Mozarabs in Medieval and Early Modern Spain

Identities and Influences

Richard Hitchcock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754663140
• eBook ISBN: 9781317093725
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The setting of this volume is the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages, where Christianity and Islam co-existed side by side as the official religions of Muslim al-Andalus on the one hand, and the Christian kingdoms in the north of the peninsula on the other. Its purpose is to examine the meaning of the word 'Mozarab' and the history and nature of the people called by that name; it represents a synthesis of the author's many years of research and publication in this field. Richard Hitchcock first sets out to explain what being a non-Muslim meant in al-Andalus, both in the higher echelons of society and at a humbler level. The terms used by Arab chroniclers, when examined carefully, suggest a lesser preoccupation with purely religious values than hitherto appreciated. Mozarabism in León and Toledo, two notably distinct phenomena, are then considered at length, and there are two chapters exploring the issues that arose, firstly when Mozarabs were relocated in twelfth-century Aragón, and secondly, in sixteenth-century Toledo, when they were striving to retain their identity.

Chapter 1
Meaning and Origins

The rejection of the use of the word ‘Mozarab’ when referring to the Christians of al-Andalus in the centuries before the advent of the Almoravids and Almohads is rational. The Arabic form of the word is absent from contemporary accounts, Arabic histories and chronicles. Whatever Spanish historians may have called the Christians of al-Andalus, they were not called Mozarabs. Simonet was alert to this fact when, in the 1860s, he was compiling data for his Historia de los mozárabes. The collective noun musta‛riba, which describes the Arabicized community, is not to be found until it occurs in Arabic histories relating to the Eastern territories of Islam in the tenth and eleventh centuries, where it denotes statusless non-Arabs of unspecified religion, in receipt of fewer privileges than the Christian Arabs.¹

The Christians of al-Andalus must be regarded in the context of other non-Muslim communities within Islam. This is not to say (and this is where the difficulties often arise) that non-Muslim communities received identical treatment throughout the Islamic empire. This would be to impute to the central authorities a degree of omnipotence that they were seldom, if ever, able to enjoy. The policies towards the conquered peoples varied not only from area to area, but also from time to time, depending on how the successive parties in power thought that their interests could best be served. When the Iberian Peninsula was occupied, it was settled initially by Berbers, a heterogeneous body of people, comprising those who had formed part of the invasive forces in 711 AD, and others who had crossed the Straits separating mainland Africa from Iberia, in their wake. The numbers of these Berber settlers are difficult to gauge, but they were sufficiently numerous to disconcert the early Arab governors of al-Andalus. Their tribes had been comparatively recent converts to Islam, but what is more significant in this context is that they had been accorded the same privileges as were enjoyed by Arab Muslims. They were recruited into the Muslim armies, and allowed a share of the plunder. This conscious policy of assimilation of the Berbers into Islam and its concomitant advantages undoubtedly contributed to their enthusiastic participation in the assault on Iberian soil. Later, this policy was reversed when Syrian Arabs establishing themselves in al-Andalus in the 730s sought to restrict the flow of Berbers across the Straits, because they foresaw that a massive Berber contingent could be a destabilizing influence and constitute a potential threat to their authority. One suspects, furthermore, that the Berbers had chosen the most favourable sites in which to settle and put down roots in the Peninsula, a predictable source of contention with the incoming Arabs. The eventual rebellion of Berbers, angered by the curtailment of their privileges, came within a hair’s-breadth of the withdrawal of the ruling Arabs from al-Andalus, and their departure from the Maghrib. Ultimately, the Yemení faction brought the situation under control temporarily, but arguments amongst Arabs of whatever faction in al-Andalus as to how most effectively to harness the Berbers within Islam, led to rebellion flaring up again in the later decades of the eighth century.²

It is assumed that the Arabs who settled in the Peninsula were numerically far fewer than the Berbers.³ Whatever their respective proportions, both groups would have been outnumbered by the indigenous population by a figure of perhaps thirty or forty to one.⁴ The immense majority of the indigenous inhabitants may be divided amongst those who became Muslims and those who did not. There seems to be no reliable or scientific means for determining the respective numerical strengths of these two groupings, but the non-Muslim mass would gradually, over the centuries, have diminished, through conversions and emigration. After the establishment of the Umayyad dynasty in Córdoba in 756, and until its demise with the dissolution of the Caliphate in 1031, the overall control of al-Andalus was vested in the hands of the Marwānid family, supported by a small number of Arab and Berber heads of clan in areas where these had established themselves. Earlier in the history of the Umayyad emirate, notably during the ninth century, vociferous opposition came from the muwalladūn, a name that literally signifies ‘those born of two races’ and referred to those who were raised as Muslims having been born into a non-Arab Muslim family. The word was in general use in al-Andalus to specify sections of society who were converts to Islam. Certain muwallad communities, indignant that they were being deprived of the prosperity enjoyed by the governing Arabs, sought to wrest some of their power and wealth from them by setting up their own states in city strongholds remote from Córdoba. These revolts were all ultimately suppressed, but their failure to achieve independence from Córdoba may, in large measure, be due to the lack of cooperation, debatably stemming from a studied disinterest on the part of the majority population of al-Andalus.⁵ The argument may be propounded that if the refusal of the affluent Arab clans to allow alien encroachment upon their wealth and power is allied to a state of indifference on the part of the indigenous population, then the perpetuation of this state of non-integration of the conquered peoples in the Iberian Peninsula is readily demonstrable.

