Christians in Al-Andalus 711-1000

Ann Rosemary Christys

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415616386
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136127380
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Our current image of the Christian population of al-Andalus after AD711 reflects the way history has been written. The Christians almost disappeared from the historical record as the historians of the conquering Muslims concentrated on the glories of the Ummayads.This book reconsiders, through their own words, the fate of the Christians of al-Andalus. The texts discusses two chronicles in Latin on the fate of Hispania, the problematic accounts of Christian martyrs in Cordoba, a Muslim historian's account of how his Christian ancestors survived the conquest and other texts reflecting the acculturation of Christians into Islamic society.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

‘Although formerly Spain abounded plentifully in every liberal art and in each one those thirsting for the fountain of knowledge were devoting themselves everywhere to the study of letters, this study along with the arts vanished entirely when she was inundated by the forces of the barbarians. And so assailed by necessity both writers were wanting and the deeds of the Spanish perished in silence’.¹

These words, written in the twelfth century at the monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos, south of Burgos, convey the dramatic effect of the islamic conquest of Hispania on the way her history would be written. The monk was exaggerating the impact of the conquest for anti-muslim polemical purposes. The deeds of the christians did not altogether perish in silence. Yet the events of 711 set christians on one side or the other of a geographical and ideological frontier between Christianity and Islam which has dominated the historiography of the peninsula. In the unconquered northwest, propagandists for the emerging kingdom of the Asturias practised a rhetoric of resistance to the invaders. ‘The Saracens took over the kingdom of the Goths, which even nowadays they still possess in part. And the christians have battles with them day and night, and are in daily conflict, but they cannot take the whole of Spain from them’.² Thus wrote a chronicler at the monastery of Albelda in the ninth century. The author of the Chronicle of Alfonso III, written at about the same time, made the defeat of Rodrigo, the last Visigothic king, the prelude to a slow but inexorable Reconquest of the peninsula, initiated by the Asturian kings who claimed to be the heirs of the Visigoths. This Reconquest began with the famous (and perhaps legendary) victory of Pelayo over the Arabs and their Berber allies at Covadonga. Later christian historians echoed Asturian triumphalism when writing about the contest between christian and muslim Spain. Although the word ‘Reconquest’ was first used in the twelfth century, and it was only at this period that it began to take on the ideology of Crusade, the battle of Covadonga was placed at the head of a chain of victories which culminated in the fall of the kingdom of Granada in 1492 and the final liberation of the christians under muslim rule.

The christians of al-Andalus, living on the ‘wrong’ side of the frontier, seem to have been consigned to a footnote to the history of al-Andalus. In the standard histories by Conde,³ Dozy⁴ and Lévi-Provençal,⁵ the indigenous population are incidental to the islamic conquest and the rise and fall of the Umayyads, Almoravids and Almohads who dominated the peninsula in turn. Kennedy's recent history of Muslim Spain and Portugal⁶ devotes three pages to the christian population of al-Andalus in the period between 711 and the collapse of the Umayyad caliphate at the beginning of the eleventh century. These works accurately reflect the bias of the sources. Whilst the christians of al-Andalus were not entirely silenced by the conquest, they wrote very little. The last chronicle to be written in Latin dates from 754. A century later, Eulogius documented the martyr movement which erupted in Cordoba in the 850s, when christians went to their deaths for blaspheming against Islam. Very little was written in Latin in al-Andalus after this. Nearly all the evidence for the history of al-Andalus is found in works written in Arabic. Historians writing in Arabic were not interested in the native population and found few reasons to refer to them. There are accounts of conflicts on the frontiers of al-Andalus which involved both christians and muslim rebels.⁷ Legal texts dealt with some of the problems posed by these conflicts, as well as the relations between muslims, jews and christians and between ‘old’ muslims and converts – although most of the legal norms they established did not relate specifically to al-Andalus.⁸ Few christians were mentioned by name. Many of them adopted Arabic names, and can be identified in the sources only where a name is qualified by a title such as ‘the bishop’ or ‘the count’. These men are minor characters in the histories of the Arab governors who ruled al-Andalus from the conquest to 756, and of the Umayyad dynasty which succeeded them.

