [djéɾon]. The presence of variants such as dieron in the written records would prove, as Pope (1934) put it, that the populace would “pollute” the language of the upper (literate) social layer to which the literate belonged.The presence of vernacular forms in the written records, according to the 2L hypothesis, reveals the existence of a degenerate, or “low”, form of Latin—el bajo latín—and are cited as evidence lending support to the existence of two spoken languages, Latin and Romance, during the Early Middle Ages.26 Additional evidence in support of this view is drawn from the lexical domain: the proto-Hispanic glosses attributed to the eleventh century, e.g., the passive analytic form se videt for the synthetic passive videtur “it is seen”, is born out of a necessity, on the part of the literate, to translate into Romance the main Latin text to the populace. In contrast to the 2L hypothesis, the alternative view (to which I will also refer as the single language [or SL] hypothesis) proposes that only one fexible code, Romance, was employed by all spheres of society, both in speech and in writing, in the Iberian Peninsula during the Early Middle Ages. This alternative view—originally proposed by Wright (1982) and endorsed, to various degrees, by Emiliano (1996, 2003, 2005), Penny (1998, 2003), Blake (1987, 1995, 1996), and Pensado (1996), among others—maintains that the name that users of this code would attribute to its various linguistic registers was latinus/ladino (in the Iberian Peninsula romanz 532
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would not come about in the written records until the thirteenth century). According to this alternative view, then, the texts whose language of composition, in retrospect, seems Latin to us today was in reality a high register of the corresponding Romance of the time with a superposed varnish of Latinity—which, again, could either be deep or superfcial, or could manifest itself somewhere in between the formality–informality continuum, depending on several language-internal or -external variables, some of which have been discussed above. The SL hypothesis proposes that Latin and the Romance vernaculars did not coexist as two distinct codes during the period that concerns us for the following fundamental reasons (Wright 2002; Emiliano 2005): (a) No one in Medieval Iberia spoke Latin natively, even if a literate minority could write—or would try to write, at times—this variety, following, to varying extents, the Latin models of (Late) Antiquity and/or the Grammaticae. Latin, i.e., writing, had to be learned in an educational context; it was only used orally by the clergy to perform ritual church services and by academics to teach at universities, but it was no one’s native language. It was also a non-native lingua franca at “international” conferences. (b) Monolingualism can be surprisingly fexible.Writing and speech, even at the lexical level, could be perceived as a single, yet very fexible, linguistic code by its users even when the gap between the two may seem, to an outsider, too distant to be considered the same language. Arabic, ironically cited as the archetypical case of diglossia by proponents of the 2L hypothesis, actually provides evidence in support of the SL hypothesis, as the formal and informal registers of this language, despite their abysmal gap on all fronts—from the perspective of a linguist—are perceived as two manifestations of the same linguistic entity by the Arabic speech community. Now, the difference between Arabic and the Latin–Romance continuum, according to the alternative hypothesis, lies in that Latin was not a native spoken language in High Medieval Iberia. Following the SL hypothesis, the logographic (as opposed to the phonographic) principle guided to a large extent the written language of the time.Writing had fallen behind the natural changes that had occurred in speech during the centuries following the fall of the Western Roman Empire. On a lexical level, in the Early Medieval period certain Latin words were maintained, others fell into disuse, and yet others were formed language-internally or were incorporated from other languages—as is only natural of any language. On the level of morpho-phonology, in the Early Middle Ages more than one letter could now correspond to a single sound. A presumably phonographic language at the height of the Roman Empire, Latin—or latinus or ladino, or however else one wishes to refer to the language employed by the Christian Iberian society of the Romanic period—became logographic in the Early Middle Ages only to be made phonographic, at least in principle, again in a frst attempt, in the Iberian Peninsula in 1080 AD at the Council of Burgos, and in a defnitive attempt in the mid-thirteenth century, with the adoption of the Carolingian educational reforms during the reign of Alfonse X. According to Wright (1982, 2002), at the heart of these reforms lay Alcuin of York, the pedagogue Charlemagne commissioned to revive Classical Antiquity’s idealistic one-letter-to-one-sound correspondence between reading and writing. Once the reforms were implemented in High Medieval Iberia, the alternative view contends, the written language of the time became unintelligible to the speech community, given that the ideal one-letter-to-one-sound correspondence had to be adopted. On the plain of the lexicon, the consequence of this reform was that, in general terms, the spoken language determined which words were to be kept in writing (the current Romance lexicon) and which lexical items were not (Latin lexicon that had fallen into disuse). 533
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The new practice contrasted with the unreformed principle, the system that had been previously employed by the literate to write and to read texts aloud, in which there was not always, and therefore not necessarily, a faithful correspondence between writing and reading aloud. The unintelligibility at hand presumably caused an awareness of a linguistic distinction between Latin and the vernaculars to arise among the Iberian society of the time—again, an awareness that, according to the SL hypothesis, did not exist before the reforms. Thus, assuming that the unreformed principle was in fact employed to render Iberian texts sometime before 1252, the SL hypothesis contends that, in Castile-León, a form like dederunt was pronounced something like [deéɾon] or [djéɾon], not [dedéɾun̠t] or [deðéɾun̠t], much as speakers of modern French articulate laissent not as [láissen̠t], but rather as [lɛs]. The attestation of vernacular forms, such as those in (1) above, like dieron, in the written records, especially when the innovative forms coexisted, intra-textually, alongside their more conservative variants, e.g., dederunt, lends support to the notion that Ibero–Romance followed a logographic reading/writing system.27 As for the lexicon, Emiliano (2005) argues that those items that we now consider to be Latin and that fell into disuse during the High Middle Ages, e.g., the passive synthetic videtur (“it is seen”), were given their corresponding vernacular counterpart in reading aloud, e.g., with the analytic passive construction se videt (“it is seen”) being used in lieu of videtur (“it is seen”).The fexibility of the Latin–Romance continuum, according to the SL hypothesis, was such that speakers were conscious of not two, but rather a single linguistic code. To sum up, for the lexical and morpho-phonological levels, the 2L hypothesis contends that, between the eighth and the mid-thirteen century, writing in the Hispanic domain was guided through the phonographic principle, in which each letter was given a phonetic value in reading aloud. Furthermore, this hypothesis assumes that those words that saw no continuation in the Iberian vernaculars were still used in the speech of the literate because they are attested in the extant texts.The more general implication of this view is that the Christian society of High Medieval Iberia spoke two languages, Latin and Romance.The alternative hypothesis, in contrast, maintains that the litterati of the same period followed the logographic principle, through which the pronunciation of morphemes, in particular, and of whole words, in general, was realized applying memorized letter-to-sound correspondences. Moreover, for the SL hypothesis, when Latin words that had fallen into disuse among speakers were found in a text, they were given a Romance lexical correspondence in reading aloud without there being an awareness of two opposing linguistic codes, much as the High and Low registers of Arabic are perceived by this language’s speech community today. Consequently, the alternative view posits the existence of only one highly variable language, Romance, while it does not necessarily deny the existence of Latin—or an approximation thereof, depending on the case—as a written, as opposed to a natively spoken, manifestation of the same language. Now, any language, whether it be exclusively spoken or also written, is not only composed of lexical items and morpho-phonological features alone. Rather, at a more general level it also consists of—and is instantiated through—syntactic patterns. As far as order of verb (V) and direct object (O) is concerned, pre-mid-thirteenth-century Iberian texts refect a coexistence, as shown in (9), between the archetypal syntactic pattern in Latin, OV, and the vernacular order VO. Although each neo-Latin variety favors VO to a different extent,VO, rather than OV, has consolidated itself as the non-emphatic order in the modern Romance languages. For those Romance idioms that allow OV, e.g., contrast Span. A Pedro lo vio María, a grammatical sentence, with ungrammatical Fren. *Pierre (l’)a vu Marie “It was Pedro that Maria saw”, this alternative order, OV, is the marked form. Now, OV, as in (9a), was apparently the non-emphatic pattern—at least in certain contexts—during Rome’s Classical period, so it comes as no surprise that a higher frequency of OV, as opposed to VO, is documented at 534
An underlying Ibero–Romance vernacular Table 33.1 Diachronic frequency and percentage distribution of VO and OV* Text(s)/Author
Century
VO
OV Percentage
Letters/Terentian Peregrinatio/Aegeria Galicano Silo Cogolla Cogolla Cogolla
2nd AD 4th AD 8th AD 8th AD 9th AD 10th AD 11th AD
11 36 50 12 ? ? ?
5 24 38 7 ? ? ?
VO: 68.75% / OV: 31.25% VO: 60% / OV: 40% VO: 56.81% / OV: 43.18% VO: 63.15% / OV: 36.84% VO: 82% / OV: 18% VO: 75% / OV: 25% VO: 83% / OV: 17%
*The question marks in Table 33.1 indicate that in Blake (1996) only percentages, not absolute numbers, of the VO and OV orders are given.
Table 33.2 OV/VO percentage distribution by text section (medial vs. solemn parts) (Velázquez-Mendoza 2016) Text(s)
Medial
Solemn
Becerro Galicano Silo
VO: 83.63% / OV: 16.36% VO: 85.71% / OV: 14.28%
VO: 14.7% / OV: 85.29% VO: 0% / OV: 100%
the height of the Roman Empire (but see Pinkster 1996). Judging from the written records, it is only later that, seemingly,VO, as in (9b–d), became the unmarked order in Late Latin, displacing OV between the second and the fourth century AD, as shown in Table 33.1.The displacement of OV by VO as the unmarked order continues to be attested in the High Middle Ages via a higher frequency of VO over OV (Velázquez-Mendoza 2016). In the Becerro Galicano de San Millán de la Cogolla, a diplomatic collection comprising later copies of Riojan texts dating from the eighth century,VO is more frequent than OV; the same holds true for the Peninsula’s only surviving original document attributed to the same century, the Leonese Diploma of King Silo (Galicano:VO = 56.81% / OV = 43.18%; Silo:VO = 63.15% / OV = 36.84%).This fact is captured in Table 33.1. Moreover, medial sections in the same texts refect a higher incidence of VO, the Romance syntactic pattern, than of OV, the Latin order, as compared to the more solemn parts, the beginnings and closings of notarial transactions (Galicano:VO = 83.63% / OV = 16.36% for medial sections,VO = 14.7% / OV = 85.29% for solemn parts; Silo:VO = 85.71% / OV = 14.28% for medial sections,VO = 0% / OV = 100% for solemn parts). This distribution is presented in Table 33.2. But the OV > VO change can really only be considered complete when clitic duplication of pre-verbal direct objects with nouns as nuclei, as in (10), surfaces in the written records. As the examples in (10) show, clitic duplication of preverbal accusatives, both animates and inanimates, points to OV having established itself in Hispano–Romance by the eleventh century, not only as an emphatic order, but also as a derived pattern from non-emphatic VO (Velázquez-Mendoza 2018). (9) a. Quintum fratrem cotidie expectamus (Att.1.5.8).28 Quintus-ACUS. brother-ACUS. everyday we expect b. abbates et fratres de Sancti Felicis dederunt in mea redemptione C.L. solidos argenti (Cogolla, §99, year 986).29 c. et fcieret mentira (Silense 31, eleventh century?; in López García 2000, 174).30 535
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d. El Emperador tiene una torre llena de oro (Sabios; in Corpus del español, thirteenth century). (10) a.A Rrapun e Sango páscanlos (Sobrarbe-Aragón, year 1090; in Menéndez Pidal 1929, 392). b. Et ad homines de Caroscastello non pignorent illos extra suos terminos (CarcastilloNavarra, year 1140; in Gimeno Menéndez 1995, 197).31 c.Ad illum hominem qui manero fuerit hereditent illum sui parentes (Valfermoso de las Monjas-Castilla, year 1189; in Lapesa 1985, 48).32 d.Ad orphanum creet illum suus pater aut sua mater (Valfermoso de las Monjas-Castilla, year 1189; in Gimeno Menéndez 1995, 192).33 e. Mea maura prendat illa don Pelaio et vestiat illam de meo (Salamanca-Castilla, year 1170; in Wright 2000, 20).34 f. Qui partitionem habuerit ad faciendum faciat illam ante tres homines uicinos (Valfermoso de las Monjas-Castilla, year 1189; in Lapesa 1985, 50).35 g.Totus homo de Ualle Fermosa qui fallaret in suam hereditatem menam de ferro aut salinam habeat illam (Valfermoso de las Monjas-Castilla, year 1189; in Lapesa 1985, 50).36 As for syntactic patterns other than OV/VO, with the exception of postposition of adjectives in relation to their nouns, the following constructions are, to my knowledge, unattested in Classical Latin but have been identifed in Iberian documents dating from the Romanic period: Possessive noun constructions introduced by de (< Lat. DĒ), the prepositional indirect object, the personal a/ad (< Lat. AD), postposition of adjectives in noun phrases, the use of double determiners, the analytic passive with se (< Lat. SĒ), among others.The prepositional possessive for nouns, the frst of these syntactic phenomena—which, again, do not have a precedent in Latin but are attested in Romance—already surfaces in the eighth century in the extant texts. In fact, the prepositional possessive is but one of at least two variants through which noun possession is expressed in the same century.The variants are: (a) Latin-inherited genitive case markers for nouns, e.g., anime mee “of my soul” (Silo); and (b) Whether they are declined in the genitive or in the accusative/ablative, an innovative structure in which the preposition DĒ marked nouns for possession, e.g., de boves (DĒ + accusative) “of oxen”: “venimus cum omnia que potuimos ganare: XXVI libros … duos incensarios,V iugos de boves”37 (Becerro Galicano); de ipsa civitate (DĒ + ablative) “of this city”:“cum illa omnia hereditate quem cludir muro in circuito de ipsa civitate”38 (Becerro Galicano); de Linares (DĒ + accusative/ablative) “of Linares”: “ad illa via qui vadit ad vado de Linares”39 (Becerro Galicano) vs. de sancti iacobi (DĒ + genitive) “of Saint Jacob”: “et medietatem de sancti iacobi de eurobas uoso quos fui de aspaio baloremoto”40 (Portugaliae). As Table 33.3 shows, the data reveal that the traditional, i.e., Latin-inherited, structure is more frequent than its innovative counterpart in the ensemble of texts, original and later copies, attributed to the eighth century. Now, the prevalence of the Latin over the Romance system of
Table 33.3 Expression of noun possession—percentage distribution of all texts attributed to the eighth century (Velázquez-Mendoza, 2020) Document(s)
Latin System (Nominal Vernacular System (DĒ + Noun Hybrid System (DĒ + Noun Morphology) Not Declined in the Genitive) Declined in the Genitive)
Becerro Galicano Portugaliae Diploma of King Silo Average
65.64% 66.07% 85% 72.23%
33.58% 28.57% 15% 25.71%
536
0.76% 5.35% 0% 2.03%
An underlying Ibero–Romance vernacular
possession for substantives in these texts might be more attributable to scribes’ own reverence to the (Late) Latin textual past—despite that this form had probably already fallen into disuse in speech by then—than to the < de + noun > construction not existing in spoken language at all. The vast majority of the modern Romance languages employ a prepositional construction to express possession, which suggests that the Latin morphological system of noun possession fell into disuse at an earlier, rather than a later, point in the evolution from Latin to the Neo-Latin varieties.41 Retaking the debate over whether Christian Iberia was monolingual or diglossic during the Early Middle Ages, the only aspect in which the two opposing views on the matter, the SL and 2L hypotheses, seem to agree is that Romance was spoken before the mid-thirteenth century. Naturally, the two differ as to the interpretation they give to the status of Latin either as a spoken (2L hypothesis) or, save the ritualized non-native oral uses mentioned above, as an exclusively written language (SL hypothesis). Taking as a point of departure the assertion that Romance was present in the speech of at least one sphere of pre-mid-thirteenth-century Iberian society, in this study I seek to trace the emergence of the Hispano–Romance vernacular as it is refected in what arguably constitutes one of the most fortuitous philological godsends in the making of two single, but historically related, texts:The use of the back of a notarial act as “scrap” parchment for the composition of an informal inventory of cheeses that was most likely, as discussed in the next section, not destined to survive. Below I undertake a scrutiny of two of the syntactic patterns discussed above which the Nodicia de kesos and its documental counterpart capture in order to shed light on how deeply entrenched the vernacular of the time in each of these texts is.The syntactic phenomena to be examined are: (a) OV vs.VO; and (b) The expression of possession for nouns. Changes at the level of syntax have been shown to occur much more slowly as compared to changes taking place on other linguistic levels (Hock 1986;Wright 2002).This asymmetry gives us an optimal typological framework on which to base our analysis, given that Latin and Romance display opposing syntactic patterns for both parameters to be studied. Following Blake (1987, 1995, 1996), I argue that the analysis of a document’s syntax provides surer grounds on which to assess whether a text’s underlying language of composition was Latin or Romance. If the documents in question were composed in Latin, OV should have a higher frequency than VO, and the < de + noun > possessive construction should not surface at all. On the other hand, had the language of composition of the same texts been an Iberian vernacular, a higher frequency of VO than of OV should be documented in the prose, and the prepositional Romance possessive should emerge in it.
The Nodicia de kesos vis-à-vis its corresponding notarial document The Nodicia de kesos is a detailed inventory of cheeses composed by Friar Jimeno (Semeno), most likely a monk of the Monastery of Rozuela (Rocola), Asturias. In the Nodicia, friar Jimeno provides a list of the cheeses that were purportedly consumed during either the farming year or part thereof. In the account, the specifc locations of the cheeses in question are identifed. The Nodicia is found on the back of an original notarial act, document §852 of the diplomatic collection of León (henceforth L852), in which, for the redemption of their souls, Hermenegildo (Ermenegildus) and his wife Cita (cum coniuge mee Zita) donate their possessions in villa Oteros (Auctarios) after their death (post ouitum nostrum) to the abbot and monks (abba et collegium fratrum) of the Monastery of Santo Justo y Pastor (Sanctorum Iusti et Pastoris). The post obitum donation contains an explicit date of composition: January 24, 959. Fernández Catón’s (2004) paleographic analysis revealed that the two texts were composed by two different scribes. 537
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Although the counterpart of the notarial document, the Nodicia, is undated, the inventory luckily makes reference to a king’s visit to Rozuela (quando jlo rege uenit ad Rocola), during which four cheeses were consumed. This historical reference points to the year 974, or sometime shortly after, as the year of composition of the latter text (Fernández Catón 2004, 66). Most probably, in preparation for his report on the consumed and remaining cheeses to his superior, perhaps to be given in an oral form, friar Jimeno wrote his Nodicia on the frst “scrap” of parchment—which was, as we know, a considerably expensive product in those days—available to him: L852. Naturally, it was principally thanks to the more important nature of the donation, as opposed to the comparatively less signifcant content of the other text, that the inventory of cheeses came down to us. Although we will probably never know with absolute certainty, the possibility exists that Hermenegildo and Cita had not yet died around the year 974, so possession of L852 was the only way in which the abbot and monks of Santo Justo y Pastor could claim the properties concerned. This fact would have explained the keeping, and “recycling”, of the notarial text as “scrap” parchment.Alternatively, had the donors died prior to 974, then it would also have made sense for friar Jimeno to recycle the same text; assuming the latter scenario, the claim for the properties would have been made already.42 Below I reproduce the two texts to be examined: Nodicia de kesos (Menéndez Pidal 1926: 24–5) Nodicia de kesos que espisit frater Semeno jn / labore de fratres: jnilo bacelare de cirka Sancte / Juste, kesos .U.; jnilo alio de apate, .II. kesos; en que / puseron organo, kesos .III. ; jnilo de Kastrelo, .I.; / infa uinia majore, .II.; que lebaron enfosado, . II. / adila tore; que [le]baron aCegia, . II. quando la / taliaron; ila mesa, . II.; que lebaron aLejone . I. … n / a … re … que … ga uane ece; alio ke leba de / soprino de Gomi de do … a … ; .IIII. quespiseron / quando jlo rege uenit ad Rocola; .I. qua Salvatore / jbi uenit.43 Text §852 of the diplomatic collection of León (Herrero de la Fuente 1988)44 (Christus) In nomine Domini nostri Ihesu Christi, cuy zedunt zelestia et famulantur terrena. Hec est series testamenti quem eligere preuidi / et confrmare constauimus nos exigui et infmi ego Ermenegildus, una pariter cum coniunge mee Zita. Cum peccatorum / nostrum molle depressimur adgrauati, necnon et repentina mors pauescente, de paupertati nostre, quod Dominus iussit nobis dari, / aliquis munusculus illi uel sanctis eius tribuimus offeri. Ideo nos super memorati uobis patronis nostris Sanctorum Iusti et Pastoris cuius zenouio / corum esse dignoscitur ripa Extole, oppidum Ardon, et tibi Iulianus abba et collegium fratrum, salutem. Conzedimus ibi, pro subs/ tentatione fratrum, ospitum adque perecrinorum, uilla nostra quem abemus in uilla que dicent Auctarios, in presura de Ueremudo, / circunde terminos de Iulianus presbiter usque in termino de Kazem, et de alia parte uia qui discurrit ad Sancto Clementio et perexiit / ad Curuellos et per alia uia qui discurrit ad Legion. Infra ipsos terminos, nostra portione, qui nos contingit, at integritatem conzedimus, / ut in uita nostra nos de hic ratione ad monasterio redamus; et post ouitum nostrum, omnia consumtum quod in uilla ipsa relinquerimus a parte / ipsio monasterio testamus: kasas et intrisicis earum, terras cultas et incultas, pasquis et padulibus, aquis cursiles et incursiles, rem / mouile uel inmouile usque minima petra. Quod intus ipsos terminos nos super taxatos contingerit, sicut diximus, post ouitum / nostrum a parte ipsius monasterio testare iuuemus, et hoc tali decretum proponimus per diuina omnia que sunt sancta. Si, quod absit, / aliquis unc uotum nostrum infringere temtauerit, genus nostrum aut aliquis quisliue persona, inprimis sit extraneus ad corpus / et sanguinis Domini, et cum Iuda 538
An underlying Ibero–Romance vernacular
proditore sit condemnatus et in pena afictus, et in diem magni iudicii nobiscum sit kausurus; / et insuper, ad damna secularia, quod distulerit redat in triplo et a parte fsco liuras IIas persoluat, set unc factum nostrum / plenam obtineat frmitatis rouorem per secula cunta. Facta series testamenti VIII kalendas februarias, era DCCCC LXLVII. / Et pro confrmandum azepimus de uos, abba et pater, oues X, plumazo palleo. / Ermegildus unc meum factum ma (signum) f. / Zita confrmans ma (signum) f.45 A superfcial look at the Nodicia and its textual counterpart exposes an abysmal difference between the prose of one text and that of the other.Whereas the Nodicia refects, rather exceptionally, a dynamic and informal Romance register—as it should, given that, although it does contain some narration, the inventory’s register is closer to the genre of a “shopping list” than to any other speech act—the notarial document belongs somewhere toward the opposite end of the Latin–Romance spectrum discussed in (1) through (8) above.The contrast between both texts is especially striking because all evidence suggests their composition taking place, on the chronological plane, a few years apart, and on the spatial plane, at the same site.
Results Scrutiny of OV vs.VO and the expression of possession in nouns as refected in the Nodicia and L852 yields the following fgures. With a total of 21 attestations of transitive verbs, 11 cases of OV and ten of VO constitute L852. The Nodicia, on the other hand, contains only one transitive construction, with verb preceding direct object.The overall frequency, in absolute numbers, and percentage of OV vs.VO as captured by both texts are given in Table 33.4. As far as the expression of possession for substantives is concerned, genitive markers (14 cases) are more prevalent than prepositional constructions (six cases) in L852. In contrast, in the Nodicia the vast majority of possessive constructions are of the prepositional kind (seven cases), while only one case attests to the use of Latin genitive morphology.This distribution is provided in Table 33.5. As can be observed from the analysis of OV vs.VO and noun possessive structures in these two texts, the Iberian vernacular can be confrmed to be, in an overwhelming manner, more deeply entrenched in the Nodicia:This exceptional document displays a much higher number of
Table 33.4 OV/VO distribution—Nodicia vs. L852 Text(s)
OV
VO
Nodicia de kesos L852
0 cases (0%) 11 cases (52.38%)
1 case (100%) 10 cases (47.61%)
Table 33.5 Expression of noun possession—Nodicia vs. L852 Document(s)
Latin System (Nominal Vernacular System (DĒ + Noun Not Hybrid System (DĒ + Noun Morphology) Declined in the Genitive) Declined in the Genitive)
Nodicia de kesos 1 (12.5%) L852 14 (70%)
7 (87.5%) 6 (30%)
0 (0%) 0 (0%)
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Romance syntactic patterns than of Latin constructions. Its corresponding notarial text, on the other hand, can be confrmed to capture the reverse: a higher number of Latin constructions, and, given the near-even split between OV and VO, an apparently more superfcial entrenchment of the spoken language of the day. Now, contrary to the view that L852’s veil of Latinity is a thick one, further inspection from a syntactic perspective reveals that, save its solemn sections (OV: 58.82%;VO: 41.17%), the document’s remaining medial part is almost transparently Romance (VO: 75%; OV: 25%).Absolute numbers and frequencies of OV/VO per section of L852 are presented in Table 33.6.The overall higher frequency of OV over VO in L852’s solemn sections must be due to the scribe’s own reverence to the (Late) Latin models, as well as to the expectations of the legal genre, rather than to OV being the norm in his speech community. Again, medial sections are a better refection of spoken language because they had to summarize the notarial act’s legal preoccupation that all parties concerned had to understand—albeit in a passive manner— before they could ratify the corresponding documents.As Table 33.1 illustrates, the prevalence of Romance syntactic patterns in the core, medial section of L852 fnds a parallel in the frequencies found in a larger corpus of older Iberian texts—one original and several copies—which are attributed to the eighth century (Velázquez-Mendoza 2016).The larger corpus attests to, overall, more instances of the vernacular pattern VO than of the Latin order OV. And also as shown in Table 33.1, parallel tendencies are documented in texts from even earlier periods, i.e., second to fourth centuries AD. Additionally, as can be observed in Table 33.2,VO is more frequent than OV in medial sections in the same larger eighth-century corpus.This distribution, again, points to VO having established itself, in Hispano–Romance, as the unmarked order of the Iberian speech community at least two centuries before the composition of both the Nodicia and L852. Finally, the Nodicia’s documental counterpart consists of very sizeable solemn sections, while in the cheese inventory such sections, appropriate to its genre, are absent altogether. Indeed, the beginning and end of L852 actually comprise about 70% of the text, while the remaining 30% is made up of the less ceremonial—and therefore more transparently Romance—medial section. This fact no doubt contributes to the notarial text’s overall Latin appearance. The second syntactic phenomenon for which our two texts were to be scrutinized consists of the expression of possession for nouns. As previously stated, if the documents in question had been composed in Latin, the < de + noun > possessive construction should not surface in the prose at all, as genitive endings, and not prepositions, marked nouns for possession in normative Latin. Contrary to this premise, the analysis actually reveals the existence of both Latin morphology and the prepositional possessive in the Nodicia as well as in L852. The attestation of the prepositional possessive in both texts signals a degree of permeation of an underlying Ibero–Romance vernacular in the prose they refect. In fact, the prepositional possessive for nouns already surfaces in the eighth century in the larger, eighth-century Iberian corpus (Velázquez-Mendoza, 2020). Interestingly, appropriate to their respective genre and register, the Nodicia only provides us with one example of Latin genitive morphology, whereas in L852 the Romance prepositional possessive is attested only in its medial section.The latter fact shows, to an even greater extent than the distribution of OV and VO does, that solemn sections in notarial acts could potentially mask an Iberian text as a Latin one. Table 33.6 OV/VO distribution in L852 by text section (medial vs. solemn parts) Text
Medial
Solemn
L852
VO: 3 / OV: 1
VO: 7 / OV: 10
Percentage:
VO: 75% / OV: 25%
VO: 41.17% / OV: 58.82%
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An underlying Ibero–Romance vernacular
Conclusion The evidence drawn on syntax adduced here lends support to the view that, in all probability, an Ibero–Romance vernacular underlay the Nodicia de kesos and L852, despite the opposing degrees of reverence paid by their respective authors toward the Grammaticae, in particular, as well as toward the (Late) Latin textual past, in more general terms.Among other language-internal and -external variables, genre expectations must also have played a role in the composition of each of these acts: the more formal the genre, the more Latin the prose. In the case of L852, the “straitjacket [of] the Latin model and the … legal genre”, as Blake and Sánchez Lancis (2016, 293) put it, obscures our vision of the speech of this text’s author. Perhaps a rehearsal for what most likely would later be an oral report on his monastery’s stock of cheeses, the Nodicia refects friar Jimeno’s spoken language much more transparently than L852, allowing us to glimpse at his vernacular in an almost unfltered way. Although the apparent discrepancy between the Nodicia and L852 seems irreconcilable, differing frequencies of two common syntactic constructions, namely < verb + direct object > and < de + noun > as an expression of possession, have been shown to exist between the two, pointing to an emerging Ibero–Romance vernacular as their underlying language of composition. In the multi-cultural context of High Medieval Iberia, the shared structural patterns that the prose of the Nodicia and L852 refect could be indicative, despite the existence of a high degree of textual diversity, of a common linguistic core. In turn, this core points to a state of linguistic unity for the Christian society of the time. What is most striking about these pre-thirteenthcentury Hispanic texts in the context of such broad textual diversity is not only their nearcontemporaneity and their presumed shared place of composition, but also their actual physical coexistence back-to-back. In the Nodicia de kesos and L852, textual diversity and linguistic unity converge in one and the same piece of parchment.
Notes 1 For Professor Robert J. Blake, on the occasion of his retirement. 2 This study was made possible by the generous funding of Spain’s Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, for the project entitled Edición y estudio de textos bíblicos y parabíblicos, based at Madrid’s Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científcas (reference number FFI2017-86726-P). 3 I am indebted to Professor Laurie Duncan, whom I thank for her translations of the passages/texts adduced here.Any errors and shortcomings are entirely my own. 4 “In the name of Christ and the indivisible Trinity, of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, ruling forever and ever, amen.—For indeed we (are) listed by name who are the council of the village called Villa de Eriezo, from the least up to the greatest”. 5 “Following the Ides of May, on the celebration of the bishop of Saint Isidore, they, the men of Boniel, went with their stock and brought (it) (to) Aslanzón … And if (one) were to bring stock from Boniel to Aslanzón, if (one) were to bring cows instead, let them eat the cow, and from the herd of sheep, let them eat ram”. 6 “Instead of pigs, let them eat pigs”. 7 “To all men of our kingdom who were to see this letter, health and grace. I order that the men of Castroxeriz not pay in my kingdom any toll”. 8 “The letter was done in the year 1165, 17 days before the calends of August, a Saturday. Reigning king Alfonse of Raimundo in Toledo and in León and in all of Spain … Rodrigo Martínez in León”. 9 “I Sancho king, by the grace of God … king Sancho”. 10 “We indeed, the most humble of all the servants of Christ, Muño Sancho and Anderazo Muñoz … This letter (was) made during the time of (his) Majesty, Sancho, reigning as king … and I wrote down the witnesses to corroborate: Sancho the bishop confrms”. 11 “And they promised that they would do everything that he himself had ordered unto the degree that it would make them friends to the people of Melgar … with this our letter corroborated by our stamps so that he who had ordered and decreed these very things”.
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Omar Velázquez-Mendoza 12 “And a man who were to enter from year to year, if his master removed him in the month of August, may he continue for two months … Whoever has removed (a) cow … may he pay 5 wages”. 13 “And they from Villa de Gonzalo did not have the fenced pieces of land forbidden from pasturing … Tovia and Cog[o]lla had the fenced piece of land”. 14 “And the men of Bonil came and they provided a guarantor for the cow in such a way that the judges of Castile ordered … And Díaz Álvarez took my life and went to Bonil, and told the entire council: ‘Barons of Bonil, give me the man with whom I will accept judgment’. And they punished Hernán Muñoz”. 15 A previous, and overall unsuccessful, implementation of these reforms had experimentally been put into practice in the chancery of Fernando III (The Saint), Alfonse X’s predecessor, who reigned from 1217–1252 (Harris-Northall 2007;Wright 2002;Velázquez-Mendoza 2016). 16 The following expressions are among the most common formulae found in both original texts and later copies:“sit sebaratus [sic] ad [sic] comunione sancta” (Silo, year 775);“In nomine Domini” (Galicano, §CCLXVI.c.1, year 800);“Sub nomine Christi redemptoris nostri” (Galicano, §CLXXVII.1, year 773); “Quod si aliquis homo hoc meum testamentum infringere temptaverit a Deo sit excommunicatus” (Sahagún, §24, year 921); “per secula seculorum” (Sahagún, §24, year 921); “cum exitu et regressu” (Cogolla, §30, año 943); “cum coniuge mee” (Sahagún, §852, year 959); “sit extraneus ad [sic] corpus / et sanguinis Domini” (Sahagún, §852, year 959); etc. 17 Despite the varying degrees of formality that legal documents refect, and despite the persistence of Latin formulae, attested terms such as legere “to read”, (re)legente(m)/religentem/reliente “(re)reader”, (re) legendo “(re)reading”, and audivimus “we heard” suggest that the legal texts in question were read aloud, and very possibly also followed, even if only in a passive manner, by the literate and the illiterate alike. Parties involved in notarial transactions actually confrmed their content by signing the corresponding documents—naturally, the literate with a rubric, and the illiterate with a cross. 18 “That is, I co-sign and hand over that these fall under the stipend of the monks serving in the same church next to those adjacent of which these are the terms, namely, the church of the holy apostle Andrew which stands out in a predetermined place from an entire milestone, with all those adjacent from the right and however they use their utilities in the same church, even from the tithes and offerings of the faithful as the account which is owed to the episcopal law … let the worshippers of the same be released from the aforementioned house; indeed also the church of San Fructuoso which is situated on the Sicco river; in the same way the churches which are called Albas; indeed on the river which is called the shrine of San Feliz and San Cristóforo”. 19 Quod ego: “That I”. 20 fago cartam de perfliacionis:“(I) write a letter of perflation”. 21 “I Lope López write a letter of with you Mr.Velasquida. I give you these houses which belonged to Mrs. Estefanía, with their garden and with their inheritance which pertains to them and with their exit and their division and with all their own possessions, indeed, in exchange for two pieces of land which you are giving me in the town named Carocera, and it lies in the place named…” 22 “Will of San Miguel de Río Seco which Taión made. In the name of God…” 23 “I Taión write a letter about my own inheritance which I have from the gift of my lord king Ordoño and from his wife, queen Elvira; and I Taión gave in confrmation to the same king a horse and two mules; and this inheritance is located in Río Seco, called the church of San Miguel de Bobatela; and the boundaries of the same church are all the way to Cancos and Valle de Aboxoc and thus to Villa Citalfer and San Esteban”. 24 “If any man should attempt to tamper with this my will may he be excommunicated from God forever and ever and may he be dammed in hell with Judas the traitor of the Lord and may he pay to the holy lords fve talents of gold; and may this will be unshaken forever and ever”. 25 “I I [sic] Horo Miguélez … offer to your holy altar or to our father, the abbot Mr. Miguel”. 26 As far as the interpretation of the correspondence between reading (and speech) and writing in High Medieval texts is concerned, for Marcos Marín (1984, 132) the broad spelling variation that characterizes the documental production of the Iberian litterati was due to contrasting articulations, given that “los escribas tendían a reproducir los usos reales, fonéticos, de los hablantes”. Assuming a phonetic correspondence between written and spoken language, Fernández Catón (2004, 67) proposes that Latin/Romance code-switching was employed in High Medieval Iberia, where there existed an alternation of “un latín tardío con un romance incipiente; romance que comenzaba a tener un espacio de expresión en palabras o locuciones aisladas en los documentos”.Also assuming a direct correspondence between writing and speech, Cabrera (1998, 21) claims that “[h]abría una pronunciación fuctuable,
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27
28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41
42 43
44 45
dependiendo de la norma gráfca que se leyera … en un mismo texto, puede haber pronunciaciones latinas, avulgaradas y romances”. A similar view is expressed by Leite de Vasconcellos (1911, 15), who posits the existence of a “latim dos escrivães … mesclado de palavras e expressões da língua falada”. The SL hypothesis interprets the high variability that Iberian texts exhibit during the High Medieval period in an opposing way to which the traditional view does. In his studies on pre-mid-thirteenthcentury Spanish, for example,Wright (2000, 15) stresses that “[l]o escrito no era, desde luego, transcripción fonética de lo hablado”, and also that “ortografía moderna representa fonética evolucionada, pero ortografía tradicional no es que represente necesariamente fonética atrasada” (Wright 1986, 211–19). Penny (2003, 227) contends that, in the Late Middle Ages, “no existía correspondencia exacta entre fonema y grafema”. In her analysis of Medieval Leonese texts, Pensado (1996, 201) concludes that Latin “was read as Romance”. Emiliano (2005, 18) arrives at similar conclusions, noting that texts of the time period were “written as if [they] were Latin … But when [they were] read aloud … [they were] read with Romance phonetics”. For Emiliano (2003, 85), spelling fuctuations attesting “padrões gráfcos tradicionais ao lado de formas e padrões … inovadores”, such as those of (1), could only have entailed variation at the level of orthography—not of phonetics. “We are expecting brother Quintus back any day”. “The abbots and friars of Saint Feliz gave 150 silver coins for my redemption”. “And s/he should lie’”. “And let the men of Carocastillo not be punched outside of their boundaries”. “And that man who were a debtor let his parents bequeathe him”. “Let his father or his mather raise the orphan”. “Let Mr. Pelayo take my moor and let him dress her from my…” “Whoever held the partitioning let him do it for the purpose of making it in the presence of three neighbors”. “Every man of Valle Hermosa who were to fnd in his/her inheritance a mine of iron or a salt mine may he/she keep it”. “We come with everything that we could acquire: 26 books … two censers, 5 yokes of oxen”. “With all those things the inheritance, which is enclosed by the wall in the circuit of the city itself ”. “To the road that goes to the ford of Linares”. “And I dedicate the half of St. Jacob of Eurobas which belonged to Aspai Baloremoto”. In Rumanian, although the genitive case system has survived in somewhat of a more reduced fashion as compared to that of Latin, the < de + noun > construction also exists to express possession. In certain contexts, the noun within this prepositional phrase can be declined in the genitive and be preceded by the so-called “possessive article”, whose allomorphs are al, a, ai, and ale: Trei studente de ale Marei “Three students of Maria” (Catasso 2011, 73). Unfortunately for us, the inventory of cheeses did not survive the passage of time in an intact manner; several humidity marks make the reading of certain words virtually impossible. “Notice of cheeses that wrote down friar Jimeno in the work of the friars: In the vineyard near Santa Justa, 5 cheeses; in the other of the abbot, 2 cheeses; in which they put this year, 3 cheeses; in that of Castrelo, 1; in the larger vineyard, 2; which they took as war tribute [?], 2 to the tower; which they took to Cegia, 2, when they cut, that table, 2; which they took to León, 1 … fruitlessly there; another that takes the cousin of Gómez of …; 4 which they spent when the king came to Rozuela; 1 when Salvador came here”.This translation was, in part, based on Morala’s (2008) interpretation of the original text. Due to space constraints, signatures, i.e., rubrics and crosses, of witnesses have been omitted. “(Christ). In the name of our Lord, Jesus Christ, to whom the heavens yield and the earthly things serve. Here is the will index which I, Hermenegildo, foresaw to pick this, and we weak and low people decided to establish together equally with my wife Cita. When we were crushed, heavily burdened with the mass of our sins, and not yet being frightened even with death being upon us, out of our poverty, which the Lord commanded be given to us, that some little gift we contributed to be offered either to him or to his holy ones.Thus, we abundantly, mindful to you all, our patrons of Santo Justo y Pastor, whose monastery is deigned to be nearby, on the river Extole, (in) village Ardón, and mindful of you, Julián the abbot, and the college of friars, greetings.There we yield for the sustenance of the friars, visitors and pilgrims, our house which we have in village Oteros, in the confnes of Vermudo, around starting from the boundaries of Julián the priest all the way to the limit of Kasem, and from one part the road that runs down to San Clemente and goes straight out to Caruelos and along the other road which runs to León. Down from those boundaries, from our portion, which contains us, we yield the whole of it, so that we pay down in this life from our check to the monastery; after our death we wit-
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Omar Velázquez-Mendoza ness that everything be taken up which we have left in the same villa from our part to the very same monastery: Houses and their furnishings, the cultivated and uncultivated felds, the pastures and fodder felds, the running and non-running water, everything movable and unmovable down to the smallest pebble.Whatever pertains to us after taxes within the same boundaries as we have said, after our death, we are pleased to promise from the part of that to the monastery, and we propose to decree in this like manner by all the divine things that are holy. If someone tries to alter upon this our wish, anything missing, our type of person or any other person, frst let him be a stranger to the blood and body of the Lord, and with Judas the traitor let him be damned and afficted in punishment, even up to the day of the fnal judgment, let him be as a warning amongst us; and beyond that, to earthly losses, let him pay back in triple what he stole and let him pay from [sic] the tax collector, from his part, two pounds, but may this our deed hold full strength of frmness forever and ever. This will list was made eight days before February frst, in the year nine hundred and ninetyseven. And we accepted in confrmation from you, abbot and father, ten sheep, a feather cloak/quilt. I, Hermenegildo, made this deed by hand (signature). I, Cita, witnessing, made by hand (signature)”.
References Blake, Robert J. 1987.“New Linguistic Sources for Old Spanish”. Hispanic Review 55 (1): 1–12. Blake, Robert J. 1995.“El latín notarial de un escriba bilingüe o bígrafo del XIII”. In Actas del primer congreso del latín medieval, edited by Maurilio Pérez González, 463–68. León: Universidad de León. Blake, Robert J. 1996. “Syntactic aspects of Latinate Texts of the Early Middle Ages”. In Latin and the Romance Languages in the Early Middle Ages, edited by Roger Wright, 219–232. University Park: Penn State University Press. Blake, Robert J., and Carlos Sánchez Lancis. 2016.“Romance Syntax in Texts from the Early Middle Ages: A Study in Scribal Evolution and Continuity”. In Diachronic Applications in Hispanic Linguistics, edited by Eva Núñez, 282–302. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cabrera Morales, Carlos. 1998. “Refexiones sobre el sistema gráfco avulgarado de los textos primitivos leoneses”. In Estudios de grafemática en el dominio hispánico, edited by Juan Manuel Blecua, Juan Gutiérrez, and Lidia Sala, 9–23. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca. Catasso, Nicholas. 2011. “Genitive-Dative Syncretism in the Balkan Sprachbund: An Invitation to Discussion”. Theoretical Linguistics 8 (2): 70–93. Emiliano, António. 1996. “Latin or Romance? Graphemic Variation and Scripto-Linguistic Change in Medieval Spain”. In Latin and the Romance Languages in the Early Middle Ages, edited by Roger Wright, 233–247. University Park: Penn State University Press. Emiliano, António. 2003.“Observações sobre a produção primitiva portuguesa: a propósito dos dois testemunhos do Testamento de Pedro Fafes de 1210”. Verba 30: 203–236. Emiliano,António. 2005.“Representational Models vs. Operational Models of Literacy in Latin-Romance Legal Documents”. In Studies on Ibero-Romance Linguistics Dedicated to Ralph Penny, edited by Roger Wright and Peter Ricketts, 17–58. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta. Ferguson, Charles. 1959.“Diglossia”. Word 25: 325–340. Fernández Catón, José María. 2004. “La Nodicia de kesos y los problemas de la documentación del siglo X: sobre el origen de los monasterios independientes de Rozuela y Cillanueva”. In Orígenes de las lenguas romances en el Reino de León: siglos IX–XII,Vol. I, edited by José María Fernández Catón, 35–44. León: Centro de Estudios e Investigación San Isidro/Caja España de Inversiones/Archivo Histórico Diocesano. Gimeno Menéndez, Francisco. 1995. Sociolingüística histórica (siglos X-XII). Madrid: Universidad de Alicante/ Visor. Harris-Northall, Ray. 2007. “Aspects of Offcial Language Usage in Castile and León: Latin and the Vernacular in the Early Thirteenth Century”. In Medieval Iberia: Changing Societies and Cultures in Contact and Transition, edited by Ivy Corfs and Ray Harris-Northall, 165–174.Woodbridge:Tamesis. Herrero de la Fuente, Marta. 1988. Colección Diplomática del Monasterio de Sahagún (857–1230). León: Centro de Estudios e Investigación “San Isidoro”, Archivo Histórico Diocesano, Caja de Ahorros and Monte de Piedad de León. Hock, Hans Henrich. 1986. Principles of Historical Linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Koch, Peter and Wulf Oesterreicher. 2007. Lengua hablada en la Romania: español, francés, italiano. Madrid: Gredos.
