This is a test
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
Islamic Spain, 1250 to 1500
Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations
About This Book
This is a richly detailed account of Muslim life throughout the kingdoms of Spain, from the fall of Seville, which signaled the beginning of the retreat of Islam, to the Christian reconquest."Harvey not only examines the politics of the Nasrids, but also the Islamic communities in the Christian kingdoms of the peninsula. This innovative approach breaks new ground, enables the reader to appreciate the situation of all Spanish Muslims and is fully vindicated.... An absorbing and thoroughly informed narrative."âRichard Hitchcock, Times Higher Education Supplement "L. P. Harvey has produced a beautifully written account of an enthralling subject."âPeter Linehan, The Observer
Frequently asked questions
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoâs features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youâll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weâve got you covered! Learn more here.
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Yes, you can access Islamic Spain, 1250 to 1500 by L. P. Harvey in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & World History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
ONE
Geographical Environment and Historical Context
PROBLEMS OF TERMINOLOGY
If we wish to discuss the Muslims of Spain at any period in their history, we encounter a series of terminological problems. What are we to call the Muslims themselves, and the land they inhabited? The difficulties arise in part because the geographical and ethnic terms available to us themselves arose in the course of nine long centuries of contact and conflict, and while reflecting that conflict, they do not always help to throw much light on it. Moor (moro), for example, is a historical term which is authentic in the sense that it occurs in source materials of the period, but it is a term we can rarely use nowadays. It is not merely geographically imprecise, leaving us uncertain whether the person it describes is of North African origin or simply a Muslim, it is ambiguous with regard to the value judgment it implies Often Moor conveys hostility, but there are contexts where Muslims refer to themselves as Moors with evident pride. Even such an apparently straightforward term as Spain places pitfalls in our path. Does Spain include or exclude those places not under Christian rule? (And does it imply the inclusion or exclusion of what is now Portugal?). If we seek to escape from the difficulty created by Spain by using such an apparently unambiguous expression as âthe Iberian Peninsula,â we find we have created a new problem, because the inhabitants of the peninsula cannot be called Iberians (that is an expression limited to ancient history, or to the contrived ecumenicism of modern times).
If we adopt the Arabic name for the Iberian Peninsula, al-Andalus, we do not avoid all difficulties, because in English (and indeed in other modern European languages) the word is used of Islamic as distinct from Christian Spain, but since in Arabic the jazīrat al-Andalus was the whole peninsula, there is always the possibility that the broader sense may be intended.
In the Iberian Peninsula in the Middle Ages two major civilizations came into conflict. The words we use to describe that conflict inevitably reflect it in their very semantic structures, and there is no way available to us to talk about what went on in neutral terms, nor is there any way of achieving flat uniformity except from the most biased of partisan viewpoints. What we must do is be aware of the ways in which our vocabulary may lead us astray.
Spanish possesses a rich vocabulary to designate the minority religious and cultural groups that existed in the peninsula over the centuries, and English has adopted many of these words. It seems at first sight that we have a tidy set of terms to meet each logical possibility. Besides straightforward Christians and Muslims, we need terms for (a) Christians living under Muslim rule, (b) Christians who are converts from Islam (or descendants of such converts), (c) Muslims living under Christian rule, and (d) Muslims who converted from Christianity (or their descendants). We do indeed find (a) Mozarab (mozĂĄrabe), (b) Morisco, (c) MudĂ©jar, and (d) muladĂ, but it is important to realize that these are not terms universally applicable over the whole chronological range of peninsular history, and each one of them has a problematical aspect. The question of the proper use of Mozarab(ic) affects a multiplicity of groups over a very long period of time (say, from 711 to ca. 1200). Some would apply it to all subject Christians without exception; the extreme opposite viewpoint restricts the word to those culturally Arabized Christians from the south who took refuge in LeĂłn in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The resolution of the problem of how the word Mozarabic ought properly to be employed must be left to specialists; the sole purpose of mentioning the word here is to point out that it gives rise to disagreement and controversy. Of the other three terms mentioned, it should be noted that two, muladÎŻ and Morisco, are subject to chronological limitations. By and large muladÎŻ is used only of converts from Christianity to Islam in the days of Umayyad rule. (Later the term elche is sometimes used, but it seems to imply that the converts in question are outsiders to the community that has adopted them.) Morisco in the special sense indicated at (b) is not in use until well after 1500 (modern historians may use it from 1500 or so, but it is doubtful whether it actually came into use until about mid-century: before that the Moriscos avant la lettre were simply referred to as nuevos convertidos).