In the first two centuries of Islam in the Iberian Peninsula, the picture of the non-Muslims that suggests itself is one of an incurious community, largely heedless of the transfer of authority from Visigoth to Muslim. Most of the indigenous population would not have spoken Arabic properly, if at all, but the application of the word ‛ajam predominantly to non-Muslims suggests that the muwalladūn would in all probability have acquired a knowledge of Arabic. On the other hand, there is little indication that non-Muslims were coerced or, indeed, were under any obligation to speak, write, or understand Arabic. The terms ‛ajam, muwalladūn and barābira (Berbers), were essentially words of disparagement, used by Arabs, particularly Syrian Arabs proud of their Arab ancestry, to denote, as it were, second-class citizens within Islam, those who had a deficiency, which effectively precluded them from being treated as equals. The use of ‛ajam is, in itself, an indication of the non-assimilation of the people of al-Andalus.

One further term that should be mentioned in a Hispano-Muslim context is mawāli. In some circumstances, it meant ‘kinsmen’ (although the misleading word ‘client[s]’ is often used), that is, those who entered into an agreement with an Arab person or an Arab tribe and, in other contexts, slaves, so used during the Umayyad Caliphate of the East. Amongst the foremost authorities on the history of the Muslims in al-Andalus, the name of Ibn Ḥayyān is universally acknowledged, his works being held in high esteem. Although his magnum opus, the Muqtabas has not survived in toto, those sections of this work that are known illustrate the care that he took with his choice of sources, and the attention he paid to his terminology. He was precise in his use of terminology: ahl al-Andalus (the people of al-Andalus), for example, always refers to settlers, to the Arabs, but not to the Berbers, who are invariably called by their ethnic name. The word, when he used it, referred to non-Arab sectors of the indigenous population, and designated a social rather than an ethnic category.⁶ Frequently, though not invariably, the word has the specific connotation of non-Arab Muslims, as such enjoying the same status as the muwalladūn, but Ibn Ḥayyān normally qualified the word still further, talking of mawāli Qurṭūba, that sector of the indigenous population of Córdoba who had become Muslims. This distinction was observed because the Arab community within Islam was ipso facto composed of Arabs, and conversion to Islam could not ensure admission to that community. The mawāli were tolerated by the Arabs within Islam, but were not treated as equals, and the consequent resentment of these non-Arab Muslims in the Eastern Islamic lands, led to the emergence of the shu‛ūbiyya movement, whereby the superiority of the non-Arabs, particularly the Persians, over the Arabs, was proclaimed. The movement attained a certain foothold in al-Andalus, as the eleventh-century epistle of Ibn García would seem to indicate.⁷ This point is significant within the context of al-Andalus because it emphasizes again the paucity of intercommunication that subsisted within the Islamic sector of the community. There is something here also of the aristocrats’ haughty disdain and distrust of the nouveaux riches, for the mawāli in al-Andalus became wealthy and powerful, and some mawāli families asserted their independence when they controlled a number of the Ṭā’ifa states after the collapse of the Caliphate.

The Arabic sources do not dwell at any length on the specifically Christian sectors of the Islamic community in the Iberian Peninsula. The non-Muslims comprised Christians and Jews, but references to the covenant which afforded statutory protection to adherents of these two religions are relatively infrequent, the mu‛āhid, those in receipt of an ‛ahd or pact, so one could assume that religious confrontation was seldom an issue.⁸ To describe non-Muslims, Ibn Ḥayyān used the words ‛ajam, musālima (those who made peace or who were at peace, and who, at one stage, comprised the conquered race living peaceably within Islam), dhimmī, and naṣrānī. A distinction can be noted, in that the ‛ajam were, by definition, non-Arab speakers; the musālima, dhimmī and naṣrānī were all non-Muslims. In time, the role of the dhimmī in Islam was codified, but there is scant evidence of any substantial measure of integration having been achieved in al-Andalus, until the growing incidence of Islamicization in the tenth century. The dhimmī was not excluded from entry into the administration and, in al-Andalus at the height of the Caliphate in the tenth century, the ambitious dhimmī could and did attain an exalted position and status in governmental circles.⁹ It is not known at what stage in the course of the progress of Islam in al-Andalus, conversion was deemed to be imperative, but ambassadors and translators in the court of ‛Abd ar-Raḥmān in the tenth century still clearly enjoyed dhimmī status. High-level dhimmīs may not have had to convert to Islam and it may be suspected that such a label was as much a social as a religious distinction.

The specific term for Christians was naṣārā, as has been noted, the least secular of the words applied to the non-Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula. When it was desired to draw particular attention to the religion of a person, naṣrānī was chosen, as is testified by the earliest Arabic-Latin word lists, but Ibn Ḥayyān also ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: The Terminological Question
• 1 Meaning and Origins
• 2 Muslims and Christians in al-Andalus in the Early Eighth Century
• 3 The Case of Córdoba in the Ninth Century
• 4 Christians in Córdoba
• 5 Mozarabism in León I: Arabic Nomenclature
• 6 Mozarabism in León II: Mozarabs
• 7 Mozarabs in Toledo
• 8 Mozarabs in Aragón
• 9 Mozarabs after 1492
• Postscript
• Bibliography
• Index