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An underlying Ibero–Romance vernacular Lapesa, Rafael. 1985.“El Fuero de Valfermoso de las Monjas (1189)”. In Homenaje a Álvaro Galmés de Fuentes, Vol. 1, edited by Ana Cano González et al, 43–98. Madrid: Gredos. Leite de Vasconcellos, José. 1911. Lições de flologia portuguesa. Lisbon:A.M.Teixeira & C. López García, Ángel 2000. Cómo surgió el español: introducción a la sintaxis histórica del español antiguo. Madrid: Gredos. Marcos Marín, Francisco. 1984. “[Artículo reseña de Wright (1982)]”. Revista de Filología Española 64: 129–145. Menéndez Pidal, Ramón. 1926. Orígenes del español. Estado lingüístico de la Península Ibérica hasta el siglo XI. Madrid: Editorial Hernando. Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, 1929. Orígenes del español. Estado lingüístico de la Península Ibérica hasta el siglo XI (2nd Ed). Madrid: Editorial Hernando. Morala, José Ramón. 2008.“La ‘Nodicia’ no está en leonés ni en castellano, es algo previo a ambos”. Diario de León (E. Gancedo; 20 August). www.diariodeleon.es/articulo/cultura/la-nodicia-leones-ni-castell ano-es-algo-previo-ambos/20080820000000981115.html. Penny, Ralph. 1998.“La grafía de los textos notariales castellanos de la Alta Edad Media: ¿sistema logográfco o fonográfco?” In Estudios de grafemática en el dominio hispánico, edited by Juan Manuel Blecua, Juan Gutiérrez, and Lidia Sala, 211–223. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca. Penny, Ralph. 2003. “Ambigüedad grafemática”. In Lengua romance en textos latinos de la Alta Edad Media: sobre los orígenes del castellano escrito, edited by Hermógenes Perdiguero Villarreal, 221–28. Burgos: Universidad de Burgos. Penny, Ralph. 2004. Variation and Change in Spanish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pensado, Carmen. 1996. “How Was Vulgar Latin Read?” In Latin and the Romance Languages in the Early Middle Ages, edited by Roger Wright, 190–204, University Park: Penn State University Press. Pinkster, Harm. 1996.“Evidence for SVO in Latin?” In Latin and the Romance Languages in the Early Middle Ages, edited by Roger Wright, 69–82. University Park: Penn State University Press. Pope, Mildred. 1934. From Latin to Modern French with Special Consideration of Anglo Norman. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Velázquez-Mendoza, Omar. 2016. “A propósito de los patrones OV y VO en los documentos notariales emilianenses y el Diploma del rey Silo”. Aemilianense 4: 557–590. Velázquez-Mendoza, Omar. 2018. “A Rrapun e Sango páscanlos: la consolidación defnitiva del cambio OV > VO en hispanorromance”. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 134 (3): 688–709. Velázquez-Mendoza, Omar. 2020.“Tipología sintáctica y expresión de la posesión sustantival en los textos luso-hispanorrománicos del siglo VIII”. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 97(3): 227–249. Walsh, Thomas. 1996. “Spelling Lapses in Early Medieval Latin Documents and the Reconstruction of Primitive Romance Phonology”. In Latin and the Romance Languages in the Early Middle Ages, edited by Roger Wright, 205–218. University Park: Penn State University Press. Wright, Roger. 1976.“Semicultismo”. Archivum Linguisticum 7 (1): 13–28. Wright, Roger. 1982. Late Latin and Early Romance, in Spain and Carolingian France. Liverpool: Francis Cairns. Wright, Roger. 1986. “La función de las Glosas de San Millán y de Silos”. XVIIe Congrès International de Linguistique et Philologie Romanes,Vol. 9, 211–19.Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence. Wright, Roger. 2000. El Tratado de Cabreros (1206): estudio socioflológico de una reforma ortográfca. London: Queen Mary and Westfeld College. Wright, Roger. 2002. A Sociophilological Study of Late Latin. Turnhout: Brepols.
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34 EPIC TEXTS IN MEDIEVAL IBERIA The cultural battlefeld between Christians and Muslims Irene Zaderenko
The purpose of this study is to present a new critical perspective on the medieval Spanish epic by re-examining some fundamental questions about the genre and problematizing the relationship between literary form and historical facts, tradition, and innovation. In Spain, there is a small number of extant epic poems.1 Only three have survived—Poema de mio Cid, Roncesvalles, and Mocedades de Rodrigo—and not one in its entirety. We lack the frst folio of the only medieval manuscript of the Poema de mio Cid as well as two in its interior, there are only about 100 lines of Roncesvalles that have been preserved in two folios, whereas the Mocedades de Rodrigo lacks the ending.As Alan Deyermond pointed out, there are about 5000 verses preserved in the three manuscripts, a very small amount when compared to 120 poems and about one million verses of the French epic (1987, 13).There are other epic narratives that have survived in a different literary form, such as medieval chronicles, but their number, as well as the role chroniclers played in their transmission, is debatable.Another source of information about lost epic poems, and no less problematic than the chronicles, are the romances (traditional ballads).These narrative songs are documented from the frst half of the ffteenth century, although they are likely to have appeared as early as the end of the fourteenth. Some of the ballads include episodes derived from, or perhaps inspired by, epic poems, but it is unclear if they originated by the fragmentation of epic poems, as Ramón Menéndez Pidal and his followers proposed, or if they were an independent form of lyrical narrative that later absorbed epic content. In this study, I will analyze a well-known masterpiece, the Poema de mio Cid, as well as other less-studied epic texts: Siete Infantes de Lara, Sancho II, Bernardo del Carpio, Mocedades de Rodrigo, and Poema de Fernán González.To some extent, they appear to be narratives of Christian propaganda; however, their representation of the Islamic world could not be more intriguing. Some critics have argued that the Poema de mio Cid was used to promote the Christian conquest of Muslim peoples and territories, justifying the use of force with inspiring poetry. But a closer look at the Poema de mio Cid and other medieval Spanish epics reveal that they were composed in dialogue with the Islamic world, showing in a very original way a “convivencia” (cohabitation or coexistence) with Hispano–Muslims during the (re)conquest of territories they occupied. Maurophilia, or the sympathy for Muslim characters and culture as manifested in epic texts, has generally been ignored despite being a unique characteristic of this genre. In earlier works (Zaderenko 2014, 2013a, 2013b, 2003–2004), I explained how Maurophilia coexists, however 546
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uneasily, with the Maurophobic discourse found in the French epic (which was known and well received in Spain) and in other Iberian literature. In this study, I would like to re-examine the corpus of the Spanish epic and its main characteristics against the background of Muslim and Christian cultures. I will discuss many of the basic statements and assumptions underpinning the notions of Maurophilia and Maurophobia in order to explore the historical place of these narratives within the context of the long Muslim presence in medieval Spain. Spain’s attitude towards the Muslims, who occupied a good part of the Iberian Peninsula for almost eight centuries, is an important clue to understanding its identity as a nation.Today, Spain is frequently associated with the Muslim culture of al-Andalus: its patios decorated with blue tiles and orange-trees; its amazing medieval mosques, like the one in Córdoba; or Granada’s shining palaces surrounded by beautiful gardens. After the fall of the Muslim kingdom of Granada in 1492 and despite the repression that culminated with the expulsion of the moriscos (Muslims converted to Christianity after the Spanish reconquest) in 1609, their culture continued to be admired in Spain.Their infuence was still noticeable in the way people dressed, what they cultivated, the food they ate, and the art they cherished. During the 100 years that separate the fall of Granada from the expulsion of the moriscos, many literary works celebrated the rich cultural inheritance of al-Andalus. In effect, despite the repression of the moriscos and their descendants by the Spanish state, the fascination with their culture during the sixteenth century was manifest in different literary genres.Their poetic representation was expanded in the new romancero morisco and three prose compositions became popular: the anonymous Historia del Abencerraje y de la hermosa Jarifa (1561); Las guerras civiles de Granada (1595, 1619), a historical novel in two volumes by Ginés Pérez de Hita; and “Ozmín y Daraja” (1599), a story included in Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache. At the beginning of the twentieth century, scholars began to study the sixteenth-century literary representation of Muslims. Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo characterized their positive portrayal as a “generosa idealización que el pueblo vencedor hacía de sus antiguos dominadores, precisamente cuando iban a desaparecer del suelo español las últimas reliquias de aquella raza” [generous idealization of their old lords made by the victors, precisely when the last relics of that race were going to disappear from Spanish soil]2 ([1905]1945, 144). For him, not only had the moriscos disappeared from the Spanish soil, but their cultural legacy (“las últimas reliquias de aquella raza”) as well, thereby reducing their presence in the Christian literature that generously idealized them after their defeat.This vision of a triumphant Christian Spain that had defnitely left the Muslim culture behind had deep roots and was prevalent for decades, until Américo Castro and his followers began to study the contribution of Jews and Muslims to Spanish culture.3 In a series of articles published between 1938 and 1944, the French Hispanist Georges Cirot was the frst to use the term “literary Maurophilia” (maurophilie littéraire) to describe the sixteenth-century representation of Muslims (1938–44). Cirot analyzed the texts within their historical context; however, he could not explain the contradiction between the literary idealization of the moriscos and their repression by the Spanish state. Years later, Menéndez Pidal pointed out that Maurophilia was not just a sixteenth-century phenomenon. In the fourteenth and ffteenth centuries, Castilians were already attracted to the Muslims of Granada, their exotic civilization, their luxurious clothing, the splendid ornamentation of their buildings, and their ability as warriors. At the time when Islam represented a real threat for Christian Spain, the Muslims were seen as enemies, as they are portrayed in the Poema de mio Cid and other epic texts. But in spite of that, they were never seen “como enemigos odiosos e irreconciliables, según aparecen en las chansons de geste francesas: los moros y las moras bendicen al Cid vencedor, porque los trata bien; el poeta se conduele del hambre que pasan los 547
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moros de Valencia durante el asedio de la ciudad;Abengalbón es ‘moro de paz’, amigo del héroe castellano” [as nasty and irreconcilable enemies, as they appear in the French chansons de geste: the Muslims bless the victorious Cid because he treats them well; the poet is moved by the hunger suffered by the Muslims in Valencia during the siege of the city;Abengalbón is an ally, a friend of the Castilian hero] (Menéndez Pidal 1957, 201–2).4 Colin Smith pointed out that Avengalvón was the frst “noble Muslim” in Spanish literature (2010, 101).After the Christians won the territories occupied by the Muslims, they were drawn to their exotic civilization; this is evident in the oldest romances moriscos that show sympathy for the fallen enemy, as well as respect and compassion for their plight (Menéndez Pidal 1957, 204). Nevertheless, the positive representation of the Muslims in Spain goes far beyond attraction for the exotic or sympathy for the defeated. As Barbara Fuchs indicates, sixteenth-century literature offered an alternative vision of them based on a particular representation of the past, which privileged the commonalities among the aristocracy over religious differences (2009, 8). For Francisco Márquez Villanueva, sixteenth-century Maurophilia was an expression of Christian humanism and its sensibility towards all sorts of alternative ideologies, and its roots could be found in the ffteenth-century romancero fronterizo, which is an expression of “mauroflia pura” (pure Maurophilia) 1984, 117–18). On the other hand, María Rosa Lida remarked that Maurophilia could already be found in Don Juan Manuel’s works, which had been composed a century earlier: la imagen caballeresca del moro y la de sus cortes como centros de molicie refnada y suntuosa nace en sus escritos y se explica porque don Juan Manuel pertenece al “clima” de frontera, y porque en sus tiempos merma considerablemente el ímpetu de la Reconquista. (1960, 354–55) [the image of the Muslim knights and their courts as centers of refned and sumptuous pleasure in Don Juan Manuel’s works are understandable because he belonged to the frontier “climate”, and because during his lifetime the impetus of the reconquest was weakening.] In effect, in his collection of short stories, Conde Lucanor (1335), Don Juan Manuel presents a number of Muslim kings who are magnanimous and wise (Saladín, examples XXV and L; the king of Granada, example XXVIII; Abenabet de Sevilla, example XXX; Alhaquem, example XLI). He also includes noble characters of lower rank, like the young Muslim who marries a strong and diffcult woman, and is able to dominate her (example XXXV), or a thief who is nevertheless “muy buen mancebo” (a very good young man) and steals only because he is very poor (example XLVII).What predominates in these examples is an attractive exoticism. As Lida remarked, “a ojos del mundo castellano debió de aparecerse como el parangón de la fascinadora desmesura ‘oriental’” [through the eyes of the Castilian people, this must have appeared as the fascinating excesses of the Eastern world] (1960, 355). Some of these narratives combine Maurophilia with a negative representation of Muslims, but although some stories of the Conde Lucanor show a crusade ideology, they also offer a refection of the more nuanced reality of daily life and human behavior characteristic of the reconquest era. It should be noted that the Arab as a wise adviser and his exotic culture had already appeared in one of Don Juan Manuel’s sources, the popular Disciplina clericalis, which was composed at the beginning of the twelfth century by the converso Pedro Alfonso.There are more than 60 manuscripts of Pedro Alfonso’s work found all over Europe, and he was a favorite among medieval 548
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preachers. His examples were included in collections by Jacques de Vitry, Étienne de Bourbon, and, in Spain, in the Libro de los exemplos por a.b.c. In recent years, Pablo Ancos has studied a reference to the Muslims and the Prophet Mohammad that appears in the Libro de Alexandre (c. 1220).There are two manuscripts of this poem: O (end of the thirteenth century or beginning of the fourteenth) and P (ffteenth century).While manuscript P refers to Mohammad as “profeta muy honrrado” (a very honorable prophet) and his people as “muy dubdado” (feared), manuscript O describes the prophet as “traedor prouado” (proven traitor) and the Muslims as “un pueblo renegado” (deceitful people). Ancos argues that both readings could have originated very early in the process of textual transmission as an expression of different religious outlooks between copyists (or authors) who had opposing views of Islam (2011, 21–2). There are other texts in Spanish literature that reveal admiration and respect for Muslims. In effect, a recent study brought to light an important precedent of the Maurophilia that appeared later in Spanish literature (Zaderenko 2013b). The legend of the Siete Infantes de Lara (or de Salas, SIL) is, perhaps, the most signifcant example of early interest in Muslim characters and culture.The narration of the tragic events that led to the death of the Infantes (young noblemen, knights) was included in the Estoria de España (c. 1270–1274) composed under the direction of King Alfonso X.5 This is the earliest version of the legend that has reached us; a more developed account was included in the Crónica de 1344.6 These chroniclers most probably prosifed a lost epic poem in which Almanzor appeared as the rich and powerful leader of the Andalusi Muslims, while Count Garci Fernández was presented as a weak character incapable of avenging the treason of Ruy Velázquez, the Infantes’ uncle who betrayed his nephews and sent their father, Gonzalo Gústioz, to Córdoba to be killed. Contrary to Christian treachery, Almanzor is shown to be magnanimous and compassionate towards the Infantes’ father. He not only spares Gonzalo Gústioz’s life twice but also enables the birth of his captive’s son, Mudarra, who later seeks justice on behalf of his father and halfbrothers. In the SIL, Almanzor is presented as a powerful ruler, as he was historically, but he is also a character of great nobility. He refuses to kill his guest, Gonzalo Gústioz, although his death would beneft him greatly given that Ruy Velázquez had promised to grant him access to Christian territories in exchange for killing Don Gonzalo. Like in the legend of Rodrigo, the last Visigothic king, a confict among Christians could endanger their survival and put their destiny in Muslim hands. But Almanzor will not take the opportunity to invade Castile because he does not want to kill his guest.7 The royal court of Córdoba is presented as a place inhabited by noble characters where generosity and compassion fourish. Rather than killing Don Gonzalo, as one would expect, Almanzor imprisons him, and when Don Gonzalo is informed of the Infantes’ death, the Moor shows great kindness and respect for him.Almanzor is able to understand the father’s sorrow and forgives him for killing seven of his men, a desperate act of revenge that will go unpunished. Finally, he releases his prisoner and allows him to return to Castile: Gonçalo Gústioz, yo é grand duelo de ti por este mal et este crebanto que te veno, et por ende tengo por bien de te soltar de la prisión en que estás; et darte é lo que ovieres mester pora tu ida, et las cabesças de tus fjos, et vete pora tu tierra a donna Sancha tu mugier. (Alvar and Alvar 1991, ch. 743, 198) [Gonzalo Gústioz, I am deeply sorry for this great loss and this grief that you are suffering. For that reason, I think it right to release you from the prison that you are in. I will give you whatever you need for your return to Castile as well as the heads of your sons; go home to your wife, Lady Sancha.]8 549
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Moreover, Almanzor raises Don Gonzalo’s son, Mudarra, who was conceived with a Muslim woman while he was in prison, and he helps the young man when he decides to go to Castile to avenge the Infantes’ deaths. Mudarra, son of a Christian father and a Muslim mother, shows early on very positive qualities that are similar to those of Almanzor, although his character is less developed in the earliest version of the legend included in the Estoria de España. He does not hesitate to abandon Córdoba’s court, where he holds an elevated position next to Almanzor, in order to avenge the affront suffered before he was born by his brothers and father, whom he has never seen. In Castile, he seeks justice following the legal procedures of the thirteenth century and acts with the strength characteristic of an epic hero: he publicly accuses Ruy Velázquez at Count Garci Fernández’s palace, and when the traitor tries to fee at night, Mudarra deals him a blow with his sword “que l’ partió fasta en el medio cuerpo” [that it split him down the middle to his waist] (Alvar and Alvar 1991, ch. 751, 201). He also kills 30 of Ruy Velasquez’s men, who had been his accomplices. The punishment of Doña Lambra, Ruy Velázquez’s wife who initiated the confict with the Infantes at her wedding celebration, is postponed until after Garci Fernández’s death since he was her close relative. All this shows that Mudarra is not only loyal and brave, but also judicious.The young Muslim born and raised in Córdoba exhibits fortitudo et sapientia (strength and wisdom), qualities attributed to the greatest of heroes. Also signifcant in this encounter of Christianity and Islam is the role of Mudarra’s mother.9 Love between a Christian knight and a young Muslim woman is a frequent motif in the French epic. In effect, in many chansons de geste (heroic songs) there are Muslim princesses who fall in love with a Christian hero and leave their family, their religion, and their home for them. In the Prise de Cordres et de Sebille, for example, Nubie, daughter of Córdoba’s “almanzor”, falls in love with Bertrand, her father’s prisoner. Nubie liberates Bertrand and helps him capture her own father. In the cycle of Guillaume d’Orange, a Muslim princess, Orable, falls in love with Guillaume without ever having seen him. She sends a message to him warning of an ambush prepared by her brother, and she promises to convert to Christianity if Guillaume agrees to marry her. Women like Nubie and Orable are part of the hero’s conquests; they are another example of the heroes’ immense power, which not only enables them to appropriate their enemies’ goods in battle, but also to win their women without any effort. In the SIL, however, the “mora fjadalgo” (noble Muslim woman) who has a son with Don Gonzalo neither abandons her home nor renounces her religion for him. On the contrary, she raises her son in the tolerant court of Córdoba, where the double stigma of Mudarra’s birth (being an illegitimate child and having a Christian father) does not seem to matter.A Christian man and a Muslim woman can love each other and beget a son who is integrated successfully into Christian Castile as well as Muslim Córdoba. There are other Muslim characters who are compassionate and generous with the Christians. After the Infantes lose all their men in battle, they are helped by two Muslim leaders: Et quando los vieron assí canssados et solos Viara et Galbe, ovieron d’ellos duelo, et fuéronlos sacar de entre la priessa, et leváronlos pora su tienda, et fziéronlos desarmar; desí mandáronles dar de comer pan et vino. (Alvar and Alvar 1991, ch. 742, 195) [When Viara and Galve saw them exhausted and alone, they felt sorry for them, and they took them out from the heat of battle, brought them to their tent, had them disarm, and then had them given bread and wine.] When Ruy Velázquez realizes that Viara and Galbe have rescued the Infantes, he threatens them, and they are forced to return the Infantes to the battlefeld where they will soon die. Once again, 550
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the Muslim leaders’ compassion and kindness contrast with the hatred among the Christians that unleashes the tragic conclusion: the severed heads of the Infantes represent the bloody end of Don Gonzalo’s descendants as well as a threat to Castile, whose destiny is now in Almanzor’s hands. Mudarra’s Muslim identity was a concern for the chroniclers of the Versión crítica—a revision of the Estoria de España redacted in the fnal years of Alfonso X’s reign (1282–1284)—who added the following statement at the end of the story: Agora sabed aqui los que esta estoria oydes que, quando este Mudarra Gonçales llego de Cordoua a Salas, que lo fzo su padre batear, e torno lo cristiano, ca antes moro era; e fue muy buen cauallero e mucho onrrado en quanto viuio. [Know now whoever hears this story that when Mudarra Gonçales arrived to Salas from Cordoba, his father had him baptized and he was converted to Christianity, since he was a Muslim before, and he was a very good knight and had a very honorable life.] (Campa Gutiérrez 2009, ch. CLXXXII, 350) Nevertheless, it seems evident to me that Mudarra’s Christianization—an important subject in the Crónica de 1344’s version—is alien to the frst account of the story as preserved in the Estoria de España. In both versions of the legend, Mudarra, who was born and raised as a Muslim in Córdoba yet reaches his potential as a hero in Christian Castile, could be seen as a synthesis or a bridge between the two cultures.That is why it is so important to consider the role of Almanzor, the “mora fjadalgo”, and other minor characters as an expression of “mauroflia pura” in the SIL. In the Crónica de 1344 version, there are signifcant changes in the second part of the legend. Mudarra is conceived after the Infantes’ death with the explicit intention of making him the instrument of his father’s revenge.There is no love story with the “mora fjadalgo”, who is now Almanzor’s sister;10 thus, her rank is substantially elevated, and she is forced to conceive a child with Don Gonzalo: Dueña, vos açomastes el sueño, Dios lo quiera soltar así, ca conbusco faré el fjo que a los otros vengará … E Gonçalo Gustios le dixo que la non dexaría por quantos moros avía en España. E como quier que fuese lasrado de la mala prisión que oviera e de muy mal comer, todo en aquella ora lo olvidó, e lançó por ella mano, e yogo con ella, e así tovo Dios por bien que de aquel ayuntamiento fncase ella preñada de un fjo que después llamaron Mudarra Gonçales, que fue después muy buen christiano e a serviçio de Dios, e fue el más onrado ome que ovo en Castiella, afuera del conde don Garçi Ferrandes. (Alvar and Alvar 1991, 225–26) [My lady, you have given me an idea, and may God bring it to fruition.With you, I will beget the son that will avenge the others … Gonzalo Gústioz told her that he would not let her go for all the Moors in Spain. And although he was so afficted from the miserable prison that he was in and from eating so poorly, in that moment he forgot everything, took hold of her, and lay with her. God considered it right that from that union she fnd herself pregnant with a son that they later called Mudarra González, who later was a very good Christian and served God well, and he was the most honorable man in Castile, besides Count García Fernández.] This relationship is not presented as adulterous, but as a feeting one that is willed by God and motivated by Don Gonzalo’s desire to avenge his sons.This is the argument of Doña Sancha, the 551
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Infantes’ mother, for accepting and later adopting Mudarra, whose Christianization spontaneously begins before arriving at his father’s house: [Mudarra] falló una eglesia, e entró en ella a faser su oraçión así como veía faser a los otros christianos, e quando se levantó con ellos, paró bien mientes por la eglesia e vio las cabeças de los infantes sus hermanos, e paróse sobre ellas llorando e dixo:“A Dios digo verdat, que del mundo es señor, que poca será la mi vida si yo estas cabeças de míos hermanos non vengo”. (Alvar and Alvar 1991, 232) [Mudarra came across a church and went in to pray just as he saw the other Christians doing.When he stood up with them, he looked around the church and saw the heads of the Seven Knights, his brothers. He gazed fxedly at them, and, while weeping, he said:“To God, Lord of the world, I speak the truth when I say that my life will be short if I do not avenge these, my brothers’ heads”.] Mudarra’s conversion is completed in Burgos, where he is baptized with Count Garci Fernández acting as his godfather. Soon after, the count knights him and names him “alcaide mayor de toda su tierra” [governor of his entire realm] (235). Once Mudarra is offcially incorporated into the Castilian feudal society, he recuperates the count’s fortresses taken by the traitor Ruy Velázquez, thus becoming not only the avenger of his brothers and father, but also Castile’s liberator. Despite the changes incorporated into the Crónica de 1344, Maurophilia does not disappear from this version of the legend. Mudarra’s more predominant role lowers Almanzor’s stature to some degree, but he continues to be the most generous and compassionate character. His magnifcence is underscored by the degraded role of the Christian characters, and his nephew Mudarra is the only one able to restore order and impose justice in Castile. Mudarra incarnates the highest ideals of society and must fght Christian traitors, not Islam, in order to win the battles that Castilian leaders cannot. In the axiology of the legend, we do not fnd opposition between Christianity and Islam, but rather, traitors against loyalists, courage and frankness against cowardice and duplicity. In the Poema de mio Cid (or Cantar de mio Cid, PMC), Rodrigo Díaz fghts against the Muslims out of necessity, not out of hate, as Rodrigo himself makes clear:“mis fjas e mi mugier verme an lidiar,/ en estas tierras agenas verán las moradas cómmo se fazen,/ afarto verán por los ojos cómmo se gana el pan” [My wife and daughters will see me waging war, they’ll see how we make our homes, in these strange lands, see with their own eyes how we earn our bread!] (vv. 1641–43).11 Álvar Fáñez says something similar: “De Castiella la gentil exidos somos acá,/ si con moros non lidiáremos, no nos darán del pan” [We’ve left sweet Castile behind us. If we don’t fght the Moors, they surely won’t feed us] (vv. 672–73), and King Alfonso acknowledges the fnancial motivation of the Cid’s campaigns against the Moors when he says “sin nulla dubda id a mio Cid buscar ganancia” [Rejoin my Cid and seek more treasure] (v. 898). In one of the poem’s most moving scenes, soon after their arrival to Valencia, the Cid’s wife and daughters contemplate for the frst time the beautiful city and thank God for the huge proft: “d’esta ganancia, commo es buena e grand” [the immense goodness he had granted them] (v. 1617). Muslims are presented as men and women who work and pray, fght and suffer, just like the Christians. In Castejón, at dawn,“todos se levantavan,/ abren las puertas, de fuera salto davan,/ por ver sus lavores e todas sus heredades” [People woke up, opened their doors and left their houses, going out to check on their felds and their workers] (vv. 458–460), and when they see the Cid’s army approaching the city, they are scared (v. 469). But Rodrigo does not want to 552
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destroy the castle (v. 533) and is worried about its inhabitants’ opinion of him: “porque lo pris d’ellos, que de mí non digan mal” [So they can’t speak badly of my taking it from them] (v. 535).After reaching a fnancial agreement with them, when he leaves Castejón,“Los moros e las moras bendiziéndol’ están” [Moorish men and women blessed them] (v. 541). After conquering another Muslim stronghold, Alcocer, the Cid declares that if he kills the Moors “nada non ganaremos” [How would we be better off?] (v. 620), and after defeating the army sent from Valencia to help the people of Alcocer, Rodrigo allows them to return to the castle and orders for them to be given some aid:“A so castiello a los moros dentro los an tornados;/ mandó mio Cid aún que les diessen algo” [My Cid ordered that even the Alcocer Moors, returning to the castle, ought to be given something] (vv. 801–2). Finally, when Rodrigo decides to abandon the city, the inhabitants weep (v. 856) and offer him their prayers:“¡Vaste, mio Cid; […]!/ ¡Nuestras oraciones váyante delante!/ Nós pagados fncamos, señor, de la tu part” [My Cid, you’re leaving us! Our prayers will always precede you! We’re deeply satisfed, our lord, with all you’ve done] (vv. 853–54). The Cid’s military campaigns are neither done under the ideological tenets of the Reconquista nor as a religious crusade.The Muslims are seen as a source of revenue that Rodrigo, in his dire situation, must exploit, not as enemies of the faith who have to be wiped out. He acknowledges their right to defend themselves from the Christians’ attacks: “En sus tierras somos e fémosles todo mal,/ bevemos so vino e comemos el so pan;/ si nos cercar vienen, con derecho lo fazen” [We’ve invaded their lands, we’ve wronged them over and over, we’ve eaten their bread and drunk their wine, here they are to besiege us; surely, they have that right] (vv. 1103–5). Moreover, the poet shows compassion for the people of Valencia who suffer the siege of the Cid’s army: “¡Mala cueta es, señores, aver mingua de pan,/ fjos e mugieres verlos murir de fanbre!” [How hard it is, gentlemen, denied the food you need, watching your children, your wives, die of starvation!] (vv. 1178–79). Sensitively, he places himself in the shoes of the Muslims, who see their wives and children suffering a terrible famine.They are men, women, and children, just like the Christians, and they face diffculties that anyone can understand. In battle, both armies invoke divine help:“Los moros llaman—¡Mafómat!—e los cristianos— ¡Santi Yagüe!” [The Moors cried, “Mohammad!” The Christians, “Saint James!”] (v. 731). The poet simply states the difference without making any negative remarks about the Muslims. It should be noted that the verse establishes a perfect parallel between Christianity and Islam; each group occupies the same space in the line, but the frst place is given to the enemy. The only character that expresses his wish of killing Muslims is a bishop, Don Jerónimo, who came “de parte de orient” (v. 1288), that is to say, from France. Many French chansons de geste presented that point of view, an ideology that juxtaposed good (the hero’s religion) and evil (the enemies’ religion).The oldest epic poems—La chanson de Roland, Gormont et Isembart, Chanson de Guillaume—have as their main subject the fght against the enemies of Christianity, the Saracens. In these poems, the hero is aided by God and fghts to defend his faith, while the enemy is demonized, often taking a monstrous form. In La chanson de Roland (c.1100), it is said that pagans are mistaken and Christians are right:“Paien unt tort e chrestiens unt dreit” (1993; v. 1015). In Girart de Vienne (c. 1180), Bertrand de Bar-sur-Aube states that loyal vassals extolled Christianity and expelled the Saracens:“Crestïenté frent molt essaucier,/ et Sarrazons confondre et essillier” (1966, vv. 56–7). In the chansons de geste, this radical attitude against Islam led to the “Frank solution”, the choice given to the enemy to either convert to Christianity or die.The only person who seems to follow these principles in the PMC is the French bishop, as we said before, since neither Rodrigo nor his men ever speak about killing Muslims for religious reasons. The most important Muslim character in the PMC is Avengalvón, governor of Molina and Rodrigo’s “amigo … de paz” (v. 1464), that is to say, his ally. He is also called “amigo … sin 553
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falla” [an ideal friend] (v. 1528), and refers to the Cid as his “amigo natural” [my great friend] (v. 1479).Avengalvón always behaves as Rodrigo’s loyal vassal, for example, when he escorts Jimena and her daughters from Medinaceli to Valencia (vv. 1477–1559), or later, when he receives the Infantes de Carrión and their wives in Molina (vv. 2636–2688). As Avengalvón says, his relationship with the Cid is based on practical considerations since he acknowledges Rodrigo’s political and military superiority:“ondrarvos hemos todos, ca tal es la su auze,/ maguer que mal le queramos non ge lo podremos far,/ en paz o en guerra de lo nuestro abrá” [To whom we show honor, one and all, as his fortune deserves—for no one can harm him; in peace or war he is destined for triumph, whatever we do] (vv. 1523–25). However, the bond between them also has an affective dimension, for instance, when Avengalvón receives Rodrigo’s vassals “con grant gozo” [a joyous greeting] (v. 1478), or when he says that their arrival pleases him:“a mí non me pesa, sabet, mucho me plaze” [I am delighted, truly, to see you here] (v. 1480).Avengalvón treats his Christian guests with affection and great deference: instead of sending 100 men to escort Jimena and her daughters to Valencia, as the Cid requested, he sends 200 (v. 1490); keeping with Andalusi-Muslim tradition, when Avengalvón meets Minaya “en el ombro lo saluda, ca tal es su usaje” [According to his custom, kissed him on the shoulder] (v. 1519), a curious detail that the poet does not forget to mention. Álvar Fáñez reciprocates Avengalvón’s attention with the same deference:“Entraron en Medina, sirvíalos Minaya,/ todos fueron alegres del cervicio que tomaran” [They rode into Medinaceli as Minaya’s guests, and were very happy with the treatment they received] (vv. 1534–35), and when they all arrive at Molina,“el moro Avengalvón bien los sirvié sin falla” [the Moor Abengalbón took very good care of them] (v. 1551). Furthermore, Avengalvón orders for the horseshoes of his guests’ horses to be changed, a generous gesture of hospitality. Later, when the Infantes decide to return to Carrión with their wives, Avengalvón receives them in Molina “con grandes alvorozes” [with real affection] (v. 2649). He shows his munifcence by giving gifts to the Cid’s daughters, and horses to their husbands (vv. 2654–55).This exhibition of wealth provokes the Infantes’ envy, and they decide to betray him. When Avengalvón discovers the Infantes’ plan to assassinate him, he confronts them and shows his disregard for “los de Carrión” (v. 2683). Avengalvón “de buen seso” [sensible and careful] (v. 2688) teaches the Infantes “malos e … traidores” [scum and traitors] (v. 2681) a lesson. King Yúcef of Marruecos, who crosses the Mediterranean to siege Valencia, represents another possibility for the Cid to acquire great wealth:“Riqueza es que nos acrece maravillosa e grand” [These are great and wonderful riches they’ve come to bring us] (v. 1648).The poet acknowledges that Moroccans are courageous warriors: “Los moros de Marruecos cavalgan a vigor,/ por las huertas adentro entran sines pavor” [The Moroccan Moors galloped fast and hard, fearless, dashing straight across the felds and vineyards] (vv. 1671–72).After defeating them, Rodrigo gives part of the profts to “los moros de las tierras” [the Moors who lived nearby] (v. 1779).The extraordinary booty obtained by the Christians is described in detail (vv. 1774–78; 1783–84), and the magnifcent tent that belonged to the King of Morocco is a gift ft for King Alfonso (vv. 1785–1790). King Bucar of Marruecos also represents an opportunity for the Cid and his men to increase their profts:“Alegrávas’ el Cid e todos sus varones,/ que les crece la ganancia, grado al Criador” [My Cid and all his men were delighted, already counting up their loot—may God be praised!] (v. 2315–16). Although Bucar shows himself to be a coward and fees from the Cid, the battle is “maravillosa e grant” [a marvelous battle] (v. 2427), and the booty, exceptional (vv. 2465–67, 2482, 2489–2491). After a resounding Christian victory, in Morocco, “o las mezquitas son” [inside their mosques], people fear the Cid will attack them, but Rodrigo rejects such a possibility because he has to protect Valencia (vv. 2499–2502). Rather, he only wants to collect a tribute 554
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from them: “ellos me darán parias con ayuda del Criador,/ que paguen a mí o a qui yo ovier sabor” [Morocco may pay me tribute, Lord, if that is what you want—me, or anyone else I tell them to pay] (vv. 2503–4). In the PMC, there is no “resistencia a ultranza a los invasores norteafricanos” [extreme resistance to the North African invaders], as it has been argued (Montaner 2011, 862). Rodrigo repels the attacks of the Moroccan kings just like he defended the strongholds of Alcocer and Murviedro from the King of Valencia’s armies. The Muslims disappear in the last part of the poem when the Cid fnally confronts his enemies, who are all Christians: the Infantes de Carrión, Count García Ordóñez, and the “malos mestureros” [malicious informers] who meddle in the king’s court. The Muslims were instrumental in the process that allowed Rodrigo to become a powerful lord, serving either as a source of wealth or as trusted allies, such as in the case of Avengalvón.The Cid fghts against them to survive and thrive; destroying them is never his goal. On the contrary, there are several instances in which he shows respect for them and admiration for their wealth. The poetic voice, always associated with the hero, reveals interest in their culture and sympathy for their suffering, as we have seen, and among the Spaniards there is no expression of hate towards the Muslims or disregard for their religion. In Mocedades de Rodrigo, a late epic poem from the fourteenth century, the young hero frst confronts Don Gómez de Gormaz as well as other treacherous counts, and later, the most powerful men in Europe: the king of France, the German emperor, and the Pope. Rodrigo also battles against the Muslims, but in some instances they become trusted allies.The Muslims are characterized in a positive way from the beginning: the King Burgos de Ayllón is “muy lozano” [very bold]; the arrayaz Bulcor de Sepúlveda,“muy honrrado” [very honorable]; and his brother Tosios, the arrayaz de Olmedo,“muy rico e mucho abondado” [very rich and very prosperous] (vv. 452–54).12 Rodrigo defeats them all and imprisons King Burgos. However, when King Fernando orders for him to be handed over, Rodrigo refuses: “Solamente non sea pensado,/ que non vos lo daré por quanto yo valgo,/ que fdalgo a fdalgo, quandol’ prende, non deve dessonrrarlo” [Let it not even be considered, not for all that I am worth, for among noblemen, when one captures another, he should not dishonor him] (vv. 498–500). Rodrigo reaffrms the principles of an aristocratic culture that transcend religious differences: King Burgos is a “fdalgo” and, despite being a Muslim, he should be treated with respect. After the confrontation with King Fernando, Rodrigo liberates King Burgos and promises him protection against Christian and Muslim kings:“itvos para vuestro reinado, salvo e seguro/ que en toda la mi vida non ayades miedo de rey moro nin de christiano” [Go to your kingdom safe and secure, and in all my lifetime may you fear no Christian or Moorish king] (vv. 509–510). King Burgos, in return, pays homage to him: Quando esto vio el moro Burgos de Ayllón muy lozano fncó los inojos delante Rodrigo, e bessóle la mano, de boca fablando: “A ti digo el mi señor, yo só el tu vasallo, et dote de mi aver el quinto, e tus parias en cada año”. (vv. 514–17) [When the very bold Moorish King Burgos of Ayllón saw this, he fell to his knees before Rodrigo and kissed his hand, speaking from his mouth, “I call you my lord, I am your vassal, and I will give you the ffth of my wealth and your tribute every year”.] After that, the two are pleased,“Alegre se va el Moro, alegre se tornó el Castellano” [The Moor goes away happy, happy returned the Castilian] (v. 518), because the deal benefts them both. Like in the PMC, the parallel between Muslims and Christians is expressed in a verse evenly 555
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divided, and again the Muslim occupies the frst half with perfect correspondence between meaning (respect for a Muslim lord/army) and form. Later, when Rodrigo fghts fve Muslim kings, King Burgos proves his loyalty to the young hero:“muy bien le ayudó el rey moro Burgos de Ayllón loçano,/ […] que era su vasallo” [For he was helped a great deal by the brave Moorish King Burgos of Ayllón, who was his vassal] (vv. 699–700). In the last part of the poem, King Fernando and Rodrigo confront the king of France, the German emperor, and the Pope, who demand that Spain pays tribute to them. Rodrigo’s generosity and respect towards King Burgos contrast with his desire to humiliate the great Christian powers. When King Fernando refuses to take the Count of Savoy’s daughter as a concubine, Rodrigo warns him: “enbarraganad a Francia, …/ suya será la dessonra, irlos hemos denostando” [Make France your mistress! The dishonor will be theirs, we will keep insulting them] (vv. 992–93). Later, Rodrigo rejects the truce requested by the King of France, the emperor, and the Pope, and opposes King Fernando who wants to stop the confict.We do not have the end of the poem and, therefore, do not know how it concluded; however, the contrast between Rodrigo’s trustworthy alliance with King Burgos and the distrust that permeates his relationship with Christian leaders, including King Fernando at some point, is remarkable. Another narration associated with the epic tradition, the story of King Sancho II’s death during the siege of Zamora, was probably sung during the thirteenth century since the Estoria de España, which includes a version of the story, mentions “cantares” as a source:“dizen en los cantares de las gestas que la tovo cercada vii annos” [they say in the heroic songs that the city’s siege lasted seven years] (Alvar and Alvar 1991, ch. 834, 281).13 The Estoria de España offers a detailed description of the events: the confict between Sancho and his brothers that originated with the partition of the kingdom and led to war among “cristianos unos con otros” [Christians against Christians] (ch. 834, 280). In this version of the story, all characters have faws—even the Cid fails when he pursues Vellido Dolfos, the traitor, because he forgot to wear his spurs (ch. 836, 285)—and the Muslims do not have a relevant role. However,“la tierra de moros” [the Muslims’ land] is mentioned several times as a refuge for Christians who have been banished or have had a confict with the king. In effect,Alfonso, Sancho’s brother, lives in the Muslim kingdom of Toledo after his brother takes over his kingdom.Arias Gonzalo advises Doña Urraca that they should go to Toledo,“a los moros, o se fue vuestro hermano el rey don Alfosso” [to the Muslims, where your brother King Alfonso went] (ch. 832, 278), if the people of Zamora refuse to fght against King Sancho.After a long siege of the city,Arias Gonzalo wants to leave Zamora and advises Urraca a second time to go to Toledo:“[e]t nós vayámosnos pora vuestro hermano el rey don Alfonso a tierra de moros” [and we should go to your brother King Don Alfonso to the Muslims’ land] (ch. 834, 281).When King Sancho becomes angry with the Cid, his men counsel him to go “pora Toledo a moros do era el rey don Alfonso” [to Toledo and to the Muslims where King Alfonso was] (ch. 833, 279). After Alfonso receives the news that King Sancho has died, he decides to return to Castile. Per Ansúrez, who accompanied Alfonso into exile, believes they should not reveal the news to Almemón, the ruler of Toledo, but Alfonso defends the Muslim king, who treated him like a son: Amigos, bien sabedes vós de cómo quando yo vin a este moro, que me recibió él onradamientre et diome muy complidamientre todas las cosas que me fueron mester, et catóme en logar de fijo, pues ¿cómo le podría encobrir la merced que me Dios fzo? Ca el que me esto á fecho, aún me fará más, segund que yo en él fío. (Alvar and Alvar 1991, ch. 840, 290–91; emphasis mine) [Friends, you well know that when I came to this Muslim he honorably received me, and very liberally gave me everything I needed and treated me like a son.Therefore, 556
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how could I hide from him the gift God is giving me? For he who has done so much for me, I trust that will still do more.] When Alfonso fnally tells Almemón that he wants to return to Castile, the Moorish king is pleased and promises to help: Gradéscolo a Dios del cielo por que tú feziste lealtad en dezirme que te queries ir, et que guardeste de yerro a ti et a mí que non oviessen los omnes en qué me travar; ca si te fueras yo non lo sabiendo de ti antes, tú non escaparas de muerte o de prisión. Mas pues que assí es, vete et toma tu regno si pudieres, et yo darte é de lo mío lo que ovieres mester con que puedas allanar et aver los coraçones de los tuyos. (Alvar and Alvar 1991, ch. 840, 291) [I thank God in Heaven because you demonstrated loyalty by telling me that you wanted to leave, and thus saved me and yourself from any reproach. If you had left without me learning of it from you beforehand, you would not have escaped death or prison. But since you told me, go and take your kingdom if you can, and I will give you anything of mine you need to help you win your people’s hearts.] Once again, the tenets of an aristocratic culture prevail over religious differences. King Almemón is portrayed as a generous and just ruler who rewards loyal vassals and punishes bad ones, while the descendants of King Fernando, who are devoured by envy and jealousy, cannot stop plotting against each other. In Bernardo del Carpio, another epic legend included in the Estoria de España,14 the protagonist is the nephew of King Alfonso II (r. 791–842). Bernardo does not hesitate to join the Muslim King of Zaragoza to fght Charlemagne at Roncesvalles, and he later rebels against his own king (and uncle) who imprisoned his father. He also joins forces with the Muslims,“puso su amiztat con los moros que l’ayudassen” [he befriended the Muslims in order to get help from them] (Alvar and Alvar 1991, ch. 654, 401), in the battle against King Alfonso III (r. 866–910) over El Carpio. There are four thirteenth-century accounts of Bernardo’s deeds, the frst two composed in Latin, and the other two in Castilian: Lucas de Tuy’s Chronicon mundi (c. 1239), Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada’s Historia de rebus Hispanie (c. 1243), the anonymous Poema de Fernán González (c. 1250), and Alfonso X’s Estoria de España (c. 1270–1274). The last version is essentially a combination of the accounts found in the Latin chronicles, which are quoted frequently, and it includes contradicting information discussed by the chroniclers. However, the Alfonsine version introduced slight modifcations to the story that provide clues about now-lost sources of the legend (the chroniclers refer to “cantares”, “fablas de gesta”, and “romances”, even if they frequently question their information).15 Although we cannot be sure, it is possible that Lucas de Tuy, who recorded the earliest surviving account of Bernardo’s story relying on sources unknown to us, was familiar with some of these materials. In the Estoria de España’s version, an old Alfonso II sends a message to Charlemagne offering his kingdom in return for help against the Muslims.When Alfonso’s vassals learn about this, they demand that the king revoke the offer, and nobody is angrier than Bernardo.The king has to recant his offer, thereby enraging Charlemagne, who threatens Alfonso. Bernardo along with many of Alfonso’s men decides to journey to Zaragoza and help King Marsil fght the French. The young hero “en uno con los moros” [in unison with the Muslims] (Alvar and Alvar 1991, ch. 619, 388) fercely battles against the French army; King Alfonso and his men also fght, and they 557
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are eventually victorious. Meanwhile, Charlemagne’s men retreat from the battlefeld and search for the emperor “por miedo de Bernaldo et de Marsil” [because they were afraid of Bernardo and Marsil] (ch. 619, 388). Once again, an alliance between Christians and Muslims manages to defeat Spain’s enemies, and treacherous members of the Christian establishment are punished. The Poema de Fernán González (or Libro del conde de Castilla, PFG) is neither an epic poem written in cuaderna vía (a monorhyme quatrain)—even though some critics believe that it is a recasting of a lost cantar de gesta (Vaquero 2014)—nor is it a historical account commemorating the foundation of San Pedro de Arlanza Monastery, as Diego Catalán suggested (2001, 107). Rather, it is a hybrid text that employs all the literary and historical resources available to an educated thirteenth-century poet who was intent on transmitting the memory of the count who made possible Castile’s independence to future generations. All the events narrated point to Castile’s unique place in history, describing its hegemonic ascendency as the most important kingdom of the Iberian Peninsula through the protagonist’s bellicose deeds. Castile’s destiny is determined by the hero’s combative attitude against all its enemies, whether Christian or Muslim, but more specifcally, by confronting the powerful kings ruling the neighboring states of León and Navarre. Unlike epic texts—Poema de mio Cid, Siete Infantes de Lara, Sancho II, Bernardo del Carpio, Mocedades de Rodrigo—the PFG presents the fght against the Muslims as a holy war for the salvation of Castile and Christianity, and the count establishes a feudal relationship with God, as noted by Itzíar López Guil: El establecimiento del vínculo feudal se da únicamente cuando el héroe lucha contra los musulmanes; por eso sólo en estas ocasiones el conde pide ayuda a Dios (antes de las guerras contra Navarra el conde nunca reza, porque guerrea siguiendo sus propios intereses y no por hacer “servicio” a la divinidad). (2001, 43) [The feudal relationship with God is established only when the hero fghts against Muslims.That is why only in those occasions the count asks for God’s help (before the wars with Navarre the count never prays because he fghts pursuing his own interests and he is not providing a “service” to God).] This is generally true, but Fernán González explicitly mentions the betrayal of the Spanish kings who have forgotten God: Los rreyes de España, con derecho pavor, oluidaron a ty, que eres su señor, tornáronse vasallos del rrey Almoçorre ............................................................... ............................................................... por miedo de la muerte fyzieron lo peor, nunca de su conpañía después uve sabor, por fazer a ty seruiçio non quise más su amor. (stanzas 395–96)16 [The Kings of Spain forgot you, you who are their Lord, and with great fear became vassals of King Almoçorre. Fearing death, they did the worst.After that, I never wanted their company; in order to serve you, I did not want their love anymore.] For the count, the confrontation is between Castile and its enemies, not between Christianity and Islam; the PFG is not a crusade song, as some have suggested, but a historical narration that 558
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includes many novelistic elements.The virtues of Christian warriors serve to eulogize Castile, the idealized land that in time would become the most important kingdom of the Iberian Peninsula.According to Isabel Uría Maqua, el PFG, más que un poema épico, es un relato histórico-novelesco de Castilla, en el que se exalta su origen, su glorioso ascenso desde un alcaldía pobre a cabeça de reinado (c. 173), su primacía política frente a Navarra, su independencia de León y, sobre todo, su papel en la reconquista de España, tras la invasión de los árabes.Todo ello visto desde la perspectiva histórica de un clérigo culto, que vive en la primera mitad del siglo XIII, en una Castilla, cultural, política y socialmente, muy pujante, situación a la que alude el poeta. (2000, 328; emphasis mine) [the PFG, rather than an epic poem, is a novelized history of Castile in which its origin is exalted as well as its ascent from a poor territory to becoming an important kingdom, its political domination of Navarre, its independence from León and, above all, its role in the reconquest of Spain after the Muslim invasion. All this is seen from the historical perspective of an educated clergyman who lived in the frst half of the thirteenth century in a culturally, politically and socially strong Castile, a situation to which the poet alludes.] There is an episode in the frst part of the poem—the extended historical introduction to Fernán González’s deeds—which clearly shows that the fght is between Castile (sometimes identifed with Spain) and its enemies, and not against Islam. In effect, the story of Bernardo del Carpio and his alliance with King Marsil against Charlemagne is retold in this poetic version with details showing that Muslims were not seen as a hated “other” that had to be eliminated: Fueron para Çaragoça a los pueblos paganos, vesó Vernaldo del Carpio al rrey Marsil las manos que diese la delantera a los pueblos castellanos, contra los Doze Pares, esos pueblos loçanos. Otorgógella luego e diósela de buen grado, Nunca oyó Marsyl otro nin tal mandado; Movió Vernaldo del Carpio con su pueblo dudado, De gentes castellanas, era byen aguardado. Tovo la delantera Vernaldo esa vez Con gentes españones, ¡gentes de muy grran prez!, vençieron esas oras a los frrançeses muy de rrefez, fue esa a los frrançeses más negra que la primera vez. (stanzas 142–44) [They went to Zaragoza, to the pagan peoples, and Bernardo del Carpio kissed King Marsil’s hand, asking to fght on the front line against the Twelve Peers, courageous people. King Marsil then very willingly granted it; he had never heard such thing before. Bernardo del Carpio moved with his fearless people; by his Castilians, he was well guarded. He fought on the front line on that occasion with the Spaniards, very excellent people.They were victorious against the French; that battle was black for them, worse than the frst one.] The enemy that threatens Spain is, in this case, Christian, and Bernardo, the hero “de los fechos grranados” [of famous deeds] (stanza 140c), does not hesitate to form an alliance with the 559
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Muslim King of Zaragoza against the “Doze Pares”. As a consequence of this daring decision, their joint forces are able to defeat the French army. In the opinion of Juan Victorio (1990, 74), which is adhered to by López Guil (2001, 188), it would have been impossible for a thirteenthcentury poet to show a Castilian hero (in the PFG, Bernardo is Castilian) becoming the vassal of a Moorish king. Therefore,Victorio interprets v. 142b as a metonymic expression meaning “pedir” (to ask). However, Bernardo is requesting King Marsil’s permission to fght on the front line of his army, which in fact means to be at his service. Moreover, requesting a favor from a mighty lord—in this case, the honor of fghting on the front line and showing one’s prowess— created a series of obligations for the person receiving the favor, and, therefore, the expression “besar la mano”, a formal gesture of vassalage, cannot be interpreted just as “pedir” but as an acknowledgment of the king’s authority. In the PFG, King Marsil has a presence that is unseen in earlier chronicles, and by allowing the Castilian troops to participate in the fght, the king makes possible the victory over the French army. In a study comparing the chansons de geste with Spanish epic poems, María Luisa Meneghetti explains that [e]l muy clerical Poema de Fernán González revela, bajo la pátina de fervor religioso, una actitud mucho más “racional” que la de los autores de las chansons de geste: se combate a los moros no tanto como enemigos de la fe, sino más bien porque su presencia obstaculiza el proyecto de unifcación de Castilla. En este sentido es signifcativo que, en el Poema, se utilice el mismo término premia (“opresión”) para designar tanto la ocupación mora de cualquier tierra de España (c. 222c) como el vasallaje histórico impuesto por el reino de León al de Castilla (cc. 575d y 613c),17 vasallaje del que esta intenta liberarse. (1991, 76) [the very clerical PFG reveals, under the patina of religious fervor, a much more “rational” attitude than the chansons de geste authors: they fght the Muslims not as enemies of their faith, but rather because their presence is an obstacle to the project of a unifed Castile. In that sense, it is signifcant that the poem utilizes the same word “premia” (oppression) to designate the Muslim occupation of any land in Spain as well as the historic vassalage imposed by León over Castile, from which Castile intends to liberate herself.] The Spanish epic, as well as texts infuenced or inspired by it, does not present Muslims as enemies of the faith who had only one option: either converting to Christianity or being killed. On the contrary, they are often described as trusted allies and courageous knights, and sometimes they are depicted as magnifcent, loyal, and generous characters. Epic poets show curiosity for their culture and admiration for their wealth, which Christians desired and fought to obtain. Therefore, it can be argued that Maurophilia did not begin in the sixteenth century, or before that with the Romancero or Don Juan Manuel’s Conde Lucanor. In fact, it has its roots in epic poems composed centuries earlier. Therefore, we can state with confdence that Maurophilia was born with the very frst literary texts of Spain, and it is one of the most striking characteristics of Castilian epic poetry.