Basing their interpretation on these sources, historians have assumed that christian society did not survive the impact of Islam⁹ and that the disappearance of the christians from the historical record must be explained either by emigration or by conversion to Islam. Emigration will be one of the themes of chapter five. The meaning of conversion in the early Middle Ages is obscure. It does not seem to have been a question of individual conscience, but of social integration. Bulliet defined conversion to Islam in the following way: ‘a convert became a muslim … by reciting a creed, in a language he may not have understood and without necessarily understanding much of what it implied, learning new ritual practices, donning Arab dress, and adopting a new Arabic name, often used alongside his old one. In this way he clearly separated himself from his old religious community and made himself acceptable to the muslims in his vicinity’.¹⁰ Estimates for the number of christians who took this step vary. Epalza concluded that most had converted by the end of the eighth century.¹¹ In the cities which still had bishops, he argued, it was possible to remain a christian, but the majority had no option but to convert to Islam. Yet only the sees of Zaragoza, Almería, Cuenca, Guadix and Sigüenza disappeared entirely. Reilly estimated that christians may still have made up thirty per cent of the population of the peninsula in the eleventh century.¹² Bulliet, working from the genealogies of the notables of al-Andalus, collected in the biographical dictionaries, calculated that the number of conversions peaked at the beginning of the tenth century; half the christians in al-Andalus had converted to Islam by the middle of the tenth century, and eighty per cent by the eleventh.¹³ He assumed that all the subjects of the biographical dictionaries were muslims by the time they were eligible for inclusion, but that some of them were of christian origin. He dated the conversion of each family by the first appearance in a genealogy of a name which looked Arabic, although it was not always easy to distinguish between muslim, Berber and christian names. There are several problems with this approach. In order to be able to draw general conclusions from a sample, the data must be accurate, and the sample representative of the population in general and of adequate size. Bulliet's study fulfils none of these criteria. He looked at 154 genealogies from five sources. Nearly all of his subjects were active in Cordoba. Since the biographical dictionaries included only public figures¹⁴ – five percent of the population at most – Bulliet's approach is rather like making conclusions about the population of Britain in the twentieth century from a study of Who's Who. The genealogies show an accelerating trend towards conversion in the upper echelons of society and may indicate that conversion was the christian's main route to such eminence. These conclusions should not be applied to the population as a whole.

Conversion has always been a major theme in the story of al-Andalus. In the nineteenth century, Spanish scholars assumed that converts formed the backbone of Andalusi society. Spanish Arabists of the school of Codera (1836-1917), Ribera (1858-1934) and Asín (1871-1944), influenced by contemporary currents of Spanish nationalism, treated al-Andalus as a special, and of course superior, manifestation of Islam which was independent of the rest of the islamic world.¹⁵ The last twenty years have seen an explosion of interest in the history of al-Andalus, particularly within Spain. A collection of many of the most important articles on this period, translated into English, has recently been published.¹⁶ Modern historians have rejected the concept of ‘spanish Islam’. Influenced by the work of Guichard,¹⁷ many see in the islamic conquest of Hispania the imposition of oriental tribal patterns of settlement. It is assumed, although there is little evidence for this, that the indigenous population were absorbed into this new social structure. Neither in ‘spanish Islam’ nor in tribal al-Andalus is there room for the christians of al-Andalus to play any role other than that of converts to Islam and clients of the new rulers.