The word Morisco illustrates particularly clearly the dangers inherent in vocabulary. To make the point very briefly (and there would be a great deal more to say), by employing this term Morisco (rather than Spanish Muslim, say) we are tacitly accepting and approving of the forcible reclassification of this group of Muslims as something other, although all the documentary evidence indicates that most (not all) of them continued until the end to be crypto-Muslims who would have rejected the conversion if they had been at liberty to do so. The very use of the word seems to signify assent to the marginalization of the people so designated. Not to use it, however, is to court misunderstanding, as it is a standard part of the Spanish historical vocabulary.
The term that will concern us most in the course of the present study is Mudejar: âa Muslim who, after the surrender of a territory to a Christian ruler, remained there without changing religion, and entered into a relationship of vassalage under a Christian kingâ (a slightly modified translation of the entry MudĂ©jar in the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española). Are we, by referring to such Muslims as Mudejars, also endorsing their marginalization? As we shall see, the problem is really more complicated than that posed by Morisco.
Against the view that Mudejar is a term that relegates those so described to an inferior status, it may be argued that in recent critical usage the word has occurred in neutral and purely descriptive senses, and indeed some ascribe to it a strongly positive value judgment. In art history, Mudejar architecture has been much esteemed; even in literary criticism, LĂłpez-Baralt has discerned positive aspects in âMudĂ©jarâ writing âfrom Juan Ruiz to Juan Goytisoloâ (the latter a twentieth-century author preaching what he sees as a mudejarismo for our times).1
A difficulty facing those who would advocate a revaluation of Mudejar lies in its etymology. Etymology is no absolute bar to upward mobility, of course, and words which have begun as terms of opprobrium may sometimes be adopted as proud banners. (In British history, the rise of Tory out of the bogs of Ireland provides a particularly striking example of the phenomenon.) Yet etymology can be a useful guide to early usage and is not to be ignored. Let us see what it tells us about Mudejar.
The phonetic changes the word has undergone mean that its origins are by no means transparent, and erroneous guesses have abounded. The attempt to associate the word with Arabic dajjÄl, âhe who leads astray,â an epithet applied to Satan, can be discounted at the outset as an obvious clumsy product of anti-Islamic polemics. To associate it with Spanish dejar âto leaveâ (presumably because these Muslims were âleft behindâ) implies that dejar was borrowed in a rather strange way: we have no evidence that the Arabic of Spain adopted dejar as a loan word. The obvious place to look for light on this problem is in Arabic texts themselves speaking of the Mudejars; usually they simply have Muslims, but a few, notably al-WansharÄ«shÄ«âs KitÄb al-MiÊżyÄr, use the expression ahl al-dajn, âpeople who stay onâ (al-WansharÄ«shÄ« 1908:XII, 198). As will be seen below (chapter 4), al-WansharÄ«shÄ« is an author who strongly disapproves of the very idea of Mudejar status, and we can be sure that in his usage it carries a charge of opprobrium. Mudajjan, the participial form, would have the same sense as ahl al-dajn, namely âhaving stayed on.â
There is another aspect of the semantics of this word. Cognate to mudajjan are forms such as mudÄjin and dawÄjin which are used of âdomesticatedâ or âtameâ animals, particularly poultry. It would seem that a semantic link exists between the animal, which passes under human protection and acquires âdomesticatedâ status, and human populations, which pass under the protection of a dominant power and become safe subjects.2 To be tame and domesticated is not a characteristic of which any man will boast. What we have here is probably a taunt, perhaps at first directed by free Muslims at subject coreligionists. Since the new âsubject Muslimâ status was one for which no existing term was available, the name stuck and even passed into Spanish usage.