Notes 1 For an overview of the debate about the origins, formation, and corpus of Castilian epic poetry, see Faulhaber (1976) and Deyermond (1987). 2 Unless otherwise indicated, the translations are mine.
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Epic texts in medieval Iberia 3 For a summary of the dispute between Américo Castro and Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz on this matter, see “La polémica Castro-Albornoz” in Francisco Márquez Villanueva (1994, 43–7). 4 In an article from 1947,“El Cid, personaje mozárabe”, José Camón Aznar noticed that the Cid always moved among Muslims, and fought or opposed mostly Christian princes (1947, 135). He dealt mainly with the historical Cid; in fact, he contrasted the “Mozarabic Cid” who lived in the eleventh century with the poetic hero, who, in his view, fought relentlessly against Islam (140). 5 The legend comprises chapters 736–743 and 751 of Menéndez Pidal’s edition, which he called Primera crónica general. I quote the text published in Épica medieval española by Carlos and Manuel Alvar (1991, 179–202).About the much-discussed dating of the legend, see Zaderenko (1997). 6 I quote the text published in Épica medieval española by Carlos and Manuel Alvar (1991, 202–242). 7 The Qur’an calls upon the righteous to extend protection and hospitality to all strangers, even if they are enemies; they must not be mistreated or oppressed in any way.The author of the SIL may have been familiar with this tradition. 8 The translations of the SIL are taken from Mahoney (2019). 9 For a historical perspective on marriages and other sexual encounters between Christians and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula from the eighth-century Islamic conquest to the end of Muslim rule in 1492, see Simon Barton (2015). According to Barton, such unions could function as a tool of diplomacy, the catalyst for conversion, or potent psychological propaganda. Interfaith couplings were tolerated or feared, depending upon the political and social contexts in which they occurred. 10 The change of status of the “mora fjadalgo” establishes a new set of oppositions: in the relationship uncle/nephew between Ruy Velázquez and the Infantes (negative, full of conficts), and between Almanzor and Mudarra (very positive, fulflling), and in the brother–sister relationship between Ruy Velázquez and Doña Sancha (negative, full of hatred at the end), and Almanzor and his sister (positive, tolerant). 11 I quote the text edited by Alberto Montaner (2011). The translations are taken from Burton Raffel (2009). For a thorough and updated introduction to the poem, see Zaderenko and Montaner (2018). 12 I quote the text published in Épica medieval española by Carlos and Manuel Alvar (1991, 104–162).The translations are taken from Bailey (2007). 13 I quote the text published in Épica medieval española by Carlos and Manuel Alvar (1991, 274–300). We do not know with certainty what the content of “los cantares de las gestas” mentioned here was because the Estoria de España distinguishes between the cantares and “las crónicas et … los libros de las estorias d’esto” (Alvar and Alvar 1991, ch. 834, 281), that is to say, the reliable sources constantly quoted by the chroniclers to tell Sancho II’s story, more specifcally, Lucas de Tuy’s Chronicon mundi, Jiménez de Rada’s Historia de rebus Hispanie, and probably the Chronica Naiarensis as well. See Bautista (2016) and Montaner (2016) for their analyses of Sancho II’s epic and historiographic sources, and the different conclusions they reach. 14 It comprises chapters 617, 619, 621, 623, 648–652, and 654–56. I quote the text published in Épica medieval española by Carlos and Manuel Alvar (1991, 384–406). 15 According to Bautista, the chroniclers most probably used “no ya los cantares difundidos oralmente sino manuscritos de los mismos, como permite observar el caso de los textos poéticos conservados e incluidos en dicha obra, el Cantar de mio Cid y el Poema de Fernán González” [not the orally transmitted songs but manuscripts, as can be observed in the case of the poetic texts preserved and included in that work, the CMC and the PFG] (2011, 102). Katherine Oswald offers a good summary of the sources employed to compose the story of Bernardo in the Estoria de España (2012, 463, n. 19). 16 The quotations of the Poema de Fernán González were taken from the paleographic edition prepared by José Manuel Ruiz Asencio (1989). 17 These verses correspond to 571d and 608b of the edition I quote.
References Alvar, Carlos, and Manuel Alvar, eds. 1991. Épica medieval española. Madrid: Cátedra. Ancos, Pablo. 2011. “Mahoma, ¿‘Vn profeta muy honrrado’ Un ‘traedor prouado’? (Libro de Alexandre, v. 2510d)”. La Corónica 39: 5–28. Bailey, Matthew, ed. and trans. 2007. Las Mocedades de Rodrigo. The Yothful Deeds of Rodrigo, the Cid.Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Barton, Simon. 2015. Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines. Interfaith Relations and Social Power in Medieval Iberia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
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Irene Zaderenko Bautista, Francisco. 2011.“Memoria de Carlomagno: sobre la difusión temprana de la materia carolingia en España (siglos XI–XII)”. Revista de Poética Medieval 25: 47–109. Bautista, Francisco. 2016. “El episodio épico de la división de los reinos por Fernando I y el Cantar de Sancho II”. Studia Zamorensia 15: 57–64. Bertrand de Bar-sur-Aube. 1966. “Girart de Vienne”. In La Geste de Monglane.Vol. I. D.M. Doughery and E.B. Barnes (eds.). Eugene: University of Oregon Press. Camón Aznar, José. 1947.“El Cid, personaje mozárabe”. Revista de Estudios Políticos 31–32: 109–141. Campa Gutiérrez, Mariano de la, ed. 2009. La “Estoria de España” de Alfonso X. Estudio y edición de la “Versión crítica” desde Fruela II hasta la muerte de Fernando II. Málaga:Analecta Malacitana. Catalán, Diego. 2001. La épica española: nueva documentación y nueva evaluación. Madrid: Fundación Menéndez Pidal. Cirot, Georges. 1938–44. “La maurophilie littéraire en Espagne au XVIe siècle”. Bulletin Hispanique, 40: 150–57, 281–296, 433–447; 41 (1939): 65–85, 345–351; 42 (1940): 213–227; 43 (1941): 265–289; 44 (1942): 96–102; 46 (1944): 5–25. Deyermond, Alan. 1987. El “Cantar de mio Cid” y la épica medieval española. Barcelona: Sirmio. Faulhaber, Charles B. 1976. “Neo-Traditionalism, Formulism, Individualism, and Recent Studies on the Spanish Epic”. Romance Philology 30(1): 83–101. Fuchs, Barbara. 2009. Exotic Nation. Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. La Chanson de Roland. 1993. Jean Dufournet (ed.). Paris: Flammarion. Lida de Malkiel, María Rosa. 1960.“El moro en las letras castellanas”. Hispanic Review 28: 350–58. López Guil, Itzíar, ed. 2001. Libro de Fernán Gonçález. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva. Mahoney, Peter. 2019. “The Seven Knights of Lara”:Text, Context, and Translation. Newark: Juan de la Cuesta. Márquez Villanueva, Francisco. 1984.“El problema historiográfco de los moriscos”. Bulletin Hispanique 86: 61–135. Márquez Villanueva, Francisco. 1994. El concepto cultural alfonsí. Madrid: Mapfre. Meneghetti, María Luisa. 1991. “Chansons de geste y cantares de gesta: la singularidad de la épica española”. In Historian y crítica de la literatura española. Edad Media. Primer suplemento, Alan Deyermond (ed). Barcelona: Crítica. pp. 71–7. Menéndez Pelayo, Marcelino. [1905] 1945. Orígenes de la novela.Vol. II. Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores. Menéndez Pidal, Ramón. 1957. “España como eslabón entre la Cristiandad y el Islam”. In Mis páginas preferidas.Vol. II. Madrid: Gredos. pp. 183–206. Montaner,Alberto, ed. 2011. Cantar de mio Cid. Preliminary study by Francisco Rico. Barcelona: Real Academia Española—Galaxia Gutenberg—Círculo de Lectores. Montaner, Alberto. 2016.“Lo épico y lo historiográfco en el relato alfonsí del Cerco de Zamora”. Studia Zamorensia 15: 65–89. Oswald, Katherine. 2012. “Vestiges of Cantares and Estorias in the Alfonsine Retelling of Bernardo del Carpio”. eHumanista 22: 454–467. Raffel, Burton, trans. 2009. The Song of the Cid. Introduction by María Rosa Menocal. New York: Penguin Books. Ruiz Asencio, José Manuel, ed. 1989. Poema de Fernán González. Facsimile edition, with studies by José Fradejas Lebrero, Gonzalo Martínez Diez, and César Fernández Alonso. Burgos:Ayuntamiento de Burgos. Smith, Colin. 2010. The Making of the “Poema de mio Cid”. Cambridge: University Press, (frst edition 1983). Uría Maqua, Isabel. 2000. Panorama crítico del “mester de clerecía”. Madrid: Castalia. Vaquero, Mercedes. 2014.“¿Qué sabemos del Cantar de Fernán González?” Romance Quarterly 61(3): 202–214. Victorio, Juan, ed. 1990. Poema de Fernán González. Madrid: Cátedra. Zaderenko, Irene. 1997. “Acerca de la fecha de composición del *Cantar de los siete infantes de Lara”. La Corónica 26: 247–255. Zaderenko, Irene. 2003–04.“La imagen del moro en la Leyenda de los infantes de Lara”. Letras. Studia Hispanica Medievalia VI 48–9: 159–164. Zaderenko, Irene. 2013a.“La mauroflia en la poesía épica medieval”. Letras. Studia Hispanica Medievalia IX 67–8: 185–194. Zaderenko, Irene. 2013b. “Mauroflia en la leyenda de los Siete infantes de Lara, un rasgo excepcional de la épica española”. Cahiers d'Etudes Hispaniques Médiévales 36: 59–82. Zaderenko, Irene. 2014.“Mauroflia y maurofobia en el Libro del conde de Castilla”. Romance Quarterly 61(3): 215–225. Zaderenko, Irene, and Alberto Montaner, eds. 2018. A Companion to the “Poema de mio Cid”. Leiden: Brill.
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PART VII
Visual culture
35 MUDEJAR TERUEL Decoding an art-historical mystery Marianne David
The techumbre (decorated ceiling) The densely patterned coffered ceiling of the Cathedral of Santa María de Mediavilla looks, at frst glance, like a Gothic tapestry with the colorful luxuriance of an Oriental rug. A melding of East and West,“Teruel’s Sistine Chapel”, as it is known colloquially, immediately impresses by its textured opulence and the sheer number of pictures that command the space: Romanesque– Gothic human portraits juxtaposed by an array of Biblical, Classical, and quotidian scenes, visual fragments from literature, images of real and fanciful animals, together with friezes displaying repetitive motifs of knights, red lions, antlered deer, as well as religious epigrams in Latin and Kufc script. Upending the various beams are sculpted fgureheads, and all along the ceiling’s edge a row of seemingly hundreds of male and female faces, to say nothing of the profusion of Moorish geometrical designs, foral patterns, planets, and stars serving as decoration throughout (Figure 35.1). The extraordinary hybridity of this Romanesque–Gothic-mudéjar ceiling is of diffcult access because it does not conform to traditional assumptions of social hierarchy and medieval spiritual unity. Impressive is the panoramic portrait gallery spanning Santa María’s central nave with its full-length characters and types, half of them women, in different occupations, social classes, cultural traditions, and sexual orientations: kings, beggars, ladies-in-waiting, drab peasants, wealthy merchants, common laborers, together with sexy dancers and minstrels alongside different types of clerics, demure looking spinners, artisans, armored knights, hunters, carpenters. An entire medieval community viewed through a “democratizing” prism! We sense a crowded urban space where heightened perception enabled these medieval folks to recognize each other’s minute personal traits and differences in dress and manner. The same mindfulness that allowed the discerning artist to distinguish the black-hooded Jewish fgure from the colorfully clad artisans, female laborers wearing the Muslim veil, and women with henna tattoos on their arms.This is a pluralist optic unique in European church art, and nonexistent in the aniconic Moorish aesthetic despite the storied coexistence of tenth-century Cordoba. Nor is there anything resembling Santa María’s stunning diversity in the Cántigas de Santa María, where the Jew is depicted in derogatory visual language in such miniatures as “the Jewish moneylender”, “the treacherous Jews”, “the wicked infdels” in Cántigas 25, 108, 187 respectively. As he also appears, albeit in a somewhat different variation, in the fourteenth- and ffteenth-century retablos 565
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Figure 35.1 Muslim designs and sculpted fgureheads. © M. Zárate, with permission.
painted in the workshops of Saragossa (Lipton 2008, 139–156; Mann 2010, 93). Demonstrably, Teruel’s groundbreaking visuality calls forth the perception Américo Castro described in España en su historia: cristianos, moros y judíos as the crucible of Iberia’s identity formation.
Ambiance sociale totale The compelling magnifcence of Teruel’s techumbre (decorated ceiling) fully in evidence, what astonishes is how little attention it has received from the perspective of Cultural Studies. An omission that may be attributable to the absent records surrounding the creation of Teruel’s profuse ceiling. But more likely to the seemingly disconnected nature of Santa María’s complex imagery, variously viewed as a “crucible of cultures”, a ‘seductive bazaar of images’, or in the words Serafín Moralejo, an “acarreo arbitario de experiencias de apuntes tomados a partir de obras concretas—o de otros apuntes” (random and arbitrary images of experiences taken from specifc works—or from other notes and formulations) (1987, 103). For Joaquín Yarza Luaces, lamenting the ceiling’s often puzzling aspects, “iconography has reached a dead end here … Needed in order to be plausible is a diversifed criticism” (Sebastián López 1982, 149–150). Santa María’s intriguing images require an interdisciplinary perspective, what Marc Bloch termed an ambiance sociale totale. But also the multi-directional, open-ended art-historical approach Meyer Schapiro derived from his work on the abbeys of Moissac and Souillac, and the monastery of Silos, since he perceived in art a mirror of society’s cultural and economic changes. In effect, what do Santa María’s images tell us about Teruel’s thirteenth-century pluralist inhabitants, and how might their symbiotic relationships add to the historical record? 566
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The mudéjar Teruel’s mudéjar is an historically freighted story. From muddayyam, meaning those Muslims who stayed in their land because the Christian colonists considered them useful to the economy, the term mudéjar is both a social concept and a hybrid aesthetic. Developed in Iberia’s northern kingdoms in the wake of the twelfth-century Christian conquest of Muslim-controlled territories, it signifes the fusion of two rival artistic idioms: the thick walls and rounded arches, or ribbed vaults and pointed arches of the Romanesque–Gothic, combined with Islamic decorative motifs such as horseshoe or scalloped arches, geometric or vegetable designs, and the use of ceramics and Kufc calligraphy (the earliest extant Islamic style of writing used to record the Qurʾan). As the artistic response to the socio-political circumstances of the diverse peoples living in medieval Aragon (and less so in Castile) under Christian political domination, the mudéjar illustrates Iberia’s braided history. In the words of Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, it constitutes “el único tipo de construcción peculiarmente español del que podemos envanecernos” (the only type of peculiarly Spanish construction of which can be proud). The narrative of the mudéjar begins in the search for an artistic program to propagate the religious–cultural changes instituted by Pope Gregory VII (1073–1085). To that end, Bishop Diego Gelmírez of Santiago de Compostela and Bishop Pedro de Roda of Pamplona made multiple journeys to France’s Romanesque centers: Cluny, Saint-Foy at Conques, Saint-Sernin at Toulouse, Saint-Etienne at Nevers, and even as far as Rome. Designed to foster unity and cohesion within the Church, and based on personal relations of reciprocity and collaboration, the program of these two ecclesiastics was to be transmitted through art and architecture. It included iconographic themes like the adoration of the magi; the medieval vices and virtues; and stories of the temptation of Christ, Adam, and Eve. By the late eleventh century their “friendship network” achieved expressivity in such massive Romanesque constructions as the cathedrals of Santiago de Compostela, Jaca, and Toledo, together with a consistent repertoire of images (Walker 2015, 77–8; Castiñeiras 210, 138), made an indelible feature of Iberia’s medieval landscape.The Romanesque scheme was amplifed through yet another channel of artistic diffusion, the camino de Santiago whose trekking pilgrims, tradesmen, clerics, and artists joined Mozarabic and Islamic craftspeople to exchange ideas and expertise about such exemplars as Cordoba’s Great Mosque, Paris’Abbey of Saint Denis, Palermo’s Capella Palatina, Castile’s Santo Domingo de Silos, and Saragossa’s Aljafería Palace. It was in this seedbed of collaboration that the interactions of Iberia’s itinerant artists and artisans evolved into the eclecticism of the mudéjar. By the thirteenth century, mudéjar structures were dotting the Aragonese landscape, each locality exhibiting its own special hybridity. Epitomizing Aragon’s artistic symbiosis was Teruel’s “ensemble”: Santa María de Mediavilla with its tower and polychrome ceiling, together with the towers of San Pedro, El Salvador, and San Martín, and including the city’s thirteenth-century ceramics. Unlike the Reconquista’s standard practice of transforming Muslim edifces into Christian churches and cathedrals (notably the great mosques of Cordoba and Seville), the process of Teruel’s acculturation worked in reverse. Built c. 1171 in the middle of a Muslim medina to indicate the Christian victory, the small Romanesque church of Santa María became hybridized through its progressive acquisition of Gothic and Islamic features. Absent a uniform style, the ensemble’s constructional sequence gives us a clue into how the different artistic idioms were integrated, and the responsiveness of Teruel’s civil and ecclesiastical authorities to the growing needs of a heterogeneous community whose majority population was mudéjar. Built c. 1236 during the Valencia Campaign, San Pedro, the oldest of the four square bell towers, has an austere military appearance.While its brick façade of recessed windows, ceramic decorations, and overlapping arches reveal Romanesque capitals with the sculpted images of 567
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Saint Peter’s keys and of a hamsa, or hand, of Fatima. An almohade protective symbol, it was also a Hebrew motif, the word hamesh denoting the fve fngers of the hand: Hey the ffth letter of the Hebrew alphabet and one of God’s holy names, thus a representation of the fve books of the Torah. By contrast, Santa María’s church interior renovated in mid-century shows elements much like those of Paris’Abbey of Saint Denis of 1135. Included are a ribbed vault, the elevation of its three naves, a reduction in the number of supporting columns, and their elongation to produce a loftier, more illuminated “Gothic” space. It was the combined effect of these features that created the need for a ceiling that was light enough in weight to be sustainable by the now less robust columns.And probably due to the availability of skilled Muslim artisans in the region, the answer to Santa María’s new structural requirement was a mudéjar innovation: the armadura de par y nudillo, or wooden collar-beam-ceiling, in nine sections with horizontal members connecting the two opposite rafters. Dating from the late thirteenth or possibly early fourteenth century, the resulting artesonado, or intricately joined wooden ceiling, which was 32 meters in length by 7.76 meters in width, forms decorative geometric patterns into which are placed individual panels painted in egg tempera (Figure 35.2). Fittingly, the construction of this armadura de par y nudillo has its representation on María de Mediavilla’s techumbre in a particularly eye-catching illustration. It consists of a frieze containing a set of geometrical pictures that show several colorfully attired artisans busily sawing, hammering, measuring, and carving. Sharply drawn and crisp, these elongated and energetic fgures come vividly alive as one realizes that they are symbolically building the “A” frame of the very ceiling on which they are being featured. And that the wooden eagle the sculptor is carving is the same fgurehead that appears on the beam adjacent to this lively scene—all the while as the viewer is witness to this art-in-the-making. By means of this captivating mise-en-abyme device, these lay medieval craftsmen are telling us a story-within-a-story, indeed, multiple stories about the new market economy in which they are forced to advertise in order to get commissions, the audience’s importance for their breadand-butter, and their “consciousness of consciousness” of their roles as protagonists as well as
Figure 35.2 Techumbre artesonado, decorated ceiling,Teruel.
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creators.We observe this same self-refexiveness in the various taller scenes depicted elsewhere on this techumbre. In one of them, an apprentice is offering libations to two female painters— clad in long garments unlike the short tunics worn by the male artisans—who are painting panels featuring the same heraldry: the red Calatrava cross and the escutcheon of Aragon, seen throughout the ceiling. We know that Santa María’s artists included mudéjar women potters whose illustrating abilities enabled them to paint some of the panels. The image of a veiled female laborer hoisting water with a pulley rope bears out the fact that indoor wells in Teruel were found only in pottery workshops (Novella Mateo 1964, 200–229). Further developing the theme of self-inscription are two “companion” pieces. In one of them, a lone artist is painting her panel red and turning to the spectator for approval. The second picture shows the same woman putting down a dab of red while looking at the fgure holding the pot of paint, who seems to offer instruction or supervision by pointing. These pictures illuminate the social and artistic conditions that allowed for self-depiction even in the face of obstacles and contradictions.We know that commissions to medieval artists and artisans entailed precise instructions of what and how to paint.And since these panels were painted in a workshop, they could be inspected for content and style before being mounted onto the ceiling.Yet despite the emphatic presence of the fgure holding the pot of paint, inspection of Santa María’s panoramic production seems to have been lax, given the often raw and uneven craftsmanship of some of the pictures, notably that of the self-depicting female artist. Whether due to insouciance or lack of quality control, this surprising absence of rigor suggests a free-wheeling milieu where individual expression could fnd acceptance, even encouragement. More broadly, the lone artist with her red panel—the color of passion or strong emotion—is indicating her personal outlook and sensibility. Or at least an intuitive grasp of the medieval artist who is seen as “owning” her work and thus furthering her own development. Especially as one considers the innovation that was taking place in Teruel in a different medium and industry, and at a time roughly coincident with the painting of the techumbre. As it was in the latter part of the thirteenth century that human and animal fgures outlined in black, and painted in a naturalistic style similar to some of Santa María’s panels, began to appear on the green and white pottery emerging from the kilns of the mudéjar potters.Their unprecedented and sudden appearance establishes the link between the Turolense ceramics and Santa María’s painted ceiling, reinforcing the idea that some of the techumbre’s artists may have been those same mudéjar female potters who illustrated their own lustrous pottery (Ibid 196–201). Surely they represent the connection point in a culture characterized by borrowings and exchanges, where personal initiative and assimilationist tendencies enabled these minority artists–artisans to compromise their own religious prohibition by introducing fgural elements into their pottery, and thereby boosting Teruel’s ceramics industry. Similarly it expands the notion that Santa María’s artists may have had considerable authorial power regarding the images they fashioned, and the manner in which they chose to chronicle Teruel’s culture on this ceiling.
Cultural symbiosis Santa María’s iconography corroborates the symbiotic relationships taking place in Teruel, while refecting the hybridity of its medieval architectural “ensemble”. Whether political savvy or sheer pragmatism, it appears that Teruel’s Christian leadership enabled its pluralist inhabitants to have a stake in creating a culture of collaboration that involved the melding of different artistic idioms. Following the acquisition of María de Mediavilla’s “Gothic” interior, the 1258 construction of the adjoining mudéjar tower represents not so much a departure from the Western European model, as a clear rejection of the French Gothic and its political associations. 569
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A polygonal structure at the top (its octagonal lantern dates from the seventeenth century) and a pointed archway at the base for pedestrian transit, the tower’s distinctive reddish clay façade exhibits an embossed panel of grid work, a set of interlacing pointed arches with geometric shapes in a play of light and dark, and recessed archivolts adorned with glazed ceramics in white, purple, and green to refect the surrounding felds (Valencia’s blue ceramics refect the sea). Even more elaborate are the façades of the towers of El Salvador and San Martin built in 1277 and 1316, respectively. San Martin’s sebqa motif, or pattern of diamond shapes in brick and plaster, exhibits the color white from zinc oxide found in Valencia to signal the conquest’s completion. And both share the almohade typology of an interior tower lodged in an exterior one, modeled after Seville’s Giralda and Marrakesh’s Koutoubia minaret. In adopting the “aesthetic of the enemy” this highly ornamental architecture bespeaks an assimilation of Iberia’s Muslim tradition, but also an emergent regional identity. Expressive of popular feeling, and using brick and wood in lieu of the more expensive ashlar scarce in the Ebro valley, Teruel’s versatile and eclectic building style was not the passive manifestation by a local culture (Dodds 2000, 93). Rather, as D.F. Ruggles has emphasized, the mudéjar aesthetic employed in the construction and decoration of Teruel’s Santa María de Mediavilla and the four square towers appear to have been a deliberate choice, “a dramatic ideological leap”. For Teruel’s ecclesiastic and civil authorities could have easily invited artisans from Castile or León to build their “ensemble”. That they did not do so suggests a political policy: an effort by the town’s Christian leadership to foster a symbiotic culture in which its cultural minorities could feel valued and legitimized (2000, 413–14). This taste for the Islamic artistic idiom, intensifed as it was by the Reconquista soldiers’ close contact with the material culture of their bitterest enemy, speaks to the persistent legacy of al-Andalus. However, it was the peculiarly Iberian mindset enabling its diverse inhabitants to separate their cultural life from their political and religious ideology that effectively allowed the mudéjar aesthetic to fourish in the newly conquered Christian territories.We see evidence of this tendency in the many adaptations of the almohade building scheme. To the Muslim and Jewish minorities, this showcasing of the mudéjar must have seemed to a de facto acceptance of Iberia’s Islamic heritage by the Christian population. In Gonzalo Borrás Gualis’ view, the Reconquista phenomenon is “yoked to late medieval tolerance”, the unambiguous preference for Islamic art in Aragonese lands, and to a lesser degree Castilian lands, amounting to a kind of political statement: an acknowledgment of “a Hispano-Moorish building system that [would] adapt itself to the new functions and needs of a predominantly Christian society” (Fuchs 2009, 52–3).
Why Teruel? Was Teruel better at embracing ethnic, religious, and cultural differences than other Iberian cities of this time? Probably. Unlike other Aragonese conquered territories,Teruel was a truly nascent society. Besides its strategic value as a stepping stone toward the conquest of Valencia, the small medina of “Tirwal”, which King Alfonso II came upon in 1171, had little in the way of historical or material culture. Made into a bulwark against the bordering Muslim threat, and set it up as a villa with written laws delineating the rights and obligations of its initial population of indigenous Muslims and Christian colonists, this sparsely populated land was fortifed and developed by immigrants from different northern and southern regions: Christians from Aragon, mozárabes (or Arabized Christians from Andalusia and León), as well as Jews, conversos, and Muslims feeing almohade fundamentalism. Adventurous men eager for war and booty, they also included physicians, tradesmen, artisans, as well pioneering women eager to take advantage of the generous benefts offered by the Fuero de Teruel, such as equal protection, tax rebates for married couples, 570
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property rights for both men and women, and the right to repudiate one’s partner and remarry. This may explain why the unusually abundant women fgures painted on the techumbre appear, not in the traditional mothering, sewing, or cooking roles, but highly individualized as musicians and queens, dancers and noble ladies, acrobats and spinners, peasants, potters, and artists. Fashioned in often gestural and provocative visual language, these feminine images animate the pictorial space, the lively firtatious ones distinct from the drab-looking laborers. These representations are unparalleled in medieval religious art, their only possible analogue found in the 22 corbels showing females in various attitudes of pain and suffering in Cahors’ Cathedral of Saint Etienne of 1135 (Kenaan-Kedar 1995,153).Very unlike the self-possessed women who comprise half of Santa María’s human panorama. How these colorful fgures came to constitute so signifcant a component of this enigmatic artesonado is unclear, but they remain its most compelling and innovative aspect, and much of the reason for the work’s singularity. Offering a multiplicity of perspectives, these quirky women speak to a vibrant secular culture.Women were sorely needed and marriage encouraged in this patriarchal, misogynist society structured around war and settlement. By taking a wife a man proved his commitment to establishing himself and creating a family. With the men fghting in Valencia, it was these “Reconquista women” who took up the slack to manage the home and community, working as wet nurses, midwives, servants, and farmers, but also as potters, weavers, taverneras, lavanderas, panaderas (tavern keepers, laundresses, bread bakers). Muslim women tended to be the town’s dancers, acrobats, juglaresas, and alfareras (female minstrels and potters), as well as its prostitutes, alcahuetas, and hechiceras (matchmakers and fortune-tellers or sorceresses). Some Jewish and Christian women were money lenders, others bought and sold slaves (Dillard 1989, 168–69). The economic heft and assertiveness of these women belie assumptions of feminine lowliness. Claiming their rights viva voce they were surely a feisty lot. Undoubtedly, their mental and emotional life is what appears refected in the feminine fgures that enliven the techumbre.The hands-on-hip “no-nonsense” woman comes across as a scold, unlike the demure-looking spinner or the young musician playing her vihuela (ancient guitar) Also distinctive are the gymnast doing contortions with a saber in each hand, the barefooted actress wringing a handkerchief to dramatize her role, and the peasant pointing into her eye to feign clairvoyance. Quite surprising is the sexual ambiguity of the young dancer combing her long hair, a symbol of virginal purity, the folds of her dress accentuating her curvaceous torso as she whirls about. And the sexual fuidity of the other entertainer, short hair and muscular body suggesting a cross-dresser who ogles her audience, fashing an ironic smile as she dances to the sound of her pandereta (tambourine), pointed slippers peering out from under her slinky dress. A similar permissiveness characterizes the treatment of love, sex, and marriage.The portrait of a husband and wife embracing acquires meaning by its placement directly below the homoerotic, classically allusive image of two skimpily dressed men in hand-to-hand combat as though to distinguish and include different types of love relationships. All the more telling is how this frontal politically correct picture of a married couple offers a contrast to the unmistakably tongue-in-cheek image of the couple in bed displayed on one of the beams.As it is a very similar couple bed that appears, crafted in the Mozarab style and decidedly unchaste in character, on the frontispiece of the Silos Beatus “Hell” to represent the sin of lust and its corresponding infernal punishment (Williams 1977, 40).
Political and economic configuration Teruel’s exceptionalism is implicit in these unorthodox images that refect the bold outlook of the self-selected, enterprising settlers who came to Teruel intent on building a better life for 571
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themselves in this unprecedented, experimental type of polity: a villa de realengo (town of the royal demesne) under the exclusive jurisdiction of the King of Aragon. In this case, King James I, a monarch known for the egalitarian treatment of his subjects and for encouraging their active participation in the body politic. Protective of the arts and of Aragon’s minority populations, and lasting for the better part of the thirteenth century, King James I’s reign saw signifcant cultural and socio-economic development. For Teruel this meant a fairer, more permissive governance than was usual in frontier territories.As distinct from the province of Teruel whose farmers and villagers were subject to various vassals, military orders, and the Bishop of Saragossa, and where life was harsher, more arbitrary than in the municipality. Teruel’s political structure informs the contours and arrangement of Santa María’s gallery of human portraits. Evoking cultural and psychological traits, models of selfhood, and human association, the series of framed pictures serve to defne the communal space they inhabit. Embellished by a vine motif of beveled edges on a black background upended by a rosette, the recurrent patterns of identical rectangles express a kind of visual “geography” indicative of urban closeness and societal rigor. Indeed, the verticality that gives this immense work its organization also conveys a responsiveness to order and respect for the rule of law. Acting as the techumbre’s spinal column, the panoramic portrait gallery appears to defne the historico–geographic mindset of a society governed by the codifed statutes of the Fuero de Teruel.As such, it corresponds to the need that motivated Teruel’s diverse peoples to emigrate to this laws-based town in order to fnd in it their desired security and economic wellbeing (Rodrigo Estevan 2009, 29). A counterpoint to the verticality and strict patterning of the framed portraits is the looser arrangement of different social, religious, and occupational scenes on friezes of different sizes, along with the whimsical entourage of fanciful animals, stylized vegetable designs, and phantasmagoric fgureheads. History is our reference as we recall that the hybrid political experiment of separate entities conceived by King Alfonso II consisted of Teruel the town, in contrast with Teruel the province. Indicating separate governments and social mindsets the two “zones” function on the techumbre in an uneasy dynamic. Teruel’s history shapes our understanding of Santa María’s iconography, even as it distinguishes the mudéjar expressivity from all other examples of European medieval art. Replete with polychrome images, artistic forms and, above all, human interest, this profusely painted ceiling manifests al-Andalus’ powerful cultural and economic infuence. Enjoying a competitive edge derived from mudéjar agriculture and the rich booty won through the Valencia Campaign,Teruel also benefted greatly from its privileged location on the road between Saragossa and Cordoba, the commercial activities of its newly enfranchised merchants and artisans, and from Aragon’s expansion in the Mediterranean. All of which made thirteenth-century Teruel with its weekly markets and yearly fairs the largest artisanal and commercial center in southern Aragon (Navarro Espinach 2014, 158–183). The techumbre’s dazzling Islamic symmetries, assorted geometrical designs, and foral patterns amply express Teruel’s prosperity. The prodigious variety of circles intersected by ovals, loops, and rhombuses forming zigzags, spirals, interlaced sunbursts, along with eight-point stars, overlapping squares, hexagons, and octagons, together create a compelling fgure-ground relationship with the Romanesque–Gothic portraits. Fanciful arabesques conjure up the ubiquitous North African bazaar replete with Byzantine brocades and Iranian silks, sumptuous rugs, embroidered fabrics, and colored cushions adorned with tassels. These opulent images allude to consumer goods made available in Teruel’s thirteenth-century markets by Aragon’s large footprint in the Mediterranean: the development of precious textiles in gorgeous colors and lavish ways seeping down “to the lower layers of society” (Goiten 1983, xiii). Expressive of upper-class pride and privilege are the banners, heraldic friezes, and stripped escutcheons of the Crown of Aragon. 572
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Combined with Islamic designs they speak to us of contrasting tastes and competing narratives of wealth from landed property, but also from industry and trade.They tell of imported products and exotic luxuries in the bustling markets of Calais and Flanders, of merchants haggling over wools and colored silks, leather, and exotic spices: clove, mace, nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, saffron. To stunning effect, tapestry-like patterns and intricate motifs evoke the cross-cultural encounters of a society seduced by Oriental splendor (Sánchez Márquez 2016, 91–4).
Consciousness of change Visible manifestations of the economic and cultural fourishment that provided medieval Teruel with the conditions for expressivity, Santa María’s imagery casts a wide net by conveying fashions, sensibilities, and currents of thought, as well as the disrupted adherences, altered mores, and clashing traditions of a frontier society bordering Muslim lands. With the completion of Valencia’s conquest in 1248, Turolenses saw a period of peace and stability accompanied by unprecedented growth.The kaleidoscopic iconography attests to this quality of excess and celebration made visible in the artistic and athletic exuberance of the many musician and dancer images.The singers and actors, hunters and archers, wrestlers, gymnasts, and jousters; no less than the farcical-satirical humor evoked by a Renard fgure dressed in men’s clothing and holding a fask of urine.The underside to this festive vision is the spectacle of chaotic, negative emotions and subconscious forces embodied by phantasmagoric dragons and other monstrous beasts. While the many variegated faces painted along the ceiling’s edge—a ruddy farmer, profled nun, whiskered soldier, well-coiffed lady, dark-eyed youth—watch and listen. Wide-ranging and eclectic, Santa María’s ceiling offered the medieval viewer a compelling mirror of Iberian life. Unlike Islamic art, the mudéjar made it possible for Turolenses to see their own quotidian reality, probably for the frst time, vividly represented in line and color. Intensifying their sense of identity, it amplifed their European existence by enabling them to imagine its myriad novelties. In various ways the techumbre tells the human story of how these medieval folks absorbed the sweeping innovations happening around them: feudalism’s unraveling, the new market capitalism, and urban crowdedness, together with a host of novel interests surrounding work and play, artistic creativity, gender and sexuality, encounters with evil, but also a coexistence of different perceptions of the common man. The frontal fgure of a letrado (a kind of lawyer) encapsulates the new socio-political context. Charged with applying the law, he appears next to the profled fgure of a wayward bishop playing an Arabic instrument. Societal change is seen in three distinctive social images: a procession of swashbuckling Reconquista knights; an awkward-looking, heavily armored young knight astride a pathetic-looking horse; and the portrait of a sharp-eyed merchant attired all in cred against a gold backdrop, while reading a large parchment document.We see a new arriviste medieval culture where wayfarers, serfs, peddlers reinvent themselves as tradesmen, merchants, bankers so they can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with kings, nobles, and clerics in Santa María’s portrait gallery (Figure 35.3). Change hardly begins to describe this time-sensitive visual narrative of human fgures who appear unencumbered by ideology, occupation, or social class—be they peasants, itinerant artisans, nobles, laborers, monks, or dancing girls. Since the focus is on the “common man”—or woman.An early embodiment of the humanist ideal, this new optic manifested through the use of portraiture foreshadows the artistic form popularized two centuries later by the Renaissance painters. But with the penetrating distinction that while the ffteenth-century Italian and Flemish artists specialized in depicting nobles, churchmen, and wealthy burghers, the human panorama of Santa María showcases individuals of all stripes. Evincing personal anecdotes or 573
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Figure 35.3 Portrait gallery, decorated ceiling,Teruel.
contextualized “stories”, these vivid and revealing portraits speak to the emergence of individual autonomy within the parameters of the law. It is an engagement and participation probably culled from the artists’ models, the ecclesiastical and civil patrons, or simply the assorted bystanders who contributed their “exterior coherence” to this vast artistic endeavor.
Community as social relations The image of assorted medieval individuals “rubbing elbows” has a down-to-earth, vernacular quality that suggests its own cohesion. Since what emerges as the central theme of this profusely painted ceiling is the sense of “community”, this may explain the crowding out of Christian iconography, limited as it is to a few portraits of clerics and saints, and a narrative sequence of Christ’s Passion. In this Catholic sanctuary, Christian elements receive short shrift. We note a realignment of priorities in the curious presence of two religious epigrams in Latin and Kufc letters, written in reverse, perceived at the same eye level.Whether meant to represent points of tension or, implausibly, commensurate expressions of faith in an attempt at ideological inclusiveness is unclear. But the diverse portraits appearing in silent commerce alongside each other accentuate the overarching feel of community. Refecting through their “conversations” not so much individual identity as a shared identity, the fgures in Santa Maria’s panoramic portrait gallery evince a solidarity akin to a Gemeischaft, rather than a Gesellschaft (impersonal social relations based on duty).To borrow from Emile Durkheim’s ideas, we sense in them a desire to belong, an intimacy perceived almost as a religion! (2001, viii–ix). The utopian quality of this bold, unprecedented, and rarifed vision of an integrated medieval community strains credulity. In lieu of identifable personages or embodiments of abstract ideas, 574
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Santa María’s close-grained depictions suggest a variety of human interest “stories” constituting the extended image of an unstratifed community. It is a vision, needless to say, clearly at variance with the historical record since Teruel, like all medieval towns, was a hierarchical society with power frmly lodged in an elite of nobles, knights, clerics, and wealthy merchants.Yet, the “democratizing” perception tells us otherwise.What could account for this audacious vision of a pluralist medieval society seen from “below”? Why would Santa María’s artists have highlighted this rift between the artistic imagination and historical reality? To what end? Essential to any speculation is knowledge of Turolense society from a legal and an emotional perspective. Andrés J. Nicolás-Minué Sánchez explains how Teruel’s primary function as a frontier territory was to shield Aragon from the Muslim threat, and to serve as a springboard for further expansion. In exchange for the rule of law promising them equal protection, the new settlers had to contribute their military service, labor, and know-how.The Fuero de Teruel’s egalitarian statues were explicit, at least in principle, and would continue so up to the town’s designation as a vill in 1347. In actuality, the Fuero contradicted itself regarding the stated political privileges of its citizens. For to accede to a position on the Concejo, or governing body, a citizen had to already possess a certain economic status.With caballeros and clerics exempt from paying tributes, everyone else was a pechero, or contributor. So the legal equality regarding infazones and villanos (knights and commoners) having an único fuero (sole charter) was strictly nominal. Even though the same basic rights allegedly applied to the different cultural and religious groups, political power was naturally assumed to be reserved for Christian citizens. Positions in Teruel’s ruling body were open to the villa’s male persons, but these had to be caballeros who owned a caballo de montura y que valga doscientos sueldos, escudo, lanza, capillo de hierro o yelmo, as well as a casa poblada en la villa de Teruel (a saddle horse worth 200 wages, shield, lance, an iron cap or helmet, and a house in the city) (2011, 213–14). If in other Iberian towns political position was attained through lineage or bloodline, in Teruel power came through personal wealth. Only that in keeping with the city’s economic growth and development, social differences could be erased to allow for the acquisition of wealth as well as status.
