Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Spain

Interactionand Cultural Change

Mark D. Meyerson, Edward D. English, Mark D. Meyerson, Edward D. English

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780268087265
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The essays in this interdisciplinary volume examine the social and cultural interaction of Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Spain during the medieval and early modern periods. Together, the essays provide a unique comparative perspective on compelling problems of ethnoreligious relations.

Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Spain considers how certain social and political conditions fostered fruitful cultural interchange, while others promoted mutual hostility and aversion. The volume examines the factors that enabled one religious minority to maintain its cultural integrity and identity more effectively than another in the same sociopolitical setting.

This volume provides an enriched understanding of how Christians, Muslims, and Jews encountered ideological antagonism and negotiated the theological and social boundaries that separated them.

PART II

Muslims and Jews in Christian Spain

5

Mudejar Parallel Societies: Anglophone Historiography and Spanish Context, 1975–2000

ROBERT I. BURNS, S.J.

A CONSIDERABLE SCHOOL of medieval historians in the United States has been studying Spain for many years; it is only fair that Spain has now begun studying us. The first such turnabout is Angel Galán Sánchez’s volume on A Vision of “Spanish Decline”: Anglo-Saxon Historiography on the Mudejars and Moriscos (18th to 20th Centuries).¹ Only a rare scholar among my non-Spanish colleagues would submit to the disconcerting description “Anglo-Saxon”; John Boswell, Anwar Chejne, Thomas Glick, Elena Lourie, Angus MacKay, and I are among those analyzed under the Mudejar rubric as Anglo-Saxon. We charitably understand, however, that “Anglophone” is meant. Galán’s book is welcome on two counts. He is well informed and careful in his analysis of authors, drawing upon serious historiographical studies in both English and Spanish. And his work implicitly invites us to pause in our production to reflect upon our common motives, assumptions, and thematic directions in the history of Spain’s Mudejars—Muslims living under their Christian conquerors. No other field of medieval study, except for the crusades, is so largely the work of Anglophone scholars. But just as our view of a Spanish phenomenon from the outside can result in distortions, lacunae, and idiosyncrasies, so a Spaniard’s view of us historians may also need correction and amplification.

Unlike continental historians, we are far less likely to have a conscious theory or a common theory, or to follow a dominant mentality in shaping and interpreting our materials. More exactly, we are likely to be pragmatic and changeable, adopting techniques, approaches, and viewpoints as they catch our fancy. However vulnerable our partialities, they are not usually programmatic or too firmly held. This is in marked contrast to literary scholars in North America, whose contentious factions rally passionately under their respective banners of theory. Nor should much be made of a connection with England and its anti-Spanish traditions. The ethnic transformation of the United States by our lifetime, the influence of German historio-graphical practice, and above all the influx of exile scholars during and after Hitler’s war broke any English continuum and radically reshaped America’s intellectual and academic landscape. Galán Sánchez presents the twentieth-century Anglophone historiography under the title “From a Polemical Vision to the Influence of the Social Sciences,” a perspective that needs to be qualified. American historians generally resist identification with the social sciences and are ambivalent about adapting their paradigms and methodologies. Historians value their use for bridging gaps in the data and for opening novel perspectives, but they also mistrust the static structure of such disciplines in a constantly changing world as well as their shallow foundations on theory. Historians do use elements from the social sciences but gingerly and as auxiliary aids toward new insights. We look to the provocative instead of the ideologic, to the exploratory rather than the fixed.

Experience and common sense nonetheless warn us that contemporary mentalities and assumptions as well as personal evolution, preoccupations, and attitudes to some degree direct and color our researches. Since these influences in their aggregate differ with each different person, like the unique fingerprint or visage, a more useful historiography might issue from autobiographical reflection by a cast of both senior and junior contributors to the Mudejar field. This would trace the origins and development of the individual’s attraction to and immersion in the world of Spain’s three communities, the talents, training, and pedagogical influences, and finally the personal characteristics, life contexts and experiences, and simple accidents that have affected his work. If history is at bottom biographies, so also is historiography.²

There were many kinds of Mudejar communities, whose structures and externals were analogous but whose contexts and experiences varied widely, according to place and time. These changing faces of Mudejar society are not yet reflected adequately in the many research works coming on stream, but a promising beginning has been made. Mudejar historiography itself displays many faces, however, and these invite a recapitulation. A thorough review is not possible except in book form. But we can draw a simple map showing where our generation started (both Hispanic and “Anglo”), where we are now, and how we got here. When I began my own medieval studies almost a half-century ago, and indeed up to the year 1960, only one serious book existed on the Mudejars in any language, and it had been published a hundred years before—Francisco Fernández y González’s Estado social y político de los mudejares de Castilla.³ This is astonishing when one reflects that conquered Muslims had constituted significant parallel societies over many generations in many parts of Spain. Moriscos had always attracted attention, of course, as much for the human tragedy of their story as for the relative abundance of their more modern sources. In a shadowy way too, the mere existence of conquered Muslims formed part of everyone’s romantic perception of medieval Spain as pluri-cultural and somehow a “tolerant” society.