Yet, more than one hundred years ago, Simonet made the ‘Mozarabs’, as he called them, the subject of a large volume, of which a substantial part deals with the first three centuries after the conquest.¹⁸ Historians working in this field owe an immense debt to him. Simonet wrote with the prolixity of the nineteenth century but he was not short of material; although manuscripts are still reappearing, especially in North Africa, most of the evidence for the christians of al-Andalus had already been discovered. Simonet's perspective was as deeply rooted in the nineteenth century as his literary style. First and foremost ‘a catholic, above being an Arabist, a professor, or anything else’,¹⁹ he told the story of embattled christians under alien rule who kept the flame of Catholicism burning. Fifty years later, Isidro de las Cagigas' account of the same period took a nationalist perspective on the christians' struggle to maintain their identity.²⁰ Heirs to the Asturian chroniclers of the ninth century, both men were working with the same grand narrative, that Reconquest had freed the peninsula from the muslim yoke. Similar preconceptions engendered the acrimonious debate between Sánchez-Albornoz and Castro, as to whether Spain was – as the former claimed – ‘really’ a catholic country and part of Europe, or inescapably set apart by her islamic inheritance.²¹ The christian-muslim frontier in the peninsula was compared with the northwest frontier of the United States.²² Sánchez-Albornoz claimed that ‘the history of no other European people has been so decisively modified by a frontier as Castile’.²³ Combatants on both sides saw the peninsula as unique, a mind set which Linehan argued is already recognisable in the writings of early medieval Spaniards.²⁴ Since the fall of Franco, the secularisation of society, devolution of political power in Spain and European integration have robbed this debate of its relevance. Further, the concept of the grand narrative is losing its power. This alone would justify a re-examination of the evidence.

It is unfortunate that methodological shifts mean that the christians of al-Andalus have become, in some ways, less accessible to study in the twentieth century than they were to Simonet. The opposition between Christianity and Islam remains crucial to Spanish historiography and it has been given a new twist, which at first sight is purely academic and concerns the importance of Arabic for the study of al-Andalus.²⁵ Simonet read both Arabic and Latin. His History of the Mozarabs deserved its subtitle: ‘deduced from the best and most authentic testimony of christian and muslim writers’. Few later historians have been able to emulate him. Some were not deterred by their lack of Arabic. Sánchez-Albornoz wrote many volumes on this period, far too many to leave time to learn a difficult language. His reliance on translation involved him in another dispute, this time with Lévi-Provençal, who edited many of the Arabic sources for the history of al-Andalus. The modern student of al-Andalus cannot afford to be on either side of this divide. Dependence on translation sometimes creates additional difficulties for the historian, since translators have been blamed for compounding the mistakes perpetrated by the editors of the manuscripts. More important than this, where a work has not been translated in its entirety, the same passages are quoted, often out of context, by one historian after another. Some knowledge of Arabic is now the starting point for work on many aspects of the history of al-Andalus. This puts most modern scholars into one of two camps and the study of christians and muslims who lived side-by-side in the early Middle Ages into different university departments. On one side are the Arabists, who are sometimes thought by historians to be insufficiently critical of their sources. Those who are limited to the Latin sources, on the other hand, miss out on the meat of the evidence. Only recently have historians begun to work across this frontier, particularly in Spain. Further, the difficulty which Arabic presents to European scholars in comparison with Latin fosters the idea that the Arabic histories are alien to twentieth-century minds in a way that the Latin material is not. This may have more to do with present mistrust of Islam than with scholars' ability to draw conclusions from apparently unpromising material; after all, most historians of the early Middle Ages have learnt to work with hagiography. The divide between Islam and Christendom is long standing and has been sharpened in recent years by acts of violence by islamic fundamentalists. It would be a mistake to extrapolate these feelings back to the early Middle Ages. Although anti-muslim polemic was written in the Middle East, and to a lesser extent in Hispania, in this period, enmity between the two religions does not seem to have crystallised until after the millennium.²⁶ Yet Crusader ideology has created a conceptual barrier which loads the interpretation of actual medieval frontiers.²⁷ Western historians conceive of Islam as monolithic and, indeed, unaffected by history, so that observations of modern islamic communities, particularly those regarded as ‘primitive’, such as the Bedouin, are held to apply to their coreligionists of more than a millennium earlier.²⁸ Nor is it possible to exonerate all Arabists f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Culture and Civilization in the Middle East
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• List of Rulers
• Maps
• CHAPTER ONE: Introduction
• CHAPTER TWO: Cordoba and Toledo
• CHAPTER THREE: News from the east in the eighth-century chronicles
• CHAPTER FOUR: The martyrs of Eulogius
• CHAPTER FIVE: Two more martyrs of Cordoba
• CHAPTER SIX: Recemund and the Calendar of Cordoba
• CHAPTER SEVEN: The Arabic translation of Orosius
• CHAPTER EIGHT: Sara the Goth and her descendants
• CHAPTER NINE: Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index