Affect as lens Santa María’s portrait gallery brings into relief the historical function of societal change and cognitive dissonance. Illustrating hybridity across the board, the human images refect a medieval Iberian society whose egalitarian statutes were more aspirational than real. But at the same time a society that provided its inhabitants with an ambiance of political nuance and ambiguity that allowed them to thrive. In consequence, medieval hierarchy in this portrait gallery appears upstaged by an enfranchised citizenry’s feeling of belonging citizenry, and thus a vision of communal wellbeing where the transmission of emotion is essential to its understanding.The close arrangement of the pictures even hints at a shared intimacy in which the defensive “other” has been transformed by a reconciliation of rival faiths into one culture. Having reached a high point in its development,Teruel could well afford the luxury of tolerance. By all accounts, Teruel’s upwardly mobile settlers acquired more than wealth through their commercial, agricultural, and artisanal contributions. Their increased importance allowed the town’s letrados, rich farmers, merchants, physicians, high-end artisans—and also minorities, as some of Santa María’s images seem to intimate—to act as dirigentes (rulers). It thus extended the status of ciudadano (or citizen) to a citizenry united in its belief in the rule of law codifed in the Fuero—a perception the artists championed by visually documenting it. Crucially, it is the view corroborated by the latest research on cross-cultural relations in medieval Iberia. As Jonathan Ray has indicated,Teruel’s Jewish inhabitants perceived themselves as Turolenses frst, and only 575
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secondarily as Jews, appreciating their membership in the polity more than their religious affliation (Ray 2009, 195–211). Interesting in this regard is what Santa María’s ceiling does not show. Few if any are the negative characterizations, let alone instances of sickness, deformity, or death.The piteous face of a crazed old man with spiked white hair who appears ensconced between two menacing-looking snake fgureheads is a notable exception. Equally unusual in this otherwise upbeat vision is the picture of a work-related dispute involving three fgures pointing energetically: two men, one of them wearing the typical Jewish hood, and a young apprentice. Other than this apparent cultural-generational controversy, images of confict on this ceiling are rare.Violence is evinced as sport mainly through instances of jousting or hunting, while mayhem and aggression are limited to man’s interface with ferce animals. We see a paring down of negative emotion, a downplaying of power and submission expressed in the lack of a hierarchical structure and, most especially, in the absence of the derogated “other”. Perceptible throughout is a smoothing of friction and the willingness to include variance and complexity.We sense in this text of many colors, but devoid of shadows, a unity superimposed upon fragmentation and diversity to create the appearance of social harmony. A society’s mentalité has a decisive effect on the art it produces and the images it chooses to highlight and illuminate. Deeply evocative is the enigmatic joust between a Christian knight and a minority “other”, who is knocked off his horse dropping a scimitar and bearing an escutcheon with a Star of David.A surreal spectacle of ideological tension, this emblematic scene brings into dramatic relief Iberia’s epic struggle of irreconcilables. Suffused with romance and allegory, and carrying a precarious ambiguity anchored in the Iberian imaginary, its psychic and artistic force lies in the confation of the perceived Islamic–Hebrew threat to Christianity. And yet, captured in “slow motion” the action stops just short of realization. Felled but not “fallen”, the minority “other” is not vanquished; nor is the Christian triumphant. Frozen in the timelessness of the subconscious it is the fulfllment of a wish for enduring confict. Expressed through Santa María’s “art of tolerance” this repressed wish can be said to underlie Teruel’s convivencia, its special warp and woof. Because Santa María’s images insuffciently refect the hegemonic, patriarchal character of the Christian enclave and the “vision of the vanquished”, the zone of contact, infuence, and exchange by necessity includes confict. Many are the ambiguities and contradictions embedded in this sprawling, tension-flled “middle ground” where medieval Iberians negotiated their nuanced, uneasy coexistence: their discomfort vis à vis “other” at having to share the space.The Fuero stated that Teruel’s inhabitants were free to reside where they pleased, yet the existence of a judería and a morería (Jewish and Islamic quarters) was indicative of conficted relationships. By the same token, despite the threat of draconian punishments for sexual transgressions by Jews and Muslims with Christian women, in actuality intercultural relationships and even intermarriages were not uncommon. It was because many of the wealthier, more infuential citizens married to converted Jews were members of the Concejo, and thus part of the municipal power structure, that Teruel in 1484 became one of the Inquisition’s earliest targets (Monter 1990, 5–6). Underscoring the messiness of history, the intriguing nature of this ceiling inheres in the emotional quality with which the contrasting images are integrated. Many are the societal changes depicted on this ceiling, church reform being expressed by different types of clerics ministering to the spiritual needs of a diverse population. The elegantly tonsured priest in his embroidered burgundy-colored vestment stands in sharp contrast to the two barefooted mendicants, one wearing a coarse brown habit with a burlap sack fung over his shoulder, the other carrying a wooden board—a rare instance of identifable fgures on this ceiling, in view of the 1217–1220 presence in Teruel of the Franciscan clerics Juan de Perusa and Pedro de Sassoferrato 576
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invited by King James I. Equally remarkable is the emphasis on feeling in the Christ’s Passion segment, where the love and compassion expressed by Mary and Mary Magdalen for the suffering Christ is refected in the weeping guards. More poignant is the awakening of the shared humanism in two unlikely fgures engaged in a common plight and on opposite ends of the social spectrum: a beggar baring his teeth in agony as a ferce dragon bites into his leg, and a young knight similarly ensnared by that all-purpose symbol of evil. In this affect-suffused ambiance, the misogynist image of the harpy—that half-woman, halfbird symbol of unhappy frustrated love—presents a clear counterpoint to the picturesque scene of young couples dallying amorously among stylized trees—an early artistic example of landscape used as a background for romance. Just as expressive is the musical soirée scene where a group of juglares is serenading a noble lady in the tradition of courtly love. It is this focus on human sentiment that allows us to understand why Santa María’s artists chose to give salience to the feminine space. Bearers of the consciousness of difference, these provocative, individualized, and highly gestural women illustrate the inner disharmony and division that is the very source of consciousness. An index of change, they are the carriers of the latest fashions and ideas that make possible the surprising and unorthodox attitudes about sexuality and social diversity. Nor is it surprising that Santa María’s women often embody literary stereotypes: cristianas appearing demure and non-provocative in both dress and manner, while the sybaritic moras with their saucy “come hither” look and risqué attire illuminate the deep cleavage existing between the two (or three) faiths and moralities. As characters as well as symbols, Santa María’s untraditional women display a spectrum of antithetical energies and equivocal meanings. Locked into a discourse of receptivity and rejection, we see a society visually orchestrated from diverse vantage points. A society of multifarious, clashing images that articulate their coherence through the framing effect these techumbre women provide. After all, artistic expression is the mode whereby a self-aware society imagines its world. Illustrating change but without action, plot, or main character, Santa María’s visual narrative tells the humanistic story of Teruel’s secular development in the context of the major transformations in European twelfth- and thirteenth-century understanding. A hybrid, multivalent narrative that required a synthesizing imagination. We can only assume that pressed to produce a historically signifcant image that would give Teruel a secure identity and legitimacy, the artists’ task was to reinterpret the raw material of medieval life, while cleaving to the facts as they knew them to create a nuanced and symbolic vision saturated with feeling.
Historical document Absent documentation, we cannot know how accurately Santa María’s iconography refects the culture of thirteenth-century Teruel. We can surmise that the numerous portraits and scenes contain incongruences and contradictions within the work itself and in its interface with historical facticity. And while the idealistic coloration of the imagery suggests the artists’ personal viewpoints, the profusion, variety, and complexity of this techumbre seem designed to appeal to the varied interests and identities Teruel’s heterogeneous population. Many of the images bespeak time-tested artistic conventions, others seem manifestations of the prevailing discourse of the day: the ethos and collective mindset, minority viewpoints, fears, and longings of a pluralist population. Nor can we discount an ambitious political agenda: the desire to arouse and foster the cohesion of the community on the occasion of the new millennium, and by implication the success of its leaders.This work of many hands was undoubtedly the result of artists and patrons deciding the content, style, and placement of the individual panels. But where the program left off and individual artistic expression began was fertile ground for creativity. 577
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Judging by the fuency with which Santa Maria’s artists were able to negotiate nuance and difference, this vast and colorful work exhibited in the town’s principal church must have been a curtain riser: an unprecedented, awe-inspiring religious and civil event. One imagines the medieval public huddling to whisper and point, identifying a familiar scene here, a recognizable face there. Christians proud of their beautifully decorated church, Muslims and Jews happy merely to look and admire.Viewing the profuse ceiling from down below, craning to discern the images on the side panels, these medieval folks would not have been able to distinguish the details so far above. Still they would have enjoyed the artistic allure. Sharing in a common imaginary and sensibility, they surely appreciated the curiosities and multilayered meanings, even engaging with them.Viewers as well as protagonists in this creative enterprise, these townspeople would have been able to fll gaps in the visual text from memory, hearsay, or storytelling. Recognizing themselves in the work’s actuality, but also cognizant of its historicity, they would have enjoyed the many stories contained therein. As lurking beneath the medieval veneer there are multiple stories, humans being by their very nature storytellers, narrators.And narrative, Roland Barthes reminds us, is the most basic and natural form of expression: “there nowhere is or has been a people without narrative … it is simply there, like life itself ” (Barthes 1977, 79). For us, left to imagine how its multifarious iconography was meant to be understood, Santa Maria’s techumbre remains the testament of a vanished age. A document like no other, this artesonado enables us to see a “living” pluralist society in full color. Crammed with details that supplement and enrich the historical record, it illuminates a defning moment of shifting societal values to reveal intricacies and historical densities that have hitherto eluded us.A departure from the aniconic art of Islamic Iberia, and from the Romanesque–Gothic aesthetic of Christian Europe, this audacious amalgam bespeaks an unusual receptivity to novelty and change. With Teruel’s trajectory from humble beginnings to cultural and economic fourishment, this was a story warranting artistic expression. Devoid of heroic or mythical characters or illustrious events, its originality inheres in its ordinariness: in its capacious portrayal of ordinary folks in commonplace occupations and mundane interests. Succinctly put by Gonzalo Torres Balbás,“La sociedad contemporánea quedó retratada en la techumbre con sus rasgos físicos, vestidura, sus ocupaciones” (Captured on the techumbre is contemporary society with its physical traits, vestments, occupations) (Novella Mateo 1964, 205).
Legacy Fastened to the moment, the variegated images on Santa María’s ceiling harness the affect of nostalgia. Painted in the latter part of the thirteenth century following King James I’s reign, this is a retrospective work memorializing the highpoint of Teruel’s creative development. Upon the death of King James I in 1276, the city began a progressive decline that would soon turn the optimistic and celebrant vision depicted on the techumbre into a distant memory.The conditions that had transformed medieval Teruel into a thriving polity: the unprecedented rise in population, enfranchisement of the rural classes, and extraordinary development of industry and commerce would prove short-lived. Starting in the fourteenth century, Aragon’s across-the-board successes saw the dawning of a new era marked by a series of downturns resulting in rampant discontent within the body politic.The distribution of King James I’s territories among his heirs degenerating into open warfare, and the nobility plotting against King Pedro III, the new monarch, resulted in political fragmentation and increased inequality. Hardening life’s pattern were pressures on local resources combined with acute losses and upheavals, among them the 1348 Bubonic plague that decimated one-third of Europe’s population, and the 1356–1375 “War of the Two Pedros” between Aragon and Castile fought on Turolense soil which pauperized the 578
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city. Intensifying the general suffering was the marginalization of Aragon’s mudéjar population, and the scapegoating of Jews that culminated in the pogroms of 1391 (Utrilla Utrilla 2009, 199–204). And yet, a few years before the announcement of the Edict of Expulsion within this darkened Aragonese landscape, the communal spirit encoded in Santa María’s ceiling would fnd its corroboration.When two inquisitors arriving in Teruel in 1484 to set up a tribunal saw their entry barred by the municipal and ecclesiastical authorities. The immediate reaction of the inquisitors was to excommunicate the city and interdict its magistrates, an act promptly challenged by Teruel’s churchmen who obtained papal letters releasing the municipality from said censures.To reinforce its position the Inquisition then issued a decree confscating all public offces in Teruel, the implacable city continuing its resistance. Until it fnally took King Fernando II’s personal intervention to bring Teruel to heel (Kamen 1997, 51–2). This event, unique in ffteenth-century Spanish history, puts to rest any doubt regarding the resonance of Teruel’s pluralist legacy. Allowing us to view the handiwork of Santa María’s artists with fresh, inquiring eyes, it opens up a new window, albeit roseate and idealistic, in our understanding of what life may have been like for Teruel’s thirteenth-century medieval peoples.
References Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image Music Text.Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang. Dodds, Jerrilynn D. 2000. “Spaces”. The Literature of Al-Andalus. Ed. María Rosa Menocal, Raymond P. Scheindlin and Michael Sells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 83–95. Durkheim, Emile. 2001. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Trans. Carol Cosman. New York: Oxford University Press. Fuchs, Barbara. 2009. Exotic Nation: Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Goitein, S.D. 1983. Mediterranean Society:The Jewish Community of the World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza. vol. IV: Daily Life. Heath, Dillard. 1989. Daughters of the Reconquest:Women in Castilian Town Society, 1100–1300. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kamen, Henry.1997. The Spanish Inquisition:A Historical Revision. New Haven:Yale University Press. Kenaan-Kedar, Nurith. 1995. Marginal Sculpture in Medieval France. Towards the Deciphering of an Enigmatic Pictorial Language.Aldershot: Scholar Press. Lipton, Sara. 2008.“Where Are the Gothic Jewish Women? On the Non-Iconography of the Jewess in the Cantigas de Santa María”. Jewish History,Vol. 22, No. 1/2,The Elka Klein Memorial Volume, published by Springer, 139–177. Mann,Vivian B. 2010. “Jews and Altarpieces in Medieval Spain”, in Uneasy Communion: Jews, Christians, and the Altarpieces of medieval Spain. Ed.Vivian B. Mann. New York: Museum for Biblical Art, 76–129. Monter, William. 1990. The Spanish Inquisition from the Basque Lands to Sicily. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moralejo, Serafín. 1987.“Modelo, copia, originalidad, en le marco de las relaciones hispano-francesas (siglos XI–XIII)”. Originalidad, modelo y copia en el arte medieval hispánico.Actas del V Congreso Español de Historia del Arte. Barcelona,Vol. 1, 89–115 (103). Navarro Espinach, Germán. 2014.“Sociedad y economía bajomedievales”, in Historia de la ciudad de Teruel. Ed. M. Martínez and J.M. Latorre.Teruel: Instituto de estudios turolenses, 158–183. Nicolás-Minué Sánchez,Andrés J. 2011.“Los caballeros villanos. Oligarquía de la Extremadura aragonesa”. en Emblemata,Vol. 17, 213–238. Novella Mateo, Ángel. 1964. “El artesonado de la catedral de Teruel (Santa María de Mediavilla)”. Teruel, Vol. 32, 200–229. Ray, Jonathan. 2009. “Images of the Jewish Community in Medieval Iberia”. Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies,Vol. 1, No. 2, June. New York: Routledge, 195–211. Rodrigo Estevan, María Luz. 2009.“Jaime I,Aragón y los aragoneses: refexiones sobre un rey, un territorio y una sociedad”, in La sociedad en Aragón y Cataluña en el reinado de Jaime I (1213–1276), Esteban Sarasa (coord.). Zaragoza: Institución “Fernando el Católico” (C.S.I.C.).
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36 COLORING WORDS New perspectives on visual culture in León and Castile (thirteenth through fourteenth centuries) Marina Aurora Garzón Fernández and Francisco Prado-Vilar
Through its sayings a man acquires the understanding of the wise, while he enhances the value of what he tells by its loveliness. Shem Tov, The Debate between the Pen and the Scissors (c. 1346), trans. C. Colahan With these words, the Castilian rabbi Shem Tov of Carrión argued that a poem’s value was enhanced by the beauty of the technique deployed to write it (Garzón 2013). Comparing the wondrous paper-cut calligraphy which could be achieved with scissors to the more ordinary and convenient technique of writing by pen he emphasizes that “it brings together the greatness of every poet, and yet the additional value of its words is beyond telling” (Colahan 1979, 285).This idea that a message achieves a higher dimension by the richness of its graphic realization shines through in the golden letters we fnd in the illuminated manuscripts created in Castile in Shem Tov’s time (Rodríguez-Velasco 2016, 125–130). In a way, the letters, which the Jewish author describes as being made with a “profusion of colors” on parchment, recall the advice given by Geoffrey of Vinsauf in his treaty on rhetoric, Poetria Nova (ca. 1210), to “let the discourse always be colored inwards and outwards but choose among colors with discretion” (Colahan 1979, 265; Gallo 1971, 53). He uses the topos of the colores rhetorici to convey the importance of harmonizing style and discourse, suiting the adornment of language to the intended audience.This aesthetic principle, known as decorum and drawn from Cicero and Quintilian, fourished during the thirteenth century with the blossoming of the artes poetriae, the artes predicandi, and the artes dictaminis (Sánchez Ameijeiras 2011). Recent scholarship has looked at medieval treatises of rhetoric, with their rich comparisons between speech and the visual arts, to articulate new approaches to the conceptualization of Gothic visual culture. In the case of medieval Iberia, Rocío Sánchez Ameijeiras’ approach to the sculpted portals of the cathedral of León proposes a new way of understanding visual language looking through the lens of treatises on rhetoric but also through the eyes of its patron, bishop Martín Fernández, as well as the future audience of kings, queens, nobles, clergy, and the rest of the congregation. León Cathedral’s celebrated sculpted portals constitute the frst case study to be discussed in this chapter, which offers a critical overview of relevant issues for the study of Gothic art and visual culture in medieval Iberia. Rather than presenting a comprehensive survey, we will focus on specifc examples that are representative of its thematic diversity, showing the ways in 581
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which recent scholarship has shown potential for methodological innovation and helps signal new directions for future research on a constellation of related works.They range from Gothic architectural sculpture to manuscript illumination, including the Last Judgment portals of León Cathedral and the collegiate church of Santa María de Toro, the narrative cycle of Fleur and Blanchefeur sculpted on the corbels of the chapter house of Burgos Cathedral, Alfonso X’s Cantigas de Santa María, and Alfonso XI’s Chronica Troiana.
Colores retorici in the portals of León Cathedral The three profusely sculpted portals forming the west façade of the cathedral of Santa María de Regla in León (c. 1255–1275) constitute a complex interactive dialogical space made to serve as scenography and as a mirror to the various rituals that took place in the parvis and inside the church. As Sánchez Ameijeiras (2011, 97–101) has shown, its north portal, the door of Saint John the Baptist, presents an expanded sermon around the sacrament of Baptism. Much like the preachers would apply the rhetorical device of amplifcation by embellishing their lectures with metaphors, exegesis, and descriptions, the tympanum and archivolts are decorated with narrative scenes riddled with anecdotes that appeal to a diverse audience of citizens and visitors. Traditionally identifed as a cycle of the infancy of Christ, the underlying and ubiquitous motif of water fows freely connecting the scenes of the frst bath of Jesus and Saint John, and those of the baptisms of Christ and Saint Paul (see Figure 36.1a), to the rest of the composition. Not by chance, this door gave access to the chapel of Saint John where the baptistery of the cathedral was located. Indeed, parishioners would have readily recognized in the Adoration of the Magi an episode commonly used in baptismal fonts. Following the trail opened by Sauerländer (1979), Moralejo (1985), Kemp (1987), and Murray (2004) in comparing the fgurative language of sermons to the images carved in stone, Sánchez Ameijeiras (2014, 73) brings into the discussion the works of the Franciscan scholar Juan Gil de Zamora (1243–1318) as writing parallels to the sculpted portal of Saint John in León.Tender details—like the scene of the ox and the mule keeping Jesus warm after his frst bath, accompanied by preciously rendered domestic objects, such as the jug and the basin used to bathe him—resonate deeply with the literary style of Gil de Zamora.This friar, a close friend of Bishop Martín Fernández, constructed his sermons following the rhetoric devices described by his master, the illustrious Bonaventure, such as analogies, metaphors, exegetical interpretations, descriptions, and contrasts. Indeed “contrast” is precisely one of the darkest features of the Leonese portal.The way in which the sweet scenes of the Nativity carefully align with the horrifying Massacre of the Innocents crowning the tympanum brings out some of the critical messages which are present in this “ode to baptism”, as they are epitomized in the image of the circumcision of John the Baptist (see Figure 36.1b). This scene, where the mohel is holding a sizable knife next to the body of baby John, rhymes visually with the next voussoir where the executioner is raising his sword to decapitate the, now grown up, Baptist.The blood pouring from these images shows a clear contrast with the depiction of water, and its cleansing function, in the scenes of baths and baptism (see Figure 36.1a). According to Sánchez Ameijeiras (2011, 99–100), there is an intentional criticism of the Jewish ritual of circumcision, defned by the shedding of blood, by showing it, in all its gory details, in sharp contrast to the Christian ritual of baptism. This underlying message of the “baptism by blood” is expanded by the scene of the Massacre of the Innocents and the martyrdom of Saint John depicted nearby. Moreover, the negative portrayal of the Synagogue located in one of the jambs adjacent to these scenes invites viewers to look further into the unfavorable depiction of the people of Israel in this sculpted program. León, like most large cities in medieval Iberia, had an 582
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Figure 36.1 León Cathedral, western façade (c. 1255–1275). (a) Portal of St. John the Baptist, archivolt. St. John’s First Bath. (b) Portal of St. John the Baptist, St. John’s circumcision. (c) Last Judgement Portal. Procession of the elect in the Hall of Paradise. © Garzón, with permission.
important Jewish population and it seems plausible that the designer of the program might have had them in mind when planning this stone sermon as a rebuke of their core religious practices. If the portal of Saint John was dedicated to birth and to the frst sacrament, the other two portals were consecrated to death and the end of times.The doors of the Coronation and the Last Judgment pair together to convey a message of passing, resurrection, and intercession.To the south, the smell of incense impregnates the portal where a silent Coronation of the Virgin takes place. The procession of angels carrying candles and incense-burners on two of the archivolts illuminates the passing of Mary, thus bringing into focus the funerary nature of the composition, which would have mirrored the burials inside the cathedral.The Coronation of the Virgin, sitting next to Jesus in body and soul, was an episode commonly linked to the Last Judgment, and in the case of León, the discourse dedicated to the resurrection of the bodies represented in the Last Judgment portal establishes echoes with the dormant body of Mary about to be carried into the hands of her son. The composition of the central portal pivots around a monumental Deisis surrounded by scenes of the Last Judgment. On the frieze underneath, the elect process cheerfully toward the gates of Heaven while the archangel Michael, weighing the souls, separates them from the mouths of Hell and the burning cauldrons (see Figure 36.1c). 583
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The resurrection itself is staged in the archivolts where naked bodies coming out of their tombs are portrayed next to images of the joys of Heaven and the punishments of Hell. This portal, in contrast to the French tradition of Paris and Amiens, does not focus on sin but on the sacrament of Penance, as it was administered by the clergy, and on the subsequent resurrection of the body. The ecclesiastical hierarchy stemming from Saint Peter is highlighted on the frieze where he stands with a smiling face greeting the blessed at the gate of Heaven. Next to this celestial doorway, the Pope is the frst to kneel while he catches sight of eternal glory, followed by a bishop, a friar, and a party of souls joyfully awaiting their moment of entrance. The Franciscan monk and the nun conversing cheerfully with a king also draw attention to the mendicant orders and their privileged position on the way to Heaven—characters who can also be seen in the portals of Amiens and Bourges as well as in the Portada de la Coronería of the Cathedral of Burgos (c. 1245) and the Portal of Majesty in Toro (Zamora) (c. 1265—1290). Once again, the small details give away the underlying message, the bishop, with his right hand on the head of a boy, absolving him before entering Paradise, puts the focus on the sacrament of Penance fundamental for salvation. Much like in the portal of Saint John, the sculptures of the frieze of the elect are sprinkled with anecdotes that engage the viewer offering a glimpse into contemporary life in medieval Iberia.Two musicians playing and pumping the organ project a heavenly soundtrack that muffes the noise of the Last Judgment.This concert harmonizes with the one taking place on the Saint John portal, where an angelic choir sings toward the Nativity. If one portal was used to praise the sacrament of Baptism, the other brings attention to the sacrament of Penance, both discourses sharing a common focus on the body itself. In one portal, the scenes of baptism and martyrdom highlight the sacred nature of the body being cleansed of all sin by the administration of the frst sacrament. In the other portal, the images of the resurrected coming out of their tombs and the corporality of the punishments of Hell emphasize the doctrine of the resurrection of the body that was widely spread through the preaching of the mendicant orders. Caroline W. Bynum (1995) focused on this issue by gathering medieval texts that refected on the destiny of the body after death.Among other writers, Franciscan Bonaventure (1217–1274), mentor to Gil de Zamora, stands out for his long digressions on the relationships of body and soul, which were collected in his Breviloquium and his commentaries on the Sententias of Peter Lombard.This scholar developed the notion of desire as the yearning of the soul to reunite with the body at the end of times. In the voussoirs of León, this longing is forcefully depicted through the eagerness with which the resurrected come out of their graves. This discourse is not only stated vividly on the portal through the voussoirs but also, continuing with the rhetorical analysis of the sculptures, the lush vegetation could be interpreted as a metaphor for resurrection. According to the Historia Naturalis by Gil de Zamora, every spring, the earth revived recovering its splendor “in the likeness of resurrection”. However, when it comes to interpreting the portals of León in relation to the content of the Artes Praedicandi, Sánchez Ameijeiras (2004) does not only take into account poetic rhetorical devices such as metaphors, analogies, and descriptions, but she delves deeper into the semantics of styles. In her opinion, it is shortsighted to consider that an artist is less sophisticated for the use of a more “facile” or colloquial style, when in fact the artist might be very aware of the principles of decorum and he may be choosing a specifc visual rhetoric depending on the message he is trying to convey. In her study on Gothic choir screens, Jacqueline Jung (2000) used the concept of “vernacular imagery” proposed by Stubblebine and Kemp to defne the narrative visual trend used in these reliefs, characterized by the proliferation of anecdotes and detailed descriptions. She compared the differences between sermons written in Latin, in a gravis mode, for a cultivated audience, 584
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and the ones written in vernacular languages, in a humilis (humble) mode, more inclined toward humorous episodes and everyday stories, planned for an illiterate public. These differences are also patent in visual discourses, and while some programs, with complicated eschatological messages and abstract metaphysical discourses would have used a visual language defned by its gravitas, many of the cycles carved on choir screens served probably as props for the preachers to illustrate their vernacular sermons, hence the narrative style. Sánchez Ameijeiras goes one step further than this division and argues that according to the rules of decorum a Latin sermon could be written in a humble mode, and a vernacular sermon could also be gravis.This would be the case of the west façade of León where each portal was programmed in a different mode.The door of Saint John, with its baptismal discourse expressed through the multiplication of fgures narrating diverse episodes from Christ’s childhood and the lives of Saint John and Saint Paul would be an example of a vernacular sermon expressed in a humilis tone. On the other side, the door of the Coronation is also vernacular in content and audience. Nevertheless, the lack of narration or anecdotes, the repetition of patterns, and the static fgures convey a serious tone that should be defned as gravis. Finally, the portal of the Last Judgment arises as an example of sophisticated rhetoric that not only combines characteristics of the humble mode and the gravis mode but also includes a third mode that Sánchez Ameijeiras described as “visionary”. The vernacular and the humble come together at the Gates of Heaven where, as was pointed out earlier, the elect converse cheerfully while the sweet music of the organ warms the scene. The richness in gestures and details, like the fgure who comfortably rests his elbow on the wing of an angel while talking to a hooded musician, fts the humilis mode but also implies a vernacular setting that suggests that these characters are not chatting in Latin (see Figure 36.1a). Nevertheless, no matter how lively the procession of the elect might look, the Gates of Heaven are part of an eschatological program, a complex metaphysical discourse about the resurrection of the bodies that was neither vernacular nor humble. For this reason, the sculptor of the Last Judgment chose a language that stands out for its elegance. Labeled as “naturalistic expressionism”, the fgures of the Master of the Last Judgment can be recognized for the stylization and slenderness of the bodies that emanates a certain aesthetic mannerism. Sánchez Ameijeiras traces these features back to other representations of the Last Judgments like the lost south portal of Saint Denis and the Portal of Bourges Cathedral, but mainly she compares the style of the Leonese master to the visual language exemplifed by the smiling angel of the famous Douce Apocalypse (c. 1270). The exaggerated poses seen in the characters of the Last Judgment of León, as well as the facial expressions and the agitated movements, are features that can usually be linked to eschatological or prophetic contexts. Once more, in her illuminating discussion of these portals, Sánchez Ameijeiras retrieves a text by Bonaventure and projects onto the sculptures of Leon the qualities that the Franciscan author attributed to angels and resurrected bodies: agilitas, the ability to move instantaneously everywhere, subtilitas, lightness and claritas, the shining clearness. The features described above as the style of the master of the Last Judgment, i.e. imbalance, distortion, movement, and disproportion, could actually be interpreted as a visionary mode reserved for prophetic and eschatological discourses.
Painting the city in the Hell of Toro: damned architects and the seeds of discord The Portal of Majesty of the church of Santa María la Mayor de Toro (c. 1265–1290) in Zamora offers another important case study to delve into the nuances and complexity of the rhetorical confguration and design of Gothic monumental ensembles in medieval Iberia. Unlike León Cathedral’s sprawling façade, here the three Christian cycles are compressed into one profusely 585
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decorated doorway.The discourse unfolds in all its chromatic splendor around the Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin depicted on the tympanum and the frst six archivolts. On the lower part of the portal, a series of six capitals is dedicated to Christ’s Childhood while the niches give shelter to kings, prophets, and angels (Ruíz Maldonado 1998). Finally, the whole portal appears embraced by a monumental outer archivolt that doubles in size the other structural elements.The artists of Toro took advantage of this constructive anomaly to create a canopied frieze featuring one of the most compelling Last Judgments of the Iberian Peninsula.This surprising solution allowed them to isolate each program while simultaneously intertwining their content (Garzón 2019, 162). At the center of the discourse is the Coronation of the Virgin surrounded by a crowded celestial court. Almost 100 characters, including angels, saints, martyrs, and musicians populate the six inner archivolts exuding an atmosphere of elegantly choreographed celebration. Similar to what happened in the portal of the Coronation of León, these sculptures can be described as static, monotonous, and repetitive—qualities that are distinctive of the gravis mode. In contrast, the voussoirs dedicated to the Last Judgment are articulated with narrative scenes and remarkable details more suited for the humilis mode (Sánchez Ameijeiras 2011, 115). A Deisis sculpted on the keystone crowns this portal, dividing almost with perfect symmetry the destiny of the elect and the damned.To the right of Christ, the frieze is dedicated to the elect and their way to Paradise. Resurrected bodies coming orderly out of their graves parade toward Heaven in a party that is mainly composed of members of the clergy such as nuns, monks, and bishops. The gardens of Paradise stand out for their innovative iconography where leafy vines enclose the inhabitants of Heaven while a group of courtly musicians play their instruments surrounded by lush palm trees (see Figure 36.2c) (Navarro Talegón 2005). Next to the gates, the King of Heaven welcomes the newly arrived celebrating a ritual of homage for the vassals of his eternal kingdom, performing a ceremony known as inmixtio manum. As was noted by Marina Garzón (Garzón 2019, 201), this representation of God as King of Heaven is unique in Iberia. Symmetrically opposed to this scene, a crowned Satan sitting on a throne welcomes the procession of the damned who are about to join the punishments of Hell (Fig. 36.2a). Holding a roll in his hand, and squired by a monstrous page, the Satan of Toro is portrayed as a judge deciding the ominous destiny of the sinners—another iconographical singularity of this portal. Transcending the doors of Hell, hanged naked bodies serve to warn the greedy and the sodomites while abominable devils torture and cook other unfortunate individuals. In the depths of Hell, a woman bitten by snakes covers her ears from the unbearable noise of the Apocalypse. The people of Toro should have been scared, for they were probably the ones portrayed at the infernal threshold (Garzón 2019, 196–200). Architects, traders, and knights are being escorted by demons toward the fames of Hell. Their scared faces may have served as a refection of the city’s inhabitants, as has been pointed out in other portrayals of the Last Judgment in medieval Iberia such as the one from Tudela (Mariño, 1989). It is plausible that the artists who designed the Portal of Toro refected events that took place in the city. Starting with the construction of the church, we see how two architects, identifed by their tools, lead the party of damned, and, to be sure, the building of Santa María la Mayor de Toro was not one without incidents, thus the image of the compass had to raise an ironic smile from the viewer who had already seen the crooked window with uneven concentric circles at the north gable (Pedrero Encabo 2017).While Sánchez Ameijeiras (2014, 160) and José Luis Navarro Talegón (2005, 79) remarked on this clear allusion to the construction problems during the previous century, the image of architects entering Hell could also be interpreted as a symbol of the vice of Pride (Garzón 2019, 197). Cycles dedicated to vices and virtues were commonly intertwined in Last Judgment programs like the ones in Paris and 586
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Figure 36.2 Santa María la Mayor de Toro (Zamora), Portal of Majesty (c. 1265–1290). (a) Architects at the gates of Hell. (b) Procession of the damned. (c) Gardens of Paradise. © Ignacio Mascuñán Freijanes, with permission.
Amiens, and in the case of Toro, the main vices seem to be portrayed in the procession of the damned starting with what the Bible described as the beginning of all vice: Pride:“initium omnis peccati est superbia” (Ecclesiasticus X: 14). Although the vice of Pride was usually represented by a knight falling from his horse, architects were also known for their arrogance. This connection was studied by Paul Binski (2010, 15), who gathered and reviewed some of the bad press medieval architects received. He points out Peter the Chanter of Notre Dame who compared the hubris of Gothic architects, building excessively tall churches, to that of Dedalus. In fact, the fall of the tower of Lincoln was blamed on the insolence of the builders (“insolentia artifci”) in the Peterborough Abbey chronicle. It is possible that the author of this chronicle had in mind the Civitate Dei (16:4) of Augustine of 587
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Hippo, where the philosopher refects on the construction of the tower of Babel and accuses Nimrod and the inhabitants of Babel of “impious pride” (“impia soberbia”). Avarice follows Pride in the Portal of Majesty.The extended iconography of the miser with a bag of gold hanging from his neck takes an interesting turn on the voussoir of Toro where a sitting creature blows on the rear of a goat-like animal defecating a row of coins into a sack (Rodríguez Barral 2010, 16). Like a set of well-oiled gears, the devils of Toro show the organized infrastructure of the hereafter where punishment works in assembly lines.When a person riddled with cupidity arrives at the doors of Hell, a purse of cursed gold coins blown out of a goat is provided to them before entering the precinct (Figure 36.2b).The town of Toro was a commercial one, known for its markets and its fourishing economy; the names on the street maps still show nowadays the guild organization (García 2002, 445–458). In this context the fve men and women depicted in the portal were clearly warning the traders and business-people of the city. Finally, three naked men covered with a book, an inverted shield, and a loaf of bread summarize the three estates as well as three vices (Figure 36.2b).The clergy, represented by the book, was commonly related to Lust; the knight, with a shield, was a symbol of Rage; and the peasant, with a large loaf of bread, may be an image of Gluttony. In addition, the history of Toro and the turbulent relationships that connected its people brings the vice of Discord to mind. A closer look into the archives helps to paint a better picture of the city (Garzón 2019, 199). According to the documents, one of the main problems in Toro and the lands surrounding the city was signifcant conficts among different powers due to issues of jurisdiction. Confrontation based on property was commonplace in thirteenth-century Zamora leading to continuous lawsuits and even excommunication. An especially well-documented case was the dispute between the Council of Toro and the Cathedral of Zamora over the borders of Venialbo. This confict, frst mentioned in 1219, reached its peak during the pontifcate of bishop Suero who in 1265 accused the people of Toro of raiding his lands, burning and looting his properties, and demolishing the milestones. In fact, this bishop requested that Pope Clement IV excommunicate many knights in Toro whose names are now immortalized on the documents. Besides the friction with the bishop, the Council of Toro quarreled with other institutions that owned neighboring land such as the Knights Hospitallers, the abbey of Sahagún, or the monastery of San Román de Hornija resulting in continuous hostilities among vassals (García 2002, 488–500). These disputes transcended social classes, and all of them have the constant presence of churchmen, knights, and peasants that contributed undoubtedly to color the climate of confict.Three naked men, a churchman, a knight, and a peasant summarize the burning, the raiding, and the looting in the portal of Toro (Garzón 2019, 224–29).
Kaleidoscopic culture in the Cantigas of Santa María The Portal of Majesty was built during the age of Marian devotion in León and Castile. The visual resources that can be seen in Toro share a common context that explains similarities found with other works such as the Cantigas de Santa María.This phenomenon is particularly striking in the image of Paradise depicted with palm trees and musicians (Figure 36.2c), an iconography that is unique in monumental sculpture and stands out for its resemblances to a miniature from the Cantiga 100 (fol. 145r) (Pérez Higuera 1988). Despite the long textual tradition describing the gardens of Paradise as a place flled with music and vegetation, visual interpretation was rarely a literary translation and it was more common to portray Paradise using metaphors like the Heavenly Jerusalem or the Bosom of Abraham. However, the artists of Toro and the Cantigas may have chosen to update their models and look for references in the Islamic world. At least, that is the opinion of Teresa Perez Higuera (1988) and Francisco Prado-Vilar (2005 and 2011), 588
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who see in the reliefs of Toro and Alfonso’s manuscript, textual infuence from the Qur’an and visual infuence from the illustrated books of Al-Hariri’s Maqamat. The synergies resulting from the contact between Christians and Muslims in Iberia are a constant in modern scholarship. It is now accepted that the Other, as it has been usually portrayed was closer than traditionally thought. Francisco Prado-Vilar (2005) explored the consequences of this relationship in the Cantigas de Santa María and developed the notion of Gothic anamorphic gaze highlighting the value of using a multi-perspective approach to study the visual culture of thirteenth-century Iberia. Prado-Vilar defnes the Gothic anamorphic gaze as “a gaze informed by experience and direct knowledge of cultural religious diversity, rather than by dogma and ingrained stereotypes of alterity” (2005, 72). He argues that Gothic art in Iberia has traditionally been analyzed through the eyes of Northern scholarship, thus missing the nuances that come from a Mediterranean multicultural society. What is more, the focus on well-known narrative devices such as typology, analogy, or exegesis resulted in the overlooking of other resources such as the depiction of intimate spaces, human emotion, and quotidian subjects that could be used for propaganda. The Códice Rico de las Cantigas de Santa María (Escorial: MS.T. I. I) is one of the four manuscripts commissioned by Alfonso X containing over 400 poems dedicated to the Virgin written in Galician–Portuguese.This codex (c. 1275–1284) stands out because it was heavily illuminated, each cantiga captured with a fgurative representation of its main episodes. The dimensions of the project, with 200 poems and their corresponding illustrations, allows us to glimpse the complexities of visual culture in Castile at the time. Perusing the pages of the codex, Prado-Vilar (2005, 67–9) proposes a look through the “rear window” of the average families portrayed on the parchment entering their spaces of intimacy. In Cantiga 46 (Figure 36.3a), for example, a Muslim converts to Christianity after seeing a looted icon of the Virgin transform into fesh and breastfeed her child, however, as Prado-Vilar points out, the visual representation of this conversion may be more elaborate than the poem.The illustration of Cantiga 46 displays the interior of the Muslim’s house in two deeply personal scenes. The viewer is not supposed to have access to the family’s private chambers where the Muslim is praising the Virgin and the wife is playing with and breastfeeding their son. Nevertheless, it is this scene that serves to build a bond, a connection, a space of affnity between the Muslim and the viewer. In this context, looking carefully at the image of the wife and son, mirroring the Virgin breastfeeding her Jesus, one could think that the Muslim’s conversion had more to do with the universal value of motherhood concentrated on the fgure of the Virgin rather than the miracle performed by the icon as described in the poem. Prado-Vilar (2005, 69) adapts the Lacanian concept of extimacy to analyze this exposure of private life used to create a connection with the spectator. In the illustration of Cantiga 205, a Christian audience witnessing a Muslim mother and child about to die in the collapse of a burning building starts praying in order to save them because of their resemblance to the Virgin.This cantiga portrays a merciful Christian audience capable of empathy with the Other. In fact, both cantigas go to illustrate that instead of the simplistic idea of the infdel Muslim as a symbol of sin and evil, it was people with families and believers in Jesus and Mary that should be converted for the good of a united Christian society (Prado-Vilar 2005, 205–274). Comparison between text and image in the Cantigas brings out the spaces of extimacy. In some cases, the artists decided to prioritize the representation of relatable feelings instead of focusing on the praising of the Virgin expressed in the text. That is the case of Cantiga 139 (Figure 36.3b), dedicated to the early death of a child who, according to the Christian view expressed in the text, was “fortunate” to join Mary in Heaven at a young age. The artist in charge of this illustration departed from the text and decided to add some scenes that were not 589
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Figure 36.3 Cantigas de Santa María, Escorial, Biblioteca del Real Monasterio, MS. T.I.1 (c. 1284). (a) Cantiga 46 (fol. 68v), the Muslim sees the Virgin breastfeeding her child and he converts to Christianity. (b) Cantiga 139 (fol. 195r), a father welcomes his son home. (c) Cantiga 4 (fol. 9v) a Jewish child is saved from burning in the oven. © Patrimonio Nacional, with permission.
described in the poem focusing on the tragedy of a family for the loss of their child. Just like in the poem, he shows a mother that takes her son to church where he talks to the Virgin who assures him that she will soon see him in Heaven. Afterward, the cantiga is quick to close the narration by saying that the words of the Virgin soon became true. However, the artist chose to expand the story by showing an intimate scene of the child coming home to his father. Once again, the viewer has a privileged look into a home interior and the life of a family.The affection expressed on the face of the father who stares deeply into his son’s eyes is even more moving when coupled with the next vignette.The child’s funeral closes the story leaving no room for celebration. It is heartbreaking to look at the family around their son’s deathbed and the father 590
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covering his weeping eyes. Here the illustrations of the Cantigas allow space for the representation of overlooked moments that make life worth living, the moment of quotidian love and happiness (Prado-Vilar 2005, 85–8). Prado-Vilar argues that there was a conscious choice made by the artists to depart from the text. Instead of presenting an image of the Paradise afforded to the child by his early death, they chose to highlight the tragedy of a broken family, giving more importance to the happiness of the child and his family while entering his father’s arms than his assumption into the Father’s bosom. A step into the realm of everyday life and extratheological emotions may have been traditionally interpreted as naive or simple, but Prado-Vilar (2005, 87–90) sees in these scenes a political agenda. For this scholar, the captivating scenes that are spread throughout the Códice Rico are contributing to build an ideal society characterized not only by its faith, but also by values like family, empathy, love, and kindness. Small details that could have been relegated to marginalia hold in the illustrations of the Cantigas a major role in the construction of a Castilian identity. According to Alfonso X’s testament, the Cantigas were to be sung on the feasts of the Virgin in the church where he would be buried next to his father Fernando III, the former mosque of Seville. It was to be expected that these celebrations, which took place in a hybrid architecture, would also have had a multi-ethnic audience that might have included the King of the neighboring kingdom of Granada as well as the Muslims and Jews that lived in Seville or participated in the court of Castile. It is in this context where the Códice Rico has to be understood as part of a larger performance encompassing all levels of society (Prado-Vilar 2005, 80–1). The illustrations of these manuscripts served to confgure a propaganda apparatus that sought to portray an ideal Castilian society (Prado-Vilar 2005, 98). This ideal of a unifed Christian kingdom where every person had a place and contributed to the well-being of the community permeates the works commissioned by Alfonso X. In fact, it was put into words in his Siete Partidas, a legal code that encompassed traditional, Roman, and canon law embedded with biblical texts as well as philosophy and doctrine (Sánchez-Arcilla 1999, 41). Prado-Vilar (2005, 72) saw in the Cantigas de Santa María the values that were built into the Partidas and he highlighted its approach to the kingdom’s diversity driven by a goal of integration. The Siete Partidas have a section dedicated to the Muslim and Jewish minorities where it is expressed that:“Christians should endeavor to convert the Moors by causing them to believe in our religion, and bring them into it by kind words and suitable discourses, and not by violence or compulsion” (VII, 25:2).This method of conversion is perfectly portrayed in the aforementioned cantigas, where the Muslim of the Cantiga 46 and the Muslim woman of Cantiga 205 became Christians after understanding that the Virgin was truly the mother of all. Furthermore, many of the poems are addressing these minorities in their role as mothers, such as Cantiga 89 where a Jewish woman is experiencing a complicated pregnancy and the Virgin miraculously cures her inability to give birth (Prado-Vilar 2005, 97). However, as Prado-Vilar pointed out, seducing the Jews into Christianity required different strategies than seducing the Muslims because the people of Israel did not believe in the sanctity of Mary or Jesus, both important fgures in the Qur’an (Prado-Vilar 2011, 124–26). Cantiga 4 (Figure 36.3c) provides another example to illustrate Alfonso X’s sophisticated politics of conversion, as it pertains to the Jews. A Jewish boy who went to school and learned to read with Christian boys was so charmed by what he read that he did not hesitate to enter a church on an Easter day. Seeing the radiance of the Virgin he was compelled to take communion from her and he found it sweeter than honey.This frst part of the poem portrays the ideal indoctrination according to Alfonso X.The conversion of women and children was part of the biopolitical strategy of the king to achieve his perfect society, hence the numerous references in the Cantigas to the well-being of children who confde in the Virgin. As for the boy in Cantiga 591
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4, his betrayal of the Jewish community was punished by his father who tried to kill him by throwing him into his glass oven.The piercing cries of the mother attracted a crowd that opened the oven to see the boy unhurt, having been protected by the Virgin. According to the poem, the mother converted and the boy received baptism while the father was thrown into the fames (Prado-Vilar 2011, 129–133). Contrary to other examples mentioned above, the artists of the Cantigas were very loyal to the text in depicting this poem, however, it is rather surprising that they decided to omit a miniature about the baptism.The last two images of the set constitute a couple that depict the good Jew, converted to Christianity in the arms of the Virgin on the left, and the bad Jew thrown into fames on the right. Prado-Vilar noted that the omission of a scene of baptism by water could be explained because the oven is a metaphor for Mary’s womb. In a way, one could also argue that by being thrown into the fre, the Jewish boy had actually received baptism by blood. Furthermore, Prado-Vilar “baptized” this character as an example of a category of converted Jew promoted in the Cantigas that he terms, building on Angamben’s discussion of homo sacer, iudeus sacer. As this scholar formulates it the “term iudeus sacer, with its double meaning of excluded and sacred, aims to capture the dialectical status of this fgure, which stands at the biological, social and religious threshold of Jewish and Christian identities” (Prado-Vilar 2012, 133). From the point of view of the father/Jewish law, “he is sacer (accursed) in its negative sense as a fgure of exclusion”, argues Prado-Vilar, “while from the point of view of the mother/Mary/Christianity, he is sacer (sacred) in the positive sense as a sacredly begotten fgure ” (2012, 132).Abandoned by the father, stripped of his legal status and religious identity, the Jewish boy becomes malleable to change. Indeed, it is in his condition as iudeus sacer, that is, in his reduction to bare life, that the Jewish boy becomes susceptible to enter, through the transformative biotheology of the Incarnation, into the Christian community.The image of the Jewish boy coming out of the oven/womb into the Christian community dramatizes the transition between iudeus sacer in its negative sense and iudeus sacer in its positive sense—a transition that is embedded in this new subject’s identity as a dynamic reversibility—a constant dialectical movement from one sense of the term to the other. Iudeus sacer is a pure fgure of potentiality because it is permanently suspended in that unresolved dialectical reversibility at the threshold of Jewish and Christian identities—a dialectical bipolarity which will determine its feeting historical existence beyond the parchment page.