Some twenty-five years further into my work, however, it was possible to survey the startling rise of a new field, as I did in my 1977 Viator article “Mudejar History Today.”⁴ Where a handful of articles had long constituted our Mudejar knowledge, by scholars such as Francisco Macho y Ortega (1922), Felipe Mateu y Llopis (1942), Leopoldo Piles Ros (1949), Miguel Gual Camarena (1949), Francisco Roca Traver (1952), and Leopoldo Torres Balbás (from the 1950s), the decade of the 1960s gave us José M. Lacarra’s pioneering book on the Mudejars of Aragon proper (1960) and Miguel Angel Ladero Quesada’s book on Isabeline Mudejars (1969). This modest start was accompanied by still more articles, notably by Juan Torres Fontes opening up the subfield of Murcia’s Mudejars (1961). Articles were now becoming numerous enough, of high quality, and of a widening range of interest, so that by the end of the 1960s one could properly speak of a maturing field.⁵

The 1970s saw a bibliographical revolution in Mudejar scholarship. The decade opened with Thomas Glick’s Irrigation and Society in Medieval Valencia (1970) and closed with his Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages: Comparative Perspectives on Social and Cultural Formation (1979). Though neither book was focused directly on Mudejarism, they both involved that society tangentially, and they both proposed provocative models and perspectives about mutual acculturation of Muslim and Christian in the Mudejar situation. Glick’s article on “Muhtasib and Mustasaf” was similarly comprehensive in its data and provocatively original in its arguments for mutual acculturation or feedback between those institutions.⁶ My own first two books on Mudejarism appeared then—Islam under the Crusaders: Colonial Survival in the Thirteenth-Century Kingdom of Valencia (1973), and Medieval Colonialism: Postcrusade Exploitation of Islamic Valencia (1975).⁷ The first attempted a comprehensive view of the Mudejar society taking form in the first generation or so after the crusader conquest. It owed something to the Annales approach to social history which then offered new visions and patterns, but there was no systematic application of principles (if indeed the founders of that approach ever envisaged the relentless system that evolved) and it did not exclude an eclectic inspiration from other historians. My previous training in ethnohistory under R. Rahman at the Anthropos Institut, then attached in exile to the University of Fribourg, in Switzerland, had resulted in a separate doctorate and series of publications, and that certainly exercised some influence.⁸ Islam and Colonialism were not strongly theoretical, but rather a pragmatic effort to recover the myriad archival details, to arrange them in the widest possible context of other data, and to approach the emerging society from as many perspectives as time allowed. The fiscal or tax documentation proved so overwhelming that it demanded the second book to explore how far such material could illumine Mudejar structure and daily life all by itself.

An important and permanent contribution appeared at mid-decade, John Boswell’s Harvard dissertation published under the title The Royal Treasure: Muslim Communities under the Crown of Aragon in the Fourteenth Century (1977).⁹ Boswell moved Mudejar research boldly into its late fourteenth-century context, a critical time in both Iberian and Mudejar history. The stage widened to encompass all the realms of Arago-Catalonia except the Balearics. Boswell focused on the decade between 1355 and 1366, the years of savage war between Pere the Ceremonious and Castile’s Pedro the Cruel, as a time of general social crisis that illumines the Mudejar condition. With archival resources so formidable for this later period, from municipal and notarial to the range of ecclesiastical corporations, Boswell’s practical strategy was to confine his energies to the register and patrimonial sections of the crown archives at Barcelona. He marshaled his findings in eight chapters: the Mudejar population (relation to lord or king, serfs, slaves, wealthy class, occupations); community organization (housing pattern, prostitution and gambling, minor officials and major, notaries, butchers); legal system (loss of autonomous jurisdiction, role of each Christian authority, fines, torture); military obligations (draft, service, mixed units, cavalry), taxes and finance (tax nomenclature, wartime exploitation, exemptions, emigration); rights (erosion of religious privileges, restricting mendicancy, armsbearing, sales, inheritance, travel); oppression (enslavement, wartime seizure, rapacious officials, sexual exploitation, harassment, grievances presented by communities); acculturation, loyalty, and the war (mixing with Christians, mutual hostility, increase in European surnames, language as acculturative index, wartime dislocation and destruction); and a documentary appendix.