Can the term Mudejar be part of our modern historical vocabulary? âMuslim subject to a Christian rulerâ is a clumsy expression; a word is needed, and it would be perverse not to employ the one that is to hand, but we must be aware that there are contexts in which it will not function as a bland and colorless adjective, that it can be an emotive and possibly, on Muslim lips, an offensive epithet. (The theological implications of the acceptance by Muslims of Christian rule are discussed in chapter 4.)
PROBLEMS OF DEMOGRAPHY
How people are to be counted has always been a problem, and one of the difficulties experienced by medieval historians is that sometimes their sources will be making honest if unsuccessful attempts to reflect reality as it was perceived, while at other times they will be using numbers because of the symbolic or magical properties attributed to them. The preeminence of mathematics in our culture and the reliance we put on statistics place historians under pressure to find ingenious ways of extending back into the past sequences of demographic statistics of the same kind as we expect to have available for the twentieth century. That is rarely, if ever, possible.
We are far from possessing reliable statistics for any of the periods or areas that concern us. Occasionally, and for certain areas, we know a great deal, but alongside the extraordinarily detailed information which some medieval archives do preserve, there are black holes of ignorance which will never be filled. It is always necessary to remind ourselves that thirteenth-century statistics are not the same as twentieth-century statistics (which are not the same as the full and objective truth).
In general, of course, the nearer we approach the present day, the more information we have. We would expect to have more information about the sixteenth century than about the fifteenth, but there is also the special circumstance that during that period the âMorisco questionâ was on the agenda of Spanish statesmen and administrators. When the Final Expulsion of the Muslims came in the early seventeenth century, the consequent movement of populations was documented as fully and as bureaucratically as the Final Solution of the Jewish question in the twentieth. Thus the careful and comprehensive studies of Muslim populations in Spain in the final period have been made on the basis of full and apparently reliable statistics. Henri Lapeyre, in his Geography of Morisco Spain (GĂ©ographie de lâEspagne Morisque), was able to assemble a remarkably complete set of figures for almost all the Muslims who were expelled in 1609â1611, and to extend this coverage to earlier periods of the sixteenth century.
Lapeyreâs survey can often be used to project even further backwards into the later Middle Ages information about the distribution and relative sizes of Muslim settlements, but it has to be employed with all due precaution, for the sixteenth century was a period of particularly large movements of population (affecting the Muslims of Granada more than others, but leaving few areas untouched).
We may form some idea of the degree of uncertainty with regard to population statistics at about the outset of our period by comparing two estimates. J. N. Hillgarth estimates as follows: âReckoning back from an estimated 7,000,000 or 8,000,000 in 1482, it is conjectured that the population of Castile-LeĂłn in 1225 was about 4,000,000 (another estimate is 3,000,000) and that the conquests added 300,000 moreâ (Hillgarth 1976: 1, 30). J. OâCallaghan (after remarking on the hazardous nature of population estimates) cites Vicens Vivesâ estimates of the population of âCastile, the largest of the peninsula states, at about the middle of the thirteenth century, as four or five million people, including about 300,000 Muslims and Jewsâ (OâCallaghan 1975: 459). Estimates for the Crown of Castile, we see, vary between 3 million and 5 million. As OâCallaghan points out, âFor the crown of Aragon there are a number of statistical records that scholars have used to advantage. On the basis of the census of households of 1359, the population of Catalonia has been estimated at about 450,000 people, including about 18,000 Jews and 9,000 Muslims, located mostly in the south. Vicens Vives believed the population had dropped from about 500,000 in the thirteenth century because of emigration to Valencia, Majorca, Sicily, Sardinia and Greece. The estimate for Valencia is about 300,000, for Aragon about 200,000 and for Majorca about 45,000. This would give a total population of one million in the crown of Aragonâ (460). He goes on to put all the figures together into a global estimate for the peninsula as between 6,200,000 and 7,200,000 before the Great Plague. The proportion of Muslims in these total populations is likewise not known with accuracy. Both OâCallaghan (1975:462) and Hillgarth (1976: 1, 32) quote the estimate given by SobrequĂ©s that about half the population of the crown of Aragon were Muslims.3 âThis very high figure is less improbable than some others given for Jewish population, but it is reached by the same process of arguing back from figures of later centuries, in this case from those calculated for the Moriscos expelled in the seventeenth century. Only in the Kingdom of Valencia (and its extension southward to Alicante) did Mudejars constitute a large majority of the population: in Majorca they may have formed 50 per cent. They were very numerous in Aragon properâ (Hillgarth 1976: 1, 32).