Colors of love and conversion in Flores and Blancaflor Three generations after Alfonso X, his great-grandson Alfonso XI wandered through the cloister of the Cathedral of Burgos, seeing history unfold in stone before his eyes. Statues of his ancestors populated the walls. Next to the entrance was the betrothal of Fernando III and Beatriz de Suabia, which marked a crucial milestone for the dynasty. Alternating with the effgies of kings were the images of bishops underscoring the partnership between both institutions in the Cathedral of Burgos.The cloister was a space of solemnity and remembrance, where luxurious sepulchers commemorated the glorious past of the cathedral, and in one of the corner pillars, a group of sculptures showed the foundation of this institution as if it were frozen in time.The ceremony of consecration is summarised with the images of a bishop assisted by a cleric, and the presence of the king memorialized the origin of the long-lasting partnership between the cathedral and the monarchy (Sánchez Ameijeiras 2012, 449–450). Sánchez Ameijeiras describes Alfonso XI’s hypothetical walk under the rib vaults of the cloister, and how he would be able to read the story recounted on the walls, like chapters in a chronicle. Each bay decorated with a sculpture would function like the illustrated frontispiece that introduced each section of the manuscript (Sánchez Ameijeiras 2012). Time-travel would 592
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happen backward as he walked slowly towards the foundation of the institution and then, when he arrived at the newly built chapter house, he would enter a time of legends. On the corbels supporting the tall star vault he would recognize the frontier tale of Flores and Blancafor, a story of love and conversion that happened in some remote past. Although there are many versions to this tale, originated with the French Fleur and Blanchefeur and known also in Italy as Florio and Biancafore, it is possible that Alfonso XI would locate the home of Flores in Almería which was back then a part of the kingdom of Granada. According to the tale, Blancafor was a Christian noble girl who was kidnapped by the Muslims on a pilgrimage to Santiago and she was then raised in the company of Flores, a Muslim prince who was born on the same day as she.When the family realized the love that had come to grow between the two, they decided to separate them through different schemes that culminated with the selling of Blancafor to the king of Babylon. Hurt and vexed, Flores decided to rescue her, and traveled to Babylon. Concealed in a basket of fowers he infltrates the harem where Blancafor has grown to become the king’s favorite. Although they are discovered and sentenced to death, the king fnally pardons them and they travel back to Almería where Flores converts to Christianity. In the end, they get married and after his father’s death the kingdom converts to Christianity as well (Baranda 1991–1992). Sánchez Ameijeiras identifed this story on the corbels of Burgos as the earliest depiction of the legend and analyzed the intricate narrative organization that was used to portray it. Given the unusual format, linearity was not seen as the best option, in contrast with other settings like a painting on a wall or miniatures in a codex. Instead, this author uses the ribs of the star vault as a means of connection to read the story through a criss-cross pattern that can be understood through the rhetorical notion of ductus.The frst two images that would be seen by Alfonso XI, the presentation images would be the two corbels located on the eastern wall. On the right, a lady holding a blooming lily with a dog on her lap can be identifed with Blancafor, and to the left a knight fghting a lion would be Flores. Both are carrying polysemic attributes. The crown of fowers that Flores is wearing could be alluding to his name but it was also a symbol of his condition as lover. As for Blancafor, the lily was a well-known image of purity as well as a mirror of her name. These “images of presentation” do not give away the story easily, for this reason Alfonso XI would have to look to the frst corbel to his right, at the entrance of the chapter house in order to recognize the childhood of the two lovers (see Figure 36.4a).This corbel chose an interesting composition to summarize the process of growing old together.The children are portrayed opposite to each other on both ends of the corbel. Little Flores immersed in a book on the left side, and little Blancafor taking advice from an older woman on the right side. In the middle of the corbel, both lovers turn to each other following a classic composition of “amour courtoise”, or courtly love. In the background, a lush tree locates the scene in a garden where Flores accompanied by his master Garsión stares tenderly at Blancafor who is carrying a puppy, a typical attribute in Western love imagery.This depiction of childhood blooming into young adulthood captures successfully one of the main episodes of the story of Flores and Blancafor. Despite the different versions of this legend, the description of young love is common to all. For this reason, it was frequently used to disclose the identity of the lovers in fgurative cycles like the one in the Nasrid palace of the Alhambra (Sánchez Ameijeiras 2012, 455–57). The ribs of the star vault would take the gaze of Alfonso XI to any given corbel. In front of him, the young lady surrounded by two knights could be interpreted as a scene relating to Blancafor.To the left, one of the most dynamic reliefs of this cycle presents Flores riding a horse and fghting a lion, captures the quest of the young prince on his way to rescue his sweetheart. To the south, Flores and Blancafor can be seen reunited (Figure 36.4b).This scene has a clear 593
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Figure 36.4 Burgos Cathedral, Capilla de Santa Catalina (c. 1344) (a) Corbel on the west wall: Flores and Blancafor as young lovers. (b) Corbel on the south wall: Flores and Blancafor meet in Babylon. © Rocío Sánchez Ameijeiras, with permission.
exotic vibe, with Flores wearing an oriental turban and Blancafor holding a lion cub on her lap. It is not a coincidence that they chose a southern corbel to portray this image so that the viewer could look to the south and identify the scene with an event happening in an Islamic setting.As pointed out by Sánchez Ameijeiras (2012, 460–61), although a modern audience might fnd an eastern corbel more geographically accurate, orientation is also a matter of feeling, and Castilian Christians located the Islamic Empire south of their kingdom. Alfonso XI would turn his eyes south and locate this episode of Flores and Blancafor in the far east, in Babylon.Then he would look up north in a movement that would parallel the trip the two lovers took back to Spain, 594
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and on the northern wall he would see a corbel representing King Flores already converted to Christianity in a scene where a group of Muslims pays tribute to their new king. However impossible it is to know what Alfonso XI thought when he visited the cloister of Burgos, Sánchez Ameijeiras “ductile” analysis opens up new possibilities of interpretation of an otherwise cryptic sculptural ensemble setting the path for other cases in medieval Iberia. She points out that the theoretical visit of King Alfonso XI to Burgos would have taken place after he emerged victorious from the famous battle of El Salado.This triumph was a highlight of his reign that was celebrated in the Cronica de Alfonso XI and the Poema de Alfonso XI and it must have infuenced the king’s attitude towards the south. In this context, Sánchez Ameijeiras explains that the corbel where the Muslims are paying tribute to Christian king Flores could be seen in three temporalities. First, it portrays an image of the past, of that legendary time where the story of Flores and Blancafor takes place. Second, it could illustrate the present, conveying the different visits from the ambassadors of Granada and Banu Marin or representing the tributes that were being paid by the recently surrendered citizens of Algeciras. Finally, it was an image that communicated a wished future in which Alfonso XI would fnally conquer Granada, and as in the tale of Flores and Blancafor, would reign over a Christianized united kingdom. Furthermore, Sánchez Ameijeiras (2012, 463) goes on to focus on the characters of Garsion, Flores’ master, and Gandifer, his chancellor, that were portrayed in some of the corbels next to the prince. According to this scholar, the prominence acquired by these characters has to be understood within the changing fourteenth-century administration, when non-aristocrats where gaining weight as counselors to the King.The rise of the Caballeros villanos, a new social class defned by non-noble knights, would help to reshape the administration of Alfonso XI, and in this context, the complementing scenes of the corbels with fghting knights could easily be associated with the new regime. The legend of Flores and Blancafor depicted on the corbels of the Capilla de Santa Catalina bring together a frontier tale of conversion through love that complements the historical Castilian discourse depicted in the cloister. If the sculpture program distributed through the galleries could be read as a chronicle, the cycle of Flores and Blancafor would act as an interpolation, used to promote the values of Christianity and Castilian identity by recalling a distant past (Sánchez Ameijeiras 2012, 461).
Colored marbles on the walls of Troy As a king who enjoyed chronicles and foundational myths, Alfonso XI shared with his greatgrandfather a love for lavishly decorated manuscripts. Among the works he commissioned, the Crónica Troyana, a Spanish translation of Benoit de Saint Maure’s Roman de Troie, stands out for its fgurative program. This manuscript is decorated with full-page illustrations narrating the history of Troy according to the apocryphal accounts of Dares and Dictys.The Roman de Troie represents a paradigm of the process of reinterpretation of classical literature in the Middle Ages. The use of anachronism as a literary device resulted in the updating of the story to suit modern audiences by incorporating, for instance, the values of chivalric novels or describing scenes of battles and duels according to the medieval tradition.This updated version of Troy would spread into the miniatures where Trojan and Greek warriors are dressed in armor and fght in front of crenelated castles. Nevertheless, this use of anachronisms must not be cast aside as naive but as an alternative fuid understanding of the past (Rodríguez-Porto 2005, 9–12). With this in mind, Rosa Rodríguez-Porto (2005) approached the images of the city of Troy represented in the Crónica Troyana looking for the differential factors that characterized them as a “Castilian visual translation” (Figure 36.5). She pointed out that in the same way that the 595
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Figure 36.5 Crónica Troyana of Alfonso XI, Escorial, Real Biblioteca del Real Monasterio, MS. h.I.6 (c. 1345). Troy restored. © Patrimonio Nacional, with permission.
translation of the text underwent a process of re-elaboration and adaptation conditioned by the new cultural context and intended audience, the images accompanying the text would also show specifc traits. Although the Crónica Troyana presents a close translation when compared with the French Roman de Troie, it is possible to distinguish certain passages with variations or amplifcations of the text. Especially relevant is the addition of an Isidorian description of the division of the world that was also captured in a miniature of a “T-O map”.The inclusion of this fragment was probably related to the reputation of Isidor of Seville as one of the main scholars in the history of Iberia. His Etimologias were extensively used in the workshops of Alfonso X and it is possible that the translator of the Roman de Troie wanted to reclaim the works of this Iberian author as a tribute. But the Iberian soul of the manuscript becomes especially apparent in the miniatures. The visual devices chosen to portray the rich descriptions contained in the text give way to a complex society characterized by the coexistence of multiple cultures. The description of the city of Troy, according to the text of Benoit de Saint Maure, fts in the tradition of ekphrases built of a collection of topoi. As was customary, he starts by praising the unconquerable walls highlighting their remarkable size and precious materials. He then goes on to present the palaces of the Trojan aristocracy drawing special attention to Priam’s castle, the alcaçar, located on top of a 596
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rock overlooking the city and described as a symbol of power and glory. Finally, he fnishes the account celebrating the robust gates, the well-designed streets, and the splendid temples. All of these details were taken into account by the artist who illustrated the manuscript (RodríguezPorto 2005). Most of the miniatures representing the city of Troy can be recognized for their magnifcent walls shining with stones of different colors.The ashlars in blue, red, black, and purple are a literary translation of the text (“marmol et bermeia et negra et cardena et vis et india”).The most prominent feature that also gives away the identity of the city is the alcaçar, the fortress of Ylion, easy to spot because it is always shown on top of a square rock, described in the text as a “whole rock carved around” (“una roca entera taiada en derredor”). Surrounding the castle and protected by the gleaming walls, a series of palaces and temples are portrayed, adorned with towers, crenels, and tracery windows that match the architectural context of fourteenth-century Castile. All these elements are common to the images of Troy throughout the manuscript and distinguish it from other cities like Mycenae or Ithaca (fols. 13v, 23v, 40v, 127v, 159v, 160r). Rodríguez-Porto (2005, 16–21) analyzes the different infuences that can be appreciated in these illustrations. She points out the presence of the horseshoe arches, a typical feature of the so-called “Hispano-Mauresque” repertoire, and she compares them to the Gothic architectures and the Italian buildings.1 According to this author, these elements were not combined randomly in order to create an exotic landscape in compliance with the legendary times of Homer, but they were rather chosen carefully to paint a fourteenth-century Castilian city. Rosa Rodríguez observes that the horseshoe arches are only used in the walls of Troy, never to portray palaces or temples. She realizes that this was actually the reality of conquered cities in Andalusia where it was common to keep the sturdy structure of the Islamic walls and alcázares but to build Gothic temples as a symbol of colonization. Nevertheless, looking at the beautiful tracery windows crowning Priam’s fortress on the miniatures of the Crónica Troyana, she points out a parallel, the city of Seville, where King Alfonso X decided to build a Gothic palace inside the Islamic alcázares.This solution would be emulated by his great-grandson Alfonso XI who also built Christian palaces in Córdoba. If Alfonso XI was able to observe different temporalities when looking at the corbels of Flores and Blancafor, he could do so as well with the miniatures of the Crónica Troyana. On one hand, the distant past associated with pagans was distinguished by the use of Italianesque buildings, symbolizing great Roman architecture, on the other hand Troyans and Greeks were brought closer to the present by being portrayed in a courtly fashion, playing games common among the Castilian aristocracy like the “juego de bohordos” (Rodríguez Porto 2005, 15–9). The “juego de bohordos” [game of lances and castles] can be seen in the illustration depicting Paris and Helena’s arrival to Troy. This game which consisted of throwing small spears at miniature wooden castles can be traced back to the Muslims and it became popular among the aristocracy of fourteenth-century Castile. In the same illustration two couples represented on top of the fortress are sitting on the foor, a la morisca, that is, in the Muslim manner.These characters are another example of hybrid iconography that combines typical courtly imagery with Islamic stereotypes. Rodríguez-Porto speaks of “cultural assimilation” to characterize this coexistence of both worlds and its subsequent depiction. According to her, the Crónica Troyana expresses an admiration for the sumptuous Islamic lifestyle that can also be linked to the use of the mudéjar style in civil architecture in Castile (Rodríguez Porto 2005, 18–21). Just like Prado-Vilar (2005) pointed out in his work about the Gothic Anamorphic Gaze, the Crónica Troyana as well as the cycle of Flores and Blancafor can only be understood using a multi-perspective scope that takes into account the conjunction of cultures in continuous exchange that populated Iberia throughout the Middle Ages. The miniature of Troy visually 597
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summarizes this coexistence portrayed through the Gothic alcaçar of Priam protected by colorful Islamic walls (Rodríguez Porto 2005, 21–2). Looking at the glazed marbles of the walls of Troy there comes to mind a sentence from the General Estoria describing the three arts contained in the Trivium: “Grammar sets the foundations, Dialectics builds up the walls, and then Rhetoric paints all the buildings and decorates the ceiling with stars”. Sánchez Ameijeiras (2011, 91) quotes this passage as an example of the topos of the colores rhetorici applied to the rhetorical notion of decorum—a notion that was also present across the visual works created in medieval Castile. The polychromatic, polyphonic, and multi-cultural reality of medieval Iberia continues to inspire a multiplicity of sophisticated methodological approaches which will continue to expand and help reveal the colors that lay unseen in the blank spaces that remain. “For a single tablet has seven facets”, states Shem Tov when describing the chameleonic possibilities of paper-cut calligraphy.“It gives occasion for the green of parsley and for the blue of the sky. It has a time for greenness, for ruby, for topaz and emerald, sometimes white and sometimes black. It takes off one shape and dresses in another” (Colahan 1979, 287).
Note 1 The dialectics that emerge in the coexistence of visual languages from different cultures have been captured by Tom Nickson in his study of Toledo’s Cathedral (Nickson 2015).
References Baranda, Nieves. 1991–1992.“Los problemas de la historia medieval de Flores y Blancafor”. Cuadernos de Filología Hispánica 10: 21–39. Binski, Paul. 2010. “Working by Words Alone: The Architect, Scholasticism and Rhetoric in ThirteenthCentury France”. In Rhetoric Beyond Words, Delight and Persuasion in the Arts for the Middle Ages, edited by Mary Carruthers, 14–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bynum, Caroline W. 1995. The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity 1200–1336. New York: Columbia University Press. Colahan, Clark. 1979.“Santob’s Debate: Parody and Political Allegory”. Sefarad XXXIX: 87–308. Gallo, Ernest. 1971. The Poetria Nova and its Sources in Early Rhetorical Doctrine.The Hague: Mouton. García, Charles. 2002. Le Campo de Toro au Moyen Âge. Peuplement, Seigneuries et Société (IXe–XIVe siècles). Lille:Atelier National de Reproduction des Thèses. Garzón Fernández, Marina Aurora. 2013. “Los escritos de tijeras: el arte de la caligrafía sin tinta”. In Funciones y prácticas de la escritura: I Congreso de Investigadores Noveles en Ciencias Documentales, edited by N. Ávila Seoane and B. Santiago Medina, 103–108. Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid / Ayuntamiento de Escalona. Garzón Fernández, Marina Aurora. 2019. “Santa María la Mayor de Toro: Iglesia y Ciudad (1157–1312)”. PhD diss., Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. Jung, Jacqueline E. 2000. “Beyond the Barrier: The Unifying Role of the Choir Screen in Gothic Churches”. Art Bulletin LXXXII (4): 622–657. Kemp, Wolfgang. 1987. Sermo corporeus. Die Erzählung der mittelalterlichen Glasfenster. Munich: Schirmer/ Mosel Verlag. Mariño, Beatriz. 1989. “Sicut in Terra et Inferno: la portada del Juicio Final en Santa María de Tudela”. Archivo Español de Arte LXII (246): 157–168. Moralejo, Serafín. 1985. “Artes fgurativas y artes literarias en la España medieval: románico, romance y roman”. Boletín de la Asociación Europea de Profesores de Español 17: 61–70. Murray, Stephen. 2004. A Gothic Sermon. Making a Contract with the Mother of God, Saint Mary of Amiens. Berkeley: University of California Press. Navarro Talegón, José. 2005. La Colegiata de Toro.Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León. Nickson, Tom. 2015. Toledo Cathedral: Building Histories in Medieval Castile. Philadelphia: Penn State University Press.
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Coloring words Pedrero Encabo, Claudio Ignacio. (2017), La construcción de la colegiata de Toro en los siglos XII y XIII. Zamora: Instituto de Estudios Zamoranos “Florian de Ocampo”. Pérez Higuera,Teresa. 1988. “El Jardín del Paraíso: Paralelismos iconológicos en el arte hispanomusulmán y cristiano medieval”. Archivo Español de Arte LXI (241): 37–52. Prado-Vilar, Francisco. 2005. “The Gothic Anamorphic Gaze, Regarding the Worth of Others”. In Under the Infuence. Questioning the Comparative in Medieval Castile, edited by C. Robinson and L. Rouhi, 67–100. Leiden: Brill. Prado-Vilar, Francisco. 2012. “Iudeus sacer: Life, Law, and Identity in the ‘State of Exception’ called ‘Marian Miracle’”. In Judaism and Christian Art. Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism, edited by H.L. Kessler and D. Nirenberg, 115–142. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. doi:10.9783/9780812208368.115. Rodríguez Barral, Paulino. 2010.“Los lugares penales del más allá. Iconografía en la Corona de Aragón en la Baja Edad Media”. Studium Medievale. Revista de Cultura Visual-Cultura Escrita 3: 1–34. Rodríguez Porto, Rosa María. 2005. “Troy-upon-Guadalquivir: Imagining Ancient Architecture at King Alfonso XI’s Court”. Troianalexandrina 5: 9–35. doi:10.1484/J.TROIA.2.301954. Rodríguez-Velasco, Jesús D. 2016. Order and Chivalry. Knighthood and Citizenship in Late Medieval Castile. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ruíz Maldonado, Margarita. 1998. “Refexiones en torno a la Portada de la Majestad. Colegiata de Toro (Zamora)”. Goya 263: 75–87. Sánchez Ameijeiras, Rocío. 2004. “Discursos y poéticas en la escultura gótica leonesa del siglo XIII”. In Actas del Congreso internacional “La catedral de León en la Edad Media”, edited by G. Boto Varela, M.V. Herráez Ortega and J.Yarza Luaces, 203–239. León: Universidad de León. Sánchez Ameijeiras, Rocío. 2011. “The Faces of the Words: Aesthetic Notions and Artistic Practice in Thirteenth Century Gothic”. In Gothic Art and Thought in the Later Medieval Period, edited by C. Hourihane, 90–118. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sánchez Ameijeiras, Rocío. 2012. “History and Stories of Love and Conversion in Fourteenth-Century Burgos”. Hispanic Research Journal 13 (5): 449–467. Sánchez Ameijeiras, Rocío. 2014. Los rostros de las palabras. Imágenes y teoría literaria en el Occidente medieval. Madrid: Akal. Sánchez-Arcilla Bernal, José. 1999. “La obra legislativa de Alfonso X el Sabio. Historia de una polémica”. In El scriptorium alfonsí: de los libros de astrología a las “Cantigas de Santa María”, coordinated by J. Montoya Martínez and A. Domínguez Rodríguez, 17–81. Madrid: Editorial Complutense. Sauerländer, Willibald. 1979. “Omnes perversi sic sunt in tartara mersi. Skulptur als Bilgpredigt. Das Weltgerichts tympanon von Sainte-Foye in Conques”. Jahrbuch der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen: 33–47.
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37 PERFORMING AUTHORITY THROUGH ICONOGRAPHY On Iberian visionary women and images Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida
Iberian religious women from the late-ffteenth to the early-sixteenth century have been recently studied in several works that deal with their writings, theological proposals, feminist approaches, and visionary performances. Nevertheless, the essential relationship between Visual Arts and beatas with a reputation for sanctity has not been analyzed. This is not the case with other European female communities, saints, or writers examined in outstanding and insightful academic works (e.g., Millard Meiss’ study on Catherine of Siena and Jeffrey Hamburger’s on drawings of German convents). However, I believe that this interrelationship can provide us with vital clues about the emergence of female spiritual authority in the Iberian Peninsula before Saint Teresa of Avila, and mainly in Castile, whose particular circumstances must be taken into account regarding multiculturalism and diversity of races and religions. Studying the cases of María de Ajofrín, María de Santo Domingo, Juana de la Cruz, and other beatas with the fame of “living saints” allows us to understand the ways through which, in a largely illiterate society, paintings, sculptures, and broadly visual representations of celestial beings give rise to a new and distinct perception of spiritual authority in their interaction with women during trances.To elucidate how these women built up and shape spaces for agency through strategical relations with icons, I want to consider here the multifaceted exchange between gender, visionary experiences, writing, and medieval Iberian culture. I should start by noting that between 1450 and 1550 charismatic discourse was used for women to get access to the public sphere, and even to acquire the category of religious leaders: feminine spiritual authority was embodied in the visionary. If nowadays fgures like María de Toledo, Juana Rodríguez, María de Ajofrín, María de Santo Domingo, the Silva sisters María and Leonor, and Juana de la Cruz are quite unknown outside the scope of the Church and Women’s History, in their time these beatas (or tertiaries) were recognized as people of great spiritual authority, and even as “living saints”, the term used by Gabriella Zarri (1990 & 1996) to refer to some Italian women who enjoyed infuence at the Court and delineated a model of feminine holiness between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the sixteenth century.1 This new model came mainly marked by Catherine of Siena, although there was a pattern of feminine holiness in Europe dating back at least to the thirteenth century, based on extreme fasting, penance, charisms, and Eucharistic ecstasy.The model was embodied especially in beguines in Central Europe, and beatas or tertiaries in Italy and Spain. Charisms consisted of the ability to 600
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have visions, gifts of prophecy, and, since Catherine of Siena and the Italian “living saints”, the reception of the stigmata. In their revelations, either the women conversed with celestial beings or became witnesses to their whereabouts. Many of these revelations ended up in writing, by them or by the surrounding male audience, since trances used to happen in public (though not always), in front of religious or laypeople of different social conditions. Thus, these visionaries gave fame to their houses (casas or beaterios, later converted into convents and beatas into nuns), which would gain economic resources; but, notwithstanding their fame for holiness in their time, none of these women have been canonized, though Juana de la Cruz’s cause is in Rome for confrmation of worship—it seems without much success. To understand the empowerment of these Iberian women as holy, hagiographies and revelations demand an interdisciplinary perspective, yet these narrative accounts have not been addressed in relation to images. In this particular study I focus more on their lives than on their writings, though their works are not set aside.2 This chapter deals especially with the following beatas: the Hieronymite María de Ajofrín (¿-1489), whose life was written by her confessor, Juan de Corrales (Vida de la bienabenturada virgen María de Ajofrín, end of ffteenth century); the Franciscan Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534), who composed a book of visionary sermons, Libro del conorte (ca. 1509), put on paper by her fellow María Evangelista with some help, as it happens with Juana’s life (Vida y fn de la bienabenturada virgen sancta Juana de la Cruz, sixteenth century), and around whose community is written the Libro de la casa y monasterio de Nuestra Señora de la Cruz (sixteenth century); and, fnally, the Dominican María de Santo Domingo (1486?–1524), author of Revelaciones (ca. 1509) and the Libro de la oración (ca. 1518), which I am in the process of editing along with her hagiography, found in the archive of her Aldeanueva monastery.3 I end this brief introduction by proposing to study the relationship between visionary women and images from a starting question that William Mitchell (2004) poses in one of his most famous books: what do pictures want? Or, in this case, what do they do inside the female visionary world, especially in Castile? I am intrigued by how an image’s miraculous quality is performed and how female spiritual authority emerged through it.
Images that are pictures I do not deal here with the aesthetic values of images, which generally did not bother people at the time studied (Duby 1995, 7), the era of Art before Art (see Belting 2009), but with strictly functional values. I analyze images as pictures, following Mitchell’s terminology (2004, xiii), who distinguishes the object itself from the image represented, which is very useful to differentiate the icon from the mental image that arises during the frequent late medieval meditation on the Gospel. This approach gets close to the famous classifcation of Saint Augustine in De Genesi ad litteram, where pictures would have their counterpart in the images seen with bodily sight (which allow attaining spiritual insight): pictures that remitted directly to Divinity in a way they no longer do so. In order to place us in the interaction vision-images, I want to refer to a famous painting by Giovanni di Paolo where Catherine of Siena, the visionary model, prays to a crucifx for the resurrection of her mother (Figure 37.1). The Son of God, in a simultaneous action, rises above her head to restore life to Lapa, who is seated behind the saint’s back.The effect is striking, as if the image could collect movement and be transformed with the prayers of the holy Italian, since it is not the crucifed that performs the miracle, but a Christ wholly dressed, summoned by an image that serves as a way/instrument/ path to produce the miracle. Although I will return to this picture at the end of this chapter, it is relevant to grasp the relational complexity that may occur during the trance. 601
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Figure 37.1 Saint Catherine of Siena beseeching Christ to resuscitate her mother, Giovanni Di Paolo. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
On medieval images To contextualize medieval images within the female visionary world we need to establish starting points. If Jerome Baschet (2008, 19) understands the medieval image not as a reproduction but as an effcient production, individual and integrated in social events (“L’image, on l’a dit, est opérante, active: on se doit de la considérer moins … comme représentation que comme présentifcation effcace”), of its three functions signaled by French medieval theologians (29): to teach, to produce remembrances, and to affect (emouvoir), it is the latter which operates mainly in the relationship of women with images.4 Moreover, in many cases to which I will refer, the effect of emotion is produced in both the beata and the icon, thus creating a dynamic interaction between the two sides. 602
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In this interaction I focus not on “the intentions of the maker”, but, as Robert L. Nelson proposes in a relevant article about icons, on “the reception, perception and interpretation of viewers” (1989, 144): Nelson calls attention to viewers, and since his work was written in 1989, much progress has been achieved in the so-called Visual Studies, giving both images and spectators an active role in perception. As proposed by Nelson, I do not consider visionary women as passive spectators but observe their degree of manipulation and control over images with which they coexist, since these women, as consumers, can “become producers, always affrming or denying, perpetuating or transforming the object’s signifcance for themselves and other audiences” (144).5 In addition to this, I take into account the dual role of visionary women as spectators and performers of their trances, since, as they act in front of a public that recognizes and sanctions their gestures, we deal here with representations; thus, we should be reminded of the common code they share with their public in order to recover the context that gives meaning to their verbal and visual interactions.6 Gestures and words (more gestures in the case of María de Ajofrín, and words in Juana de la Cruz’s) display a code framed within a system of social uses, for which Jean-Claude Schmitt (1990) prepared us some years ago. He considers that body uses responded to a particular civilization and transform through time. Schmitt warns us that there is an obstacle to our understanding of these gestures, because the historian, unlike the ethnologist or sociologist, cannot directly observe the mimicry of the past but know it only through the mediation of writing and images; that it is to say, through representations of gestures that include interpretations offered by the culture in which they are produced and received. Approaching this code is a way to recover the collective memory to which Maurice Halbwasch (2011) famously referred, because undoubtedly a religious image was not observed as we do it in our time, when new aesthetic conceptions of art dominate a secular world; as he points out, a number of connotations and semantic felds are shared only by the spectators of one particular time. For the ffteenth century, we speak of a collective memory of images which hundreds of objects propagate generating a cultural and mental experience.A memory that can be confned to small areas, which explains why, in rural Castile, the Virgin appears with the same look as the icon venerated at the hermitage nearby (Christian 1981, 203–212; see also Belting 2009, 550).7 This collective memory should not be forgotten when we watch the sculpture of an altar child lift a foot or salute with the hand. In this regard, there are certain protocols of looking, considering the historicity of visual experience, which have a crucial role when understanding the senses in the Middle Ages (see Woolgar 2006). If “looking becomes both the means and the end of the devotional art” (Hamburger 1997, 129), for religious women “to look is to love and to love is to look” (129).Yet, Francesco Faeta gives priority to touch over sight when he conceives intense visual practices like ecstasy and vision as the founding moment of the image, which establishes the relationship of the faithful with the simulacrum (2016, 27 & 33). But in our case study, to look (even when often accompanied by touch and voice) is prior to everything: a look that is connected with memory, with the teaching of sacred history, for it does not discover new things but follows normative beliefs (Hamburger 1998, 19).This act does not disappoint the audience’s horizon of expectations when watching the visionary interact with images.
From teaching to a means for achieving transcendence Given these assumptions, let us contemplate now the characteristics of the interaction between images and visionary women found in the hagiographic narratives and visionary revelations already mentioned, dotted with some examples. 603
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The frst function of images is the teaching one, which serves a universal recipient, and is prevalent in the European Middle Ages.This teaching function coexists with others which seek to share, comfort, or protect. If we think in Mitchell’s terms, we realize that images want to communicate with their audience: in our case, they make an effort to advise, teach, or console visionary women.The extent to which this function is relevant comes from the fact that images instruct them more and better than priests, and clearly Iberian women prefer them as a source of spiritual wisdom.8 In their zeal to teach or provide protection, images, in texts by and on visionary women, employ words more than contemporary images (cf. Mitchell 2004). Pictures, even in their immediate oral, visual, and tactile communication, do not lose sight of the rhetoric of writing in their messages: the rhetoric heard during sermons or lectures in the refectory.9 I have also spoken of a function of comfort and protection. If Saint John Damascene, in his work on sacred images (eighth century), asked to embrace, love, and venerate images with eyes, lips, and heart (see Nelson 1989, 148), they in return provide protection and comfort to worshippers.10 And, as we shall see, the living quality of some images helps women to seek physical comfort, protection, or dialogue in a life, let us not forget, full of silences (Jäggi 2014, 263): indeed, pictures are valued for their ability to create emotions.11 In addition, images transport the viewer to a higher reality and act as a means (a way) of transcendence: I refer to visionaries who use the icon to cross the distance and reach God, and to the mediating quality of images, which enhance communication with the other world (Duby 1995, 8). Thus images generate signifcance in the spiritual life of charismatic women, whose visions relate dramatically with the iconography of their time: hagiographies show us explicitly that art serves as a starting point to get into ecstasy in María de Ajofrín and Juana de la Cruz’s lives. Icons inspire their visions: pictures connect them with the sacred and open the door of revelation. Hamburger (1998) already demonstrated the crucial role of images in shaping mysticism.Visionary women who in their bodily trances represent the Passion scenes (some of them with stretched arms, as if crucifed) begin their fight to the Divine while praying to a sculpture, a painting, or other artistic representation. Angela of Foligno (2014, 56) falls into a ft when she contemplates an image in Assisi in which Christ embraces Saint Francis, a moment to which Juana de la Cruz may have appealed when hugging Christ in a vision (Vida y fn, fol. 60r).12 Julian of Norwich begins her revelations when the priest shows her a crucifx, and, for this ability to grant raptures, María de Santo Domingo insists at length in her Revelaciones (fols. 246v–249r) that eyes should be put on this icon (surely the crucifxi dolorosi widespread in Dominican and Franciscan convents; Recht 2008, 198). If meditating on this image is representative of the devotional trend of her time (devotio moderna), this Dominican beata shows the fruit of what she preaches when she goes into ecstasy by the contemplation of a cross. On the other hand, I can allude also to María de Ajofrín’s frst revelation while watching an image of the Madonna and Child (Vida de María de Ajofrín, fol. 194v), or Gertrude de Helfta’s vision of a pregnant Mary inspired by the sculpture of the Visitation at the convent of Katharinental (Hamburger 1998, 118). Many revelations of María de Ajofrín remind us of pictorial motifs, such as her vision of the Adoration of the Three Wise Men (Vida de María de Ajofrín, fol. 211r), which could have been inspired by a painting by the Master of Sisla, who worked at the monastery that controlled her beaterio: the Hieronymite, like Agnes of Montepulciano (Frugoni 1983, 140–41), envisions the Virgin the way she is frequently represented in the iconography of her time, on the throne with angels (fol. 218v). I can also mention her plastic visions of celestial processions, the Incarnation of the Lord, or the descent from the Cross (fols. 196v–197v, 218v & 220v). The same iconographic inspiration can be found in Juana de la Cruz’s visionary sermons, where she sets up a paradise flled with dances, heavenly banquets, and musician angels calling with trumpets. Juana seems also inspired by iconography in her description of purgatory and hell (Vida y fn, fols. 604
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79v–108r) or in her invocation of the choir of holy virgins at her death bed (fol. 133r; also 75v). Habits and dresses are used in her revelations to identify the blessed and their social positions (fols. 63v & 77r): a respect for clothing as a symbol of the saint’s status that is carefully upheld from early medieval iconography. Pictures were images that visionary women could observe around them and recompose in their ecstatic revelations, but these inspiring images came not only from paintings or sculptures. María de Ajofrín is presented before revelations holding a prayer book whose illustrations help her to get into a trance: she is not reading (like many visionaries, María was illiterate), but looking at the illustrations of the codex, a Veronica, or a painted skull (Vida de María de Ajofrín, fols. 198v & 220r; see also 117r).13 Here we might consider the difference between going into a trance thinking of a mental image, reconstructed from a meditation on a Gospel passage, and getting the trance looking with bodily sight (returning to Saint Augustine’s terminology).14 At this point I think the issue of gender should be particularly present. Icons as a means of transcendence unveil a qualitative difference between men and women, visionary and non-visionary: we deal with the question about the extent to which gender discourse is mediated by religious practice or religious practice by the discourse of gender.15 It is true that everyone, lay and religious, could receive visions but this phenomenon was more expected in women, as Jean Gerson shows us in his work on spiritual discernment, or Vicente Ferrer in his treatise on spiritual life.16 The truth is that male visions were more linked to exegetical interpretations of the Scripture, such as those in the very famous Meditations on the life of Christ by Pseudo-Bonaventura or in the Vita Christi by Ludolph of Saxony, who encouraged the reader to think the illustrations accompanying the text mimicking the physical postures as a way to feel the emotions. From there, one could raise the visionary fight. For women, the association of evangelical texts with artistic images was established in a more direct way.Their visions were strikingly related to the visual monastic art that surrounded them. If novices were often distributed small icons when entering the convent, as part of the late medieval process by which the image becomes an object of personal appropriation (Duby 1995, 93), it is no wonder that trances began to be based more than on Eucharistic longings. The Libro de la casa shows clearly the relationship of familiarity that women held with images, favored by the weaving of suits and dresses for sculptures from altars and shrines. Relevance given to sculptures and paintings draws attention in this book (not only to Christs or Virgins, but also to Saint Barbara, Saint Anne, or John the Baptist: the allusion to images is continuous: fol. 51r) and reminds us of the role that women play in decorating sculptures. In this sense, their devotion is particularly tactile. In addition, since the thirteenth century there is an increase in the popularization of icons, to which mystics contribute demonstrating their potential to intensify the feeling, a way of achieving the union with God always open to women, who, except in rare cases, could not read or write and were urged to look at pictures to understand the Scriptures.We should not, then, miss the continuity of the daily effect of artistic images on women to understand the reciprocal relationship established between visions and art. If art awakens visions, visions also feed art into a network of mutual loans, as shown by the representation of Christ’s birth inspired by Bridget of Sweden’s revelations (see Warner 2013, 185).