A Princeton dissertation by Donald Thaler, unpublished but still available from Xerox University Microfilms, also appeared at this time (1973): The Mudejars of Aragon during the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries).¹⁰ Though the author attempts too large a review for two hundred typed pages, both chronologically and geographically, he does present a useful survey as well as novel data, suggestive interpretations, and transcribed documents. After a chapter on sources, published and archival, and a chapter on the Reconquest and Mudejarism, Thaler offers three chapters: social organization by aljama, economic activity (crops, tenure, trades, rents), and relations with Christians. The last is an inconclusive essay, which sees intermixing and formal correctness along with an alarming increase of troubles between the two peoples from the fourteenth century, and in general a slow decline from the end of the Reconquest.

In 1978 my Variorum reprint collection Moors and Crusaders in Mediterranean Spain selected seventeen of my articles, particularly those in Speculum and The American Historical Review.¹¹ The decade had seen a generous spate of articles, of course, including Elena Lourie’s revisionist Speculum study on “Free Muslims in the Balearics under Christian Rule in the Thirteenth Century” (1970) from her Oxford dissertation, the starting point for all future work on Majorca’s Mudejars.¹² The scope and quality of that decade’s books in English on Mudejars would alone have made it a memorable time in Mudejar Studies. Even halfway through the decade, it seemed imperative to survey all the recent advances in articles and books to inform medievalists of the burgeoning field.¹³ The Anglo-Saxons had arrived.

It would expand this presentation inappropriately to take in supporting fields, but it is necessary to note that an Anglophone medieval Hispanism was part and parcel of the Anglophone Mudejarism. Joseph O’Callaghan brought out his comprehensive History of Medieval Spain in 1975 and Jocelyn Hillgarth his Spanish Kingdoms 1250–1516 in 1978, with summary histories coming from Gabriel Jackson (1972), Angus MacKay (1977) and Derek Lomax (1978).¹⁴ Others would follow later, notably Roger Collins’s survey, Early Medieval Spain: Unity in Diversity, 400–1000 (1983), and Bernard Reilly, The Medieval Spains (1993).¹⁵ Anglophone Hispanists by the 1970s encountered each other in formal conferences, reviewed each other’s books, came together in sociable interchanges, and in 1975 established the Academy of Research Historians on Medieval Spain. That organization, numbering about 150, became an affiliate of the American Historical Association, with a national newsletter and two large conference-programs annually. It offered both a platform for frequent Mudejar papers and the supporting function of critique and reflection such a peculiar required. To a lesser degree the more general Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, from 1975, was hospitable to a measure of medieval history and presented some Mudejar offerings. Of use too from the late 1950s, though resolutely literary in its main issues, was the North American Catalan Society.

The patterns of availability of Mudejar documentation tended to draw its practitioners into Catalan archives and Catalan historical contexts. The rise of a vigorous Anglophone school of Catalan history, both medieval and modern, is therefore relevant to the contemporaneous rise of a parallel Mudejar school. I have reviewed “Catalan Studies in North America: Medieval History” elsewhere, however, so the movement’s rise from the 1940s into the 1990s, and its many younger scholars, need not detain us here.¹⁶ Anglophone Hispanists, Catalanists, and Mudejarists alike now turned up each year in Spain’s archives and congresses. People began to speak of Hispanist “schools” at Toronto and UCLA, picking up the torch of medieval Hispanism from the pioneering Charles Julian Bishko of the University of Virginia. It was in 1975, too, that Bishko published his monograph-length recapitulation of the “Spanish and Portuguese Reconquest, 1095–1492” in the giant Wisconsin history of the crusades.¹⁷ And in 1976 the Institute of Medieval Mediterranean Spain opened its doors in a high-rise office building in Playa del Rey, a pleasant beachside adjunct to Los Angeles. Its library of Catalan history and microfilm manuscripts has increased considerably with each passing year.¹⁸

Though special attention is given here to Anglophone contributions, Spain itself increased its own output of Mudejar articles strongly in that decade, while France contributed the early works of Pierre Guichard, especially his important study on the Mudejar fief of Crevillente.¹⁹ The defining event in the origins and evolution of Mudejar Studies at large came appropriately at mid-decade—the In...