As for Granada itself, the figure of 200,000 given by Aragonese envoys at the Council of Vienne in 1314 (OâCallaghan 1975: 460) is undoubtedly far too low, although we have no reliable figures. Hillgarth declines even to conjecture what it might have been; Ladero gives an estimate of 300,000 for the years before 1492 (Hillgarth 1976: 1, 30).
If we add to the population of approximately 5,000,000 in Castilian lands, the 1,000,000 for Aragon, we have perhaps 6,000,000 in total (with a considerable margin of uncertainty, as we have seen). The population of Muslims may have been the 300,000 for the Crown of Castile. (OâCallaghan [1975: 459] gave 300,000 for Muslims and Jews together; his estimate seems low bearing in mind the numbers of Muslims remaining behind at least until the Mudejar revolts of 1264.) For the Crown of Aragon one-half of the total population of 1,000,000 is clearly too high, but 300,000 is probably on the low side bearing in mind the dense settlements in Aragon proper and in Valencia. For the Kingdom of Granada we can only guess at least 300,000 or more. The total for Muslims in the whole peninsula must have approached 1,000,000. Perhaps one in six of the total population in the whole peninsula may have been Muslims. (Navarre with its steady small population of about 100,000 in all, and perhaps 1,000 Muslims,4 does not really affect our estimates as these figures fall well within our margins of error.)
If these very rough estimates are anywhere near the mark, they give rise to considerable problems when we seek to relate them to estimates for earlier periods in the Middle Ages. Thomas Glickâs survey of these problems may be cited verbatim: âAssuming that there were seven million Hispano-Romans in the peninsula in 711, and the numbers of this segment of the population remained level through the eleventh century, with population growth balancing out Christian migration to the north, then by 912 there would have been approximately 2.8 million indigenous Muslims (muwalladĆ«n) plus Berbers and Arabs. At this point Christians still vastly outnumbered Muslims. By 1100, however, the number of indigenous Muslims would have risen to a majority of 5.6 millionâ (Glick 1979: 35).
The theore...
Table of contents
- Cover
- Copyright Page
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1. Geographical Environment and Historical Context
- 2. The Rise of the BanĆ«ÊŸ I-Aáž„mar
- 3. Enclaves and Anomalies
- 4. Mudejar Status: The Teachings of the Islamic Lawyers; Christian Attitudes and Doctrines
- 5. Mudejar Communities: Castile
- 6. Mudejar Legal Codes from Castile
- 7. Mudejar Communities: Aragon
- 8. Mudejar Communities: Valencia
- 9. Mudejar Communities: Navarre
- 10. Muáž„ammad II (1273â1302)
- 11. Muáž„ammad III (1302â1309)
- 12. NaáčŁr (1309â1314); IsmÄÊżÄ«l (1314â1325); Muáž„ammad IV (1325â1333)
- 13. YĆ«suf I (1333â1354)
- 14. Muáž„ammad V (1354â1391): A Reign Interrupted by Those of IsmÄÊŸÄ«l II and Muáž„ammad VI
- 15. YĆ«suf II (AbĆ«ÊŸ l-កajjÄj) (1391â1392); Muáž„ammad VII (1392â1408); YĆ«suf III (1408â1417)
- 16. The Interlocking Reigns of Muáž„ammad VIII, Muáž„ammad IX, Muáž„ammad X, Muáž„ammad XI, YĆ«suf IV, and YĆ«suf V (1417â1452)
- 17. SaÊżd (1453â1464) and AbĆ«ÊŸ l-កasan ÊżAlÄ« (1464â1482)
- 18. The Final Decade of Granadan Independence (1482â1491)
- 19. The Conquest of Granada (1490â1492)
- 20. All Mudejars Now: Islamic Spain (1492â1500)
- Bibliography
- Index