Living art From this point we reach another feature of medieval pictures, but one that is selective since it does not affect all the faithful: living art.This phenomenon was a common experience of vision605
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ary medieval men and women alike.17 In their living quality, images seek to interact with some faithful, performing their already mentioned protective and teaching functions.This happens in miracles of male and female saints, although I must say that we fnd more examples in the second group (again a division of gender). Women tend to see more physical movement (sometimes accompanied by speech) of sculptures or paintings. Notwithstanding, Jäggi (2014, 271) points out something interesting: not only the German nuns she studies believe the Deity lives in the image, many friars believe it also, but in their case this belief was belittled for not being intellectual; that is, we return to the gender issue. Yet I note that we should differentiate even further: between those women who envision images in this almost magic or demiurgic way and those who contemplate pictures as constructions of inferior quality, since Divinity is not there: they are just a representation and have a lifeless nature.This argument is held by Saint Teresa in her Libro de la vida. She insists that pictures should act only as a path to God and not to promote idolatry: Unas veces era tan en confuso [Cristo] que me parecía imagen, no como los dibujos de acá: por muy perfectos que sean, que hartos he visto buenos, es disparate pensar que tiene semblanza lo uno con lo otro en ninguna manera, no más ni menos que la tiene una persona viva a su retrato, que por bien que esté sacado no puede ser tan al natural, que, en fn, se ve es cosa muerta. (Teresa de Jesús 2004, 279) [Sometimes He was so confusing that he seemed to be an image, not as drawings here: no matter how perfect they are (and I’ve seen many good ones), it’s nonsense to think that there is any kind of similarity between them and the one, no more or less than a living person has to his portrait, since as good as it might be it cannot be as natural, so, fnally, what you see is a dead thing.] Saint Teresa, who is inspired by Saint Augustine, makes a clear distinction here between a spiritual and a physical image, and the latter one, like drawings made by men, results in a lower quality. But we do not need to go into the late-sixteenth century to appreciate the difference between those who believe in the demiurgic quality of images and those who value icons only as a way of inspiring devotion. About a century and a half earlier, María García (1340–1426), a famous non-visionary woman from the beaterio of Sisla, thinks like Teresa that images are not alive, but painted (“no eran vivas, sino pintadas”: Sigüenza 1600, 752). However, despite these misgivings in assessing the icon as a living image, I must say that in the time I refer to (and even later, as many imitators of Teresa interact with images as if they were alive), the most widespread feature in the relationship between art and the visionary is the living quality of the frst. As for the Iberian “living saints”, they experience numerous episodes of physical movement of icons. Juana de la Cruz and María de Ajofrín relate to sculptures and paintings as if they were living art, like other European mystic women that interact with crucifxes sweating blood (Julian of Norwich 2006, 67–9) or feel the embrace of a painted Christ, as in the mentioned case of Angela of Foligno. The same can be said of their Castilian communities, as the Libro de la casa shows us, or the narrative of the foundation of the Aldeanueva monastery, where we are told of miracles realized by the Cristo de las Batallas, given as a present by the Catholic Monarchs. For Iberian visionary women, art is particularly dynamic, as we can conclude from the episode in which María de Ajofrín gets on a roof and looks at how “imágenes del tiempo antiguo” (images of ancient time) light up (Vida de María de Ajofrín, fols. 212v–213r), in front of which she is lifted into the air, before the Virgin tells her that her prayers will save the population from 606
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the torrential rain that, by raising the river, spoils the harvest. At another moment she watches the icon of Veronica coming to life (I will return to this) and on a certain occasion the Virgin on a wall communicates with her by acquiring miraculous clarity (fol. 210r).This beata gets to interact with different representations of the Virgin with any excuse: two moments where the image of the Virgin sweats follow. Tres días antes de la festa de San Lorenço, estando enferma la hermana maior de dolor de costado desahuziada de los físicos … de que la vio en la agonía de la muerte, fuese a la capilla a una hora de la noche y estuvo ante el altar de Nuestra Señora hasta las doze con muchas lágrimas, rogando mui afncadamente a Nuestra Señora que no quedase ella güérfana de tan gran bien, y que se la quisiese dar sana y viba.Y desde a poco viole sudar el rostro, y pensando que se le antojava, atreviose a llegar a su rostro y a limpiarlo con su toca tres veces el sudor … tornole a mandar la salud de su hermana y oió una boz que dixo:“Otorgada es la vida para consolaçión y remedio tuio” … Y este día vio la imagen de Nuestra Señora que está en el altar por tres veces sudar gotas de agua y fue llena de maravilla, y llegose a la imagen y limpió el sudor, y con ello labó su rostro.18 (Vida de María de Ajofrín, fols.128v–219r & 210r) [Three days before the feast of Saint Lawrance, being ill the prioress with a pain in her side and left without a solution by the doctors … when she saw her in the throes of death, she went to the chapel at a certain time of the night and was before the altar of Our Lady until twelve with many tears, praying very much to Our Lady not to be deprived of such great goodness and to give her sister back healthy and alive. And in a bit she saw her face sweating, and thinking that she [the Virgin] wanted, she dared to reach her face and clean the sweat three times with her wimple … she [the Virgin] gave health back to her sister and she [Ajofrín] heard a voice saying: “Granted is life for your consolation and remedy” … And that day she saw the image of Our Lady on the altar sweat three times drops of water, and she was full of wonder, and drew near to the image and wiped the sweat, and thus washed her face.] Thus, as we see, regarding art and female revelations, not only do we deal with heavenly visions of pictorial infuence or with inspiring icons, but also with prayers to images that come to life and with whom there can be a tactile exchange. This is also clear in the scene where María de Ajofrín prays before the altar statue of the Madonna and Child, in the aforementioned vision of the Three Wise Men and shepherds adoring Baby Jesus, which not only refers to iconographic motifs but also contains living images and ends with the beata’s watching Mary laughing while embracing the Child:“Vio cómo la imagen de Nuestra Señora, que estava en el dicho altar, se rio tres vezes contra el Niño” (Vida de María de Ajofrín, fols. 210v–211r) (She saw how the image of Our Lady, which was in the said altar, laughed thrice at the Child). Exchanges of movements and words with images of the Virgin were common in all visionary women. But María de Ajofrín does not only perform her visionary discourse but modifes the last appearance of icons. Indeed, images in revelations are always restless; they lift their feet or hands, as if they were not comfortable in their positions, as if they betray that “lack” mentioned by Mitchell regarding contemporary pictures (2004, 10): as he would say, images are continually “wanting” life. So, through María de Ajofrín a sculpture of Child Jesus is able to change his position by staying with one foot raised (a move made for the beata to kiss it), as in pictures where 607
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the celestial being projects the foot forward inviting others to kiss to it: which reminds us we are facing that system of coded gestures studied by Schmitt (1990). Como otro día adelante estuvose rezando en el oratorio y tuviese consigo dos libros en donde tenía sus orationes, demandó a una hermana que le truxese la imagen del Niño Jhesús, que estava en el altar de Nuestra Señora, el qual estava vestido de una ropilla que le abían hecho hasta los pies.Y como el dicho Niño le fuese entregado, tomolo con devotión y púsolo de pie encima de un libro.Y como por algún espaçio con alegría y devotión le hiziese oratión con artas lágrimas, alçó la ropilla por besalle los pies, y vio cómo uno de los pies se bullía y meneava como si estuviera en carne, y alçóse un poco el pie para que se le pudiese besar.Y como le besase con devotión quedose el pie levantado y no se baxó jamás.Y como pusiese el pie del Niño en una gran hinchazón que tenía en el ojo, luego fue abierta, la qual cosa luego fue divulgada en la casa, y el niño quedose con el pie levantado. (Vida de María de Ajofrín, fols. 217r–v) [When a later day she was praying in the oratory and had with her two books where she had her prayers, she asked one sister to bring her the image of the Child Jesus, who was on the altar of Our Lady and was dressed in a robe made for him that reached his feet. And as that Child will be handed over to her, she took him with devotion and laid him standing on the top of a book. And as for some time with joy and devotion she prayed accompanied by many tears, she raised his little robe to kiss his feet, and watched how one of them seethed and moved as if it had fesh, and how it was raised up to allow the kissing.And, as she kissed with devotion, the Child laid the foot lifted, and was never down again. And, as she put the Child’s foot in a large cyst in her eye, then it burst, and this was released to the house, and the Child abode with a raised foot.] Thus the image of the Child acquires through Ajofrín’s mystic vision not only a physical modifcation but the capacity to induce miracles such as the literal restoration of her sight. Movement, but this time of the hand, is acquired as well by another Child Jesus in the Convent of the Mother of God, founded by the Silva sisters: this vision is likely inspired by pictures with Christ raising his hand. In this case it seems that the hand is left also forever lifted, after a nun’s vision of Our Lady raising up her son’s right arm to bless her community (Becerro del Convento de la Madre de Dios, fol. 10v).This episode seems very similar to another one of María de Ajofrín’s vita, where the Child sculpture raises his hand to absolve her, a hand that is also fnally set: María sees her Lord being in her mother’s hands acting like a priest absolving the penitent (“como quando el saçerdote absuelve a la penitente”). And when later, after making her confession, she comes to pray to the image, she perceives clearly this raised hand, a miracle that she keeps to her heart (Vida de María de Ajofrín, fol. 194v). Notwithstanding, undoubtedly, the most impressive episode in the life of María de Ajofrín occurs in chapter 39, when the Virgin of the altar (before whom the beata has prayed several times with her sisters) frees María de Ajofrín’s brother from his chains in prison. Afterward her brother regularly offers votive wax to this Virgin until his death, when he departs to purgatory, according to what this image tells the Hieronymite in a revelation (Vida de María de Ajofrín, fols. 219r–220r). That constant interaction with images contributed to the impression that they were alive is openly shown in one of Juana de la Cruz’s revelations, which includes a representation of John the Evangelist with the Virgin, the two Marys, and Christ.The scene at the foot of Mount 608
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Calvary appears to be a picture within Juana’s vision, where it seems that all fgures are alive. The image of the crucifx acquires a certain macabre tinge in the revelation: “descoyuntado y muy llagado y sangriento e difunto” (disjointed and very wounded and bloody and dead) and it becomes a disturbing image because Christ is not a completely static fgure, but, if observed from the side,“pareçe que está como vivo y mirando a quien le suplica con gesto alegre y bulto resplandeçiente e muy claro” (Vida y fn, fol. 65v) (it seems as if he is alive and looking at whom is begging him with a cheery gesture and a glowing and very lighted profle), as in certain pictures that look at the viewer from all angles, lasting till nowadays in representations of the sacred heart of Christ.Thus, this Jesus seems to live when approached by different people who make requests, to which he responds with a negative gesture when someone has not behaved well; however, when people asking are friends, the image of Christ shows a positive signal (fol. 66r).And this implicit movement is defnitely interesting since the picture moves within Juana’s revelation. That is, Juana does not achieve a trance looking at a sculpture or a painting that comes alive, but from a representation inside another representation, her vision.And maybe now is the time to pose two relevant questions: frst, the difference between sculptures and paintings. In all miracles and revelations sculptures move more; being three-dimensional, they are more dynamic, since they have more materiality, and hence probably the proximity between sculpture and relic: when we read the Cantigas de Santa María or Berceo’s Milagros de Nuestra Señora the teleporting ability of sculptures does not surprise us. Second, the icons of Eastern or Byzantine infuence are those that seem to acquire more life.19 After the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), the human side of Christ is emphasized and representations that recall his humanity are enhanced, especially the crucifx, and since the thirteenth century (a key century for the model of visionary holiness) sculptures showing signs of being animated begin to proliferate, mainly sculptures of the Virgin and icons, made cult images. The Oriental icon succeeds because the Virgin loses the rigid solemnity of the Romanesque, thus bringing intimacy to the portrait of the Mother of God in the ffteenth and sixteenth centuries. In María de Ajofrín’s revelations we can guess the presence of these features in the Madonna altar and in the representations of the Veronica.
Sharing time and space Let us now take another side into consideration. In these interactions between pictures and women, space and time are apart from everyday life: they both share sacred history. Whoever attended the public disclosures of these women (in María de Santo Domingo and Juana de la Cruz’s trances this audience was formed by important personages of the Court) would see the visionary beatas interacting with images in a time and space that reached toward transcendence. These revelations presented something these women were seeing and which people who shared rooms with them were unable to see: in revealing the images’ movement their word has creative power, since in their speech these visionary women are completing the space they occupy with their public, who is not able to see everything in its entirety.20 The time and space of the trance depart the quotidian when the audience relates to that collective memory mentioned above, which is invoked through pictures that probably recalled key lectures and readings in the refectory, episodes of sacred history, and processions and ceremonies attended by the performing beatas and their public, such as the sword dances in the revelations of Juana de la Cruz (Sanmartín & Massip 2017).As Maurice Halbwachs has pointed out, collective memory is displayed in a spatial framework (2011, 185) and relies on a reconstructed time where Christians place the founding events.Visionary women recur to that framework when communicating their encounters with the celestial beings, sharing their same holy past, as in 609
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Juana’s vision of Mount Calvary, discussed above. Sacred history is thus shared with living art when women are incorporated into the narrative, as in an episode of María de Ajofrín where the Virgin happens to give this beata her child to seek an inn, moving the town of Bethlehem to Toledo (Vida de María de Ajofrín, fol. 196r). In the space and time of trance, visionary women and pictures re-live the experience of Mary’s motherhood or Christ’s Passion, mingling imageries sometimes. We can observe this regarding the Virgo lactans. Undoubtedly, a fundamental source of inspiration for Iberian visionary women is the Virgin with the infant, but this Virgin sometimes shows her breast, accompanied on occasions by an adult Christ who shows in his turn his wounded side: this is a motif in art called the “double intercession”, in which both mother and son sacrifce their breasts and side respectively for sinners.We fnd one of these episodes in Juana de la Cruz’s life: to her, as later on in the case of the Cistercian María Vela y Cueto (Sanmartín Bastida 2015a, 88), Christ offers his mother’s milk while interceding for souls.This vision is experienced by Juana when she is “en su çelda en una ferbiente oraçión ante una ymagen del Señor y de su bendita madre” (Vida y fn, fol. 125r) (in her cell during a fervent prayer in front of an image of the Lord and his blessed mother).When Christ looks at his mother’s breasts, Juana, with great humility, begs his Divine Majesty to feel the sweetness of the milk of his precious mother, to which the Lord answers: “La dulçe leche de mi amada madre es muy buena mediçina para las llagas ynteriores del alma” (Vida y fn, fol. 127r) (the sweet milk of my beloved mother is very good medicine for the inner wounds of the soul). Indeed, Mary’s milk is very important to Juana, and she refers to it in many visionary sermons, probably inspired by surrounding iconography. I take this image of Juana begging for the Virgin’s milk in front of a picture to make a small point: we should refect on the differences in the conception of space during women’s revelations and the kind of miracles that appear in works like Cantigas de Santa María. While in the Cantigas the image moves but does not lead the viewer into its territory and instead gets into the universe of its faithful (as in the aforementioned episode of Ajofrín’s brother, where the Virgin is transferred to his prison), the opposite happens to visionary women. For them the image not only speaks but acquires agency in carrying out the vision, leading the beatas to its own space, so that the Virgin offers her baby Jesus to María de Ajofrín to fnd an inn, or Christ lends his mother’s breasts to Juana de la Cruz.21 Within this visionary common space, women can manipulate images and make them appear in visions to play a role in their revelations: we have seen this in Juana’s vision of a crucifx with Jesus moving his face, and we can also fnd this phenomenon in a revelation of a Franciscan soul being dragged by a bull carrying an image of a saint, who protects him through Juana’s intercession. Y primero que la viese, oyó unos grandes bramidos como de toro.Y escuchándolos, vido entrar un toro muy feroz, grande y fuerte para ella.Y alzando la sancta virgen los ojos a mirarle, vídole entre los cuernos una ymagen, y tras la mesma ymagen, vido un bulto como un ánima, la qual la dixo:“Conóçesme, yo soy fulano, por quien tú mucho ruegas. Doy muchas graçias a Dios e a ti. Por tus ruegos se me an hecho muchas virtudes, y me dieron esta sancta ymagen para mi consuelo y defendimiento”. (Vida y fn, fols. 109v–110r) [And before she saw it, she heard a big roar like a bull. And listening, she saw a large and strong and very ferce bull for her. And raising the holy virgin her eyes at him, she contemplated a picture between the horns, and behind the image she discovered a bulge like a soul, who said:“Know me, I am such and such, for whom you pray much. 610
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I thank you and God very much. For your prayers I’ve been given many favors, and I got this holy image for my comfort and defense”.] We fnd another fnal sample of this “traffc” of images, so prevalent in Iberian women’s revelations, in an episode where the Virgin makes Juana’s fellow beatas appear like pictures (in Mitchell’s sense), so Juana can complain about her companions made statues one at a time, though, in the end, the Franciscan beata refuses this authoritative performance (Vida y fn, fol. 111r).
Women’s authorization through images We arrive now at the most important point of this chapter: the authorization of women’s sanctity that occurs in the interaction with images. Through this interaction, images, and women are able to provide each other with spiritual authority, which is achieved through imitation and equalization between images and women in the space and time shared with living art. I am no longer speaking here about inspiring iconography, but of interchangeable charisms with images that become agents. Thus, I can point out that a frst approach that empowers women is based on imitation.The observation of sculptures of Virgins caught up in pain surely infuenced the body movements of the beatas who relive the Virgin’s contemplation of her son’s Passion (e. g., Libro de la oración, b6r), while crucifxes become models for those who are flled with stigmata (as in the case of Juana, María de Ajofrín, and María de Santo Domingo). There is therefore a type of mimicry, and the public attending trances would recognize the gestures of pain, piety, or passion made by visionary women in their ecstasies. On the other hand, hagiographies tell us of a chain of more complex imitations, as when María de Ajofrín has a revelation while contemplating the mystical marriage of Catherine of Alexandria.The same happened to Catherine of Siena, who, as shown by Millard Meiss (1951, 105–131), imitates Catherine of Alexandria’s wedding with an adult Christ (and, when the adult Christ is substituted in paintings by an infant Christ, representations of the Italian’s mystic marriage undergo the same transformation).This sort of imitation reaches the Castilian beatas.When in 1486, on the night of the feast of Saint Catherine, to whom she is a true devotee, María de Ajofrín is kneeling and praying in the chapel, in front of the painting of Catherine’s marriage to the Child Jesus, light falls on the representation of his act putting the ring on her fnger and María is left full of pleasure (“gozo”), being privileged with such an experience that signals her holy destiny (Vida de María de Ajofrín, fols. 216v–217r). Indeed, images make up the identity and authority of Iberian visionary women by the reproduction of established models. María de Ajofrín reaches to Catherine of Alexandria through imitating Catherine of Siena, who, as I have said, is the paradigm that “living saints” follow. I can also allude to the beatas’ commitment to extreme abstinence, which follows Catherine of Siena’s model, as said by the prologist of María de Santo Domingo’s Libro de la oración (fol. a6v) when explaining her prolonged fast. Catherine’s rib (a most precious relic) was given by the Pope in 1520 to the newly founded Dominican convent of Aldeanueva as a likely recognition of María de Santo Domingo’s sanctity. Another example of this mimetic network is offered by Saint Francis’ stigmata. Saint Francis and Saint Catherine had a major impact on the wounds of Christ received on visionaries’ bodies. Castilian beatas were acquainted with these saints, as with contemporary Italian living saints (like Lucy of Narni) and with their European predecessors. This was possible not only through sermons, preaching, and talks with their confessors or through the books printed by Cardinal Cisneros, which were beginning to circulate with the lives and works of Angela 611
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Foligno, Catherine of Siena, or Mechtilde of Hackeborn (Sanmartín Bastida 2012, 106–10 & 313–15), but also through images which reproduced charismatic experiences. So the stigmata of María de Ajofrín, Juana de la Cruz, and María de Santo Domingo would probably be infuenced by what was observed in the art of their time.Thus María de Ajofrín imitates Catherine of Siena, who in turn had imitated Saint Francis, and receives the stigmata observing the image of the crucifx, as her predecessors: la sierva del Señor … levantose de la cama y hincó las rodillas a un ymagen de un cruçifxo que tenía allí pintado en un papel, horando con gran fervor de corazón.Y fue tan grande el dolor que sintió en las manos y en los pies y amortiguamiento en los braços y piernas que dezir no se puede, como si se fueran con grandes clavos traspasadas las palmas. (Vida de María de Ajofrín, fols. 203r–v) [the Lord’s servant … rose from the bed and dropped to her knees in front of a crucifx that was there painted on paper, praying with great fervor of heart.And it was so great the pain she felt in her hands and feet, and acute the weakness in arms and legs, that it cannot be expressed, as if her palms were pierced with great nails.] The second way of empowering and giving authority to women comes from an equalization in which a mutual loan is encouraged. Images and women provide each other with power and dominion. If some images command or advise visionary women, these beatas in turn, at a given moment, may authorize the circulation of certain images as if they were priests; and when, as we have seen in some revelations, the movement of an image results in a modifcation of the icon (hand or foot raised) these women can consecrate and sanction the material change. Thus, in an episode told in Juana’s vita, this holy woman decides whether the modifcation of a sculpture (the renewal of her gesture and chest) makes a Virgin lose or not lose her power.After being consulted by her fellow women, Juana has a revelation where the new image is tested, and she discovers it has the same power as before casting out demons and blessing the rooms when carried in procession (Vida y fn, fols. 199r–121r, Libro de la casa, fols. 44r–48r).22 That is, Juana becomes a new mediator between the divinity and the community, in a parallel role to that of the Virgin, God, and the priest, and the ultimate authority about whether this image has the same validity as the previous one: the importance of this episode is manifested through its appearance both in the Vida and Libro de la casa.23 This kind of authority over images (the visionary woman acquires authority when allowing empowered pictures to circulate) permits us to establish another difference between non-visionary women and “living saints”. In the interaction between non-visionary women and images, no reciprocal relationship is given because there is no exchange of authority. On the other hand, I have spoken of images as providers of protection and comfort. But pictures can certainly also mourn as well, and need help from visionary beatas, as shown by the ones that weep in front of María de Ajofrín (Vida de María de Ajofrín, fols. 197r & 231r).Thus, a mutual need is established that contributes to the equalization I am pointing to between image and visionary woman. It is not just that this woman chooses the image and makes it move, but also that this image needs the visionary to achieve a kind of fulfllment, a sort of justice or consolation, as happens with the Christ bleeding before María de Ajofrín because of heretics’ sins, which is surely inspired by an Ecce Homo image (Vida de María de Ajofrín, fol. 223v).And in an emphatic approach to each other, pictures and visionary women share the ability to seduce and produce strong emotions, moving others to tears, as evidenced by María de Santo Domingo’s trial, where her defender argues that her audience cries when attending her trances.24 612
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This case brings us to another key aspect of female spiritual authorization: the fact that visionary women and images can substitute each other and share the nature of icons. We can argue this by employing the Veronica as a case study.The image of the holy face is quite relevant during visionary ecstasies (as shown in Hamburger 1998, 317–382) in Europe as much as in the Iberian world.25 On one occasion, María de Ajofrín contemplates the face of Christ in a codex as it becomes fesh and blood in a revelation that lasts for an hour and that makes this image glow with light (Vida de María de Ajofrín, fol. 198v). On another occasion, rays of clarity emanate from a certain Veronica on the altar (fol. 214r). In a community that lives without mirrors, and with a desire for Christifcation (these women relive the Passion in their bodies), we could refect on the establishment of a mirror look at the Veronica. Indeed, following the vision of the living “Vera Icona”,Ajofrín’s stomach closes and she begins a prolonged fast, similar to that of Christ. I thus wonder if by looking at the Veronica the visionary woman acquires the nature of the image. Do these women receive the quality of the image of Christ present at the Veronica? Let us recall the condition of the relic to refer the part for the whole, and how the transference occurs by contact. Is this possible in an era in which the replica appears to mechanize the image (from the ffteenth century onward) with a new perception of art as a temporary artifact?26 I think so, since even in the late medieval world, for a majority, if the sacred physical object is touched its quality is transferred, as we discover, in a reversed secular context, with the issue of Melibea’s cordon in La Celestina (Rojas 1997, 164). This phenomenon explains why Cardinal Cisneros asks María de Santo Domingo to gird herself with his Franciscan cord. It is the Dominican beata who is going to sanctify an object that does not belong to her: she acts like a living icon. I also note the fact that María de Santo Domingo wears jewelry and dresses: Father Antonio de la Peña, her defender in the trial held against her, argues that she carries these decorations by the request of people who want her to sanctify these objects, to transmit to them her holy nature. But there is more to it: in her defense by a witness in the trial, María del Cordero, she insists that María de Santo Domingo wears no jewels or rich clothes out of vanity or lust (of which she is accused) but as a picture or statue (Sanmartín Bastida 2012, 329–331). I think we have not refected on what this also implies: visionary women may seem to be vivid images. They can become icons and be contemplated, admired, and adored by others, and transform themselves into a source of imitation just as pictures are capable of doing. If Juana de la Cruz says in a visionary sermon that saints of the heavenly court are bejeweled and adorned (Vida y fn, fol. 34r; no doubt she is infuenced by paintings and sculptures), we cannot be surprised by the self-representation as an icon of the intending-to-be-a-living saint María de Santo Domingo. This Dominican woman dies leaving 300 potential imitators in her convent, as the narrative of the foundation of the Aldeanueva convent states.Thus, supernatural experiences end up with visionary women becoming the living image in which the audience seeks to be refected just the same way as these women did with the Veronica.What most interests me is that this iconic identity of the visionary, which certainly gives her spiritual authority, is formed by rituals that offer these beatas privilege and power within an elitist practice. As shown by Francesco Faeta (2016, 155), images and representations are the supporting frame of rituals, and I refer here to a constant ritual of renewing the identity of a living saint since one performance was not enough to establish public recognition. Repetition is important: a repetition that creates the pattern by which the saint is molded, and during this repetition or citation of “a prior authoritative set of practices” (in Judith Butler’s terms: 1993, 227), the image carries the woman to its territory and incorporates her into a sacred time and space, as we have seen.At the same time, images involved in the identity ritual of “living saints” acquire miraculous power that many did not have before, so they also build their identity as demiurgic pictures through the mise-en-scène of visionary 613
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women’s trances.Why not talk, then, of a mutual lending of power and authority, and (from this perspective) of visionary women that give pictures commanding agency? Yet, there is another important source of authorization raised from the relationship between women and images, related to the diffcult religious coexistence of different religious groups and ethnicities in the Iberian Peninsula in the late ffteenth century.We know that the lack of possession and veneration of images created suspicions of heresy or of Judaizing practices regarding conversos, and that the emerging market of images at that time (which evolved into a mechanization of producing pictures) has to do with the desire of avoiding accusations of heterodoxy. It was alleged that Jews refused to worship images, and the Inquisition penalized and persecuted many conversos (putative crypto-Jews) with this excuse: some individuals had not entirely converted to Christianity because, it was argued, images were not in their possession or were at their homes left apart, as Felipe Pereda (2007) has proven in his well-documented book. Faced with this suspicion, visionary women, aspiring to be considered living saints and champions of orthodoxy, are depicted as lovers of images. If, for inquisitorial trials, close relationship to images was key to escape accusations, Castilian visionary women re-authorized these elements of worship in their revelations, as they did with the Sacraments; the Eucharist was a starting point for their ecstasies, as shown to us in the Libro de la oración (fols. a4r, b5r, d2r).27 Surely, this impulse given to images (for their capacity to break one free from suspicion of heresy), within a policy promoted by the Catholic Monarchs, is what lies behind these words of Juana: “Lo que ay que deçir es que Nuestro Señor Dios tiene en tanto las ymágenes y se sirve que las aya en la sancta madre Yglesia, y que sean honrradas y beneradas por nosotros peccadores, pues Él mesmo … vino a la vendeçir [esta imagen] y a enseñarnos cómo son cosa por donde se alcança virtud y devoçión quando se tiene en el coraçón. Y bien se pareze, según yo vi en una revelaçión que el Señor fue servido de me mostrar, quánto Él ama y honra la sancta madre Yglesia y a sus sanctas ymágines por amor della”. (Vida y fn, fols. 120v–121r) [“What must be said is that our Lord God values very much images and allows them in Holy Mother Church, and to be honored and venerated by us, sinners, since He himself … came to bless this one and to show us how they help to achieve virtue and devotion when they are in our heart.And it rather seems, based on a revelation that the Lord was served to show me, that He loves and honors so much Holy Mother Church and her holy images due to his love for her”.] Thus, in multicultural Iberian society, images and visionary women work together to marginalize the non-Christian groups through their own exchange of orthodoxy and authority.
Conclusions In this chapter I have tried to answer the following questions:What do pictures do in feminine religious trances? What kind of relationships do visionary women establish with them? How is female spiritual authority manifested through pictures in the Iberian Peninsula, especially in Castile? As I hope to have shown, images serve as a source of inspiration and imitation when interacting with “living saints”. But we can also infer other things from this interaction, especially in what concerns spiritual authority. Considering the examples I have mentioned, we can state that art gives authority and orthodoxy to visionary women.And we can also argue that pictures 614
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want and seek life and empowerment through female visionaries, offering them in turn the same possibilities for agency. Art is a source of spiritual teaching because the public of these women was surrounded by an iconography that continually appealed to them; and the beatas’ interaction with the surrounding art in a space and time apart from daily matters somehow incorporated them into the environment of the sacred characters, and gave them more authority since both (holy personages and visionary women) shared miraculous powers. Images intensify the identifcation with the heavenly and holy; for example, looking at the Virgin makes visionary women discover their maternal potential, especially when the Mother of God provides them with the Child; but also looking at Saint Bernard makes them long for the Virgin’s milk; and looking at the crucifx or at the Veronica moves them to develop stigmata or begin an extreme fast.This identifcation does not depend on gender or age, but it is more common in women. In addition, visionary women have power over images: they can change their gestures or authorize them to circulate. Thus, pictures seek out these beatas in order to move and acquire new positions. Both become ways to access otherness and transformation. Both are presented to the public of their trances as the tools of a connection between the mundane and the supernatural. Both represent in their bodies maternal scenes or passions. Both are decorated and displayed. So, would it not be necessary to refect on how Iberian visionary women received a legacy of pictures that allowed them to transform themselves into representations? That is, I propose not to look further at the costumes that saints wear in their visions (to which I have already alluded) but at the ones acquired by these beatas. In any case, there is something disturbing in common that is at stake: the parallel, through images, among the heavenly beings and visionary women, who can become living icons. Conversely, the beatas’ attachment to living art provides them with enormous authority not only through making them part of the sacred history before viewers who share a collective memory, but also through their orthodoxy, because they stand in contrast to heretics’ relationship with images.And I should add that in their discourse there is no sense of danger about the dubious origin of certain pictures which certainly existed at their time: the danger of worshiping deceiving pictures, manifested in an episode of the Corbacho (Martínez de Toledo 1998, 264–67), and against which Saint Teresa warns us: the demon can show us false images (Teresa de Jesús 2004, 277). Instead, here we fnd a rather relaxed relationship, an unproblematic vision of the icon, which is worshiped without entering into disquisitions on the propriety of this act, or whether it is more like illiterates to pay attention to it, as exposed by Gregory the Great or Bernard of Clairvaux.28 Undoubtedly, the unproblematic consideration of the icon would help the Reformation and its encouragement of a contemplative meditation with a little help from icons. Indeed, taking a leap forward in time, I think when we may ask ourselves about the role of the visual arts in Saint Teresa, and how we should delve into this prior relationship between female devotion and images (Sanmartín Bastida 2015b & 2016). This would help us to reformulate the vision of Saint Teresa as a predecessor of the Baroque, which has been attributed to her without taking into account the background discussed here. Instead, I suggest that she distances herself from pictures rather than potentiate the mystique of images: for, although she was a friend of icons, she always said that they constituted a frst step that should be left behind when the real binding with Divinity happens, as they become distracting to the ultimate fusion with transcendence (Teresa de Jesús 2004, 847). Saint Teresa’s pictures do not seek, therefore, the mutual authorization we fnd in the female visionary movement at the end of the Iberian Middle Ages.29 615
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To conclude, I would like to go back to the painting by Giovanni di Paolo mentioned at the beginning of this study, since it sums up much of the interactions between pictures and medieval visionary women explained here (Figure 37.1). I think we can now turn to look at it and discover even more things: (1) the image serves as a gateway to the supernatural and shows a protective function; (2) there is living art in Christ’s movement in reaching to Lapa to resuscitate her; (3) space and time apart is shared between the image and the visionary woman; (4) picture and female saint are able to produce the miracle and become images worthy of emulation.Through this interaction, there is an obvious emergence of spiritual authority and a mutual loan and exchange of empowerment refected in the space shared by the crucifx and Catherine. As regards the specifcity of Iberian culture, I should say that the Muslim, Jewish, and heretical issues add emphasis to their attachment to images, and behaviors like acting as icons are unique to these Castilian “living saints”, who had a Queen (Isabella I) who felt at ease being represented as a saintly monarch, that is to say, as a sort of living icon.
Notes 1 I study these fgures under the auspices of a project funded by the Spanish Government and FEDER, called “La emergencia de la autoridad espiritual femenina en Castilla” (Ref. FFI2015-63625-C2-2-P), which edits their works and hagiographies (http://catalogodesantasvivas.visionarias.es). No doubt Bernard McGuinn’s frst chapter to his recent book on Spanish mysticism will help make these women well known for scholars (2017, 12–24). For introductory studies on some famous beatas, with different scopes, see Muñoz Fernández (1994), Surtz (1995), and Braguier (2014). 2 Being aware of the differences between reading their words and reading their lives, I should say that they have mediators in either case, since their hagiographies narrated experiences made public by them to confessors, and their works were put on paper by other men and women. See Baranda Leturio (2006) and Sanmartín Bastida (2012, 245–271) for further development on this topic. I should also say that we have lost many testimonials, e.g., Juana Rodríguez’s, of whom the chronicler Pedro Salazar (1612, 368) states that “muchas de las cosas que veía en las meditaciones y contemplaciones divinas las dejó escritas y se ven hoy día”. Unfortunately, we are not able to say so any more. 3 To this narrative I will refer several times in this study.As regards my quotations of the aforementioned sources, I transcribe from manuscripts modernizing the punctuation and accents. 4 With similar arguments, Duby (1995, 96) exposes the three functions of Art between 1320 and 1400: to instruct, to warn, and to comfort. 5 This is a legitimate starting point for, as Michael Camille (1996) reminds us in his introduction to Gothic Art, since Aristotle it was believed that images send rays which are grasped by the eyes in order to get perception.This model of vision results in a receptive eye and an agent status for images, and is linked with the idea of receptive understanding. If eyes receive rays rather than direct them outward (as it was believed before the thirteenth century), images become more active. See also Burke (2000, 74) about how in the premodern era existence was predicated upon vision, with being viewed as a key part of the self. 6 Nelson urges the need to “recover the context, contact and code that made its verbal and visual images meaningful to its audiences” (1989, 145). For a theatrical approach to these female trances, with Turner’s (1988) theories in mind, see Giles (1999) and Sanmartín Bastida (2012, 241–289). 7 As Halbwasch (2011, 63) points out, if our impression is supported by both our memories and those of others, our confdence in the accuracy of our memory will be higher, as the same experience is repeated by more than one person. See Frugoni (1984, 530) and Woolgar (2006, 186–88):“Like all the external senses, sight was linked to the internal ones by way of the common sense. Special connections between sight, the imagination and memory were developed, particularly in the monasteries and the universities, and became an integral part of the process of religious contemplation and thought”. See also note 14. 8 Perhaps that is why in the seventeenth century, pictures were recommended for the evangelization of America (Faeta 2016, 29), not forgetting the language barrier. On the other hand, I am dealing here with the time of the Reformation, when theologians would complain that images have usurped the authority invested in spiritual advisers (Hamburger 1998, 441): surely, afterward the priestly role grows with the Counter-Reformation, as studied by Bilinkoff (2005).
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Performing authority through iconography 9 For the relationship between images and rhetoric, see González García (2015).This study shows that rhetoric can illuminate how ideas taken from the sacred eloquence infuenced the ways of looking at art in the High Modern Age. 10 For a brief overview of the body of ecclesiastical theory about images, see Baxandall (1972, 40–5). 11 As Faeta (2016, 22) suggests, emotions must be given relevance when evaluating artistic images and their social implications. 12 About how Saint Francis’ imitatio of Christ infuenced the execution of the cycle of painting in Assisi, see Recht (2008, 74–6). 13 Duby (1995, 96) reminds us of the growing importance of devotional books in the Late Middle Ages, books which often contain images similar to those that inhabit chapels. 14 For a study on mental images as mnemonic devices related to memory, meditation, and rhetoric, see Carruthers (1998). 15 I am aware of the issues involved in a gender-based study. Nonetheless, in spite of the early well-argued warning against the limitations of this approach by Zemon Davis (1976), I must say that Scott (1986 & 2010) and Morgan (2006, 1–48) show convincingly how gender still remains a useful historical and analytical category. 16 Gerson warned of the possible insanity of visionary women in his De distinctione verarum revelationum to falsis (Sanmartín Bastida 2015a, 139). As regards Ferrer, the critical part on women’s visions in his Tractatus de vita spirituali was removed from the Castilian version, probably under Cisneros’ command, since the Cardinal supported visionary beatas. 17 On live images and visions (also with male protagonists), see chapter 11 of Freedberg (1989); and Belting (2009), who points to the roots of magic qualities in images. Mitchell (2004) shows how the two trends of skepticism and belief in live images continue today, in spite of our not belonging to Belting’s era before Art. 18 Undoubtedly, three is a key and magic number, so we are not surprised to fnd it in the fuids of the Virgin, as in some miraculous apparitions where she gives three drops of her milk, symbolizing the Trinity, to her devotees (as in Saint Bernard’s lactation). 19 For proximity between sculptures and relics, and Byzantine icons which seem very alive, see Mocholí Martínez’s (2016) thorough study (especially 4, 295, 425–42). For living images of the Virgin in the Cantigas, see García Avilés (2007). 20 I could make here a distinction between narrative paintings and icons; however, I do not think it to be crucial since in both cases the biblical history is recalled, although icons tend to isolate the emotional moment. 21 For the development of art acting on its users and achieving agency, see Gell’s (1998) theory, which will not be discussed here. On the other hand, the analogy of what is discussed here in terms of performance would be that in the Cantigas, images break the “fourth wall” by moving from the stage down into the audience, whereas among women’s visions, images draw their immediate audience (the visionary, not their public) up onto the stage. 22 Deterioration of images was taken seriously since it can result in suspensions or changes of celebrations, as Faeta points out (2016, 25). 23 Maybe the priestly quality of visionary women is mediated by the conception of the Virgin as a priest (present in Juana de la Cruz 1999, 369, and Vida de María de Ajofrín, fols. 196v–197v), due to her consideration as a Eucharist container since the Fourth Lateran Council (see Mocholí Martínez 2016, 478–79). Though I am not going to delve into this, I should say that for Caroline Bynum, women’s charismatic role was an alternative to the characteristic male form of religious authority:“the authority of offce” (1987, 233). 24 For the seduction employed by images, see Faeta (2016, 154). Images and visionaries encourage the production of strong emotions and seek solace in the other. 25 There was a growing popularization of the Veronica at the end of the Middle Ages in Europe. Surely the root of its importance is based in certain manifestations where the Vera Icona had the status of an original: in the thirteenth century, under the infuence of the Eastern Church, the Veronica becomes a relic with the face of Christ (e.g., in the Basilica of Saint Peter’s in Rome) and is perceived as being alive (Belting 2009, 575). 26 For a study of how the replication technology changes the relationship between artifacts and time, and how the timeless sense of images is lost due to the replica, see Wood (2008). From another perspective, Duby (1995, 105) speaks of a process of vulgarization of the image. 27 As Elliot (2004, 1) remarks,“an emphasis on the sacraments becomes intrinsic to contemporary profles of sanctity”.
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INDEX
Abascal, Santiago 193 Abbasids-Umayyad rivalry 197, 200 ‘Abd al-Ḥaqq al-Islamī 280 ‘Abd al-Ḥaqq al-Islāmī 269 ‘Abd Allāh 160 Abdallah Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ 508; see also Kalila wa-Dimna Abdallāh’ Ṭaru¯b 206 ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Habīb 5 ‘Abd al-Raḥmān I 155, 197, 200–1, 203, 209 ʻAbd al-Raḥmān II 204–6 ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III: ascendancy to power 159–60; brutality 157–59; caliphate declaration 123, 145–46, 153, 156; children 156–57, 160; contemporary critics of 152, 157–58; defeat by Christians of Zamora 156; education 160; praise for 159; reign 153–54; in Tārīkh Iftitāḥ al-Andalus (Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyya) 207; titles 153 Abd al-Wahid Dhu Nun Taha 188 ʻAbdullāh (Emir) 205, 211n21 abjection 491–92; see also Celestina, abjection in Abner of Burgos 269 Abraham ibn Daud 122, 364, 371n4; see also The Book of Tradition Abraham ibn Ezra 125, 371n15 Abu Hamid al-Gharnati 411–12 Abu Harun Musa ibn Axaat 260–61 Abu¯ Ismā’l al-Azdī 187 Abulafa 257 Abu¯ Marwān al-Mu‘ayṭī 161 Abu ‘Omar bin Suxen 260 acculturation 56, 58, 62n4 Accursio, Francesco 108 adoration of the Magi 216, 217 Afonso I of Portugal 37, 312 Afonso III of Portugal 41 Afonso IV of Portugal 317–18
Afonso V of Portugal 307, 313–14 Agamben, Giorgio 360n24, 592 agriculture 5–11, 13n2; see also irrigation Aguilar, Josep Antoni 434n6 Aguirre, Esperanza 194 Aḥmad al-Rāzī 146, 155 Aḥmad b.Yaḥyā al-Wansharīsī 446 Airas de Santiago, João 260n30, 355 Ajofrín, María de: charisms 611–12; hagiography 601; living art 606–10, 612, 617n18; protecting images 612; revelations 604, 607, 609, 611, 613; trances 603–5, 609 Akhbār Majmu¯ʻah 197, 210n7 Alans tribe 68, 70 Alberni, Anna 337 Albertus Magnus 480 Alcanyís, Miquel 228 Alcoy, Rosa 220 Alcuin of York 533 Alemán, Mateo 547 Alexandreis 393, 395–96 Alfons I of Catalonia 22, 25, 30n11, 308–9 Alfons the Liberal 41 Alfonso, King of Galicia 312 Alfonso, Pedro 548–49 Alfonso I of Aragon 37, 271, 312–13 Alfonso II of Aragon 37, 168, 257, 557, 570, 572 Alfonso III of Aragon 424 Alfonso III of Asturias 144, 200, 210n12, 557 Alfonso IV of Aragon 92, 94, 320 Alfonso V of Aragon 96, 98, 268, 290, 306 Alfonso VI of Castile and León: death and succession 312; emperorship claims 36, 93; imperial ambitions 88; Taifa kingdom strategy 36, 38;Toledo conquest 122 Alfonso VII of Castile 38, 88, 93, 312–13 Alfonso VIII of Castile 260, 290, 305
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Index Alfonso IX of León 95, 260, 290, 313, 375 Alfonso X of Castile and León:Alfonsine Tables 167;Arabic kingship infuences 54–55, 62n3; Books of Astronomical Knowledge 167; cantigas attributed to 346; Cantigas de Santa María 276; Castilian language 170; cathedrals built 171–72; on chivalry 375–76; claim to Holy Roman Empire throne 170; collaborative writings 167; conquests 40; construction projects 597; court 172, 183n6; cultural-political project 169–70, 172, 174–75, 512; decline 167–68; denunciations of 399; dispositive 171–73; education reforms 533; and Fernando III’s conquests 512; historiographical model 175–76; imperial ambitions 400, 463; legal codes 42; and Libro de Alexandre 400; Libro de las armellas 175; madrasa established 44; military orders founded 172; and non-Christians 514; ordinances of Seville 295; production of presence 172, 183n4; Setenario 174–75; standardization of writing 530; Tablas Alfonsíes 182; transhumance regulation 11; translation projects 121, 125, 463, 511–13;Visigothic king remains 172; wife, Violant of Aragon 311; on writing 173–74; see also Cantigas de Santa María; Estoria de España; Grande e General Estoria; Siete Partidas Alfonso XI of Castile and León: Caballeros villanos 595; Castillian stability 99; construction projects 597; coronation 94, 320; Crónica Troyana 595–98; and Guzmán, Leonor de 317–18; resistance responses 97; royal minority 96–97; theoretical Burgos Cathedral visit 592–95 Alfonso the Kind see Alfonso IV of Aragon Alfonso the Magnanimous see Alfonso V of Aragon Alfonso the Wise see Alfonso X of Castile and León Alghazali 249–50 the Alhambra 55, 593 Alhambra Decree 297; see also Jewish people Alim, Samy 460, 462, 468 Ali ʿIzz al-Din Ibn al-Athir 130n7 aljamas: Jewish 260, 297; Muslim 39–43, 45, 296 Aljamiado-Morisco language 439–40, 458, 460–61 aljamiados 204, 211n17 Aljamiado texts: overview 439, 442; Coplas de Yosef 446, 449, 451, 453; cuaderna vía use 452–53; existant corpus 440; Hebrew 449; Joseph in 453n11; as knowledge expansion 452; parallels 452–53; production 439–40; religious themes 440; see also Ḥadīth de Yúçuf Allen,Valerie 479 Almanzor see al-Manṣu¯r bin Abī ‘Āmir Almohad Caliphate: al-Andalus 37; claims to power 89; decline 40, 511–12; dhimmī privilege elimination 109, 271; Ibn Tumart’s reign 109; infuence on Alfonso X 54, 62n3 Almohad invasions 87
Almoravids: claims to power 89; empire disintegration 37; invasions 87, 126; Islamication 109; Jewish peoples 271; Zaragoza 38 Almosnino, Moses 128 Alonso del Castillo 462 Althusser, Louis 178 Altschul, Nadia 56–57, 62n4 Alvar, Manuel 217 Alvarus, Paulus: debate with Bodo 271; hagiography of Eulogius 234, 241n3; Luminous Catalog 236–41, 241n12 Amadís of Gaula (Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo) 377, 383–87, 388n4, 388nn11–12 Amazigh people see Berbers Ameijeiras see Sánchez Ameijeiras, Rocío Amigo de Sevilha, Pedro 352 Ancos, Pablo 475–76, 488n3, 549 al-Andalus: agricultural practices 4–8, 10;Arabs 35; Berbers 35; cultural legacy 547; cultural openness 120; cultural polarity theory 54; cultural production 120; fragmentation 35; geographic limits 156; historiography produced 3–5, 7, 154–55; ideological impacts 185; landscape 3–5; Medina connection attempts 160–61; mudéjares 41; Muslim social structures 271; palace gardens 7–8; peasants 6, 8; Spanish historical writing on 185; term meanings 185 Andanças e viajes (Pero Tafur) 418 Andrés, Juan 280 the Anthropocene 61 Arabic language: Christian conquest accounts 186, 189, 194; Christian use 460, 513–14; Córdoba martyrdom movement 238; Don Quixote 464–65, 467, 470; identity 470; Jewish use and knowledge 122–2, 125, 364–70, 371nn16–17; Morisco use 469–72; Muslim conquest sources 138, 144–47, 186–89, 192, 194; and the single language hypothesis 533 Aragon:Alfonso I 37, 271, 312–13;Alfonso II 37, 168, 257, 557, 570, 572;Alfonso III 424;Alfonso IV 92, 94, 320;Alfonso V 96, 98, 268, 290, 306; attacks on Zaragoza 37; Castile conficts 45; coronations 319–20; decline 578–79; forced conversions 281; fueros 42; Hospitallers 37; Jewish community 579; Joan I of Aragon 306, 317; María de Luna 289–90, 309–10, 317; Martin I 289; monarchy resistance 22; Moriscos 48; mudéjares 37, 43, 45, 272, 579; mudéjar structures 567; Pere the Ceremonious 45, 311, 317–20; Petronila 308–9, 316; representative assemblies 95, 96;Templars 37; Vidal Mayor 28; see also Crown of Aragon; Jaume I of Aragon; Jaume II of Aragon Arbesú, David 337 Archivo Digital de Manuscritos y Textos Españoles (ADMYTE) 330 Arendt, Hannah 105, 115n10
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Index Arianism 68, 74–77, 81–82 ‘Arīb bin Sa‘īd 138, 146 Arīb ibn Sa‘d 156 Ariès, Philippe 220 Aristotelian Natural Philosophy 392, 394, 396, 398 Aristotle: condemnations of 398; ethics 105; in Libro de Alexandre 393–94, 396, 398; misogyny 304; rapture and horror 494; reintroduction to the West 398, 404; on sensitive souls 101, 103; on vision 616n5 Arizaleta, Amaia 400 Ars Magna (Ramon Llull) 245–51 art 605, 610, 615, 616n4; see also living art Artabas 199, 201 Arte de Trovar 345, 353–54, 360n28 Artes Praedicandi 584 Asding Vandals 68, 70 Asenio, Eugenio 346, 356, 359n6, 359nn11–12, 360n27 Asturias:Alfonso III 144, 200, 210n12, 557; in Estoria de España 168; Muslim settlements 36; Reconquista 192;Visigothic traditions 93; see also Nodicia de kesos The Augsburg Web Edition of Llull’s Electoral Writings 337 Augustine: City of God 235–36; condemnation of Donatists 236–38, 241n11; on curiosity 397; on cursing contradiction 239; on images 601; on listening 483; on martyrdom 235–37; on reading 495–96 Augustine of Hippo 278, 587–88 Aurell, Jaume 89 d’Averçó, Lluís 422 Averroes 105, 111–13, 125, 446 Avicenna 105, 125 Avinyó, Mossèn 422 al-Azraq 42 Babylon 404 Baḥya ibn Paqu¯da 365 Bailey, Matthew 338 Bakhtin, Mikhail 141, 446–47 Al-Bakri 414 al-Balāḏhurī 187 Ballester, García 398 Bamford, Heather 331 the Banu¯ Ḥu¯d 38, 41 baptism, forced 75, 272, 274 Bar,Violant de 317 Barbastro 37 Barberà, Jean Marie 386 Barceló, Miquel 5–6 Barcelona 22, 91, 291 Barkai, Ron 210n5 Barletta,Vincent 402, 442, 451 Barnstone, Willis 367 barraganas (concubines) 292–93, 317–19
Barthes, Roland 494, 578 Bartolomé de las Casas 418 Barton, Simon 316, 561n9 Barukh ben Isaac ibn al-Balīya 371n4 Baschet, Jerome 602 Basilea, Fadrique de 516, 518 Bauman, Richard 450, 452 Bautista, Francisco 561n15 Baveca, João 354–55 beatas (holy women):Angela of Foligno 604; authorization through images 600, 611–15, 617n23; charisms 600–1, 611; hagiographies 601, 616n2; Helfta, Gertrude de 604; as icons 613, 615–16; image interactions 603–5, 610–11, 614–15; insanity 617n16; Julian of Norwich 604; living art 605–10, 612, 615, 617n21; as living saints 600, 611, 613; marginalization of non-Christians 614; revelations 601; Santo Domingo, María de 601, 604, 611–13; stigmata 611–12; trances 603, 605; trance time and space 609–11;Veronica 613, 615; see also Ajofrín, María de; Juana de la Cruz Beauvoir, Simone de 314 Becerro Galicano de San Millán de la Cogolla 535 Bejarano, Ingrid 412 Bello, Andrés 56 Bellviure, Pau de 429–30 Beltrán,Viçens 330, 359n12 Benedict II 79 Benedict XIII 268 Benjamin, Walter 463 Berbers: in al-Andalus 35, 271; Hispania invasions 82; irrigation 5–6; Islamicization 143; return to North Africa 6; views on 154 Berceo, Gonzalo de: faith and hearing themes 486; Martirio de San Lorenzo 231; suavitas use 481, 488n5; Vida de San Millán 486; Vida de Santa Oria 488n7; Vida de Santo Domingo de Silos 452, 483; see also Milagros de Nuestra Señora Berenguela of Castile 290 Berenguer, Ramon III 23 Berenguer, Ramon IV 22, 37, 308 Berenguer de Masdovelles, Joan 422, 430 Bernard of Clairvaux 395, 615 Bernardo II 398 Bernardo del Carpio 557–58 Bhabha, Homi 57 Biale, David 447, 450 the Bible: Hebrew 367; leprosy 224; misogyny 304; queenship models 320–21; use in Grande e General Estoria 169, 180–82 Bibliography of Old Spanish Texts 329 Biblioteca Digital Hispánica 331 Biblioteca Digital del Patrimonio Iberoamericano 331 Biblioteca Joan Lluís Vives 334 Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes 334 Bibliotheca Augustana 334
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Index Binski, Paul 587 Al-Biruni 414 bishops: of Burgos 261; Diego Gelmírez of Santiago de Compostela 567; of Hippo 235–37, 239; and Jewish people 258–59, 261; of León 259–60; Miguell of Tudela 262–63; Pedro de Roda of Pamplona 567; royal authority over 257–58; translation support 262–63 Bisson, Thomas 22 Bizarri, Hugo 485 Black Death 12, 44 Blackmore, Josiah 360n34 Blake, Robert J. 529, 537, 541 Blanca I 306–7, 311 Blanca of Anjou 309 Bloch, Marc 566 Bodo 271 Boethius of Dacia 398, 431 Boïl, Bernat 249, 251 Bolseiro, Juião 352 Bonaventure (Saint) 399, 584 Boniface VIII 288 Bonner, Anthony 244 Book of the Deeds of King Jaume 183n4 The Book of the Knight Zifar: overview 380–81; chivalric status 377, 381; exemplary tales 381; geography 414; and “The Knight of the Swan” 383; as literary fction 381, 387; motifs 381; origins 379–80 The Book of Tradition (Abraham ibn Daud) 363–64 Borrás Gualis, Gonzalo 570 Borrut, Antoine 210n5 Bourbon, Blanche de 319 Bouza, Fernando 503 Brabant, Siger de 398 Braga Rite 81–82 Brann, Ross 54, 60, 62n8, 125 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau 60 Bratutti,Vicente 521–24 Braulio of Zaragoza 75, 78, 80–81 Brea, Mercedes 358n1, 359n6 Brethren of Purity 103, 105 Bridges, Roy 409 Briggs, Charles 450, 452 Brihuega, Bernardo de 179 Brown, Susan 333, 341n22 Bruno, Giordano 249 Bulliet, Richard 142–43, 270–71 Burgalês, Pero Garcia 350, 357–58 Burgos: cathedral 171, 584, 592–95; Jewish community 261 Burgos, Abner de see Valladolid,Alfonso de Burke, James 491, 504 Burnett, Charles 479, 485 Burns, Robert I. 58, 62n10 Busa, Roberto 328 Butler, Judith 304, 314
Bynum, Caroline W. 584, 617n23 Byzantium 67, 76, 80, 120 Cacho Blecua, Juan Manuel: on Amadís of Gaula 384–85, 386, 388n4; on chivalric biographies 378; digital humanities projects 332 Cairo Genizah letters 296, 372n19 Calderón Medina, Inés 115n11 Calila e Dimna: overview 511;Alfonso X’s role 511–13; continuity with Arabic original 513– 14, 523; date of translation 508, 514; historical contexts 511–12; marginalia 514; social mobility theme 514–15, 519; surviving manuscripts 511, 513–14, 524n10 caliphs 160; see also ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III Calvino, Italo 457 Camille, Michael 616n5 Camões, Luís de 317 Camón Aznar, José 561n4 Campbell, Joseph 403 Campbell, Mary B. 409 canals 10 Canary Islands 12 cancioneiros see songbooks Cançoner Gil 424, 430 Cançoner Vega-Aguiló 426, 430, 434n1 Cantar de mio Cid see Poema de mio Cid the cantigas (Galician-Portuguese): overview 345, 358n1; accentual patterns 360n23;“Ai eu coitada” 346, 357–58, 359n4;“Ai madr’, o que bem queria” 346–47;“Amigo, sei que há mui gram sazom” 354;“Amigos, cuido sempr’em mia senhor” 357, 360n35; cantigas de escárnio e maldizer 353, 360n26; coita 350, 355–57, 360n34; conventionality 349–50; as dramatic poetry 351, 360n22; “Fez ũa cantiga d’amor” 352; gender 345, 351, 354–55, 360n22; genre 345, 354–57, 360n27; “Levantou-s’a velida” 356; “Loarmi-á muito e chamar-mi-á senhor” 355; as lyric poetry 347–49, 359n12; musical notation 351–52; Occitan infuence 345, 351; parallelism 346–47, 359nn6–7; performance 351–53; poetics evidence 353–57;“Proençaes soem mui bem trobar” 345, 349–50, 360n19; repetition 346, 348, 356–58;“Sedia la fremosa seu sirgo torcendo” 355–57, 360n33; self-consciousness 345;“Sueir’Eanes, nunca eu terrei” 353–54; “Um cantar d’amig’há feito” 352 Cantigas de Santa María (Alfonso X): overview 589; Christian-Muslim contact 589; conversions 276, 589, 591–92; digital humanities projects 337; illustrations 589–92; living art 609–10, 617n21; Paradise representations 588–89; performances 591 Cantor, Norman 401 Capua, Juan de 516–17 Carbonnel, Pere 429
624
Index Carruthers, Mary 481, 488n8 Carthaginensia 70–71 Casson, Andrew 337 Castaño, Javier 259, 263–64 Castells, Manuel 60 Castelnou, Joan de 424 Castile:Alfonso VII 38, 88, 93, 312–13;Alfonso VIII 260, 290, 305;Aragon conficts 45; Catalina of Lancaster 307; concubines 292–93; cultural similarities with Granada 55; environment 3; female succession 310, 312–14; forced conversions 281; Granada conficts 89; Hermandades 97–98; instability 99; Juana I 309, 314–15; María of Castile 290, 306–7, 309; minorities 98; mudéjares 45–47, 272; Nasrid sultanate conquest 45; natural philosophy 398–99; Pedro the Cruel 45, 318–19; political unrest instigation 93; and Portugal 312; reforms 54; representative assemblies 95–97; resistance 97–98; rituals of power 93–94; royal inquisitions 107, 115n12; royal power 96; royal women 290, 318; succession crises 96;Trastámara dynasty 94; Urraca of León 290–91, 312–13;Virgin appearances 603; war with León 260; see also Castile and León; Fernando III of Castile; Isabel I of Castile Castile and León: bishops 258; female succession 313; fueros 512; imperial ambitions 88; mudéjares 36–37, 42–43, 45–46; Murcian territory 41; Sancho IV 94, 310–11, 313, 382; separation and reunifcation 313; unifcation 88; see also Alfonso VI of Castile and León;Alfonso XI of Castile and León;Alfonso X of Castile and León; Asturias; Burgos Castilian language 128, 170, 182, 523–24 Castillo, David R. 502 Castro, Américo 52, 56, 142 Catalán, Diego 182n2, 558 Catalina of Lancaster 307 Catalonia: Constitucions de Catalunya 23–24, 28; Crown of Aragon’s jurisdiction 23–26; irrigation 8; mudéjares 37, 42; peasant rights 98; Pere I 22, 25–26; political structures 91; representative assemblies 95, 96; war of the remenças 98; wives of priests 293; see also Alfons I of Catalonia; Barcelona Cathedral of Santa María de Mediavilla 567–68; see also the techumbre of Teruel cathedrals: built by Alfonso X 171–72; Burgos 171, 584, 592–95; Chartres 221; Santa María de Mediavilla 567–68; Santa María de Regla (León) 172, 258–59, 582–85; Santa María la Mayor de Toro cathedral 584–88;Tudela 263, 264, 265; see also the techumbre of Teruel Catherine of Alexandria 611 Catherine of Lancaster 46–47, 313 Catherine of Sienna (Saint) 600–1, 602, 611–12, 616
Catholic-Arian division 68, 74 Catlos, Brian 198, 238 Catón, Fernández 537, 542n26 Çelebi, Ali 521 Celestina (Fernando de Rojas): audience 501, 503; authorial persona 495–99, 502–3; desire 497– 502; dualistic nature 502; historical contexts 491, 501, 503; language 494–95, 501, 504; moral imperative 497–500; negative responses to 482, 501–2; oral literary culture 503; pessimism 499–500; printed editions 502–3, 505n10; reading motif 496, 498–99; scholarship on 491–93, 505n1; success and infuence 492–93; title changes 492, 498, 505n7; traumatic event portrayal 493–94; universal confict 500–1 Celestina, abjection in: catharsis 498; celestinesca tradition 504; cosmology 500–1; and didacticism 495, 497; and language 495; sources of 491–92, 494, 505n1; surplus meaning 499; woodcuts for print editions 503–4 celibacy 80 Cerda, Fernando de la 310–11 Cervantes, Miguel de, 501–2; Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes 334; see also Don Quixote Chalmeta, Pedro, 190 chansons de geste (French heroic songs): crusader chronicles 382; Muslims in 547–48, 550, 553, 560; orality 425 charity 496 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor 46, 97, 170 Chartres Cathedral 221 Cheyette, Frederic 21 chivalric literature: overview 375; Amadís of Gaula 377, 383–87, 388n4, 388nn11–12;Arthurian infuences 384–85; biographies 378; Curial e Gu¨elfa 426; exemplary tales 381; fabulae 376; fctional genres 378, 387; genre labels 378–79; The Great Conquest of Overseas 377, 381–82, 387; historiographical aspects 377–78, 382, 387; impact 387–88; infuence on hagiography 379;“The Knight of the Swan” 377, 382–83, 387; The Knight Plaçidas 379, 381; modern 386; origins 387; tropes 377, 384; see also The Book of the Knight Zifar; Tirant lo Blanc chivalry 375–77, 379 Chrétien de Troyes 384, 387 Christian conquests:Arabic accounts 186, 189, 194; books of distribution 40; Christian versus Arabic accounts 186; colonial aspects 8, 40; continuity rhetoric 9; Córdoba Caliphate collapse 35–36, 87; end of 12; environmental impacts 8–9; fall rhetoric 189, 194; Granada 8–9, 12, 46, 316, 547; incorporation term 188–89; irrigation infrastructure 8–10; Jaume I’s 9, 40–41, 244, 308; Lisbon 37; Mallorca 41, 244; mudéjares 35, 39–40; Murcia 40–41; Nasrid sultanate 45–46; Navarre 46; pastoralism 10–11; post-Almohad
625
Index decline 40;Toledo 122;Valencia 9, 36–37, 41, 62n10; see also Reconquista Christiani, Paul 273 Christianity:Arian confict 68; Church challenges to monarchies 401; conversion prohibitions 272; Coronation of the Virgin 583; malediction 239; and natural disasters 12; peace-making 239; supremacy goals 269; see also the Bible; Christian conquests; conversion to Christianity; Councils Christian kingdoms 8, 38, 87; see also individual kingdoms Chronicle of Alfonso III 200, 210n12 El Cid 36–37, 561n4; see also Poema de mio Cid Cirot, Georges 547 Clarke, Nicola 191 Clement I 237 Clement IV 58, 273 Clement VIII 76 clerical poetry see mester de clerecía Codax, Martim 348, 351–52, 358n2, 359n8 Coelho, Estêvão 355–57 Cohen, Gerson 364 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 56, 58, 61 Cohen, Rip 358n1, 360n23, 360n33 collective memory 603, 609 Collins, Roger 191, 210n6 Colocci, Angelo 358n2 colonialism 8, 40, 58 Columbus, Christopher 418–19 Comestor, Petrus 182 Compludo monastery 78–79 concubines 292–93, 317–19 Conde Lucanor 548 confessor handbooks 106 Lo conhort (Francesc Ferrer) 430 Connolly, Jane 217 conveniencia 49–50 conversion: Barcelona Disputation 273; as cultural metaphor 269; Disputation of Tortosa 273; historical contexts 274; historiographical problems 274–75, 277; to Judaism 271–72, 277–78, 280–81; laws covering 272; social contexts 270; as social phenomenon 269; as temporal metaphor 275; terms for 275 conversion to Christianity: in Cantigas de Santa María 276, 589, 591–92; conversos 127, 273, 449; debates over 270; Flores and Blancafor tale 593; forced 75, 80, 120, 270, 272–74, 281, 297–98; Hebrew literary responses 127–28; Julian of Toledo 79; miraculous stories 275; mudéjares 272; pressures encouraging 272–73; Siete Partidas 591; texts meant to motivate 79; women 297–98; see also Moriscos conversion to Islam:Almohad rule 271; as culturalpolitical assimilation 270–71; feigned 271; rates
of 142–43, 271; testimonials 280–81;Turmeda, Anselm 268–69, 274, 277, 280–81 conversion literature: contexts 281; frst-person accounts 268–69, 274, 277, 280–81; Hebrew 127–28; idealizing 275–76; polemicals 269, 276–78; testimonials 278–81; theological treatises 269, 277–78, 281 conversos (New Christians) 127, 273, 449 convivencia 52, 56, 250, 546, 576 Coplas de Yosef 446, 449, 451, 453 El Corbacho (Alfonso Martínez de Toledo) 303–4 Córdoba, Martín de 314 Córdoba Caliphate: Berbers 154; collapse 35, 40, 87, 154; economy 153; frontier control 156; Ḥasdāy b. Shapru¯ṭ 161; Hishām II 161, 294; historiography 155–59; identity 156–57; learning 160–61; Madīnat al-Zahrā’ 153–54, 159; memorializations 157;“ornament of the world” epithet 152; political aspirations 156; praise for 153; religious tolerance 152; scholarly activities 157; see also ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III Córdoba emirate 197; see also ‘Abd al-Raḥmān I Córdoba martyrdom movement: overview 234; Alvarus, Paulus’s support 236–41; behavior 241n8; Christian resident views on 234; cursing 238–40; Eulogius’s support 234–39, 241; versus Middle Eastern martyrs 239; opposition to 235–38, 240; provocations 234, 238; relics 241n4; women 294 Córdoba’s Great Mosque 203 Corfs, Ivy 392 Cornet, Ramon de 430 Corominas, Joan 473n3 Corpus Diacrónico del Español 335 Corral, Esther 351 Cortijo, Antonio 317 Costa Gomes, Rita 89, 99n2 Cotom,Afonso Anes do 353, 360n26 Councils: Braga, 74, 81; Burgos, 533; Coyanza, 258; Gallaecia, 74; Granada, 73–74; Lateran, Fourth, 43, 230, 261, 272–73, 609, 617n23; Seville, Second, 75;Toledo (various mentions), 72–74, 79–80;Toledo, Fourth, 73, 75, 82, 270, 274; Toledo, Third, 74–77; Trent, 77;Visigothic– Mozarabic rite, 81;Vivienne, 245; Zaragoza, 74 Covarrubias, Sebastián 458–59, 464 Crenshaw, Kimberle 304 Crònica general (Peter III) 428–29 Crónica Troyana 595–98 Cronon, William 7–8 Crown of Aragon: overview 307–8; anointments and coronations 91–94; Barcelona merger 22; entities under 88, 91; inheritance laws 311; liberties 98; lieutenancy offce 308–9; María of Castile 290, 306–7, 309; mudéjares 45–46; paper production 41; political entities 88; queens 290,
626
Index 307–10; representative assemblies 88, 95–96; royal power 96; women’s sexuality 292; see also Aragon; Catalonia;Valencia Crown of Aragon political culture: Barcelona merger 22; Constitucions de Catalunya 23–24, 28; fragmentation 21–22; government centralization attempts 22; Hospitaller Order 26–27; Juneda blocked inquest case 23–26; jurisdiction 21–22, 24–26, 30n2; L’Espluga de Francolí legal customs 26–27; military service conficts 27–29; royal bureaucracy 25–26; seigniorial autonomy 23–26; standardization resistance 29;Templar Order 26; Usatges de Barcelona 22–24, 26, 28, 91; women 30n4 the Crusades 58–59 cuaderna vía strophic form 439–41, 450–53, 458 Cuenca 37, 109 Culler, Jonathan 349, 359n13 cult of the Innocents 219 cultural and religious fuidity 508 Cunha, Celso Ferreira da 361n37 curiosity: Libro de Alexandre 392–93, 395–97, 404; sin associations 397–98 currency 259, 263, 265n9 Dagenais, John 53, 454n16, 496 Dalmau de Cervera, Guillem 23, 30n11 Dana, Joseph 368 Dante 400–1 Da Piera, Solomon 128 Daris Phrygius 377 Dark Ages Cold Period 5 Davis, Kathleen 56 Decker, Sarah Ifft 297 decorum aesthetics 581, 585, 598 dehesas (wooded pastures) 10–11 De perpetua virginitate (Ildefonsus of Toledo) 77–78 Derrida, Jacques 141 Desclot, Bernat 429, 431, 434n6 Devoto, Daniel 480, 488n4 Deyermond, Alan: on The Book of the Knight Zifar 381; on Celestina 496, 500, 503; on the Galician-Portuguese cantigas 351; on The Great Conquest of Overseas 382; on Libre dels tres reys d’Orient 217; on Spanish literary genres 378–79; on surviving epic texts 546 dhimma law 152, 270 dhimmis 39, 270–71; see also Mozarabs Dialogus contra Iudaeos (Petrus Alfonsi) 278–79 Díaz del Vivar, Rodrigo 36–37, 561n4 Dictionary of the Old Spanish Language 329 Dictys Cretensis 377 digital humanities (DH): CD-ROM texts 330; corpora 334–35, 337–38; databases 332–33, 337; digital editions 336–38; discipline history 328–31, 340, 340n6; geographic information system (GIS) 330, 338–39; Iberian scholarship
328; interdisciplinarity 327–28; interoperability principle 333, 341n22; lexicographical projects 328–30, 341n10; libraries 331, 334–35; Medieval Studies overview 328, 339–40; music 337, 339; online resources 330–33, 341n17; paleography 339; preservation of sources 331; scholarly editing 330, 337; semantic web 331–32; standards 333, 337;Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) 330, 341n12; textual editing 337; Zenodo 338, 341n33 Digital Library of Old Spanish Texts 334–35 Dinant, David 398 Dinis I of Portugal:“Ai Deus, e u é?” 358; “Levantou-s’a velida” 356;“Proençaes soem mui bem trobar” 345, 349–50, 360n19; wife Isabel of Aragon 312 Diploma of King Silo 535, 536 dispositifs 171 Dominican Order 40, 273, 398 Donatists 235–38, 241n11 Don Juan Manuel: anti-chivalric writing 376–77; Conde Lucanor 548; Maurophilia 548; sources 548 Don Quixote (Cervantes): Aljamiado-Morisco language 461;Arabic language 464–65, 467, 470; historical contexts 457–58; as literary classic 457; Morisco characters 457, 464–65, 467–68; raciolinguistic analysis 463–68; reading motif 502; translation theme 457–58 d’Oppido, Giuàn 281 Dotzè (Francesc Eiximenis) 426, 429, 433 Douglas, Mary 230 Dozy, Reinhart 210n5 Dresser, Rachel 221 Driscoll, Matthew James 336 Drory, Rina 60, 369, 372n23 DuBois, John 444, 453n9 Duby, Georges 616n4, 617n13, 618n28 Duffell, Martin 360n23 Du¯nash ben Labrāṭ 123, 367–68 Du¯nash bin Tamīm 161, 162n15 Duque, Adriano 235 Durkheim, Emile 574 Dutton, Brian 318, 338, 480, 488n4 Eagleton, Terri 491 Earenfght, Theresa 306 Echevarría, Ana 60 ecocriticism 61 Eden visual representations 588–89 Edgerton, Samuel 229 educational reforms 533 Eiximenis, Francesc: anti-Muslim preaching 45; digital databases 332; Dotzè 426, 429, 433; hand-printed texts 433; holographs surviving 422; Regiment de la cosa pública 429, 431, 433; Scala Dei 310, 432; Terç 429; treatise on feminine virtue 310
627
Index Eleanor/Leonor 289–90 Electronic Corpus of the 15th Castilian Cancionero Manuscript 337 Elliot, Dylan 617n27 Elvira see Granada Embassy (Ruy González de Clavijo) 417–18 Emiliano, António 543n27 emotion, historians of 351, 360n21 Enrique II 94 Enrique III 96 Enrique IV 47, 94, 97 enslaved people 293, 296 the environment: al-Andalus 3–5;Atlantic archipelagos 12; Castile 3; Christian conquests 8–9; climate change 5–6, 11–12; human impacts 4–5, 10–13; irrigation 4–12; natural disasters 11–12; pastoralism 10–11; second nature 7–8; Spanish Empire 12–13; variation 3–5 epic texts: ballad sources 546; Bernardo del Carpio 557–58; versus French chansons de geste 550, 553, 560; Maurophilia 546–47, 560; Mocedades de Rodrigo 546, 555–56, 558; Poema de Fernán González 477, 486, 558–60; Roncesvalles 546; Sancho II’s death narrations 556–57; see also chansons de geste; Poema de Mio Cid Espejo político y moral 508, 520–24 Esther 321 Estoria de España (EE): overview 168; authorial positioning 176; Bernardo del Carpio legend 557–58, 561n15; Bishop Tajón story 179–80; critical version 168, 170; Dido 178; exemplary fgures 177–78; form and ideology 177–82; hegemonic goals 170; historical contexts 167; impact 168; interpretive criteria 176; layout techniques 177; manuscript production 177; naming 177, 183n7; narrative techniques 176–78; political functions 177–80, 182; precedents 167; prolog 173–76; redactions 168, 175; Sancho II’s death 556, 561n13; Siete Infantes de Lara 549–51; source materials 168, 561n13; structure 168; unique aspects 170–73; value 169 ethnicity concept problems 459–60 ethnolects 459 Etymologiae (Isidore of Seville) 76 Eugene II of Toledo 79 Eulogius: death sentence 241n3; Memorial of the Saints 234–39, 241n5, 241n7; mockery experienced 241n1 Eusebius of Caesarea 114n4 Even-Zohar, Itamar 60 Exemplario contra los engaños y pelígros del mundo: date of translation 508, 514; didacticism 518; historical contexts 515–16, 519; inter-group relations theme 519–20, 523; Latin sources 516–17; paratextual elements 518–19; preface 517; reception 516
exemplary tales 177–78, 381, 516; see also Kalila wa-Dimna; Libre dels tres reys d’Orient extimacy 589 Eymerich, Nicholas 106, 248, 251 Faeta, Francesco 603, 613, 617n11, 617n22 Fanjul, S. 193 fatḥ concept 186–89, 194 Fatima bint al-Ahmar 307 Fatimids 153–54, 159–60 Faulhaber, Charles B. 329–30, 333–34 Febrer,Andreu 426, 430 Felipe II 114n2 Felipe III 49 feminine holiness 600; see also beatas Ferdinand III 88 Ferguson, Charles 532 Fernández-Ordóñez, Inés 177, 182n2 Fernando I: conquests 45–46; coronation 91, 93; death and succession 309; and the Taifa kingdoms 36 Fernando II: coronation 93; marriage to Isabel of Castile 46, 91, 93, 314; support for peasants 98; Teruel 579 Fernando III of Castile: Castile consolidation 96, 99, 290; and Jewish communities 261; military expansion 40, 511–12; writing reforms 542n15 Fernando IV 96, 379–80, 382–83 Ferran I 29 Ferreira,Ana Paula 351 Ferreira, Manuel Pedro 351, 358n2, 360n28, 360n31 Ferrer, Francesc 423, 430 Ferrer, Joan Ramon 434n1 Ferrer,Vincent (Saint) 45, 273, 423, 605, 617n16 Fidora, Alexander 244–45 Fierro, Maribel 53–54, 62n3, 199, 211n18 Filios, Denise K. 210n5 Flavius, Ricimir 69 Flavius Josephus 169, 431 Flores and Blancafor tale 593–95 Fogassot, Joan 422, 430, 434n1 Foster, David William 215 Foucault, Michel 21, 105, 171, 305 Fourth Lateran Council 43, 230, 261, 272–73, 609, 617n23 Fowler, Elizabeth 483–84 Fradejas Ruedas, José Manuel 338 Francis (Saint) 611–12 Franciscan Order 40, 245, 251, 398; see also Eiximenis, Francesc Francomano, Emily C. 331 Frederick II 400–1; Dante on 400–1 Freedman, Paul 510 French epic poetry see chansons de geste Fructuosus of Braga 78–79 Fuchs, Barbara 465, 515, 548 Fuente Ovejuna 97
628
Index fueros (law codes):Alfonso X’s undermining 512; Aragón 42; Castile and León 512; Cuenca 37, 109; Jewish people 257; kings granting 90, 257; mudéjares 36–37, 39–40; Navarre 42, 311; as political networks 108–9, 115n16; succession 311;Teruel 257, 570, 572, 575–76;Valencia 28, 288; women 288 Gagliardi, Donatella 502 Galceran de Pinós, Francesc 422 Galicia:Alfonso 312; Jillīqiya translation 195n6; Urraca of León 290–91 Gallaecia: Braga councils 74; Germanic invasions 70; Suevic kingdom 68–73; tribal conficts 70 Garbarino, Collin 236 García, Aldana 241n8 García, María 606 Garcia, Martí 429 García, Ofelia 463 García-Arenal, Mercedes 270, 447 Garcia Latorre, Juan 11 García-Sanjuán, Alejandro 62n1 García Solalinde,Antonio 183n3 Garzón, Marina 586 Gaufredi, Ramon 251 Gaunt, Simon 55 Gaylord, Mary 495, 498 Geertz, Clifford 89 Gelmírez, Diego 567 gender: as analytic category 617n15; the cantigas 345, 351, 354–55, 360n22; enslavement 293; and images 605; ius commune 287–88; living art 606; as performative 304, 314; social rules 318; see also women genre: the cantigas 345, 354–57, 360n27; chivalric literature 378–79; contextualization 450; futu¯ḥ 187–88; Spanish terms 378–79, 388n5 Geoffrey of Vinsauf 581 Geoffroy, Marc 112 Gerard de Cremona 398 Gerli, Michael 444, 491, 495, 505n1 Gerson, Jean 605, 617n16 al-Ghāzālī 112–13, 115n20, 115n22, 295 Gil de Zamora, Juan 582, 584 Giles, Ryan 486 Giles of Rome 431 Gilman, Stephen 505n10 Girona, Cerverí de 426, 430 Girón-Negrón, Luis 449, 454n15 Glazer-Eytan,Yonatan 270 Glick,Thomas F. 5, 54 Godfrey of Viterbo 180 Le Goff, Jacques 201 Goldenberg, David 57 Gomes, Maria Joana 59 Gómez Redondo, Fernando 313, 377–78, 382–83 Gómez-Rivas, Camilo 109
Gonçalves de Portocarreiro, Pero 345 González de Clavijo, Ruy 417 Gossman, Lionel 198 Gothic anamorphic gaze 589, 597 Gradín, Pilar Lorenzo 358n1, 359n6 Graf, Eric 458, 464 Granada: agriculture 7;Almoravid conquest 126; Castile conficts 89; as Castile tributary 512; Christian conquest 8–9, 12, 46, 316, 547; conversion order 46; councils 73–74; cultural similarities with Castile 55; historical summary 88; internal conficts 89–90; Jewish community 120, 271; Moriscos 48; mudéjares 45; political power 89–90; revolts 40; transhumance 11; women 307 Grande e General Estoria (GE): overview 168–69; Biblical sources and stories 169, 180–82; on Castilian language 182; form and ideology 179–80; imperial ambitions 381; knowledge transmission 173; language 180–82; political functions 179, 182; structure 169; three arts of the Trivium 598; unique aspects 170–73; value 169 Gratian 288 The Great Conquest of Overseas 377, 381–82, 387 Gregory I 74, 77, 234, 239, 270 Gregory VII 82, 567 Gregory the Great 615 Gregory of Tours 71, 74, 225 Grigley, Joseph 433 Grillo, Laura 202 Grosseteste, Robert 398 Gualbes, Melcior de 426 Las guerras civiles de Granada 547 Gui, Bernard 106 Guichard, Pierre 5, 143 Guil, López 560 Guinot, Enric 9 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 183n4, 368–69 Gundisalvo, Domingo 480 Guzmán, Leonor de 317–18 Ḥadīth de Yúçuf: author 442; contexts of production 446, 452–53; critical editions 442; cuaderna vía
440–41, 450–52; dating 440–41; instructional intent 443, 445, 447–48; intertextuality 442–43, 446–50; manuscript A 440–42, 450, 453n5, 453n8; manuscript B 441–42, 450–52; mudéjar origins 441; patience theme 445–46; recitation motifs 443–44; ritual speech 444; scholarship on 441–42; scribal alterations 450, 453n8; sheep motif 448; signifcance 439; titles 439, 442; unbound folio 441 hagiographies 234, 241n3, 379, 601, 616n2; see also Libre dels tres reys d’Orient Haidu, Peter 349 the Hajj 211n15
629
Index al-Ḥakam I 198, 204, 209 al-Ḥakam II 153, 199, 210n11, 241n4, 294 halakha 130n3, 296 Halbwasch, Maurice 603, 609, 616n7 Halevi, Judah: cultural production 371n15; poetry 369; scholarship on 365; Sefer Ha-Kuzari 81, 269, 277–78 Halevi, Samuel 126 Halevi, Solomon 280 Hamburger, Jeffrey 600, 604 Hames, Harvey J. 250 Hamilton, Michelle M. 59 Haney, Kristine Edmondson 221 Hapsburg dynasty women 308 Hart,Thomas R. 360n19 Harvey, L. P. 461 Hary, Benjamin 459 Ḥasdai ibn Shapru¯ṭ 277, 366–67 Hāshim Ibn ‘Abd al-‘Azīz 205 Haskin, Charles Homer 405n1 Hegyi, Ottmar 440 Helfta, Gertrude de 604 Hen,Yitzhak 67 Heng, Geraldine 57–58 Henriques, Afonso see Afonso I of Portugal heresy: Donatist 235–38, 241n11; and philosophy 396, 398; Priscillianism 71–72 Herman of Cologne 280–81, 281 Hermenegild 74–76 Herod: death 222; in Libre dels tres reys d’Orient 215–19, 221–22, 231 Herodotus 413–14, 417 Heroides VII (Ovid) 178 Hillgarth, Jocelyn N. 244, 249 Hindmarsh, Bruce 275 Hishām son of ʻAbd al-Raḥmān I 203–4 Hishām II 161, 294 Hispania:Arab and Berber invasions 82;ArianCatholic division 68, 74; and Byzantium 80; Granada councils 73–74; Hispana canon law collection 73, 80; historical sources 71, 73; Isidorian Renaissance 75–81; Martin of Braga 71–72, 74, 78, 81; political instability 68; Priscillianism 71–72; tribal conficts 68–69; see also Gallaecia; Toledo Historia del Abencerraje y de la hermosa Jarifa 547 Historia Naturalis (Juan Gil de Zamora) 584 historiography:Alfonso X 175–76; al-Andalus 3–5, 7, 154–55; Book of the Deeds of King Jaume 183n4; chivalric literature 377–78, 382, 387; Christian versus Islamic 3–4; Córdoba Caliphate 155–59; environmental 3–5; Les Grandes Chroniques de France 171; in vernacular Romance 171 The History of the Conquest of al-Andalus see Tārīkh Iftitāḥ al-Andalus history’s literary dimensions 198
Hita,Arcipreste de 329 Hockey, Susan 340n6 Hohenstaufen dynasty 399 Honorius (Emperor) 68 Honorius I 80 Honorius III 261 Hospitaller Order 26–27, 37, 40 Hoyland, Robert 186 Hroswitha 152, 154, 158–59, 161n3 al-Hudaybiyya pact 187 Humayun-Nameh 521 Humbert of Romans 273 Hurtado de Mendoza, Diego 471 Hurus, Juan 518 Hurus, Pablo 516, 518 Hutcheson, Gregory, 453n2 Hydatius 70–71 Iberian Romance language:Alfonsine cultural project 174; dating of spoken 537; historiography 171; Latinity 528; LatinRomance continuum 530–32, 534; logographic principle 533–34; phonographic principle 534; single language (SL) hypothesis 532–34, 537, 543n27; spelling variation 542n26; syntactic patterns 534–37; textual variability 543n27; two language (2L) hypothesis 532, 534, 537; writing 174, 530; see also Nodicia de kesos Iberian social uniqueness 269–70 Ibn Abd al-Barr 295 Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam 138, 145, 187 Ibn ‘Abd Rabbihi 156 Ibn Abī l-Fayyāḍ 157 Ibn Akhī Rabī‘ al-Ṣabbāgh 161 Ibn al-A’tham 187 Ibn al-Athīr 146 Ibn al-Faraḍī 157, 188, 209 Ibn al-Jallāb al-Baṣrī 272 Ibn al-Makwī 161 Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ 518–19 Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyya: family and heritage 146–47, 156, 208–9, 210n6; futu¯ḥ genre writing 187; grammar knowledge 198; life and career 197; see also Tārīkh Iftitāḥ al-Andalus Ibn al-Ṣaffār al-Anṣārī 157 Ibn al-Shabbāṭ 138, 146 Ibn Falaquera 105, 113 Ibn Ḥabīb 138, 145, 155 Ibn Ḥārith al-Khushānī 157 Ibn Ḥayyān 154, 157, 159 Ibn Ḥayyān al-Qurṭubī 364 Ibn Ḥazm 157 Ibn ‘Idhārī 146, 147n2, 188 Ibn Jubayr 415–16 Ibn Juljul 157 Ibn Rushd 105, 109, 111–13, 125, 295, 446 Ibn Sina 105, 125
630
Index Ibn Tumart 109 Ibn Waḍḍāḥ 204, 211n16 iconography:Alhambra 55; Burgos cathedral 172; Celestina 503; León cathedral 172, 258–59, 582– 85; Mary 604, 609; Massacre of the Innocents 216–21, 227; mudéjar 567; the techumbre of Teruel 569, 572–74, 577–78;Tudel cathedral 263, 264, 265 icons: beatas as 613, 615–16; living art 609; popularization of 605; and trances 605; worship of 615 Ide, Nancy 330 identity: collectivization 60–61; convivencia 52, 56; Córdoba Caliphate 156–57; critical approaches to 53; cultures in contact 54–55, 62n4; debates over 52–53, 62n1, 142; diversity 52; ecocriticism 61; language 458, 460, 470; Libre dels tres reys d’Orient 216–21, 230; nation-state model 53; network and system approaches 60–61; otherness 52–53, 57; postcolonial theory 53, 55–59; race theory 56–58; racialized religious groups 460; scholarship on 53–54; Sephardic 120–21, 130; the Sueves 68;Taifa kingdoms 154; translation 59–60, 462;Visigothic 68 Idris, Murad 115n9 Ife, Barry W. 494 Ignatius of Antioch 235 Ildefonsus of Toledo: on Braulio of Zaragoza 80; De perpetua virginitate 77–78; and Jewish people 256–57; and Julian of Toledo 79; life and career 77 images: Christianity versus Judaism 614; collective memory 603; the Crucifxion 228; deterioration 617n22; emotion 604, 617n11; functions 602, 604; and gender 605; mourning 612; painting of Catherine of Sienna 601, 602, 616; as pictures 601; Saint Teresa 615; spiritual wisdom 604, 616n8; transcendence 604; see also living art infrastructure 4–12 El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha see Don Quixote inheritance 160 Innocent I 71 Innocent III 91, 309, 313 Innocent XIII 76 the Inquisition: creation of 273; documents produced 106–7; images 614; and the Moriscos 48, 298; ritual emphasis 106; and Teruel 579 interfaith marriage 316, 561n9 internal senses 101, 103, 105, 114n8 al-‘Iqd al-farīd (Ibn ‘Abd Rabbihi) 156 irrigation 4–12 Isaac ben Sheshet Perfet 127 Isaac ibn Baru¯n 365 ‘Īsā al-Rāzī 156 Isabel I of Castile: conversion order 46; marriage to Fernando II 46, 91, 93, 314; power 291,
307; reign 313–14; royal power rituals 94; sarcophagus for parents 306; succession 314; writings on 314 Isabel of Aragon 312 Iser, Wolfgang 494 Ishmael 448 Isidore of Seville: and Braulio of Zaragoza 80; Etymologiae 76; family 76; forced conversion views 270; Fourth Council of Toledo 73, 75; on Hermenegild 74; honors 75; on Iberia’s name 3; infuence on Alfonso X 168; life and career 75; on Priscillianism 72; on sound 478; on spoken language 485; on the Suevic kingdom 71; synonymous literary technique 77;Visigothic– Mozarabic Rite 82; writings 75–76; writings in Crónica Troyana 596 Islam: conversions to 142; cultural spread 270; dār al-islām 446; fatḥ 186–89, 194; the Hajj 211n15; Hellenistic learning 366; law 109, 130n3, 144–45, 272, 296; Mecca 187; Muhammad the Prophet 202–3, 549; people of the Book 270; pilgrims 44, 47; the Qur’an 187, 445, 561n7; riḥla voyages 414–17; scientifc-philosophical orientation 366; storytelling traditions 442–43; see also conversion to Islam; Muslim conquests Islamic conquest see Muslim conquests Islamic geography 413–14, 417 Islamicization 143 Islamic law 109, 130n3, 144–45, 296 Ismail ibn Muhammad al-Shaqundi 120 isnāds 138–40 Itinerary (Benjamin of Tudela) 412–13 ius commune 287–88 Jacob ben Elazar 121, 125 Jacobus, Laura 219, 221 Jäggi, Carola 606 Jakobson, Roman 348 James, David 210n5 James of Urgell 430 Jaume I of Aragon: canal building 10; conquests 9, 40–41, 62n10, 244, 308; death 578; legal code 42; lieutenancy offce creation 308; Llibre del Rei en Jaume 424, 426, 433; and the Muslims’ War 42; reign characteristics 572; royal minority 309; wife 290 Jaume II of Aragon: Hospitaller Order complaints 26; Mallorca 244–45; positions held 308; wives 289, 305, 309 Jaume of Urgell 311 Jauss, Hans Robert 359n16 Jensen, Robin M. 224 Jerome 168–69 Jewish Antiquities (Flavius Josephus) 169, 431 Jewish literary culture:Arabic language 364–68, 370;Arabic poetry adaptation 367, 369, 371nn16–17;Arabo-Islamic contexts 363–66,
631
Index 370; conversion responses 127–28; functionalistinstrumentalist scheme 369; Hebrew poetry 365, 367–71, 371nn15–17; Hebrew Bible interest 367; Judah al-Ḥarīzī 120, 124–25, 366–67; language uses 369–70; philological approaches 368–70; Samuel the Nagid 363–64, 367; Taḥkemoni 366–67, 371n14; women 123, 296; see also Moses ibn Ezra Jewish people:Almoravid period 271;Arabic language use 364–66, 369;Arabized 62n8; attitudes toward 52; Church authority over 257–58, 261; communities 269–70; cultural and historical consciousness 122; cultural elites 120, 126; cultural integration 60; dhimmi status 119–20, 271; expulsions 128–29, 263, 273–74, 297; Granada 120, 271; and Ildefonsus of Toledo 256–57; intellectual centers 262–63; land transactions with Christians 258, 260–62; lay authority over 257–60, 264; León 258–60, 582–83; León Cathedral depictions 582–83; versus mudéjares 50; and natural disasters 12; Navarre 262; persecution 120, 126–28, 260, 270; in Provence 364, 371n7; and Rada, Rodrigo Ximénez de 256–57, 260–63; religious intellectuals 365–66; representations of 263, 264, 265; revitalizations 129; and Saint Martin 260, 266n16; subordination of 39, 42; taxes and tithes 259–64;Teruel 575–76; as theological category 258, 263;Toledo 260–61;Visigothic period 120, 270; women 123, 296–98; see also conversion to Christianity; Sepharadim Jillīqiya 192, 195n6 Joan I of Aragon 306, 317 Joan I of Catalonia 29 Joana, Countess of Foix 309 Johannes Affighemensis 479 John the Baptist depictions 582–83, 585 John of Biclar 71, 74 John Cassian 78 John Paul II 76, 82 John of Salisbury 391, 401, 403–4 Johnson, William W. 442 Jonah ibn Janāḥ 363, 364 Jones, Linda 442–43, 446 Jones, Nicholas 460 Jónsson, Einar Már 103 Jordanes 168 Joseph (Biblical) 446, 448, 453n11 Joseph ibn Migash 371n4 Joseph ibn Tibbon 121 jouissance 494 Juan II 93, 96, 98 Juan de Austria 113n2 Juana I of Castile 309, 314–15 Juana de la Cruz: authority 612, 614; charisms 611– 12; confrmation for worship 601; hagiographies 601; living art 606, 608–9, 612; revelations
608–11; trances 603–4, 609; visionary sermons 604–5, 613; visions 604–5, 610, 613 Juana of Portugal 317 Judah al-Ḥarīzī 120, 124–25, 366–67 Judaism: conversion to 271–72, 277–78, 280–81; law 224–25, 297; the Rabbinate 122; see also Jewish literary culture; Jewish people Julian of Norwich 604 Julian of Toledo 77, 79–80 Jung, Jacqueline 584–85 Justinian 76, 114n4 Justinus Frontinus 178 Kabir,Ananya Jahanara 59 Kalila wa-Dimna: overview 508–9; animal narrators 509–10;Arabic prologues 510; circulation 512, 524; cross-period analysis 510–11; Espejo político y moral 508, 520–24; familiar-foreign theme 509, 519; historical contexts 509; Indian origins 508–10; intercultural circulation 510; perspective theme 510–11; reception 508; themes 510; translations 508–9, 511, 516, 521; see also Calila e Dimna; Exemplario contra los engaños y pelígros del mundo Kantorowicz, Ernst 90, 114n4 Kay, Sarah 360n34 Kelman,Ari 476–77, 487n2 the Khazars 277 Kilito, Abdelfattah 509 kings: animated law 101–2; control over bishops 258; coronations 89–94, 319–20; fnancial rights over Jewish people 257–58; fueros, 90; and God 320; religious challenges to 401; sovereignty 103, 105; see also individual kings by name Kitāb al-‘ibar (Ibn Abī l-Fayyāḍ) 157 Kitāb al-majālis wa-l-musāyarāt (Qāḍī al-Nu‘mān) 159 Kitāb al-ta’rīkh (Ibn Ḥabīb) 155 Kitāb fī ash‘ār al-khulafā’ min Banī Umayya (Ibn al-Ṣaffār al-Anṣārī) 157 Kitāb fī dhikr al-dākhilīn ilā al-Andalus min Banī Marwān (Mu‘āwiya b. Hishām Ibn al-Shabinisī) 157 Kitāb quḍāt Qurṭuba (Ibn Ḥārith al-Khushānī) 157 Kitāb ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbā’ wa-l-ḥukamā’ wa-l-falāsifa al-qudamā’ wa-l-islāmiyyīn (Ibn Juljul) 157 Klein, Elka 257, 296–97 The Knight Plaçidas 379, 381 “The Knight of the Swan” 377, 382–83, 387 Kraemer, Joel 130n3 Kristeva, Julia 491–94, 501 Kunzle, David 221–22 L852 see Nodicia de kesos Lacan, Jacques 505n4, 589, 594 Lacarra, María Jesús: on Amadís of Gaula 384–86; on chivalric biographies 378; digital humanities
632
Index projects 332; on Kalila wa-Dimna translations 509, 521 language:Aljamiado-Morisco 439–40, 458, 460–61; Bakhtin, Mikhail on 141, 446–47; Castilian 128, 170, 182, 523–24; in Celestina 494–95, 501, 504; domestic versus legal 106; ethnic and religious correlations 143; ethnolects 459; Grande e General Estoria 180–82; Hebrew 124–25; Ibero-Romance 126–28, 461; identity 458, 460, 470; ideologies 523–24; Isidore of Seville on 485; jouissance 494; JudaeoArabic 460; Judeo-Spanish 127; Lead Books of Sacromonte 462, 468; Maimonides on 126, 363; mester de clerecía 484–87; Moriscos 469–71; mudéjares 44, 47, 439–40; noise words 479–80; poetic suitability debates 124–25; religious minorities 459–60; Rumanian 543n41; Sepharadim 124–29; as soundscape 484–87; Tirant lo Blanc 386; and the unconscious 494; see also Arabic language; Iberian Romance language; raciolinguistics; translation Las Casas 418 The Last Song of the Troubadours 337 Latin: Latin-Romance continuum 530–32, 534; Muslim conquest sources 139, 144, 189–90, 192; see also Iberian Romance language law: animation of 101–4, 106–7, 109–10;Averroes on 111–13; blood purity 299, 471; canon 288; clients 113; and culture 102–3; Customs of Tortosa 288; dead law concept 104; dhimma 152, 270; discipline versus science 113; divorce 315; documents 107–10; fulanizations 108, 110–13; gatekeepers of 112; al-Ghāzālī on 112, 115n20, 115n22; Hellenistic writers 104; hermeneutics 101; heuristics 101; histories of 102–3; internal senses 101, 103, 105, 114n8; Islamic 109, 130n3, 144–45, 272, 296; ius commune 287–88; Jewish 224–25, 297; jurisprudence 107–9; and languages 106; legal souls 102, 109–10; legal subjects 104–5, 107–9, 113n1; leprosy 224–25; lex animate 101–2, 104, 114n4; Maimonides on 101, 111–12; Maliki school 109, 144–45, 161; networks 107–9; the people 105–7; relationship to philosophy 111–13; and religion 106; Roman 287–89; schools of 109; sensitive souls 101, 103; Usatges de Barcelona 22–24, 26, 28, 91; women 287–89, 292, 294–95, 297; see also fueros; Siete Partidas Lawee, Eric 127 Lawrance, Jeremy 497, 500 Lawton, David 485–86, 488n9 Lead Books of Sacromonte 462, 468 Leander of Seville 74–77, 82 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 249 Leo II 79 Leo the Great 71 León:Alfonso IX 95, 260, 290, 313, 375; cathedral of 172, 258–59, 582–85; female succession 310;
Fernando 259; Jewish community 258–60, 582–83; reforms 54; religious unity rhetoric 36; royal women 290; Urraca of León 290–91; Vermudo II 259; war with Castile 260; see also Castile and León Leovigild 74–77, 82 leprosy 224–25 Levin, Israel 368 Lewis, Bernard 188 Lewis, Gilbert 224 Leyes de moros 272 Libera,Alain de 112 Libre dels tres reys d’Orient: overview 215; adoration of the Magi 216, 217; corporeality 218–19, 222, 224–26; criminality 226–28; critical scholarship 215–16; crucifxion 226–30; economy of response 229; expulsion trope 230; human body leitmotif 216; human nature 230–31; identity 216–21, 230; leprosy 215, 222–24; Massacre of the Innocents 216–21, 227; mother-son connections 220; narrative economy 226–27; revulsion 216–18; soteriology 222–27, 231; structure 215–16, 231; suffering 228–30; type and anti-type tropes 216, 225, 229–30; women 219–21 Libro de Alexandre: overview 391; versus Alexandreis 393, 395–96; and Alfonso X 400;Aristotle 393–94, 396, 398; author 392; battles 477–79; curiosity theme 392–93, 395–97, 404; digital humanities projects 329–30; eschatological framework 395–97; faith and hearing 486; historical contexts 392–93, 396, 398–399, 401, 403; Hohenstaufen family connections 400; imperial discourses 402–4; knowledge theme 391–96, 403–4; lunático term 395, 405n2; as mester de clerecía 440; Mohammad in 549; moral symmetry 397; MS O 400, 549; MS P 549; Natural Philosophy 394–96; New Science 394–95; noise 479–80; political philosophy 401–3; power theme 394; pride 392–93, 395–97, 403; Scholasticism connections 392–94, 404–5; sin 395–96; soundscapes 476–80; source material uses 393, 395–97; thematic tensions 393–94, 403; theological positions 403–4; travel 408; vernacular use 403 Libro del Arcipreste see Libro de buen amor Libro de buen amor (Archpriest of Hita): bilingualism 485; epistemology 496; language soundscapes 484–87; mester de clerecía use 440; performances 444; quotations 475; scribal alterations 450; sound 477; truth and sound 486–87 Libro de las Confesiones (Martín Pérez) 106 Libro del conde de Castilla 477, 486, 558–60 Libro del conoscimiento 410 Libro de las maravillas 409–10 El Libro de Marco Polo (Rodrigo Santaella) 408–10
633
Index Lida, María Rosa 548 Linehan, Peter 171, 399 linguistics 459–60; see also Iberian Romance language literary systems 60 literature: abjection in 492;Aljamiado–Morisco 460; anachronism 595; circulation 510; conversion to Judaism 278, 280–81; cuaderna vía 440; as cultural resistance 127–28; effects of increased literacy 491; ekphrases tradition 596; enjoyment of 494; eroticism 491; fear of 501–2; futu¯ḥ genre 187–88; history as 198; maqāmāt rhyming narratives 55, 366; mester de clerecía 440; Morisco 460–62, 547; network and system principles 60–61; as resistance 127–28; Spanish genre terms 378–79, 388n5; subjectivity 349; tragic 493;War of Troy chronicles 377; see also Aljamiado texts; Celestina; chivalric literature; conversion literature; epic texts; exemplary tales; Jewish literary culture; Muslims in literature; poetry; Sephardic literature; textuality; travel literature; individual titles Little, Lester 239 Little Ice Age 11–12 Liu, Benjamin 360n26 living art: overview 605–6; beatas and 606–10, 612, 615; Cantigas de Santa María 609–10, 617n21; painting of Catherine of Sienna 616; Saint Teresa on 606 living saints 600, 611, 613, 616 Llibre d’Amic e Amat (Ramon Llull) 429 Llibre dels Feyts (Jaume I of Aragon) 9 Llibre del gentil i dels tres savis (Ramon Llull) 269, 278 Lloret, Albert 336–37 Llull, Ramon:Arabic writings 247–50; Ars Magna 245–51; Catalan writings 247–48, 251; contemporary reputation 248, 251; conversion experience 244–45, 275; and convivencia 250; evangelism 250; infuence 244, 248–49, 251; Latin writings 247–48, 251; learning 249–50; legacy 244, 248, 251–52; life of 244–45; Llibre d’Amic e Amat 429; Llibre del gentil i dels tres savis 269, 278; scholarship on 252; and Scholasticism 247; sources on 244, 248; spiritual romances 248; surviving manuscipts 422–23, 427–28, 431–32; texts familiar with 249–50; travels 245; unknown information about 250–51 Llullism opposition 248, 251 Lomax, D. 191 Lombard, Peter 320 López, Martín 260 López-Baralt, Luce 462 López Madera, Gregorio 114n2 Louis (Saint) 171 Lozano-Renieblas, Isabel 275 Lucan 168
Lucas of Tuy 168, 398 Lucía Megías, José Manuel 379 Ludolph of Saxony 605 Lullism 248–52, 422 Luminous Catalog (Paulus Alvarus) 236–41, 241n12; see also Córdoba martyrdom movement lyric poetry 347–49, 359n12; see also the cantigas Mackenzie, David 329 Madīnat al-Zahrā’ 153–54, 159 Maiano, Benedetto da 93 Maimonides: education 371n4; feigned Islam conversion 271; Guide of the Perplexed 127; Judeo-Arabic use 121; on language 126, 363; on law 101, 111–12; studies of 365 Makkī, Mahmud 140 Mālik b.Anas 144, 160–61 Maliki school of law 109, 144–45, 161 Mallorca 41, 244–45 Mancebo de Arévalo 471–72 Manrique, Jorge 359n17 al-Manṣu¯r bin Abī ‘Āmir: book burning 161; rulership 152, 513; in Siete Infantes de Lara 549–52, 552nn9–10; traditional narratives of 364 Manzano, E. 194 maqāmāt (rhyming narratives) 55, 366 March, Ausiàs 359n17, 424, 426, 430–33 Marco Polo 408–9 Marcos Marín, Francisco 329–30, 542n26 Marcus Aurelius 233 María of Castile 290, 306–7, 309 María de Luna 289–90, 309–10, 317 María de Molina 379–82 Marín, Marcos 542n26 Marín-Guzmán, Roberto 210n5 Marj Rāhiṭ battle 203 Márquez Villanueva, Francisco 548 marriage 315–17, 561n9 Martí, Ramon 273 Martin (Saint) 260, 266n16 Martin, Georges 171, 182n2 Martin I of Aragon 289 Martin of Braga 71–72, 74, 78, 81 Martin of Tours 72 Martínez Casado, Ángel 398 Martínez de Toledo,Alfonso 303–4 Martirio de San Lorenzo 231 Martorell, Joanot see Tirant lo Blanc martyrdom, 158, 233, 235–240, 241n11; see also Córdoba martyrdom movement martyrs of Lyon 238–39 Marwān ibn al-Ḥakam 203 Mary: depictions of 217, 223; iconography 604, 609; in Libre dels tres reys d’Orient 215, 219, 222, 225; living art 607–9; virginity of 77; visions of 604, 610; see also Milagros de Nuestra Señora
634
Index Massacre of the Innocents: as cultural metaphor 221–22; depictions of 218, 221, 582; Libre dels tres reys d’Orient 216–21, 227 Master of Sisla 604 Matthew of Vendôme 171 Maurophilia: overview 546–47; cultural 47; decline 48; literary examples 547–52; origins 560 Maximus (rebel Emperor) 68, 71–72 Maymu¯n al-ʻĀbid 201 McCarty, Willard 327 McGaha, Michael 446, 452, 454n13 Mecca 187 Medieval Climate Anomaly 6, 11 medievalism 56 Medieval Optimum 38 Meiss, Millard 600, 611 Memorial of the Saints (Eulogius) 234–39, 241n5, 241n7; see also Córdoba martyrdom movement Mendicant Orders: Dominican 40, 273, 398; emergence of 273; Franciscan 40, 245, 251, 398 Meneghetti, María Luisa 560 Menéndez Pidal, Ramón 176, 182n2, 442, 546–47 Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino 547, 567 Menocal, María Rosa 152, 514 Meogo, Pero 356 Merback, Mitchell B. 229–30 Meseta Central environment 3–4 mester de clerecía: overview 475; battles 477–80; Coplas de Yosef 447, 451; cuaderna vía associations 440; diffusion modes 476; environments of textual production 475; ethics of 392; faith and hearing 486; gardens 480–84; Ḥadīth de Yúçuf 447, 450–51; ideologies 451–42; language 484–87; Libro de Apolonio 477, 486; noise 479–80; notable texts 440; Poema de Fernán González 477, 486; recitation motifs 443; selfawareness 480; soundscapes 476–80, 485–86; studies of 405n1, 475–76; voice 485–86; see also Libro de Alexandre; Libro de buen amor; Milagros de Nuestra Señora Metalogicon (John of Salisbury) 404 Metge, Bernat 309, 422, 426–28 Meyerson, Mark D. 52, 127 Michael, Ian 392–93, 402 Miguel de Luna 462 Miguell of Tudela 262–63 Miguel-Prendes, Sol 496 Milagros de Nuestra Señora (Gonzalo de Berceo): conversions 275–76; gender 488n7; living art 609; scholarship on 480, 488n4; scribal alterations 450; soundscapes 477, 480–83; sweetness terms 481 Military Orders 26–27, 37, 40, 172 Miller, Kathryn 442, 451 mimicry 57, 62n8 Minervini, Laura 449, 454n15 the Mishna 130n3
Mitchell,William 601, 604, 607, 617n17 Mocedades de Rodrigo 546, 555–56, 558 Mohammad 202–3, 549 Molina, Luis 140, 157 Molina, María de 313 molinismo 379–80 monarchies, religious challenges to 401 Monferrer Sala, Juan Pedro 210n5 Montcada, Elisenda de 289, 305 Montero,Ana Isabel 503 Montero,Ana M. 54 Montpellier, Maria de 309 Moriscos: overview 35, 48, 461; alfaquíes 442, 453n4;Aljamiado-Morisco language 439–40, 458, 460–61;Arabic use 469–72;Aragon 48; cuaderna vía use 451; culture and society 48; discrimination against 48–49; in Don Quixote 457, 461, 464–65, 467–68; expulsion 35, 48–49, 269, 547; Granada 48; and the Inquisition 48, 298; language 469–71; Lead Books of Sacromonte 462, 468; literature 460–62, 547; network theory 60; oppression 461–62; Philip II’s policies 461–62; as racialized category 461; raciolinguistic analysis 468–72; resistance and revolts 49, 469, 471; translation work 462, 470; Valencia 48; women 48, 298; see also Aljamiado texts Morrison, Karl 274–75, 280 Morros, Bienvenido 484 Moses ben Maimon see Maimonides Moses ibn Ezra:Arabic appreciation 126, 365–66; Arabic sources used 365–68; on Hebrew poetry 123–24; intellectual activities 371n15; poetry 365, 371n12 Moses ibn Giqaṭilla 365 Moss, Candida 237–38, 240 The Mozarabic Chronicle of 754 179, 190, 200, 210n12 Mozarabic liturgy 239 Mozarabs: conversions 271; rights and obligations 234, 238, 241n1; term problems 57; women 294; see also Alvarus, Paulus; Córdoba martyrdom movement Mu‘āwiya b. Hishām Ibn al-Shabinisī 157 mudéjar aesthetics, 567; see also the techumbre of Teruel mudéjares: overview 35, 271–72; alfaquíes 442, 453n4; aljamas 39–43, 45, 296;Aragon 37, 43, 45, 272, 579; attacks on 97; Castile 45–47, 272; Castile-León 36–37, 42–43, 45–46; Catalonia 37, 42; Christian relations 42; conversions 35–36, 44–48; Crown of Aragon 45–46; cultural experiences 58, 62n10; discrimination 44; eastern Andalusia 41; economy 38–39, 42, 44, 47; elites 43; expulsions 40, 46–47; freedom of movement 44–45; fueros 36–37, 39–40; fuqahā’ 440, 442, 451, 453n4; Granada 45; impact of
635
Index 49–50; international connections 47; language 44, 47, 439–40; laws covering 39–40, 42–43, 45, 295–96; local variation 47–48; Mallorca 41; map 43; Murcia 40–42; Muslim criticisms of 446; Navarre 37, 42–46; Portugal 37, 45–46; and Reconquista 36; revolts 40, 42, 45–46; ṣabr (patience) 445–46; social integration 44, 46–47, 50; suspicion of 45; term origins 281n1;Toledo 272;Valencia 41–42, 44–46;War of the Two Peters 45; women 47, 295–96; see also Aljamiado texts; Taifa kingdoms mudéjares history: Christian expansion (1050–1200) 35–40; age of conquest (1200–1350) 40–44; time of crisis (1350–1525) 44–48; the Moriscos (1502–1614) 48–50 Muhammad (Emir) 205–6 Muhammad I 241n4 Muḥammad ibn Hudhayl (al-Azraq) 42 Muhammad the Prophet 202–3, 549 Muhammad Rabadán 453n11 al-Mundhir 205, 211n20 Muñiz, Pedro 398 Muntaner, Ramón 92, 424–25, 429, 431–32 al-Muqtabas fī ta’rīkh rijāl al-Andalus (Ibn Ḥayyān) 157 Murcia 40–42 al-Mu’rib ‘an ba’d ‘aja’ib al-Maghreb (Abu Hamid al-Gharnati) 411–12 Mu¯sā bin Nuṣayr 144–46, 154, 188, 208 Mu¯sā ibn Mu¯sā 207 music: the cantigas 351–52; digital humanities 337, 339; song collections 318, 358n2, 430, 434n7; troubadour 348–49 Muslim conquests: overview 137;Andalusī historical tradition 146–47; cultural changes resulting from 142–43; events narrative 138; material culture evidence 137, 139; memory of 137, 140–41, 143, 145, 147; minimalist interpretations 142; modern writings on 188– 94;Table of Solomon 138, 145; topoi 140–41 Muslim conquests,Arabic historical sources: versus Christian 138, 186; Christian recovery goals 192; criticisms of 186; fatḥ term 186–89, 194; versus Latin 139, 190; narratives 144–47; providentialism 189 Muslim conquests, historical fgures: ‘Abd al-Azīz 144; collaborators 138, 144–45; Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyya 142, 146–47; Julian 145; Mughīth al-Ru¯mī 138, 146; Mu¯sà ibn Nuṣayr 144–46, 154, 188; Pelayo 144; Roderick 138, 144–45; Sara 146–47; Ṭāriq bin Ziyād 138, 144–46; al-Walīd 144 Muslim conquests, historical sources: commonalities 138; as cultural projects 141–42; historicity 147; isnāds 138–40; Latin 139, 144, 189–90, 192; scholarly approaches to 139–42; Treaty of Tudmīr 143–44; variety 137
Muslims: in chansons de geste 547–48, 550, 553, 560; expulsions 273; farmer displacements 9; migrations to Murcia 41; and natural disasters 12; Spanish attitudes toward 547; women 47, 294–96 Muslims in literature:Alfonso, Pedro’s works 548; Bernardo del Carpio 557–58; cultural bridges 551–52; Don Juan Manuel’s works 548; French versus Spanish 553, 560; Libro de Alexandre 549; Mocedades de Rodrigo 546, 555–56, 558; negative 558–60; Poema de Fernán González 558–60; Poema de mio Cid 552–55, 558; positive 547–58; Roncesvalles 546; Sancho II’s death in Estoria de España 556–57; Siete Infantes de Lara 549–52, 549n7, 552nn9–10 Muslims’ War 42 muwalladu¯n 210n8 al-Muwaṭṭa’ (Mālik b.Anas) 160 Le Myésier, Thomas 248 Nahmanides 273 Naim, Moisés 305 Nalle, Sarah 501 Narpan 332, 341n17 Nasrid dynasty 41 Nasrid sultanate 45–46 nation building 515 nation-state model 53 natural history 411, 415 Natural Philosophy 392, 394–96, 398–99 Navarre: Blanca I 306–7, 311; Christian conquest of 46; female succession 310–11; fueros 42, 311; Jewish people 262–63; Miguel of Tudela 262–63; mudéjares 37, 42–46; political history 87; succession laws 311;Tudela 262–63 Navarro, Juan 433 Navarro Talegón, José Luis 586 Nelson, Robert L. 603, 616n6 network and system principles 60–61, 107–9 Neusner, Jacob 130n3 New Christians (conversos) 127, 273, 449 Nicholas of Cusa 248, 251 Nicolás-Minué Sánchez, Andrés J. 575 Nicolau, Guillem 428–29 Nîmes 142 Nirenberg, David 52, 57–58, 451–52 Nitti, John 329, 341n11 Nodicia de kesos: overview 528, 537–38, 543n42; linguistic contexts 530; syntactic analysis 537, 539–41; textual reproductions and translations 538–39, 543n43, 543n45 Nolan, Kathleen 219 Núñez Muley, Francisco 469–70, 473n7 Octavio de Toledo Huerta, Álvaro 335 Olagu¨e, Ignacio 137 Ong, Walter 424
636
Index Opusculum de conversione sua (Herman of Cologne) 280–81 Opusculum de reductione artium ad theologiam 399 Ordoño II 158 Orosius, Paulus 155, 168 Orwell, George 185 otherness 52–53, 57 Otto I 153 Ovid 168, 178 “Ozmín y Daraja” 547 Pablo de Santa María 280 Padilla, María de 319 Pagès, Guillem 427 Pagis, Dan 368–69 Palencia,Alonso de 317 Pamplona 142 Panchatantra 508, 510 Paolo, Giovanni di 601, 602, 616 Paradinas,Alfonso de 450 Paradise visual representations 588–89 Parker, Geoffrey 461–62 Parkinson, Stephen 337, 358n1, 360n23 Paschal II 290 Patton, Pamela 57, 263 Paulus Orosius 70 Pax Romana 238–39, 241 Pedro I of Portugal 317–18 Pedro III 92, 578 Pedro the Cruel of Castile 45, 318–19 Pelagios Commons 339 Pelagius 158, 162n13 Pellat, Charles 210n6 Pellen, René 328 Penny, Ralph 543n27 Peraino, Judith A. 348–49 Pere I of Catalonia 22, 25–26 Pere III of Valencia 22, 28–29 Pere the Ceremonious of Aragon 45, 311, 317–20 Pere the Great 42 Pereda, Felipe 614 Pérez, Martín 106 Pérez de Hita, Ginés 547 Perez Higuera,Teresa 588–89 Pergaminho Sharrer 358n2 Pergaminho Vindel 358n2 periodization 56 Peris, Antoni 223 Perry, Mary Elizabeth 298 Peter III 422–23, 428–29, 431 Peter the Chanter 587 Petrarch 429 Petronila of Aragon 308–9, 316 Petrus Alfonsi 269, 278–79 Philip II 96, 461–62 Philip III 96, 171 Philip IV 98
Philip Augustus 262 Philobiblion 329, 333, 341n10, 341n23 philology 368–70, 372n19 philosophy: and heresy 396, 398; natural 392, 394–96, 398–99; political 401–3; relationship to law 111–13; theology interactions 399 picaresque tradition 55 Pierazzo, Elena 336 Pineda, Juan de 502 Pinet, Simone 388n11 Plantagenet, Leonor 305 Plato 494, 501 Poema de Fernán González 477, 486, 558–60 Poema de José see Ḥadīth de Yúçuf Poema de mio Cid: digital humanities projects 328– 29, 338, 342n36; infuence 449; movement 408; Muslim representations 552–55, 558; network approaches to 61; surviving material 546 Poema de Yúçuf see Ḥadīth de Yúçuf poetry: Ausiàs March 359n17, 424, 426, 430–33; of grammar, 348; lyric 347–49, 359n12; Moses ibn Ezra 123–24, 365, 371n12; Poema de Fernán González 477, 486, 558–60; Sephardic 123–24, 127–28; songbook 318; strophic 126; textuality 424–26, 430; troubadour 348–50, 358n2, 359n17; Zaragoza 127–28; see also the cantigas; Cantigas de Santa María; chansons de geste; Ḥadīth de Yúçuf; mester de clerecía; Poema de mio Cid polemics 269, 276–78 Policraticus (John of Salisbury) 391, 401, 403 political occupation 58–59 political power: overview 86;Alfonso X on 105; Castile 94–99; cooperation 98–99; coronations 89–94, 319–20; Crown of Aragon 88, 91–96; edifying discourses 86; entities post-Cordóba Caliphate 87–88; Granada 89–90; Muslim 89; onion metaphor 105, 115n11; representative assemblies 88, 95–96; resistance to 86, 97–98; royal minorities 96–97, 309; royal representations of 90–95; succession crises 89, 96; urban procurators 95; see also Crown of Aragon political culture; kings; law; queens polygyny 316 Pompeius Trogus 178 Pons, Bernabé 60 Pons Boigues, Francisco 201, 210n6 Ponte, Oldradus de 272 Ponte, Pero da 353, 360n26 Pope, Mildred 532 population changes 4–5, 9, 13, 38 Porter, Dot 337, 340n6 Portugal:Afonso I 37, 312;Afonso III 41;Afonso IV 317–18;Afonso V 307, 313–14; and Castile 312; conquests 41; establishment of 37, 88; female succession 310, 312; forced Jewish conversions 128; historical overview 87; mudéjares 37, 45–46; royal inquisitions 107,
637
Index 115n11; Sancho I 346;Teresa 290–91, 320; see also Dinis I of Portugal postcolonial theory: overview 53, 55; Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome on 56, 58; Crusades 58–59; identity, 53, 55–59; mimicry 57; non-modern applications 55–57; otherness 57; race 56–58; translation 59 power 21, 86, 105, 305; see also political power Practica Inquisitionis Hereticae Pravitatis (Bernard Gui) 106 Prado-Vilar, Francisco 588–89, 591–92, 597 Pratt, Mary Louise 409 pride 586–88 Primant 171 primary orality 424 printed books: Celestina 502–4, 505n10; Eiximenis, Francesc 433; similarities to codices 503; textuality 431–34; Tirant lo Blanc 386, 432 printing’s impact 503 Priscian 479 Priscillian of Avila 71–72 Priscillianism 71–74 Proaza,Alonso de 498 production of presence 172, 183n4 Pròixida, Gilabert de 426 Provençe 54–55 Prudentius 238 Pruss, Johann 516 Pulido, Ángel 129 purity of blood laws (limpieza de sangre) 299, 471 purity concerns 462 Pym, Anthony 59 al-Qāḍī al-Nu‘mān 109, 159, 161 Qasmuna 296 qiṣaṣ al-anbiyā’ 442–43 queens: Biblical models 320–21; challenges faced 291; chivalric literature 379–81; concubines 317–19; consorts 315–17; in El Corbacho 303–4; coronations 319–20; Crown of Aragon 307–10; examples 306–7; foreign 316–17; inheritance laws 310–15; and marriage indissolubility 315; power 290, 304–5, 321; requirements to become 305; roles 289, 305, 321; social status 304; texts on 306–7; see also Isabel I of Castile; individual names queenship studies 306 Quiricus of Barcelona 77 Quiroga, María Dolores 262 the Qur’an 187, 445, 561n7 Rabanus Maurus 239 Rabbi Joel 516 the rabbinate 122 race 56–57, 458–59
raciolinguistics: overview 460; Don Quixote 463–68; Moriscos 468–72; power of 462; and translation 462–63 Rada,Aznar de 262 Rada, Rodrigo Ximénez de (El Toledano) 168, 171; and Estoria de España 173–74, 179 family 262; History of the Romans 178; and Jewish people 256–57, 260–63; Parisian education 262 Raguel 158, 162n12 Ramos, Rafael 382–83 Ratzaby,Yehuda 368 Ray, Jonathan 575 Raymond of Peñafort 273 Raymond of Sabunde 248 Raymond of Toledo 121, 125 reading:Augustine’s theories 495–96; meditative 496; moralizing concerns 493; pleasures of 493 Reccared 73–77, 81 Reccesvinth 78, 80, 172 Rechiarius 71 Recio, Roxana 330 Reckert, Stephen 346, 359n6 Reconquista: overview 36, 154; dictionary defnition 191; as modern neologism 192; modern writings on 191–94; proponents of 192–93; and Spanish nationalism 191–93 Reeves, Ksenia Bonch 235 Regiment de la cosa pública (Francesc Eiximenis) 429, 431, 433 religiolistics 459–60 religion as racial category 458–59 religious conversion see conversion religious minorities: dhimma law 152, 270; dhimmis 39, 270–71; language 459–60; see also Jewish people; mudéjares Remie Constable, Olivia 473n7 Resende de Oliveira,António 358n1 Retamero, Felix 7 Revel, Judith 108, 115n13 revolts: comunero 97; Granada 40; Morisco 49, 469, 471; mudéjares 40, 42, 45–46; Muslims’War 42; southern Valencia 42; wars of the remenças 98 Ribeiro Miranda, José Carlos 351 Ribera, Julián 210n6 Richardson,Vivienne 230 Rico, Francisco 405n1, 451 riḥla voyages 414–17 Ríos Saloma, Martín 192 rituals: coronations 89–94, 319–20; the Inquisition’s focus on 106; of power 93–94 ritual speech 444, 453n9 Robinson, Cynthia 54–55 Roderick: in The Mozarabic Chronicle of 754 210n12; in Muslim conquest narratives 138, 144–45; in Tārīkh Iftitāḥ al-Andalus 200, 202, 208 Rodrigues Lapa, Manuel 358n1
638
Index Rodríguez de Montalvo, Garci 383–84; see also Amadís of Gaula Rodríguez Molina, Javier 335 Rodríguez-Porto, Rosa María 400, 595–97 Roig, Jaume 306–7, 422, 426, 431–32 Roís de Corella, Joan 426, 428 Rojas, Fernando de see Celestina Roman Empire 4–5, 67 Roman des rois (Primant) 171 Roman de Troie (Benoit de Saint Maure) 595–98 Romanç de l’armada del soldà contra Rodes (Francesc Ferrer) 423 Roncesvalles 546 Rosen, Tova 369–70 Rosenwein, Barbara H. 350–51 Roudil, Jean 328–29 Rouighi, Ramzi 109 royal favorites 308 royal minorities 96–97, 309 Rubio, Josep E. 244–45 Rucqoi, Adeline 399 Ruggles, D. Fairchild 7, 156, 570 Ruiz, Juan see Libro de buen amor Ruiz, Teos 320 Ruíz García, Elisa 514 Saavedra, Eduardo 190, 452 Sabaté, Flocel 21 Sáenz-Badillos, Angel 368 Safran, Janina 5, 106, 109, 147 Sahle, Peter 336 Sahner, Christian 238–39 Saint Maure, Benoit de see Crónica Troyana Salimbene de Adam 400–1 Salustius 168 Samawʾal al-Maghrebī 281 Samuel ibn Tibbon 371n7 Samuel the Nagid 363–64, 367 Sánchez, Rafael 193 Sánchez-Albornoz, Claudio: on agricultural practices 5; Iberian identity debate 52, 62n1, 142; Reconquista promotion 192–93 Sánchez Ameijeiras, Rocío: Burgos cathedral studies 592–95; decorum 598; León cathedral studies 581–82, 584–86 Sánchez Lancis, Carlos 529, 541 Sánchez-Prieto Borja, Pedro 180 Sancho I of Portugal 346 Sancho II 556–57, 561n13 Sancho IV of Castile and León 94, 310–11, 313, 382 San Sebastián, Isabel 194 Santaella, Rodrigo 408–10 Santa Fe, Jerónimo de 273 Santa María la Mayor de Toro cathedral 584–88 Santa María de Regla cathedral 172, 258–59, 582–85
Sant Jordi, Jordi de 424, 426 Santo Domingo, María de 601, 604, 611–13 Santoyo, Julio César 59, 62n13 Sarah 146–47, 199–201, 209 Saraiva, António José 360n22 Saucier, Catherine 481 Sayf al-Dawla 38 Sayf ibn ‘Umar 187 Scala Dei (Francesc Eiximenis) 310, 432 Scarborough, Connie 61 Scarry, Elaine 229 Schafer, R. Murray 487n2 Schapiro, Meyer 566 Scheindlin, Raymond 369–70 Schippers, Arie 368 Schirmann, Jefm 368 Schmitt, Jean-Claude 603, 608 scholastic epistemology 495–96 scholastic humanism 393, 404–5, 405n1 second nature 7–8 Sefarad: overview 119, 122; cultural continuity 122 as geographic place 122–23; interest in 129; modern ideas of 119, 129; rabbinate 122–23; study of 129–30; terminology 122, 130n1 Sefardi exceptionalism 364 Sefer Aḥiṭub ve-Tsalmon 269, 278 Sefer Ha-Kuzari (Judah Halevi) 81, 269, 277–78 Sefer ha-Qabbalah (Abraham ibn Daud) 363 Segunda Celestina (Feliciano de Silva) 492, 501, 504 Sepharadim: overview 119;Arabic learning 121– 22, 125; cultural participation 120–21; cultural prestige 123–24; diaspora 128–29; expulsions 119, 128–29; identity 120–21, 130; immigration 126; intellectual activity 121; languages 124–29; literature as resistance 127–28; reunifcation attempts 129; terminology 130n1 Sephardic literature: in Arabic 121; Coplas de Yosef 446, 449, 451, 453; Joseph-Purim associations 449; poetry 123–24, 127–28 Servando, João 357 Severin, Dorothy 338, 496, 505n1 Seville 40, 273 Shem Tov ben Isaac Ardutiel of Carrión 127 Shem Tov of Carrión 581, 598 Shimon ben Israel 296 Siete Infantes de Lara 549–52, 549n7, 552nn9–10 Siete Partidas (Alfonso X): overview 591;Arabic sources 105; canon law use 105; on chivalry 376, 379; circulation of power 105; conversion prohibitions 272; dead law 104; digital editions 338; divorce 315; external senses 111; gender 288, 310; infuences 105; legal subjects 104–5, 115n9; organizational desires 174; the people 101–2, 114n3; poetics of justice 110–11; queenly qualities 319; religious minorities 591; sensitive soul concept 101–2, 113; sovereignty 103–5; succession 310; surviving versions
639
Index 319; translation into Catalan 319; vernacular jurisdiction 105–6 SIL see Siete Infantes de Lara Siling Vandals 68, 70 Silva, Feliciano de 492, 501, 504 Simon, Julien 493 single language (SL) hypothesis 532–34, 537, 543n27 Sisebut 270 slaves see enslaved people Smith, Colin 548 Snow, Joseph T. 494 Soares, Martim 353–54, 360n26 social status 304 Solomon ibn al-Mucallim 364 Solomon ibn Gabirol 126, 367, 371n15 Solomon ibn Verga 128 songbooks 318, 358n2, 430, 434n7 songs see the cantigas; chansons de geste Sos, Lleonard de 430 sound 479–83, 485–86 soundscapes: versus interior narrative 477; mester de clerecía 476–80, 485–86; noise 479–80; Santo Domingo de Silos 483; voice 479 Southern, R.W. 404–5, 405n1 Soyer, François 459 Spanish Empire 12–13, 515 Spiegel, Gabrielle 199–200 Spill (Jaume Roig) 426, 431–32 Spiritual Landscapes project 339 Stearns, Justin 210n5 Ste. Croix, G. E. M. de 238 Steinschneider, Moritz 414 Steinwenter,Arthur 101–2, 114n4 Stern, Samuel M. 364, 368 Stobaeus 104, 114n4 Stone, Gregory B. 350 Suárez, Rafael 339 Suetonius 168 the Sueves 68–75, 82 Summitt, Jennifer 510 sweetness terms 481 synonymous literary technique 77 Ṭabaqāt al-naḥwiyyīn wa-l-lughawiyyīn (al-Zubaydī) 157 al-Ṭabarī 145, 156, 187, 443
Tafur, Pero 418 Tahiri, Ahmed 188–89 Taifa kingdoms 35–36, 38, 120, 154 Tapia, Joan de 306 al-Ṭarafī 443 Tārīkh Iftitāḥ al-Andalus (Ibn al-Qu¯ṭīyya): overview 146, 197, 209; anxieties expressed 204–5, 208; Artabas 199, 201; biases 207–8; criticisms of emirs 205, 207; eunuchs 206; goal of 198; good governance theme 201, 206, 208; Iberian-
Syrian connections 200; incident of the hole 198; legitimizing functions 199–200, 202, 209; literary scope 198; versus The Mozarabic Chronicle 200; muwalladu¯n 206–7; omens and prophecies 202–5, 209; palace of Hercules 202; piety theme 203; political instability 205–6; revolts 206–8; Sarah 199–201, 209; scholarly assessments 197, 210nn5–6; signifcance 156; sources 210n6; time period covered 198–99; transfer of power theme 201–2, 209; Umayyad-Visigoth relations 199, 201;Witiza 200, 208; women 200, 206; writing of 199, 205, 207–8;Yulian 202, 208; Ziryāb 205 Ta’rīkh mulu¯k al-Andalus (Aḥmad al-Rāzī) 155–56 Ta’rīkh ‘ulamā’ al-Andalus (Ibn al-Faraḍī) 157 Ṭāriq bin Ziyād 138, 144–46, 202–3 Tarte-Ramey, Lynn 57 Tavani, Giuseppe 348, 357, 358n1 the techumbre of Teruel: overview 565; community theme 574–75; construction 568–69; cultural studies scholarship 566; cultural symbioses 569–70; diversity 565–66, 573–74, 577; female fgures 565, 569, 571, 577; as historical document 577–78; iconography 569, 572–74, 577–78; legacy 578–59; mudéjar aesthetics 567, 569–70, 572–73; negative imagery 576; photographs of 566, 568, 574; portrait gallery 565, 572, 574–75; Reconquista contexts 570; refections of prosperity 573; self-refexiveness 568–69; social change 573, 576–77 Teissier-Ensminger, Anne 108 Tempier, Etienne 396 Templar Order 37, 40 Terç (Francesc Eiximenis) 429 Teresa of Avila 606, 615 Teresa of Portugal 290–91, 320 Tertullian: infuence on Eulogius 241n8; on martyrdom 235–37, 240, 241n11 Teruel: decline 578; diversity 570–71; fueros 257, 570, 572, 575–76; governance 572; and the inquisition 579; Jewish inhabitants 575–76; prosperity 572–73; settlement 570–72; social mobility 575; social tensions 576; women 571; see also the techumbre of Teruel Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) 330, 341n12 texts, High Medieval period: Latin 529; LatinRomance continuum 530–32, 534; oral performance 530, 542n17; variability 528–31, 542n26, 543n27; see also Nodicia de kesos textuality: anonymity 426; approaches to 421–22; archival documentations 423; authorial changes across versions 429–30; authorship 422–25, 428–29, 431; frst-generation codices 422–43; hand-printed texts 431–34; holographs 422–23; inscription 433–34; Llibre del Rei en Jaume 424, 426; lost texts 425; manuscript transmission 426–28; multiple-authorial variation 429; oral
640
Index origins 423–24; poetry 424–26, 430; production and dissemination 421, 424–25; rubrics 430; scribal alterations 427–31, 434n5; songbooks 430, 434n7; sources 421; translations 428–29, 431; unique copies 425–26; witnesses 426, 431, 433 Theodoric II 71 theology 399 Third Council of Toledo 74–77 Thompson, Billy Bussell 441 Ticknor, George 441 tiny lives 108, 115n13 Tirant lo Blanc (Joanot Martorell): language 386; print editions 386, 432; surviving copies 425, 431, 434n9; texts integrated into 429; writing contexts 386–87 Tobi,Yosef 369 Tolan, John 187 el Toledano see Rada, Rodrigo Ximénez de Toledo:Alfonso VI’s siege 36; councils and canons 72–80; courtly culture 122; Fourth Council 73, 75, 82, 270; intellectual activities 398; Jewish people 260–61; mudéjares 272 Toro 588 Torre,Alfonso de la 59–60 Torroella, Pere 429 Torsimany 422 Tortosa 28–29 Touati, Houari 413–14 Transcribe Estoria 338 transculturation 56, 62n4 transhumance 10–11 translation: artistic, 367; as authorship 428; Benjamin,Walter on 463; bishops supporting 262–63; cultural interaction 59–60; in Don Quixote 457–58; identity 59–60, 462; medieval-postcolonial studies connections 59; postcolonial theory 59; and raciolinguistics 462–63; social group relations 509; textuality 428–29, 431; translanguaging 463; types of 62n13 translation projects:Alfonso X 121, 125, 463, 511–13; bishops supporting 262–63; hubs of 62n14; Morisco 462, 470; Raymond of Toledo 125; at Toledo 398 translations: Calila e Dimna 508, 514; Crónica Troyana 595–96; Exemplario contra los engaños y pelígros del mundo 508, 514; Kalila wa-Dimna 508–9, 511, 516, 521; Nodicia de kesos 538–39, 543n43, 543n45; Siete Partidas 319 Trastámara, Enrique de 45, 316, 318 Trastámara, Joan 311 travel literature: overview 408–9;Abu Hamid al-Gharnati 411–12; aesthetics 409; Andanças e viajes (Pero Tafur) 418;Al-Bakri 414;Al-Biruni 414; Cantar de Mio Cid 408; Christian 409–10, 416–19; digressions 408, 413; Embassy (Ruy
González de Clavijo) 417–18; ethnographic commentaries 408–9, 411–13, 415, 417–18; Herodotean 413–14, 417; Ibn Jubayr 415–16; Itinerary (Benjamin of Tudela) 412–13; Jewish 410, 412; Libro de Alexandre 408, 410; Libro de las maravillas 409–10; Libro del conoscimiento 410; El Libro de Marco Polo (Rodrigo de Santaella) 408–10; Logs (Christopher Columbus) 418–19; modern 409, 415, 419; Muslim 410–16; natural history 411, 415; readers 419; tropes 410 Trebalio, Jacob 258 Trigg, Stephanie 360n21 troubadour music 348–49 troubadour poetry 348–50, 358n2, 359n17; see also the cantigas Truax, Barry 487n2 Tudela 262–63, 264, 265 Tuḥfat al-Albāb (Abu Hamid al-Gharnati) 411–12 Turmeda,Anselm 268–69, 274, 277, 280–81 two language (2L) hypothesis 532, 534, 537 tyranny 403–4 Ullmann, Walter 88 Umaīyah ibn ‘Isā ibn Shahīd 206–7 ‘Umar al-Ṭabbā‘ 200 Umar Ibn Ḥafsu¯n 206 Umayyads:Abbasid rivalry 197, 200; dynasty establishment 187; and the Fatimids 154, 159–60; see also Córdoba Caliphate; Córdoba emirate Umm al-Hasan 294 Umm al-Kiram 294 Uría Maqua, Isabel 559 Urraca of Castile-León 290–91, 318 Usatges de Barcelona 22–24, 26, 28, 91 Valencia: Christian conquest 9, 36–37, 41, 62n10; fueros 288; Furs de València 28, 288; Jaume I’s annexation 41, 62n10; Jewish communities 127; Moriscos 48; mudéjares 41–42, 44–46; Pere III 22, 28–29; al-Qādir 38; representative assemblies 95; revolts 42; seigniorial domains 30n4; working women 291–92;Yaḥyā 36 Valla, Lorenzo 417 Valladolid,Alfonso de 279–80 Vallmanya,Antoni 422, 430 Válor, Hernando de 154, 471 Van Landingham, Marta 25 Vázquez y Gutiérrez, Juana see Juana de la Cruz Velasco, Rodríguez, Jesús 375–76, 386 Venantius Fortunatus 71 Verlinden, Charles 293 vernacular imagery 584–86 Veronica 613, 617n25 Vial, Theodore 458 Victorio, Juan 560 La vida del Ysopet 518
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Index Vida de San Millán (Gonzalo de Berceo) 486 Vida de Santa Oria (Gonzalo de Berceo) 488n7 Vida de Santo Domingo de Silos (Gonzalo de Berceo) 452, 483 Videira Lopes Graça 358n1 Vigilius 71 Vilanova,Arnau de 422 Vila-rasa, Lluís de 429–30 Villanueva, Márquez 62n3 Villena, Enric de 422, 425, 429, 431 Villena, Isabel de 422, 431–32, 434n9 Vincent of Beauvais 181 Violant of Aragon 311 Violant of Hungary 290 Virgo lactans 610 Visigothic-Mozarabic liturgy 75, 80–82 the Visigoths:Arianism 68, 74–77; Catholic conversions 74, 76–77; councils with HispanoRomans 73–74; cultural identity 68; defeat by Franks 69; defeat by Muslim invaders 82, 137; defeat of Sueve kingdom 69, 82; Hermenegild 74–76; Imperial military cooperation 68–70; internal power struggles 82; Jewish people under 120, 270; kingly remains transferred to Toledo 172; Latinization 68; Leovigild 74–77, 82; migration into Roman Empire 67–68; Reccared 73–77, 81; Reccesvinth 78, 80, 172; royal power infuence 88 Sisebut 270; tribal conficts 68;Wamba 172 Visigoths in Tārīkh Iftitāḥ al-Andalus: overview 197; Artabas 199, 201; importance of 200; palace of Hercules 202; Roderick 200, 202, 208; Sarah 199–201, 209; transfer of power 201–2; Umayyad relations 199, 201;Yulian 202, 208 vision 603, 616n5 visions: gender differences 605; Juana de la Cruz 604–5, 610, 613; of Mary 604, 610; see also living art visual culture: art 605, 610, 615, 616n4; Crónica Troyana 595–98; decorum aesthetics 581, 585, 598; Flores and Blancafor, Burgos Cathedral 593–95; Gothic Anamorphic Gaze 589, 597; León cathedral portals 582–85; Paradise 588–89; rhetoric 584–85; Santa María de Regla cathedral 172, 258–59, 582–85; Santa María la Mayor de Toro cathedral 584–88; vernacular imagery 584–86; see also Cantigas de Santa María; images Vives, Juan Luis 502 voice 485–86 Wacks, David A. 55, 60, 510 Wael Hallaq 109 Wallace, David 510 Walladah bint al-Mustakf 294 Walter of Châtillon 393
Waltman, Franklin M. 328 Wamba 172 al-Wāqidī 140 Ward, Aengus 338 Wardropper, Bruce W. 346, 359n8 Warren, Michelle R. 59, 477 wars of the remenças 98 Watson, Andrew 13 Wei, Li 463 Weiss, Julian: on cantigas de amor 349–50, 357, 359n18; on Libro de Alexandre 402; on mester de clerecía 405n1, 440, 475; on postcolonial theory 55 Welsh, Andrew 360n33 Wensinck,A. J. 445 Whinnom, Keith 493 White, Hayden 178 Wiegers, Gerard 440 Williams, Deanne 59 Williamson, Beth 482–83 Willis, Raymond 396–97 Wolf, Kenneth 234–35 women: in chivalric literature 380, 383; concubines 292–93, 317–19; conversas 297–98; Crown of Aragon political culture 30n4; divorce 315; elites 290, 294–95; enslaved 293, 296; Granada 307; Hapsburg dynasty 308; Iberian gender system 287, 299; and images 605; imperfect male trope 304; Jewish 123, 296–98; and the law 287–89, 292, 294–95, 297; in Libre dels tres reys d’Orient 219–21; marriage 315–17, 561n9; misogynistic texts 303–4, 306; monasteries for 77; Moriscas 48, 298; mudéjares 47, 295–96; Muslim 47, 294–96; power 290–91; religiosity studies 339; religious minorities 294–99; reputation 292; scholarship overview 287; sexuality 289, 292–93, 295–96; status boundaries 289–93; in Tārīkh Iftitāḥ al-Andalus 200, 206; the techumbre of Teruel 565, 569, 571, 577; unmarried 292; wives of priests 293; working 291–92; see also beatas; queens Woolard, Kathryn 471, 473n8, 523–24 Wright, Roger 143, 529, 533, 543n27 writing standardization 528, 530 Xàtiva 41 Yahalom, Joseph 369 Yaḥyā, king of Muslim Valencia 36 Yaḥyā al-Qādir 36 Yahya II al-Qadir 122 Yarza Luaces, Joaquín 566 Yça Gidelli 440 Ysopete ystoriado 518 Yulian 202, 208
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Index Zacuto, Abraham 122–23 Zahr al-Riyadh 307 Zamora, 156; see also Santa María la Mayor de Toro cathedral Zaragoza:Aragon’s attacks on 37; Banu¯ Ḥu¯d 38; cultural similarities with Provence 54–55; poetry production 127–28; women’s sexuality 292
Zaragoza I council 74 Zarri, Gabriella 600 Zias, Joseph 224–25 Zirids 154 al-Zubaydī 157 Zumthor, Paul 349 Zurita, Jerónimo de 93
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